Resenhas
Conversion of the Imagination, The
The author generally does well at explaining the text in its context, locating the Corinthian Christians in their Greco-Roman context. His reconstruction of a group of well-to-do and more "spiritual" group as those who are often critiqued by Paul is reasonable, and makes good sense of the text in man places (especially the last half of 1 Corinthians 11 and in 1 Corinthians 15). Many of his application points for preaching and teaching are apt.
At some points, though, the author strains credulity. His position on 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 is not nearly as circumspect as most of his other positions. He at least tries to make sense of 1 Corinthians 11:3-16 in context, but has little by means of application.
Overall a good resource to consider when exploring 1 Corinthians.
This book is the result of that 2010 conference. Half is about Jesus, the other half about Paul. Each half contains papers written by various theologians, each one briefly responded to by Wright. Then, at the end of each major section, Wright wrote a new paper about the current state of Jesus and Pauline studies.
Any book with this many contributors is bound to be a mixed bag, and that's certainly the case here. Some contributors reminded me of that guy in the lecture that insisted on asking questions solely to demonstrate his own wisdom. So be it. Over all, the papers were stimulating, thoughtful, and readable—in the spirit of Wright's style of doing theology.
Perhaps the most exciting part of the book was the last paper by Wright on the state of Pauline studies. As you may know, Wright is in the process of writing book four in his Christian Origins and the Question of God series on Paul. By the sounds of it, he has chosen to start with Philemon and ecclesiology, topics usually found closer to the appendix of a Pauline theology.
These papers, by their nature, assume a basic understanding of Wright's theology. They are excellent reading for anyone who has studied N. T. Wright's work.
(22 juli, 2011, voorbereiding preek Matth 5,38-48)
Episcopale kerk in Washington, raam met tekst: 'Getuigenis voor de jongens van de parochie die dienden in de Grote Oorlog'. De kerk beweent en viert z'n doden?
Vraag: is het passend voor hen die de Goede Herder volgen, dodelijke wapens opnemen? Of breder: is het ooit Gods wil om geweld te gebruiken om gerechtigheid te doen geschieden? Het NT zegt nee, christelijk getuigenis meent 'ja'. Kun je Bonnhoeffer aanvoeren omdat hij meewerkte aan een plot om Hitler te vermoorden? Augustinus, Stad van God: geweld is toegestaan voor de bewaring van de orde.
Wat te denken van een christelijk protest tegen een concert van Ozzy Osbourne vanwege anti-christelijke waarden? Hoort dit ook niet bij de trek van de mens om de wil aan een ander op te leggen door geweld?
Andere voorbeelden hoe christenen geweld gesanctioneerd hebben:
-ethnische zuivering van Bosnische moslims bij christelijke Bosniers;
-Servische priesters die militairen zegenden toen die terugkwamen van moord-en=plunder acties;
-katholieke priester die voor de piloot de mis opdraagt die op punt stond naar Nagasaki te vliegen (blz 318-319).
Matth 5,38-48:
Uitleggers hebben vaak geprobeerd om de kracht van Jezus' woorden weg uit te leggen:
-het gaat hier om een ideale, eschatologische wereld;
-het gaat om een interim-ethiek omdat de wederkomst snel zou komen;
-deze woorden verbieden zelfverdediging, maar gaan niet in tegen het verdedigen van een onschuldige derde;
-deze woorden gaan alleen over ver-gevorderde christenen;
-deze woorden tonen ons hoe onmogelijk het is om Gods geboden te gehoorzamen.
Bergrede, hoe moeten we die begrijpen?
-dDit is Jezus' ontvouwing van het programma van het KvG - is dit een soort Follow-up van Mozes die vanaf de Berg Gods wet geeft?;
-het onderwijs is voor Jezus' discipelen, zij worden opgeroepen om
te leven volgens de standaard van Gods K in een zondige wereld;
-maar je ziet steeds dat tegenover het gezonde verstand wordt gezet hoe Gods zegen rust op hen die treuren, op hen die vrede stichten. De Bergrede toont de werkelijkheid op zo'n manier dat in Gods ogen de gewone orde van zaken op z'n kop staat;
-hoe verhoudt zich dit tot Jezus' wet?, de gerechtigheid waar Jezus toe oproept intensifeert en gaat uit boven de meest rigoreuze standaard van de Wetgeleerden;
-het gaat niet om een nieuwe morele code, maar om het karakter van een gemeenschap waarin boosheid overwonnen wordt door verzoening, waarin lust door discipline z'n gezonde plek houdt, het huwelijk wordt ge-eerd door trouw, en liefde voor de vijand haat vervangt.
Matth toont hier een countercultural community vrij van boosheid, en geweld. Het overstijgen van geweld door je vijand lief te hebben vormen de kern en het hoogtepunt van het onderwijs.
Het onderwijs van Jezus past in het geheel van Mattheus' evangelie: in 4,1-11 is het Jezus die geen macht wil over de koninkrijken van de aarde, in 16,21-23 / 17,22-23 / 20,17-19 zie je hoe Jezus vertelt dat hij zal leiden als iemand die vervolgd wordt om gerechtigheid, in Gethsemane zie je Jezus worstelen met zijn Vader, maar onderwerpt Hij zich. Yoder: de verleiding om de beker niet te drinken is hetzelfde als kiezen voor weerstand bieden met wapens. Een authentieke interpretatiev van Matth 5,39 is de arrestatie van Jezus. Daarna sterft Jezus, machteloos en bespot.
