The Church sets forth three criteria for interpreting Scripture.

To better understand Scripture, we must consider its literal and spiritual senses: the intention of the human author and what God wanted written for the sake of our salvation.

The spiritual sense of Scripture is divided into three senses: the allegorical, the moral, and the anagogical.

Typology is the study of how people, places, things, or ideas earlier in salvation history foreshadow or point to a later person, place, thing, or idea in salvation history.