Remembering Richard Hays

And officially launching this newsletter

Ten years ago, Christianity Today commissioned me to write an obituary for Richard Hays, Duke Divinity School professor and New Testament scholar (and by then someone I considered a friend as well as a mentor), who had just been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. For whatever reason, they won’t be running it, so I’m sharing it here—and taking this sad occasion to welcome you to this newsletter. (More about that soon.)

Sometime in the next several days, Christianity Today will publish some reflections from me on Richard’s latest co-written book on sexuality. When that appears, I’ll share it here. But for now, here is my gratitude for a life well lived and an appreciation of someone whose wisdom I have cherished for many years.

Died: Richard Hays, Theologian of the Cross, Member of the New Community

The New Testament scholar’s legacy echoes beyond the halls of the academy.

By Wesley Hill

“[T]he meaning of Scripture is ultimately written on the tablets of fleshy hearts,” wrote Richard Hays in the conclusion to his groundbreaking book Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul. This statement was true not only of the apostle and the early Christian communities he founded, but also of Hays himself, who taught and mentored a generation of students—including numerous accomplished New Testament scholars—at Duke Divinity School. Hays unfolded Scripture’s meaning in the classroom as well as from the pulpit, in the quiet hallway after class, and at Duke basketball games, where he was often seen peering through binoculars and sporting his school’s apparel.

Hays grew up in a suburb of Oklahoma City and was reared in the United Methodist Church. His younger brother Whis remembers him as athletic—he lettered in football, basketball, and baseball in high school—and musical—he played guitar in a garage band. As a teenager, he met Judy, the woman he would eventually marry. After completing his undergraduate degree in English literature at Yale, he enrolled at the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. But a year later, in 1971, he was disheartened by what he perceived to be denominational careerism among his fellow students. So he withdrew, and together with Judy, by then his wife, moved to Massachusetts.

There, Hays taught high school English—further cultivating a literary sensibility that would distinguish his New Testament scholarship in the years to come—and joined an intentional Christian community. “We developed a pattern of eating meals together, praying together daily, and sharing common expenses,” Hays once recalled in a lecture. “We all read Bonhoeffer’s little classic Life Together and tried to put into practice his counsel about the practices of confession, forgiveness, and mutual accountability.” Whis, who also was a member of the community, recalled: “First Corinthians 14:26—‘When you come together, each one has a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation’—was the operative principle of [our] worship.”

By 1974, the community had grown into a more formal entity—Metanoia Fellowship—and Hays, as the de facto pastor, began commuting to Yale Divinity School, having recognized his need for further theological formation.

A Pioneering Scholar

Within three years, Hays had completed a master of divinity degree. He was decisively marked by the so-called “Yale School” of “narrative theology.” Through reading Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics, and from taking classes with heavyweights like Hans Frei, George Lindbeck, and Brevard Childs, Hays absorbed the conviction that the identity of Jesus, as well as the vocation of the community of his followers, was rendered through the stories Scripture tells—above all in the four Gospels.

After he arrived at Emory University to begin a PhD in New Testament studies, he developed a clear and singular agenda: to study Paul’s letter to the Galatians and find what he came to call its “narrative substructure”—the way it depended on the story of Jesus, the crucified and resurrected embodiment of God’s faithfulness to his people Israel.

His dissertation, published in 1983 and later reissued in 2002 as The Faith of Jesus Christ, became a game-changer in New Testament studies. Hays argued that Paul’s focus in Galatians is not on human faith as an alternative to human “works of the law,” but on Christ’s own faithfulness as the expression of God’s commitment to his promise to Abraham.

This emphasis on Christ’s faith was more than just academic. At the time Hays was writing, mainline Protestants and evangelicals had prioritized the interior life of individual believers. Hays’s focus on Christ’s faith—which precedes and transcends human response—was a bracing corrective to the status quo. Hays wanted to shift attention away from personal subjectivity and back to God’s action on believers’ behalf.

For most PhD candidates, surviving their oral defense is enough of an accomplishment. But Hays’s published dissertation quickly became one of the great works in the history of Pauline scholarship. Luke Timothy Johnson, New Testament professor at Emory, described Hays’s success: “[W]hen a dissertation has stayed in print for twenty-five years and is then reissued by a major publisher—without alteration—for a still wider readership, we can speak of real influence and importance.”