Als Jezus naar de hemel gaat, zijn zijn laatste woorden: 'Alle macht in hemel en op aarde is aan Mij gegeven, ga daarom heen, maak alle volken tot mijn discipelen...' Doel is: mensen trainen in de disciplines van Jezus.
Daarom is de Bergrede geen onmogelijk ideaal, het is een manier van leven bevolen door Jezus, Die alle macht in hemel en op aarde heeft. Hij woont in de gemeenschap.
Jezus wil niet de belangen verdedigen van de armen en ondedrukten in Palestina, door een opstand tegen de Romeinen te organiseren Hij preekt liefde en laat zich gevangen nemen.
In alle 6 anti-theses van Jezus intensifeert Hij de wet. De wet verbiedt moord, Jezus verbiedt zelfs boosheid, de wet verbiedt overspel, Jezus verbiedt lust.
In Deut 19,15-21 lees je over de straf voor valse getuige. Geen enkele barmhartigheid, de valse getuige moest de straf krijgen die de vals beschuldigde zou krijgen. Toon geen barmhartigheid is de boodschap. Jezus zegt: verzet je niet tegen iemand die je kwaad wil doen. De wwet zocht stabiliteit en recht, Jezus wil tot geweldloosheid aanmoedigen.
Het gaat er niet om dat de gemeenschap passief is, het gaat om daden van dienst. Door meer te doen dan wat de geweldenaar wil, getuigt de discipel van een andere werkelijkheid, waarin vrede, dienst, gulheid, boven zelfverdediging en persoonlijke rechten uitgaan. Het gaat dus niet om regels om acties te voorkomen, het gaat om het karakter van een vredevolle gemeenschap.
Door je vijand lief te hebben toon je het karakter van God/
De antitheses: 'Jullie hebben gehoord dat gezegd is...', vs 21, vs 27, vs 31, vs 33, vs 38 gaan terug op een OT-ische bron. Maar de laatste antothese, vs 43, heeft geen bron, alsof dat moest zijn: 'haat je vijanden'. Waar tegenover plaatst Matth vs 43? Wellicht op Psalm 139. Misschien eerder nog op de wijdverspreide formule: 'doe goed aan je vrienden, haat je vijanden'.
Volgende vraag: wat zijn de vijanden? Persoonlijke vijanden of naar militairen? Nee, het is niet nodig om vijanden te beperken tot een nader te identificeren groep vijanden.
Wat betekent: 'volmaakt', vs 48? Het refereert aan Lev 19,1-2: 'wees heilig want Ik ben heilig' en Deut 18,13: 'je zult volmaakt voor de Heer, je God zijn'. Het gaat erom dat de gemeenschap de heiligheid van God weerspiegelt door radicaal gehoorzaam te zijn.
Matth 5,38-48 onderwijst de norm van geweldloze liefde tot vijanden. De woorden: 'keer je andere wang toe' is meer dan een regel, het gaat om een houding van de discipel.
Wat te denken van Rom 13? Dat gaat over de regering/staat, dat hfdst is niet gericht op de gelovige.
Efez 6,10-20, de gemeente heeft niet te strijden tegen mensen maar tegen geestelijke krachten van de duisternis. De wapens zijn waarheid, gerechtigheid, vrede, geloof, verlossing en Gods Woord.
Hebr 10,32-34: plunderen verdragen met blijdschap i.p.v. met geweld te verzetten.
In Openb 12,11 wordt de gelovige opgeroepen de macht van het kwaad te overwinnen door het bloed van het Lam.
Heel het NT is consistent tegen geweld en een oproep aan de gemeente om het voorbeeld van Jezus te volgen en lijden te aanvaarden i.p.v. het te veroorzaken.
Wat te denken van Matth 10,34? Het zwaard in vs 34 staat voor de scheiding die er zal komen tussen hen die het goede nieuws verkondigen en hen die weigeren het te aanvaarden.
Mag een christen dienen in het leger als soldaat? Luc 3,14-15, soldaten vragen op Johannes de Dopers onderwijs' wat ze moeten doen. Het antwoord is niet dat ze uit het leger zouden moeten vertrekken.
Jezus verwondert zich over het geloof van een centurion, Matth 8,5-13. Een andere centurion is de eerste die Jezus als Heer erkent,Marc 15,39.
Cornelius is de eerste bekeerling in Handelingen, 10,1-11,18.
Dus?, participeren in het leger werd niet gezien als sowieso zondig. Het is ook zo dat de evangelie-en laten zien dat ook soldaten bereikt en geraakt worden door het evangelie. Ze dienen als voorbeelden van hoe het evangelie mensen kan raken, soms in tegenstelling tot hen die God al lang mogen kennen, Matth 21,31.
Er staat geen enkel verbod of afraden in het NT op een taak in het leger, staat dat niet itt de lijn die we zagen, van vrede-stichten?
Het Oude Testament, en heilige oorlog: er staan teksten in het OT die Israel oproepen om vijanden te vermoorden, Num 31. Deut 20,10-18, er mag niemand blijven leven. Zie ook 1 Sam 15,3, het feit dat Saul niet gehoorzaamt, wordt gezien als ongehoorzaamheid. Samuel moet dan Agag voor het altaar aan stukken hakken. In de traditie zijn dit soort teksten gebruikt om kruistochten tegen bijv. moslimgelovigen te houden.
