Vanhoozer, Kevin J. Mere Christian Hermeneutics: Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2024.

If the beatitudes of our Lord have general application, Kevin J. Vanhoozer is a blessed man. “Blessed are the peacemakers,” says Jesus, “for they shall be called sons of God” (Matt 5:9). Vanhoozer finds in this benediction an invitation to be a hermeneutical peacemaker, and in his recent triumph of a book, Mere Christian Hermeneutics: Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically, he has undertaken a truly harrowing task: to make peace between the biblical scholar, the theologian, and the churchman, on the question of how to read Holy Scripture. Summing up an entire accomplished career of reflecting on hermeneutics, Mere Christian Hermeneutics is something of a personal manifesto. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that this most recent of Vanhoozer’s statements on the topic is his best yet.

Right out of the gate, Vanhoozer’s proposal for adjudicating Christian hermeneutics is refreshingly candid and—if I might say so—refreshingly Christian: he suggests “judging the rightness of critical methods by the kind of theological reading, readers, and reading cultures they beget” (5). This theme of “reading culture” resurfaces throughout the book and becomes the grounds on which he brings disparate reading methods into conversation with one another. Readers are shaped by, and shape, their reading cultures. An animating concern with Vanhoozer throughout the book is that the Bible’s various reading cultures (i.e., the academic reading cultures of biblical studies and systematic theology, and the ecclesial reading culture of the local church) are hermetically sealed off from one another, and therefore produce radically different kinds of readers.  “My ultimate concern,” Vanhoozer tells us in the first chapter, “is with reforming churches and seminaries so that they become the kind of reading cultures that can form readers to inhabit the strange new world that has been brought into being by the gospel of Jesus Christ” (29). Ultimately, it is up to the reader to determine if Vanhoozer succeeds in accomplishing the lofty (I almost said “audacious”) ambition captured by the title, but none should deny him the credit for his moxie or his devotion to the topic. This is truly an impressive book.

Structurally, Mere Christian Hermeneutics is divided up into three parts. Part 1: “Reading the Bible in and out of Church” surveys the landscape of hermeneutics in the post-enlightenment moment in which we find ourselves. These three chapters cover an impressive scope. Borrowing from C.S. Lewis’s well-known essay, “Meditation in a Toolshed,” in which Lewis elaborates on the difference between looking at a shaft of light to see what it illumines, and stepping into the shaft to look along the light to its source, Vanhoozer proposes something of a heuristic for relating critical reading methods to more theological-doxological ones. At their best, the critical exegete looks at the light of biblical revelation, while the theologian looks along the same. Both practices, Vanhoozer says, are crucial and neither should be rejected—what should be rejected is the strict choice between either. In his third chapter, Vanhoozer puts his finger on why it seems so difficult to find traction on hermeneutical discussions today. He does this by rightly identifying the three kinds of polarization the Church has endured in the last several hundred years. These polarizations are “epochal (premodern/modern), institutional (church/academy), and disciplinary (biblical studies/theology)” (76). With impressive lucidity, Vanhoozer demonstrates how all three of these polarizations are interrelated, and that the latter two are in some ways the direct result of the first. In the end, all parties have been greatly diminished by these polarizations, and not one discipline or reading culture has been unscathed. This analysis leads to another important theme Vanhoozer develops throughout: frame of reference. One’s frame of reference will determine the kinds of questions one expects the text to answer, which will largely determine what kind of hermeneutic one finds acceptable. Since biblical scholars and theologians often have different frames of reference, it can be difficult for them to even find enough common ground to argue. Vanhoozer’s proposal? Taking biblical studies and theology back to church. Vanhoozer writes:

Exegetes and theologians need to go back to church. What does this mean? The issue is not whether individual biblical scholars and theologians have a personal faith (for the sake of the present discussion, let us assume they do). The issue, rather, has to do with the kind of reading practice into which exegetes and theologians have been socialized. Church is not simply a safe space where biblical scholars and theologians can become friends, though it should be that too. The church should be the community that generates and governs the interpretive aims and interests of biblical scholars and theologians alike… Reading the Bible in the church should affect the kinds of questions and frames of reference that biblical scholars and theologians prioritize and bring to the text (101-102).

No lover of Christ and his Bride should object to this clarion call to “go back to church.” Vanhoozer, of course, is not ignorant of the fact that this proposal is not enough to resolve the disciplinary tensions in biblical hermeneutics today. We still need to answer crucial questions about what the biblical text is before making serious headway in “making peace.”

This is why part 2 of the book is dedicated to “figuring out literal interpretation.” As one familiar with Vanhoozer should expect, double entendres abound throughout the book, and this phrase is no exception: he proposes that “figuring out” (i.e., understanding) the literal interpretation is to figure it out—that is to say, identify its figurative contours. This section of the book is Vanhoozer’s most dense, wading through the treacherous waters of debates surrounding allegory, typology, human and divine authorial intent and the like. As such, it is sure to stimulate everyone and entirely please no one (this reviewer included, as I’ll explain below). Here, Vanhoozer develops what he calls “trans-figural interpretation.” “My mere Christian alternative to both allegory and typology,” says Vanhoozer, “is to describe the right kind of figural reading as trans-figural… Trans-figural interpretation follows the way the biblical words run across or beyond figures to the realities those figures foreshadow and anticipate” (169). This is, in some sense, Vanhoozer’s attempt to cut the gordian knot of figuration and literal interpretation: “My claim is that what people often refer to as the spiritual sense (i.e., ‘good’ figuration) is actually the eschatological fullness of the literal-historical sense. It is not the bare historical but the historical-eschatological frame of reference that enables the literal sense to come into its own—or rather, into all its glory” (168).

