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AGE
50

POSITION
Professor of New Testament at The Divinity School, Duke University

NOTABLE BOOKS
Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (Yale, 1989)

The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics (Harper-SanFrancisco, 1996)

First Corinthians: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Westminster John Knox, 1997)

To use a baseball image (and Richard Hays is a serious fan of the minor league Durham Bulls), Hays has hit a home run every time he has stepped to the plate. His Ph.D. thesis, on the correct translation of a phrase in Galatians, sparked theological discussion that continues to this day. His book Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul helped reverse the long-standing belief that the Old Testament was of little importance for Paul's theology. Greg Jones, dean of Duke Divinity School, calls that book "a stunning achievement," and says it was "one of the few books I can remember reading and thinking, 'This is going to change a lot of my thinking.' "

Hays's latest book, The Moral Vision of the New Testament, may well become the standard work in New Testament ethics. Fuller Seminary President Richard Mouw says of Hays, "Richard is a triple threat: a gifted interpreter of biblical materials, an expert on the history of early Christianity, and a first-rate ethicist." In Moral Vision, Hays not only takes up crucial issues in a compelling way, he carefully shows every seam of his argument, so that reading Moral Vision becomes an education in how to reason biblically about ethical issues.

Hays pulls no punches, applying the New Testament texts as morally authoritative on such contentious concerns as homosexuality and divorce. As such, he is bound to please conservatives. Yet when I called around I heard divided opinions about how much of an evangelical Hays is. Hays himself was hesitant about being interviewed for Christianity Today. "I've got such a funny package of diverse ecumenical religious connections," he muses. "The Methodist Church, William Sloan Coffin, Francis Schaeffer, a charismatic, Anabaptist house church community … "

Hays considers himself an evangelical, and he unquestionably has the deep commitments to Jesus and the Bible that are associated with evangelical faith. He resists, however, any attempt to harmonize the divergent views of New Testament authors. That sometimes means he sets one Gospel at odds with another, even concluding that one is historically inaccurate when it seems to run contrary to another. He is not in tune with an understanding of Scripture as inerrant, not because he has trouble believing in miracles or obeying scriptural commands, but because he thinks inerrancy as a theory tends to blind one to the realities of the texts themselves. His version of evangelicalism—a more Wesleyan version, he says—is interested in the living effects of Scripture more than in theories of inspiration.

There is no denying the heartfelt evangelical orientation. Hays has a testimony, as they say. He grew up in and around a large Methodist church in Oklahoma City, where his mother was the organist. As with so many children of mainline churches, Hays's faith evaporated during his high-school years. By the time he began Yale University, he had stopped going to church altogether.

It was the era of Vietnam War protests and earnest searches for meaning. Hays grew fascinated by the antiwar ministry of Yale Chaplain William Sloan Coffin. He took literature and philosophy courses addressing "big issues." No clarity emerged from his confusion, however. A Wellesley student he was dating told him of Francis Schaeffer, who had greatly influenced her InterVarsity-related Christian fellowship. At his girlfriend (now his wife) Judy's behest, Hays traveled to Cambridge to hear Schaeffer, reacting ambivalently. "On the one hand, I said, 'Boy, this is superficial. He's painting with such a broad brush that this is not intellectually serious.' But on the other hand, I said, 'But you know, he's right about a lot of stuff.' "

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February 8 1999, Vol. 43, No. 2