How Kevin Vanhoozer Bridges Biblical Studies and Theology

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0:00:00 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): I certainly do draw a connection between the transfiguration of Jesus and the way we should read the Bible. And it’s because the transfiguration is an event that without distorting the humanity of Jesus, shows us who he truly is. Light from light, the light streaming from Jesus face, showing that he is by nature God in the flesh.

0:00:39 – (Collin Hansen): Back in 2024, Kevin Vanhuser’s book Mere Christian Transfiguring what It Means to Read the Bible Theologically won the Christianity Today Book Award in the Academic Theology category and also won the Gospel Coalition Book Award in Biblical Studies. I really couldn’t even begin to account for all the other awards Dr. Vanhuser has won for his earlier works. I had the blessing of studying under Dr. Vanhuser at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and I was challenged in this book, just as I was challenged and encouraged in his courses.

0:01:12 – (Collin Hansen): Mere Christian Hermeneutics helps all of us who live on the far side of the demise of Biblical civilization. When Westerners want to tell the story of the world, we no longer open the Bible to do so. Vanhuser aims to reconnect us with Scripture as our means of enjoying covenant fellowship with the triune God. And I loved this summary in the book. How an unholy people can come into the presence of a holy God is the chief complication in the Biblical narrative to which the Gospel is the solution.

0:01:47 – (Collin Hansen): So let’s jump in, get into mere Christian hermeneutics, reading the Bible spiritually, the transfiguration, and much more. Kevin, thank you for joining me on Gospel Bound.

0:01:56 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): Thank you for the invitation.

0:01:58 – (Collin Hansen): Let’s just start with the basic premise of this book. What makes this Christian hermeneutics mirror?

0:02:04 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): So that’s a bold word to use because I’m invoking C.S. lewis. And what makes it mirror is that I. I feel that we’re in a situation of many kinds of polarization. And so what Lewis called mere Christianity, we have to ask today, will the center hold? Will the mirrorness hold? Or will we be dividing up into a number of factions and smaller groups at war with one another? And we’re in a polarized context.

0:02:38 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): And what has disturbed me is that Christians who say they all believe the Bible are nevertheless polarized about what the Bible means. And it’s not just the interpretations that are polarizing it. I think it’s the way we read the Bible that is the deepest source of this polarization. So the mirror is a challenge to myself. And by the way, I would sometimes smile at the title and then sometimes cringe you know, because could I make good on this promise to articulate what all Christians do have in common when it comes to reading Scripture?

0:03:17 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): It’s a big ask, but that was the thrust of it, trying to articulate what we all have in common when we seem to be so divided.

0:03:26 – (Collin Hansen): I might as well just go ahead and follow up on that kind of open door. Walk through that open door you just had there. On why hermeneutics, then, is the essential challenge to this unity. Not merely what the Bible says, but really how we’re even approaching it and how we’re interpreting it. Explain more of why. That’s the real challenge underneath everything else.

0:03:49 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): So I think that all of us interpreters of the Bible have been formed to read the Bible in certain ways. So one of the main concepts of the book is the idea of a reading culture. And by reading culture, I don’t simply mean a group of people that like reading. No, I mean that every group of readers or every individual reader has been socialized into a way of reading, a culture of reading that is characterized by having certain values, certain priorities, prioritizing certain questions and looking for some things rather than others.

0:04:29 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): And so if you’ve been socialized into a way of reading the Bible, even if you meet another Christian and, you know, want in all goodwill to get along with that person, there is often a culture shock and a culture clash. And cultures are often invisible because it’s the environment in which we live and move and have our reading. But if we call out what these values and assumptions and priorities are, then we’re more likely to find out where the disagreement really lies.

0:05:01 – (Collin Hansen): Help us get the lay of the land on some of the differences between Christians right now. You know, been involved historically with evangelicals and Catholics together, but I’ve seen some people saying that recently there’s actually more conflict theologically between Catholics, Orthodox, Protestant, specifically evangelicals. Do you sense some of that more probably YouTube driven polemics, especially with younger people.

0:05:28 – (Collin Hansen): Does that, if you see that, does that pose a threat to some of what you’re trying to do here? Or do you think maybe some of that’s overblown? There isn’t as much conflict right now as it might appear.

