Rendering Mute The Word: Overcoming Deistic Tendencies In Modern Hermeneutics; Kevin Vanhoozer As A Test Case

By Mark Alan Bowald

[Mark Bowald is Assistant Professor of Religion and Theology at Redeemer University in Ancaster, Ontario, Canada.]

I. Introduction

We cannot escape our skin. Nor should we want or attempt to. The results would run the spectrum from comedy to tragedy. This simple observation parallels one basic, widely accepted principle from contemporary hermeneutics, that human creatures bring assumptions to the interpretative moment: we read from within a “worldview.”

This claim is brought to the fore in a dramatic fashion with respect to theological knowledge in Karl Barth’s familiar rule that, for theological knowledge, the ratio essendi precedes and governs the ratio cognoscendi: God’s very nature; that which God is and does, absolutely determines the nature and shape of our knowledge of God.

This dictum, framed in terms of agency, helpfully illuminates key aspects related to the act of theological hermeneutics. Thus, for reading the Bible, the fundamental question is the shape of the divine economy that underwrites all activity related to the production, reception, and interpretation of Scripture, enveloping and directing the corresponding creaturely noetic activities. The hermeneutical skin we read from as Christians is, therefore, theistic and Trinitarian. It is irrevocably imprinted and shaped by the self-revealing economy of the living Word of the triune God. The primary features of the divine economy under which the composition, canonization, and reading of the Christian Scriptures are given are the risen, seated, ruling Christ and the Spirit sent to inspirate his kingdom in the church and the world. The ontology of Scripture and its reading, therefore, are founded and administered by Christ in the offices of his heavenly session at the right hand of the Father, implemented by the Holy Spirit, and underwritten by the providential and paternally elective care of God the Father.[1]

In contrast to this model, the divine economy that underwrites prevailing paradigms for reading Scripture is, largely, de jure if not de facto, deistic. In these paradigms the nature of Scripture and its reading reflect a theological economy which only requires the action of a God who creates a world and a stable system of human speech activity and who maintains the stability of that created world. Beyond this initiating and stabilizing activity no further divine action is required or necessary in order to account fully for the hermeneutics of reading the Bible.[2] In what follows I will, first, define the manner in which deism informs contemporary biblical hermeneutics and, second, look at the work of Kevin Vanhoozer to illustrate someone whose early work demonstrates this tendency and who, in subsequent work, has taken significant strides in correcting it.[3] An argument in support of this direction and the general need to dwell more deeply on the intricate and necessary relationship between divine and human agency in theological hermeneutics is offered therewith.

II. The Deistic Lens Of Contemporary Biblical Hermeneutics

Contemporary approaches to reading Scripture are plagued with a kind of noetic opacity about the theological assumptions that frame their methods. This is derivative of certain developments in Enlightenment epistemology that contributed to create an obscurity in the perception of the ideal act of discerning knowledge, of which reading books, including Scripture, became a subset. That obscurity promotes a milieu in which deism has become the default worldview setting for the ideal act of reading the Bible. It will be helpful to clarify at this point the exact nature of deism that is in question here and the obscurity produced. I will illustrate by way of brief reference to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.

The first noteworthy thing for our purposes is that deism is not primarily defined by the question of whether God exists but rather what is the nature of God’s actions and agency. It is concerned with observing and enforcing functional restrictions in God’s ongoing activity in relation to human agents. This is driven by a moral/ethical apprehension. The logic runs like this in Kant. It is vital that God does not influence or assist us in our moral and ethical activity for two reasons: first, assistance by God potentially relieves us of the full sense of our moral obligations. We would then use God as an excuse in cases where we fall short of our ethical responsibilities. Second, if God assists human creatures then this might be taken to imply that humans need assistance, which, likewise, relieves us of our moral duty. Kant extends this restriction of God’s help and influence to any and all ways that other persons and agents might influence or affect us. Human persons must be fully capable of acting ethically from their own initiative and resources and encouraged at all costs to do so.

This ethical impulse is directly reflected in Kant’s epistemology. The ideal epistemological situation is envisioned as being that in which the action of the knower is ideally performed independent of the influence of any and all other agents. The degree to which this restriction is observed is the degree to which pure reason produces true knowledge. Theological knowledge is not exempt from this proscription: on the contrary it is of the utmost importance that knowledge of God observes these limits as well.

