Can Biblical Interpretation Change the World?

Note: From Mere Christian Hermeneutics (Zondervan, 2025). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Citations have been omitted.

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.
Karl Marx

It may be a moot point in light of widespread biblical illiteracy, a consequence of the decline of biblical civilization in America, and in the West in general. There was a time, however, when biblical interpretation shaped civilization. The patristic period created a culture of reading that inhabited a Christian symbolic universe, a universe that is no more, thanks to the “Big Crunch” of secular modernity that flattened it. There is today 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.

The 2010 Cape Town Commitment, the product of the Third Lausanne Congress, issued a call to action, urging theological educators to recenter the study of the Bible “as the core discipline in Christian theology.” This is not a plea for a return to Christendom, much less for the supremacy of a single denomination, system of theology or exegetical method. It is a call for a return to biblical Christianity, for a theological approach to reading scripture with and for the people of God, past and present, from east, west, north and south. It is a call to respect the heritage of literal and spiritual interpretation. It is a call to see exegesis, systematics and church history alike as properly theological disciplines. It is, I submit, a call for a “mere Christian” hermeneutics: a principled approach to biblical interpretation that (1) asks what we are doing in reading the Bible, particularly for its literal sense, and (2) emerges from both the historic consensus on the essentials of the faith and a church-based understanding of what the Bible is primarily for.

We live on the far side of the “demise of biblical civilization,” that momentous revolutionary change when modern people no longer read the Bible as telling the true story of the world. Of the many factors behind the collapse of the Bible’s de facto authority, perhaps the most devastating was interpretive disagreement not only over what it says but, more radically, over how to read it.

Can Biblical Interpretation Change the World?

It therefore behooves us to ask what it means to be “biblical,” and “literal.” The suffix provides a clue. Logical means “relating to or being in accord with logic.” Comical means “relating to comedy.” Ethical means “relating or conforming to certain standards of behavior.” Similarly, being biblical means speaking, thinking and acting in accordance with the scriptures, and literal means reading in accordance with the letter. Sadly, many people, including confessing Christians, have lost the ability to discern (or even discuss) whether a particular idea or practice is warranted by scripture – or to define what literal means.

It was James Barr who first alerted me to the importance of being able to say what it means to be biblical, as well as to the challenge of defining what it means to be literal. Simply holding a “high” view of scripture is no guarantee that one’s interpretation will be sound. Nor does citing verses here and there make for a biblical theology; heretics do this too. Barr castigated so-called fundamentalists for their supposed “literal” interpretations, showing in example after example how poor their readings actually were, at times not even getting the genre right (is it I, Lord?). How, then, can we get the Bible right? There are so many ways to read, so many schools of biblical interpretation, so many “methods for Matthew,” to cite one title in the “Methods in Biblical Interpretation” series. [Mark Allen Powell, ed., Methods for Matthew] That there is a conflict of interpretations is well known. The more intense conflict, however, is between approaches to interpretation and competing visions of what biblical interpretation is for.

The present book is about what it means to read the Bible theologically. In 2010 Miroslav Volf declared the renewed interest in theological interpretation of the Bible to be “the most significant theological development in the last two decades,” comparable to the rediscovery of the Trinitarian nature of God in the early twentieth century. [Miroslav Volf, Captive to the Word of God: Engaging the Scriptures for Contemporary Theological Reflection] Most significant, perhaps, but surely one of the most controversial and misunderstood developments. I served as general editor of the award-winning Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible, yet despite its being a dictionary, a definition of “theological interpretation of scripture” (henceforth TIS) proved elusive. In the introduction, I confidently said what theological interpretation is not, gestured toward what it is (e.g., it pertains to God), yet concluded by acknowledging a smorgasbord of approaches operating under the general rubric. Minimally, we could say that TIS is “interpretation that keeps theological concerns primary.” [Stephen Fowl, “Christian Theological Interpretation,” in The New Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation, p. 189]

Much to my chagrin, TIS fell less like a bombshell than a lead balloon into the playground of the exegetes. Historical and systematic theologians were generally enthused, but many (not all) biblical scholars came to regard theological interpretation with a hermeneutic of suspicion. What was new about TIS was worrisome; what was good about it was old news, something biblical scholars had already been doing. The following evaluation is representative: “Theological Interpretation of Scripture is partly disparate movement, partly a call to reformation in biblical interpretation, partly a disorganized array of methodological commitments in hermeneutics, partly a serious enterprise and partly (I suspect) a fad.” [D. A. Carson, “Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Yes, But…” in Theological Commentary: Evangelical Perspectives, p. 187]

To Plot a New Course

There is some truth to every part of this verdict. For example, many parties were scaling the mountain that is TIS by different routes. Having observed (and tried) several of these attempts, however, I have concluded there is a better way. Like the Sherpas who serve as both guides and bearers of camping equipment, ropes, food and even oxygen canisters, I here plot a new course, although it remains to be seen whether I am climbing Sinai or Tabor (or both). In any case, it is a mountain with light on top.

