So Paul is writing this part of the letter to convince the Corinthians that the death of Christ has abolished the old standards for what counts as power and persuasiveness. That is to say, the standards for knowing rightly have been transformed by the cross. And in light of these new standards — in light of the New Creation that God has brought into being — the Corinthians should stop their rivalry and boasting and conflict. They should be reconciled to Paul and to one another…
Paul is not just saying, “Look at me, my sins have been forgiven, and so I’m now a new creature.” He is saying that the whole world is being made new by the cross and resurrection and that all our relationships have to be re-evaluated in light of that transformation. -Richard B. Hays, “The Word of Reconciliation“
Hays on Reconciliation & Knowing
Hays v. Wright at Wheaton (part 1 of 2)
At the Wheaton Theology Conference on N. T. Wright, Richard Hays gave a critical assessment of Wright’s Jesus, as represented in Jesus and the Victory of God.
I want to respond to this lecture because it brings to the surface the passion behind my next major research project on the humanity of Jesus.
First off, I want to say where I agree with Hays. Jesus and the Victory of God is valuable as a “theology of the synoptic gospels,” and as something that gives us a historically contextualized reading of that sort of Jesus.
But our Jesus is the canonical Jesus, which means that we are not trying to look through the gospels at something that lies behind, but to understand the Jesus whom we meet in the canonical stories. I find JVG valuable as a help toward understanding these stories, not as an approximation of “the historical Jesus.”
Also, I agree with Hays that we are to read the gospels with a “resurrection hermeneutic,” because I believe that the gospels were written with a resurrection hermeneutic.
Without detracting from these base-hits, and in large part because of them, I call foul on a couple of other points. First, 
Hays spoke of “resurrection hermeneutics” in the same breath as “incarnational hermeneutics”. These are fundamentally different for one important reason: whereas all four gospels affirm the resurrection, only John has an incarnation. So, while reading these with a prior understanding of Jesus as resurrected Lord is a good reading of the gospels as written, reading them all as witnesses to the incarnate God is truly bringing in the theology of the church, and requires its own separate argument.
And I want to suggest that Hays has provided the strongest argument against an incarnation hermeneutic in his critique of JVG.
One place at which Hays finds JVG wanting is that it does not give due attention to the unique voices of each of the four Gospels we have in our New Testament canon. It is insufficiently attentive to the particular stories of Matthew, Mark, and Luke (Wright’s sources). But this is the very reason why an incarnation hermeneutic is inappropriate for interpreting the same books! Hays is asking for a canonical reading that flattens out the polyvalent witness, the individual voices, of the Gospels.
Resurrection hermeneutic? Sure. Because the resurrection/ascension is Jesus’ enthronement (Matthew, Luke), so when Jesus comes proclaiming the reign of God, he is enacting something that we know more fully once he is enthroned as the one who reigns at God’s right hand.
Why is it that I am so resistant to allowing the church’s tradition to transform the witness of the Synoptic Gospels? Tune in tomorrow.
N. T. Wright Conference Now Online
The Wheaton Theology Conference from this week is now online here (streaming video and everything)!
I just watched my Doktorvater Richard Hays give his response to Wright’s Jesus and the Victory of God. I come down somewhere between the two, except in this: like Tom, I’ve escaped from the attic and I much of how I read the NT is done in studied refusal to return. (See Hays’ speech for the reference.)
My Books
