I have enjoyed reading some of Richard Hays' earlier works (I've read parts of The Moral Vision of the New Testament and he has a very good 1 Corinthians commentary in the Interpretation series), so I decided to plunge into a collection of his essays written at different moments in his career in Reading with the Grain of Scripture. Hays is a United Methodist who recently retired from teaching. He became an influential interpreter of Paul and a significant New Testament scholar. He taught at both Yale and Duke. Probably the main ideas that stood out to me are how Christians should read the OT analogically as pointing to Jesus and the Spirit, his approach to hermeneutics, and some of his takes on Paul. I'm posting below quotes from the book that stood out to me. This is definitely a Bible nerd sort of book, so folks who've been through seminary might find these quotes more palatable.
On trying to separate biblical study from the church and take it entirely into the academy:
Here is the point I’m leading to. […] …the intense academic study of the Bible really is not important outside of faith communities. […] As Robert Jenson has incisively remarked, “outside the church, no such entity as the Christian Bible has any reason to exist.” The Bible is a collection of documents gathered by and for the church to aid in preserving and proclaiming the church’s message. Therefore, “the question, after all, is not whether churchly reading of Scripture is justified; the question is, what could possibly justify any other?” (p. 34; quoting Robert Jenson’s “Scripture’s Authority in the Church”).
On how resurrection informs Christian interpretation of the OT:
(3) The NT resurrection accounts teach us to read the OT as Christian Scripture. To read it in this way, as we have noted, does not mean to deny its original historical sense, nor does it preclude responsible historical criticism. Christians have a stake in seeking the most historically careful readings of the OT texts that we can attain. At the same time, however, in light of the NT’s witness, we cannot confine the meaning of the OT to the literal sense understood by its original authors and readers, for these ancient texts have been taken up into a new story that amplifies and illumines their meaning in unexpected ways. The NT writers insist that we are to read Israel’s story as a witness to the righteousness of God, climactically disclosed in Jesus Christ. They insist that Israel’s Scriptures, understood in the fullest and deepest way, prefigures Jesus. This claim, of course, has important implications for Jewish-Christian dialogue. I would suggest that the goal of such dialogue should be not “tolerance” but respectful controversy between communities that make competing and partly incompatible claims about the meaning of Israel’s story. In any case, the stories we have considered here show emphatically that a hermeneutic of resurrection will not treat the OT as superseded or obsolete. It has an indispensable role in bearing witness to the gospel. (4) Reading in light of the resurrection is figural reading. Because the OT’s pointers to the resurrection are indirect and of a symbolic character, the resurrection teaches us to read for figuration and latent sense. The Sadducees were literalists, but God seems to have delighted in veiled anticipations of the gospel. For that reason, resurrection is the enemy of textual literalism. Or, more precisely, resurrection reconfigures the literal sense of Scripture by catalyzing new readings that destabilize entrenched interpretations: the resurrection stories teach us always to remain alert to analogical possibilities and surprises. Resurrection-informed reading sees the life-giving power of God manifested and prefigured in unexpected ways throughout Scripture. It would therefore be a mistake to catalog, say, all the explicitly christological readings of OT texts in Luke-Acts and suppose that we had thereby exhausted the hermeneutical possibilities for understanding Scripture’s witness to Jesus Christ. On the contrary, the Jesus who taught the disciples on the Emmaus road that all the Scriptures bore witness to him continues to teach us to discover figural senses of Scripture that are not developed in the NT (pp. 64-65).
The cross in Paul's theology and writing:
Thus, for Paul, there is no right knowledge of the identity of Jesus apart from the cross. That is why he tells the Corinthians he “decided to know nothing among them except Jesus Christ, and him crucified” (1 Cor 2:2). Paul’s struggles with rival preachers often turned precisely on this issue: the super-apostles in Corinth were preaching a powerful, glorious, rhetorically polished Jesus rather than a crucified Lord; the rival missionaries in Galatia sought to avoid persecution and remove “the offense of the cross” by preaching circumcision (Gal 5:11; 6:12); and in Philippians, Paul derides his adversaries as “enemies of the cross of Christ” (Phil 3:18). Whether by precept or by example, these other early Christians were proclaiming “another Jesus” because they were not allowing the crucifixion to stand at the heart of their account of his identity. Paul, on the other hand, returns again and again to the cross as the touchstone of his interpretation of Jesus’s identity (see, e.g., 1 Cor 1:23-24, 30; 2 Cor 13:4; Gal 3:1; 6:14; Phil 2:8; Col 1:20) (p. 158).
