Kevin J. Vanhoozer > Quotes

“If I speak in the tongues of Reformers and of professional theologians, and I have not personal faith in Christ, my theology is nothing but the noisy beating of a snare drum. And if I have analytic powers and the gift of creating coherent conceptual systems of theology, so as to remove liberal objections, and have not personal hope in God, I am nothing. And if I give myself to resolving the debate between supra and infralapsarianism, and to defending inerrancy, and to learning the Westminster Catechism, yea, even the larger one, so as to recite it by heart backwards and forwards, and have not love, I have gained nothing.”
― Kevin Vanhoozer

“To get a doctorate, you need only have a modicum of intelligence and the ability to grind it out. I’m afraid you may only be qualified to be an academic, not a pastor. Ministry is a lot harder than scholarship.”
― Kevin J. Vanhoozer, The Pastor as Public Theologian: Reclaiming a Lost Vision

“Sola scriptura means at least this: that the church's proclamation is always subject to potential correction from the canon. It is for this reason that we resist simply collapsing the text into the tradition of its interpretation and performance.”
― Kevin J. Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical Linguistic Approach to Christian Doctrine

“To make disciples is to teach people how to keep the faith. One keeps faith by following Jesus’ words rather than merely knowing faith’s content.”
― Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Faith Speaking Understanding: Performing the Drama of Doctrine

“All television is educational television. The question is merely, ‘What is it teaching?”
― Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Everyday Theology (Cultural Exegesis): How to Read Cultural Texts and Interpret Trends

“theology is the serious and joyful attempt to live blessedly with others, before God, in Christ, through the Spirit”
― Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Faith Speaking Understanding: Performing the Drama of Doctrine

“Of ultimate importance, then, is not that I become good, or that the condition of the world be improved by my efforts, but that the reality of God show itself everywhere to be the ultimate reality.”
― Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Faith Speaking Understanding: Performing the Drama of Doctrine

“The knowledge of God is a mountain steep indeed and difficult to climb—the majority of people scarcely reach its base. —Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses”
― Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Mere Christian Hermeneutics: Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically

“Desire for God without doctrine is blind; doctrine without desire is empty. The”
― Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Faith Speaking Understanding: Performing the Drama of Doctrine

“It is well known that Pentecost reverses Babel. The people who built the tower of Babel sought to make a name, and a unity, for themselves. At Pentecost, God builds his temple, uniting people in Christ. Unity – interpretive agreement and mutual understanding – is, it would appear, something that only God can accomplish. And accomplish it he does, but not in the way we might have expected. Although onlookers thought that the believers who received the Spirit at Pentecost were babbling (Acts 2:13), in fact they were speaking intelligibly in several languages (Acts 2:8-11). Note well: they were all saying the same thing (testifying about Jesus) in different languages. It takes a thousand tongues to say and sing our great Redeemer’s praise.

Protestant evangelicalism evidences a Pentecostal plurality: the various Protestant streams testify to Jesus in their own vocabularies, and it takes many languages (i.e. interpretive traditions) to minister the meaning of God’s Word and the fullness of Christ. As the body is made up of many members, so many interpretations may be needed to do justice to the body of the biblical text. Why else are there four Gospels, but that the one story of Jesus was too rich to be told from one perspective only? Could it be that the various Protestant traditions function similarly as witnesses who testify to the same Jesus from different situations and perspectives?”
― Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Biblical Authority after Babel: Retrieving the Solas in the Spirit of Mere Protestant Christianity

“According to Levin, the fundamental problem is that both rival parties view social institutions “not as molds that ought to shape their behavior and character but as platforms that allow them greater individual exposure and enable them to hone their personal brands.”
― Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Mere Christian Hermeneutics: Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically

“Christian identity, the role disciples have been called to play, requires being with others. It takes two or three gathered in Christ’s name fully to represent him. It takes a company.”
― Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Faith Speaking Understanding: Performing the Drama of Doctrine

“the twenty-first-century evangelical church is on the verge of selling its Protestant birthright, sola scriptura, for a mess of pottage, sola cultura.”
― Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Faith Speaking Understanding: Performing the Drama of Doctrine

“In sum: the church exists to be a living exhibit of the reality of the gospel.”
― Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Faith Speaking Understanding: Performing the Drama of Doctrine

“The church has become the theater of the gospel, and in this theater, there are no passive spectators, only engaged participants, acting out what is in Christ.”
― Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Faith Speaking Understanding: Performing the Drama of Doctrine

