Mere Christian Hermeneutics: Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically
Book Review • Vanhoozer, Kevin J. Mere Christian Hermeneutics: Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2024. Kindle Edition. 424 pp. $29.99.
Read time: 11 min
Introduction
In a hermeneutical climate often divided between historical literality and christological, figurative readings of Scripture, Kevin J. Vanhoozer attempts to reunite what the Enlightenment divorced: grammar and God. Mere Christian Hermeneutics: Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically seeks to heal the split between exegesis and theology. Vanhoozer, a research professor of systematic theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and now Blanchard Professor of Systematic Theology at Wheaton College as of July 2026, writes from decades of work at the intersections of hermeneutics and dogmatics. His earlier volumes—Is There a Meaning in This Text?, The Drama of Doctrine, and Hearers and Doers—have shaped evangelical conversations about hermeneutics in academia and the church. Educated at Westminster Theological Seminary and the University of Cambridge, Vanhoozer brings an unusual combination of exegetical insight, philosophical range, and theological nuance to his project. The book’s animating claim is that Christ’s transfiguration in the Gospel provides a theological framework for reading the literal sense in the light of Christ, so that the “letter” of texts reveals the glory of Christ in all of Scripture. Although its analogical ambition sometimes exceeds its theological clarity, Mere Christian Hermeneutics is a masterful theological retrieval of figural interpretation that restores the literal sense to its christological fullness.
Summary
Vanhoozer advances the thesis that Christ’s transfiguration in the Gospels offers scaffolding for theological readings of Scripture that appreciate Christ as the ultimate referent of the literal sense of biblical texts. Because the Bible’s primary author is God, exegesis must move beyond textual and grammatical mechanics toward hearing the divine address within the “economy of light,” a proprietary term Vanhoozer defines as “the ordered way God makes himself known by the Father shining his light (i.e., revealing himself) through the Son by the Spirit” (401). The book aims to develop a mere Christian hermeneutic: “a way of thinking about hermeneutics that could overcome historical, ethnic, denominational, and especially disciplinary divides” (xxi). As such, the intended readership includes ecclesial and academic scholars seeking a robust biblical hermeneutic that both protects Scripture’s literal sense and embraces canonical, christological theology. Part 1 diagnoses polarized reading cultures (i.e., monastic/scholastic and exegesis/theology). Part 2 elucidates the literal and figurative senses by reconciling philological and grammatical exegesis with their God-intended christological referent—the heart of a properly theological reading. Part 3 appropriates an analogia corporis to connect Christology to the literal sense of Scripture, arguing that “what happens to Jesus’ body in the Transfiguration . . . happens to the letter of the biblical text when read theologically” (401).
Vanhoozer proposes that multiple hermeneutical “frames of reference” should be employed in biblical interpretation (i.e., lexical, semantic, historical, literary, and theological) so that no single frame reductionistically distorts interpretation (4). Drawing on C. S. Lewis’ toolshed analogy—which distinguishes between “looking at” and “looking along” a sunbeam—Vanhoozer urges peace between “biblical scholars and theologians” by integrating textual analysis (i.e., looking “at” the text lexically, semantically, etc.) with theological teleology (i.e., looking “along” the text christologically) (50).
For Vanhoozer, the crux of the troubling modern fragmentation between reading cultures in the theological disciplines is—what Charles Taylor termed—the “immanent frame” (i.e., the “self-enclosed world of nature that moderns inhabit . . . sealed off from the sacred or other-worldly” (81). This naturalistic frame has lead critical scholars to dismiss spiritual (i.e., figural, typological, christological) readings of Scripture as unwarranted retrospective eisegesis (82). Vanhoozer offers an ecclesial remedy: “taking biblical studies and theology back to church,” where interpretive aims—to know and love God—govern hermeneutical methods (100).
