Reviews of Richard Hays Book- Moral Vision of the New Testament

The Moral Vision of the New Attestation, Richard B Hays, 1996

In 1996, the year that this book was published, I was a student at Bible College.  One of the papers I studied that year was Theological Ethics.  I wish that this book had been available to me during that class; it would accept made studying both ethics and hermeneutics (Biblical estimation) much more than interesting and relevant.

Richard Hays seeks to describe a framework for New Testament ideals within which moral judgements tin be made (p6).  To this end, he begins by surveying the New Testament pedagogy on what is a moral life.  Hays looks into the teaching of Paul, the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, John, Luke and the volume of Acts, plus Revelation.  At that place is near 200 pages of material in this section of the book and it is well worth reading for its sensitive treatment of each New Attestation author's purpose in writing, their audience, the context in which they are writing, and how these things shape their emphases on what is the moral life.  This section is a superb example of expert hermeneutics; I commented to a friend that the book could be used as a hermeneutics text and he said that is exactly what it was used for in the seminary he attended.

But to go dorsum to the chief topic, Hays manages to synthesise this broad range of upstanding fabric into iii focal images: Community, Cross and New Creation.

Customs:

The church building is a counter-culture community of discipleship, and this customs is the primary addressee of God's imperatives.

The coherence of the New Attestation's ethical mandate will come into focus only when we understand that mandate in ecclesial terms, when we seek God's will not by asking showtime, "What should I do," but "What should we do?"

Cantankerous:

Jesus' expiry on a cantankerous is the epitome for faithfulness to God in this earth.

The customs expresses and experiences the presence of the kingdom of God by participating in "the koinonia of his sufferings" (Phil. 3: ten). Jesus' death is consistently interpreted in the New Testament as an act of self-giving love, and the community is consistently called to have upwardly the cross and follow in the way that his death defines.

The image of the cross should not exist used by those who hold power in order to ensure the amenable suffering of the powerless. Instead, the New Testament insists that the customs equally a whole is called to follow in the manner of Jesus' suffering. The New Testament writers consistently use the pattern of the cantankerous precisely to call those who possess power and privilege to give up information technology for the sake of the weak (see, east.thousand., Mark 10: 42– 45, Rom. fifteen: one– 3, 1 Cor. 8: one– xi: 1).

New Creation

The church embodies the power of the resurrection in the midst of a not-even so-redeemed world.

The eschatological framework of life in Christ imparts to Christian beingness its strange temporal sensibility, its odd capacity for simultaneous joy amidst suffering and impatience with things as they are.

In Christ, we know that the powers of the old age are doomed , and the new creation is already appearing. Yet at the same time, all attempts to assert the unqualified presence of the kingdom of God stand under judgment of the eschatological reservation: not earlier the time, not withal. Thus, the New Testament'due south eschatology creates a critical framework that pronounces judgment upon our complacency as well as upon our presumptuous despair. Equally often every bit we eat the bread and drinkable the cup, we proclaim the Lord'southward death… until he comes. Inside that anomalous hope-filled interval, all the New Testament writers work out their understandings of God's volition for the community.

These 3 focal images allow usa to brand ethical decisions that are consistent with the New Testament moral teaching.  Yet, upstanding decisions do not residuum on the Biblical teaching alone.  Almost people would recognize that tradition, reason and feel are also sources of authority when someone makes an ethical choice.  How, then, has the subject area of ethics really been skillful?  Hays surveys the ethical methods of the leading Christian ethicists of the twenty^thursday century: Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Barth, John Howard Yoder, Stanley Hauerwas, and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza.  This is some other section of the volume worth reading, particularly if you are someone who has read one or more of these authors and want some insight into their method and ethical point of view.

Non surprisingly, Hays finds that each of these ethicists have their ain emphasis and methodology, which shapes the outcome of their ideals.  While Hays prefers some more than others, none of them is completely satisfactory; yet all of them accept something to offer.  Hays and then lays out the post-obit x points as guidelines for doing ethics.

1. Serious exegesis is a basic requirement. Texts used in upstanding arguments should be understood as fully equally possible in their historical and literary context. New Testament texts must be read with careful attention to their Old Testament subtexts.
2. We must seek to listen to the full range of canonical witnesses.
3. Substantive tensions within the canon should be openly best-selling.
4. Our constructed reading of the New Testament canon must be kept in balance past the sustained utilise of three focal images: community, cantankerous, and new creation.
5. New Attestation texts must be granted authorisation (or not) in the way in which they speak (i.east., rule, principle, paradigm, symbolic world). All four modes are valid and necessary. Nosotros should non override the witness of the New Testament in one way by appealing to some other mode.
6. The New Attestation is fundamentally the story of God's redemptive action; thus, the paradigmatic style has theological primacy, and narrative texts are fundamental resource for normative ethics.
7. Extra-biblical sources (i.east. tradition, reason and experience) stand in a hermeneutical relation to the New Attestation; they are not independent, counterbalancing sources of authorisation.
8. Information technology is incommunicable to distinguish "timeless truth" from "culturally conditioned elements" in the New Attestation.
9. The utilise of the New Testament in normative ideals requires an integrative deed of the imagination; thus, whenever we appeal to the authorisation of the New Testament, we are necessarily engaged in metaphor-making.
10. Right reading of the New Testament occurs merely where the Word is embodied.

In point ix, Richard hays says that NT Ideals requires an integrative deed of imagination in metaphor making.  Here's a lengthy quote that illustrates what he means.

Metaphors are incongruous conjunctions of 2 images— or two semantic fields—that turn out, upon reflection, to exist like one another in ways not ordinarily recognized. They shock united states into thought by positing unexpected analogies— analogies that could not be discerned within conventional categories of knowledge. Thus, metaphors reshape perception. For example, when the Gospel of John presents Jesus every bit proverb, "I am the living bread that came downward from sky" (John six: 51a), the message jolts his hearers, who are looking for him to play the role of Moses by providing them with miraculous bread to eat (half dozen: 30– 31). Jesus' striking response refuses the identification with Moses and posits instead a metaphorical conjunction between himself and the manna that fed the Israelites in the wilderness. The metaphor chop-chop takes a gruesome plough when Jesus goes on to say, "[ T] he bread that I will give for the life of the world is my mankind," and affirms that "those who eat my flesh and drink my blood take eternal life" (six: 51b, 54a). At one level, the metaphorical shock induces the reader to confront the scandal of John's merits that "the Give-and-take became flesh." (Indeed, the statement that the Word became mankind strikingly illustrates the ability of metaphor to "mutilate our world of meanings" and create a new framework for perception.)  On another level, the metaphor leads the reader to make the imaginative connection between the Exodus story and the church's Eucharist, with the flesh of Jesus equally the startling common term. The hearer of such a metaphor is confronted by 2 options. We can have offense at this jarring conjunction of images, as did those disciples who went away murmuring, "This teaching is difficult; who can take information technology?" (John 6: 60). Or, alternatively, we can "understand" the metaphor. To "sympathize" information technology, notwithstanding, is to stand under its authority, to permit our life and perception of reality to be changed in lite of the "ontological flash" 14 created past the metaphorical conjunction, and then that we confess with Peter, "Lord, to whom [else] can nosotros go? You have the words of eternal life" (half-dozen: 68).

The metaphorical process tin occur not only at the level of the individual image or sentence but besides at the higher level of the story, as we see in the parables of the synoptic Gospels.  Luke'southward parable of the quack manager (Luke 16: i– 9), for example, offers an unsettling narrative of a shrewd operator who, on the verge of beingness fired past his master, ingratiates himself with the master'south debtors by settling their accounts at a dramatic disbelieve. In the parable's surprise punchline , the primary, rather than being still more furious at the manager, commends him for his savvy dealings! We readers, expecting that the parable will end with a tidy moral condemnation of the quack manager, are caught off guard and forced to reconsider our agreement of the moral lodge of things. Why does the main not condemn the retainer? Perhaps information technology is considering he recognized that the moment of judgment was at hand and acted decisively, just as the hearers of Jesus' message of the kingdom of God are chosen to respond decisively rather than continuing with concern as usual. Our discomfort with this determination to the tale forces united states of america to recognize our affinity with the priggish older blood brother in the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15: 11– 32), which immediately precedes the parable of the quack manager in Luke's story. Like the older brother, we stand offended outside the celebration if we continue to insist that people ought to go what is coming to them. To "empathise" these parables is to exist changed by them, to have our vision of the world reshaped by them. To "empathise" them is to enter the process of reflecting virtually how our lives ought to change in response to the gospel— a gospel that unsettles what we "know" nearly responsibility and ideals.

A similar reorientation of our perceptions occurs— on an even larger calibration— when we read and come up to "understand" the Gospels, with their story of a crucified Messiah. This story is "a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the chosen, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God" (i Cor. 1: 23– 24). The fundamental task of New Attestation ideals is to call usa again and over again to encounter our lives shattered and shaped anew past "reading" them in metaphorical juxtaposition with this story.

Equally Steven J. Kraftchick has summarized the matter, "Metaphor is a mode of creating dissonance of thought in order to restructure meaning relationships."  That is what the New Testament, read metaphorically in conjunction with our feel of the world , does. The world we know —or thought we knew— is reconfigured when nosotros "read" it in counterpoint with the New Testament. The hermeneutical task is to relocate our contemporary feel on the map of the New Testament'south story of Jesus. By telling u.s. a story that overturns our conventional means of seeing the globe, the New Testament provides the images and categories in light of which the life of our community (the metaphorical "target domain") is reinterpreted.

The temporal gap between the get-go-century Christians and Christians at the finish of the twentieth century can be bridged simply by a spark of imagination. How does this piece of work of imaginative correlation inform the formation of normative judgments in New Attestation ethics? Let united states of america consider a few examples.

When we read the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16 :19– 31), we are moved to reimagine our lives in light of this story. The parable is told, according to Luke, to Pharisees scoffing at Jesus' teaching because they "were lovers of money" (Luke 16: xiv), but when nosotros read the text metaphorically, we hear it as told to us. This imaginative reading does not depend upon a ane-to-one emblematic interpretation of characters and elements in the story; rather, a metaphorical stupor occurs when we come across our own economical practices projected side by side with those of the rich man who ignored poor Lazarus at his door. His fate of being tormented in the flames of Hades becomes a stern warning to us. Nosotros come away haunted by Abraham'due south sorry declaration about the brothers that the rich homo left behind: "If they practice not mind to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead." Does that become a give-and-take of warning for united states who stand on this side of Jesus' resurrection? The Discussion leaps the gap.

The account of the early Jerusalem community in Acts two: 42– 47 and four: 32– 37 provides a positive image, rather than a negative warning, for the church. But the normative function of this narrative is still metaphorical in the sense that I am describing: in this text, nosotros are given neither rules for community life nor economic principles; instead, nosotros are given a story that calls us to consider how in our ain communities we might live analogously, how our own economic practices might powerfully bear witness to the resurrection so that those who subsequently write our story might say, "And corking grace was upon them all." The Word leaps the gap.

Such metaphorical mappings of the biblical stories onto our lives do not require us to imitate the narrated practices point for point or to repristinate ancient economic conventions in item.  (Indeed, one of the salient characteristics of metaphor is its power to sustain the tension of simultaneous likeness and unlikeness between the semantic fields that are joined metaphorically.)  Rather, the metaphorical conjunction betwixt the narrated church of Acts 2 and 4 and the church that we experience unsettles our "commonsense" view of economic reality and calls u.s. to rethink our practices in radical means.

This sort of metaphorical hermeneutic pervades Scripture itself. Consider the use that Paul makes of the story of Israel in the wilderness in 1 Corinthians 10. Writing to Gentile believers in Corinth, Paul spins a startling metaphor that links the wilderness events with the situation of Corinthians who are wrestling with the effect of whether to swallow meat that has been sacrificed to idols; presumably, some of them justify the do on the grounds that their participation in baptism and the Lord'southward Supper makes them immune to baleful spiritual influence. But Paul adopts a metaphorical reading strategy to induce a more than circuitous reflection about the problem:

Our ancestors were all nether the cloud,

and all passed through the bounding main, and all were baptized into Moses[!]

in the cloud and in the ocean,

and all ate the aforementioned spiritual food,

and all drank the aforementioned spiritual potable…

Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them,

and they were struck downwardly in the wilderness. (ten: 1– 5)

The metaphorical interaction here of the Exodus story and the Corinthian situation is complex. First, Paul rereads Israel'due south story anachronistically in terms of Christian symbolism, reading the sacraments back into the narrative; withal, the hermeneutical logic and then reverses direction equally Paul reads the church's dangerous situation in terms of the fate that befell Israel: "Are we [i.e., we also] provoking the Lord to jealousy ?" (one Cor. x: 22a; cf. Deut. 32: 21). Thus, the metaphorical conjunction between State of israel and the Corinthian situation provides the warrant for the moral judgment that Paul calls the Corinthians to make: Therefore, my beloved friends, flee from the worship of idols" (ane Cor. 10: fourteen).

A moment's reflection volition propose that Paul's advice to the Corinthians tin can in plough become a metaphor for our own struggle to resist the temptations of idolatry. (In our case, the idols may tempt u.s.a. with "national security" or sexual fulfillment or tokens of social status rather than with meat.) If and when that metaphorical transfer occurs, the Word leaps the gap from Corinth to America, just as information technology leaped from Exodus to Corinth.

If this sort of metaphorical hermeneutic is fundamental to New Testament ethics, so our normative appeals to Scripture will most often be in the paradigmatic mode or in the mode of symbolic earth structure. Nosotros will seek, nether the inspiration and guidance of the Holy Spirit, to reread our ain lives within the narrative framework of the New Testament, discerning analogies— perhaps startling ones— between the approved stories and our community's situation.

The great difficulty, of course, lies in knowing how to judge the validity of proposed metaphorical appropriations of the New Testament. There are no foolproof procedures. Our metaphorical readings must exist tested prayerfully within the community of organized religion by others who seek God's will forth with us through close reading of the text. The community that seeks to be shaped by Scripture must in the end merits responsibleness for adjudicating between proficient and bad readings. In this book I have proposed one style to exercise this: nosotros must ask whether whatever given estimation is consonant with the fundamental plot of the biblical story as identified by the focal images of community, cantankerous, and new creation.

After all this, Richard Hays gets into the task of applying his method by discussing a selection of ethical issues.  He spends a chapter each on the use of violence in back up of justice, divorce, homosexuality and anti-Judaism.  In each case, it becomes apparent that the 'modes' in which the relevant Biblical texts speak is important (i.e. rule, principle, paradigm, and symbolic earth).  It is worth quoting Hays once again:

New Attestation texts must be granted potency (or non) in the mode in which they speak.  Claims almost the authority of the text must respect not but its content just also its form. The interpreter should non plough narratives into law (for instance, by arguing that Acts two:44–45 requires Christians to own all things in common) or rules into principles (for instance, past suggesting that the commandment to sell possessions and give alms [Luke 12: 33] is not meant literally simply that it points to the principle of inner detachment from wealth). Legalists and antinomians are as guilty of hermeneutical gerrymandering to annex New Testament texts to foreign modes of ethical discourse. Christian preachers, at least since the time of Clement of Alexandria, have preached hundreds of thousands of disastrous sermons that say, in event, "Now the text says x, but of course it couldn't actually mean that, then we must encounter the underlying principle to which information technology points, which is y." Let there be a moratorium on such preaching! The New Testament's ethical imperatives are either normative at the level of their ain claim, or they are invalid.

