Catholic (& Orthodox) Bible study methods

Here are some great sources for liturgical and patristic interpretation:

I found Scott Hahn's book Letter and Spirit: From Written Text to Living Word in the Liturgy (Doubleday 2005; still not available in Logos) to be an enormous breakthrough for me in understanding the principal distinction behind scriptural interpretation from a Protestant perspective to scriptural interpretation in a Catholic methodology. It comes down to liturgy, and liturgy as primary theology, out of which the scriptures themselves were written. Huge swaths of the Old Testament books were written as liturgical texts for procession, for singing, for reciting, for ceremony, for prayers (largely and predominantly public), in the context of temple life. Therefore, taking the scriptures out of the context of worship is to remove the scriptures from their primary (or principal) context of being understood and received by human beings. This, of course, has a huge impact on how we read and interpret the scriptures. (the very difference between proclaiming the Word and reading it privately underlies the question: is God the God of a community or only my personal God? I think the content of the scriptures speak well to this)

A good patristic approach is Origen's approach, contra Marcion. Marcion's approach was to see the scriptures only literally, and he had to conclude that there were two gods--an angry, vindictive, even evil god of the Old Testament, and a generous, forgiving, and merciful god of the New Testament (this is much the same problem a young Augustine once had). Origen's approach outlined in On First Principles reveals how he reads scripture as Christ himself; that is, Scripture is not something we impose interpretations upon, but is something that interprets us. As Christ will come to judge us, so does scripture here and now judge us. So apparent difficulties in scripture (such as with God's condoning of war, his apparent condemnation of peoples on an ethnic basis, etc.) are meant to confront us and challenge us; we need to wrestle with them until we are slowly and gradually changed. When we face Christ, we are the ones who are contrite and repent, not He, and Marcion shows that a strictly literal approach instead demands Christ, the Incarnate Word, to change. This, of course, has huge implications for how you read and interpret scriptures, but perhaps at its base just points out the fundamental difference between reading scripture as one who believes its deliverances and one who does not.