Beeson podcast, Episode 417 Dr. Kevin Vanhoozer November 5, 2018 Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now, your host, Timothy George. Timothy George: Welcome to today's Beeson podcast. Well, today I have the privilege of having a conversation with Dr. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, a good friend who's been loyal to the Lord and a great leader in both the academy and the church. He teaches systematic theology, a research professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He holds degrees from Westmont College in California, Westminster Theological Seminary, and a PhD from Cambridge University in England, the author of numerous books that many of us have read and benefited from across the years. Welcome to the Beeson podcast, Kevin. Kevin Vanhoozer: Thank you. It's good to be at Beeson. Timothy George: Now, you're here at Beeson to give reformation heritage lectures 2018, and we've enjoyed our time with you very much. I know our students have enjoyed interacting with you, but I wanted to use this occasion on the podcast to talk to you about theology. You're a theologian, so that doesn't seem to be too big of a stretch, and I'm bouncing off an essay you published recently in the journal First Things called Letter to an Aspiring Theologian. Now, before we get into your article and what you were trying to do there to encourage younger theologians to think about theology, let's say a little bit about First Things. What's been your association with First Things? Kevin Vanhoozer: Well, they're, in a sense, the host for the Evangelical, Catholics Together discussion that we've both been involved in for several years. Timothy George: Yeah. Kevin Vanhoozer: I've been reading it for several years. It's a forum for Christian fought on public issues that we have co-belligerence, as it were, Protestants and Roman Catholics, Evangelicals often on the same page, but addressing issues in a public way of social significance and intellectual significance that don't get addressed in thorough dept in other magazines. Timothy George: Yeah. You were asked to write this article by First Things, by our editor, right, Rusty Reno. Kevin Vanhoozer: Our editor did invite me and he gave me the title as well. I think I'm the second in a series of such letters. The first was Paul Griffiths' Letter to an Inspiring Intellectual. Timothy George: Yeah. Kevin Vanhoozer: It wasn't a stretch for me because I often get inquiries about what is it to do theology, I was able to pull from real letters as well as just craft something de novo, of my own. Timothy George: Now, theology is a word that put some people off, and for various reasons. One of the reasons is it seem to be not so directly related to the Christian life. It's heady. It's abstract. It's abstruse sometimes. You want to bring theology and Christian life into closer association, don't you? Kevin Vanhoozer: I do. It's always sad to me when people, believers talk about theology as something impractical. I sometimes hear this, or at least, I used to hear this in my seminary classes, they were in my classes because it was a requirement. I think theology and doctrine are vital of discipleship. Theology tells us the way the world is in Christ. It tells us the way we should be going to follow that way. It gives us understanding. There's nothing more practical, I would argue, than understanding, and understanding our faith and the way and truth and life of Jesus Christ and how to follow that today. I think doctrine is vital for making disciples, people who can understand what it means to follow Jesus, who he was and what his way is. Timothy George: Was Jesus a theologian? Kevin Vanhoozer: Jesus was a theologian because he spoke often and regularly about God. Theology is speech about God. He might even say was theology incarnate. Timothy George: Good. Theology, you say, is the study of how to speak truly of God and of all things in relation to God, which really doesn't leave anything out, does it? Kevin Vanhoozer: It doesn't. Have a lot of work to do, a lot of remedial reading, things to catch up on, the theologian is interested in everything but everything in relation to God. There's still an anchor. This is a dimension that really needs to be included and universities, for example, universities study all sorts of subjects, but the role of the theologian in a university is to make sure that people are relating them to God. Arguably, there is no other principle of unity in a university than the creator through whom all things have come to be. You wouldn't have these various subject matter without a creator God. Timothy George: I want to get to Revelation in a minute because, how can we talk about God? How do we even use that word within a meaning? First, think about this definition. You quote this definition from William Ames, theology is a question of living before God, of living in the presence of God, the science, the knowledge, "Theologia est scientia vivendo Deo." Theology is the knowledge or the science of living before God, which connects, again, spirituality and theology. Kevin Vanhoozer: Definitely. It raises questions about who we are as human beings, who we are, why are we here? These are the big questions we may not have time to give them thought, but human beings have been, from the start, addressed by God. The human project, I think, is knowing how to live to God, how to respond to God's address. It's not simply in Scripture, of course, it's in creation. The heavens declare the glory of God. If we can still see the heavens despite all the light pollution in our cities, what is our response? Nature confronts us. Our conscience confronts us. To be human is to be faced with the question, how do we respond to the gift of our existence? Timothy George: Good. I love the way you begin with Thomas Aquinas. He gives us a very famous definition. Why don't you tell us that definition, and then give us a bit of an