Kant describes this process in the piece “What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?” He returns to the subject of antecedent judgments and their relationship to the investigation of “supersensible objects” and explores the implications of these limitations of antecedent judgments for the investigation of beliefs about God as potential knowledge, writing:

A pure rational faith is therefore the signpost or compass by means of which the speculative thinker orients himself in his rational excursions into the field of supersensible objects. .. and it is this rational faith which must also be taken as the ground of every other faith, and even of every revelation.. .. The concept of God and even the conviction of his existence can be met with only in reason, and it cannot first come to us either through inspiration [Eingebung] or through tidings communicated [erteilte Nachricht] to us, however great the authority behind them.[4]

The first type of influence needing restriction is “inspiration” which is offered as the translation of Eingebung. The word connotes a kind of influencing action of one person on another. The verb form eingeben can also be translated as “put forward,” “ administer to,” “ suggest” or “put into his or her head.” The word is used elsewhere by Kant in contexts where he is also considering the question of God’s revelation (Offenbarung) but has a more precise meaning than “revelation” in that it connotes the influence of another personal agent in the process of the individual obtaining or making knowledge. His discussion of revelation takes up this issue and, again, proscribes the agency of the knower in such a way that any antecedent influence should be, as far as possible, set aside or nullified, including the influence of God: “inspiration.”

The second type is “tidings communicated [to us].” These can be thought of as ideas which are given or delivered to us, bits of knowledge we can possess and manipulate. Alternate English words which can be used to translate this German term Nachricht are “news,” “ message,” or “report.” A simplistic way to describe the difference between these two effects would be that the former variety is like the influence of another person pushing or pulling us in a particular direction, directing our attention. The latter is like pieces of paper with bits of information written on them composed by others to which we might refer in our investigations.

Kant goes on to describe the origins of both of these influences and how they both violate the freedom of reason and rational faith in that they do not allow rational faith to have the “right to speak first” and therefore attack the “freedom to think.”[5] This freedom is preserved by eliminating their bearing from three sources of compulsion: “civil compulsion,” which is the influence and control of civil institutions; “compulsion over conscience,” which is the influence of religious institutions; and finally any other law or influence other than “those which [Reason] gives itself.”[6] The indictment of these three realms has an exhaustive quality with respect to any sort of antecedent judgment that originates within a traditional or communal purview: political, sociological, or religious.

The net result of these limitations on the investigation of knowledge is that the agency of the knower must begin unaffected by others and that the object of investigation should only be supplied by the immanent senses and measured by the subjective ground present within the individual. This limiting circumscribes the knowing investigation to purely immanent actions and spheres initiated and maintained exclusively by the knower.

These restrictions do not completely eliminate any significance for God’s activity in deism, however. As Kant turns to discuss moral practices in the exposition of Practical Reason he affirms the importance of three aspects of divine agency: God’s activity in the original act of creation, God’s preserving of creation, and God’s future judgment.[7] God sets the ethical stage in some remote past, preserves the stability of that stage in the meantime, and awaits us as judge in an unknown future. These activities also frame the present investigations of pure reason, which pursue knowledge through the study of immanent objects and actions ideally unaffected by other agents, including God. This limiting is illustrated as a kind of moral frame encompassing the activity of human agents not interacting or interfering with that agency: but not interacting or interfering with that agency:

Historical studies and post-Enlightenment readings of Scripture accepted these terms as the ideal norm. I will not seek to narrate the historical process which resulted in the immanentization of the hermeneutics of Scripture. That history has been well plumbed and explored.[8] The influence of the Enlightenment, and of Kant in particular, on Western theology is generally acknowledged.[9]

In the wake of these developments and within these limits, the interpretation of Scripture (as a subset of a general hermeneutic for reading any book) came to be viewed in terms of two competing immanent arenas of human agency: “texts” and “readers.” The tension between text and reader(s) came to define the range of activity responsible for determining the “meaning” of any and all books. As these epistemological limits gained purchase after the Enlightenment the result was that both the “text” and the “reader(s)” of Scripture were increasingly defined strictly by immanent parameters. The “text” is perceived as being primarily a container possessing the literary production or action of deceased and “distanciated” human beings. Readers, in turn, are expected to be “objective,” reflecting the absolute freedom and capabilities they possess aside from the influence of any other agents. Any violation of objectivity is cast in moral terms. Benjamin Jowett expresses this mood with his customary directness:

It is better to close the book than to read it under conditions of thought which are imposed from without. Whether those conditions. .. are the traditions of the Church, or the opinions of the religious world—Catholic or Protestant—makes no difference. They are inconsistent with the freedom of the truth and the moral character of the Gospel.[10]

Jowett himself imposes a “condition of thought” here by the presumed negative judgment about these influences: specifically, that they are morally suspect. By extension, God Himself, apparently, is not in any way involved with these traditions of reading: this would make God complicit in their manipulation and bias. As these conditions become the default terms for reading the Bible, appeals to God’s agency, when they occur, in hermeneutical account tend to be limited to the underwriting of human language by God’s original act of creation and sustaining that created order of language. This worldview is one that assumes that the only proper divine activities necessary to account for biblical hermeneutics are God’s setting the stage for human speech action in creating and sustaining the world and God’s work, often attributed to the work of the Sprit, in underwriting the continuing proper functionality of created human speech conditions, making them stable and clear. The debates over what the true meaning of Scripture is, in turn, became reduced to two aspects: who had a better account of the natural created condition of human speech activity, and who was more accurately discerning the meaning of Scripture according to that account.

