Welcome to Dwell on These Things, a podcast by Dwell Community Church in Columbus, Ohio, where we hear stories and examples of how God is moving in the church at Dwell and around the world. Welcome to Dwell on These Things. I'm Pat Reeder, Director of Equipping here at Dwell Community Church. With me today is Kevin Van Hooser, Blanchard Professor of Theology at Wheaton College's Litvin Divinity School. Previously, he served for more than 25 years as Research Professor of Systematic Theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He's the author of 12 books, including Hearers and Doers, and most recently, Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically. Welcome, Kevin. It's good to be here, Pat, thanks. Yeah, thanks so much. I wanted to start off just kind of asking kind of broad questions about your career and kind of how you got here. You know, much of your writing, at least some that I've been exposed to, has centered on the theology of Scripture, and I guess I wanted to ask what attracted you to this topic early on your career, and yeah, tell us about that. Well, I've always liked Bible stories ever since my mom read them to me as a boy. I found them enrapting, but when I got to seminary, I realized that Bible-believing Christians were often Bible-disagreeing Christians, yeah, and so it raises the question, why do so many people disagree, and what can I do about it? Do I have to pick sides or what? And I also found this among theologians. Every theologian, conservative or liberal, wanted somehow to claim the Bible as being an authority or at least a help in what they were trying to say, and so I left seminary with a big question, and the question was, what does it actually mean to be biblical? What's the force of that adjective? Yeah, that's great. And what kind of kept you on that path? I mean, I would imagine some of those, you know, answering that question, like, answering the question of what does it mean to be biblical is a big question, and I could see a career of research coming out of that, but, you know, yeah, were there...what did you unearth after kind of starting there, like, what kept you going down that path? Well, it's foundational. The Church is, you know, Luther called the Church the creature of the Word, and I wanted to be a biblical Christian. It seemed to me that biblical Christianity was at stake, because where are the other reliable narrators of the story of Jesus? I mean, I guess I'm alluding to the problem of authority. That's right. Who says so about God and what makes what they say special? The only way you can answer that is to say, well, I'm drawing from the Bible, and so that's why I thought it was so important. Authority and interpretation were linked, and I guess that was the problem I saw. Yeah, yeah, that's great. So I'm also just sort of curious, maybe on a more personal note, you mentioned your mother reading to you as a child. Was the distinguished Professor Van Hooser of the 2020s on the horizon, or part of the vision of, you know, the young, maybe college student Kevin, you know, maybe whether it was in your undergraduate years or even in high school, like, kind of what was this, your vision for yourself? Certainly not high school. In college I had the normal interests. I was a musician, piano, athlete, tennis, girls. So being a professor was not on my radar, but I did got the bug for integrating my faith with everything else, as I went to a Christian liberal arts college, Westmont, and that vision of how faith touches everything and transforms it, that has never left me. So I'm very grateful for those undergraduate years. But after my college, I actually did a short-term mission stint in France, which is where I met my wife, and that raised another set of questions about what it meant to be biblical, because I was largely with American missionaries, but some of what they were doing struck me as more American than Christian, and so again I had to go back to the Scriptures. That's great. That's insightful. My in-laws are missionaries in Cambodia, and so I've been interested in missions questions for a long time, but of course these have become increasingly interesting to me as I interact with them. And that core question, you know, what's central to what you were just saying, I think, has come up a lot in our dinner conversations about what is it to be gospel-faithful while also being able to effectively interact with a culture of any kind, of course, but also especially one that's quite different than your own. I think culture and Christianity was probably the topic my wife and I talked about the most before we were married, and we continue to talk about it. She still wonders why I eat so quickly from her perspective. For France, they would go home from school and stay for two hours for lunch, and then go back in the afternoon for further studies. Yeah, I actually have wondered at times, I admit to being a fast eater, I have always been a little bit jealous of that. I had the pleasure of spending a handful of weeks in France when I was in high school. It was kind of an exchange program, not the full year type one, but we were up in Paris for a little bit and then stayed with families and went to school and stuff. And yeah, the recess, quote-unquote, the midday, leaving, having an afternoon meal. There's something I have to respect as a Christian, really, not as much as an American, about the French devotion to friendship and to kind of making sure we're having a nice...we're here to talk, we're here to spend