Author’s Note: This is not so much a book review as an engagement.
In retrospect, it may have been a mistake—a well-meant and maybe even propitious mistake. Excited by the very recent publication of Kevin J. Vanhoozer’s new book, Mere Christian Hermeneutics: Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically (Zondervan), I assigned it to my students taking an introductory course in biblical interpretation. Hot off the press in October 2024, it had already been named Christianity Today’s Book of the Year in Academic Theology (on December 3). Not only so, but Dr. Vanhoozer had been a professor of mine, though not as often as I could have wished, and has continued to be my teacher, albeit through his writings. My students, however, had a range of reactions. For some it was a challenge!
I had to confess that this was a heavy lift for an introductory course. Student reactions notwithstanding, my high hopes for this text were not disappointed. Vanhoozer has been among the most prolific contributors to the field of biblical hermeneutics of our generation, and few scholars can boast his mastery of the multifaceted discussion, including its most seminal theorists.
Going back to his Cambridge dissertation on Paul Ricoeur (revised for publication as Biblical Narrative in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: A Study in Hermeneutics and Theology, Cambridge, 1990), Vanhoozer has been speaking sanity and insight into the hermeneutics debates for more than three decades. Defying easy categorization, Vanhoozer writes as an evangelical, yet in an explicitly reformed-catholic vein and yet with postmodern, postliberal, and postcritical inflections.
He has been on the vanguard of the “theological interpretation of Scripture” movement while also remaining a champion of authors and the priority of the “literal sense.” He espouses ecclesial and catholic sensibilities, while also advocating for the Reformers over against facile readings that make them a foil. He’s been “all over the place” in the best sense.
It was against this background that his book advocating a “mere Christian” hermeneutic stirred my enthusiasm. You may have guessed that the title intends an allusion to C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, and this is perhaps the key to understanding the mission of the book. Rather than taking up sides with a particular tradition of biblical interpretation, Vanhoozer is arguing for a properly universal Christian approach to biblical interpretation.
Among the joys of reading this book is to find commonalities between and commendations of, say, Henri de Lubac and Jonathan Edwards or Origen and John Calvin—but this in a principled rather than performative eclecticism. The history of biblical interpretation is highly varied and has largely consisted of pendulum swings from one emphasis and then to another. Vanhoozer is obviously trying to define some equilibrium that can endure. After a long succession of books recovering this or advocating that, setting the target at “mere” is welcome.
Vanhoozer’s starting place is the foundational notion of reading communities and their interpretive frames, that is, the implicit and diverging premises and aims of Bible readers and what we might call the sociology of knowledge, with its varied presuppositions reinforced in a certain kind of community. This is to say that before we start, we have already started, and when we disagree, it is likely that the presenting disagreement is not the fundamental one. Thus, to the extent that modernist Bible reading has (I would add for all kinds of good reasons) restricted itself to the “immanent frame”—immediate historical contexts and demonstrable causes—a theological or “spiritual” reading can be nothing other than special pleading.
And yet where the “same” text is understood as the speaking voice of the Holy Spirit “making wise unto salvation” and making known the otherwise inscrutable ways of God, the autopsy procedures that hypothesize a source here or determinative influence there can only seem a fixation with obscurity. And then to persons for whom the weaponized biblical text has been the tool of oppression, these fanciful or archeological excursions can look more like evasions. We can multiply examples.
Without gainsaying historical-critical or advocacy hermeneutics, Vanhoozer is clear that a Christian hermeneutic finally engages the Bible toward its divine ends of revelation and salvation. And to do so is to prioritize the literal sense. But the literal sense is not to be confused with a reactionary literalistic sense that disallows metaphorical and figural entailments.
The literal sense is to be taken as an authorial sense, if indeed God can be spoken of as an author, the ultimate author, of Scripture and his authorial purposes discerned canonically rather than at the low altitude of the immanent frame. While this will seem like just so much common sense to pious and theological readers, it is a big ask of the Bible scholar, who still thinks she finds insights in philology, archeology, and ancient backgrounds reconsidered. That is to say that, while easily disparaged, the “immanent frame” has dispensed many gifts.
However, there can be no “mere” Christian hermeneutic without entering contested spaces, and Vanhoozer ventures into the most paradigmatic of them all: the ancient Christian “schools” of Alexandria and Antioch. The former is epitomized by Origen and his Jewish forebear, Philo, for whom Scripture of its very nature requires that it be read spiritually, allegorically, beyond the letter. For this, not only the writings of the New Testament but the very nature of the divine communicative act are taken to give generous warrant.