explication of it? Kevin Vanhoozer: Thomas Aquinas writes, and this is hundreds of years ago, but he writes that theology is taught by God, teaches of God, and leads to God. Each of those preposition, from, of, to, is important. We can't speak of God in and of ourselves. We can't examine God with scientific instruments. As a science, we're dependent upon the given, as all scientists are, but in this case, it's God giving him knowledge of himself, revelation. The amazing thing about Christianity and the beginning of all theology is that we speak of God because he has first spoken to us, otherwise, we would be fairly in the dark, but God has spoken in many modes. Kevin Vanhoozer: I think this is what Aquinas has in mind. We're taught by God himself primarily on the Scriptures, his self-revelation. The Scriptures are largely about God and his purposes for human beings, for the world. He has told us what he's done in history, and so that's what he means when he says teaching of God, and the purpose of this communication is for us to respond and God wants to draw us back because we've lost our way in the world. The idea of being led to God, I think, Scripture, theology, it's discourse about God, but the ultimate aim is cultivating godliness in us, right orientation to God. Timothy George: You've taught and written a lot about Scripture and how we understand it, how we interpret it. You give us four words that you think theology ought to track, Trinitarian, biblical, Catholic, and systematic. We'll come back to the other three but focus on biblical for just a minute. First of all, let me ask you, why don't you start with Trinitarian instead of biblical? I mean, one of the objections to theology is that we don't it we have the Bible. What do you mean when you say theology is and ought to be biblical? Kevin Vanhoozer: Right. Scripture is the soul of theology. There is a way of trying to speak of God that bypasses Scripture. It's called natural theology. It only takes us so far. We can't say the things we really want to say about Jesus and the gospel just by looking at nature. We need the special word from God, and we have it. My thinking about God, my speech about God has to be tied to these words. These are the words that God uses to teach me how to think about him. Kevin Vanhoozer: As a theologian, I see myself first and foremost as a reader of Scripture, one that not simply not gets the grammar right, but is asking questions about the subject matter, so we have to get beyond the grammar, beyond these difficult old fashion words to the subject matter of Scripture. Being biblical means learning to think about God, the world, and ourselves through what Calvin calls the spectacles of faith through these lenses that Scripture affords. It's a very complex set of lenses. It's not just one kind of book. We have a whole set of books in the Bible, different kinds of book. Kevin Vanhoozer: All of these, I think, together don't simply give us information about God, though they do that, but they also help us to view the world the right way, and they touch, as Abraham Kuyper says, all the chords of our soul. It's not just about giving us knowledge. It's about inspiring us, giving us comfort, consolation, guidance, warnings. The project is to form human beings who reflect God back to him. We are his images. Timothy George: Now, we know the word Trinity is not actually found in the Bible. It was coined in, probably, the third century by Tertullian and became a part of the vocabulary of Christian theologians and Christian believers in the west, especially, initially. I like what Moltmann said. I wonder if you would comment on this, the Trinity is the story of God as told through Jesus, or the story of Jesus as the story of God, I think, is what he actually says. What is the Trinity? Kevin Vanhoozer: This is the abstract concept people often fear about Trinity, about theology. The first thing I want to say is I'm not interested abstract speculation and neither were the church fathers. The so-called doctrine of the Trinity and it is complex, but it was quite a human feat to get this concept and the purpose that they had in formulating the doctrine to the Trinity was to answer Jesus' own question to his disciples, who do you say that I am? There are only so many options? Kevin Vanhoozer: At the time, some people were reading the Bible and saying that Jesus was a creature. The church fathers in the third century and afterwards knew that what was at stake in this doctrine of the Trinity was Jesus' own status. In order to read the story of Jesus right, they felt we had to come to some understanding of God as three in one. Somehow, Jesus, this man, the story and the Scripture say things about him that clearly imply, they don't state, but they clearly imply that Jesus is doing the same kinds of things that God does, that he is receiving worship, forgiving sins, the kinds of things that God does. Kevin Vanhoozer: The identity of Jesus converges on the identity of God, and yet there's one God. This was a problem for the early church. How do we read this text as monotheists and confess that Jesus is the one through whom all things were made, that he forgives sins, that we are to worship him? The answer they came to was that somehow, Jesus is God, and yet God is one. To spell that out required a full-fledged formulation of what is now the doctrine of the Trinity. Timothy George: Many of the words that we associate with the classical Trinitarian teaching, the Creed of Nicene of Nicaea and so forth use rather long and for us, a fancy word, homoousios and so forth. Kevin Vanhoozer: Yes. Timothy George: One of the criticisms of the doctrine of the Trinity has been that this is really a Hellenizing of Christianity. It's taking on Plato and all the Greek philosophers and really subjecting Jesus to that foreign, alien element. Now, the church had to deal with that very specifically. What would be your response to that today