Christianity Today Book Award in Biblical Studies (2021) “All these essays illustrate, in one way or another, how I have sought to carry out scholarly work as an aspect of discipleship
Christianity Today Book Award in Biblical Studies (2021)
“All these essays illustrate, in one way or another, how I have sought to carry out scholarly work as an aspect of discipleship—as a process of faith seeking exegetical clarity.”
Richard Hays has been a giant in the field of New Testament studies since the 1989 publication of his Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul. His most significant essays of the past twenty-five years are now collected in this volume, representing the full fruition of major themes from his body of work:
- the importance of narrative as the “glue” that holds the Bible together
- the figural coherence between the Old and New Testaments
- the centrality of the resurrection of Jesus
- the hope for New Creation and God’s eschatological transformation of the world
- the importance of standing in trusting humility before the text
- the significance of reading Scripture within and for the community of faith
Readers will find themselves guided toward Hays’s “hermeneutic of trust” rather than the “hermeneutic of suspicion” that has loomed large in recent biblical studies.
“Richard Hays is arguably the most significant American New Testament scholar and theological interpreter of Scripture of the last half-century. Many of the essays in this wide-ranging collection have been groundbreaking and discipline-shaping. Each one is highly perceptive both exegetically and theologically, for those dimensions of interpretation merge seamlessly in these exemplary pieces of rigorous scholarship as Christian discipleship. For many years I have told students and colleagues to read everything that Richard Hays writes; accomplishing that satisfying task is now much easier.”
— Michael J. Gorman
St. Mary’s Seminary & University, Baltimore
“This fine collection of essays represents the work of an outstanding scholar at the top of his game—intellectually rigorous, wide-ranging, and full of profound reflections that will enrich all those engaged in the theological interpretation of Scripture.”
— John M. G. Barclay
Durham University
“Richard B. Hays opens this volume by modestly invoking Jesus’s parable about wheat and weeds growing together. But readers of Reading with the Grain of Scripture—and there will be many—will likely invoke a later line from Matthew 13: the scribe trained for the kingdom of heaven who ‘brings out of the treasure both what is new and what is old.’ Here we see both the abiding concerns of Hays’s career and their recent inflection in a volume that takes us across the canon of the New Testament and into the life of this fine interpreter. A most welcome contribution!”
— Beverly Roberts Gaventa
Baylor University
“This is a veritable feast for those of us who’ve followed Richard Hays’s work over the years. This collection of wide-ranging essays touches on all the major themes of Richard’s exegetical and theological work. A great introduction for those still unfamiliar, a deeper dive for the devoted followers.”
— Gary A. Anderson
University of Notre Dame
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Richard B. Hays is George Washington Ivey Professor Emeritus of New Testament and former dean at Duke Divinity School. He is internationally recognized for his work on the letters of Paul and New Testament ethics. His book The Moral Vision of the New Testament was selected by Christianity Today as one of the 100 most important religious books of the twentieth century.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: Gathering the Wheat
Part One: Interpretation
1. Narrative Interpretation and the Quest for Theological Unity
2. Reading Scripture with Eyes of Faith
3. Reading Scripture in Light of the Resurrection
4. Figural Interpretation of Israel’s Story
Part Two: Historical Jesus
5. Rebranding Jesus and the Pitfalls of Entrepreneurial Criticism
6. Story, History, and the Quest for Jesus
7. Catholic Tradition and the Quest for Jesus
8. A Modest Sketch of Jesus of Nazareth
Part Three: Paul
9. Christology: Paul’s Story of God’s Son
10. Soteriology: Christ Died for the Ungodly
11. Apocalyptic: New Creation Poetics in Galatians
12. Pneumatology: The Spirit in Romans 8
13. Gospel: For Gentiles Only?
14. Israel: Hope for What We Do Not Yet See
15. Paul, Acts, and Early Christian Proclamation
Part Four: New Testament Theology
16. Christology: Jesus in the Apocalypse of John
17. Covenant: New Covenantalism in Hebrews
18. Humanity: Bultmann’s Misreading of Pauline Anthropology
19. Law: Whose World Is It, Anyway?
20. Confession: Romans and the Nicene Creed
21. Eschatology: “Why Do You Stand Looking Up into Heaven?”
Conclusion: A Hermeneutic of Trust
Epilogue: Dark Fruition—Waiting in Hope
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