In the customary account, the allegorical license of Alexandria is chastened by the constraints of the literal and historical sense favored in the Antiochene school, as championed by, among others, Theodore of Mopsuestia and John Chrysostom. As the taxonomy goes, the latter, construing biblical study as a disciplined and circumscribed historical enterprise, eschews flights of fancy into allegorizing, figural interpretation, and, among its modernist adherents, even theology, at least understood as existential religious commitments.
Meanwhile, heirs of the former locate the Bible firmly in the soteriological economy of the church, affirm, if not relish, figural readings, even allegorizing, and rue the reductive tendencies of the so-called historical-critical or grammatical-historical variety. This push and pull has reached something of a standoff.
Vanhoozer is rightly dissatisfied with this stereotyped contrast and the subsequent trajectories. The difference is not, as so often supposed, in a sharp, never-the-twain-shall-meet, advocacy of allegorical (Alexandria) over against literal (Antiochene). Instead, he shows that neither “school” eschews the figural but that they govern it differently: Antioch’s theoria tied to an intratextual, biblical-narrative framework and Alexandria’s allegoria evoking broader philosophical, theological, or ethical frameworks.
Acknowledging the impasse on allegory and typology, Vanhoozer’s mere Christian hermeneutic takes a fresh start with his “trans-figural” alternative. Here figures are traced across (“trans”) the canonical whole, showing that the “literal” meaning also must include the “figural” meaning. Thus, instead of two senses (literal and spiritual) or four (as in the quadriga), there is a unified unfolding potentiality that inheres to the literal sense. This is a bold, invigorating claim—worked out climactically in an extended treatment of the Transfiguration narratives. It is as good a synthesis of the questions at hand that I have read, and I have not given it justice here.
Did I regret assigning this book? Well, no. It raises the right kinds of questions and gives compelling answers—admittedly long-winded answers for an introductory course, but these are durable and important matters and oversimplification carries its own liabilities. If the book was too long for some of my students, it was in some respects too short for me.
Maybe it is better to illustrate than to describe. I read Mere Christian Hermeneutics overlapping with my reading of Christopher and Richard Hays’s The Widening of God’s Mercy (Yale, 2024). Given the topic (an affirmation of same-sex intimacy and marriage) and the prominence of Richard especially in the earlier discourse on this topic (not to mention our collective sadness at his recent death), the book has garnered much attention and has been reviewed, celebrated, and rebutted sufficiently.
In short, father and son argue that the widening of God’s ever-expanding inclusivity (depicted not unproblematically as “mercy”) of the once-estranged and excluded finds a fitting denouement in the affirmation of faithful same-sex intimacy in our time. This is not a new sort of argument, nor does it endeavor to be. (Episcopalians especially will recognize the shape of the argument, and I expect most will find it heartening.)
For the purposes of this essay, I have nothing to add but to say that it occurred to me that Vanhoozer’s book offered very little by way of help in assessing that book or the many others like it. Of course, why should it? Yet, given that Vanhoozer’s argument for the canonical wholeness of Scripture and its Christocentric telos shares methodological themes with The Widening of God’s Mercy, it would not have been unthinkable to find what Vanhoozer thinks of these sort of theme-privileging, Christ-trumping arguments, sometimes described as “redemptive trajectory.”
So, while there is no reason to think Vanhoozer should have picked up on this sort of thing, it is a (I hope not backhanded) compliment of what he has written to wonder what he might say had he done so. And I don’t think I am mistaken in saying more of the contemporary church is living with this sort of question than is wondering about the differences between Antiochenes and Alexandrians.
This led me to a second, obliquely related, reflection, namely that the shadow of Marcion hangs over Mere Christian Hermeneutics as, indeed, whether in old or new forms, it hangs over the history of Christian theology. We have, after all, Marcionism to thank for the earliest Christian hermeneutical apologetics that—granted, with precedent—appeal to nonliteral senses to embrace the Old Testament as Christian Scripture. That also is an enduring trajectory, occasionally chastened, taking full flight in the medieval quadriga, until rejected (more in theory than in practice) in the Reformation and disparaged in modernism’s historicist turn.
Christian readers of the Bible, Old and New Testament, should have sympathies with Marcion—not because he was right (he was insidiously and disastrously wrong) but because disciples of Jesus should always experience some tension between Jesus’ “widening of God’s mercy” and the letter of Scripture. The tensions, while not insuperable, are not fabricated, and are the stuff with which every mere Christian hermeneutic must come to terms. For his extraordinary contribution toward this end, Vanhoozer deserves our gratitude and wide readership.
Garwood Anderson is the Donald J. Parsons Distinguished Professor of Biblical Interpretation at Nashotah House Theological Seminary and, beginning September 1, 2024, the Distinguished Fellow, Biblical Studies and Theology, at the Lumen Center of the Steve and Laurel Brown Foundation, Madison, Wisconsin.
