Vanhoozer writes,
“Our hypotheses are put to the test precisely by being brought to the text. Those hypotheses that can account for more aspects or features of the communicative act have more explanatory power. Interpretation thus works through abduction, that is, by inference to the best explanation. An “explanation” is in fact a “thick description” of what an author has done. It “explains” insofar as it accounts for the relevance and coherence of the text as a completed communicative act.” (FT, 184)
I heartily concur with Vanhoozer that we ought to take our interpretive bearings from Scripture. It is just that when we do so, many of us contend that we end up with is a picture of God and man that does not cohere with the interpretations of the Reformed Calvinist tradition. Non-Calvinists and Calvinists both contend they have the accurate “explanation” of a text and Scripture as a whole. But in many essentials, they are diametrically opposed “explanations.” This is especially true regarding the gospel and soteriology.
Therefore, a serious matter continues to plague the evangelical church and needs to come to resolution if it is to maintain a credible witness that advances the true gospel throughout the world. It is the question of what precisely is the biblical gospel? Lack of attention to the essential hermeneutical concern mentioned above has led to serious implications for the gospel message and ministry. With respect to the gospel as “good news” “evangelicals” certainly experience an ultimate hermeneutical divide resulting in two very different “gospels” being promulgated among Christians today. The soteriology of Reformed Calvinism is incompatible with the soteriology of those holding to non-Calvinist soteriological perspective. Ultimately they offer conflicting, contradictory messages, and unless we are willing to embrace a biblical and spiritual relativism, both cannot be the true testimony of Scripture. Discerning which one is closer to biblical truth is an arduous, complicated, and multifaceted task, only made more complicated by the Calvinist’s incoherent, circuitous rationalizations. I submit that the Calvinist has embraced a logical and moral relativism by cavalierly dismissing what are obvious contradictions and incoherencies within their theology and soteriology, declaring them to be a “mystery” or only “apparent contradictions.”
Vanhoozer attempts to lend a hand to the Calvinist position in this regard. He is certainly seeking a way through the logical, moral, epistemic, and biblical difficulties generated by the Calvinist view of divine sovereignty as a universal divine causal determinism. He attempts to provide an explanation as to how this understanding of what it means for God to be sovereign can be compatible with human freedom. Note the word “compatible.” This is an acknowledgement of this problem of dichotomous interpretations and implies that rational coherence is an essential element in a credible solution. It’s a tacit admission that one should seek and obtain rational coherence in one’s interpretations and theology. The “compatibilist” approach concedes, at least in theory, that one’s interpretation must be rationally coherent. That is the essential goal of compatibilism. It attempts to make sense out of two propositions that are rationally incoherent. For one to feel the need for “compatibility” is an acknowledgement of the necessity for rational credibility in one’s interpretive conclusions. The word “compatible” presupposes that there are certain logical and moral givens, laws of rational thought, lines to be drawn in one’s reasoning and interpretive processes that cannot be crossed without simply rendering one’s position irrational or invalid. So the Calvinist theologian acknowledges this essential hermeneutic of rational coherence, at least in theory.
It is my observation that for far too long many Calvinists have been allowed to cross the line of rational coherence into incoherence with little intellectual accountability. Vanhoozer himself dismisses a vast amount of the biblical witness in one fell swoop when he attempts to “explain” the epistemic gospel or salvific difficulty raised by his doctrine of an “effectual call.” He writes,
“As to why some people do not respond to God, is a deep mystery; as to why some do, it is a deep grace.” (RT, 384, footnote 154)
Here is a prime example of the flight to “mystery” that Calvinist determinism necessitates. Vanhoozer’s deterministic theology reaches a point of incoherence with respect to the nature of God and the content of the gospel as “good news.” To avoid the incoherence, Vanhoozer resorts to “deep mystery” and “deep grace.” We have here the entire Calvinist deterministic apologetic in a nutshell. “As to why some people do not respond to God is a deep mystery” only for the Reformed Calvinist because he cannot explain how a God of love and mercy would predestine many to eternal damnation. We simply have no moral framework from which to think about such a proposition and it therefore presents itself as incoherent and contradictory with what we do know of the nature of God and moral norms from general and special revelation in Scripture. Rather than letting what we do know of God’s nature and moral norms inform their theology of sovereignty, the Calvinist theologian attempts to explain what amounts to a contradiction in his theological propositions. We are not simply dealing with something about the divine that cannot be comprehended in and of itself, we are dealing with at least two interpretations that are very well comprehended yet in real contradiction with each other. Both interpretations the Calvinist theologian claims are accurate interpretations of the biblical texts even though they are contradictory.
