Kevin Vanhoozer’s stimulating essay, “Interpreting Scripture between the Rock of Biblical Studies and the Hard Place of Systematic Theology: The State of the Evangelical (Dis)union,” can be found in Renewing the Evangelical Mission, ed. Richard Lints (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), 201-225.
One of the wonderful things about Vanhoozer is that his writing is both creative and insightful. For example, here is he writing on the frustrations of scholarly specialization:
Scholars know deep down that they can and should do better than stay within the confines of their specializations:
For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out.
For I do not do the interpretive good I want, but the historical-criticism or proof-texting I do not want is what I keep on doing.
Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but interpretive habits that have been drilled into me.
Wretched reader that I am!
Who will deliver me from this body of secondary literature?
Thanks be to God, there is a way forward: the way, truth, and life of collaboration in Christ, where sainthood and scholarship coexist, and where theological exegesis and exegetical theology are mutually supportive and equally important. (pp. 218-219)
Other notable and quotable examples include:
The challenge is to read the Bible in such a way that we neither learn merely about it (as in much biblical scholarship) nor merely use it to substantiate our doctrinal claims (as in much systematic theology) but rather learn from it in order to be changed by it. (p. 218)
Or:
Understanding without communion is empty; communion without understanding is blind. (p. 219)
Or:
Biblical reasoning is father to the Christian imagination, the means of viewing our world in terms of the strange new world of the Bible. (p. 219)
Or:
To Sir Edwyn Hoskyn’s rhetorical question, “Can we bury ourselves in a lexicon, and arise in the presence of God?” we may respond with a resounding “Yes!” It begins with a belief that God speaks to us in and through the human words of the Bible. (p. 223)
Or:
What if they laugh at us? So what? Let us continue to uphold standards of research and protocols of argument. Evangelicals, of all scholars, should display the intellectual virtues without which academic debate degenerates into grandstanding or mud-slinging. Intellectual humility, patient study, honest, and consistency: against such things there is no law. (p. 223)
Or:
The pastor-theologian should be evangelicalism’s default public intellectual, with preaching the preferred public mode of theological interpretation of Scripture. (p. 224)
The entire essay is well worth reading. The heart of his proposal includes ten theses on theological interpretation of Scripture. “The ten theses are arrange in five pairs: the first term in each pair is properly theological, focusing on some aspect of God’s communicative agency; the second draws out its implications for hermeneutics and biblical interpretation.”
- The nature and function of the Bible are insufficiently grasped unless and until we see the Bible as an element in the economy of triune discourse.
- An appreciation of the theological nature of the Bible entails a rejection of a methodological atheism that treats the texts as having a “natural history” only.
- The message of the Bible is “finally” about the loving power of God for salvation (Rom. 1:16), the definitive or final gospel Word of God that comes to brightest light in the word’s final form.
- Because God acts in space-time (of Israel, Jesus Christ, and the church), theological interpretation requires thick descriptions that plumb the height and depth of history, not only its length.
- Theological interpreters view the historical events recounted in Scripture as ingredients in a unified story ordered by an economy of triune providence.
- The Old Testament testifies to the same drama of redemption as the New, hence the church rightly reads both Testaments together, two parts of a single authoritative script.
- The Spirit who speaks with magisterial authority in the Scripture speaks with ministerial authority in church tradition.
- In an era marked by the conflict of interpretations, there is good reason provisionally to acknowledge the superiority of catholic interpretation.
- The end of biblical interpretation is not simply communication—the sharing of information—but communion, a sharing in the light, life, and love of God.
- The church is that community where good habits of theological interpretation are best formed and where the fruit of these habits are best exhibited. (pp. 211-214)
What a rich essay!