1 
jd234512 | outras 3 resenhas | Mar 23, 2011 |
jd234512 | outras 3 resenhas | Mar 23, 2011 | 
1 jesposito | outras 3 resenhas | Aug 7, 2007 |
jesposito | outras 3 resenhas | Aug 7, 2007 | 
The Deep and Subtle Unity of the Bible
A conversation with Richard B. Hays.
Interview by Garrett Brown | posted 10/17/2016
(K) Read the Bible as a whole, as a work of art. There is a difference between prediction and foreshadowing. Understand the concept of metalepsis (figure of speech wherein a figurative term used earlier in a another piece of writing is used in a new context--"I've got to catch the worm tomorrow").
To see what's going on in the text, you have to read the thing whole and see how the parts relate to the whole.
And the same thing applies not only to individual gospels but also, analogously, to the Bible as a whole. It has a deep and subtle narrative unity—not because unity has been superimposed by ecclesial fiat or by some clever editorial design...
We are taught to read instrumentally to extract information. We're not taught as well as perhaps we once were to read texts as literary works of art that have their own integrity and their own way of addressing us.
At the time I wrote that book there was a consensus among most New Testament scholars that Paul's quotations of the Old Testament were simply atomistic proof texting, ignoring the context from which they came.
But the more I looked into the evidence, I decided that was just wrong: actually, the Old Testament was extremely formative for the way Paul thought, and his citations frequently did evoke an awareness of the larger literary Old Testament context from which they were taken.
Hollander made the point that all great literature is densely allusive and that very often poetic texts are full of echoes of earlier texts. A sensitive reading requires us to recognize that and to see where the echoes come from.
Metalepsis is a literary device of quoting a piece of text that beckons the reader to discover more of the original context from which the fragmentary citation came.
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Would you start by telling our readers a little bit about yourself and your background?
I grew up in Oklahoma, went to an Episcopal day school as a high school student, and had a rich education there that included daily chapel. That had the effect of getting the Book of Common Prayer into my bones, although I was a Methodist by family upbringing.
I went to Yale as an undergraduate and ended up being an English major. I was particularly immersed in poetry and drama of the 16th and 17th centuries. After that, I went to seminary, graduated from Yale Divinity School in 1977, and continued on to a PhD at Emory in New Testament Studies.
How did you switch from English to New Testament Studies? What led to that decision?
When I graduated from Yale, I had no intention of pursuing an academic career. I got a job teaching high school English in Longmeadow, Massachusetts. I did that for a couple of years, but I found myself frustrated because I kept discovering that the great literature I was teaching inevitably raised fundamental questions about the meaning of life and how people respond to suffering and the complexity of the human predicament.
As a public school English teacher, I felt constrained, not being able to speak very freely about religious matters. I ended up deciding that I needed to go back and learn more about Christian tradition, theology, and Scripture in order to be able to answer the questions I myself had.
Then, once I got into biblical studies courses in seminary, I was both fascinated by the subject matter and puzzled by the ways I found a lot of biblical scholars approaching the text: in many cases, they seemed less interested in the wholeness and message of the text than in trying to excavate some hypothetical prehistory of the text.
My response to that has left its stamp on most of my work as a New Testament scholar. I've been attempting to interpret the Bible with the sensibility of someone trained as a literary reader of texts and, through that kind of reading, to recover the powerful and surprising messages of Scripture.
It is certainly a pattern that distinguishes your work. You're always attentive to the larger work and the way in which a coherent reading of the text has to inform each of its parts. Was there a part of your literary training or sensibility early on that helped to discipline that kind of reading?
That's a nice observation. I think so. When I was an undergraduate at Yale in the 1960s, the English department was still fundamentally shaped by what was called the New Criticism. That approach predated the emergence of deconstruction and the various kinds of postmodernist approaches to literature that have since become dominant.
The New Critics were not particularly concerned about the historical circumstances of the production of the text, or influences on the author, or those kinds of things. Rather, I was taught to look at the way in which the language of the text itself worked—its imagery, music, metaphor—and to think about how the text functioned as a complete work of art. I think that approach to interpretation has informed the pattern you're describing in my scholarship.
The Bible is just not a collection of little verses or tidbits of wisdom. When we're reading the Gospel of Luke, for example, we're reading a text that has a narrative shape to it. To see what's going on in the text, you have to read the thing whole and see how the parts relate to the whole.
And the same thing applies not only to individual gospels but also, analogously, to the Bible as a whole. It has a deep and subtle narrative unity—not because unity has been superimposed by ecclesial fiat or by some clever editorial design, but because the diverse biblical witnesses bear common witness to God's grace-filled action in the story of Israel. The emergence of the biblical writings themselves, in their complexity and diversity, is itself part of God's mysterious "authorial" action. That's why I believe that the Old Testament and the New have an underlying narrative unity that can be discerned only in retrospect, when we read the whole thing together.
That approach is uncommon these days. Our interpretative efforts can be so focused on a certain strand of narrative or a theme. There are many reasons why that happens. But it can also make one blind to the way in which these things function as a part of the larger narrative.
Yes, I think you're right about that. It's partly a function of the decline of humanities in general in liberal arts education. We are taught to read instrumentally to extract information. We're not taught as well as perhaps we once were to read texts as literary works of art that have their own integrity and their own way of addressing us.