time together, and it seems like more and more, even in the typical American workplace, there isn't the old cafeteria anymore where people gather. I bring my lunch to my desk and I carry on, and so I think there's something...I guess I really appreciate that about the French culture and sort of appreciate...yeah. If Sylvie were here, she would probably say amen, but she'd also be quick to add that though the French are known for the quality of their food, and there's something in that, what she values about the meals is being around the table precisely for conversation. And so the rush is not really about eating, it's that, you know, why can't we sit and have a proper discussion during dinner? Yeah, that's great. So you know, going back to this discussion, where you were so many years ago, so I think it was 98 or so, so almost 30 years ago, you published a title, Is There a Meaning in This Text? And I'm guessing, is this a reference to the Stanley Fish book? Okay. Thank you, I love it when readers catch my references. Yeah, I've caught a few more, I think. I don't remember, I might have been reading Hearers and Doers, and I was like, is this a reference to Alasdair McIntyre? It's which...which justice, whose rationality. Yeah, I think there was a like a subheading or a chapter title, where I was like, I'm wondering if he's dropping hints. My only defense is that a lot of biblical authors allude to what has been said before. So in this project, there's, you know, you might say there was kind of a negative side and a positive side, the negative side being there's kind of a response to, I think, what you call the masters of suspicion. But then at the same time, like, well, if this idea is wrong, then what's right? And so I took this to be that, and you know, correct me if at any point I misspeak or misrepresent your book, but you know, alongside engaging especially folks like Derrida, but also maybe more distantly Nietzsche, and some of these other pessimistic thinkers, you laid out a vision for a kind of Trinitarian hermeneutics, you know, you sort of engage with the Searle and Austen, a speech-act theory, kind of trying to, for lack of a better word, resurrect authorial intent, and sort of the way that, if I remember, the Holy Spirit plays a role on the reader side. Yeah, I don't know if you have it, does that sound right? You know, I mean, this is a, you know... Yeah, let me just say that you're right, I wrote it in 1998, and it was, actually I wrote it during the 1990s, it was published in 1998, but that's significant because I was teaching at the University of Edinburgh, and I was there to teach theology, but I had a guest stint every year in a comparative literature course, because I had done some work on a French philosopher who dabbled in hermeneutics called Paul Ricoeur, so I would have a couple of weeks on Paul Ricoeur, and my students were in a literary theory course, they had come from all over Europe, and they thought Ricoeur was way too conservative, and they were telling me, yeah, they were telling me, who are you, and who is Ricoeur to tell us how we can or cannot read? Wow. And so that to me was an aha moment, because I realized, if someone picked up the Bible with that attitude, that the reader is in charge, I can do whatever I want to with this text, it's my playground, that's the end of biblical authority. So my weak response was, well, would you like me to read your papers with this philosophy in mind? Because I was trying to get them to see that the golden rule applies to reading, right? Do unto other people's texts as you would have them do unto yours. That's great. And so, but I wanted to think Christianly about text interpretation, and that meant I had to think in Trinitarian terms, because Christianity is this proclamation that the Father has done something in the Son through the Spirit, and what He's done, I want to say, because the Bible says so, is that He's spoken. He said something. That's amazing. So you're right, I do think about the whole process of text interpretation in a Trinitarian framework, where God is the ultimate author, and His actions have meaning. What He speaks is His Son, the Word, but what carries the Word home is the breath of the Spirit. And that allowed me to deal in theological ways with big questions about the metaphysics, the epistemology, and the ethics of meaning. That's fantastic. Deep dive. So it was an attempt to get...yeah, it was a very deep dive, but it was an attempt to give Christians the resources to enter into these discussions about, do texts have meaning? Right, yeah, that's...and I personally, I actually was a little late to the party. I think I read this maybe four or five years ago, admittedly. But were you, you know, this book came right on the heels of gagging of God. Were you at Trinity yet? Because Carson, I think that came out in maybe 96, and I think he had a similar, you know, whoa, something needs to be said here. But of course, your approaches are quite different and, of course, complementary. Yeah, they're complementary. At the time, I could not find Christian resources to answer what I felt were the key questions. I think Don Carson probably was thinking the same thing, and so yeah, he did that. I had forgotten the date of the publication of that, but you're right, that was his response to post-modernity. Yeah. I've sensed, you know, and I'm sure we've encountered some of these groups, the emergent groups, and then there's more, you know, conservative outfits actually here at this church. Some