0:05:38 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): Well, you know, the conflicts I’m trying to negotiate in the first place are the ones within the Protestant house. You know, we have to clean up our own house first before we go out into the neighborhood and try to make friends. But I do think that you’re probably right. There probably is, in this age of polarization, an attempt to flee the middle ground and to find some comfort and solace and maybe defense in particular communities.

0:06:14 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): It disturbs me a little bit because I think we’re doing this. We’re polarizing in part because of the some fear that there is a threat to our identity. And if you view your identity in a narrow way, then, yeah, the polarization and the pluralization is quite threatening. But there’s a different way of trying to fellowship with believers who may not agree with you on every particular point, but they may have the main things in common.

0:06:43 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): So I’m beginning in the book, at least, trying to sort out just disagreements within the Protestant traditions themselves.

0:06:52 – (Collin Hansen): Is that fear related to some of the loss of that Western narrative that I was referring to in the introduction?

0:06:58 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): Yes, I think you’re right. You know, there’s a fear that we’re no longer a Christian nation, if we ever were. There’s a fear that the church is losing its influence socially. The church used to be at least smiled upon by larger society, but it’s been suggested that we’re now in a negative world where people come to the Christian faith, the Christian church, with a suspicion that maybe it’s not good for society after all, maybe it’s the source of oppression, of hurt, of being burned.

0:07:36 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): And so I think there is a concern now that we’re losing our influence and prestige and power and that we’re just letting civilization get away from us.

0:07:46 – (Collin Hansen): This is a more specific question, I think, than I was planning to ask, but it was something that came up just as we were talking here. Part of what you’re addressing here is Christian Smith’s pervasive interpretive pluralism critique, switching from Protestant to Catholic and then making the critique of Protestantism. Of course, we’ve seen Dr. Smith recently comment about the challenges at Notre Dame as he stepped away from there as well.

0:08:11 – (Collin Hansen): Could you perhaps talk to some Protestants who are exploring the Catholic tradition, seeing it as an escape from that basic hermeneutical problem? Well, we say that the Bible first, but we can’t even agree on what the Bible says. So this is why we need an authoritative interpretation. Could you speak maybe to some of the people thinking about that challenge and the challenges that are seen on the opposite side as well?

0:08:37 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): Sure. So I read Christian Smith’s book the Bible Made Impossible while it was still a manuscript. And I did suggest to him that while I saw the problem, I felt that he wasn’t really doing justice to historic Protestant emphasis on sola scriptura, because the Protestant reformers never meant by sola scriptura that every individual is supposed to read the Bible for him or herself. In context, the Reformers were Catholics. That is, they were trying to reform the one true holy Catholic apostolic Church, not start a smorgasbord of alternatives.

0:09:18 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): And so his book doesn’t really capture that. His book, and he’s a sociologist, so he has lots of evidence. His book is looking at what I think is the pathology of Protestantism, not the historic, true nature of Protestantism, which as I said, is Catholic with a small C. Trying to root the Church not in Rome so much, but in Romans. Paul’s letter about the Gospel.

0:09:49 – (Collin Hansen): Well, it strikes me as maybe the reverse problem Catholics have or Protestants have. When they look at the Catholic Church, they’re looking at what’s on paper, but not on the pathos of what they’re encountering. And perhaps that’s what’s disturbing to them when they get there to say, well, wait a minute, there’s just as much infighting on that side as there was on the side that I just left. Well, on paper it seems to make a lot of sense.

0:10:15 – (Collin Hansen): Go ahead.

0:10:17 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): In the Catholic Church there are different approaches. That’s true. For example, in the 20th century you had Karl Rahner and, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. Quite a bit of difference. Not quite Barth and Bultmann, but not quite so far away from that kind of contrast either. So it’s true that the unity in the Roman Catholic Church is a little bit overdrawn.

0:10:43 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah, that’s hard to know because you tend to know your own tradition and the weaknesses of your own house and then you look at the positives on another side. I think that’s just a very human way of thinking about things, but it can leave you making some maybe short sighted choices. Just going back, talking about the book, just help us understand what it means to interpret the Bible spiritually. I think if you talk to a lot of evangelical Protestants, they might have a good sense what they think that means. But I’m not sure it’s the same thing of what you mean.

0:11:18 – (Collin Hansen): Help us explain. What does it mean to interpret the Bible spiritually?

