Kevin J. Vanhoozer Quotes & Sayings

To get a doctorate, you need only have a modicum of intelligence and the ability to grind it out. I'm afraid you may only be qualified to be an academic, not a pastor. Ministry is a lot harder than scholarship. — Kevin J. Vanhoozer

Sola scriptura means at least this: that the church's proclamation is always subject to potential correction from the canon. It is for this reason that we resist simply collapsing the text into the tradition of its interpretation and performance. — Kevin J. Vanhoozer

the church, like television, is always educating; the only question is, What is it teaching? — Kevin J. Vanhoozer

The truth is that there is a world of difference between looking beautiful and being beautiful. — Kevin J. Vanhoozer

If I speak in the tongues of Reformers and of professional theologians, and I have not personal faith in Christ, my theology is nothing but the noisy beating of a snare drum. And if I have analytic powers and the gift of creating coherent conceptual systems of theology, so as to remove liberal objections, and have not personal hope in God, I am nothing. And if I give myself to resolving the debate between supra and infralapsarianism, and to defending inerrancy, and to learning the Westminster Catechism, yea, even the larger one, so as to recite it by heart backwards and forwards, and have not love, I have gained nothing. — Kevin J. Vanhoozer

The church is biblical, therefore, when it seeks to embody the words in the power of the Spirit and so become a living commentary. The church is thus not only the "people of the book" but also "the (lived) interpretation of the book. — Kevin J. Vanhoozer

The call to self-emptying will always be unpopular to those whose pockets and closets are full. What — Kevin J. Vanhoozer

Being in Christ is both gift and task, privilege and responsibility. Exaggerate the gift, and you risk antinomian complacency; exaggerate the responsibility, and you risk legalistic anxiety. — Kevin J. Vanhoozer

What is the message? Can faith bereft of specific beliefs speak understanding? If so, understanding of what? My concern is that the only thing Cox has to say to young people seeking spirituality is "Do good."13 But why should we do good? And what is the good if it is not somehow rooted in the nature and work of God? Cox's Age of the Spirit needs a normative Word. For while belief without faith is empty, faith without belief is blind. — Kevin J. Vanhoozer

Pastor-theologians exist to embody the evangelical mood, an indicative declaration ("He is risen! He is Lord!") and a concomitant way of being that is attuned to the world as already-not-yet made new in Jesus Christ. — Kevin J. Vanhoozer