How can we read the text of Scripture well, rightly, and faithfully?

Challenges abound when it comes to reading Scripture, including not only the variety of actual interpretations of the Bible but also the plurality of reading cultures, each with its own preferred frame of reference. A cynical observer might say that Christians have never agreed upon how to interpret the Bible, or even on the meaning of the “literal sense.”

Theologian Kevin J. Vanhoozer responds to these challenges by offering Mere Christian Hermeneutics Video Lectures. The allusion to C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity is no accident, for he develops a “mere” Christian hermeneutic—that is, principles for reading the Bible as Scripture everywhere, at all times, and by all Christians. Vanhoozer seeks to fulfill this promise without degenerating into a bland ecumenical tolerance of conflicting opinions. Rather, he turns to the accounts of Jesus’s transfiguration, a key moment in the broader economy of God’s revelation, to suggest that spiritual or “figural” interpretation is not a denial or distortion of the literal sense but rather its glorification.

In this light, he calls both church and academy to develop reading cultures that enable and sustain the kind of unity and diversity that “mere Christian hermeneutics” calls for and encourages.