Book Review: “Sanctified Vision” (By John O’Keefe and R. Reno)

John J. O’Keefe, and R. R. Reno. Sanctified Vision: An Introduction to Early Christian Interpretation of the Bible (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 2005). 

The aim of this book is to understand patristic exegesis on its own terms without making judgments about the correctness of their techniques or the truth value of their results. The chief difficulty in achieving this aim, the authors argue, is modern assumptions about the nature of texts, meaning, and interpretive practices. 

On the one hand, moderns assume that texts have referential meaning, that is, that every text points to an x outside of itself. Premodern readers, on the other hand, assume that the text is the x to which it refers, and thus they do not see the need to draw upon extra-biblical disciplines to establish the meaning and veracity of the biblical text. With this in mind, the authors probe into the Christocentric hermeneutic that dominated patristic exegesis, summarize three reading strategies that broadly characterized patristic exegesis (intensive, typological, and allegorical), and highlight the prominence of the rule of faith and spiritual disciplines in patristic exegesis. 

While the authors oversimplify, and at times misconstrue, the relationship between text and referent in the minds of patristic authors, their central thesis gets to the heart of patristic exegesis: to think in and through the Scriptures themselves, and intensively so, is to have a sanctified vision, and a sanctified vision is necessary for a right understanding of the Scripture and the purposes of God in Christ.