BOOK REVIEW

SancTified Vision: An Introduction To Early Christian Interpretation Of The Bible, John, J. O’Keefe and Rusty R. Reno, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005, 176 pages, ISBN 0801880874. $50 hb, $16.97 pb.

Reviewed by Steven B. Clark, Ph.D. (candidate), St. Elias School of Orthodox Theology

A number of years ago there was a religious cartoon that showed an enormous Bible.  It was closed and laid out on its back cover.  Around this book were a half a dozen or so people doing what appears to be archeological digs.  However, there is no unified approach to these excavations.  Each person is “digging” in his own place with no reference to what anyone else is doing.  This “tongue and cheek” cartoon pictorializes the modern approach to the Holy Scriptures – the Bible is just a series of unrelated books written in different eras by different authors.  The purpose of exegesis in this modern approach is to “get behind” the texts to show all the apparent contradictions and problems inherent in the text or texts being examined.  Anyone who has taken a college or seminary course in the Old or New Testaments will know this as the historical-critical method.  What tends to be forgotten is that, while this method has produced many interesting and quite useful discoveries, it was developed in part to “debunk” the Bible. [1]   The question remains: is there another way of reading the Bible?

It is with this in mind that John J. O’Keefe and Rusty R. Reno have written SancTified Vision: An Introduction To Early Christian Interpretation Of The Bible. [2]   O’Keefe and Reno (hereafter O and R) teach theology at Creighton University, and over the past few years they have begun to question “…the role of biblical interpretation in the logic of Christian theology” (ix).  While neither O or R’s area of study is the Bible per se, their teaching of undergraduate theology courses forced them back into the question of how the church fathers interpreted the Bible, as they were seeking to express to their “…students the striking density of Christian thought” (ix).

In recent years there has been a renewed interest in patristics and patristic commentaries that are aimed at a more “general” public – one of the most notable being InterVarsity Press’ (IVP) Ancient Christian Commentaries on Scripture. [3]   But, as O and R point out in their opening chapter: “Reading the church fathers is difficult.”  For example, “[s]imply to pick up Irenaeus’ treatise Against the Heresies and read invites confusion and boredom if one does not the know the point of the many digressions” (1).  Herein lies the point and purpose of their book: “…to understand the structure of patristic interpretation of scripture,” and, “…to consider the exegesis itself as a discrete intellectual practice” (5).

In the first chapter, O and R point out that one of the main difficulties in approaching the patristic commentaries are the modern assumptions brought to the enterprise.  In modern biblical study, there is an assumption about the meaning of the text that O and R call “referential theory” (8f).  “The Bible is significant because it refers” (9), whether that be theological insights, what “really” happened, or its timeless truths.  Modern theory is not interested in the story per se, but what the text “represents” because it refers to something else.  What they discovered is that this is not so with the fathers.  The fathers “…simply did not ask: ‘What is the event or truth to which the Bible refers?’  For them, the text was woven into the fabric of truth by virtue of being scripture” (11).

The fathers can rightly be called “precritical," not because they did not think or use various techniques or analysis.  Rather, “…they are precritical because they did not ask, for example, ‘What gives meaning to the story of Moses’ ascent of Mount Sinai?’” seeing that there are two accounts in Exodus and Deuteronomy.  Instead, because “[t]hey assumed the authority of [both] accounts, …they sought to order their interpretations accordingly.  Instead of looking behind the text to the events, they looked into the text for clues and solutions” (12).

This analysis might help to “answer” some of the claims of the Jesus Seminar.  Like the Jesus Seminar group, the fathers also noticed that the four gospels differed in detail; but instead of trying to find the “real Jesus” behind the texts, they sought to use the texts itself to reconcile the differences.  The scriptures themselves became the context for divine meaning.  The conviction held by the fathers is that Jesus is the way, and the truth, and the life.  Patristic interpretation, then, “…is best understood as a continuous effort to understand how faith in Jesus Christ brings order and coherence to the disparate data of scripture” (22).  One might say that the fathers read the scriptures holistically – what O and R call “a ‘total reading’ of scripture, organized around the fulfilling person of Jesus Christ” (25).  “[T]he exegesis of the fathers was research into the Christ-centered unity of scripture” (25).

