Two Failures of Mere Christian Hermeneutics—and Five Triumphs

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-15

[00:00:00]Few books in Evangelical Biblical Studies can be called a magnum opus as this book can. Few raise reader expectations to a fever pitch as this book did. Even fewer satisfy those expectations as indeed this book did not. Those expectations came in part through the promise in the title. Kevin Vanhoozer, the great hermeneutician, the man whose initials are literally KJV, was going to deliver to serious believing readers of scripture a mere Christian hermeneutics, the hallway where the various denominations and reading cultures, more on that term in a moment, who read scripture might find some hermeneutical unity um amidst our never-ending theological cacophony. "I argue," he says, "that interpreters need to leave their interpretive silos and mingle in the hall to converse with those who read the Bible differently."

[00:00:57]Vanhoozer was going to accomplish this feat via the method in his subtitle, Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically. And as any reader of Vanhoozer knows, he was going to use verbal panache unlike that of any other writer. This humble reviewer was very eager to read this book. What came when the volume delivered was a wide-ranging read of nearly 400 pages. A brief YouTube review must content itself with the high points and the low points.

[00:01:27]There were for this reader two key promises that Vanhoozer made that he failed to fulfill, two expectations which were left unsatisfied. I will discuss these before I offer sincere praise for this incredibly stimulating book.

[00:01:43]First, Vanhoozer promised to rescue the reputation of the fathers as careful readers of scripture. This was admittedly not an explicit promise, but rather a clear implication of the rhetorical structure of the work.

[00:01:56]Vanhoozer, who is a leader in the theological interpretation of scripture movement, brilliantly lays bare the two reading cultures that are often found fighting in the mere Christian hallway rather than working together.

[00:02:08]Biblical studies on the one hand and theology on the other. Each of these reading cultures, and this makes me think of Stanley Fish's interpretive communities, has its own rules and expectations for the hermeneutical task, the Bible interpretation task. Each culture devalues or dismisses the value of the other. Can the two be unifying?

[00:02:30]Van Hooser says that his own transfiguring interpretation, his grammatical eschatological exegesis, is shorthand for the attempt to combine scholarly exegesis with its philological attention to the letter and spiritual interpretation with its concern for reading in such a way that readers understand in ways that conform them to the image of Christ.

[00:02:52]Then, Van Hooser continues, what earlier generations called the spiritual sense is, according to the view set forth here, that is in this book, the transfigural sense, namely the glory of the literal sense.

[00:03:04]To see Christ in the letter is not to see something other in the text as an allegorical other interpretation.

[00:03:12]It's to see instead how much more there is to the literal referent. Transfigural interpretation stands for the whole hermeneutical process of glorifying the biblical letter for the sake of the reader's glorification.

[00:03:25]Perhaps Van Hooser did not intend this, but his subsequent forays into pre-critical interpretations of scripture and his regular reminders that these earlier readers brought a better frame of reference than so many of us moderns, a reference beyond what Charles Taylor calls the immanent frame, all of this led me to expect a defense of at least some of the fathers' allegorizations.

[00:03:48]Van Hooser does helpfully point out that even Origen distinguished between proper and improper figural exegesis.

[00:03:55]And for page numbers for all the quotes in this video, plus a few extras, sign up for my free weekly newsletter at wordonword.com. Anyway, Vanhoozer says, and I saw this for myself when reading Augustine, that Augustine, too, had hermeneutical controls.

[00:04:10]Mere Christian readers have always worked with some such distinction, Vanhoozer says.

[00:04:15]But this promise remained unfulfilled for me, Mark Ward. I still react to far too many comments in IVP's very valuable ancient Christian commentary on scripture with the very syllables that Vanhoozer uses to describe my reaction.

[00:04:29]He says, "Nothing bothers seriously literal interpreters more than the arbitrary list of correspondences that allegorical interpretation apparently licenses." This means a lot.

[00:04:40]>> [laughter] >> I waited the length of the book to be told what I was missing.

[00:04:45]I highlighted countless lines full of wisdom, but I did not finally come to a decidedly positive view of the fourfold sense or of ancient Christian allegoristic practices.

[00:04:58]I am still open. I see the fourfold sense popping up here and there in evangelicalism nowadays, but Vanhoozer did not get me there. The second constructive criticism that I would levy at this otherwise phenomenal book is that Vanhoozer promised to reveal the transfiguration of Jesus as a kind of hermeneutical key to the grammatical eschatological exegesis that he argues for in the text.

[00:05:22]He made numerous provocative and insightful connections between the light of Christ's face and the task of reading the Bible.

