The Good and the Bad of Richard Hays, ‘Moral Vision of the NT’
I just finished reading Hays’s work that has become an instant classic in the world of NT Ethics. Hays is a renowned scholar in the area of New Testament biblical ethics and an important voice among conservative New Testament biblical studies professors and theologians.
Here’s my rapid react to the work. I tried to be fair about what I thought was good, and then give some detail about what I didn’t care some much for. Up front, I want to say that I learned more from the first 270 pages or so of his work than any other book I’ve read. He moved with such breadth and clarity through the majority of the New Testament providing compelling descriptions of the ethical perspectives and themes of the various books. And, of course, his categories of Community, Cross, and New Creation are illuminating in a way that they can’t be dismissed as the three central focal images of the New Testament.
Here’s my reaction:
I thought his sections on the Bible and his descriptions of Niebuhr, Barth, Yoder, Hauerwas, and Fiorenzia were great. I found those to be enlightening and helpful. I enjoyed his synthetic/descriptive work on Scripture and of the five examples of hermeneutics I had only read Niebuhr so I enjoyed having a more systematic and detailed description of the other figures. I thought he was unnecessarily unfair to Niebuhr in places and flat out wrong in his claim that Niebuhr puts too great trust in our ability to predict the outcomes of our actions (if I had the book with me I’d give the reference). I just finished Niebuhr’s Irony of American History which is a book that focuses on explicitly denying America’s ability to predict the future and to warn against overconfidence when it comes to political moves like war. I’d be interested to know if he was unfair in places to the other four.
My biggest complaint with his hermeneutical proposal was his insistence on the primacy of Scripture and that all other sources are subservient to it. It sounded a whole lot like “the Bible says it, that settles it” to me, especially as he worked out his approach the issues like homosexuality, war, and abortion at the end. To be fair to Hays, he says that this is an assumption he makes and to defend it would be another full length work, so I can respect ‘Moral Vision’ as “this is how application would work if you assume the primacy of Scripture.” But I want to know more about why he’s so disparaging of (especially) tradition and experience. From my perspective, these sources should be treated as competing ethical resources rather than subservient resources to understanding Scripture. It seems that Hays’s approach to Scripture is a product of Reformational categories and a belief in sola scriptura which I find historically late and epistemologically problematic. It seems that the origin of the canon attests to the fact that Scripture stands within tradition more so than it stands above it. He was also disparaging of philosophy as a resource (in the category of experience) which seems equally historically late and going against the Christian tradition of the first millenia. I’d love to hear if anything I’m saying/thinking in this area is misguided either in my disagreement or my interpretation of Hays.
My only other gripe with the work is more an issue of style and presentation rather than content. I was so frustrated when he stated that he would do something later in the book, but it was only done indirectly. For instance, he said early on that he would show the problems with Hauerwas’s desconstructionist approach to texts, but never spelled out those problems specifically. He indirectly dealt with it, but I wanted a specific section arguing and setting out a more systematic proposal. Hays did the same thing later on when he said in passing that there are problems with giving too great a role as a resource for ethics. He said he’d pick that argument back up in the “homosexuality” section but never did so. In his mind I’m sure he indirectly answered the question, but I wanted a clear and convincing argument from him.
I’d love to hear thoughts from anyone who’s read Hays or knows more about him.
