Greg McKinzie. The Hermeneutics of Participation: Missional Interpretation of Scripture and Readerly Formation. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2025. 272 pp. Paperback, $35.00.

When was the last time you encountered the philosophers Paul Ricoeur and James K. A. Smith, as well as the Post-liberal theologians Hans Frei and David H. Kelsey, in a mutual dialogue with theologians Karl Barth and Jürgen Moltmann, and with missiologists David Bosch and Lesslie Newbigin? This is what happens in Greg McKinzie’s splendid The Hermeneutics of Participation, an interdisciplinary study based on his PhD dissertation at Fuller Theological Seminary.

McKinzie’s book is about making theological interpretation of Scripture missional through and through—and, more precisely, making it missionally embodied, engendering participation in the mission to the world by the Triune God. All the time, he is concerned about the limitations of making the interpretation of Scripture only an intra-ecclesial affair. Scripture is about God’s mission to the world.

The need for an authentically missional approach to the Bible is obvious:

On the one hand, theological interpretation of Scripture remains too missionally deficient to offer a convincing answer. On the other hand, missional hermeneutics remains too inattentive to the theological dynamics of readerly formation to address the question (20).

Therefore, the ultimate aim of the project is to help the church “become better readers of Scripture” (21) from the vantage point of the Triune God’s mission to the word. In other words, this study is an exercise in missional hermeneutics—a topic not foreign to mission theology. But the way Dr. McKinzie engages this complex issue is unique.

Here is the plan and outline of this remarkable study. After the Introduction, Chapter Two provides a case-study on the meaning, nature, and conditions of “missional participation.” This requires rehearsing the familiar terrain of debates about the interpretation and meaning of the Missio Dei and its implications for participation in the Triune God’s mission. Greg’s five-fold taxonomy of approaches is helpful.

Chapter Three takes a surprising turn to the doctrine of theosis (divinization, deification) as the key to participation in God’s mission. Following the groundbreaking work of the New Testament scholar Michael Gorman and a growing number of other scholars who are seeking the roots of this ancient Orthodox Church’s soteriological symbol, McKinzie also engages contemporary Evangelical[ly-friendly] scholarship to scrutinize deification. This alone would mark this study unique.

Chapter Four continues the search for embodied participation in the Triune God’s mission to the world by focusing on the embodied narrative—the way God speaks to us in Scripture. Taking a lead from the late J. Moltmann and Latin American Liberationists, Greg speaks of “solidarity” in embodied missional narrative. This conversation is further developed in Chapter Five, continuing dialogue with Ricoeur in search of helping the congregation to move “from embodied commitments to textual interpretation” (24). Following this, Chapter Six seeks to bring the main argument of missional hermeneutics to completion with the help of Ricoeur. The concluding Chapter sums it all up.

Having mentioned the study’s interdisciplinary nature, I really mean it: here you have a tour, on the one hand, across philosophical hermeneutics, theological interpretation of Scripture, historical and contemporary theology of mission, and systematic theology concerning the relationship between Scripture, church, and mission. On the other hand, you will also get a “crash course” in theological and philosophical anthropology, following the late J. Moltmann and other luminaries. I can only admire the capacity of the author to handle and manage so many theological, philosophical, and missional disciplines.

As a whole, Dr. McKinzie’s book is a wonderful premiere in all-things-missional hermeneutics and many-things-current-mission theology. As with any dissertation-based publication, there is a lot of familiar territory for us professionals—although, at the same time, both theologians and missiologists would be greatly helped with this tremendous resource:

• Missiologists, too often thin in biblical and theological scholarship, would be provided with a crash course in 20th/21st-century theological discussions about mission.
• Theologians, almost by rule, ill-versed in mission theology, would be served by a wonderful “one-stop” shop for getting the basics.

On top of that, Greg’s constructive proposal is worthy of much discussion and debate. Its greatest vision, namely connecting tightly the interpretation of the Bible and missional hermeneutics tightly, is a worthy call for all churches and theological movements.