Key to his project, Vanhoozer seeks to “save” the sensus literalis by providing a “richer and more theologically adequate definition” (3). The literal sense is not merely “the straightforward, surface, or nonfigural level of meaning of the textual letter” but instead “the meaning of the human-divine biblical discourse when read grammatically-eschatologically in canonical context, and the norm of theological interpretation” (402). In so doing, he lays the foundation for distinguishing sense from reference, showing how one’s frames of reference tacitly determine where words “run” and how interpretations are made (65). He catalogs literality as verbal, authorial, historical, literary, and ruled/plain, concluding that the “plain” sense is socially mediated and that the true literal sense requires all five aspects (115). Modern frames of reference, Vanhoozer reasons, tragically eclipse the Bible’s own canonical, christological frame. The literal meaning of an Old Testament text, for instance, should be relocated within an eschatological horizon in which the text’s verbal sense and christological referent belong together (142). The result is a “thick, trans-figural literal sense”: figural theological readings that do not alter but clarify the literal sense in relation to the ultimate referent (i.e., Christ) as divine authorial discourses unfolding canonically under God’s providential superintendence (183).
For a case in point, Vanhoozer posits Genesis 1:3 (“Let there be light”) as a proving ground for his thesis. The question of literal meaning is whether God truly speaks and acts such that saying is doing in creating the world both ex nihilo and ex locutione (222). He offers a brief history of exegesis on Genesis 1:3 (e.g., Basil, Augustine, Thomas, Luther, Calvin) and displays how the pre-modern church read the passage literally and theologically, with the idea of “light” being descriptive of God’s revealed presence and the cosmos as a theater of God’s glory (252).
Ultimately, Christ’s Transfiguration serves as Vanhoozer’s hermeneutical “linchpin” (223, 226). He proposes an analogia corporis: just as Christ’s transfiguration clarified the already existent glory of Christ, so proper figural readings of Scripture magnify (and not disannul) the literal meaning of texts (228–43). In the eschatological “today,” the Holy Spirit illuminates how the Old Testament witnesses to Christ without straying into eisegesis (341). Thus, a transfigural, theological hermeneutic approaches Scripture as a christoscopic canon (i.e., with Christ as scopus) and orders every text within the story of Christ’s passion and kingdom (76, 185). A mere Christian hermeneutic, in the end, is participation in God’s economy of light. The Spirit illumines both letter and reader so that beholding the glory of God in the face of Christ produces transformation (i.e., the reader’s transfiguration) “from glory to glory” (2 Cor 3–4) (341, 351). In a word, Mere Christian Hermeneutics proposes an biblically answerable, grammatical-eschatological practice that unites grammar and God, sense and referent, so that the literal sense glows with the light of Christ (100).
Critical Evaluation
Although the methodological core of Vanhoozer’s thesis is not entirely novel—drawing connections between Christology and Scripture as both divine and human in their natures, among other analogous connections—Mere Christian Hermeneutics uniquely provides biblical readers with a theological argument for interpreting the literal sense of biblical texts both literally and christologically. In evaluating the work, there is much to commend.
Strengths
The first strength of Vanhoozer’s work is the way he re-centers hermeneutics on Scripture’s own subject matter and ends. He successfully “think[s] about biblical interpretation in the Bible’s own theological terms” (xx). More than the how of hermeneutical method, he admits his work mainly presses toward its why—“to hear the voice of God, learn virtue, gain wisdom, and become Christlike” (360). In the process, he thoroughly Christianizes biblical interpretation (a scandalous endeavor in some academic circles, one might say), tying his why directly to ecclesial life: “the ultimate purpose of the Bible is to generate and govern a covenant people” (12). As such, he calls churches and seminaries to reading cultures that are both “answerable to” the Bible’s literal meaning and distinctly theological-christological (47). The goal of a mere Christian hermeneutic is clear: “To read the Bible theologically . . . [as] ultimately a means of spiritual formation and transformation unto Christlikeness: in a word, transfiguration” (353). Vanhoozer’s theological orientation, combined with an immense scholarly apparatus—nearly four hundred pages interacting with well over eight hundred scholarly sources—yields an erudite hermeneutic that truly honors Scripture’s theological intentions.
