Sanctified Vision: An Introduction to Early Christian Interpretation of the Bible

The Johns Hopkins University Press, April 2005. Paper Back. New. Discontent can breed a great number of creatures: temptation, envy, tyranny, and in its rarer forms, change and renewal. For John J. O'Keefe and R.R. Reno, professors of theology and office neighbors at Creighton University, it bred initiative. Dissatisfied with the stock categories of ''liberal'' or ''conservative'' in regard to biblical interpretation, they sought specific reading techniques used by the early church fathers to interpret biblical texts. By analyzing portions of patristic exegesis between themselves and within their classrooms, O'Keefe and Reno organize their discoveries around three basic patristic strategies: literal, typological, and allegorical. Hungry for ''the red meat of doctrine,'' our authors discuss ''how the arrow of exegetical analysis moves toward and through the biblical text'' and also provide an explanation of the larger framework of patristic interpretation -- that Jesus Christ is the way, truth, and life -- and how faith in him ''brings order and coherence to the disparate data of scripture.'' O'Keefe and Reno's text is lively and rife with animating patristic illustrations and even appropriate contemporary cultural analogies. Their concluding chapter reminds us of the important standard the early fathers perpetually kept before them: communal accountability is crucial-or to paraphrase Irenaeus, ''proper interpretation depends on fidelity to the apostolic witness.'' Good exegesis is, finally, a religious exercise and right reading a fruit of righteousness. The reader must first ask, and keep asking, that his soul be purified and his vision turned toward the divine.