After completing his doctorate, Hays returned to Yale, this time as an assistant professor of New Testament. He soon published the artful Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul. Jason Byassee, an erstwhile colleague of Hays at Duke and now senior pastor of Timothy Eaton Memorial Church in Toronto, told me, “Echoes may turn out to be his most lasting contribution.” And John Barclay, professor emeritus of divinity at Durham University, concurred, saying Echoes “utterly transformed the way we appreciate Paul’s indebtedness to the Old Testament Scriptures.”

Hays’s thesis was simple but not widely accepted when he first wrote: When Paul quotes the Old Testament, he intends to evoke the wider narrative in which the quotation is embedded. Thus, Paul aims to reactivate Scripture’s voice for his own time and place. As Hays put it, “Paul, groping to give voice to his gospel, finds in Scripture the language to say what must be said.” Scripture, therefore, is not just Paul’s grab-bag of prooftexts. It’s more like his palette, giving him colors and textures for articulating his message about the crucified and risen Christ.

According to N. T. Wright, currently a senior research fellow at Wycliffe Hall in Oxford, Echoes’ brilliance is twofold. First, there was Hays’s extensive familiarity with Paul’s letters. Hays “soaked himself in the Greek New Testament in a way which ought to be normal for scholars but is sometimes skimped,” said Wright. Second, Hays had a keen eye for literary craftsmanship. As Wright observed, “The great classics, from Shakespeare to T. S. Eliot and beyond, were second nature to him, and he was a past master at the sensitive recognition of themes, literary clues, and the hidden pathways that run down underneath the greatest texts to the deepest meanings.”

Before Hays’s book appeared, New Testament scholars were far less attuned to the deep scriptural roots of Paul’s letters. Paul was often considered a reckless and headstrong evangelist, who bent the plain meaning of Old Testament texts to match his own intentions. After Echoes, that picture was dismantled. Hays’s portrayal of Paul as a subtle theological artist who summoned Old Testament cadences and sagas in order to substantiate his message about Christ changed the face of Pauline studies. The book won Hays a permanent place in the annals of Pauline scholarship. Reflecting on the book years later, Hays summarized what he had attempted to say: “Paul, the missionary preacher, is at least as much a poet as he is a theologian.”

A Courageous Gift to the Church

Most scholars would feel as if they’d won the lottery after publishing a book like Echoes of Scripture, but Hays immediately went to work on another trailblazing project. When The Moral Vision of the New Testament appeared in 1996, it once again disrupted an established consensus. Hays argued that the New Testament, in spite of—or better, in and through—its diversity, could give ethical guidance for today’s churches. The New Testament’s panoply of voices could be heard in concert, singing in harmony—albeit, not in unison—about the three complementary themes of “community,” “cross,” and “new creation.”

Most critical scholars eschewed the idea of any theological or ethical unity in the New Testament, preferring instead to highlight the tension between various biblical authors. For Hays, such an approach was both wrong and right. Without papering over the divergences among the apostles—the New Testament’s unity, he said, “is not the unity of a dogmatic system”—Hays still insisted that writers like Matthew, Paul, John, and James agreed on the solidarity among believers (community), the centrality of Jesus’ non-violent surrender to crucifixion (cross), and the hope of a bodily resurrection and a new, tactile world (new creation).

Hays’s argument was subtle. He did not intend to deny the presence of competing voices in the canon. Nonetheless, he maintained that if we read each of the New Testament documents through the three lenses described above, “our blurry multiple impressions of the texts come more sharply into focus,” and we can, in turn, derive ethical guidance from those texts.

Thus, for instance, in a case study on homosexuality, Hays argued that the New Testament’s difficult words on the topic can only be heard rightly if we consider the calling of the Christian community as a whole to be sexually pure, the cross as the means by which contemporary gay and lesbian believers become “the objects of God’s deeply sacrificial love,” and the new creation which means that our hope for sexual holiness and wholeness in the present time must be both “already” and “not yet.”

A few years after its publication, CT named The Moral Vision of the New Testament one of the top 100 religious books of the 20th century. According to L. Gregory Jones, a close friend of Hays and the president of Belmont University in Nashville, it is “a classic that will be read for generations to come.” Byassee remembers a quip from Reinhard Hütter, a Duke colleague of Hays’s: “He took the ethicists on. Most scholars aren’t brave enough to do that.”