of our pastors wrote a book many years ago called The Death of Truth, kind of around the same time, which is actually, in essence, the founding of this event, the Zenos Summer Institute, was kind of around these questions. I think William Lane Craig came, and eventually, I think actually Carson was here too, around in that time period. But I think, you know, post-modernism has had—and really, this is like any cultural phenomenon, right? The church is chugging along, and then there's something comes in, and it's very tempting. If there's a big change in culture, the church has a tendency to become a little bit polarized in how it responds to these issues. You know, sort of, is this Satan or is this our Savior? You know, is post-modernism sort of a golden calf, or is it sort of Moses leading us out of the Egypt of modernity? And so from your standpoint, and obviously you said some about this already, but what did you see as the real threat of post-modernism in the 1990s, at least as you were working on this and maybe even in years subsequent? Yeah, well, you're right about there's this temptation either to deify or demonize cultural trends, and I think I wanted to do more than that, I wanted to really think it through biblically and theologically. I also wanted to be fair to Derrida and folk like that, because I heard Christians demonizing him. To my mind, he was a serious philosopher exploring the same question as Immanuel Kant 200 years earlier, and it had to do with the limits of reason. So what I like about post-modernity, and I'm not afraid to say that, but what I like about post-modernity is I think they represent a check on Western modern intellectual pride, and we needed that. Yeah, I agree. Now you asked what's my main concern? Well, I tend to think in terms of pride and another sin as the two on the seven deadly sins spectrum, and my concern is that the post-moderns, the radical ones, were leaning to the other extreme, which was sloth. And it's not laziness, it's this sin that just refuses to be committed to anything because it doesn't believe anything, super cynical. And cynicism is worse than doubt, it's more than a check on pride, it's not even humility, it's something else. So I was concerned about sloth, particularly when it came to reading texts, because I don't think we should read Scripture slothfully or pridefully. Right, yeah, I think you're... I've always, you know, I read Carson before this, I think I actually am still sort of chipping away at gagging of God, admittedly, I haven't finished it yet, but I read his book Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church, which is a little bit more popular level and kind of for the pastors of the world, and specifically engaging that particular Christian movement, right? But I appreciated his, like you, saying there are things these guys have right, you know, that the arrogance of modernity was a problem. It was not, you know, if Christians think that modernism was their friend, they've got another thing coming. And so the same, you know, the same mistake, though, you know, like just, again, modernity comes along and if the Christians are, you know, oh this is our Savior, this is our Satan, or as you said, demonize or deify, right? There's this... that same kind of phenomenon occurred on with modernity, I think, at a certain point. And if Christians were sort of, yeah, I just think it would be a mistake for Christians to think, no, no, we're actually moderns. It's like, no, we're, as you put it earlier, biblical. And that will mean aligning ourselves at times with insights from modernity, like there is such a thing as truth, we can know things, and at other times with post-modernity, which is, there are limits to this. And, you know, we, frankly, you know, when you look at the teaching of the New Testament and, frankly, other plenty, you know, even Jeremiah 17, sort of a familiar verse about the heart that is deceitful above all else, you know, that one of the things the postmodern people have right is there's a kind of the power of sin to warp the mind. You know, I don't know if they would put it in those terms, but that is something that would be harder to make sense of from a strictly modern standpoint, where there's a kind of, you know, to use sort of the Rorty picture, the glassy essence, or this mirror of nature, where there's just a direct correspondence between the mind and the other things. So I've always, I really appreciated that about Carson's writing, and I, you know, got that as well from reading, is there a meaning in this text. What I wanted to see exhibited more than I was seeing was, such as on your point, instead of swinging from modern to postmodern to whatever else the next philosophy is, I think we need to recover Christian doctrine. Yes. I'm a theologian, so I, and many people are now looking back to older Christian traditions of thinking, say Augustine, Augustinianism, or Thomas Aquinas and Thomism, instead of the cultural, you know, movement of the day. Right. And I think that can be, that probably is a helpful sign. Yeah, yeah, I think that's great. Do you think there were any red herrings at the time? You know, things that back then seemed like, wow, this is really, really scary, and then kind of given another 30-some years, you're like, I don't know why I was so troubled by that. I mean, postmodernity, largely, I don't hear about it much anymore, and I have mixed feelings, because I edited a book called The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology, and I think it went through a second edition and then it stopped. Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. Right, so maybe it seems like postmodernism as a proper movement, you know, maybe that, you know, frankly, it seems as though it's part of postmodern's own inner logic, if we may, if there is such a thing, to be pluralistic. And so it seems like that movement just dissipated. It split up into all these different ideas. You have feminist theology, Black theology, you know, there's all these different...that it almost just invited a splintering, but that there's not this kind of core movement anymore. At least it doesn't seem that way. It's an interesting point, that maybe we're still too close to it, but one way to think about it would be, it's not as radical, it's not as talked about as much, because it's sort of one. Yeah, yeah, actually, well I've thought that too, when you look at, what was it, Kellyanne Conway's Alternative Facts, you know, just everyone gets to say, that's fake news, no, no, yours is fake news, you know, there's this...it has seeped its way deep into the marrow of American culture, sadly, so it's not really a philosophical movement anymore as a way of life that, sadly, maybe many have unwittingly adopted in the interim. Yeah, we seem to have made our peace with pluralism. That's right, that's right. Yeah, I think, yeah, and I think one thing that's interesting too is, there seems to have been a migration away from texts as such, though I think philosophers are still struggling with these questions and still struggling with truth and objectivity, you know, there's...people are still out there asking these questions, but yeah, that doesn't seem to be quite as electrifying as it was in the 1980s and 1990s. You know, I think, I don't know, I'm pretty sure that Richard Rorty's philosophy in The Mirror of Nature and Leotard's The Postmodern Condition both came out in 1978, and that kind of, like, worked its way through, strangely, English departments, you know, it almost seemed like the philosophy world just kind of balked at that, but at least Anglo-American. Richard Rorty in particular is a fascinating case, because he started out as a philosopher, a major philosopher, and then he went to the comparative literature department, and he was, I think he was being consistent. He no longer felt there was truth with a capital T, but there are different ways of talking about things, and there are different ways of being interesting with words, and so comparative literature was his preferred choice. I want to actually kind of pivot over to some work that you've done more recently, Mere Christian Hermeneutics, and this was, you know, I think, like Is There a Meaning? is a pretty multifaceted project. One portion of the project, from when I read it, I sense it has a lot to do with this literal reading, which, you know, you engaged with the fact that what it means to be literal is a slippery concept that, you know, takes work to make sense out of. And another part kind of extends and maybe even completes that notion by developing a concept of theological interpretation, and in particular, you know, one that ideally any Christian can or should appreciate. I don't know if you want to add to that two-sentence summary. I mean, you said it in many, many, many more sentences, but... Well, the literal sense matters to me because, to go back to our beginning of the question, it's tied up with what it means to be biblical, and what it means for the Bible to have authority. If the Bible doesn't have a determinant meaning, a meaning that has teeth, then it doesn't have any authority. And so then the question is, what's the nature of the teeth? And theologians have said for ages, it's the literal sense. Where we have a problem is, what did they mean by that? So that's my new question, not only what does it mean to be biblical, what does it mean to be literal? And it doesn't mean, apparently, what people normally think it means in our time, where people often use it just as a term of emphasis. Literally. Yeah, I mean, you're so funny I literally died laughing. Right. Well, I hope I'm not that funny. I hope you didn't die. That's right, that's right. So as I just got at a moment ago, so thinking about what you just said, that you're looking for what's biblical, and you're ideally, of course, not just what's biblical, but what's Christian. And so, yeah, there's Baptists, there's Lutherans, there's Evangelical Free, there's Catholics, there's Eastern Orthodox, who gets to be the Christian, you know, of the biblical Christian? And so I think, great question. That is a great question. It's what has divided the Church all too often, and so the mere idea in my title, mere Christian hermeneutics, that is, you caught the reference, I'm sure, to C.S. Lewis, but it's a claim that at times I thought, well that's kind of a funny reference to C.S. Lewis, but then if you think about it, it's an audacious claim. Is there such a thing as a common way of reading that unites all these people that Lewis calls mere Christians? And so the title of my book, it could look like a fool's errand. Surely you can't articulate that. So I don't mean that one particular denomination is the winner, that's not at all what I mean. I am really asking the serious question, are there things that all Christians should be doing as we read the text? That's the main part. It's not going to answer all the issues, it's not going to heal all the divisions, but I do think it's important for our Christian