0:11:21 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): Well, in the book instead of spiritually, I often use the term transfigurally or theologically. But the key thing, and it works just as well but spiritually, is that I want to read the Bible literally. All theologians since Aquinas and maybe before have realized that it’s the literal sense that has authority. And the concern about spiritual reading is that somehow the spirit is doing an injustice to the letter, not the spirit but spiritual reading is thought to be doing an injustice to literal interpretation.

0:11:57 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): Paul says the letter kills the spirit, gives life this letter, spirit tension that had turned into a kind of literal versus allegorical tension that’s been a recurrent theme in the history of Bible reading. And so in the book, I try to suggest that spiritual reading or transfigural reading or theological reading is not a distortion of the literal sense, but penetrating into what the literal sense is actually speaking about, getting beyond the surface.

0:12:33 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): And I think the main claim of the book really is that spiritual or theological interpretation does not distort the literal sense, but in seeing the ultimate reference to Christ actually glorifies the literal sense. And for me, that was the takeaway that when I first formulated it and saw it and felt the force of it, kind of gave me chills, you know, because it seemed like a breakthrough. To be honest, we don’t distort the literal sense when we read it Christianly.

0:13:12 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): For the full face of Jesus Christ shining through the text. That’s a way of glorifying the letter, not distorting it.

0:13:23 – (Collin Hansen): Let’s go a little bit deeper on that. Tell us more about how the transfiguration guides us in how to read the Bible.

0:13:29 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): Is guide the best word? I certainly do draw a connection between the transfiguration of Jesus and the way we should read the Bible. And it’s because the transfiguration is an event that without distorting the humanity of Jesus, shows us who he truly is. Light from light, the light streaming from Jesus face, showing that he is by nature God in the flesh. That again, is such an important notion. And in the same way, or at least analogously, I should say, the light of Christ shines not just from his human face, but from the biblical letter, from the letter of the text. If we’re reading Christianly, ultimately, I think we have to acknowledge that what the Bible is finally about is Jesus.

0:14:24 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): And you know, it’s all. My book is really all about reading the Bible to see Jesus. Sir, in my hermeneutics course, we would see Jesus. We want to see the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ through Scripture. And let me just add, you know, when we think of Jesus asking hard questions, we often go to, who do you say that I am? That’s the Christological question. But I like to focus on Luke 10:26, when Jesus is confronting the Pharisees and he asks another hard question.

0:15:01 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): How do you read? How do you read? And in context, he’s asking the Pharisees about how they read the law. But we know what Jesus thought they should see when they looked at the law. Because in John 5:46, he says, if you believed Moses, you would believe me, for Moses wrote of me. Well, we wouldn’t know that unless we read in this transfigural way, unless we glorified or saw the glory hiding just under the surface of the letter.

0:15:38 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): But the law was never intended to be our way to God. The law was a pedagogue, a guide to direct us to Christ. So I think the transfiguration for me is an analogy and a reminder that at the end of the day, it’s all about the glorification of Jesus and reading the words of the Bible in this glorification way that makes them glorified.

0:16:08 – (Collin Hansen): Is this also then your effort to try to help bridge this divide where people seem to want to pit Jesus against the Bible? That can seem to go in both different directions. There seems to be an awkward arrangement where some people will say, well, I’m really following Jesus, and therefore the Bible is subservient to that. Or somebody saying, no, I’m trying to represent the whole Bible as a counter argument there. Is that part of what you’re trying to help us avoid as well?

0:16:36 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): It wasn’t the main idea, but I have heard this argument too many times that somehow we pit Christology against bibliology. And that just strikes me as being wrong. If we’re following the way the biblical words go, if we’re being biblical, we’ll get to Jesus. And. And not only will we get to Jesus, if we really follow the way the words go, attend to what’s being said, absorb the testimony and believe it in faith, we begin to become like Jesus.

0:17:11 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): And that’s striking to me. And here’s another connection to the transfiguration, by the way, I spend quite a bit of time in 2 Corinthians 3:4, and in 2 Corinthians 3:18, Paul says that if we read the Scriptures, the law and the prophets and so on with unveiled faces, we’ll begin to reflect the Lord’s glory. And he says we’re being transformed into his likeness with ever increasing glory through reading Scripture, we’re being transformed into his likeness.

0:17:48 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): What strikes me about that verse is the word for transformed is metamorpho, the same word that occurs in two instances describing Jesus transfiguration. So there’s another strong connection, I think, between Jesus transfiguration and our reading of Scripture. If we read a scripture, if we read as Christians with unveiled faces. We’ll participate in In Jesus own transfiguration. I think that’s a strong connection.