Preaching informed by Vanhoozer’s “economy of light” will treat exposition as participation in divine address. His framework recalibrates the aims of preaching. Preachers announce what God is doing in and through the text and call hearers to faith, repentance, and living under that Word to produce transfigural Christlikeness. A transfigural hermeneutic rightly facilitates christological readings of especially Old Testament texts, in keeping with the apostolic objectives of the New Covenant ministry of the Word (1 Cor 2:2). Preacher become stewards of God’s speech-acts, crafting messages that form people in Christ-ward love and obedience.
A second strength is his clarifying and corrective account of literality that both resists reductionism and supports christological readings of Scripture. He posits this maxim:
Texts are complex, stratified realities, involving words, sentences, structure, and genre. Accordingly, interpreters require multiple methodological approaches, working on different levels (e.g., lexical, semantic, historical, literary) to do them and their meanings justice. Each method yields certain insights, but no one method catches everything relevant to textual understanding. (4)
He take the literal sense seriously. Nevertheless, “knowledge of grammar . . . is [not] the be-all and end-all of reading” (45). He offers an improved toolkit: a fivefold typology of the literal sense—verbal, authorial, historical, literary, and ‘ruled’” by Scripture’ christological frame of reference (115). The result lets a text’s literal sense remain stable. Moreover, appreciating Christ as the text’s ultimate referent allows for the text’s figural meaning(s) to unfold across the canon, giving readers a firm footing without flattening the Bible’s canonical horizon. In a word, “Transfigural interpretation does not change but, rather, glorifies the literal meaning” (268). This strategy authorizes readers to engage texts literally and figuratively (i.e., christologically) without resorting to the “‘nuclear option’ of hermeneutics (i.e., eisegesis)” (272).
Preaching performed according to a mere Christian hermeneutic will likewise seek to do justice to the literal sense of texts. The result is stabilized exegesis that presents passages in their immediate contexts without jumping prematurely or improperly to their canonical contexts and implications. Treating literality as verbal, authorial, historical, literary, and ruled by the canon’s christological frame safeguards meaning and original authorial intent. Grammar and history keep the sermon honest, and the canonical telos keeps it “Christian.” This twin fidelity curbs wooden literalism, on one hand, and fanciful allegory on the other, granting confidence to exposit texts faithfully and proclaim Christ as the texts’ rightful end.
A third strength is his use of the analogia corporis—an analogy between Christ’s body and Scripture’s letter. This move reframes biblical typology as “figural realism” that “presupposes that the meaningful patterns connecting persons, things, and events in the biblical story are grounded in the divinely intended patterns that make up historical reality” (154). Scripture is not mere human discourse but also divine discourse, ordered in God’s providence to testify to God’s Son (Luke 24:44; John 5:39). The analogia corporis provides a structure for reading Scripture in a proper figural light. Central to his argument is that a “referens plenior” reading is a superior conception to the classic sensus plenior. Namely, the Old Testament “prophets knew what they were saying, but they did not know exactly what, or whom, they were speaking about. They understood the sense of their discourse but not its ultimate referent. . .. Strictly speaking, then, what is ‘fuller’ is not the sense, but the reference, of their discourse” (137). He, thus, supplies pastors and scholars with a theology of figural readings—readings that, by the Spirit’s illuminating work, see the literal sense in the light of its “ultimate” and “final referent,” Christ himself (171).
In preaching, the concepts of analogia corporis and referens plenior vindicate christological readings of all biblical texts, in that—in God’s providential inspiration—Christ is properly the ultimate frame of reference for texts’ literal senses. Vanhoozer’s theological justifications reframe typology as figural realism, not preacherly invention, and invite congregants to see Scripture’s unity in the drama of redemption. Sermons gain a luminous progression: textual exposition, christological proclamation, and applicatory summons. The result is transformation without distortion—a “transfigured” hearing in which Christ’s glory intensifies, not eclipses, the letter.