There is one particular divine activity which we have not yet mentioned. Post-Enlightenment discussions over the nature of Scripture often turned on the inspiration of the authors of the Bible. The assertion that God acted in a specific way to guide or direct or inspire the activities of the biblical authors functions to underwrite the uniqueness of the quality of Scripture—its truth quality, moral quality, and so forth. This role for divine agency functions as a cantilever to support the authority of Scripture. The manner of reading, of perceiving the meaning of Scripture, nevertheless, remains unaffected by this modification: the terms for this activity return to the default setting of negotiating the relationship between human agency in the text and human agency in the reading. To put it another way: the doctrine of the inspiration of the biblical authors provides the justification for picking up this book as the Word of God, as the authority for our life and faith as Christians. It does not, however, inform the post-Enlightenment Christian on how one reads this book.

Contemporary biblical hermeneutics tend to be deistic, therefore, insofar as they observe this pattern and are preoccupied with the investigation and reading of the meaning of Scripture simply or exclusively in terms of their being a byproduct of human agency, as an expression of its created capacities and conditions. In contrast, the appropriate theological hermeneutic for reading Scripture is one that overtly and intentionally acknowledges its place in the larger theological and dogmatic milieu of the gracious divine economy in all of its diachronic and synchronic activities. We read Holy Scripture against a thicker theological horizon of divine agency or we do not read it at all.[11] This point will not detain us but arises simply from the logic that insofar as Scripture’s being arises from and is maintained by divine agency, all of the human activity that results or corresponds to it only does so truthfully insofar as it faithfully harmonizes with its divine ontology.

III. Escaping The Deistic Labyrinth: Kevin Vanhoozer As Exemplar

We see a development in the writings of Kevin Vanhoozer from a hermeneutic which is characterized by a tendency toward deism to one which is much more attuned to its appropriate form as the gracious and saving viva vox dei. An important qualification needs to be noted here: we are not asserting that, at some point in his theological development, Kevin Vanhoozer was a deist. We are suggesting that he, like many (or most) others, as they enter into reflection on the nature of the task of reading the Bible, slip into ways of thinking and talking which require nothing more than a lightly modified deistic theological framework. To put it another way: if a methodology accounting for the full and complete success of reading the Bible requires little more from divine agency than the establishment and maintenance of created human speech capacities and structures, it operates within a deistic worldview. Kevin Vanhoozer’s early writing displays this tendency, and one of the most (if not the most) important developments in his thinking is developing a more nuanced and integrated understanding of the complex and intimate relationship between divine and human agency in theological hermeneutics. We will illustrate this by way of survey and commentary.

In an early article, “The Semantics of Biblical Literature: Truth and Scripture’s Diverse Literary Forms,”[12] one of the key issues he discusses is the problem of imposing prefabricated systems or theories on Scripture; frameworks that get in the way of “letting Scripture’s literary forms be literary forms.”[13] He praises Hans Frei’s Eclipse of Biblical Narrative as an example of a defense of the integrity of the text against this imposition.[14] He takes issue with Frei, however, in the latter’s assertion that “meaning” and “truth” should be distinguished. Vanhoozer takes up a similarly radical, but opposite position, that meaning and truth are utterly united in God and that, therefore, all textual expressions of meaning necessarily carry with them a variety of truth claims which can and should be described. He writes:

Because God is all-knowing and omnipresent. .. Truth must be comprehensive and unified (at least for God, if not always for us). Truth, like Reality, is in one sense One. However, Reality is so rich and multifaceted that it, like white light, can only be conveyed (verbally) by an equally rich “spectrum”—diverse literary forms.[15]

The features of divine agency that underwrite this point are not unlike the way notional ideas about God, as Creator, Preserver, and Judge, function for Kant: they underwrite human activity but do not influence, interfere, or actively participate in that action. Vanhoozer’s selection of which of God’s attributes to emphasize reinforces the point: God is everywhere and God knows all. But is God doing anything?

Further, his argument for the unity of “Truth” is founded on the infinite unity of God’s presence and knowledge. However, truth is not only a state or essence but also an action. Questions arise: who enacts truth? Do we? If we do, is there a corollary and accompaniment in God’s action? The issue of divine agency is not addressed anywhere in this early piece.

