Vanhoozer writes,
“As an alternative proposal for first theology, remythologizing involves a hermeneutical and methodological strategy tied to a particular view of God (i.e., as triune communicative agency). As such, it addresses the formal problem of theology by proposing guidelines for biblical interpretation (i.e., how to move from mythos to metaphysics in order to speak of God). Second, and more importantly, remythologizing addresses the material principle at the heart of first theology (i.e., what must God be like if he is actually the speaking and acting agent depicted in the Bible?). It is therefore a concrete proposal for understanding God and God’s relation to the world that follows not the five speculative “ways” of Aquinas (i.e., the five proofs for God’s existence) but the biblical account of the “ways” of God (Ps. 103:7), “ways” that lead not only into the far country but ultimately to the cross of Jesus Christ.” (RT, 23)
Vanhoozer claims that his hermeneutical and methodological strategy leads “ultimately to the cross of Jesus Christ.” The most important implications of any hermeneutic bear upon the revelation of God’s salvific will in Christ. A truly biblical hermeneutic will coherently confirm the gospel biblically defined as “good news.” The doctrine of an “effectual call” logically entails the other Calvinist doctrines of an eternal, deterministic decree and unconditional election. These presuppositions of course raise the specter of determinism and the biblical, logical, moral and epistemic problems associated with Reformed Calvinist thought. They bear directly upon our perceptions of God’s saving purposes and our knowledge of God’s salvific will towards us in Christ. Vanhoozer emphasizes that it is how God does what he does that is the key to coherently understanding how he can predetermine whom to save and “effect” his will in them without violating their will or personhood. For Vanhoozer the solution to the problem of determinism and free will lies in the way God goes about implementing his will, not in the fact that he unconditionally predetermines by his own eternal decision which individuals he will saved and which individuals he will not save. Vanhoozer states that the Bible requires us to view God as a “being-in-communicative-act” working in the manner of “triune communicative agency.” By speaking, God reveals himself to mankind. His speaking produces actions that accomplish his will in the world. God’s “speech-acts” cause persons to perform his will in a way that is suitable to the nature of humans as free beings. Vanhoozer calls this new approach to “first theology” – the fundamental theological concerns of hermeneutics and theological method – remythologizing theology.
Granted, our metaphysical statements about God need to spring from an accurate understanding of the biblical “theodrama” in which we observe God at work through “speech-acts.” But a whole host of problems spring from the doctrine of Calvinist predestination that cannot be resolved simply by claiming that God predestines “communicatively.” Vanhoozer’s emphasis on the need to subject ourselves to what God has said in his word, both in his speech and act, to “dethrone the autonomous knowing subject” (RT, xv) is a necessary reminder for all those reading, interpreting. and expounding upon the meaning of Scripture. It is the essential attitude and intellectual posture for proper interpretation. We would not know God as we need to know him unless he revealed himself to us. According to Vanhoozer how God has revealed himself through “speech-acts” is intricately linked to what he has revealed, and therefore what we should glean from that revelation. Therefore Vanhoozer presses home the point that God reveals himself via “communicative action,” quoting Reinhold Niebuhr who understood that “The Bible conceives life as a dramatic whole. There are ontological presuppositions for this drama, but they are not spelled out.” (RT, xiv) Hence, “doctrine is not a matter of what works but of what befits the way things – God, the world, oneself – are.” (RT, xiv) Thus Vanhoozer presents Scripture as a mythos or “dramatic plot” (RT, 5) into which God enters the story or “theodrama” and plays the most important part. The purpose is to glean knowledge about God from God’s own speech and actions as they are found in the drama of biblical history told through its various literary genres. Vanhoozer states that “…it behooves us to attend to the concrete manner in which God “projects” his own story. Hence my thesis: the mythos of the Bible – the christological content and canonical form – is the written means of God’s triune self-presentation. In a word, the mythos is the medium (and the message).” (RT, 11) Theological and metaphysical statements about God ought to be rooted, not