witness, if we say the Bible is the Word of Truth, we need to agree on some things, or else that witness will, you know, fall on deaf ears. Right, there's a certain...so ideally finding something that could be common, as it were. In the best sense of common. That's right, that's right. That is universal. Yeah. You urge in this book for people to read across historical boundary lines. Like I listed all those different groups of Christians, and that we need to look across, like, hey, what are they doing over there? And maybe, you know, and even building bridges across reading cultures, right? So supposing, you know, looking at, say, a particular university or a particular seminary has a reading culture, you want to kind of cross over, you know, can one seminary meaningfully talk to, read, and engage with people across the other side? So actually, so I gave one example, but maybe you could give some others. Like, what are maybe some rough-and-ready examples of reading cultures which feature heavily, this notion of a reading culture, it features heavily in mere Christian hermeneutics? Yeah, that was one of the most exciting concepts for me, because by reading culture I don't simply mean a group of people who like reading. Right. No, it's more serious than that. It's about a group of people who agree on what the priorities in reading should be, on what questions we should be asking, on what methods we should be using, and on what we think reading is for. So from the earliest church, there have been different groups, different reading cultures. Your listeners may have heard about the school of Alexandria and the school of Antioch in the early church. During the Middle Ages, there were people in monasteries reading, and that was a monastic reading culture, and then there were people in the fledgling universities reading, and they formed a scholastic culture, and that monastic versus scholastic tension, that has survived into the modern university, because biblical studies, the study of biblical texts as historical documents, that has become a specialization that has become isolated from theology. And so, believe it or not, biblical studies and theology are often different reading cultures of the Bible, so much so that in our profession, every year we have these annual professional meetings, and there are two groups. There's the Society of Biblical Literature, which is where the one reading culture goes, and then the American Academy of Religion, which is where the other one goes, and they sometimes meet, but more often than not, they miss. Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. I think that's an important observation that you just made, because yeah, so I gave the example of, say, one seminary talking to another seminary and being able to kind of interact with the other's sort of cluster of values or priorities, as you put it, but what you're suggesting, and I've witnessed this as well, is the break. Say, you could even be in the same seminary and even have your office mate or someone close by on the same floor of the seminary, and that person, yeah, one's a systematic theologian and the other one is a New Testament scholar, and I think actually I saw recently there's a whole book series that came out where it's like, what New Testament scholars, whatever, what they wish the theologians would know, and the flip side, theologians, what they wish every New Testament scholar or Old Testament scholar, biblical studies, so there's this funny kind of divide even within single institutions. Yeah, you said you could find yourself, I would say every seminary student will find themselves in a kind of, I can use this term, reading culture war. Right. And it's not a war between people, the people get on fine most of the time. The conflict is between ways of reading, where does it come from, why is there this difference, it's not denominational, it's disciplinary. My biblical studies friends have been trained often in secular universities to become biblical scholars, they've been socialized into ways of reading, but conversely, I was trained in a theological context to ask some questions and not the others, and believe it or not, when I went to Cambridge in the 1980s, being involved with the Bible was an option for a theologian, and that stood out to me as, this is odd. Yeah, yeah, that's particularly quite strange. But I'm serious, my supervisor was easy on whether I use scripture or not. Wow. To speak of God. Yeah, that is surprising, when you have at least, you know, you're doing theological studies, you know, that God's involved, and you know, presumably that even thinking about this from a standpoint of engaging a history, right, that so much of the history of these discussions intersect scripture, that it is surprising to sort of leave that on the shelf. Yeah. Can I make one more point about these reading cultures? You know, there are churches all over the world, and I believe that the local church is an amazing thing, but the local church is an embassy or a representative of the Catholic Church, small c, which means the one true Church, the people united to Jesus Christ. So if the local church is a representative of the Catholic Church, in the same way, I think one reading culture, call it a local reading culture, should have something Catholic about it. Yes. Right? If it's Christian reading culture, there should be some Catholicity, some commonality with other Christian reading cultures, that's what I'm trying to articulate in this book. Yeah, and I think that's really