This hermeneutical guideline has a couple of corollaries. Starting time, we should guard against falling into a habit of reading New Attestation ethical texts in i fashion only. If we read the New Testament and discover simply laws, we are patently enmeshed in grave hermeneutical distortion. Likewise, if we read the New Attestation and detect but timeless moral principles, we are probably guilty, every bit Barth warned, of evading Scripture's specific claims upon our lives. Second, we must be wary of attempts to apply i mode of entreatment to Scripture to override the witness of the New Attestation in some other mode. Niebuhr, every bit we have seen, engages in this sort of hermeneutical trumping of the text in "The Relevance of an Incommunicable Ethical Platonic," when he argues that allegiance to the ideal of honey exemplified in Jesus sometimes requires us to utilise violence to seek justice; thus, adherence to Jesus' love ideal requires rejection (in practise) of Jesus' explicit but unrealistic teaching against violence in the Sermon on the Mount. A community that has been taught to run into the world through Matthew's eyes, yet, will sense that something has gone awry here. In fact, Niebuhr'due south argument is finally a sophisticated dodge of Jesus' call to plush discipleship, assuasive us to call Jesus "Lord, Lord," without doing what he commands. (p.294)

So, what do Hays' 10 guidelines lead him to conclude regarding the upstanding issues he chooses to examine?  Is it upstanding for Christians to utilize violence in pursuit of justice?  No, never.  Is divorce permissible for Christians?  Only in cases of sexual unfaithfulness, concrete abuse, or of a non-Christian spouse who initiates divorce.

What about homosexuality?  Here, Hays says, "It is no more than appropriate for homosexual Christians to persist in homosexual activity than it would be for heterosexual Christians to persist in fornication or adultery. (Insofar as the church building fails to teach clearly about heterosexual chastity exterior of spousal relationship, its disapproval of homosexual coupling will appear arbitrary and biased.) Unless they are able to change their orientation and enter a heterosexual marriage relationship, homosexual Christians should seek to live lives of disciplined sexual abstinence." (p.401).  This is merely one conclusion Richard Hays draws and if this is a hot topic for y'all, then it worth reading the whole chapter to gain an appreciation of his full answer and the sensitive way he deals with the issues and the Biblical texts.

Finally, we turn to the chapter on anti-Judaism, which has an in-depth give-and-take of the attitude towards the Jews in Matthew, Marker, John and Paul's letters.  Hays present the historical circumstances in each instance, helpfully explaining how the context has shaped the various views reflected in the New Attestation.  Richard Hays says that the paradigm presented in Romans 9-eleven is to be taken as prescriptive for the Christian attitude and actions towards Jews considering information technology "about adequately preserves continuity with the larger scriptural story" (p.430) that God has not abandoned his people and will laurels His promises to State of israel.  It is also the most consistent with the iii foci of Community, Cantankerous and New Creation.  The insight that God has not abased any indigenous group is a powerful cosmetic to much of the tribalism and ethnic conflict that I run into in East Africa.

The Moral Vision of the New Testament is a magisterial book and worthy of the accolades it has received.  It provides a very good example of how to handle the Bible with sensitivity and skill.  Richard Hays allows the Bible to speak for itself; he draws the various passages on a topic together into a coherent whole without silencing the difficulties.  This is a bang-up example of skillful hermeneutics leading to Godly ethics.  I like the mode he listens to the individual Biblical authors just also insists that our upstanding decisions and stances must exist consistent with the overall vision of the New Testament for Community, Cross and New Creation.  I highly recommend this book if you're interested in discovering the process to go through to make good Christian upstanding decisions.

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