This sets Vanhoozer up for offering his proposal for another significant contribution in this book, which he covers in part 3: “transfiguring literal interpretation.” In this final section of the book, Vanhoozer puts his hermeneutic to work. The orienting theme of this section is Vanhoozer’s appeal to the transfiguration of Jesus as a helpful illustration and theological principle for his proposed hermeneutic. The transfiguration was neither an essential metamorphosis in which Jesus changed from one kind of a thing to another, nor a mere appearance in which Jesus had some external and alien glory momentarily given. The transfiguration was an apocalypse—a revelation of his glory and an eschatological unfolding of biblical revelation. Thus, the “transfiguring” of biblical interpretation involves a “trans-figuration”—that is, a recognition of biblical figuration across (trans) the chronological and teleological scope of history and eschatology. This section alone is worth the price of the book for the reflections Vanhoozer draws out on the biblical theme of light. If these chapters are what constitute as trans-figurative interpretation, Vanhoozer has laid out an impressive case for it. Fittingly, Mere Christian Hermeneutics concludes with a chapter reflecting on how this kind of trans-figurative reading can transform the individual reader, as well as the Church’s reading culture, in accord with the criteria Vanhoozer proposed at the very beginning of the book.

Vanhoozer has surely succeeded in making a lasting contribution to the field. How could he not? The sheer scope covered in this volume demands the attention of a wide readership. Of course, this also invites a wider range of potential critics, some of whom will push back on the wideness of scope itself. For example, throughout the book, Vanhoozer will often break off into brief reflections of historical figures, wherein theologians throughout the Great Tradition are appealed to as illustrative for his argument. Vanhoozer is not ignorant of the question these kinds of appeals are sure to raise, and indeed, he raises it for his readers explicitly: “Am I creating a catholicity after my own image? It is an important question” (181). In my estimation, Vanhoozer does a fine job at defending the “mereness” of his proposal. However, he explicitly opts out of one of the arguments readily at his disposal: the metaphysical “frame of reference” that his many historical figures shared in common. At one point in Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Vanhoozer pushes back against “Christian Platonism” in general, and the “Sacramental Ontology” of Hans Boersma in particular. Some of Vanhoozer’s criticisms are undoubtedly worthy of serious consideration. For example, he may be correct to worry about the “concept-inflation” of a term like “sacramental” when he writes, “While Boersma’s intent to retrieve a Christ-centered picture of created reality as existing through, for, and in Christ (Col 1:16), not everything in creation is part of the economy of saving grace the way baptism and the Lord’s Supper are” (132). But Vanhoozer goes a step further to “highlight the contrast between the vertical dynamic of Christian Platonism with its upward pull (i.e., participation in God) and the more horizontal dynamic of salvation history with its eschatological pull” (133). Vanhoozer repeatedly reminds his readers that “the right frame of reference is less Platonist and sacramental (above/below) than Pauline and eschatological (already/not yet)” (153).

But is this contrast necessary? I confess I cannot see why it should be. It may well be the case that my inability to see these two proposals as competitors rather than allies is owing to my own limitations of comprehension, but I simply do not understand why the vertical-participatory should be in competition with the horizontal-eschatological. Indeed, it seems to me that the former underwrites the latter and bolsters it up to a greater degree. Vanhoozer’s insistence on this “either/or” rather that opting for the more advisable “both/and” is surprising, given the fact that Vanhoozer’s overall proposal includes other “both/ands” that have analogical potential for this topic, not the least being his central biblical theme: the transfiguration itself. “The Nicene and Chalcedonian formulas,” says Vanhoozer, “in affirming Jesus Christ as one person with two natures, provided both a frame of reference and rules for rightly reading the gospel narratives… [The transfiguration] reveals Jesus’ ‘double Sonship’: he is both the eternal Son of God (‘light from light’) and the messianic son of David… I believe the letter of the biblical text has an analogous dual-aspect character in its capacity as human-divine discourse” (229-230). Of course, neither the vertical/horizontal frameworks of the incarnation on the one hand, nor its analogue in the human-divine discourse of Holy Scripture on the other, are the same as the vertical/horizontal framework of participatory metaphysics (vertical) and eschatological figuration (horizontal), but I would contend that they all rhyme.

By posing these two “frames of reference” (i.e., participation versus eschatology) as competitors, it seems Vanhoozer wants to replace a metaphysical framework for an eschatological one. But this does not make the metaphysical concerns that a participatory outlook attempts to address go away, it simply changes the subject. One wonders if the subject Vanhoozer changes to (i.e., eschatology) would benefit from standing on a self-conscious metaphysic; namely, the participatory one that the pre-modern theologians he appeals to in support of his mere Christian hermeneutic stood on. It seems inadvisable to retrieve components of a pre-modern hermeneutic without laboring to do the same for the pre-modern metaphysic upon which it stood.

Despite this specific point of pushback, I find little to object to in Vanhoozer’s proposal for “trans-figural” interpretation. Indeed, Vanhoozer has achieved a masterful work in Mere Christian Hermeneutics, and it deserves the far and wide readership it will no doubt enjoy for years to come.