I may be a voice crying in the wilderness in that regard. I'm trying in what I write to help people see that wholeness.
Let's talk about some of your work. The operative one here is the one that you wrote in 1989 called Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul. What prompted you to write that book? Were you trying to illuminate something that was under-appreciated or ignored at the time?
Yes, as it turned out, very much so. The genesis and development of that book were entirely unexpected. When I was at Yale, one of my teaching tasks was to teach the intermediate Greek reading course for divinity students.
One year, it occurred to me it would be fun to have them read New Testament texts alongside texts from the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures) and to see how the New Testament authors were quoting and using these Old Testament texts and what differences were introduced in the quotations.
I had no idea when I started to do that how fascinating it would turn out to be; I had no idea how complex the differences are between the Septuagint texts and the way that they get taken up into the New Testament.
It started me down a trail of investigating for myself the problems the class had brought up. I didn't know where I was going, but I had hold of a rope and I was following it hand-over-hand out of the cave to see where it led. When I started to write Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul, I thought of it as an inductive study that would work out of purely descriptive analysis of a series of examples to see what I could say about how Paul was using the Old Testament.
I ended up in a lot of places I never would have predicted. At the time I wrote that book there was a consensus among most New Testament scholars that Paul's quotations of the Old Testament were simply atomistic proof texting, ignoring the context from which they came.
But the more I looked into the evidence, I decided that was just wrong: actually, the Old Testament was extremely formative for the way Paul thought, and his citations frequently did evoke an awareness of the larger literary Old Testament context from which they were taken.
A large part of Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul is taken up with trying to demonstrate the phenomenon of metalepsis. It's a term I learned from the literary scholar and poet John Hollander, who had written an elegant book called The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After. Hollander made the point that all great literature is densely allusive and that very often poetic texts are full of echoes of earlier texts. A sensitive reading requires us to recognize that and to see where the echoes come from.
Metalepsis is a literary device of quoting a piece of text that beckons the reader to discover more of the original context from which the fragmentary citation came. That was the discovery I made in writing Echoes of Scripture in Letters of Paul. It really opened up in the field of New Testament studies a very different way of thinking about how Paul was related to his own Jewish tradition.
At the time, there was a certain body of scholarship that argued that because Paul was a trained rabbi, you could understand his uses of the Old Testament as instances of midrashic biblical interpretation in the rabbinic mode. There were attempts to show how that worked out formally in Paul's citation practices. I found those very unsatisfying as well. I don't actually think that Paul, in his letters, works in the same stylistic vein or genre as Jewish biblical midrash. There are different things going on there.
I was blazing a different trail in analyzing Paul as a writer who taps into his deep knowledge of Jewish Scripture and evokes Jewish scriptural narratives in a way that is literarily rich and suggestive.
We'll get into this a little bit later with the gospels, but I'm curious about the letters of Paul. Are there other examples from that time and place where you can compare what he's doing if isn't midrash? In other words, as a point of comparison, are there texts that do what he's doing, or is he inventing a new genre in his use of metalepsis?
The genre of the letter, of course—the epistle—is not a Pauline invention. There are plenty of letters in antiquity. And Paul certainly didn't invent metalepsis, either; it is a pervasive trope in all literature. But his particular way of re-reading Israel's Scripture through the lenses of the story of the death and resurrection of Jesus does not have obvious precursors.
Surely, the church fathers who came after Paul picked up on these tropes and did similar things with them. I'm wondering then if there's a way to think of what he was doing; maybe it's de novo. I don't know.
It's hard to come up with something that's an exact parallel. There are analogies of different sorts. What he's not doing, for example, is the genre of biblical commentary. You can compare the works of Philo, who is a Jewish author, who actually give extended allegorical expositions of particular biblical texts.
In the Dead Sea Scrolls, you have examples of commentaries that go, more or less, line by line and perform what's called pesher exegesis. This kind of commentary quotes a line of Scripture and then says, "Its interpretation is …" Then it goes to the next line and says, "Its interpretation is …"
Paul doesn't do that kind of thing exactly. What Paul is doing is more like what a preacher does in evoking a text and then reflecting upon it in various ways, in a way that tries to be edifying for his readers. If we had access to synagogue sermons contemporary with Paul, which we don't (they simply haven't survived in literary form), they might offer closer parallels. Perhaps the closest parallels are to be found within the intertextuality of the Old Testament itself: for example, the way that Isaiah evokes the creation and exodus stories.
I do think that the letters of Paul, in the way they use Scripture, are, at least as far as I know, distinctive in their own historical setting.
Since the time that book was published, do you find that others have followed your lead in investigating these literary connections? Are scholars doing a better job of seeing these echoes?
Yes. There's been a flood of articles and monographs, many of which even pick up the term "echoes" in their titles. Many of these are informative and edifying, even brilliant. On the other hand, sometimes when reading some of that stuff, I feel a little bit like the "Sorcerer's apprentice," who let the brooms out of the closet. People's imaginations occasionally run wild. I'm not responsible, I hope, for all of that.
Let's talk about your two most recent books, Reading Backwards and Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels, which are closely linked.
Reading Backwards is the published version of a lecture series, the Hulsean Lectures, which I gave at Cambridge University. When I was asked to give those lectures, I was, at that time, serving as Dean of the Divinity School at Duke and was overwhelmed by administrative work.