if someone made that objection? Kevin Vanhoozer: I don't think Greek philosophy took the Bible captive. That's been an old story. It's called the Hellenization thesis. I like to reverse it, and I like to think that the church fathers were missionaries, and they were trying to speak the gospel into Greek culture. Instead of the Hellenization of the gospel, we could think of it as the evangelization of Hellenism. Timothy George: That's good. Kevin Vanhoozer: Yeah, it's the first act of contextual theology, and it needs to be done again and again as the gospel enters new cultures. Timothy George: Another word you used to talk about theology and theologians is Catholic. Again, a controversial word, and for some people, of course, they immediately associate Catholic with Roman Catholicism, which is one definition of Catholic, but not the only one. What is Catholic? Kevin Vanhoozer: Catholic is a reference to the whole church, and I do think the church fathers, the reformers, Protestants were originally Catholics. They knew the church is one. There's one faith, one Lord, one baptism. That's another way of talking about the Catholicity. It has to do with the scope of people who agree on the one faith. Any adjectival or qualifier, like Roman, well, that circumscribes the scope to some extent. You might almost say it's a contradiction in terms. It's a limit to Catholicity. Kevin Vanhoozer: The whole point of the concept is to express universality. We have to spell out what kind of universality. The Catholicity I have in mind here is believing with the whole church across cultures, across centuries, and there is a consensus about first-order truths that we can discern, so much so that some would speak of the great tradition, referring to the Catholic or universal tradition, things that all Christians have agreed on. Timothy George: The last word you use is systematic. Now, that's, again, a word that gets people's hackles up. Systematic, it sounds like a Procrustean kind of badge you're putting people into to be systematic, and yet, you defend that word. You think theology ought to be, and in some ways, must be systematic. Kevin Vanhoozer: Let me first acknowledge that there are systems that are Procrustean. That there are systems that people would like to force the Bible to fit. That's not what I have in mind. Another way of thinking about system would be just consistency, that is to speak of systematic theology means that what you say about one doctrine will have an effect on others. There's a linkage, for example, between the doctrine of original sin, what you think the problem is, and the question of election, and atonement, and so on, salvation. There's a linkage, an important linkage. I think the best theologians have tried to read Scripture as a unified, coherent story. The softer version of systematics that I commend is simply the one that tries to articulate the coherence of the biblical story. Timothy George: I want to talk to you a little bit about hermeneutics. That's a word that's associated with you in your many, many writings. Is There a Meaning in This Text? is maybe your most famous book, though you've written a lot of them, but say a little bit about how we read and understand the Bible. You used a quotation from CS Lewis that I think is very illuminating. Lewis makes a distinction between looking at a beam of light and looking along a beam of light. What is that about? Kevin Vanhoozer: Lewis, I think it's a great image, the Bible is the light unto our path, so it's wonderful to compare the Bible to a beam of light. Lewis imagined someone coming into a dark storage room and seeing a beam of light, if you stand apart from it, which is his way of speaking, if you have a critical distance, you can look at it objectively. You can see certain dust particles floating and so on, but that's all you see. Then he says, "If you step into the beam of light and look a long the, you'll see the source, which is the sun." Kevin Vanhoozer: I think he's trying to say that it's one thing to have a critical distance from the Bible and analyze it but not be personally engaged, and quite another to submit yourself to it, enter the world, inhabit its story, and then look along it as a participant, not as someone who's trying to maintain neutral objectivity critical distance. Timothy George: Yeah. In universities and seminaries, divinity schools, we sometimes distinguish systematic from biblical or historical theology. These are closely interconnected though, aren't they? While we might separate them for the purposes of offering a course or studying some topic, we have to, in some ways, see them as cohering, co-inherent, maybe Kevin Vanhoozer: I think so. I think there are good arguments that could be made for the various departments. We have such specialized bodies of literature now, but there was a time when they were not. There was a time when they weren't separate divisions. Everyone was trying to read the Bible to hear the word of God for the people of God, so we were reading the Bible with the communion of saints, and historical theology is simply interested in what other saints have found in Scripture. Kevin Vanhoozer: Systematic theology, as I said, is interested in the subject matter of Scripture and trying to go deeper in our understanding of it. Biblical theology is interested in, I think, getting back into the minds and experience of the original recipient and trying to say what it felt like for the particular authors and their terms to understand God, and then to trace the progression throughout Scripture of how people use different terms to understand the same God and the same story. Timothy George: Here at Beeson, we've had a little bit of a protest movement against the more recent way of fragmenting theology. I don't know how successful we've been, but every professor here is a professor of divinity, not of this or that discipline within the body of divinity, but of divinity, which