What Is Hermeneutics? | Kevin Vanhoozer

Kevin Vanhoozer joins Kirk E. Miller to surface the question that quietly shapes every act of Bible reading: What does it mean to understand Scripture well? Aiming to demystify the discipline, Kevin explores what hermeneutics is, what theological and metaphysical pre-commitments ought to inform our approach to Scripture, and why it matters for our Christian “reading cultures,” the local church.

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Episode guest: Kevin Vanhoozer

Kevin Vanhoozer is currently Research Professor of Systematic Theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. As of fall of 2026 he will become the Jonathan Blanchard Professor of Theology at the Wheaton College Litfin Divinity School.

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Episode synopsis

What is hermeneutics? Defining the discipline

As Kevin explains, hermeneutics is the study of understanding how humans interpret messages of all kinds, whether written, spoken, enacted, or embodied. The term itself derives from Hermes, the messenger god of Greek mythology, highlighting the discipline’s concern with communication, messages, and meaning.

In this broad sense, hermeneutics applies not only to Scripture but also to literature, film, law, history, and culture. Humans are, at their core, interpreting creatures. We constantly try to make sense of words, actions, gestures, and events, from reading facial expressions to discerning motives and intentions.

Biblical hermeneutics, then, is a focused application of this universal human activity: seeking to understand what God is communicating through Scripture.

Why hermeneutics matters: a matter of life and death

Hermeneutics is not an abstract academic exercise but a practical necessity. Human relationships depend on understanding. For instance, consider how conflict, confusion, and division often arise from misunderstandings.

Thus, if interpretation matters this much for general human relationships and communication, how much more does it matter when the subject is God and his Word? Consider how Scripture repeatedly presents how we respond to God’s Word as a matter of life and death. Israel’s history, for instance, turns on whether its kings listened to and obeyed God’s speech. The book of Hebrews opens by declaring that God has spoken through his prophets, and that speech has culminated in his Son (Heb 1:1–2). As such, faithful hearing is central to Christian existence.

Hermeneutics as more than principles and procedures

While hermeneutics is often treated as rules for interpretation and skills for Bible study, Kevin clarifies that understanding a text involves more than grasping the meaning of individual words. True understanding requires asking what authors are doing with words—why they chose them, how they arranged them, and what communicative action they are performing.

Meaning is not located in isolated vocabulary terms but in discourse: language used purposefully by someone, about something, for someone, in some particular way, for some particular end. Hermeneutics, therefore, asks questions about intention, context, purpose, and audience, and guards against reducing Bible study to verse-by-verse analysis while ignoring larger literary, canonical, and theological patterns.

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What does it mean to be “biblical”?

At stake is nothing less than the question, What does it mean to be “biblical”? —a deceptively simple question that many Christians simply assume they know the answer to. However, disagreements in our interpretation and use of the Bible can reveal significant differences in the beliefs, priorities, and frameworks that we variously bring to the Bible and which we often simply take for granted.

There is no more telling barometer of the intellectual, social, and spiritual condition of a people than the way they read the Bible.

Kevin illustrates this with some of his “laws of hermeneutical motion,” as he calls them.

1. Every kind of reading developed in the academy eventually gets applied by someone to how we read the Bible, and the question is, Does it open up the text or subvert what its authors are doing?
2. Every cultural trend and social concern eventually shapes how people read Scripture.
3. There is no more telling barometer of the intellectual, social, and spiritual condition of a people than the way they read the Bible.

Hermeneutics is never neutral. Nor is it merely intellectual. It strikes at the heart of what it means to be the church. In other words, how Christians read Scripture both reflects and forms who they are. Hermeneutics, then, is not merely about procedures but about persons, not merely about methods but about meaning, and not merely about interpretation but about formation. Hermeneutics is concerned with how the church is shaped by the way it reads Scripture, and whether Christians are willing to be corrected and transformed by the Word rather than simply make use of it (sometimes for their own ends).

Hermeneutics as a field-encompassing discipline

Hermeneutics functions, according to Kevin, as a field-encompassing discipline. That is, it intersects with philosophy, history, literary theory, and every branch of theology.