With its ringing endorsement of pacifism and its determination to engage the thorniest debated issues (e.g., divorce, abortion, etc.), The Moral Vision is not only an achievement in New Testament scholarship, but also a courageous gift to the church. Furthermore, its prose is fluent, occasionally causing the reader to pause with admiration for a poetic flourish or an artful turn of phrase. According to Wright, “Richard wrote beautifully—something one can say of very few biblical scholars.”

Just prior to completing The Moral Vision, Hays left Yale to take a post as associate professor of New Testament at Duke Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina. While at Duke, he continued to publish: commentaries on a number of Paul’s epistles, a book of essays on selected Pauline passages, and a pioneering set of lectures on the Christology of the four Gospels. Yet the number of Hays’s publications is not voluminous. “He has not written dozens of books,” said Wright. “But then, Beethoven wrote only nine symphonies.”

A Real Christian

Hays’s students remember him for his pastoral presence on campus. “Richard was known as a brilliant classroom teacher, a superb mentor of doctoral students, a deeply committed colleague, and, for those privileged to know him [more intimately], a faithful friend who embodied great wisdom,” said Jones. Another Duke colleague and a former doctoral student of Hays, C. Kavin Rowe, put it simply: “The main thing to say about Richard is that he was a real Christian.”

Hays once gave a conference lecture at the seminary where I previously taught. We met and began to chat about my doctoral dissertation, also on Paul’s letters. Hays was abruptly called away from our conversation, and I expected not to see him again. I would have been grateful to have had only those five minutes with the great scholar. But just before he was whisked in another direction, he asked if he could come to my office later to continue our conversation. Surprised, I said, “Yes, of course.” And, true to his word, he showed up. He sat in the chair where my students sit and for 30 minutes asked me thoughtful questions about my work. That is not the sort of attention a junior scholar takes for granted.

Hays was also a teacher committed to the wider church. As an ordained Methodist minister, he occupied pulpits everywhere, from small rural parishes to Westminster Abbey. “He has an extraordinary gift of being able to unpack the Scriptures as a public speaker,” said his brother Whis. And Hays’s sister-in-law, Mary Maggard Hays, a canon in the Anglican Church in North America, said, “He loved the Scriptures and expected God to speak through them.”

Hays will also be remembered for his family ties. His daughter Sarah penned the final chapter in a 2008 book honoring Hays and his work. She wrote honestly of her departure from her parents’ faith and her discovery of Eastern philosophy. But she also described her father’s response of genuine interest and sympathy. “As recently as two years ago,” she wrote, “my parents flew out to Los Angeles to sit down with me and try to understand how I continued to find so much peace inside this foreign worldview. They challenged but they did not condemn.” Later, Hays traveled to Nashville to play his guitar and record music he had written with Sarah.

Hays’s marriage to Judy, lasting over five decades, was central to his vocation. During their years at Yale, Judy earned a PhD in epidemiology and subsequently taught at the Duke University School of Nursing. Together they served students, albeit in different departments. And in an essay they co-wrote, Richard and Judy spoke of “the Christian practice of growing old [together as] a lifelong habit of believing God’s witness in the Scriptures and acting on it, for as long as God gives life.”

Byassee remembers a particularly touching moment, several years after Hays had arrived at Duke, when Richard and Judy renewed their wedding vows in an alcove at Duke Chapel. A small circle of family and friends huddled around them. “It took all of ten minutes,” Byassee said, “but the two of them were bathed in light, promising to love like Christ and the church till death do them part. They were living out Scripture, not cutting it up or debating it or scoring points with it.” For Byassee, this moment illustrated Hays’s commitment to Scripture as a living document that invited active performance.

Toward the end of his career, Hays was appointed dean of Duke Divinity School. The post was prestigious, but it limited his time for research and writing. By accepting the position, Hays signaled his commitment to serving the school and the United Methodist Church, as well as to shaping them for the decades to come. As Jones said, “Richard’s willingness to put his own scholarship and teaching on hold in order to assume the deanship of Duke Divinity School was a sign of his impeccable character. Diversely gifted, he lived his life in the service of the risen Christ, wherever he might be needed most.”

