Book Review Vanhoozer (Part 1)

Kevin Vanhoozer received his bachelor’s from Westmont College, a Masters of Divinity from Westminster Theological Seminary, and a Ph.D. from Cambridge University, England having studied under Nicholas Lash. Currently Vanhoozer is the research professor of Systematic Theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He is also the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology and The Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible. As an author, VanHoozer has written numerous books including First Theology: God, Scripture and Hermeneutics and Is There Meaning in This Text?. The Drama of Doctrine is a creative work that integrates VanHoozer’s work in systematics, hermeneutics, and post modernity. With the use of “creative fidelity”, VanHoozer has created a systematic doctrine for a postmodern generation that is often resistant to both fidelity and the systematic. This is the intrigue of VanHoozer’s work.
While many fall into the abyss of extremes to either fidelity or creativity, Vanhoozer provides for his readers a helpful balance between the two. He powerfully labels this balance as creative fidelity. An example of how creative fidelity manifests within his framework of thought is through his idea of Sola Scriptura. To even mention Sola Scriptura within the book implies VanHoozer’s connection to fidelity. However, he rearranges the typical approach to Sola Scriptura as a propositional truth, to a better-balanced approach to Sola Scriptura with a call to both faithful understanding and creative action. “Sola Scriptura returns, then, not by positing the Bible as a textbook filled with propositional information but by viewing the Bible as a script that calls for faithful yet creative performance.” Essentially Vanhoozer is calling for a better balance between the often forgotten and Biblically emphasized reality of orthopraxy, and the over remembered and Biblically less emphasized reality of orthodoxy.
Vanhoozer also approaches systematic doctrine through the lens of creative fidelity. “While some in the church decry using the Bible to generate Doctrine, preferring to emphasize Scripture’s ability to reframing our way of reframing the world and understanding our lives, it is preferable to see doctrine itself as an indispensable and imaginative instrument for shaping the life of the church.” Vanhoozer’s use of the word indispensable represents his post-conservative tie to fidelity. At the same time, Vanhoozer calls the church to repent of using the Bible to generate doctrine in order that the doctrine might reframe the world. He creatively rearranges the purpose of doctrine as an imaginative instrument for shaping the life of the church. While the change is minute form, it is grandiose in function. His reflection, again, is a smart balance between retaining the tradition of the past while reshaping the past to encourage the church into the future.
The excitement of this book comes in the integration of the old with the new. VanHoozer’s foundation of creative fidelity was the most powerful overarching idea that brought a vividness of color in his text not only in the area of hermeneutics of systematics, but also for the practical nature of ecclesiology and missiology. I’ll conclude with one final quote. “The canonical linguistic approach to theology has as its goal the training of competent and truthful witnesses who can themselves incarnate, in a variety of situations, the wisdom of Christ gleaned from indwelling canonical practices and their ecclesial continuations.”