Chapter two seeks to further explain the father’s understanding that the Bible is a unified whole – every word points to the deeper reality of Jesus.  Using Irenaeus’ doctrine of recapitulation, O and R show that patristic exegesis of scripture is about expressing God’s economy within the Biblical texts; and that proper exegesis is one that sees Jesus as the “recapitulation” or summing up of the Bible.  Far from being some facile claim that Jesus is the unifier of the scriptures, chapter three turns to the interpretative strategies used by the fathers.  Intensive reading is the basis for all patristic exegesis. “[A] faith that Jesus Christ fulfills the scriptures did not supersede or make unnecessary the difficult task of struggling with the literal details of the Bible” (45).

O and R discuss three forms of intensive reading: lexical, dialectical, and associative.  Origen’s Hexapla is the example used for intensive lexical reading, where the meaning of words are probed.  This, of course, is still very much in use today.  The second form is that of dialectic.  Here, the apparent contradictions and difficulties in the text are seen as being present in the texts for a purpose.  These difficulties are probed for deeper meaning.  “Exploring how contradiction motivates distinctions that, in turn, illuminate other portions of scripture is the goal of dialectical strategy” (62).  Athanasius’ Orations is used as one example of this dialectical reading.  In this instance Athanasius probes the language problems posed in the Gospel of John and the Letter to the Hebrews “…by contrasting verses rather than rushing to resolve them” (60).  Finally, the fathers employ associative readings of scripture – something which modern biblical scholarship eschews.  Of the three strategies of intensive reading, the associative is probably the most difficult for moderns to grasp, because it is so foreign to “academic” biblical scholarship.  Modern scholars shy away from purely verbal links, because such stress is upon distinct “…historical periods and literary contexts.  Ancient readers had the opposite reaction.  They positively relished the way verbal associations can motivate leaps from one context to another.  The same sensibility that makes us chuckle when we hear a clever pun was given much freer rein in patristic exegesis (63).

Moving on to chapter four, O and R turn to the strategy of typology.  “[T]ypological interpretation is rightly viewed as the most important interpretive strategy for early Christianity” (69).  Here, events are analyzed by type (pattern).  As O and R state in the beginning of this chapter: “Without typology it is difficult to imagine patristic theology and the concept of Christian orthodoxy it defined and supported as existing at all” (69).  The authors examine three patterns of typology – the first being the most important.  First, how Christ is prefigured in the Old Testament.  Some of the most common are: Joshua and Jesus, and David and Jesus.  These types prefigure Christ who recapitulates the past; but then also illuminates his identity.  Secondly, typology illuminates pastoral practice.  Christian baptism is seen through the lens of the Exodus event where the people of God pass through the Red Sea.  The Mystagogical Catechesis of Cyril of Jerusalem is a prime example of this type of exegesis, as he seeks to catechize his hearers about their having been baptized at the Easter Vigil, and then draws out the deeper meaning of the event.  Finally, the fathers saw Christ himself as the archetype for those who follow him.  The Martyrdom of Polycarp details the Bishop’s final days as he meticulously maps out his ensuing death by using the narrative details of the life of Christ (83)

Towards the end of chapter four, O and R show how the use of typology is turned on its head by men like Marcus Borg.  Borg, rather than seeing Jesus as the archetype that establishes the pattern by which Christians live, creates a pattern and attempts to fit that Jesus into it.  But, as O and R continually show: the typological strategy of the fathers and their faith in the divine economy sees “…Jesus Christ’s life, death, and resurrection [as] strangely more real, more interpretively powerful, than our own this-worldly lives and experiences” (88)

