I teach the theology of biblical hermeneutics at an evangelical university, and at the beginning of each semester, I ask students to explain why they affirm the scriptures of the Old and New Testament as the word of God. What makes this book that evangelicals defend staunchly as God’s word, God’s word? What do we mean by this? How does it function differently or distinctly from another truth-telling book by a fine believer? I usually get two distinct reactions. One is a trickle of common words that also beg definition as the dialogue continues: God-breathed, infallible, inerrant, inspired. The other reaction from the majority of students is a poignant silence. Many pastors and church leaders in my graduate class as well as those students in my upper division undergraduate class have simply never been asked to wrestle intelligently with a good assumption.

Kevin Vanhoozer’s bright orange book (affectionately dubbed “the Great Pumpkin” by Kevin’s wife) does just that through the use of an extended metaphor, scripture as theo-drama. The canon is a divine play script to know, understand, study, and enter into with fitting improvisation. This metaphor is well developed throughout the book and is clear from the sub-headings for the book’s four parts. Between a helpful introduction and a final pastoral challenge to the church, the four sections of the book are sequentially set out as Part One: “The Drama,” Part Two: “The Script,” Part Three: “The Dramaturge,” and Part Four: “The Performance.”

In “The Drama,” Vanhoozer does a masterful job of addressing the work of both Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthazar in transcending the personal vs. propositional dichotomy regarding revelation using the language of speech-act philosophy. He makes the case well that God’s truth is borne in both the reality and genre of story and that hone does not truly understand, nor can one participate in, God’s truth apart from participating in God’s story. To know the story is the grounding for revelatory epistemology.

In “The Script,” Vanhoozer deals with the dynamics of Word and Church, reading and living the story as a covenantal community (and he does this without making the community the authority for hermeneutics!), the importance of canonical depth and consistency, and the perichoretic participation of the Trinity as Father, Son, and Spirit in the tri-personal theo-drama that is the biblical canon.

In “The Dramaturge,” Vanhoozer challenges the scholars, theologians, laity, and clergy of the Church with what it takes to engage in the scientia of scripture study and bear its sapiential fruitfulness. Again, Vanhoozer is keen to keep faith and understanding under the same roof and the Gospel of Jesus as the defining center of the stage. From this Christocentric North Star, all the other players, all the story, all the movement, history, and continuing improvisation of the script finds it fitness, its voice, its place.

In the final part of the book, Vanhoozer particularly challenges the pastor-director and the disciple-actor to present the theo-drama of the Gospel well in community life, worship, study, and mission. Again, the conclusion of the book reflects how clearly and even lovingly Vanhoozer reminds the theological academy to be a servant of the Church.

In this third volume (not a series and with multiple publishers) in which Vanhoozer uses the terms and ideas of speech act theory, the enriching evolution of his work is clearly apparent. In this work, in distinction from his first volume, Is There Meaning in this Text? and his second volume, First Theology: God, Scripture and Hermeneutics, Vanhoozer borrows less terminology from linguistics, and his own particular vocabulary emerges. This is especially helpful in unpacking the trinitarian dynamics of his argument and finds much more resonance in the ear of his intended audience. Like Barth’s “Dogmatics,” Vanhoozer’s work is modified by “Church.”

It is the covenant community, the participants in the theo-drama, that is, the theatre of the Gospel. The Church must know the story, study the Script, relate to the Author of the script, rehearse in worship, mission, study, and do all of this in the company of fellow actors, past and present. However, Vanhoozer very clearly and carefully shelters the Church from finding its identity in the performance itself and resists how Lindbeck and others locate hermeneutics and community identity in its own practice and patterns. This religiously well intended self-reference lends itself to the seductions of crowd approval and the motivations of cultural reviews.

For Vanhoozer the locus of Church identity and the bedrock of hermeneutical criteria are grounded in the canon itself, the patterns of God’s story, the revelation of God’s character through the story, and most particularly in the culmination of God’s theo-drama in Jesus Christ. As the community becomes the embodiment and performance of the Gospel, the story is known, understood, manifest, and retold truly.

The canonical foundation of the Church’s identity is God’s theo-drama to be reenacted in the worship of the church, rehearsed in her creeds, confessed in her theology, and extended in her mission. Reading the Drama of Doctrine will also help the Church have an insightful and joyful answer to the question of how the scripture really is the word of God.

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