Exegesis, biblical theology, and systematic theology are all hermeneutical in nature because they seek understanding of Scripture, albeit by different routes or at different levels. Exegesis may focus on words and passages. Biblical theology traces themes across books or corpora. Systematic theology interprets Scripture canonically, systematizing and seeking coherence across the whole. Church history is, as some have said, the history of biblical interpretation.

Rather than competing, these disciplines all contribute to the project of understanding the Bible. That is, they’re all hermeneutical. They remind us that hermeneutics involves different planes of textual understanding.

Reading Scripture within the communion of saints

Kevin highlights the importance of reading Scripture with the church across time. Church history is not merely a past record of biblical interpretation. As we attend to it, it also contributes to today’s reading of Scripture. And we have theological warrant for this: The Spirit has been at work shaping the way saints have read the Bible in the past. To ignore that past is to assume, what C. S. Lewis coined, “chronological snobbery”: a false sense of superiority that neglects the wisdom of earlier generations simply because they are earlier. Reading in communion with these saints guards against idiosyncratic interpretations and displays humility.

Which comes first, theology or hermeneutics?

Prolegomena involves the preliminary questions asked before doing theology.

Sometimes folks are taught that one cannot speak about God (theology) until they first establish an epistemological and hermeneutical framework for doing so. Kevin challenges that assumption. Why? Because doing this is to force theology into a box that may not be hospitable to it.

Instead of doing hermeneutics and then doing theology, we should think about hermeneutics theologically.

Rather, prolegomena itself should be theological—it should begin with God himself. Instead of doing hermeneutics and then doing theology, we should think about hermeneutics theologically. For instance, our hermeneutic should be shaped by the following theological convictions:

• Humans are created to understand one another.
• Sin distorts that understanding.
• Redemption restores it.

Hermeneutics, therefore, involves our theological commitments rather than standing outside them as an alleged neutral gatekeeper. No interpretation is free from presuppositions. Interpretation without presuppositions is impossible. The real question is not whether we have pre-commitments, but whether they are the right ones.

How does our view of the Bible shape our interpretation of it?

One of the most important of these theological pre-commitments is our view of Scripture. Disagreements about interpretation, and differences in its use, often trace back to different answers to more basic questions: What is the Bible (its ontology), and what is it for (its teleology)?

For example, some scholars approach the Bible with the preliminary question, How can we read the Bible to find out what actually happened to Israel or Jesus? In this approach, the Bible becomes something of a sourcebook for something else, the events behind the text. Others may approach the Bible asking, How can I use this text to facilitate liberation? In this case, readers are prioritizing something “in front of the text,” a concern in the reader’s own context. In other words, our preliminary questions about the Bible will shape how we read it.

To this end, Kevin proposes three preliminary questions that lead us to the right theological foundations:

1. Who wrote Scripture? Human authors inspired by God, the ultimate author.
2. What is it about? God’s creating and redeeming work.
3. Why was it written? To lead us to friendship with God and godliness.

These theological commitments ought to control our exegesis, aligning our reading of Scripture with the nature of Scripture.

The Bible is not merely a record of religious experience. Scripture is divinely inspired human discourse, genuinely human communication that simultaneously conveys God’s communicative intention. Denying this weakens Scripture’s authority and the place of the apostles and prophets as the foundation of the church (Eph 2:20).

The Bible, in short, is a set-apart set of texts designed to shape a people of faith. As such, we are to accord with Scripture rather than expecting or attempting to make Scripture accord with us. God is not a character in our story. We are characters in his. Thus, Christians are not meant simply to analyze Scripture but to enter its story, a story God continues to conduct even today. We are to ask not how Scripture can serve our purposes, but how we can participate in God’s purposes.

Should we read the Bible literally or figuratively?

The question of whether Scripture should be read “literally” often generates confusion. Kevin notes that “literal” originally referred to attention to the letters of the text, not a rejection of figurative language. Words do not carry meaning on their own. Meaning arises from how authors use them. The literal sense, properly understood, is the sense intended by the author. Figural interpretation should not negate this literal meaning.

