Hearers and Doers: A Pastor’s Guide to Making Disciples Through Scripture and Doctrine By Kevin J. Vanhoozer (Lexham, 2019).

Vanhoozer is always a provocative and stimulating read, and Hearers and Doers is no exception. Here are the three emphases of the work: pastors countering the effects of contemporary culture with biblical truth; theological (i.e., doctrinal) reading of Scripture; and comparing physical fitness (a cultural value) and spiritual fitness (an ecclesial value) (xiv–xv).

I loved the title: hearing God’s word and doing it is what drives preaching. So I dove into the book hoping there would be a substantial portion devoted to preaching, after all it was A Pastor’s Guide. But, alas, the systematic theologian that he is, Vanhoozer focuses almost exclusively upon his discipline: he is into “teaching disciples to read the Scriptures … theologically” (xi), because “doctrine is a primary form of the teaching of theology” (241). Preaching systematic theology, Sunday after Sunday, disciples doth not make. Theology, of both the systematic and biblical species, is simply not specific enough for a given pericope, and does not do justice to what that particular text is doing. Methinks there needs to be another species of theology, an understanding of what an author is doing in a particular pericope, and deriving application passage by passage, sermon by sermon, as individual texts are privileged.

Vanhoozer reminds us of the dangers of worldly metaphors and stories that drive humans, the “social imaginary,” “that nest of background assumptions, often implicit, … that shapes a person’s perception of the world, undergirds one’s worldview, and funds one’s plausibility structure” (8–9). These stories must be examined “in light of the biblical images and stories by which they ought to live”; what is needed is “an imagination nurtured … by the Bible” (10, 104; emphasis added). Good stuff, especially this: “If I had to sum up in one sentence what Paul is trying to do in most of his letters, I would say that he is setting forth a new imaginary grounded in the new reality inaugurated in Jesus Christ, then asking church members to live in accordance with this reality” (13). But that did raise a question: What specifically is being imagined in each pericope of Paul’s letters (or in each pericope of any book of Scripture)? It appears that what is sought by our author is some tidbit of systematic theology. I would argue instead that each pericope portrays a segment of God’s ideal world in front of the text, directing readers to specific ways they may live out that pericopal theology, thus instantiating and actualizing the Kingdom of God on earth by becoming its true citizens living by its demands, growing in Christlikeness.

When I read that “chief” among the biblical images and stories (that ought to supplant the world’s images and stories) was “the story of Jesus Christ, the climax of the story begun in the Old Testament” (10), I began to suspect a strong Christocentric thrust to what Vanhoozer was after. I was right; he calls for a “Christocentric social imaginary” (99). He is therefore appreciative of Luther who “views Christ as the literal sense of the Old Testament. How? By viewing the promised Messiah as the intended referent of the divine author expressed in the words of the human authors of the Law, Prophets, and Writings. Pastors today should go and do likewise” (226). I would, pace Vanhoozer, beseech readers of this Journal to refrain from doing likewise, for such a Christocentric hermeneutic is unsustainable for most of Scripture. How would one bring Christ into, say, the story of Rachel and Leah battling for reproductive supremacy (Genesis 29–30)? Or where would Christ be in the verse that warns against consuming too much honey lest one vomit (Prov 25:16)? Redemptive-historical interpretation renders the specificity of any particular pericope void, subsumed into nonexistence within the canonical Christocentric story. We preachers, instead, need to be asking: How specifically, is my life (and that of my listeners) intended to change as a result of a pericopal imaginary, rather than a generic biblical (pertaining to biblical theology) or canonical (pertaining to systematic theology) imaginary? Otherwise, I doubt we have understood Scripture for application.

Vanhoozer concludes: “At the end of the day, what is most important in learning Christ is not having bits of information but rather the big picture” (216). Unfortunately, this “big picture” is a view from the International Space Station, miles above terra firma. The need of the hour is theology that is specific for the pericope, a view from up close, if we preachers are to be effective in the business of making doers out of hearers.

Journal of the Evangelical Homiletics Society 20.2 (2020): 142–44