What is noteworthy is that the complex problematic theological implications generated by such interpretations and the fact that they present themselves as contradictory, is not a consideration for the Reformed Calvinist with respect to his hermeneutic. In contrast, I submit that incoherence and contradiction must be a consideration within one’s hermeneutic. Also, implied in this statement is an admission that Vanhoozer’s application of “speech-act” theory to biblical interpretation has not lent any clarity to the main issue of sovereignty and human freedom. It still remains essentially a “deep mystery” and a “deep grace.” Some are bound for heaven and others are bound for hell without any condition involving themselves but only by God’s sole, unchangeable determination. Furthermore, the statement does not fully disclose the Reformed position. “As to why some people do not respond to God” is not a “deep mystery,” for the Calvinist answer is that God has not predestined them to salvation and therefore they do not receive an “effectual call.” Actually, the “deep mystery” lies in how to give moral credibility and assent to something stated about the character of God that is completely contradictory to the biblical data and our framework of moral thought and intuition. Furthermore, the doctrines of predestination or unconditional election, and an effectual call are the “deep grace” Vanhoozer mentions. It is a particularly Calvinist deterministic definition of “grace” that Vanhoozer attempts to soften with oxymorons such as “dialogical determinism.” (RT, 384) It is a definition of grace completely foreign to Scripture (see Rom. chs. 4 and 5).
Regarding the first quote in this section, I submit that Calvinism is a hypothesis that is very poor at “explaining” “the relevance and coherence of the text as a completed communicative act.” It misses the relevance of many texts and certainly their coherence because it does not read them in context. I have provided many examples in this section on Vanhoozer’s writings and throughout this website to prove that Calvinism does not “account for more aspects or features of the communicative act” and therefore lacks “explanatory power.” It is very poor at reasoning “by inference to the best explanation.” Indeed, Calvinism requires the suppression of reason as I have demonstrated in chapter 10. Also, it certainly does not provide “for the relevance and coherence of the text as a completed communicative act.” I have also demonstrated that it adopts a hermeneutic of incoherence. Vanhoozer asks the question, “To what do we commit ourselves when we enter interreligious dialogue?” He answers, “Minimally, to the formal criteria implicit in rational conversation: the willingness to validate what one proposes and the absence of constraints on what the other can say in response. Jurgen Moltmann states that in serious dialogue ‘there can be no valid evasion of difficult questions by recourse to a higher authority not open to critical inspection by others.’” (FT, 49) I contend that due to Vanhoozer’s commitment to Calvinism he cannot practice with integrity what he states here. Like all Calvinists, he evades the insurmountable difficulty inherent in his salvific determinism with his flight to “deep mystery,” and seeks recourse in “a higher authority” (e.g., God’s inscrutable ways), which an intensive critical inspection reveals that he is not willing to validate what he proposes on the basis of “the coherence of the text as a completed act.” His Calvinist interpretations “canonize” incoherence.
