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Theology matters: Showing the glory of story

31 January 2025

Tom Wright celebrates the theological legacy of Richard Hays, who died this month

DUKE UNIVERSITY

Richard Hays (1948-2025)

WHEN the history of biblical scholarship in the 20th and 21st centuries comes to be written, a strong case will be made for seeing Richard B. Hays as the leading American New Testament scholar of his generation. The word “leading”, sometimes used in a vague, arm-waving fashion, is meant here in its precise sense. Many careful and wise scholars have provided food for thought and further study. There are not so many who have opened doors that others had not even noticed, shining a light down an unanticipated but exciting pathway, and enticing others to follow.

The reason why Richard Hays saw doors where others had only seen walls owes a good deal to his particular combination of underlying theology and early training. Theologically, Richard recognised (as Reformed theology in general has long done) that an easy-going use of the phrase “justification by faith” could easily give the impression that “faith” — saying a prayer, coming to believe in Jesus, whatever — was a form of “work”: something which a person “does” to earn God’s favour. For Paul, however, the vital move — the salvific action — was not something “we” do, but something God does, in and through the work of Jesus: the faithful work of Jesus.

This (formerly very much a minority) opinion, that pistis Christou might mean not “faith in the Messiah” but “the faithfulness of the Messiah”, tied in with Richard’s lifelong theological intuition that the relationship between Israel’s scriptures and the New Testament is primarily one of continuity rather than discontinuity, even if mapping that continuity is always a delicate and difficult business. All this amounts to a fresh pathway into Paul.

 

RICHARD was enabled to make this theological move through his early training, which was neither in theology nor in philosophy, but in literature. You don’t have to read very far in his many books and articles to sense his lifelong love of poetry, plays, and novels. And at the heart of that is a well-modulated sense of what stories are, and how they work. So much Pauline exegesis in the middle years of the 20th century had concentrated on microscopic linguistic analysis and the attempt to find parallels for this or that phrase or idea in the Greek culture of the time, all within an assumed theological framework which owed much to the existentialist Lutheranism of Rudolf Bultmann.

Richard’s lifelong rejection of the Bultmannian framework (not least because of the ways in which it allowed American scholars to sit loose to central teachings like the resurrection of Jesus) was thus facilitated by his deep understanding that what mattered for Paul was not a set of abstract theological formulae, to be appropriated in a dehistoricised and non-narrative fashion, but precisely the story of Jesus — particularly of his crucifixion, and the ways in which that story related to the larger story of God’s dealings with Israel.

 

RICHARD had studied at Yale in the 1960s and 1970s, when innovative Yale scholars like Hans Frei were reminding the Biblical Studies guild that the scriptures are primarily narrative, not encoded dogma. The resulting movement always ran the risk of producing a new form of ahistorical reading: just live within this story, never mind whether or not it happened! But Richard did not take that route. Instead, migrating to Emory for his Ph.D., he was encouraged into the method of narrative analysis popularised by the French scholar A. J. Greimas.

This, too, could have led into an abstract analysis, detached from history. That it did not, but rather brought remarkable illumination to Hays’s doctoral study of Galatians, is due once again to his combination of theological acumen and literary perception. When Paul was summarising the story of the gospel, in passages like Galatians 3.10-14 and 4.1-7, the fine-grained analysis of how those micro-stories actually worked pointed back, so Richard argued, to the larger story of God and Israel: the story which was then focused specifically on “the faith” — that is, the faithfulness — “of Jesus Christ”.

Without Richard’s dissertation, The Faith of Jesus Christ (published in 1983 and still in print), it is doubtful whether the idea of Paul as a narrative theologian — and, within that, the fresh reading of pistis Christou — would have made its way into mainstream translations and commentaries, where a whole new way of understanding Paul has been opened up, and we are still exploring the pathways it reveals.

 

RICHARD’s combination of theological insight and literary sensitivity emerges perhaps most strikingly in his other famous early work, and in its much more recent sequel: Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (1989), and Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels (2016). The key point here can be simply stated: when the early Christian writers echo, or even allude to, the scriptures they knew so well, they are regularly doing far more than proof-texting or providing decorative adornment for their arguments or narratives. They are demonstrably, in a great many passages, evoking the larger contexts in which not only citations but also echoes and allusions are to be found.

This is the literary trope of metalepsis, where an author, gesturing to another work (in this case, a New Testament writer gesturing to Israel’s scriptures) is inviting the reader to understand the larger context of that work as part of the presently intended meaning. In the way Richard has developed it, metalepsis is much more than a clever way of hinting at extra points over and above what appears on the surface of the text. It has to do with the intended continuity between the larger narrative world of Israel’s scriptures, and the new world — and story — in which the early Christians believed themselves to be living as followers of Israel’s Messiah, Jesus.