I guess, theoretically means that they have the right to teach and speak on any part of theology without claiming, "That's not my are it's yours, or hers, or his." Timothy George: The other thing is what we've done with systematic theology in church history, we've abolished them. That is to say, we no longer have two stack poles and try to relate them disjunctively, but we brought them together in a sequence we call history and doctrine. The effort is to look chronologically, but in a more systematic doctrinal way at the movement in the history of God's people of how these ideas have arisen and how they shape Christian life. That's our effort, maybe a protest against what you've described as a disjunctive approach. Kevin Vanhoozer: My your tribe increase. Timothy George: In your essay, this wonderful essay, which by the way, I commend the everyone, Letter to an Aspiring Theologian, how to speak of God truly, Kevin Vanhoozer, First Things. It was published in August 2018, and I'm sure it's still on the website and available. What do you say a little bit about Luther's phrase, you're adapting or paraphrasing Luther, a theologian is perfectly free, lord of all discipline and subject to none, in conjunction with what you bring together as two traits or virtues of a theologian, bonus and humility. Those two aren't often paired together. Somebody is very bold, or someone is very humble, but you won't come to be in close connection with theology, bonus and humility. Kevin Vanhoozer: Yes, and I want people to have the wisdom to know when to exercise the one, and when to exercise the other. There's a time for boldness. Mainly when we're speaking God's word and not so much our interpretation, that a time for humility when we're out on a limb, perhaps, with our interpretation and further from a Catholic consensus, for example, on what God's word is. Kevin Vanhoozer: Yes, the theologian is lord of all disciplines in the sense that not that we lorded over the disciplines, but in freedom, we can and should relate to the various disciplines, taking whatever is good and true and pure because God is the creator of all things. I do think the discussion between theology and the other disciplines is very important. We don't want to sequester God from the rest of the world, the theologian is, again, one who wants to relate God to all things. We just need to do that very carefully with humility mover in the area of other disciplines. Timothy George: Everyone is a theologian. Every Christian is a theologian. You talked about every pastor should be a theologian. Not just those who are in the guild of systematic or historical, or biblical theology, but everyone who speaks of God truly is called into this vocation of giving praise to God, which is one of the meanings of the word confession, isn't it? Not just to say what you believe, but to praise the God who establishes that belief. Timothy George: About a year ago, you and I had a conversation on the Beeson podcast about a document that we were both involved in. You were the primary drafter of it, a number of other people joined in promoting and giving attention to this document called Reforming Catholic Confession. Now, we're a year down the road form that original publication, which was Reformation week, I think, of the year 2017. Kevin Vanhoozer: Yes. Timothy George: 500th anniversary of the Reformation, say a little bit, looking back now on the Reforming Catholic Confession, the reformation festivities that we commemorated and where this movement is taking us. Kevin Vanhoozer: Well, it's a little difficult. I'm not sure how much movement our Reforming Catholic Confession generated. We don't have an instrument to gauge its reception other than counting up the people who signed onto it officially on our website. You can still do that, www.reformingcatholicconfession.com, still up. I commend it to you. The exercise was excellent. The exercise was an exercise in Catholicity among Protestants trying to find areas of that final agreement between people who belong to a variety of different churches. The exercise itself, I found very edifying, but as to the effects, again, we don't have an instrument. What we do have is anecdotal evidence. Again, we have the people who've signed on. We could look at their institutional affiliations. I was encouraged to see the number of nations represented on our lit. Timothy George: It's been translated into several languages. Kevin Vanhoozer: Several languages, and my hope would be that in some of these contexts, it might serve as a unifying basis for theological institutions, churches, seminaries, and I have been led to believe that in some cases, that's the case, that instead of coming up with yet another confessional statements, some groups are thinking about adopting the one we worked on. I think that's wonderful. As to the long-term prospects of the Reformation and its significance, that story is still being written. I still have a sense of urgency. I think Roger Nicole is right. There's lots of challenges facing the church, but we don't need a new Reformation. We just need to finish the old one. Timothy George: That's great. I'm glad you mentioned Roger Nicole because he is the person who first gave our Reformation Heritage Lectures here at Beeson 30 years ago. Now, you're giving them 2018, so that's a wonderful continuity. Well, thank you, Kevin, for visiting Beeson and for being a part of this conversation. God bless you and all your good work. Kevin Vanhoozer: Thank you very much. Announcer: You've been listening to the Beeson podcast with host, Timothy George. You can subscribe to the Beeson podcast at our website, beesondivinity.com. Beeson Divinity School is an interdenominational evangelical divinity school, training men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. We pray that this podcast will aid and encourage your work, and we hope you will listen to each upcoming edition of the Beeson podcast.