I had previously written hundreds of manuscript pages of work I'd been doing for the book which eventually became Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels. What I did in the Hulsean Lectures was to extract material out of that much larger unfinished manuscript and condense it into the lectures that became Reading Backwards.
Those lectures focused very narrowly on the question of how the gospel writers draw upon Israel's Scripture in order to narrate the divine identity of Jesus. It's a Christologically focused set of excerpts from the larger and older manuscript.
When I finally completed and published the bigger book, Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels, it included most of the material that was in the Hulseans, but now in its larger, original context.
For both books, your starting point is, in many ways, the story of the road to Emmaus in Luke 24. Can you talk about how that passage sets up your argument?
For readers who may not have that text immediately at hand or in mind, Luke tells the story of two travelers who had been followers of Jesus. despondently leaving the city of Jerusalem after Jesus' crucifixion.
The risen Jesus then appears along the road and walks with them, but they don't recognize him. He asks them, "What are you talking about?" and they say, "Oh, we're very sad and hopeless because Jesus, who we thought was a great prophet, has been put to death by the Romans and the Jewish authorities. We had hoped he would be the one to redeem Israel, but in fact, obviously not because he was killed." I'm paraphrasing, of course.
Jesus then says, "Oh, foolish and slow of heart to believe the Scriptures," and launches into a long exposition of how Moses and all the prophets bore witness to the fact that the Messiah must suffer and be raised. It's only then when they finally arrive at their destination in the little town of Emmaus, sit down in a table together, and break bread together that their eyes are opened and they recognize him.
So there's a post-resurrectional exposition of Scripture as revelatory. In Luke's gospel this suggests the fundamental insight that only in retrospect can you come to understand how Moses and the prophets bear witness to Jesus.
How is reading backward in a figural sense different from reading prophecy forward? And why is the difference important for readers to appreciate?
If we read the Old Testament as predictive prophecy, there are several problems with that. First, not very much of the Old Testament actually does take the form of making predictions about some future coming Messiah. Attempts to make it read that way are often rightly seen as forced and artificial.
To take a single example, the New Testament passion narratives repeatedly echo Psalm 22, culminating in Jesus' dying cry, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" But Psalm 22, read on its own terms as a lament psalm, though it looks forward to future deliverance and vindication, does not purport to be making predictions about a future coming figure. Rather, when the Evangelists retell the story of the crucifixion, they retrospectively discern the striking correspondences to the psalm.
To be sure, in the Old Testament, there are a few passages that look forward in hope to a future king who will restore the kingdom, a lot of those particularly in the Psalms. There are also enigmatic passages, of course, in Isaiah that refer to a suffering figure, although that figure is never described there as a Messiah.
But the whole picture doesn't really come together until you read the text, as I say, "backwards," through the lens of cross and resurrection. Once you have the story of Jesus, you can go back to the older texts and have a kind of "Aha!" recognition that certain things are foreshadowed there, but there's a big difference between foreshadowing and prophecy.
When you're moving forward in a narrative, you can't know what is foreshadowed until you see the full unfolding of the plot and see what actually happens in the end, and then you can do a second reading of the text in light of its ending. That second reading allows you to unravel clues that you never would've seen before.
That's why the approach of reading backwards, which Erich Auerbach has described as figural exegesis, is a much more helpful description of what's actually going on in the New Testament itself.
I realize that your book is not a critique of other critical approaches, but there are a few things that your two most recent books certainly do challenge. One of them is the notion of high and low Christologies. What is generally meant by that and how does your work frustrate these distinctions?
Good question. That distinction between high and low Christology has to do with the extent to which any particular text thinks of Jesus as God or not. Is Jesus a human figure, a prophet?—that's a "low" Christology. Is Jesus an incarnation of God?—that's a "high" Christology.
Many works of New Testament scholarship will say that the high Christology is a late development, and that the original, earliest traditions about Jesus represent a low Christology. He was simply a Palestinian prophet and teacher, who was executed. That's the historical fact, and then it took about a century for the church eventually to develop the mythological claim that He was divine—and to superimpose that idea as a dogmatic overlay on the earlier simple stories of Jesus.
I'm painting there with a very broad brush, but that's the way the terms are usually used. John is of course thought to have the highest Christology, and usually Mark and Luke, the lowest Christologies. I came to the conclusion as I studied this material that that was fundamentally wrong. Instead, all four gospels in their different ways, at their foundational layers, bear witness to Jesus as the embodiment of the God of Israel.
The Gospel of Mark doesn't have the concept of incarnation in the way that John does, but we find Jesus consistently in that gospel doing things that God alone can do: forgive sins, still storms, etc., etc. It's evoking narrative patterns from the Old Testament to show that Jesus is doing acts that identify him with the Divine.
The terms high and low Christology are misleading to start with. As the church ultimately declared at the Council of Chalcedon, Jesus was fully human and fully divine. What we see in the four gospels is the astonished and astonishing narrative testimony to that reality. All four gospels tell distinct stories that portray the human figure, Jesus, as the mysterious embodiment of Israel's God. They do it in four different narrative ways, but they're all doing the same thing. It is as though the single event of Jesus' life/death/resurrection was a Big Bang—an explosion that spun out the hermeneutical universe of narrative and biblical reinter-pretation that we see in manifold forms in the gospels.