important because, well, if you push too far outside of that, you become a cult or a sect or something. A heresy, a cult, a new religion, yes. Right, and that requires a sensitivity and awareness of the relation, not just the history here, for history's sake, but history that we are followers of Jesus. Yes, that's the name to mention, because it isn't about landing on the right hermeneutical method or anything like that, the question is, what do you make of Christ as a Christian reader of the Old and the New Testaments? That's right, that's right. So how would you describe what you're doing? You know, so sometimes ecumenical projects, depending on someone's, maybe personality, maybe culture, sometimes ecumenical projects are viewed with suspicion, and other times they're viewed as, wow, this is glorious, we're so great, everyone's holding hands again. How would you describe some of what you're doing as different from other historical ecumenical projects? Well, the ecumenical movement, which is a modern movement, was aiming to give public a face, public witness to the unity of the Church. But in many of the discussions, particularly when the whole worldwide global Church is involved, you know, conservative and liberal, in the broadest sense, the ecumenical movement seemed to value unity more than truth. And I was aware of that all the way through, so one has to keep Christology at least front and center. Yeah, that's great. I think in another context, I was just pondering, you know, this wanting to have unity with Christians. I was studying John 17, and you know, there is this laudable desire. Unity is good, it's a good thing. But it cannot be the end-all be-all, and I think, yeah, like anchoring it in truth, anchoring it in the Bible. For example, I just remember hearing a story of, you know, a pastor just explicitly saying that Jesus did not rise from the dead, and you're just...it's like, okay, we've just broke, you know, there's a pretty serious problem here, Houston we have a problem, or Columbus we have a problem, you know, that there's a pretty problematic breakdown there, and I think that, you know, I think one thing too is, you know, when you think about...yeah, I think I like kind of what you're doing where, you know, you said, and maybe you could even comment on this more, because I felt like there was a little bookmark there for, like, common, right? So we want something that's common, but we don't want to sacrifice the truth. And so, yeah, maybe I don't know if you want to comment on this common concept. So in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul talks about the gospel as things of first importance, and those are the things that I think we need to have in common. And if pressed, I could begin to spell those out, but there's a lot of things that churches have split over that are not of first importance. That's right. And it's a judgment call sometimes, I want to say that, but I do think studying church history and seeing how the earlier church dealt with movements who didn't keep Christ central, or who divided over things that really were not of first importance, those should inform our judgments today. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's well put. I read a couple years ago, well actually, it's funny how I'm getting old enough that when I think of a couple years, it's now getting to be like, oh, that was actually six or seven years ago. I read Erikson's Systematic Theology, and I was struck, partly because I don't think this way, right? I was trained as a philosopher in philosophy of mathematics, and so much of what we talked about was written in the last 25, 50, maybe 50 years. History mattered, but I appreciated how much in that book, and I've since observed in other systematic theologies, the way that, hey, who were the Arians? Who are the Sassinians? A lot of these cults of the 20th century, 19th century, they had counterparts in the first five centuries of the Church, or so. And that somehow, if you're conscientious of that past, it gives you an arsenal to engage with the present. Yes, and the groups you mentioned, the Arians, which are heretics with regard to the doctrine of the Trinity, and the Sassinians, heretics with regard to the doctrine of the Atonement, what they had in common was they weren't reading the Bible rightly. Yes. It all starts, then, with how do we read the Bible? That's great, that's great. That actually leads kind of naturally...I have a question about, you talk about grammatico-eschatological hermeneutics in your book, and sometimes people use this language of, you know, Protestants are often encouraged to have a grammatico-historical hermeneutic, and I wonder if you could comment on the difference between those two, or if you, yeah, maybe you could even see one as a proper completion of the other, but tell me a little bit about that, and what...yeah, let me hand it over to you. Yeah, excellent question, because I use the term grammatico-eschatological precisely to raise that particular hackle, or at least the question as to why aren't you using the term that everybody else uses? Yeah. And the reason everybody else uses it is that whether you're Christian or not, you can use that method to read the Bible. You can assume that the only relevant context is the immediate historical context of the human author. So, obviously, grammar is important, history is important, but does that way of reading do justice to the fact that there is a divine author as well? These prophets, these apostles were speaking for God, and God's intentions are not confined to an imminent historical context, the way a human author's would be, and that's relevant to the way Christians read the Bible. 