[00:05:30]There was a highly pleasing amount of clever word play as I expected regarding the common light metaphor in scripture.

[00:05:37]I agree that Jesus's transfiguration showed up the showed off the truth of what he was all the time, much as moments of illumination while reading God's word only reveal light that was already being shed on our paths, whether we saw it or not.

[00:05:53]But, Vanhoozer raised an expectation that Jesus' transfiguration would unlock all of scripture. He wrote, "In looking back to the law and the prophets and forward to Jesus' exaltation, the transfiguration is an interpretive crux of the gospel narratives." I wrote in the margin, "Really?" I admit that Vanhoozer brought forth intriguing quotations in which many other writers have seen unexplored depths in the important events at Mount Tabor that all three synoptics relate, Matthew 17, Mark 9, and Luke 9.

[00:06:28]But, I prefer to see that pericope as a profound illustration, note the luster in the middle of that word, of what grammatical eschatological exegesis canon should do, not a guide for how to do it. Now, I'm eager to agree with Vanhoozer when he says we ought to engage in interpretation that starts with the letter of the text and with the way the authors, human and divine, make the words run, but does not stop there.

[00:06:56]Such exegesis gives a thick description of the Bible's literal sense by reminding us that the figures in scripture have an ultimate eschatological reference. The words run to an end point that God in Christ through the Spirit may be all in all.

[00:07:13]I agree that the Old Testament prophets could know the sense of what they were saying without necessarily knowing the reference to whom their prophetic words pointed. Vanhoozer sees in Isaiah's servant songs, for example, not a sensus plenior, a fuller sense, but a reference plenior and a sensus splendidior, a fuller referent and a shining sense, namely Jesus Christ.

[00:07:37]But, I found concrete specifics to be somewhat lacking in Vanhoozer's book.

[00:07:43]Granted, we should read the Old Testament in the light of Jesus Christ, and the sensus litteralis of a divine human text can include eschatological reference, a spiritual sense, because God can mean more than his inspired writers do. But what makes for bad figural readings? This was left less than fully clear. The major example of good figural reading that Van Hooser uses at the very end of the book felt like low-hanging fruit. It was the Song of Songs. But what about the minor prophets? What about Genesis 3:15? Van Hooser offers helpful categories for understanding these passages, but little guidance for how to choose which categories apply. I struggled to wrap my mind around this book as a whole.

[00:08:30]Academics, like I sort of am, are not supposed to admit such weakness, but I choose to say it this way rather than to criticize Van Hooser for somehow failing, because I do have immense respect for him. Mere Christian hermeneutics is bursting with insight and quotable lines.

[00:08:49]Because I cannot with honesty point to a clear through line, I will instead finish this video by simply noting individual instances of insight that I appreciated. I will mention five out of literally hundreds. This is an experience I've had with several of Van Hooser's books. The sum of the parts adds up to more than the whole.

[00:09:11]First, Van Hooser's concept of answerability accords well with the morality of knowledge that I've already come to see in Jesus's rhetorical question to the Pharisees, "Have you not read?" Christians are the new covenant people. When God addresses us in scripture, we're accountable to respond as young Samuel did, "Speak, Lord, for your servant hears."

[00:09:35]Then wrote, "Right reading requires interpretive virtues, dispositions of the mind and heart that arise from a deep desire for understanding and for doing justice to the voice of the author.

[00:09:48]No single method, he says, can guarantee right reading. Right reading requires right-hearted readers."

[00:09:55]Like his apparent ally Ian Provan, whom I've met, Van Hooser calls for right readers reading rightly. Good interpretation arises from desire, from love. This is a point that I first got from John Piper, who got it from Jonathan Edwards, who got it from the Reformed tradition more broadly, I would guess, which got it from Augustine, who got it from Paul and Jesus.

[00:10:18]I wrote a dissertation defending that last sentence more or less. I won't go into it all now. Suffice it to say that Van Hooser's way of putting it resonated really deeply with me.

[00:10:30]Second, Van Hooser made more brilliant uses of C. S. Lewis than just echoing his famous book title, itself echoing a line from Richard Baxter. Van Hooser wrote with clear allusion to Lewis's An Experiment in Criticism, "Instead of judging right readers or right readings on the basis of the critical methods that they use, I propose judging the rightness of critical methods by the kind of theological readings, readers, and reading cultures they beget."

[00:10:59]This point is profound.

[00:11:03]And it is, I judge, empirically observable in the various Christian communions that Van Hooser hopes to bring together through his work.

[00:11:11]I cannot say that Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy hold no appeal.

