Kevin Jon Vanhoozer (born March 10, 1957) is an American theologian and current research professor of Systematic Theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS) in Deerfield, Illinois.
His interdisciplinary dissertation was titled Biblical Narrative in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: A Study in Hermeneutics and Theology, published in 1990 (reprint 2007) by Cambridge University Press (ISBN 0-521-04390-5).
[3] Douglas Sweeney and Daniel Treier edited a Festschrift in his honor, Hearing and Doing the Word: The Drama of Evangelical Hermeneutics, published in 2021 by T&T Clark (ISBN 9780567702197) and consisting of essays by his former teachers and students and present colleagues.
Primarily, he engages the thinking of Jacques Derrida, but Stanley Fish and Richard Rorty also receive attention.
Vanhoozer develops a theory of communicative action that relies strongly on the speech-act theory of J. L. Austin, in which a biblical text is seen as a communicative act involving "locutions" (the text itself), "illocutions" (the stance of the author to the locution, e.g. questioning, asserting, promising, etc.