SancTified Vision: An Introduction to Early Christian Interpretation of the Bible (review)

A colleague aware of this book's publication wondered if it might prove to be that long lost patristic work, a comprehensive introduction to hermeneutics in the early church suitable for student use. I doubt if the authors would make that claim; one author does not pretend to a grounding in patristics, and neither admits to biblical expertise, as the contents confirm (targim appearing as the plural of targum, "the Septuagint" cited as though a univocal term in the brief treatment of the text(s) before the Greek fathers, and no real assessment made of their grasp of Hebrew and its implications for adequate exegesis/interpretation of the Old Testament). The style adopted for the treatment is generally not magisterial, being instead discursive and heuristic, autobiographical at the outset and even whimsical; and the presentation is not particularly user-friendly. We may have to look elsewhere for that elusive compendium.

On the contrary, what the authors (both teachers of theology at Creighton University) claim to do is to "illustrate specific reading techniques used by early church fathers to expound the meaning they believed intrinsic to biblical texts." And this in fact they proceed to do, plus considerably more. Anyone unfamiliar with, and perhaps bemused by, the way patristic commentators approach the Bible will be grateful for the clarification of the meaning of meaning provided in the opening chapter. We have difficulty with the fathers' approach to the text, the authors say, because "the common referential theory of meaning gives an overall structure to the modern approach to interpretation" (9), a theory and an approach not current in the early church. A helpful example from the Life of Moses of Gregory of Nyssa reveals "a web of scriptural associations, no doubt guided, consciously or unconsciously, by Gregory's sense of the overall unity and shape of Christian truth, but constructed across and within the literal detail of scripture" (18).

Discovery of such different approaches and reading strategies in at least certain fathers prompts the authors to examine three such categories—intensive, typological, and allegorical—to which following chapters are devoted. While modern biblical study also engages in intensive reading, in fathers like Nyssa we find that network of verbal associations operating within a larger framework, which the authors will later claim to be "Jesus Christ as the hypothesis of scripture" (43), or in Irenaeus's terms oikonomia and recapitulation. The two further chapters on typology and allegory—categories for which they "beg the indulgence" (xii) of Robert Wilken for distinguishing—were for this reader the clearest and most helpful, the influential figure of Origen looming large here and elsewhere. Throughout, the contact maintained with literary theory and scientific method appeals.

If it is unrealistic to expect to find a compendium of early Christian interpretation of the Bible in a work of a hundred and fifty pages, it is also unwise to be overly general throughout the text in referring to "the main interpretive strategies of the church fathers, taken as a whole" (29), "Origen and all the church fathers" (132, 136), "all early Christian interpreters" (76), etc. One of the fascinating features of patristic interpretation, in fact, is the diversity of approaches to the text one finds in Greek and Latin fathers (the latter less well represented here apart from Augustine) at different times and in different places or, for that matter, even within one author. While Didymus is cited here for the oblique christological character of his Genesis commentary, one would find a marked contrast in his work on Zechariah. While not smoothing over real hermeneutical differences, the missing compendium that I mentioned would also avoid being partial and unrepresentative; the treatment of Origen's lexical strategy (51–56) is crying out for mention of Eustathius' rebuttal, as the citation of Galatians 4 illustrating the use of allegory (90) should surely attract a note on its rejection by...