Furthermore, I am somewhat baffled by Vanhoozer’s constant reminder that we ought to glean our theological insights from the speech acts recorded in Scripture and yet distances himself from philosophical reflection, especially as it can be applied to the problem of evil. He writes, “A theodicy provides a monological, theoretical view that does not solve but inadvertently contributes further to the problem of evil by remaining on the theoretical level. We need a variety of speech acts to deal with evil, not just the “cool and detached explanations of the philosopher.” (RT, 350) Granted, the Bible provides a “variety of voices” and “literary forms that, taken together, serve as corrective lenses that enable us to see evil from a number of different angles.” (RT, 350) But a good dose of sound philosophical thinking is precisely what the Calvinist needs to acknowledge the incoherence in their theology! The “cool and detached explanations of the philosopher” can prove indispensable for challenging interpretations that show themselves to be incoherent, inconsistent, or contradictory as is the case in Calvinism. Hence, one wonders if the literary theory Vanhoozer is propounding here can expose and correct the incoherencies, inconsistencies, and contradictions in Calvinism. If it cannot, and I don’t see it doing so, then of what value is this approach? It leaves fundamental misinterpretations in place.
Vanhoozer has so thoroughly sifted Scripture through the Bakhtin literary theory grid that at times it was unrecognizable as Christian biblical theology. One could subtitle Remythologizing Theology as “The Bible Through Bakhtin.” For example, when Vanhoozer is examining the question of ‘powers and principalities’ and “other “authorial” powers or agents that oppose the divine Author” (RT, 352)[1] he suggests “One way forward is to integrate Bakhtin’s insights into the need for multiple genres with Arthur Peacocke’s insight into the multi-leveled nature of reality.” (RT, 352) One wonders if the “theodrama” of Scripture is really enough for what we need to know and hear from God. Vanhoozer finally indicates some reservations about Peacocke’s views “in light of Scripture” and goes on to assert that “according to the Scriptures…” (RT, 352). Well, the way most Christians have always read the Scriptures is just what Vanhoozer ultimately suggests – “according to the Scriptures…” Has Vanhoozer presupposed certain Calvinist doctrines that require further creative “solutions” that move us away from the text and not to where a more basic, common sense solution is to be found, that is, to do theology in such a way so as not to dichotomize the text but clarify and harmonize the biblical message. Instead of adding another layer of rationalization upon an incoherence, Vanhoozer ought to confront the incoherence in Calvinism, letting it guide him to the necessary adjustment of his understanding of the text. I agree that the various academic disciplines may lend useful insights into the study and meaning of Scripture. That is what the historical-grammatical methodology advocates. I am not discouraging Vanhoozer’s interdisciplinary integration, but we ought not simply dismiss the more fundamental concern that our interpretations should be logically, morally, epistemologically and biblically coherent. If we ignore this aspect of a sound, biblical hermeneutic we will have already taken a giant step away from the biblical text as the paradigm through which to think about the issues at hand. The biblical text is not a confused and contradictory conflation of divine “speech-acts” but a unified revelation of the message of “good news” and of a God who can be sufficiently known so that we might have light, life, and hope. “As to why some people do not respond to God, is a deep mystery; as to why some do, it is a deep grace” is a conclusion that simply presupposes the truth of their Calvinistic deterministic doctrines but leaves a large portion of the biblical testimony unaccounted for. How is such a presupposition a legitimate testing of “our hypotheses” “by being brought to the text” when the text has so much more to say that is not allowed to inform or be coherently incorporated into our “hypotheses?” Leaving texts in dichotomous abeyance is certainly not to “account for more aspects or features of the communicative act” thus providing “more explanatory power.” It is to reduce explanatory power. Does Calvinist thought really strive for “abduction” of the whole scope of the biblical witness so that it can work “by inference to the best explanation?” I submit that it does not. Does Calvinist thought really explain “insofar as it accounts for the relevance and coherence of the text as a completed communicative act?” (FT, 184) I have shown that it does not.
Back to “The Vanhoozer Essays”
[1] This is another point that confirms my observation of incoherence in Reformed Calvinist theology. “Powers or agents that oppose the divine Author” speaks against the Calvinist view of God’s sovereignty in which he ordains “whatsoever comes to pass,” unless that is, Vanhoozer is prepared to have God creating entities designed for the very purpose of providing for him a formidable but ultimately futile conflict. Vanhoozer has God ordaining evil and working against himself.
The Truth of the Gospel 