“Right worship, the kind that is pleasing to God, acknowledges the grace that is in Jesus Christ not only with our lips but also with our lives. Christ’s own sacrifice makes possible the right kind of offering and proper worship: the sacrifice of the whole of our lives, a thanksgiving existence that proceeds from a mood of gratitude. Worship”
― Kevin J. Vanhoozer, The Pastor as Public Theologian: Reclaiming a Lost Vision

“A theologian is one who prays—and stays awake.”
― Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Faith Speaking Understanding: Performing the Drama of Doctrine

“The church is biblical, therefore, when it seeks to embody the words in the power of the Spirit and so become a living commentary.”
― Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Faith Speaking Understanding: Performing the Drama of Doctrine

“Serious and sustained Bible reading, at once reflective and practical, is the soul of theology and the beating heart of the body of Christ, the”
― Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Mere Christian Hermeneutics: Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically

“To “confess” [homologeō] the coming of Christ is to do more than say words or repeat certain lines. Nor is it simply a matter of asserting the content of one’s belief. To confess is rather to acknowledge, which is a self-involving speech act.16 In self-involving speech acts, speakers do not simply refer to a state of affairs, but they take up a particular posture toward it. The speakers are prepared to stand by their words (i.e., to take a stand), to borrow a phrase from Wendell Berry.”
― Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Faith Speaking Understanding: Performing the Drama of Doctrine

“Jesus is a person, not a proposition; however, language is the means the Spirit uses to enable the gospel to become the all-encompassing framework that allows disciples not only to think but also to situate themselves in relation to the truth, goodness, and beauty of what is in Christ.”
― Kevin J. Vanhoozer, The Pastor as Public Theologian: Reclaiming a Lost Vision

“As Søren Kierkegaard says in the opening pages of The Sickness unto Death (the sickness in question is despair): “Everything essentially Christian must have in its presentation a resemblance to the way a physician speaks at the sickbed.”
― Kevin J. Vanhoozer, The Pastor as Public Theologian: Reclaiming a Lost Vision

“Doctrine forms disciples when it helps the church to act out its new life in Christ.”
― Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Faith Speaking Understanding: Performing the Drama of Doctrine

“There is too much concern with what works and sells than with gospel truth. It is tempting, and better for one’s self-esteem, to be “like other nations” (1 Sam. 8:20) than to be a resident alien, a marginalized weakling, or a fool.”
― Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Faith Speaking Understanding: Performing the Drama of Doctrine

“There are few more perplexing and yet important problems in the history of biblical interpretation than the issue of defining what is meant by the sensus literalis of a text.”38”
― Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Mere Christian Hermeneutics: Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically

“The theory-practice dichotomy that still bedevils many a theological curriculum serves neither seminary nor church. There is a debilitating dichotomy between what Christians believe (doctrine) and how they live their lives (discipleship).”
― Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Faith Speaking Understanding: Performing the Drama of Doctrine

“Stanley Woodworth, my high school French teacher, once described the peculiar passion for his own vocation in the following terms: “The joy of teaching lies not in one’s own enthusiasm for the students, or even for the subject matter, but rather for the privilege of introducing the one to the other.” If this is true of French, chemistry, or history, how much more is it true of the pastor’s passion, which is not simply love of God or love of people, but rather the love of introducing the one (people) to the other (God)? The pastor’s special charge is to care for the people of God by speaking and showing and by being and doing God’s truth and love. Success in ministry is determined not by numbers (e.g., people, programs, dollars) but by the increase of people’s knowledge and love of God. This is the only way “to present everyone mature in Christ” (Col. 1:28).”
― Kevin J. Vanhoozer, The Pastor as Public Theologian: Reclaiming a Lost Vision

“To read the Bible theologically requires resources beyond those of general hermeneutics, beyond even the secular interpretive virtues. In the final analysis, reading the Bible rightly requires the theological interpretive virtues—faith, hope, and love—and a theological frame of reference.”
― Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Mere Christian Hermeneutics: Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically

“We best read the Bible theologically, before God, by adopting the posture of prayer: on our knees.”
― Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Mere Christian Hermeneutics: Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically

“At the center of humanities is the love of words. The philologist asks, “What do I love when I love these words?” Augustine asked, “What do I love when I love my God?” Christians who want to read the Bible theologically ask, “What do I love when I love the biblical words as the word of God?”
― Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Mere Christian Hermeneutics: Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically