Hays on the Art of Reading Scripture

Mark Goodacre drew my attention to this write up from Tim Gallant on some lectures by richard b. hays. Richard Hays is Professor of New Testament at Duke University and author of the following very important books: The Faith of Jesus Christ, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul, and The Moral Vision of the New Testament. It's worth checking out the whole post. I really liked this from Hay's second lecture:

Interpreting Scripture is an art. This is both bad news and good. The bad news is that it is difficult to do well. No one expects to pick up a violin on the spur of the moment and play brilliantly, but for some reason, we expect to do something similar with the Bible.

The good news about the artistic character of interpretation, however, is that the art of biblical interpretation carries within it the potential for creating something beautiful. Hays goes so far as to suggest that readings of Scripture ought to be judged by the standards of beauty. He also draws attention to the all-too-pervasive tendency of biblical commentaries to be ugly and boring ...

... In his concluding section, Hays goes on to speak of "Reading Scripture through the eyes of the Evangelists." This entails seven matters:

1. God is the primary agent of the biblical story. (Hays says that in his first semester with new students, he likes to drill into them the notion: "It's about God, stupid!" Contra much "biblical scholarship," Scripture is not merely human reflections upon the divine.)

2. Scripture tells a unified story, from creation to the eschaton.

3. In the words of Hays's colleague David Steinmetz, the Bible must be read both "from front to back" and "from back to front." Neither "end" can be understood apart from the other.

4. Scripture has multipled complex senses, given by God - and some come into focus only retrospectively.

5. We are summoned to a "conversion of the imagination." We must learn not to be literalistic and unimaginative. (Hays recounts the story of a student of Brevard Childs who was labouring hard and long on everything, and only getting B's. Finally, he went to Childs and asked what it took to get an A. Reportedly Childs said: "Become a more interesting person.")

6. The story is open-ended, unfinished. Hays cites the endings of the Gospels and Acts, which are characterized by lack of "closure." Thus the readers are invited into an ongoing process.

7. Scripture is rightly read in communities of prayer, service, and witness - in other words: not from a position of supposed "objective neutrality." Such a position is doomed to sterility and misunderstanding.

Hays also notes what is requisite to all of this. We must get to know the texts "by heart," in its most extensive sense. Only immersion in the Scriptures made it possible for the Evangelists to write as they did; and likewise, only such immersion in the Scriptures will enable us to understand them. It was due to that immersion that the Evangelists were able to re-narrate the story of Jesus for the contexts which they addressed; we too have that same goal of re-narrating Jesus' story to our contexts, and therefore require a similar immersion.

Comments

[Brodie]

Andy - what's your understanding of "multipled complex senses ....and some come into focus only retrospectively"?

[andy goodliff]

Good question. You can hear Hays spell out his theory by hearing the actual lecture given in New Zealand The 2004 Burns Lectures (the username is "theology", password "hays" - not sure if that is meant to be public!). He gives the example of when Matthew uses the words 'out of Egypt I have called you' (matt 2:15) from Hosea (11:1), who in turn is referring to the story of the Exodus - Hosea is using it to mean a new exodus is happening, and matthew is writing a new layer of meaning, by reinterpreting it with Jesus. Of course Hosea didn't have in mind Jesus, but the text is open to introduce Jesus and so link the whole story together from Exodus, Israel to Jesus - we can do this only retrospectively. I think Hays is saying, that something for example like the theme of Exodus plays out throughout the whole biblical narrative. He says: there is an 'extension of meaning from the exodus story into another book of Israel's scripture, through to Jesus in the gospels and on into the life of the church'. Hays is very into hearing the Old Testament in the New Testament and seeing the links between both - the OT needs the NT to finish the story, the NT needs the OT to understand what is happening and this is all given by God. Not sure if that all makes sense.

[Laurence]

I found that a very sympathetic analysis - but then I do tend to approach religious text from the point of view of a painter, so maybe I would say so. The stories are incredibley imaginative, and have so much continuous scope for finding our own story in the light of enagement...

[Brodie]

Andy - thanks for answering my question, it makes sence now! Cheers.