Weaknesses
All these strengths notwithstanding, Vanhoozer’s work is not without weaknesses. First, his analogia corporis needs additional metaphysical argumentation to demonstrate that Christ’s transfiguration is truly the “linchpin” of Scripture’s own theology of literal and figural readings (349). The transfiguration in the Synoptic narratives does serve as a helpful “framework for understanding” how an Old Testament text can and may be read well both literally and figuratively (195). Turning that framework into a theological rule, however, remains speculative. The analogical connection between Christ’s body and the letter of Scripture is one of five theses of a mere Christian hermeneutic, but is it a universal exegetical entailment? While Vanhoozer argues splendidly for the analogous aspects between Christ’s incarnation (i.e., the hypostatic union) and biblical inspiration (i.e., God speaking through human media), he leaves undeveloped aspects of discontinuity and if or when the analogy eventual breaks down. He writes,
“Jesus is truly human. So are the Scriptures. Yet there is more to Jesus’ body, and to the literal meaning of the biblical text, than their humanity. Beneath the human surface—in the one case, skeleton and skin; in the other, written letters—lies something divine, rendering both Jesus’ face and the literal sense of Scripture conduits of light. (267–68)
Another way to state this concern is that the body-text comparison would benefit from a more robust and precise theological elaboration. He argues that Christ’s “transfiguration [is] a framework for understanding what it means to read the Bible theologically” (231). So, is the analogia corporis a mere analogy for illustrative purposes or a theological basis for his theology of literal and figural readings? He claims “an analogy . . . between the human body of Christ and the letter of the biblical text” so that “the letter of the text serves as a bright medium for the knowledge of Jesus Christ” (250). The analogy is evocative, but his mapping from both Christ’s hypostatic union of natures and his transfiguration to the textual letter is not fully demonstrated. Vanhoozer could have invested more space developing his own theology and less space surveying the history of interpretations of the transfiguration and related matters.
Second, Vanhoozer also leaves methodological guardrails for “good” figural readings underdeveloped. The work does not provide a robust section on validating or falsifying figural readings, leaving responsible limits unclear. The boundaries between proper typology, spurious allegory, and broader “trans-figural” links remain porous. Genre-sensitive thresholds, required textual anchors, identifiable intertextual triggers recognized by biblical authors, and explicit falsification tests would render the model more reproducible for pastors and students rather than the elegant, yet complex and proprietary, framework he provides. Vanhoozer never specifies when or by what definite criteria readers should adjudicate good from bad figural readings. He seems content to judge “the rightness of critical methods by the kind of theological readings, readers, and reading cultures they beget,” which ostensibly runs the risk of embracing unjustified allegorical readings if they beget “good” ends, such as the worship of Christ (5). Stronger criteria should define scope, controls, and decision-rules to prevent unwarranted allegory.
Conclusion
Kevin Vanhoozer’s Mere Christian Hermeneutics succeeds in recovering the Bible’s theological center by insisting that the God who speaks is also the God who shines through both Christ and Scripture. The book’s strengths lie in its capacity to restore confidence that Scripture’s literal sense is not a barrier to christological revelation but its appointed means. Vanhoozer’s “economy of light” reminds readers that reading is a moral and ecclesial act, forming those who submit to the text’s luminous authority. The work’s complexity will challenge general readers, yet for studious pastors, theologians, and advanced students, its rewards are immense. His proposal for a “transfigural literal sense” clarifies why Scripture can be read with intellectual rigor and spiritual illumination, though its analogical scope occasionally presses beyond exegetical controls. Vanhoozer’s vision offers a fresh take on reading canonically without obscuring the literal sense or collapsing into allegory and likewise on to reading historically without losing sight of Christ’s glory in all of Scripture. Personally, his work reawakens assurance that exegesis is itself participation in “God’s light show” (252). Ultimately, Mere Christian Hermeneutics models what it claims: a framework for transfigured readings that behold the face of Christ in the letter, hearing anew the voice that still says, “Listen to him.” ❖
Quote this Review
Footnote: Timothy J. Harris, “Mere Christian Hermeneutics: Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically,” Practical Theologian, October 20, 2025, https://www.practicaltheologian.com/blog/bookreview-h7ysn.
Bibliography: Harris, Timothy J. “Mere Christian Hermeneutics: Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically.” Practical Theologian, October 20, 2025. https://www.practicaltheologian.com/blog/bookreview-h7ysn.