in human speculations, but in God’s own revelation of himself while allowing the method by which he has revealed himself – in “communicative action” – to guide interpretation and conclusions about God. Vanhoozer writes, “…Christianity is less about philosophies and systems of moralities than it is about how God’s particular words and acts in the history of Israel converged climatically in the history of Jesus Christ.” (RT, 10) “Consequently, this work derives a doctrine of God’s being from an analysis of God’s speaking.” (RT, 11) “Unless we accord priority to God’s own self-presentation in theodramatic activity, Christian theology is but smoke and mirrors – a human projection of religious affections and special effects.” (RT, 23)
We appreciate Vanhoozer’s call to put first-things-first in our hermeneutical and theological methodology. He reorients our theological thinking away from philosophical speculations to the biblical text. He also challenges us to view the text with a more appropriate literary awareness and sense of dynamic unfolding of events in which God is intimately involved rather than just a text upon which to implement a raw, technical exegesis to glean theological propositions. For this he is to be commended. Biblical theology is of the essence of systematic theology, and systematic theology always needs to be aware of the influence of philosophical speculation. All this is especially applicable to “liberal” theologies that are notorious for replacing the text with social, political or other kinds of agendas.
Yet I contend that although Vanhoozer’s remythologizing method may not follow the five speculative “ways” of Aquinas, it does position itself with its doctrine of an “effectual call” squarely within the five systematic propositions of Calvinism. Nowhere does Vanhoozer demonstrate how he gleans an “effectual call” from the “mythos” or “theodramatic” plot of Scripture, but rather presupposes the truth of the Calvinist doctrine of an “effectual call” and proceeds to attempt to understand it as an example of God’s speaking and hence effectually acting to irresistibly bring about what he wills in the lives of his elect and in the world. He simply presupposes an “effectual call” as the explanation of a person’s positive response to the gospel without letting the gospel as “good news” test the validity of his doctrine of an “effectual call.” The negative corollary of this doctrine is of course that God does not desire nor intend for those who do not receive an “effectual call” to be saved. As such, with respect to the biblical gospel as “good news,” the nature of faith, and the matter of an individual sinner’s eternal destiny, I contend, that Vanhoozer certainly does lead us into a “far country.” That “far country” is one of the darkness of the unknown eternal counsels of God and away from the light of the knowledge of the “ways” of God and the assurance of God’s revelation of his love and kind disposition towards all of us as sinners and persons made in his image that is found in the cross of Christ.
I believe that it can be convincingly shown that this Calvinist doctrine of an “effectual call” is inconsistent with Vanhoozer’s emphasis that God has spoken his ultimate Word in Christ, for this doctrine dichotomizes the one divine Word spoken “in Christ” into two meanings and realities for the elect and non-elect. It removes the effective christological center from theology, making it less than “Christian.” The gospel as “good news” is vacated of its biblical content in that it cannot be preached with the assurance of a univocal truth value and application to all who hear. This is my essential theological concern with Reformed Calvinism. The assurance that God is kindly disposed and desires to save me or you as an individual is placed beyond our knowing. The “effectual call” is biblically untenable and incoherent with a God of “communicative agency” and a God of truth, for such a God is a God of double-speak to the multitude of the non-elect. Perhaps Vanhoozer’s theology is coherent with a God of “selective communicative agency.” But if such an exclusivity of God’s “communication” is what Vanhoozer ultimately maintains, then he ought to say so. And in accord with his point that we ought to glean our understanding of God and God’s relation to the world from God’s own speech-acts, I cannot see how Vanhoozer’s “effectual call” which presupposes an unconditional election and the granting of faith in persons who are completely passive in their salvation is coherent with God’s “speech-acts” as recorded in Scripture. It is not the fixity of eternal destiny and faith that is the testimony of Scripture, but the possibility of eternal life based upon the condition of faith in Jesus. And these two understandings are mutually exclusive. Jesus tells