Theological statements about God function for Vanhoozer in this earliest work like backdrops for a play. The activity in a play occurs against, but not with or in, the backdrops. This is also demonstrated in the way Vanhoozer takes his cue from speech act theory by way of the work of J. L. Austin and John Searle. It is not necessary to rehearse the features of speech act theory at this point.[16] The only consideration of divine agency required for the appropriation of speech act theory to account for reading the Bible is that God created the world in such a way that human speech has a certain stability in the way it functions. Divine agency in creating and maintaining human speech capacities are the only necessary activities this way of thinking about biblical hermeneutics requires.[17]

The “middle” phase of Vanhoozer’s hermeneutical writing is represented by a collection of articles written between 1993 and 2001 published as First Theology: God, Scripture, and Hermeneutics[18] and a book published in 1998, Is There a Meaning in This Text? The Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge.[19] One of the strongest points of continuity from the early piece into the writings in this period is this use of notional claims about God’s activity in creation to set the stage for lengthy considerations of human speech acts. So in “From Speech Acts to Scripture Acts: The Covenant Discourse & the Discourse of Covenant” he proposes ten theses for the consideration of a development of theological hermeneutics:

1. Language has a “design plan” that is inherently covenantal.
2. The paradigm for a Christian view of communication is the triune God in communicative action.
3. “Meaning” is the result of communicative action, of what an author has done in tending to certain words at a particular time in a specific manner.
4. The literal sense of an utterance or text is the sum total of those illocutionary acts performed by the author intentionally and with self-awareness.
5. Understanding consists in recognizing illocutionary acts and their results.
6. Interpretation is the process of inferring authorial intentions and of ascribing illocutionary acts.
7. An action that aims to produce perlocutionary effects on readers other than by means of understanding counts as strategic, not communicative action.
8. To describe generic (or canonic) illocution is to describe the communicative acts that structure the text considered as a unified whole.
9. The Spirit speaks in and through Scripture precisely by rendering its illocutions at the sentential, generic, and canonic levels perlocutionary efficacious.
10. What God does with Scripture is covenant with humanity by testifying to Jesus Christ (illocution) and by bringing about the reader’s mutual indwelling with Christ (perlocution) through the Spirit’s rendering Scripture efficacious.[20]

There is much to unpack here, but for the sake of brevity we will focus on just a few points. The fundamental claim is based on the “design plan of language.” Further, Vanhoozer now suggests that the triune action of God is the “paradigm” for human speech action. This appeal to the Trinity is an important addition but, nevertheless, continues to function as a notional claim about God which, in turn, underwrites a general theory about human speech acts much as the doctrines of God’s omniscience and omnipresence did in “Semantics.”

The Trinitarian model in point two is utilized, in part, because the “missions of the Son and Spirit, authorized by God the Father/Author, bear a certain resemblance to the economy of the ‘sender-receiver’ model of communication.”[21] This resembles an argument from an “analogy of being,” that is, that there are similarities reflected in the way human beings communicate with each other to the way God, in his immanent Trinitarian life, communicates amongst the three Persons. The actual interaction between God’s ad intra communicative relationship with God’s ad extra interaction with human speech agency is not accounted for, however. In the end divine agency continues to have an indeterminate role to the reading of Scripture apart from God’s action in creation of analogous communicative conditions. This is reflected in Vanhoozer’s list in that points three through eight only require the stability of the created conditions for human speech agency. Post-Enlightenment theological limits are still honored at this point.

Point nine confirms this dramatically. The role for the agency of the Holy Spirit is to render Scripture’s “illocutions at the sentential, generic and canonic levels perlocutionary efficacious.”[22] This perfectly reflects the role accorded in deism to the ongoing activity of God in maintaining the stability in the structure of creation. The Spirit underwrites the ongoing currency of created human speech conditions. God is simply watching and insuring that the house of human speech is kept clean and in good order, that the speech actions of Scripture are successful. Point ten picks up at the point of the results of the speech acts of the Bible and does begin to point in a more nuanced direction regarding a more substantial role for the interaction of divine and human agency. This point, nevertheless, only affects how we perceive the outcome, the effects, the telos of the reading, and, strictly speaking, does not impinge on the accounting of the actual agency and activity involved in the reading itself. Consideration of divine agency in this list is heaviest in creating human speech conditions and insuring that the speech acts of Scripture are successful.

This way of approaching the hermeneutics of reading Scripture is employed in Vanhoozer’s book Is There a Meaning in This Text? In it he sets out to defend the integrity of the author and the text. His opponents are the “undoers” represented by Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish, and others who share their outlook. Part one of the book outlines the problem he sees with their undoings. The integrity of the human author is under siege: the human reader is left vulnerable to the whims of human ideology and violence.

