Reading with the Grain of Scripture by Richard B. Hays (review)

After his recent retirement from Duke Divinity School, Richard B. Hays has provided his students and fellow scholars with the gift of a retrospective look at the great themes of his exegetical work. The essays collected in this volume are in many respects the capstone of his intellectual labors; they represent his attempt, "at the end of a long career of teaching and writing, to harvest some of the wheat and gather it into the barn" (p. 1).

Assembled in this volume are book reviews, public lectures, conference papers, journal articles, and edited volume chapters, all written in the last twenty-five years, and all but one previously published. They have, however, been given new titles in order to highlight "an underlying coherence of thought" (p. 3), as H. shares his assessment of how his life's work "has held together and how it has mattered" (pp. 5–6). Hays defines his scholarly efforts as "an aspect of discipleship—as a process of faith seeking exegetical clarity" (p. 2).

The volume itself is divided into four parts featuring twenty-one essays, as well as a conclusion and an epilogue. The four parts delineate the subjects that have occupied H. throughout his academic career: Interpretation, Historical Jesus, Paul, and New Testament Theology. The first part highlights H.'s distinctive emphasis on narrative exegesis and figural interpretation. In the opening essay, "Narrative Interpretation and the Quest for Theological Unity," H. displays his typically incisive exegetical style in revealing the underlying coherence of Paul, Matthew, John, and the author of Hebrews in "their theological understanding of the soteriological purpose and effect of [Jesus'] death" (p. 22). In the fourth essay, "Figural Interpretation of Israel's Story," H. constructively responds to various criticisms of his figural exegesis, asserting that "figural interpretation discerns a divinely crafted pattern of coherence within the events and characters of the biblical narrative" (p. 82; italics original). The other two essays in part 1 are "Reading Scripture with the Eyes of Faith" and "Reading Scripture in Light of the Resurrection."

Book reviews that maintain the "situational particularity" (p. 4) in which they were written form the core of H.'s second part, "Historical Jesus," which contains "Rebranding Jesus and the Pitfalls of Entrepreneurial Criticism"; "Story, History, and the Quest for Jesus"; "Catholic Tradition and the Quest for Jesus"; and "A Modest Sketch of Jesus of Nazareth." H. gives a blistering takedown of the Jesus Seminar project from the 1990s, a sustained but charitable critique of N. T. Wright's understanding of history, faith, and exegesis, and an appreciative but question-filled evaluation of Pope Benedict XVI's first Jesus of Nazareth volume (Freiburg: Herder, 2007). H.'s own "modest sketch of Jesus of Nazareth" (p. 132) encapsulates his aim of overcoming distorted subjective reconstructions of Jesus: "Because each Gospel has a determinate structure and content, the interpretive imagination is given a set of constraints that guide and limit the range of viable readings. … Thus, we are more likely to reach consensus about literary and theological readings of the individual Gospel texts than about the historical figure who stands behind them all" (p. 134).

Each of the seven chapters in part 3 three centers on a particular theme in the letters of Paul: "Christology: Paul's Story of God's Son"; "Soteriology: Christ Died for the Ungodly"; "Apocalyptic: New Creation Poetics in Galatians"; "Pneumatology: The Spirit in Romans 8"; "Gospel: For Gentiles Only?"; "Israel: Hope for What We Do Not Yet See"; and "Paul, Acts, and Early Christian Proclamation." H. insists that Paul would not understand the distinction between "the Jesus of history" and "the Christ of faith": "For Paul, Jesus Christ is a single person whose identity is disclosed in a seamless narrative running from creation to the cross to the resurrection to the eschaton" (p. 151). One particular example of H.'s well-known intertextual approach is his treatment of pneuma in Romans 8; "the intertextual field within which we should read Paul's discourse...