0:18:24 – (Collin Hansen): You know, talking here with Kevin vanhuser about mere Christian hermeneutics, transfiguring, what it means to read the Bible theologically. You know, Kevin, I don’t get too much criticism in this podcast for being overly popular or just catering to the whims of the viewers. But just in case anybody out there is wondering and thinking that I do, I’m going to ask about Ocalampadius, who I didn’t know anything about until studying at Trinity and then read a whole book at Oklahompadius for one of my upper level classes. But you identify him as your mere Christian hermeneutical patron saint.

0:19:02 – (Collin Hansen): Probably a lot of people out there, they’re not familiar with this early first generation reformer who had an amazing influence, but just is overlooked for all the Bullingers and bootsers and Luther’s and obviously later Calvin and others. But help us tell a little bit more about what you see in Oklahompadius and how he helped inspire you on this project.

0:19:23 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): So there are a lot of Protestants that I wanted to look to, but I like his name because it means house lamp. And so I like things like that even if I didn’t make a big fuss about it in the book. It pleased me on one level that to some extent his name reflects the nature of what he’s writing about, the way that Scripture lights our path. But he is known with many of the Reformers as being concerned to articulate the Scopus, the main subject matter of Scripture.

0:19:59 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): And he thought that if you’re going to be a reader of Scripture, you have to know basically what this book is about, that knowing that ultimate referent or subject matter is a guide to reading the parts. And so what helps me in his writings, and this was in part I was helped by a doctoral dissertation on him that focuses on this point, was the idea that the Scopus of Scripture is Christoscopic. That is, Christ is really the ultimate subject matter behind all of the Scripture.

0:20:34 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): And he did not mean that we should, you know, search Christ in every detail of the text. He’s really reminding us it’s the big picture that we have to keep in mind. And I just found that’s very helpful. Scopus has always been important in biblical interpretation, but I think we’ve lost sight of it because we become, well, maybe sometimes too detail focused, sometimes too focused in trying to find something in a verse that will help us directly in our Christian life.

0:21:07 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): But I think everything in the Bible, law, prophets, writings, is given to us to prepare the way for Jesus. A little bit like John the Baptist, without the prophet, the prophets, the law, and the writings, we would not grasp who Jesus said he was. We wouldn’t understand what he did and how he is, the fulfillment of God’s promises to Israel, to Abraham, and so on. So that’s a lot to put on him. But basically he just is there in the book because he reminds us that we must never forget that the main subject matter of Scripture is Christian.

0:21:51 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): And he makes that point in a different way. And long before Karl Barth did you

0:21:57 – (Collin Hansen): write in the book? What the church needs now is disciplinary integration, not segregation. Interpreters of the Word unite. Do you have hope that biblical scholars and theologians might be able to collaborate more closely for the good of the church? And a lot of people watching and listening to this may not even recognize that they don’t necessarily collaborate very well or understand why they wouldn’t collaborate well. So give us a little bit of that background.

0:22:25 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): You’re right. When I talk in churches to lay people, they’re stunned to hear that there may be any kind of conflict or contrast between what biblical exegetes do and what theologians do. However, if you’ve been a seminary student and you’ve taken biblical studies classes and then theology classes, you’ll realize that there is a different approach to doing these disciplines. I do not want to tar either discipline with this distinction, but I think a helpful, easy way of grasping what’s at stake is using a distinction C.S. lewis draws in his little essay, Meditations in a Tool Shed, where he contrasts looking at a beam of light with standing in the beam of light and looking along it.

0:23:19 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): And I think that is an interesting contrast in the academy. Biblical studies has become a species of looking at. Biblical scholars in the academy are always concerned to keep a critical distance. If you step into the light and look along it, that’s like having faith, and it’s like inhabiting the light. And in the academy, you know, biblical studies does not require faith. It’s a historical, descriptive enterprise.

0:23:52 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): And a lot follows from these two prepositions. Looking at, looking along these two ways of looking at, or getting involved in light. And again, I don’t want to say that theology always wins because it’s looking along. I think many exegetes are beginning to do that in biblical theology, for example. But historically, there is that distinction that has, I think, characterized Scholastic reading in the medieval period, from monastic reading, different Ways of inhabiting.