Vanhoozer responds by suggesting that the issues raised are inherently theological, that “secular literary theories are anti-theologies in disguise.”[23] The proper response to these attacks, he concludes, should be theological as well. The theological defense here, however, continues to exhibit the ambiguities of his earlier writing pertaining to divine agency. Vanhoozer defends authorship with strict attention only to the general created conditions of human language. So he begins telling us that “the fear of the author is the beginning of literary knowledge,” hinting at a theological analogy, and then continues, “To inquire after the nature of the author is also to ask what it is to be human.”[24] He goes on with his defense treating the hermeneutical problem strictly in terms of immanent creaturely speech activity. Hewrites, “Language is a God-given capacity that enables human beings to relate to God, to the world, and to one another.” Language is “designed” and “endowed” by God and given to human beings to “produce true interpretation.”[25] The theological component of divine agency continues to be limited to creation but does not indicate any further or related action by God. We also see this in his specific response to Derrida:

If we begin not from Derrida’s Doubt but from Christian doctrine, we can formulate the following thesis: the design plan of language is to serve as the medium of covenantal relations with God, with others, with the world.[26]

The key thing here is that language is an instrument used by human beings according to its “design plan.” It remains unclear how divine action fits into this plan apart from the planning and building phases. Vanhoozer tends, then, to approach these issues in his earlier writings honoring post-Enlightenment terms which isolate biblical hermeneutics from the full consideration of the accompanying influence of divine agency.

Vanhoozer closes Is There a Meaning? with a clarification of one of the developments in his thinking, that “the best general hermeneutics is a trinitarian hermeneutics.” He clarifies how the Trinity functions:

The thesis underlying the present work takes God’s trinitarian communicative action as the paradigm, not merely the illustration, of all genuine message-sending and receiving.. .. The triune God is therefore the epitome of communicative agency.[27]

That the Trinity is not simply an “illustration” but rather the “paradigm” and “epitome” does not provide much clarification, however, beyond his earlier appeal to the Trinity we discussed above. All this suggests is that the Trinity is not a type but the archetype of human communication. There is still no clear indication for how the actual influence or participation of God’s speech action occurs with human speech action. He also displays this ambiguity when he suggests that “disputes about the nature of interpretation are ultimately theological, therefore, insofar as they revolve around the possibility of transcendence,”[28] and that

the Trinity thus serves the role of what Kant calls a “transcendental condition”: a necessary condition for the possibility of something humans experience but cannot otherwise explain, namely, the experience of meaningful communication.[29]

Vanhoozer’s writing begins in the late 1990s to explore the nature of reading Scripture by overtly considering divine speech action in more expansive terms. One indication of this development in his thinking is found in chapters two through four of First Theology, which were published between 1996 and 2001. They deal explicitly with questions pertaining to the doctrine of God and specifically with laying out a Trinitarian theology of communicative action. There is also a shift in Vanhoozer’s vocabulary in these writings. For example, before in “Semantics” he defined the diversity of human speech acts in Scripture as diverse literary forms. Now he sees that same diversity as “a rainbow of divine communicative acts.”[30] This is also demonstrated in a more dynamic exposition on the relationship between God and Scripture:

I submit that the best way to view God and Scripture together is to acknowledge God as a communicative agent and Scripture as his communicative action. The virtue of this construal.. . lies in its implicit thesis that one can neither discuss God apart from Scripture nor do justice to Scripture in abstraction from its relation to God. For if the Bible is a species of divine communicative action it follows that in using Scripture we are not dealing merely with information about God; we are rather engaging God himself—with God in communicative action. The notion of divine communicative action forms an indissoluble bond between God and Scripture.[31]

We also see in “Body Piercing, the Natural Sense & the Task of Theological Interpretation: A Hermeneutical Homily on John 19:34” (2000) a modification of the “ten theses” we noted above to “five theses”:

1. The ultimate authority for Christian theology is the triune God in communicative action.
2. A text’s “plain meaning” or “natural sense” is the result of a person’s communicative action (what an author has done in tending to his or her words in this way rather than another).
3. To call the Bible “Scripture” is to acknowledge a divine intention that does not contravene but supervenes on the communicative intentions of its human authors.
4. The theological interpretation of Scripture requires us to give “thick descriptions” of the canonical acts in the Bible performed by both the human and the divine authors.
5. The norm of theological interpretation (what an author has intentionally said/ done) generates an interpretive aim: to bear competent witness to what an author has said/done.[32]

The ubiquitous coupling of human and divine action in this as compared to the early list is a confirmation of Vanhoozer’s growing investment in divine agency.[33] In introducing this list he also offers the important new qualification that he had “sought to derive these theses from Christian doctrine” and that “the use of speech act philosophy is merely ancillary to my theological purpose.”[34] Whether speech act theory was, in fact, auxiliary in his early work is unclear.[35]