those who learned of Pilate’s cruelty to the Galileans and of the eighteen people upon whom the tower of Siloam fell, that these things did not happen to them because they were worse sinners, “but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” (Lu. 13:1-5) Jesus tells the Jews who did not believe in him that “unless you believe that I am he you will die in your sins.” (Jn. 8:24) Jesus is rejected at Nazareth and Matthew adds that “he did not do many mighty works there, because of their unbelief.” (Matt. 13:58) He identifies powerlessness in the disciples as due to “your little faith.” (Matt. 17:20) The presupposition behind Hebrews 11 is that faith is a response to God that is from the person themselves given God’s revelation of himself to us. For “without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.” (Heb. 11:6) And John 3:18 clearly states the reason one remains under condemnation and has not received eternal life is “because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.” Believing is something that persons themselves must do. Therefore, faith is not predetermined for a limited number of people as part of an unconditional election to salvation. The Bible cannot be read coherently given the theological determinism inherent in the Calvinist doctrines of an eternal decree, unconditional election and an “effectual call.” (See Gen. 1:26, 2:16, 4:6, 14:6; Deut. 28:1, 15; Solomon’s prayer in 1 Kings 8:22-61; 2 Chron. 15:1-4; Is. 1:19, 20, 45:22, 48:18, 55:3, 6, 7; Matt. 8:10; Heb. 12:15, 25, et al.)
Vanhoozer’s “effectual call” reduces to an unconditional election rooted in a definition of sovereignty that demands an eternal divine decree by which God predetermines each person’s eternal destiny. This indicates that his “remythologizing” method, like all theological methodologies, is susceptible to presuppositional eisegesis and therefore needs to be subordinated to sound hermeneutical principles. To the degree that Vanhoozer has contributed to a biblical statement countering the errors of panentheism, kenotic-perichoretic relational ontotheology and open theism he is to be applauded. But I submit that a biblical hermeneutic must include logical, moral and linguistic coherence. One must not only claim that their theology is gleaned from “God’s speaking and acting as depicted in the Bible,” but examine whether that thinking about God and his ways exhibits logical, moral, epistemic, and biblical coherence. The Calvinist attempts to make compatible a deterministic sovereignty with human freedom and moral responsibility and an “effectual call” with a God that desires “communion” with his human creatures, fails precisely because they are logically and morally incoherent. To the degree Vanhoozer has left God’s sovereignty and human freedom in a dichotomous relationship unsupported by Scripture, and has asked us to embrace his compatibilism without solving the logical and moral difficulties generated by his definition of God’s sovereignty, is the degree to which we cannot give assent to it. He certainly has not advanced the credibility of Reformed Calvinist theology. Reformed Calvinists will not be convinced by the verses quoted above or any other biblical evidence provided against their theological determinism to alter their theology. They too have their verses to support their end of the theological spectrum. So where does that leave us? I contend that this quandary indicates that correct interpretation is not simply a matter of piling up biblical texts as evidence for a particular theological position, nor is it piling up texts that are diametrically opposed with each other and claiming both are true, but the interpretation that is valid will demonstrate an ability to present the full scope of the biblical evidence with logical, linguistic, moral, epistemic, and biblical coherence. Therefore, Calvinist and non-Calvinist interpretation differs in this essential respect. The non-Calvinist feels compelled to situate the particulars of the biblical evidence into the whole scope of the biblical presentation of God’s revelation of himself and his plans and purposes for sinful mankind so that the Word remains a coherent Word of God. This is not necessarily so for the Calvinist. Therefore, the Calvinist can present dichotomous, inconsistent, and contradictory interpretations while claiming these are what the Bible teaches. It is a matter of the biblical content being evaluated coherently so as to preserve its integrity as a unified Word of the “good news” of salvation to the glory of God. At the heart of the Calvinist / non-Calvinist divide is the role of logical, moral, epistemological and biblical coherence as essential to a sound, biblical, hermeneutic and therefore reliable indicators of valid interpretations.
The Truth of the Gospel 