Yet because God is the author of history as well as Scripture, historical events themselves can function as figures—real events that signify deeper realities. The Old Testament sacrificial system, for example, is both historically literal and theologically figural, pointing forward to Christ. The challenge, then, is not whether to read figurally, but how to discern God’s figures rather than invent our own, which we lack authority to do.

Can we derive objective meaning from the text?

What is the meaning of meaning and what it means for the text to “mean” something? Contemporary skepticism often alleges our inability to discern any sort of objective meaning in the text, given our inescapable subjective lenses. And Christians disagree widely in their interpretations and applications of Scripture.

Kevin responds by defining meaning not as a private psychological state (what the author intended) but as a public communicative action. Meaning is what authors do with words, how they “tend” them in order to communicate. This action is accessible through the text itself, even if the authors’ inner mental states are not.

Because Scripture has both human and divine authorship, interpreters must attend to both levels. Methods that illuminate human authorial action are valuable, but approaches that exclude divine action ultimately fail to grasp Scripture’s full meaning.

As such, Kevin advocates a pluralistic use of interpretive methods. Different critical tools can often highlight different aspects of a text. The problem arises when a single method claims exclusivity or reduces meaning to what it alone can explain. In short, such approaches are often right in what they affirm but wrong in what they deny. A faithful reading must remain open to the full range of what Scripture is doing.

A hermeneutics of virtue

Yet Kevin argues that a proper set of procedures will not itself solve all our interpretive disagreements. Hermeneutics is both an art and a science. Understanding Scripture is inseparable from becoming a certain kind of person. Beyond technical competence, interpreters must cultivate the proper virtues to become the right sort of reader (e.g., humility, patience, goodwill, teachability, and a willingness to be corrected by the text). As Athanasius closes On the Incarnation,

But in addition to the study and true knowledge of the scriptures, there is needed a good life and a pure soul and the virtue which is according to Christ, so that the mind, guided by it, may be able to attain and comprehend what it desires, as far as it is possible for human nature to learn about the God Word. Without a pure mind and a life modeled on the saints, no one can comprehend the words of the saints. For just as, if someone would wish to see the light of the sun, he would certainly wipe and clear his eyes, purifying himself to be almost like that which he desires, so that as the eye thus becomes light it may see the light of the sun; or just as if someone would wish to see a city or a country, he would certainly go to that place for the sight; in the same way, one wishing to comprehend the mind of the theologians must first wash and cleanse his soul by his manner of life, and approach the saints themselves by the imitation of their works, so that being with them in the conduct of a common life, he may understand also the things revealed to them.¹

Hermeneutics is not simply about getting the text right. It is about being rightly formed by the text so that God’s people can live faithfully within his unfolding story. The goal is not to master Scripture but to be mastered by it.

On reading cultures or interpretive communities

Thus, Christian interpretation of Scripture requires acknowledging our fallenness, dependence on the Spirit, and reliance on others. No single reader or community sees everything. Cultural trends often can obscure our sight. Insights emerge across time as different contexts illuminate different aspects of the text.

To this end, Kevin introduces the concept of “reading cultures,” interpretive communities formed by shared values, priorities, and interpretive habits. Church history reveals that different reading cultures have always existed. A challenge is navigating these competing interpretive communities.

Local churches are the prime example of such reading communities. Churches exhibit cultures that shape how believers learn to read Scripture and in turn influence how its members are formed by Scripture.

Select works by Kevin Vanhoozer on hermeneutics

Additional resources on hermeneutics

Related content

• All about Hermeneutics: A Guide to Interpreting God’s Word Faithfully
• How to Study the Bible Like an Evangelical: Principles & Practice
• Everything Boils Down to Hermeneutics
• Is There Such a Thing as an Evangelical Approach to Theology?
• Will Evangelicals Lead a Revival in Dogmatic Theology?

1. St. Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation, ed. and trans. John Behr, Popular Patristics Series 44a (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011), 173.