Garrett Brown is the publisher of Merrifield Press and an occasional blogger at www.noteandquery.com.
Copyright © 2016 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
Believing to Understand
Richard Hays on figural Christology.
Scot McKnight | posted 4/17/2015
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(excerpts)
Among Christian thinkers of the first age known to us there are three of genuinely creative power: Paul, the author to the Hebrews, and the Fourth Evangelist. We are precluded from proposing any one of them for the honour of having originated the process, since even Paul, greatly as he contributed to its development, demonstrably did not originate it. What forgotten geniuses may lurk in the shadows of those first twenty years of Church history about which we are so scantily informed, it is impossible for us to say. But the New Testament itself avers that it was Jesus Christ Himself who first directed the minds of His followers to certain parts of the scriptures as those in which they might find illumination upon the meaning of His mission and destiny.
Richard B. Hays, in the published version of his Hulsean Lectures in Cambridge, Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness, proposes that Jesus read the events of his life "backwards" and in so doing taught Christians how to read the Old Testament "forwards." As he puts it, "the Gospels teach us how to read the OT, and—at the same time—the OT teaches us how to read the Gospels. Or, to put it a little differently, we learn to read the OT by reading backwards from the Gospels, and—at the same time—we learn how to read the Gospels by reading forwards from the OT."
Hays opens by appealing to the term "figural" to describe this backwards reading, and so we hear Erich Auerbach boiled down into New Testament hermeneutics:
There is consequently a significant difference between prediction and prefiguration. Figural reading need not presume that the OT authors—or the characters they narrate—were conscious of predicting or anticipating Christ. Rather, the discernment of a figural correspondence is necessarily retrospective rather than prospective. (Another way to put this point is that figural reading is a form of intertextual interpretation that focuses on an intertextuality of reception rather than of production.)
That is, time and later perspective generate new readings:
Because the two poles of a figure are events within "the flowing stream" of time, the correspondence can be discerned only after the second event has occurred and imparted a new pattern of significance to the first. But once the pattern of correspondence has been grasped, the semantic force of the figure flows both ways, as the second event receives deeper significance from the first.
Perhaps the deciding point for affirming this backwards-and-forwards reading of the Bible comes in Hays' chapter about the Gospel of John, where once again he picks up that famous text about Moses and Jesus from John 5:46. The deciding point, after all, is what one decides about Jesus:
Jesus does not challenge or denigrate Moses; rather, Moses actually testifies to Jesus. Yet Jesus' adversaries, despite their earnest scrutiny of Moses' writings, lapse into interpretative failure because they reject Jesus' astonishing claim to be the true and ultimate referent to whom Moses' words point. There is a fateful circularity here: reading the writings of Moses should lead to believing in Jesus; but in order to understand Moses' words, one must first come to Jesus to receive life… . And so those who do not trust Jesus' word remain in incomprehension and death. Only those who enter this hermeneutical loop at the point of believing Jesus can rightly understand what Moses wrote.
The historian and the apologist may cry out for a place at the table, but the hermeneutical loop eventually closes in and begs the reader to believe.
But what he does is remind us that theological commitments of a creedal nature determine how we read the Bible.
________________________________________________________________________________________________
What disturbs the professor is that so many read their New Testaments with nary a glance at the Scripture reference notes in the central column of many Bibles or printed in the footnotes in others. What disturbs the reader is what one finds when one pursues those cross-reference suggestions.
We need go no further than Matthew's first chapter. The original woman in mind in the famous "the virgin will conceive" was a "young woman" already married to Isaiah and pregnant and soon to bear a child. But the Greek translation, the Septuagint, turned the Hebrew almah into parthenos, which meant "virgin." Matthew, knowing Jesus was born of a virgin, chose the latter on which to hang this profound interpretation of the conception and birth of Jesus. In chapter 2, the holy couple, after having spent time in safety in Egypt, return—and Matthew finds a golden egg in a text that had nothing to do with the Messiah. Matthew brings rugged realities and scriptural patterns together: If Jesus is the Son of God, if he spent time in Egypt, if YHWH called Israel his Son and out of Egypt summoned them to the Land of Israel, then Jesus somehow needs to be seen fulfilling that text too. It's all in Matthew 2:1-15. Or take John 5:46, which tells us in the words of Jesus "If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me." If there is so much Jesus in Moses, why did so few recognize him when he came? Over and over we see this interpretive approach to the "Old Testament" when we pay close attention to the cross references in our Bible, at once opening a world of glorious discovery and faith and re-imagining history and at the same time provoking us into pondering what kind of readings these early Christian hermeneuts were offering their readers.
Where did this kind of hermeneutics originate? On a single page in a short book that has more drama than one can find in a hundred or more other New Testament studies, C. H. Dodd posed our question and answered it with rhetorical deftness:
Among Christian thinkers of the first age known to us there are three of genuinely creative power: Paul, the author to the Hebrews, and the Fourth Evangelist. We are precluded from proposing any one of them for the honour of having originated the process, since even Paul, greatly as he contributed to its development, demonstrably did not originate it. What forgotten geniuses may lurk in the shadows of those first twenty years of Church history about which we are so scantily informed, it is impossible for us to say. But the New Testament itself avers that it was Jesus Christ Himself who first directed the minds of His followers to certain parts of the scriptures as those in which they might find illumination upon the meaning of His mission and destiny.[1]
Dodd continues:
I can see no reasonable ground for rejecting the statements of the Gospels that (for example) He pointed to Psalm cx as a better guide to the truth about His mission and destiny than the popular beliefs about the Son of David, or that He made that connection of the "Lord" at God's right hand with the Son of Man in Daniel which proved so momentous for Christian thought; or that He associated with the Son of Man Ianguage which had been used of the Servant of the Lord, and employed it to hint at the meaning, and the issue, of His own approaching death. To account for the beginning of this most original and fruitful process of rethinking the Old Testament we found need to postulate a creative mind. The Gospels offer us one. Are we compelled to reject the offer?
One good reading of Luke 24:36-48 reminds us that Jesus was himself an intense Bible reader, a 1st-century Jewish hermeneut who not only knew what the Bible said but knew to whom it was pointing. He read the Bible, yes, with Christological lenses. Dodd was right: Jesus taught his followers to read the Bible as he did. And that makes all the difference.
The two generations since Dodd's incisive study have seen an avalanche of books and technical articles about the use of the Old Testament in the New Testament, about how the Bible's own authors were interpreting previous books in the Old Testament into a veritable maze of canonical inter-interpretations, about how post-canonical Jews read the Tanakh, about how the Septuagint interpreted when translating the Hebrew text, about how Targums (paraphrases into the lingua franca of 1st-century Jews) interpreted the Bible, about how the Dead Sea Scrolls re-read the Bible, and about how the rabbis hermeneuted the Bible in their own way. Add to this early Christian exegesis and hermeneutics and one life could not afford the time to read it all. The cross references disturbed enough New Testament scholars that Richard Longenecker, after his lengthy and informed updating of the issues and conclusions, asked, "Can we reproduce the exegesis of the New Testament?" and "Are we able?" and "Ought we try?" He answered that set of questions with a guarded "No" and "Yes"![2]
The grip of historical method has historians by the neck, but not so the new "theological interpretation of the Bible" crowd, now on full and detailed display in the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible. For the historians, what the original author meant—only what he (or she) meant—is all that matters; for the theological interpreters, while authorial intent certainly matters, it is not all that matters. What matters perhaps more is what mattered to Jesus and the apostles, and what mattered to them is now mattering more and more to Christian readers of the Bible. The tight grip of the historians has been loosened. More and more we are learning to see the Bible as an inter- and intra-textual reality; only by embracing its central vision—Jesus as Messiah—can one read that Bible well.
Richard B. Hays, in the published version of his Hulsean Lectures in Cambridge, Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness, proposes that Jesus read the events of his life "backwards" and in so doing taught Christians how to read the Old Testament "forwards." As he puts it, "the Gospels teach us how to read the OT, and—at the same time—the OT teaches us how to read the Gospels. Or, to put it a little differently, we learn to read the OT by reading backwards from the Gospels, and—at the same time—we learn how to read the Gospels by reading forwards from the OT."
Hays opens by appealing to the term "figural" to describe this backwards reading, and so we hear Erich Auerbach boiled down into New Testament hermeneutics:
There is consequently a significant difference between prediction and prefiguration. Figural reading need not presume that the OT authors—or the characters they narrate—were conscious of predicting or anticipating Christ. Rather, the discernment of a figural correspondence is necessarily retrospective rather than prospective. (Another way to put this point is that figural reading is a form of intertextual interpretation that focuses on an intertextuality of reception rather than of production.)
That is, time and later perspective generate new readings:
Because the two poles of a figure are events within "the flowing stream" of time, the correspondence can be discerned only after the second event has occurred and imparted a new pattern of significance to the first. But once the pattern of correspondence has been grasped, the semantic force of the figure flows both ways, as the second event receives deeper significance from the first.
Hays, well known for his brilliant studies of how Paul read the Bible,[3] is concerned in this book with the Gospels, so we are treated to four separate, succinct introductory essays into how the Evangelists read the Bible backwards. The result is a masterpiece. Hays shows that the Evangelists had a "high" Christology, one that was shaped by the divine identity of Jesus. Mark, for instance, calls Jesus "Lord" and so Hays turns to "Who can forgive sins but God alone?" (2:7), a claim about Jesus that leads Hays to Exodus 34:6-7 and Isaiah 43:25 and Daniel 7. To conclude what? Mark is a master of indirection, and Hays imitates Mark's own style in these words: "the reader of Mark's Gospel may ponder at least the possibility that his sovereign authority to forgive sins is not just delegated." The only way to grasp what Mark is doing is to embrace his "poetics of allusion." Hayes concludes with as breathtaking a conclusion as we find in Dodd: "Our study of Mark suggests that Mark's proclamatory mystagogy is meant to lead readers, through a mysteriously allusive reading of Israel's Scripture, into recognizing Jesus as the embodiment of the God of Israel."
By contrast, Matthew, Hays concludes, is not so indirect. Indeed, he says Matthew "is producing an annotated study Bible, providing notes and references that will give the uninitiated reader enough information to perform the necessary interpretation." One quick reading of texts like Matthew 24:15, which updates Mark's more allusive reference in Mark 13:14, is enough to see Matthew's annotations in context. But there's far more to Matthew than this, as we indicated in the opening paragraph above. For Matthew, Jesus is Immanuel, God's presence among us—seen in worshiping Jesus (14:33) and in Jesus as present (18:20) as well as in his promise of continued presence (28:20). Matthew "believes and proclaims that Jesus is the embodied presence of God and that to worship him is to worship YHWH—not merely an agent or a facsimile or in intermediary"—and this takes a unique form: "the one who was crucified and raised from the dead is himself the embodiment of the God who rules over all creation and abides with his people forever."