Twenty years ago, I wrote another book about biblical interpretation. [Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning in This Text? The Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge] Its primary aim was to respond to the postmodern challenge that drained the Bible (and preaching) of authority by claiming that texts, including biblical texts, have no stable, authoritative or objective meaning. My argument was theological but pursued two related projects simultaneously, flip-flopping between general and special hermeneutics, so that it was not always clear on which track the engine was running. Was I arguing that all books should be read “theologically,” or only the Bible? Answer: I was arguing that all books should be read like the Bible, namely, by trying to do justice to the “real presence” of authorial meaning by inferring their communicative intent from what authors actually did with their words. I inadvertently led some readers to think that I was saying the Bible should be read like every other book, such that biblical hermeneutics was a subset of general hermeneutics, when in fact I was trying to argue the opposite. So much for authorial intent!

While reading scripture is in many respects similar to reading books in general, reading the Bible is ultimately marked by an even greater dissimilarity. What primarily makes reading the Bible like reading other books is that both have human creatures as their authors; what makes reading the Bible unlike reading other books is that its primary author is God. To say that is to make a confession of faith. The question is, for people of faith, what difference should this make? Minimally, it means that biblical interpretation is not simply a matter of textual mechanics or scholarly expertise. The Bible is more – but not less! – than a piece of history and literature. Archaeology, philology and literary criticism all have a place, but finally they are but stations on the way to the cross.

Transfiguring Biblical Interpretation

The goal of the present book is to think about biblical interpretation in the Bible’s own theological terms. This leads me to privilege what I call the economy of light, namely, the way the God who in himself is the Father of lights (James 1:17) communicates his light to the world in Christ (John 8:12) into our hearts (II Corinthians 4:6), by the illumination of the Spirit. This in turn leads me to privilege Jesus’ transfiguration as a climactic moment in the history of God’s luminous self-communication. In looking back to the Old Testament and forward to Christ’s crucifixion and exaltation, the transfiguration provides a capsule summary of the economy of light and, in so doing, gives us a distinctly theological purchase on the nature of the biblical text, the process of reading and its effect on the reader. I was encouraged along the way by my discovery that Jerome, centuries before me, had also seen hermeneutical significance in the transfiguration.

Two other things led me to the foot of this holy hermeneutical, sacred story mountain. The first was a 2011 conference co-organized by Hans Boersma and Matthew Levering and sponsored by Regent College in Vancouver: “Heaven on Earth? The Future of Spiritual Interpretation?” The conference brought Roman Catholic and Protestant biblical scholars and systematic theologians together to discuss the relationship between grammatical-historical and spiritual-theological exegesis. Brian Daley led off as the Roman Catholic keynote speaker, and I brought up the rear with the evangelical keynote address,“ Ascending the Mountain, Singing the Rock: Biblical Interpretation Earthed, Typed, and Transfigured,” the seed of the present book.

The second contributing factor was not a onetime but recurring event. For years I have taught a doctoral seminar titled “Advanced Theological Prolegomena.” (It’s more exciting than it sounds.) Each class includes PhD students from four different disciplines: Old Testament, New Testament, church history and systematic theology. The aim is to promote interdisciplinary, integrative reflection by asking: (1) In what sense are all four properly theological disciplines? (2) What does each discipline contribute to the common task of reading the Bible as Christian scripture in and with the church, yesterday and today? That the course usually includes international students, including some from the Majority World, only makes it more exciting: given all this diversity, in what does our unity consist?

Both the conference and the course suggested to me the need for a “mere Christian” hermeneutics: a way of thinking about hermeneutics that could overcome historical, ethnic, denominational and especially disciplinary divides. Would it be possible, I wondered, to do for biblical hermeneutics what C. S. Lewis did for Christian belief in his book Mere Christianity? Lewis responded to the plurality of Christian traditions by documenting the widescale agreement about the essentials of the faith. Lewis likened this “mere Christianity” (as Richard Baxter called it) to a hall that connected the various “rooms” in God’s “household.” In the present work, the various “rooms” represent different approaches to biblical interpretation and, as Lewis observed about hell, they are locked from the inside. I argue that interpreters need to leave their interpretive silos and mingle in the hall to converse with those who read the Bible differently. The notion of a “mere” hermeneutics alternately made me laugh, then gasp, at the sheer folly and magnitude of the task: achieving interpretive peace after centuries of interpretive conflict.

The book you are about to read does provide principles for theological interpretation, but not a detailed step-by-step method. Nor does it provide an exhaustive survey of the kinds of criticism and interpretive approaches that lay claim to the TIS rubric. While I engage different approaches to biblical interpretation from a variety of times and traditions, I do so not to draw up a list of hermeneutical heroes and villains, but for the sake of formulating a positive, integrative proposal. My fundamental claim is that we need all the theological disciplines, and several kinds of biblical criticism, to read the Bible rightly, in ways that do justice to both its human and divine authorship.

Can biblical interpretation change the world? Yes, and the particular change I have in view is a transfiguration. “Transfiguring biblical interpretation” refers both to the process of rethinking biblical hermeneutics in light of the transfiguration of Jesus, “the radiance of the glory of God” (Hebrews 1:3) and to the change interpreting the Bible this way makes, not least in the reader. Transfiguring biblical interpretation attends both to the Bible’s literal sense and to the light in the letter.

I dedicate this book to Dan Treier on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday. He has been, if not all things to all people, then at least many things to me: student, colleague, coeditor, coauthor, colaborer on the bridge, counselor, critic (of this book too) and, most importantly, friend. Unfortunately, Dan, unlike Christmas gifts, this one is not returnable because, as you well know, a text is authorial discourse, fixed by writing – and by (as you also know) extensive revisions.

Kevin Vanhoozer, research professor of systematic theology, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School