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AGE
40

POSITION
Research Professor of Systematic Theology, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

NOTABLE BOOKS
Is There Meaning in This Text?: The Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge (Zondervan, 1998)

While American evangelical culture can claim only limited credit for Richard Hays or Miroslav Volf, Kevin Vanhoozer is a born-and-bred American evangelical. He grew up in an evangelical church, and he proceeded through Westmont College and Westminster Seminary. Stepping out of the evangelical world for a few years to complete a doctorate at Cambridge University, he returned with his first teaching job at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois. From there he made an unusual jump, landing a teaching post at the University of Edinburgh.

Vanhoozer is less well known than the other theologians I talked with, but that may change with the recent publication of Is There Meaning in This Text?, a scholarly engagement with postmodern critiques of biblical truth. Timothy George, dean of Beeson Divinity School, calls Vanhoozer "a premier evangelical theologian" and "one of the most promising scholars of this generation."

When I met Vanhoozer he was about to move back to Trinity from Edinburgh, which was one reason I wanted to talk to him. Most theologians only dream of a tenured position at a premier research university. Why would he leave it for Trinity, which most scholars would consider a far less brilliant light?

Vanhoozer's choice seemed even more unusual to me as I walked under showers of cherry blossoms from his family's Victorian-era apartment to the dark spires of New College, overlooking the grand valley of Princes Street and a long stone's throw from the looming massif of Edinburgh Castle. Leave this for Deerfield, Illinois?

His reasons, it turns out, were prosaic. Vanhoozer wryly said that by publishing at the pace he had achieved during eight years at Edinburgh, he would complete the books he had contracted to write by the age of 88. Edinburgh's load of teaching and administration left little time for research and writing, and Trinity had made him an outstanding offer—every third year off. By usual standards for academic careers, it would be a disastrous move. In terms of his vocation, however, he thought it was right. Vanhoozer has made himself an expert in postmodern thought, specializing in hermeneutics. The question "What is truth, and how do we know it?" is very much up for grabs these days. Vanhoozer wants to answer it. To do that he needs time for study and writing.

Vanhoozer is young, dark, bearded, and he speaks in a clipped, schoolteacher accent that didn't come from his hometown in Santa Barbara, California. He says he wasn't terribly reflective before college. "The church I went to—if I asked a question, the normal answer was, 'You shouldn't ask that question.' " But there were other influences. Westmont College New Testament professor Robert Gundry was a family friend who gave Vanhoozer theology books to read when he was 17. Other books Vanhoozer found on his own.

The big questions, he says, came to him on the beach as he was reading "the imaginative worlds" of Dostoevsky, Dickens, and Dumas. "I was able to form an idea of a life of virtue through reading about people who got along in difficult situations without losing their integrity. These are very postmodern themes, actually, that you orient your world or identity or ethics around a narrative. I was doing that before I knew what a narrative was."

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February 8 1999, Vol. 43, No. 2