These seminal ideas have been “leading” in the sense of pioneering new ways of reading over-familiar texts, and thereby encouraging others to follow in similar ways, not simply (be it said) by agreement, but by fresh dialogue. Leadership at a different but vital level has also been provided by Richard’s commentaries, notably his Galatians in the New Interpreters Bible and his First Corinthians in the Interpretation series. And, if and when churches come to realise that one cannot do ethics by slogans, as though all issues of behaviour were simply functions of binary political stances, then The Moral Vision of the New Testament (1996) will be there to help them find a better way, nuanced and multi-faceted as it will need to be.

 

IN AND through all this work, Richard Hays has demonstrated that it is not only possible but often wise and right to combine the critical instinct — refusing to take received opinions for granted; always ready to read well known texts in fresh ways — with a hermeneutic of trust. Suspicion is important but, as Chesterton insisted, the point of an open mind, like the point of an open mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

Notoriously, a good deal of biblical scholarship (particularly but by no means exclusively in North America) has come from scholars whose relationship with the church — often particularly the church in which they grew up — has been, so to say, conflicted. This has produced an academic climate in which almost any conclusion can be tolerated as long as it has the flavour of épater les bourgeois: of showing that “ordinary Christians” (particularly those fundamentalists, whether Catholic or Protestant, from whom the scholar wishes to distance him- or herself) are out of touch, backward-looking, socially or culturally inept.

The scholar who, while squarely facing all the arguments and evidence, continues to believe in, and to follow, the crucified and risen Jesus, and to teach the Bible from that perspective — while offering, as a creative scholar must, quite fresh angles of vision on well known themes and texts — is facing a challenging task indeed. The climate of the times favours the hermeneutic of suspicion; Richard has again and again stood up for trust. This is not (as a sceptic might suppose) a matter of blind adherence to dogma. It has nothing to do with ignoring counter-arguments or awkward evidence. This is scholarship at its best. A new generation, looking to Richard Hays for such a lead, has taken courage and is making its way into new and creative areas.

 

TWO vignettes illustrate all this. At the Society of New Testament Studies annual meeting in 1998, Richard presented a paper which, against the then popular view that the Corinthians had understood Paul’s eschatological teaching only too well and had embraced an over-realised eschatology which Paul then had to oppose, argued that in fact Paul was trying to teach the Corinthians to think Jewishly, rather than fit the gospel into their existing Hellenistic categories; and particularly to think of themselves as the renewed people of God, to reshape their identity in the light of Israel’s scriptures.

As we left the session, I bumped into an old friend who had taught 1 Corinthians for many years. “There are some conference papers”, he said, “that make you go away and change a few footnotes here and there. There are others that make you tear up your entire lecture-course and start again.”

 

AND then, at the Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting in 2016, a panel discussed Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels. The session was memorable for many things, not least when Richard illustrated the ways in which poetic texts could be adapted to new situations by modifying the end of Yeats’s “The Second Coming” so that it now read:
 

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Washington to be inaugurated?
 

which, in the light of recent years, turns out to have been more than a little prophetic. But the most dramatic moment came when one of the participants pressed Richard as to why, in a work of careful scholarship, he had allowed himself to wear his heart so obviously on his sleeve. Having argued carefully throughout his book that all four Evangelists, each in his own way, really does claim that Jesus was, and is, the embodiment of Israel’s God, he had concluded: “Either that is true, or it is not. If it is not, the Gospels are a delusional and pernicious distortion of Israel’s story. If it is true, then the figural literary unity of Scripture, Old Testament and New together, is nothing other than the climactic fruition of that one God’s self-revelation. As readers, we are forced to choose which of these hermeneutical forks in the road we will take” (Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels, Baylor University Press, 2018).

Most people present knew that Richard had suffered a seriously life-threatening illness in the second half of 2015, and that he had made a truly remarkable recovery. But the book had been completed when the likely prognosis was very grim. Richard’s response thus challenged those present — participants in the often avowedly “secular” academy of “biblical literature” — as to what these texts are really all about. “When I wrote that section,” Richard replied firmly, “I thought it might well be the last thing I would ever write.”

Happily, it wasn’t. But that example gave fresh heart to many who were hoping and intending to follow Richard in a life-path that would bring faith and scholarship together with full integrity, and work at the many questions that would then arise. Richard’s example, in life as in scholarship, has pointed the way and given hope.

 

The Rt Revd Dr N. T. Wright is Professor Emeritus of New Testament and Early Christianity, in the University of St Andrews, and Senior Research Fellow of Wycliffe Hall, Oxford.

This is adapted from the foreword to A Scribe Trained for the Kingdom of Heaven: Essays on Christology and ethics in honor of Richard B. Hays, edited by David Moffitt and Isaac Morales (Fortress Academic, 2021).

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