Mere Christian Hermeneutics in a Divided Age

Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Mere Christian Hermeneutics: Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically. Zondervan Academic, 2024. 448 pages.

Alexandre Dumas’s ragtag band of musketeers still pervades our social imagination two hundred years after its publication. There are no doubt many reasons for that. That said, I would surmise that what really strikes most of us about the musketeers is not their adventures but their famed unity. Though they could not be more different one from the other, their heartfelt cry of “all for one and one for all” aspiringly echoes in our hearts. Indeed, we all find ourselves wearied by the divisions abounding in our world and, most regrettably, even in the church of Jesus Christ.

It is to answer one such division that Kevin Vanhoozer wrote his Mere Christian Hermeneutics. The word “mere” should already give everybody a clue as to what he is about. It is a small, but very ambitious term. Try defending a “mere” ideal football team to your friends. I doubt the enterprise will be crowned with uncontested success. Regardless, Vanhoozer’s goal is nothing short of “overcom[ing]” the “disciplinary divide that too often keeps exegesis and theology separate” (369). After all, it has long been “one of his chief preoccupations, not least in this book” (369).

From the start, Vanhoozer reminds both sides that “we need all the theological disciplines, and several kinds of biblical criticism, to read the Bible rightly” (xxii). That said, if Vanhoozer dons a musketeer’s cape and attempts to unite exegetes and theologians under the same cry, he does not mean for his call to stop in the ivory towers of academia. Indeed, he sees his project as all-encompassing. There is an “urgent need to recover Christian practices of reading the Bible theologically, for the sake of the well-being of the church, academy, and world alike” (xvii).

To recover such mere Christian practices, nay practitioners, Vanhoozer begins in part 1 by “fostering certain exegetical sensibilities” (194) in his readers. Here he rightly rejects the pragmatist’s overemphasis on method. Rather than “providing a specific exegetical method” (194), Vanhoozer wants us to think of the reading cultures we inhabit, the nature of the Bible, and the world behind, of/within, or in front of the text. Of note is his section on “The Divided Domain of Biblical Interpretation” (86) in which he tackles head-on the exegetes-and-theologians divide. He gently rebukes them like a mother would two squabbling children, concluding that “exegetes and theologians need to go back to church” (101). Indeed, “The church should be the community that generates and governs the interpretive aims and interests of biblical scholars and theologians alike” (102).

However, a gentle rebuke and developed sensibilities only go so far. Thus, in part 2, Vanhoozer sets “out a mere Christian account and definition of the literal sense” (194). In hermeneutics, the literal sense is the veritable stumbling block of the matter. It has fallen on many a hermeneutic, crushing it into irrelevance. The main challenge is to cogently explain what we even mean by “literal” and how we can have a literal interpretation that coherently permits a deeper, spiritual reading as well (105). This is where Vanhoozer begins to offer what he promises in the subtitle of his book: a transfiguration of what it means to read the Bible theologically. Vanhoozer wants us to leave ultimately deficient terms like typology and allegory to embrace a “trans-figural interpretation” of the Bible. Simply put, a “trans-figural interpretation follows the way the biblical words run across or beyond figures to the realities those figures foreshadow and anticipate” (169). It is eschatological, canonical, and Christoscopic. It rightly considers a literal reading of the Bible that has not perceived the glory of Christ as an utter failure. That being said, he takes time to reassure those who might be worried about ham-fisted Christocentric interpretations as well: “Trans-figural interpretation thickens, extends, and deepens the literal sense, precisely by following the way the words go, from figure to what is figured” (170). It is not the perceived free-for-all of Origen’s allegorical method. Vanhoozer spends considerable time warning of “bad” figural reading, which “thins, stymies, or subverts the literal sense” (168).

Finally, in part 3, Vanhoozer unfurls the “material principle of mere Christian Hermeneutics: the light of Christ or, more expansively, the knowledge of God in the face of Christ” (194). This part both models much of what he has been teaching at that point, as well as deepens it. He wants us to see the “economy of light” in Scripture whose main subject matter is the Son of God.