0:24:29 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): And this is what I meant by different reading cultures. If you’re enculturated into the world of biblical studies, you’ll learn different values, priorities and methods. And if you’re enculturated into the world of systematic theology, well, worst case scenario, you may not even be interested in the biblical text. You may turn to philosophy. So in my book, I try to teach or treat each of these disciplines equally fairly.

0:25:00 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): But a word of warning for each of them, because each of them can go wrong in their own way.

0:25:05 – (Collin Hansen): There’s another claim in the book that I didn’t just underline, but I starred it as well. It’s a big claim. Kant’s Copernican revolution matters because it is the epitome of critical thinking, the impetus of the secular social imaginary and the foundation of biblical criticism. There’s a lot going on there. Why don’t you explain a little bit of that revolution?

0:25:28 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): So this isn’t just me here. I think a lot of scholars would agree. I’m thinking particularly of Michael Legaspi. He wrote something entitled, I Think this Is Right, the Death of Scripture and the Birth of the Academic Bible, something along those lines. But the idea is in modernity, Kant, who actually had the manifesto on what it means to be an enlightened critical thinker, says a critical thinker must take nothing on authority or tradition.

0:26:03 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): You have to examine everything for yourself. He’s a prime example of what it means to look at and to have a critical mind is to be suspicious of appearances. And in modern biblical studies, that’s what’s happened. Biblical scholars have been suspicious of biblical appearances. So Genesis 1 appears to say the Bible was. Or that the world was created in six days. But the critic asks what really happened? That’s the appearance. What’s the reality?

0:26:38 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): And that little critical gap between appearance and reality that’s characteristic of the modern mind, that the modern mind will not accept the appearance as reality, will not trust the appearance as reality without critically and independently providing corroboration for the claim. So that it is a big thing, and it’s affected everyone in the modern world. You know, we’re. We’re more critical, we’re more distrustful. We want evidence.

0:27:17 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): We look to science as the paradigm of what it means to be rational. And so to stand in the beam and look along it, some might say that’s a matter of sacrificing your intellect. Augustine would say, no, it’s a matter of believing in order to understand.

0:27:34 – (Collin Hansen): Oh, that’s very, very helpful. Are There other ways that you would suggest that we’re reading and interpreting our Bibles in ways that we don’t recognize as unique to our modern era.

0:27:47 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): There was a couple of negatives there. Yeah, there’s double negative ways.

0:27:52 – (Collin Hansen): We think we’re just reading the Bible and we don’t recognize this is unique. We read the Bible this way. They didn’t read the Bible that way before the modern era. Post Kant, essentially.

0:28:05 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): Yeah. So there have always been people who asked critical questions. I mean, Augustine, in his reading of Genesis had all sorts of questions about what the text really meant. So it wasn’t as though he gave up his mind. But we moderns tend to ask a different kind of question. And you know, as I said about reading cultures, we’ve all been taught to ask certain kinds of questions. So for example, today, you know, after Karl Marx, one question that some people will ask is, what is the effect of this text on human society, human liberation? Is this going to free human beings to read it in this way or maybe oppress them in some way? And so ideological criticism, ask the question, in whose interest is reading the Bible this way?

0:29:07 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): Whose power interest does this way of reading serve? And that’s the postmodern question, not simply asking about the difference between appearance and reality, but asking in whose power interest is this particular text or this particular way of reading? And so the whole process of biblical interpretation has become politicized. But you asked, what are we not aware of? We’re probably not aware of the presuppositions we bring to the text.

0:29:40 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): That is, what are we assuming about God, the world, ourselves, the Bible, Jesus? And I think we need to be very honest about what it is that we bring to the text. And I think we need to become good listeners because I want to understand the text, stand under its authority. I don’t want to overstand the text and make it address agendas that are mine rather than the authors of Scripture themselves.

0:30:14 – (Collin Hansen): Now, I don’t was thinking about this as I prepared for this interview. I don’t remember all the seminary classes. Trinity Evangelical Divinity School where I got my best grades. But I do remember the seminary class where I got my worst grade. And that was Theology three, your systematic theology class. What will you miss most about Trinity Evangelical Divinity School with the close of the Deerfield campus and then your move to Wheaton College.