1 Peter 1 talks about the prophets searching intently to find out what it was they were talking about. Right, right, there's that forward movement. Yeah, and it wasn't that they were speaking, you know, gibberish, not at all. Their terms had sense, but they were inquiring about the referent. The referent, I believe, this is where eschatology comes in, all of the things they were talking about were preparing the way, as John the Baptist did, and pointing to the coming of Christ, and by eschatology I'm talking about the fulfillment of God's promises, judgment and salvation is ultimately in Christ, and so grammatical eschatological is simply saying, it's a reminder, don't just stop figuring out what the human authors meant in their context, follow the story and see what they actually were talking about, as Peter indicated, and that's the eschatological fulfillment of all these stories about Israel in Jesus' own story. Yeah, I think it's a really helpful observation because, as you put it, if you're taking just those words, grammatical, historical, in a really strict sense, the historical biblical criticism kind of uses that method. They do. You know, and of course, frankly, it ends up being often quite destructive of the core message of Scripture. Well, it obscures Christ. Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. And that is the reading culture into which many biblical scholars are socialized, not because they aren't persons of faith, but because they're studying with, you know, in a secular university setting, where these simply are the ways you read. And also, so you also use this phrase, theological interpretation. I think what you just said starts to get us along that path, just as you described grammatical, eschatological hermeneutics. Sometimes people hear theological interpretation, and that makes evangelicals or even Protestants anxious. So I wonder if you could comment on, like, first of all, why is that, and what is it about how you understand theological interpretation that mitigates those concerns? Yeah. Well, I was excited about the notion when I heard it, because I wanted to get out of the straitjacket of this historical, critical way of reading the Bible that would not let me see Christ in the Old Testament. Yeah, yeah. But I think why many of my evangelical friends are suspicious of it is that it has been appropriated by many people who read the Bible differently, Roman Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants of all stripes, liberal, conservative, and so that multiplicity of uses has confused people. What does it mean? I want to be just very simple and clear, when I say theological, I mean the Bible is written by God, it's about God's actions, and it's written for the sake of godliness, you know, uniting us to God in Christ. Keeping God front and center, that's what I mean by the term, and I don't have a particular method associated with it, and so that might be one of the ways I would distinguish my approach. Yeah, and that, I think, brings us full circle in the sense that, you know, this brings us back to this Trinitarian approach to Scripture, you know, that if indeed the Trinity is out there, then that should heavily impact how we look at the Word, look at what God says. Yeah, I discuss what it is to be theological in many ways, but one way of being theologically is just paying attention to God as the One who created all things, as the One in whom all things hold together, as the One who is bringing all things to their fulfillment, the new heavens and the new earth. Just keep attending to God and all things in relation to God, including the Bible and including reading the Bible. That's right, that's great. So I want to kind of start wrapping up as we're winding down here, and I think we corresponded briefly a couple years ago, and I think you told me at that time that you were writing a three-volume systematic theology, and I heard more recently that it would be four volumes, and I'm starting to wonder, is this going to be a five-volume systematic theology with 14 parts? I'm just teasing, but do you have anything that we can look out for as it concerns this systematic theology? When I heard that you were writing a systematic theology, I was pretty excited, but tell us a little bit about that if you could. I'm very excited. The fourth volume is really just an introduction to the other three. It will have a Trinitarian structure, following the Apostles' Creed and other historic documents. But the first volume I am excited about because it's about doing theology, what it is, why it matters, how it involves reading Scripture, and like a good overture to a theatrical musical, it's going to have themes that you'll discover in subsequent volumes. But that's the one I'm working on now, so I'm always most excited about what I'm now working on. That's cool. Well, we're excited to see that when it hits the shelves, whether it's three, one, or 14 bounded volumes. So I just wanted to say thanks again, Kevin Van Hooser, for joining us here on Dwell on These Things. Thank you, Pat, for your hospitality. Yeah, it's been my pleasure, and for those listening in, thank you, too, for joining in. I hope Professor Van Hooser and I have not been unduly nerdy in our discussions, but we are grateful for you tuning in, and for more resources like this, check out dwellcc.org.