Jews and Gentiles, Continuity and Discontinuity:
(1) God the Father acts freely and graciously to rescue his people, in a totally unexpected way, to create a new covenant community of the “sons of God.” This new community is continuous with the covenant community of Israel reaching all the way back to Abraham yet at the same time is discontinuous in its surprising inclusion of gentiles as God’s sons and daughters. The relation between continuity and discontinuity is worked out through scriptural exegesis that demonstrates how God’s unexpected action was prefigured and promised in Israel’s Scripture, whose true original sense is now at last disclosed through the apocalypse of Jesus Christ. This complex retrospective hermeneutical reconfiguration of the “Israel of God” [Gal 6:16] complicates any attempt at simple judgment about whether Paul is or is not a supersessionist. A corollary of this point is that Pauline interpreters ought to quit lobbing the accusation of “supersessionism” at one another (p. 199).
Paul's Use of Polemics and Bracing Critique:
(3) Paul is not afraid of polemic. I offer this observation with some trepidation, because in some sectors of the church there is already all too great a readiness to adopt a polemical tone similar to Paul’s brutally undiplomatic “O brainless Galatians, who has bewitched you?” (3:1). But I equally suspect that in other theological circles–and certainly in many approaches to pastoral care and preaching–the default tone has instead become one of unconditional, nonjudgmental inclusivity, a tone that greets any and all opinions and practices with tepid, suffocating tolerance. To the extent that this is an accurate diagnosis of a certain malaise in “mainstream” Protestantism, Galatians may come as a bracing blast of fresh air, with its uncompromising call: “Stand firm, … and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (5:1). Galatians reminds us that there are times when the truth of the gospel really is at stake, when we must not yield submission even for a moment to forces that would compromise or undermine the liberating message of Jesus Christ. The difficult task, of course, is to discern when those times are at hand, and when we are confronting a status confessionis (p. 202).
In the following long quote, Hays is offering some positive evaluations of NT Wright’s interpretation of Romans 11:25-27. I have not included some questions and critiques he poses later.
(3) Gentile believers “come in” to Israel. When Paul writes of the fullness of the gentiles “coming in” prior to the salvation of all Israel, into what does he expect them to come? Wright answers that they are to come in to Israel, precisely as the olive-tree metaphor in 11:17-24 has indicated. As wild olive branches they are grafted onto the tree, which is undoubtedly a symbol for Israel. This image is fully consistent with Paul’s well-attested theological conviction that his gentile converts have been taken up into the story of Israel. Paul insists that Abraham is the father of circumcised and uncircumcised alike (Rom 4). In his view, the non-Jewish Christians at Corinth “used to be Gentiles” (1 Cor 12:2), but now they are to regard Moses and the people of Israel in the wilderness as “our forefathers” (1 Cor 10:1-4). As Wright compellingly observes, gentile believers in Jesus have, in Paul’s view, received circumcision of the heart and can now rightly be described as “Jews” (Rom 2:25-29); accordingly, Paul can encourage his Philippian converts who “worship in the Spirit of God” and confess Jesus as Messiah to join him in declaring “we…are the circumcision” (Phil 3:3). In light of such texts, it also seems highly likely that when Paul invokes a blessing on “the Israel of God” (Gal 6:16), he is referring to all those, gentile and Jew alike, who share a common identity in Christ (Gal 3:26-29).