The Third Evangelist's style is narratival, and Hays ably frames it this way:
[M]any of the OT echoes in Luke do not function as direct typological prefigurations of events in the life of Jesus. Still less do they function as prooftexts. Rather, they create a broader and subtler effect: they create a narrative world thick with scriptural memory. The Gospel scenes are played out on a stage with scenery familiar to the reader who remembers the biblical drama. The things that happen in Luke are the kinds of things that happened in the tales of the patriarchs and prophets, and the plotted action, while never simply identical to the OT stories, is often suggestively reminiscent of Israel's sacred past. It is as though we are hearing, throughout Luke's Gospel, subtle musical variations on a theme. Most significantly, the memories evoked by retrospective reading disclose that the character of God portrayed in this Gospel is consistent with his character as displayed throughout Israel's history: this God who elects Israel, judges their faithlessness, and still acts in unexpected ways to redeem them is recognizably the same God the reader knows from previous episodes of the story—but now made manifest in new and surprising ways. The question before us, then, is how Israel's God is manifest in and through the figure of Jesus.
Read Luke 3:1-6, thumb back to Isaiah 40, and then read Luke 3 all over again: Luke led you backwards to Isaiah so you could read forwards to Luke 3 and see Jesus as he is created in his fresh narratival reading of Jesus. Which leads us back to the Emmaus story in Luke 24, and ahead to Hays' conclusion to his chapter on Luke:
The brilliant dramatic irony of Luke's Emmaus road scene nudges readers inexorably toward a subtle but overwhelming conclusion: the two disciples are wrong to be discouraged but right to have hoped for Jesus to be the one who would redeem Israel. In their puzzled disappointment, they truly name Jesus' identity without realizing what they are saying, for the Redeemer of Israel is none other than Israel's God. And Jesus, in truth, is the embodied, unrecognized, but scripturally attested presence of the One for whom they unwittingly hoped.
The narrative that generates this conclusion is one that is shared by readers with an ear to hear the echoes of the Old Testament in passage after passage in Luke's Gospel.
Perhaps the deciding point for affirming this backwards-and-forwards reading of the Bible comes in Hays' chapter about the Gospel of John, where once again he picks up that famous text about Moses and Jesus from John 5:46. The deciding point, after all, is what one decides about Jesus:
Jesus does not challenge or denigrate Moses; rather, Moses actually testifies to Jesus. Yet Jesus' adversaries, despite their earnest scrutiny of Moses' writings, lapse into interpretative failure because they reject Jesus' astonishing claim to be the true and ultimate referent to whom Moses' words point. There is a fateful circularity here: reading the writings of Moses should lead to believing in Jesus; but in order to understand Moses' words, one must first come to Jesus to receive life… . And so those who do not trust Jesus' word remain in incomprehension and death. Only those who enter this hermeneutical loop at the point of believing Jesus can rightly understand what Moses wrote.
The historian and the apologist may cry out for a place at the table, but the hermeneutical loop eventually closes in and begs the reader to believe. For such a reader, believing that Jesus is the Son of God, the Bible suddenly makes (new) sense. Can any Bible reader not recognize what John does in 1:1 when he says all over again "In the beginning"? But now something has changed. Jesus has been inserted into the narrative, and the beginning has been christologically reframed: the Logos, Jesus, the Son of God, the Messiah, the incarnate one, is the Creator and the Life who gives eternal life. Whether it is the Temple (John 2:13-22) or the feasts of Israel (John 10:22-30; 19:14), under John's guidance they are all about Jesus—and the reader who sees they are about Jesus can rightly understand what the Temple and the feasts were designed to do. What then is John's approach? "John understands Scripture as a huge web of signifiers generated by the pretemporal eternal Logos as intimations of his truth and glory."
Hays knows some are provoked by such readings and some want him to press deeper to prove that not only is this the way the Evangelists worked but that the text witnesses to a historical reality that underlies this the authorial intent. Not all agree, and Hays will not go where many want him to go. But what he does is remind us that theological commitments of a creedal nature determine how we read the Bible. I give him the last word, in which he takes us back to Dodd's compelling offer:
There is only one reason why Christological interpretation of the OT is not a matter of stealing or twisting Israel's sacred texts: the God to whom the Gospels bear witness, the God incarnate in Jesus, is the same as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. 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, OT and NT 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.
Scot McKnight is professor of New Testament at Northern Seminary. His books include commentaries on Galatians, James, and 1 Peter.
1. C. H. Dodd, According to the Scriptures: The Sub-Structure of New Testament Theology (Welwyn, Hertfordshire: James Nisbet, 1952), p. 110.
2. Richard N. Longenecker, Biblical Exegesis in the Apostolic Period, rev. ed. (Eerdmans, 1999), p. 219.
3. Richard B. Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (Yale Univ. Press, 1993); Richard B. Hays, The Conversion of the Imagination: Paul as Interpreter of Israel's Scripture (Eerdmans, 2005).
Copyright © 2015 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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