Christian orthodoxy has always affirmed the normative canonical status of the Old Testament as an abiding word of God for the Church. Yet the struggle to interpret that Old Testament word in relation to the Gospel and the ongoing life of the church is as old as theology itself. Modern historical approaches to interpretation have exacerbated the sense that there is a gulf separating the two Christian testaments. Conservative affirmations of the historical accuracy of the Old Testament and its synchronic coherence do not tend to solve the problem of how these texts reveal Christ, either for dogmatic formulation or Christian preaching. This paper addresses this problem demonstratively by interpreting a theologically central and exegetically challenging text, the "Immanuel sign" of Isaiah 7:14, in light of what might be called an "ontologically calibrated canonical approach." In short, I will show how the hermeneutical shaping of the book of Isaiah as a whole can function as a guide to interpreting this concrete specific text in such a way that we learn to perceive final eschatological realities within the penultimate forms of contingent history. The outcome is a mode of exegesis that respects all necessary dimensions of the text, including the often-overlooked dogmatic dimension.