[00:11:17]Clearly, many intelligent people with apparently sincere religious faith find each compelling. And Reformation Protestantism has plenty of flaws, of whom I am chief. But truly evangelical reading methods have produced better Bible reading cultures than those of Catholicism and Orthodoxy. This feels indisputable to me.

[00:11:38]Third, and following immediately on from the previous point, I definitely feel the tension between the two reading communities or cultures of biblical biblical studies and theology. And it was helpful to have this tension named and to have a solution described for me.

[00:11:53]KJV wrote, "I define a bad exegetical method as one that forbids for stalls or frustrates any theological reading of the Bible and a good exegetical method as one that is open to, facilitates, or necessitates some kind of theological reading."

[00:12:12]Reading Vanhoozer reminded me to believe that if scripture cannot be broken, neither can good theology.

[00:12:19]Vanhoozer pushed me to connect my examination of the biblical trees to the synthesis of the theological forest and vice versa.

[00:12:27]Fourth, Vanhoozer has picked up, perhaps due to his attention to post-modern theorists, some of the cast of mind of Stanley Fish, whom I've already mentioned. And one very Fishian point that I found very provocative and insightful came in a quotation that Vanhoozer gave about typology and allegory. He quoted Peter Martins in an article on that topic, quote, "The emerging consensus is that typology and allegory are competing forms of non-literal exegesis. The former the successful variety, the latter its unsuccessful non-literal twin."

[00:13:04]This helpfully clarified my still in process feelings about the typological interpretations of influential and clearly very knowledgeable and godly contemporary exegetes such as Jim Hamilton and Mitch Chase, both of whom are at Southern.

[00:13:19]And both of whom have been sincerely kind and friendly to me, I might add.

[00:13:23]Fish would observe that typology is not a neutral category that sits above the fray monitoring its progress and keeping the combatants honest. No, typology is right there in the middle of the fray, an object of contest that will enable those who capture it to parade their virtue at the easy expense of their opponents. We're for Christological interpretation and you are for unfettered hermeneutical flights of fancy.

[00:13:51]This was an important quote from Fish with interpolations from me. If you want to see it, you got to see it on the blog that I have.

[00:13:58]I believe in Old Testament types and New Testament anti-types, but the line between them is both blurry and contested. Fifth and finally, I believe I will from now on style myself a grammatical eschatological interpreter.

[00:14:13]As with Van Hooser's provocative self-designation, one I share of reformed Catholic, note the lowercase R viewers and lowercase C viewers, Van Hooser's grammatical eschatological exegesis is a playful and memorable and counterintuitive pointer to important truths.

[00:14:32]I am not stuck in Charles Taylor's immanent frame or Schaeffer's lower story. Though it is true that the Bible records the historical intentions of real writers in history who used linguistic forms that were accessible that are accessible through historical study. And though it's true that a major aim of my interpretation is to read the Bible as it was read by its intended historical readers.

[00:14:55]The Bible is divine address that can and must be read in light of the future Trinitarian glories to which it's always pointing throughout all of it. Some people read the Bible and come away with their faces dulled by over-attention to historical tabulation. So-and-so begat so-and-so who begat begat so-and-so.

[00:15:14]Yawn.

[00:15:15]But I wish to come away from my Bible with my face shining like Moses's, shining like someone who has beheld the glory of God in the face of Christ, and who is changed into that same image from glory to glory.

[00:15:28]Kevin Vanhoozer is an expert in prolegomena, the the genre of theological writing I love. I do think readers need his runs to run further. We need some legomena. I would like to see Vanhoozer cash out his reading strategies with more exegesis.

[00:15:45]But till that day, I remain sincerely grateful for his work.

[00:15:49]A small postscript about Vanhoozer's witticisms, the clever references that only certain people will get, the fascination with metaphor and wordplay.

[00:15:58]These feel genuine to me always, not ostentatious. They let the reader into the workings of a mind that delights in God's gift good gift of allusion and of paronomasia. I commend Vanhoozer for writing in this way, and his editors at Zondervan Academic for letting him.

[00:16:14]A real quick addendum, it's been just a little while since I thanked my many generous Patreon and YouTube supporters.

[00:16:20]I just I cannot tell you how true it is that I could not do this work without you. Recently, a couple people have started giving me coffees at Buy Me a Coffee in order to ask me Bible questions, and I am not so important or so busy that I demand money before answering people's questions. But I just wanted to say that that was very touching. I was so touched by the thoughtfulness of that approach.

[00:16:44]Okay, let's close out with my new slogan, KJV all the way.