by The Rev. Canon Porter C. Taylor
I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Richard Hays ahead of our 2015 C4SO Leadership Retreat where he will be our keynote speaker. Dr. Richard B. Hays is the Dean of Duke Divinity School and the George Washington Ivey Professor of New Testament. Much like his friend and fellow scholar N. T. Wright, Dean Hays has written extensively on Jesus, the Gospels and Paul; his books include The Moral Vision of the New Testament and the recently released Reading Backwards. I was blessed and honored that Dean Hays would allow me to pick his brain for an hour.
Certain words and phrases come to mind when I hear the name “Richard Hays.” They include “Figural Christology,” “Duke,” “New Testament Scholar,” “Gospels, Jesus and Paul,” and “Interpretive Matrix.” But when I called to ask Dean Hays about his life and work, new phrases began to crop up like “Charismatic Renewal Movement,” “Radical discipleship,” “Morning Prayer,” “Francis Schaeffer” and “house church.” Clearly, I was getting to know a new side of this learned man of God.
Early Formation
By his own admission Hays has been influenced by a wide variety of leaders and Christian traditions during the course of his early life. Brought up within a Methodism that had a “veneer of piety” and which emphasized the idea that God was nice, Hays rejected his tradition and set off on a course to find deeper meaning. Coincidentally, as he was moving farther away from the Methodist Church, Hays was attending an Episcopal Day School in Oklahoma City. He recounts his time there as being a place that was both “intellectually stimulating” and where he was formed daily by the liturgy of Morning Prayer. He said thoughtfully of the daily Morning Prayer experiences, “That got into the bones for me.”
Undergraduate studies and early married life included formation through the work of William Sloane Coffin, a campus minister known for his social and liberal activism; Francis Schaeffer’s apologetics work and the L’Abri Fellowship; four years in a house church/radical discipleship community with a confluence of Bonheoffer, the Anabaptist tradition and the Charismatic Renewal Movement of the Episcopal Church. Hays’ experience in the house church led him toward graduate and post-graduate studies. He received his Master’s from Yale Divinity School, studied under Leander Keck at Emory and received his PhD from that institution. He was then hired by Keck back at Yale as a member of the New Testament faculty. Now ordained as a minister in the United Methodist Church, Hays is constantly involved in writing, teaching at Duke and traveling to churches and conferences to train lay leaders.
More Than a Scholar
Needless to say, Dr. Hays was influenced by a number of traditions from a variety of angles in his early years, and yet two themes seem to remain constant: discipleship and cultural engagement. Hays is one of the world’s leading New Testament scholars and has devoted his academic career to understanding the fourfold Gospel account, Jesus of Nazareth and Paul. However, our interview revealed a slightly broader picture than New Testament scholar: Hays is above all a servant of the church, passionate about teaching and equipping God’s people for discipleship with solid biblical interpretation and theological convictions. When asked about his vocation as a teacher and minister, he responded, “The reason I’m doing this, the reason I’m interested in being a scholar of the New Testament is because I see it as being a vocation that is a service to the church, to help the church understand scripture more deeply and interpret it more wisely.”
Hays continued, “The list of gifts given to the church in Ephesians 4 suggests that alongside the apostles and the other offices you have teachers; the offices are all for the building up of the body of Christ. That’s always been the way I think about who I am and what I do…I am a teacher trying to equip the saints for the work of ministry.”
Views on Scripture
Much of our later conversation was devoted to the faithful reading and preaching of God’s Word within the context of Sunday worship. How does one read Scripture well? How does one faithfully preach God’s Word week by week? A helpful methodology, according to Hays, is that we learn to read backwards. He believes the Old Testament to be the “interpretive matrix” for the fourfold Gospel.
Hays’ view, which he expounds on in much of his writing, celebrates that Jesus of Nazareth was a Jew, that he lived within a very Jewish context, and that the stories of Israel were his own. Further, to fully understand the many claims of Jesus as recorded in the gospels one needs to understand the story from which they were launched. For example: Israel was waiting for Messiah and many believed that the Anointed One would be a political and/or military type leader, and yet this was not who Jesus was. Instead Jesus was the Suffering Son of Man and the only way to grasp such a concept is to be aware of the “Son of Man” motif in Daniel and the Suffering Servant in Isaiah.
Rather than reading the New Testament into the Old, or “searching for Jesus” within Israel’s Scriptures, we are challenged to embrace these writings as our own corporate memory just as we’ve been adopted into Jesse’s branch. This has all sorts of ramifications for preaching and discipleship. One is a call to radical discipleship and an authentic engagement with culture. To read Scripture well is to begin living Scripture daily and publicly, it is to engage with a world desperately in need of the triune God, and it is to occupy space in the here and now according to Jesus’ vision for life. The faithful presence that Hays sees for every Christian begins with understanding the story of Jesus through the lens of Israel and then embodying Jesus’ kingdom presently.
Learning From Hays
If you are an ordained- or lay-leader of a church or feel called to church planting and/or parish ministry within C4SO or the ACNA, and want an opportunity to learn more from Hays, then consider attending our annual C4SO Leadership Retreat in Dallas, Texas from February 26-28, 2015. You will have the opportunity to rub shoulders with other clergy and planters inside the Diocese and be able to interact directly with Dr. Hays.
I also highly recommend that you purchase and read Dr. Hays’ new book: Reading Backwards. As well as addressing the importance of studying, reading and preaching Scripture wisely and faithfully, the book encapsulates well his role of a servant scholar-pastor.
Note: Hays, along with friends Bishop N. T. Wright and Dr. (Deacon) Scot McKnight, serves C4SO as an example for clergy interested in bridging the gap between the parish and the academy, and developing significant resources for parochial life and ministry. C4SO often draws from Hays’ writings in the areas of theology and New Testament studies.
For more information, contact Porter Taylor.