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A little-known monk living in the Egyptian desert at the end of the fourth century provided one of the most durable interpretive keys in the history of Bible study. The monk, named Nesteros, proposed that all of Holy Scripture is to be understood in four ways or "senses."

He explained this paradigm by examining the various meanings of "Jerusalem" in the Bible.

Jerusalem in its literal and historical sense, said Nesteros, is simply a city in the Holy Land. That is the Bible's first sense, its literal and historical meaning.

Besides this, however, Jerusalem is also a symbol (typos) of the Church, God's redeemed and sanctified people. That is its second or allegorical sense (Gal. 4:24—allegoroumena).

Next, Jerusalem is an image of the redeemed but struggling Christian soul; this is its third or moral sense.

Finally, Jerusalem is that heavenly city on high (Gal. 4:26; Rev. 21:2), the final expectation of our hopes, and this is its fourth or anagogical sense.

Nesteros's "four senses" became the foundation of all monastic reading of the Bible. It shows up absolutely everywhere in medieval theology. In Dante's fourteenth-century masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, we find the same scheme in use.

The history of monasticism owes most to one of these four senses: the moral. When church fathers and medieval interpreters spoke of the Bible's "moral sense," they expressed a conviction that God's unfailing word, precisely because it is fulfilled in Christ the Lord, is intended by the Holy Spirit to address the practical moral lives of those who are "in Christ." It is especially the Christian believer, they argued, who can most truly tell his heavenly Father, "Your word is a lamp unto my feet and a light to my path" (Ps. 119:105), because the Christian has been given, in the person and work of Christ, the Bible's true interpretive key.

Thus, whether in the pulpit or in other forms of pastoral teaching, teachers of the Bible continued for over a millennium to present the Bible, correctly understood in the light of Christ, as the ready and reliable source of moral guidance for those striving to live godly lives. Indeed, they discovered this interpretive principle explicit in the Bible itself, as when the apostle Paul taught that "whatever things were written before were written for our learning" (Rom. 15:4).

Certainly, this approach to Scripture was always understood to be valid for all Christians. But not surprisingly, we find a greater concentration of interest on this subject in the writings of monks, nuns, and other ascetics. These were Christians who felt called to a more intense life of prayer and virtuous striving, and their ancient monastic rules show how thoroughly biblical that quest was for them.

The preeminent example is the Rule of St. Benedict of Nursia (d. 547), which became the dominant monastic code of the entire western half of Christendom. In Benedict's rule the monk's entire waking day, roughly seventeen hours, was divided among three activities: manual labor, the prayerful reading of Holy Scripture (lectio divina), and choral prayer, especially the praying of the Psalms. Even while the monk ate his sparse meals each day, he listened to one of his brothers reading Holy Scripture.

The monks and nuns pursued their goals—purity of heart and the gift of constant prayer—by ingesting massive daily dosages of Scripture. They gave themselves totally to God not only by denying themselves and serving others, but by allowing themselves to become saturated in and absorbed by the power of God's Word. Monks took seriously that principle of Jerome of Bethlehem (347-419), who said, "To be ignorant of the Scriptures is to be ignorant of Christ."

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