Chiefly, it is here that Vanhoozer defends his use of the term “trans-figural” by arguing that the transfiguration narrative “provides a unique vantage point from which to think about the ends and means of Christian hermeneutics in distinctly Christological terms” (25). He considers it “an excellent case study for our experiment in biblical-theological criticism” (25). He spends a colossal amount of time proving this very point to his reader.

Unfortunately, this latter argument now leads me to relate that Vanhoozer’s musketeers’ cry will not rally everyone. Indeed, a colleague of mine on the biblical studies “side” takes issue with that very point. While he recognizes that the transfiguration is an important text for hermeneutics, he finds Vanhoozer’s use of it as a template for exegesis unfounded. His concern revolves specifically around how our author sees it as amplifying the glorified humanity of Christ. This colleague worries that seeing the Son as glorified before the Son is glorified (1 Cor. 15 and Luke 24) fits more of a Roman Catholic schema than a Reformed one. Additionally, the Trinitarian character of the revelation of the mount appeared to him as lessened by Vanhoozer’s glorified humanity view. Fundamentally, he considers that Vanhoozer’s template misunderstands the transfiguration.

On the other “side,” it is also worth noting that not every theologian will agree with every aspect of Vanhoozer’s proposal. For example, his pushback against the necessity of proper metaphysics in hermeneutics will leave many puzzled. While I agree with him that it is unhelpful to insist that we can’t open our Bibles before being able to distinguish an efficient cause from a material one, I do think that some principles of realist metaphysics are necessary to read the Bible aright. Incidentally, when Vanhoozer states that he prefers the “more horizontal dynamic of salvation history with its eschatological pull,” as opposed to the “vertical dynamic of Christian Platonism with its upward pull” (133), I wonder if he finds himself not rejecting the necessity of metaphysics per se, but pointing down with Aristotle, Thomas, and the Reformed scholastics. I wish that Vanhoozer would explore the Aristotelian metaphysical frame of reference of some of our fathers further. I think he might find that it rescues the best of the Platonist theologians’ proposal without causing any interpreter’s head to be pulled into the clouds.

All in all, it should come as no surprise that Vanhoozer’s proposal of a trans-figural interpretation is not the panacea for all our hermeneutic woes. As Americans succinctly put it: Figures! That said, I personally thank the Lord for his evidently arduous work. I have used Vanhoozer’s Mere Christian Hermeneutics as the main textbook of my Principles of Biblical Interpretation 2 class at Bethlehem Seminary in Cameroon, and I plan to do so again. After being saved from the polluted hermeneutics of the prosperity gospel, my Cameroonian students found the book to be a fountain of nourishing waters they greedily drank at.

Pastors interested in seeing more of Christ in the Word to ever better feed their people week by week will be well served by this book. The way of being with the Word that Vanhoozer teaches “more closely resembles dialogue with its living divine author than it does an operation performed on dead letters” (319). His aim is “beatific lection: a beholding, through reading, of the radiant face of Christ in the letter of the text” (363). In other words, this is no academic barren land. Pastors will also appreciate that Vanhoozer makes much of the authority of the local church. He makes it clear all throughout that the Bible is primarily to be read “in, with, and for the church” (25).

In the last analysis, Vanhoozer’s musketeer cry does not stop at the horizontal level, trying to force brooding exegetes and theologians to lay down their double-edged pens. Were that the case, it would be fruitless. If the reader allowed me a bad figural reading of Dumas’s motto, Vanhoozer is rather ultimately striving to call all of God’s church to be for the One who himself is already for us all in Jesus Christ. All for the One and the One for all! It is this vertical aspect, this dogged attempt to make others see the light of Christ in all of Scripture, that readers will remember once they close this book. Whatever its flaws, I can only commend to you a work of hermeneutics that is resolved to make its reader sunbathe in “the radiance of God’s glory,” our Lord Jesus Christ (Heb. 1:3). May reading this book lead you to have his “face shine upon you” ever more as you meditate on his precious Word (Num. 6:25).