His increasing investment in the relationship of divine and human agency for biblical hermeneutics becomes most overt in a paper he gave in Toronto in 2002 at the annual meeting of the Institute for Biblical Research and, finally, in his recent book, The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology (2005). In the former he responded to a paper given by I. Howard Marshall entitled “Developing a Biblical Hermeneutic for a Developing Theology.”[36] Vanhoozer’s thinking has become so attuned to the issue of divine agency that he directs his critical remarks toward the role that antecedent judgments pertaining to God’s agency play in Marshall’s proposal. Vanhoozer highlights the implicit theological judgments about God’s actions that underwrite Marshall’s proposal.[37] He does not challenge the validity of bringing such judgments to the conversation but only suggests that those that Marshall brings may be inadequate in light of Scripture’s own witness. In response he affirms the necessity and priority of theological judgments about divine agency:

Now what might this paper have looked like had it been written by a theologian—by me, for example? First, the title would have to be slightly adjusted: “Developing a Theology for a Developing Biblical Hermeneutic.” The point is that the way we read and use the Bible already depends on certain theological assumptions, say, about the character of God (as we have just seen) or about the trajectory of redemption. There is circularity here, to be sure, but it need not be vicious because these assumptions are corrigible.[38]

Vanhoozer then picks up on the notion of the “trajectory of redemption” that Marshall proposes and highlights the problem he sees in similar terms.[39] He suspects that Marshall usurps aspects of the authoritative action of God in Christ, relocating them in the present interpretive actions of the Christian community. His proposed corrective highlights how it is God’s action in Christ that is uniquely definitive for shaping the life and interpretive practices of the church and how it is proper and necessary to be led into the reading of Scripture with doctrinal judgments about God’s action in Christ.[40] Thus, Vanhoozer is effectively relocating the dogmatic location of reading Scripture from the doctrine of creation to salvation.

This trajectory culminates in his most recent work, The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology.[41] Drama is a watershed book in the evolution of Vanhoozer’s hermeneutical and theological thinking. He goes much further in Drama than in earlier writing by locating the diverse aspects of biblical truth assertions within the more expansive milieu of divine speech action: “The macrogenre of Scripture is divine address.”[42]

Whereas before he anchored the meaningfulness and truthfulness of Scripture abstractly in the speech actions of its human authors and sought to create a hermeneutic for all texts which unpacked this against the backdrop of the stability of language inherent in creation, he now emphasizes divine agency to the point that he dismisses his own earlier assertion that all texts should be read like the Bible. Now he insists, “The Bible is not like other texts; it has been commissioned by Jesus and prompted by the Spirit. It is part and parcel of God’s communicative action that both summons and governs the church.”[43] The Bible is now acknowledged to have a distinct ontology from other texts. Vanhoozer argues further: “Both the gospel and the ensuing work of theology involve words and acts, though the divine speech and action are prior to and take precedence over the human response.”[44]

His commitment to the authority of Scripture in both its hermeneutical and doctrinal functions continues, but is now overtly acknowledged to be strictly derivative of its relationship to God’s prevenient and accompanying gracious revelatory activity:

What comes first—that to which doctrine is primarily accountable—is triune communicative action. In the beginning was the word—the promissio, a communicative act— not propositions or religious experience or community practices. To the extent that Scripture has been taken up into the economy of triune communicative action, it has meaning before it is used by the interpretative community or socialized into the church’s life.[45]

So far this sounds very much like his earlier writings. However, now he adds this telling qualification: “At the same time, Scripture is incomplete in the sense that, as an authoritative script, it calls for appropriation on the part of the believing community—in a word, performance.”[46]

This new emphasis receives extensive treatment in Drama and, as such, is one of few attempts by an American Evangelical to dwell deeply with the question of the role of tradition and reading communities without getting anxious and nervous and aborting the dialogue too quickly. It will be curious to see whether Evangelicals follow his lead or dismiss him as a prodigal son.

IV. Conclusion

Properly construed, scriptural hermeneutics must account for the concurrent divine action and agency that accompanies the text and the reader and also for the dogmatic location of its reading. The interaction of divine and human agency is integral to any and all proposals for reading Scripture. This dynamic is fundamental within all proposals in determining and shaping subsequent decisions made about “texts,” “readers,” “reading communities,” “contexts,” and so forth. In other words, the relationship between divine and human agency, as the neglected feature of contemporary scriptural hermeneutics, is more determinative and more fundamental than others which currently compel attention. It is necessary to its ontology as the witnessing Word of God. The time is right and ripe in biblical hermeneutics for approaching the task intentionally focusing on divine agency, as the most revealing manner both to expose and to redress the obscurity created in the course of following modernity’s epistemological strictures. The development of Kevin Vanhoozer’s thinking on theological hermeneutics demonstrates this emerging sensitivity and also presents a model to illustrate the direction that hermeneutical reflection on the reading of Scripture must pursue.

