Diocesan Resources
The Senses of Scripture by Dr. Pauline A. Viviano (2015)
National Bible Week 2015: The Senses of Scripture by Dr. Pauline A. Viviano
The Church has a rich tradition of interpreting Sacred Scripture. That tradition had begun already in the New Testament, as the Old Testament was interpreted in relationship to Christ, and it was further developed by the early Church Fathers and systematized in the medieval period. Though modern and contemporary biblical scholarship both have adopted “new means and new aids to exegesis” as encouraged by Pope Pius XII, the foundation laid by the early Church Fathers and the medieval Church continues to support subsequent inquiries into the meaning of the biblical text. The early Church Fathers were not bound to one meaning of the text but rather allowed the biblical text to speak its message in various ways. These various ways correspond to the levels of meaning in a text; these levels of meaning we call “the senses of Scripture.”
There are two basic senses of Scripture: the literal sense and the spiritual sense. The literal sense refers to the sense of the words themselves; it is “that which has been expressed directly by the inspired human authors.” It has been variously described as the verbal or grammatical sense, the plain sense, the sense the human author intended, the sense the divine author intended, the historical sense, and even the obvious sense. Underlying these various descriptions is the notion that “the literal sense is the meaning conveyed by the words of Scripture.” The literal sense is discovered by careful and attentive study of the biblical text using all interpretive tools available, such as grammatical aids, archaeological evidence, historical and literary analyses, sociological and anthropological studies, and whatever else can be called upon to expand one’s knowledge of the historical and literary context of the text and thereby gain a better understanding of the literal sense of the biblical text.