0:30:42 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): Well, you know, I will miss that theology course sequence. Not, not because I enjoy assigning grades other than A’s. That’s what happened. I don’t know, but I miss. I Just miss getting pastors excited about and competent in the project of systematic theology, which is, I would want to say, simply answering the questions that reading the Bible raises. Right. I don’t impose, you know, a framework onto the Scriptures.

0:31:20 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): I’m trying to respond to the questions that naturally arise from a careful reading. And I do get excited about the connections between different doctrines that one can see an organic unity of truth emerge, a different way of thinking about God, the world, and ourselves that’s coherent and countercultural, always calling for some kind of reform, but essentially the best news that can be heard about reality, that the one who created things in the first place is recreating things in Christ through the Spirit.

0:32:01 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): Just that that is the big systematic truth, as it were. That is, in Scripture, God is active and he is actively doing things to redeem. So this is good news and it’s deep. And we don’t always see everything if we just skim the surface of Scripture. And systematic theology is simply the discipline that takes the time to answer the questions that Scripture itself raises. I’ll miss going through that whole series of questions with people who are preparing to be pastors.

0:32:37 – (Collin Hansen): Well, I don’t think I’d be leading a center for cultural apologetics or teaching pastors here at Basin Divinity School who are preparing for ministry in cultural apologetics if I hadn’t taken your course on cultural hermeneutics.

0:32:54 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): Ah, yes.

0:32:55 – (Collin Hansen): Now, you hadn’t taught it in quite a while, right? Maybe at least a decade or so. But I can remember even the. Well, I guess this is appropriate because my paper was on a theology of place, and I can remember the place where we had the. And the time of year and everything where we had that class. But I’m wondering how you’ve seen that discipline of cultural hermeneutics evolve during your academic career. I think maybe people don’t recognize how few people were doing that kind of work back when you were teaching.

0:33:28 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): Yeah, I remember that when I first started teaching at Trinity, culture was only mentioned when it had to do with a country other than the United States. In other words, we didn’t have a culture. They had cultures. So I’m very pleased that by the time I left Trinity, the students and the professors all knew that we had to get busy exegeting our culture and. And not just foreign cultures. And I think we are aware that culture is a force of spiritual formation.

0:34:05 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): I’m very concerned about that. I like to say that. I don’t like to say, I have to say that culture is the most powerful means of spiritual formation second only to the Spirit working in the church. But that is quite a claim. Right. And the point is everyone is being spiritually formed. The only question is, what kind of spirits is contemporary culture forming? So pastors have to know their culture in order to make sure that they’re pursuing the project of making their congregations more and more like Christmas, because there’s a lot of energy and money being spent trying to form our spirits in other directions.

0:34:54 – (Collin Hansen): First thing I have my students do is just write a personal narrative, thinking about themselves as if they were from the outside, meaning as if they were going into a foreign culture. In missiology, we’ve had to do this for a long time. You have to assess what do I see as essential to my Christian faith that I’m going to bring across? What do I see as it could go either way. I care about this, but I’m not going to force everybody else to care about it. And what do you have to drop? What’s the baggage that you need to leave behind?

0:35:26 – (Collin Hansen): We’ve known for quite a while we need to do that in missiology. Thanks to you and others, we recognize more now than we need to do it in our home host culture. But still, the students that I run into, they are very rewarded with the exercise because they’ve never taken that time, they’ve never taken that time to process through their home churches, their families, what kind of reading culture they’ve inhabited.

0:35:51 – (Collin Hansen): But hopefully by the end of the course, they’re able to see that and ultimately become more effective Bible interpreters and then also teachers who can teach across cultures, including the various cultures that make up the United States. So you played a big role in helping me with that.

0:36:10 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): Well, but thank you for your service, because just to answer your question, I’ve been very encouraged to see that now culture is very much a part of the. On the radar of those who are involved in theological education. It really has to be, of course.

0:36:24 – (Collin Hansen): Glad to do that with our friend Doug Sweeney leading here at Bason Divinity School, who invited me to teach that course. No doubt shaped by your own experiences there at Trinity. How would you describe the current state of theological interpretation of Scripture? Some people will. Will know exactly what we mean by that, but not everybody will. So maybe give just a brief explanation and then describe exactly where you see us right now. You’ve been involved in that effort for quite some time.