After being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in May 2015, Hays made the decision to step down as dean and pursue another large-scale writing project: the culmination of several years of research and in many ways the summit of his scholarly career. Hays planned to study the Gospels’ literary dependence on Israel’s Scriptures. In doing so, he hoped to demonstrate how the evangelists read Scripture figurally, and to discern parallels between the stories and symbols of the Old Testament and the life and teachings of Jesus that the evangelists wished to illuminate.

In a matter of mere months, the book was completed, with the help of several scholarly friends and a team of editors at Baylor University Press. It was published as Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels. More systematic in its presentation than the earlier Echoes in Paul book, the book features four main chapters that treat each of the four canonical Gospels by asking and answering the same three questions: How does this Evangelist, by invoking or evoking Israel’s Scripture, re-narrate the history of Israel? How does this Evangelist quote, allude, and echo Scripture to narrate the identity of Jesus? And how does this Evangelist use Scripture to narrate the church’s mission in the world? One notable achievement of the book, recognized by Hays himself, was its ability to hold Christology and ecclesiology tightly together. If the earlier Echoes book on Paul stressed that Paul did not show an interest in predictive prooftexts for Jesus’ messiahship but instead read Scripture for prefigurations of the church (an “ecclesiocentric hermeneutic”), the Gospels book insists that Israel’s Scripture evokes Christ and the church—the nexus that St. Augustine called the totus Christus, the “whole Christ,” head and body.

I recall attending a review session for the book the following year at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. One panelist objected to the book’s insistence on a so-called “high Christology,” a conclusion—that Jesus is to be seen as equal to and one with the God of Israel—many scholars find implausible, believing that it was only decades or centuries later that the church arrived at such a fulsome view of Jesus’ deity. Hays’ conclusion was clear: Already for the Gospel writers themselves, Jesus is the embodiment of Israel’s God. “[A]ll four Gospels, in ways both subtle and overt, portray the identity of Jesus as mysteriously fused with the identity of God.” Highlighting this portion of Hays’ book, I remember the exasperated panelist accusing Hays of “pugnacity.” In his response, Hays spoke with an obvious lump in his throat. He told the packed meeting room that, since the book was finished under the shadow of impending death, he felt that he had to say clearly what he really believed. As he put it elsewhere, “Jesus is kyrios [Lord]. That is where we ought to begin if we want to know the truth about Jesus.”

Hays’ final book—published only months ago and co-written with his son Christopher, a professor of Old Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California—was a reappraisal of what the Bible might say to contemporary lesbian and gay couples. Kicking off a firestorm of discussion, The Widening of God’s Mercy argued that the unfolding narrative of Scripture presents a dynamically, relationally responsive God who is willing to change his mind and opt for mercy in dialogue with human beings who find their circumstances intolerable. Tracking this narrative should cause Christians today to rethink positions like Richard Hays articulated in his Moral Vision of the New Testament, which presented a “traditionalist” Christian case against same-sex sexual intimacy.

Predictably, the book ignited a fresh round of debate on a perennially painful topic. Conservative evangelicals accused Hays of “apostasy.” Others, while sympathetic to Hays’ conclusions, nevertheless found fault with its revisionist portrait of God’s immutability and foreknowledge. For his part, Hays insisted that the book is ultimately about compassion. In one of his last public appearances, in an interview with Karen Keen at the CenterPeace conference, Hays said:

Let’s go back to the text and see how God's mysterious ways... continue to demonstrate an expansive compassion for human beings, for all of us who are created in God's image. God ultimately seeks to redeem all—all. The way that works itself out in history is as messy as it possibly can be, but that’s just who God is. God is not capricious. God is not fickle. God is a God who continues to reach out to us even when “all we like sheep have gone astray.”

If Scripture’s meaning is revealed ultimately in the embodied living of life, perhaps Hays really will be remembered as one of the church’s foremost biblical interpreters. His books will likely endure for generations of academics to ponder. But more than that, his life—as a pastor, community member, husband, teacher, mentor, and friend—will stand as an exposition of the apostle Paul, of whom he was especially fond. “You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, to be known and read by all,” said Paul to one of his churches (2 Cor. 3:2). The life and work of Richard Hays is such a letter, and it will no doubt echo in the life of the church.

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