Chapter five turns to the most controversial of the father’s exegetical endeavors: that of allegory.  Many see it as a betrayal of the reality of the texts themselves, an over-emphasis in otherworldly aspirations (89).  Allegorical interpretation is based on the claim that the plain - or obvious - sense of a given text is not the full meaning; that it can only be found in another reality.  O and R set forth three approaches to allegory.  First, that “…allegories can help make sense of texts that seem to make no sense on the literal level” (91).  Augustine’s Literal Commentary on Genesis is used to show how the process is worked out.  For example, “[t]he light on the first day indicates spiritual truth, and its creation on the first day points to the initial and primary creation of intellectual life that is to be illuminated by spiritual truth” (95).

The second level of allegory “…adds a level of meaning that surpasses and completes the literal” (99).  The authors cite Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Moses as a prime example of this enterprise.  The Life never denies the most basic literal level of the life of Moses, but probes it for its deeper spiritual meaning.  Gregory tells the story on two levels: first, on the level of historia, the literal level of basic facts about the life of Moses; and second, on the level of theoria, the spiritual meaning that flows from the text itself.  “The literal story is the surface of the mystery” (100).

Finally, allegorical readings come into play when the basic literal meaning of the text is replaced by another meaning altogether.  The most notable of this type of allegory is the Song of Songs.  Rather than being a love song about Solomon and his bride, it becomes a love song about Christ and his church.  The authors acknowledge that many scholars rebel against any type of allegorical reading by saying it is a betrayal of the text itself.  O and R counter with the argument that the interpretive strategies of the fathers about the divine economy under girding and unifying the Biblical text, is no different than the post-Enlightenment claims that their interpretive strategies have something useful to say about the text.  Clearly the authors stand with the fathers here.

In the final chapter entitled “The Rule of Faith and the Holy Life” O’Keefe and Reno try and draw some conclusions and point to some very important aspects of the life of the fathers missing in modern Biblical study.  The first is to remind the readers of what was said in the opening, that the fathers do not read the scriptures as a surviving record that scholars must asses and analyze in order to recover as best as they can the actual knowledge of the past; it is not some culturally saturated window upon events that “really” matter.  Instead, they interpret the text as text, not as a referent to something else (115-116).  Second, that the fathers read the scriptures according to the “rule of faith,” such as God’s economy of salvation.  “Adopting [this] rule of faith sets the reader down the right path; it offers an appropriate method by which to control interpretation” (125).  Finally, O and R raise an issue lost in modern academic scholarship: that of a holy life. “A lack of spiritual discipline can be exegetically dangerous!” (136).  This is very important in understanding the fathers and what O and R and trying to convey.  Citing Gregory the Great’s emphasis on purification as a necessary precursor to reading the scriptures, “[t]he goal of exegesis...is not worldly knowledge but divine wisdom;” because...[v]ision must be sanctified if one is to see rather than be blinded by the mystery of God” (139).

John J. O’Keefe and Rusty R. Reno’s book, “SancTified Vision,” is one that repays careful reading, study and reflection, especially on the issue “referential assumptions” – that “[t]he Bible is important in light of its capacity to refer to some x – what really happened or timeless truths” (11).  Because of the historical-critical method so ingrained in our learning today, O and R have done a great service in pointing out what sets the fathers really apart from us in their approach to the Bible.  This alone is worth the price of the book, but it is not an approach that will be easily understood because of our modern theological method of referential reading.  One needs only to cite the Jesus Seminar whose whole approach is to “get behind the text” to the real Jesus.  O and R have done the church a great service is reappropriating the fathers’ method for us.

Finally, while not part of this study, what would have been interesting is to show how the methodology of the fathers is still in use today in the historic church’s baptismal and Eucharistic liturgies and lectionaries.  Clearly the hand of typological and allegorical reading is all over these ancient texts.  But maybe that will come in volume two of their reading of the fathers and help reengage the larger church in reappropriating this method in her liturgical practice and in her teaching and preaching.