Much contemporary biblical hermeneutics, nevertheless, continues to frame the problem of reading Scripture in term of the tension between “text” and “reader(s).” Those who defend the rights of texts for determining meaning do so by way of either the human author (i.e., “intention,” E. D. Hirsh et al.) or the “final form” (Frei, Childs et al). Others posit meaning as a product of the agency of the reader(s) (“Reader-Response,” Stephen Fowl et al.).

There is a common characteristic of both approaches that needs attention and redress: that the framing of the problem as being between “text” and “reader(s)” observes a noetic limit that focuses on human agency in abstraction from divine agency. The role for divine agency in these approaches tends to appear, if at all, in connection with the created conditions for language in general, which observes, more or less, the deistic limits of the Enlightenment. Theological hermeneutics must attend more conscientiously to the pervasive, perennial, and myriad forms of God’s agency to locate and understand more properly the task of reading Scripture. Kevin Vanhoozer is presented as an exemplar in this regard even as his work directs us to more conscientious and sophisticated treatments of this relationship in the emerging field of theological hermeneutics.[47]

Notes

1. For a dogmatic account of the nature of Scripture and its reading compatible with the argument of this article, see John Webster, Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
2. This locates the task of reading the Bible as a subset of the doctrine of creation which tends to reduce it to a naturalist account. So just as theology—broadly speaking—approached from this standpoint is “theology from below” or “natural theology” hermeneutics viewed in this way becomes “hermeneutics from below” or “natural hermeneutics.”
3. The material for this article is derived from research related to my book Rendering the Word in Theological Hermeneutics: Mapping Divine and Human Agency (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate Press, forthcoming).
4. Immanuel Kant, What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?, in Religion and Rational Theology (ed. and trans. Allen W. Wood and George Di Giovanni; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 14–15; emphasis added. Also found in Kant, Gesammelte Schriften (29 vols.; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1900–), 8:142, where the last sentence reads: “Der Begriff von Gott, und selbst die Überzeugung von seinem Dasein, kann nur allein in der Vernunft angetroffen werden, von ihr allein ausgehen und weder durch Eingebung, noch durch eine erteilte Nachricht von noch so großer Auctorität zuerst in uns kommen.”
5. Kant, “What does it Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?,” 15.
6. Ibid., 16-17.
7. Kant, “Religion Within the Bounds of Mere Reason,” in Religion and Rational Theology, 163–71; and “Critique of Practical Reason,” in Practical Philosophy (ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 239–58.
8. One compelling example would be the arguments and discussion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries leading up to and culminating in the work of Baruch Spinoza. Important new light has been shed on this period by J. Samuel Preus, Spinoza and the Irrelevance of Biblical Authority (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). See also Christopher Norris, Spinoza & the Origins of Modern Critical Theory (The Bucknell Lectures in Literary Theory; Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); and A. K. M. Adam, Making Sense of New Testament Theology: “Modern” Problems and Prospects (StABH 11; Macon: Mercer University Press, 1995). Other accounts include Hans-Joachim Kraus, Die Biblische Theologie: Ihre Geschichte und Problematik (Neukirchen: Neukirchener Verlag, 1970); Werner Georg Kümmel, The New Testament: The History of the Investigation of Its Problems (trans. S. McLean Gilmour and Howard C. Kee; Nashville: Abingdon, 1972); Robert M. Grant and David Tracy, A Short History of the Interpretation of the Bible (2d ed.; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984); Klaus Scholder, The Birth of Modern Critical Theology: Origins and Problems of Biblical Criticism in the Seventeenth Century (trans. John Bowden; London: SCM Press, 1990); Roy A. Harrisville and Walter Sundberg, The Bible in Modern Culture: Baruch Spinoza to Brevard Childs (2d ed.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002). Also highly relevant is Isaak A. Dorner, History of Protestant Theology: Particularly in Germany, Viewed According to Its Fundamental Movement and in Connection with the Religious, Moral, and Intellectual Life (trans. George Robson and Sophia Taylor; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1871).
9. Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974); Jeffrey Stout, The Flight From Authority: Religion, Morality, and the Quest for Autonomy (Revisions 1; Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981); Michael Buckley At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); C. D. Cashdollar, The Tansformation of Theology, 1830–1890: Positivism and Protestant Thought in Britain and America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); Milbank, The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997); Philip Clayton, The Problem of God in Modern Thought (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000). The ultimate genesis of the epistemological influences I discuss is not at issue here. Whether Descartes bears greater responsibility (Stout, Harrisville and Sundberg, Scholder et al.), or whether the roots go back to the Medieval Disputations (Milbank) or the influence of Bacon is a debatable point which does not ultimately affect the argument put forth here. This work does hinge on whether the account offered by Kant is representative of Enlightenment ideals, broadly speaking, and that those ideals have been implicitly or otherwise accepted as normative by biblical theologians.
10. Benjamin Jowett, “On the Interpretation of Scripture,” in The Interpretation of Scripture and Other Essays (London: Routledge, 1902), 11; repr. from Frederick Temple et al., Essays and Reviews (London: John W. Parker & Son, 1860).
11. An important but ignored question in our times is, “What is the dogmatic location for the reading of Scripture?” The default location in contemporary debates is as a subset of creation; more appropriate candidates that warrant consideration are loci within the doctrine of redemption: election, atonement, salvation, etc.
12. Kevin Vanhoozer, “The Semantics of Biblical Literature: Truth and Scripture’s Diverse Literary Forms,” in Hermeneutics, Authority and Canon (ed. D. A. Carson and John D. Woodbridge; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1986), 49–104; hereafter “Semantics.”
13. Ibid., 69.
14. Ibid., 67-75.
15. Ibid., 85.
16. The best introduction to speech act theory and its implementation in theological hermeneutics is Richard S. Briggs, Words in Action: Speech Act Theory and Biblical Interpretation; Toward a Hermeneutic of Self-Involvement (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001). See also Timothy Ward, Word and Supplement: Speech Acts, Biblical Texts, and the Sufficiency of Scripture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
17. This reductionism illustrates one of the fundamental limitations in the adoption of speech act theory as a general umbrella for accounting for theological hermeneutics of Scripture.
18. Kevin Vanhoozer, First Theology: God, Scripture, and Hermeneutics (Downers Grove: InterVarsity 2002).
19. Kevin Vanhoozer, Is T here a Meaning in T his Text? T he Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998).
20. Vanhoozer, First Theology, 202-3. T his essay, ch. 6 of Vanhoozer s collection, was repr. from After Pentecost: Language & Biblical Interpretation (ed. Craig Bartholomew, Colin Greene, and Karl Moller; Scripture and Hermeneutics 2; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001).
21. Vanhoozer, First Theology, 168. There also may be theological problems with the identification of the communicative actions of the different members of the Trinity with the three modes of speech act theory, for Vanhoozer suggests Father = locution, Son = illocution, Spirit = perlocution (154–56, 162–63).
22. Ibid., 202-3.
23. Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning?, 200. Vanhoozer appeals here to John Milbank’s work.
24. Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning?, 201.
25. Ibid., 205.
26. Ibid., 206; emphasis in the original.
27. Ibid., 457.
28. Ibid., 455; emphasis in the original.
29. Ibid., 456.
30. Vanhoozer, First Theology, 35.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid., 293. This article, ch. 10 of Vanhoozer s collection, was repr. from ExAud 16 (2000).
33. Ibid., 12-13.
34. Ibid., 291.
35. As mentioned above in n. 21, his earlier use of speech act theory suggested the following analogy: “Father = locution, Son = illocution, Spirit = perlocution.” He now softens this to “God is the initiator of this action (agent), the Word or content of this action (act) and the Spirit or power of its reception (consequence)” (First Theology, 292).
36. I. Howard Marshall, Stanley E. Porter, and Kevin Vanhoozer, Beyond the Bible: Moving from Scripture to Theology (Acadia Studies in Bible and Theology; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004), 11–79.
37. Kevin Vanhoozer, “Comments on ‘Developing a Biblical Hermeneutic for a Developing Theology”’ (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Institute for Biblical Research, Toronto, Canada, November 2002), 3. A substantially revised version of this paper appears as “Into the Great ‘Beyond’: A Theologian’s Response to the Marshall Plan,” in Beyond the Bible, 81–96.
38. Vanhoozer, “Comments,” 4.
39. Ibid., 6-7. Ibid., 9-10.
40. Kevin Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005); hereafter Drama.
41. Ibid., 224.
42. Ibid., 224.
43. Ibid., 202.
44. Ibid., 35; see also 114.
45. Ibid., 101.
46. Ibid.; see also the discussion on 161-85.
47. Other noteworthy figures who are attempting to contribute to the recovery from the problematic way of thinking include John Webster, Francis Watson, N.T. Wright, Christopher J. H.Wright, Christopher Seitz, Richard Hays, Joel Green, Craig Bartholomew, as well as many others.