Kevin J. Vanhoozer on the Semantics of Biblical Literature

Kevin J. Vanhoozer, ‘The Semantics of Biblical Literature: Truth and Scripture’s Diverse Literary Forms’, in D.A. Carson and John D. Woodbridge (eds.), Hermeneutics, Authority and Canon (Leicester: IVP, 1986), 53-104.

This essay may well be the first major thing Vanhoozer published, and has been extremely influential on my own thinking since I first read it over twenty years ago. (Yikes!)

It’s a long and fairly sprawling essay containing a number of strands (which still remains a mark of his work, in my opinion)… but essentially Vanhoozer contends that ‘Evangelicals have not come to grips with certain problems pertaining to the diverse literary forms of Scripture’ (375, n. 15).

He picks up on James Barr’s accusation that evangelicals do violence to biblical interpretation in how they view the genre or function of propositions. So, he asks: ‘how does the diversity of Scripture’s literary forms affect the way we take biblical propositions and understand scriptural truth?’ (56).

He notes how Barr and David Kelsey (among others) have criticised evangelicals for making a literary category mistake in insisting that the main function of biblical sentences is to convey propositions (Barr), and for being chiefly concerned with ‘doctrines’ (philosophical propositions) abstracted from the text (Kelsey) (64-65).

Indeed, Vanhoozer agrees that while evangelicals have acknowledged the importance of Scripture’s diverse literary forms, in general it appears to be mere lip service, and the informative-propositional function of language carries the day (67-75).

He is thus concerned ‘to provide a model of biblical revelation that will preserve the substance of “propositional” revelation (i.e., the emphasis on verbal, cognitive communication) while at the same time allowing for greater appreciation of the “ordinary” language of Scripture and its diverse literary forms’ (67).

Against accusations from Barr and Kelsey, he maintains that ‘diverse literary forms and truth are by no means incompatible’ (68).

And in response to the accusation that evangelicals seldom study the humanities, and do not know how to read the Bible, Vanhoozer offers the example and work of C.S. Lewis (75-78). To summarise, for Lewis, ‘good reading calls for the response of the rationalist (who approaches the Bible as truth to be believed), as well as the “romantic” (who approaches the Bible as a reality to be received). Lewis the Christian reader has an appreciation for both the propositional, or rational, truth-bearing function and the nonpropositional, or imaginative, reality-bearing function of good literature’ (78).

Since Scripture contains a diversity of literary forms, when it comes to the debated notion of scriptural ‘inerrancy’, for example, the literary form of the text should be allowed to determine how far the text can be said to be ‘inerrant’ or not. ‘Inerrancy must be construed broadly enough to encompass the truth expressed in Scripture’s poetry, romances, proverbs, parables – as well as histories’ (79). Here he appeals to E.D. Hirsch on genre, and Paul Ricoeur on revelation (78-82). Furthermore, individual literary forms may be seen as language games (à la the later Wittgenstein) (82-85).

This leads him into a discussion of speech act theory, borrowing especially from the work of J.L. Austin and John Searle (85-92). He applies this not merely to sentences, but to literature, seeking ‘to propose (moving beyond Searle) that there is a correlation between a text’s genre, or literary form, and a text’s illocutionary point and force’ (91).

Just one of the upshots of this is that different types of texts determine the nature of truth being proposed. ‘The nature of the correspondence to reality (and thus the nature of truth) of an utterance is determined by its illocutionary aspect and literary form’ (101).

He concludes with various implications for exegesis and theology: (1) God reveals himself in the Bible through inscribed discourse acts; (2) exegetes should not make a priori decisions about biblical genres; (3) Scripture does many things with words and hence its authority is multi-faceted; (4) infallibility means that Scripture’s diverse illocutionary forces will invariably achieve their respective purposes; (5) theology is ‘ordinary literature’ analysis of an extraordinary book (93-104).