The Symphonic Bible
Sanctified Vision: An Introduction to Early Christian Interpretation
of the
Bible
by John J. O’Keefe and R. R. Reno
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005
(156 pages, $16.95, paperback)
reviewed by Ryan J. Jack Mcdermott
In his Life of Moses, Gregory of Nyssa explicates Moses’ transformation of the magician’s staff into a snake as “a figure of the mystery of the Lord’s incarnation, a manifestation of deity to men which effects the death of the tyrant and sets free those under his power.” To do this, he conflates texts from Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Proverbs, John, 1 and 2 Corinthians, and Revelation.
Modern readers appreciate Gregory’s rich creativity, but we balk at his freewheeling method. Historical critics will scoff at Gregory’s Christological reading of the Hebrew Bible (the “snake” was actually a young crocodile, they tell us, and the trick itself a commonplace of prestidigitation reported in Egyptian papyri). The rest of us can affirm Gregory’s theological insights, but we doubt whether they have any real grounding in the text.
Our initial problem with Gregory, according to John J. O’Keefe and R. R. Reno, who both teach theology at Creighton University, is that he “does not push through or beyond the text to reach its ‘true meaning,’” by which we mean its historical meaning.
Gregory’s approach seems anti-historical, and modern Christians of all stripes find it difficult to accept. Sanctified Vision: An Introduction to Early Christian Interpretation of the Bible seeks to show how the church fathers’ ways of reading the Bible are more subtle, more complete, and, ultimately, more faithful to the history of redemption than modern approaches that eschew spiritual exegesis.
Sanctified Vision ostensibly addresses an audience of hardened historical critics. But the real audience of this book is the bespectacled hobgoblin of historical criticism who inhabits the skull of most every evangelical catholic, chiding our most earnest efforts to read the Bible with the Fathers. The authors want to put that fellow in his rightful place, with his nose in the lexicon, so that we can get on with the more important task of spiritual interpretation.
This slim volume is organized like a beginners’ manual, with chapters focusing on four characteristic techniques of patristic exegesis: Christological interpretation, “intensive reading,” and typological and allegorical interpretation. An introductory chapter contrasts modern with ancient attitudes toward Scripture, and a hortatory conclusion focuses on the disciplines of prayer, memory, authority, and community that made patristic exegesis possible in the first place. Throughout, the authors quote liberally from the Fathers to give us a feel for their style.
Sequences & Formulae
O’Keefe, a scholar of patristics, and Reno, a theologian, begin our education with a finely wrought analogy honed in the undergraduate course they taught together at Creighton. The language of the Bible, they suggest, is like the sequence of numbers, 2, 4, . . . , where the sequence must be interpreted in order to discover its “meaning,” so as to extend it indefinitely.
One way to interpret the sequence is to supply some more numbers based on our research and knowledge of the field. From our math training, the numbers “6, 8, 10” seem plausible, and so we interpret the “meaning” of the sequence as the progression of even numbers.
Ryan J. Jack McDermott is a doctoral student in English literature at the University of Virginia. He, his wife Darrah, and their first child, Augustine (born in April) are Episcopalians.
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