(4) Paul’s kinspeople, the Jewish people, can find salvation only through confessing Jesus Messiah as Lord. There is no separate dispensation for Jews apart from Christ. Paul has insistently argued throughout Romans that “there is no distinction” between Jew and gentile with respect to God’s saving action. This is the whole burden of Rom 1-4. The righteousness of God is revealed through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ for all who trust in him (Rom 3:21-24). And, in case his readers may have forgotten the point, he hammers it home again in Rom 10:9-13: everyone who confesses that Jesus is Lord and believes that God has raised him from the dead will be saved (v. 9). Precisely with respect to this point “there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord [Jesus] is Lord of all” (v. 12). Thus, whatever Rom 11:26-27 means, it cannot mean there is a Sonderwag, a separate path of salvation for Israel–or for some part of Israel–apart from trusting in the one whom Paul proclaims to be Israel’s Messiah. That is why Paul anguished over many of his own kinspeople who have not accepted the gospel (9:1-5), and that is why he continues to pray earnestly “that they may be saved” (10:1)–surely meaning that they may not “remain in unbelief” (11:23).
(5) The meaning of kai houtÅs (11:26a) is “and thus”–not “and then.” It refers to manner, not temporal sequence. In other words, it points back to the events summarized in verse 25 (the hardening of a part of Israel and the incoming of a plenitude of gentiles to stir Israel to jealousy) as the surprising manner in which the salvation of “all Israel” will occur. As Wright puts it, “and that, the entire sequence of 11.11-24, summed up in 11.25, is how ‘all Israel’ will be saved” [Quote from pg. 1241 of Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God].
(6) “All Israel” means the one people of God, composed of Jews and gentiles who have come to place their trust in Jesus Messiah. The cumulative force of the previous five points leads almost inescapably to Wright’s conclusion that “all Israel” in Rom 11:26a is Paul’s way of describing the whole people of God, the whole body of those who confess Jesus as Messiah and Lord, and thereby find salvation within the christologically reconfigured covenant with Israel’s God. […] Wright notes that Paul had, significantly, launched this whole train of argument in 9:6 with the declaration that “not all who are from Israel are Israel. […] And Paul further insists that it is “the children of promise” who are truly reckoned as the “seed” of Abraham (9:8). We should not forget that in Galatians he had argued vehemently that the uncircumcised gentile believers in Galatia were precisely among the “children of the promise” (Gal 4:28), Abraham’s heirs. Thus, for Paul to include Jewish and gentile Christians together under the designation “Israel” is fully consistent with deep currents in his theology (pp. 243-245).
Here Hays cites Paul’s use of Abraham in Romans 4:18-21 as an example for how to interpret Scripture, particularly in opposition to a hermeneutic of suspicion. It is a good quote with which to end.
This passage is particularly interesting because Abraham’s pistis [faith] is interpreted explicitly as his trust in God’s promise despite its incongruence with Abraham’s own experience of sterility and frustration. Abraham might have had good reason to exercise a hermeneutic of suspicion toward the divine word that had promised him numerous descendants, for all the empirical evidence–his experience–seemed to disconfirm God’s word. Yet he did not: “no apistia,” no suspicion, “made him waver.” Abraham was not a simpleton who failed to see the tension between his experience and the word that God had spoken to him. He had to wrestle with doubts and–indeed–with the extinction of all human hope for normal progeny. This wrestling is clearer in the Genesis narrative, where Abraham openly questions God (see Gen 15:2-3; 16:1-16; 17:17-18; for Sarah’s doubts see 18:12-15), than in Paul’s brief summary. Nonetheless, according to Paul, Abraham discounted his own experience, rejected skepticism, and clung to the promise of God “who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” Rom 4:17); therefore, “it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” Thus, Abraham becomes the prototype of the community of faith, which interprets all human experience through trust in God’s word: in short, Abraham exemplifies a hermeneutic of consent, a hermeneutic of trust. (In this respect he is like Mary, who asks suspiciously, “How can this be?” but in the end submits herself to the word of promise: “Let it be with me according to your word,” Luke 1:34, 38). A trusting hermeneutic is essential for all who believe the word of the resurrection but still see the creation groaning in bondage to decay and do not yet see death made subject to God. The hermeneutics of trust turns out to be, on closer inspection, a hermeneutics of death and resurrection–a way of seeing the whole world through the lens of the kerygma. Our reliance on God entails a death to common sense, and our trust is validated only by the resurrection (pp. 395-396).