0:36:54 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): Yes. Theological interpretation of Scripture is, on one level, the kind of interpretation theologians have been given of the biblical text. And there’s been a bit of a culture clash here because a lot of the biblical scholars aren’t really acknowledging it as good interpretation. The concern is that theologians are reading something into the text. And by the way, I share that concern. But at least the dialogue has been happening for several years now. We have exegetes and theologians talking together.

0:37:30 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): I believe it’s ultimately a matter of partnership. I believe that the exegetes are giving the right kind of attention, helpful attention to the grammar of the text, the words, the syntax, the semantics. But I think theologians are rightly giving attention to what we might call the grammar of God, the subject matter of the text. We need both. We need people dealing with both kinds of grammar. The grammar of the words, the grammar of God as it were. And by grammar, I simply mean, you know, the rules for rightly thinking about the words and their meaning, and then the reference and the subject matter of the text. We need rules for thinking about these things.

0:38:15 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): Theology deals with the rule of faith. And many people read the Bible theologically by adopting the rule of faith, which simply says Old and New Testaments are part of one unified story. There isn’t a God of the Old Testament and a God of the New, as was thought in the ancient church. Sometimes it’s one story. And the rule of faith is a rule for thinking the God of Israel and the Father of Jesus Christ together, same God.

0:38:50 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): But to answer your question, it’s a work in progress. It’s a work in progress because many of us, all of us, have been formed by reading cultures in secular universities that don’t necessarily adopt that rule of faith. So to the extent that faith is kept out of the academy, and to the extent that we’re trained, many of us in secular academies, we have to unlearn some of the things we’ve been taught, or at least we have to enlarge our learning by bringing church based learning as well as academy based learning to this project of reading the Bible.

0:39:29 – (Collin Hansen): This is somewhat related. Is there anything that worries you in today’s movement toward theological retrieval?

0:39:36 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): Well, the obvious question is what exactly are we retrieving? And if one thought that one is simply retrieving a unified tradition, there are some positives and negatives about that. I mean, I’m obviously for mirror Christianity, but on the other hand, as Lewis himself was quick to point out, a lot of the growth in our Christian life happens not in the hall where mere Christianity takes place, but in the particular rooms or specific traditions.

0:40:14 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): And so I wouldn’t want retrieval to dilute what specific historic Protestant traditions have developed and explored, because There are specific questions that denominations have answered differently. And I think the key for Protestants is we can still fellowship across our differences most of the time. And I think that is why I would want to claim, and here I’m following Gavin Ortland and Beth Felker Jones and their recent books on Protestant baptism.

0:40:53 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): I would want to claim that Protestants really are able to demonstrate a true catholicity, a fellowship across the faith, unity on the essentials, while being tolerant and gracious and generous about differences on secondary matters. And by secondary, I don’t mean they’re not important. They’re just not important enough to divide the church over. So I spend a lot of time on secondary differences. I have my own favorites, as it were.

0:41:28 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): But I’m not going to break fellowship if someone doesn’t agree with me on a particular doctrine that is not essential for orthodoxy itself.

0:41:40 – (Collin Hansen): Well, of course, a lot of those are the issues that come out or came out in your Theology 3 class because it covers ecclesiology. So you get all those different things that actually put us in different churches. You know, people who have been listening to this podcast may be familiar with the Alexandrian Institute, which has been sponsoring and putting ads here on this podcast and elsewhere at the Gospel Coalition.

0:42:02 – (Collin Hansen): So I thought we’d give you a chance to tell us a little bit more about the Alexandrian Institute, what you’re up to, what you’re hoping to do.

0:42:08 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): Yeah, I have joined it in a part time but significant role. And I am excited because we’re at an age where everybody’s asking, how do we do theological education? And what I appreciate about the Alexandrian Institute is that I think they’re on the right track. I appreciate the fact that the founder, Emmanuel Campuris, a retired businessman, wanted to use his fortune or his resources to further higher theological education.

0:42:42 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): And he was actually born in Alexandria. So the Institute has a couple of reasons for being called what he is.

0:42:48 – (Collin Hansen): Good point.

0:42:49 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): The other reason is that we like to say that Alexandria paved the road that led to Nicaea and creedal orthodoxy by theologians like Athanasius and Cyril of Alexandria. But many of the things we’ve been talking about with regard to my book are also values of the Alexandrian Institute. But my particular role is I’m director of postgraduate research. But what that means is, and this is what I’m excited about, I get to supervise the doctoral supervisors.

0:43:26 – (Collin Hansen): Oh, that’s cool.

0:43:27 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): And my mandate, my job description is I’m supposed to help form a research culture that emphasizes intellectual and spiritual formation and puts the priority on reading Scripture with the great tradition for the sake of engaging contemporary culture. So what’s not to like?

0:43:51 – (Collin Hansen): That sounds like you.

0:43:53 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): It is, but for the student experience. I’m also pleased that a student who enters the Alexandrian Institute can be assured that they are entering into a research culture where all the supervisors I’m supervising, 10 of them at the moment, have been involved in discussions and readings so that we’re all on the big. On the same big page, as it were.

0:44:19 – (Collin Hansen): Wow, that’s really cool. I appreciate you sharing about that. And it’s very exciting to hear. And exciting to hear that there are people with resources willing to back that kind of work, which is always needed, but not always easy to. To finance and to pull off.

0:44:33 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): Indeed, indeed.

0:44:35 – (Collin Hansen): In these times. I have a final three that are just going to be quick questions, but let’s get one more before we jump in there. What’s left for you to finish before your career ends?

0:44:48 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): What’s left is the biggest project I’m at work on, a four volume systematic theology. I like to say that everything up to now has been, in a sense, a tilling of the ground. And now the real planting project begins. The planting, because I hope it will bear fruit for the church and the academy. And yeah, I’m excited about this. It’s going to be something of a distinct systematic theology, but still recognizably in that genre.

0:45:26 – (Collin Hansen): Where are you in that process? Four volumes. I mean, are they coming out? Are they all going to drop at once? How does this work?

0:45:33 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): In my head, I’m coming along very well,

0:45:37 – (Collin Hansen): but I’m not your publisher or your editor, so I don’t. I’m not legally bound to ask that question.

0:45:42 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): And when the publishers come, I quickly cross to the other side of the street. But you know, I’m doing my best under the circumstances, which is all we humans can do.

0:45:53 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah. Amen. Well, we’re all excited to see that. Been talking with Kevin vanhuser about his 2024 book, Mere Christian Hermeneutics Transfiguring, what it means to read the Bible theologically. Let’s do our final three. I don’t always get to do this in interviews, but I thought this would be a great fit. So I’ve asked these at various times and I’m just looking for basic reactions here. But where do you find calm in the storm?

0:46:19 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): So I’m an amateur pianist and Brahms.

0:46:25 – (Collin Hansen): I love it. I love it. And where do you find good news today?

0:46:31 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): I think among younger people, I’ve been, you know, I get invitations to give talks in various places and both online and in person. I’m just back from a couple of weeks in the United Kingdom and I was very encouraged to see the number of people show up for talks. And I’ve actually zoomed with, believe it or not, high school classes at Christian classical schools of people taking theology. I’ve zoomed with 15 and 16 year olds.

0:47:04 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): Wow. And if they pay attention and they seem to be fairly sharp, that means there’s hope for the church throughout the 21st century.

0:47:13 – (Collin Hansen): I love that. And the last one is simply what’s the last great book you read?

0:47:19 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): Well, that is a hard question. I am reading a very good book right now. I haven’t finished it, but I’ll just give you a report on work in progress. Is a novelist, Henry James, the brother of William James and his classic Portrait of a Lady. And I think what’s important about this book is that he shows us how people are multi layered. And he’s an observant, sensitive writer. And I would have thought that pastors and teachers who work with people would learn from Henry James. Not to make quick judgments about, you know, surface appearances, but you know, he understands that we’re emotional, psychological, spiritual beings affected by all sorts of concerns. Our status in society, our romantic relationships, our prospects.

0:48:22 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): It just helps to remember that people, like culture, need to be read carefully.

0:48:28 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah, I love it. My guest on Gospel Bound Today has been Kevin vanhuser. His book Mere Christian Hermeneutics Transfiguring what It Means to Read the Bible. Kevin, thank you again for all the ways you formed me over the years and continue to form me through your works. And thanks for spending time with us here today.

0:48:46 – (Kevin Vanhoozer): Thank you Collins. I enjoyed it.

0:48:54 – (Collin Hansen): Thanks for listening to this episode of Gospel Bound. For more interviews and to sign up for my newsletter, head over to tgc.org gospelbound rate and review gospel Bound on your favorite podcast platform so others can join the conversation. Another until next time. Remember, when we’re bound to the gospel, we abound in hope.