Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Richard B. Hays, Professor of New Testament at Duke Divinity School, Durham, North Carolina, since 1991, is an ordained United Methodist minister. He received his B.A. and M.Div. Degrees from Yale University and his Ph.D. from Emory University in Atlanta, where he taught in the Chandler School of Theology. He also taught at Yale Divinity School for ten years. Hays is noted for his work in the field of Pauline theology and New Testament ethics. His books include: The Moral Vision of the New Testament: Community, Cross, New Creation (Harper SanFrancisco, 1996), Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (Yale University Press, 1989) and First Corinthians (Interpretation commentary series; John Knox Press, 1997).

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THE FAITH OF JESUS CHRIST

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Contents

Foreword, by Luke Timothy Johnson...............................................................................................xiPreface.........................................................................................................................xviiAcknowledgments.................................................................................................................xixIntroduction to the Second Edition..............................................................................................xxiI. The Search for the Constant Elements of Paul's Gospel........................................................................1II. How Has the Narrative Dimension in Paul's Thought Been Handled? An Overview of Previous Interpretations.....................33III. Analysis of Narrative Christological Formulations in Galatians.............................................................73IV. The Function of Πστ the Narrative Structure of Paul's Gospel.................................................119V. The Logic of Argumentation in Gal 3:1–4:11.............................................................................163VI. Conclusion: Implications for Pauline Interpretation.........................................................................209Selected Bibliography...........................................................................................................231Appendix 1: Once More, [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] James D. G. Dunn.......................................................249Appendix 2: [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] and Pauline Christology: What Is at Stake? Richard B. Hays........................272Index of Authors................................................................................................................299Index of Scripture References...................................................................................................304

Chapter One

A. Statement of the Problem and Elaboration of the Thesis

1. The Quest for the "Core" of Paul's Thought

Upon reading the Pauline letters we find ourselves cast in medias res, into a network of unexplained assumptions and allusions. With no advance briefing, we can pick up a Platonic dialogue or Descartes' Discourse on Method and read it from start to finish with a sense of being able to "follow" the reasoning that undergirds the text, but not so with a Pauline letter, which is a much more challenging object for exegesis because of its "occasional" character. Paul is speaking to particular situations and events within the communities to which he writes; he brings his gospel into an encounter with these situations and draws out applications for the concrete problems of the community's life. As J. C. Beker has formulated it, Paul's letters bring the "core" of the gospel into dynamic interaction with particular circumstances: "The 'core' then is not a frozen unity, but has interpretive fluidity, which consists in a steady interaction between the constant elements of the gospel and the variable elements of the situations, so that in each new situation the gospel comes to speech again."

Historical-critical exegesis attempts, of course, to reconstruct the particular situations into which Paul was speaking. (Who were the opponents of Paul at Galatia and what were they really saying?) Important as this task of historical reconstruction is, however, critical exegesis must reckon equally with the question of what Paul brought to these encounters: what constitutes the framework out of which Paul reacted to the pastoral problems that appear in his letters? What are, in Beker's phrase, "the constant elements of the gospel" which Paul brings into contact with various situations?

When the question is posed in this way, NT critics have almost invariably tended to seek the answer in Paul's "ideas," the doctrinal content of his thought. Older orthodox Protestant exegesis treated Paul as a systematic theologian whose teaching could be understood as a compendium of theological propositions, or Lehrbegriffe. In the late nineteenth century there emerged a growing awareness that Paul was not, after all, a systematic theologian, and that his letters, if read as theological tractates, must be judged as peculiarly rambling and unsatisfactory ones, riddled with non sequiturs and contradictions. Nonetheless, as Beker remarks, the attempt to grasp the "core" of Paul's gospel was still conceived by critics as "a quest for doctrinal centers," a quest for conceptual formulations. Even W. Wrede, with his acute awareness of the nonsystematic character of Paul's thought, was still persuaded that "the religion of the apostle is theological through and through: his theology is his religion."

The great difficulty with this approach, of course, is that it has inevitably forced critics to play Paul off against himself: if the "core" of Paul's thought is a central theological idea, then all the ideas expressed in the letters, if not derived from this central idea, must be tangential (and therefore unimportant) or even in conflict with it. E. P. Sanders' study Paul and Palestinian Judaism, for example, represents a vigorous attempt to restate Albert Schweitzer's position that "justification" is a "subsidiary crater" within Paul's thought and that eschatological participation in Christ is the real center. This interpretation, however, results in the rather odd judgment that Romans 1–5, for example, is peripheral to Paul's theology and that major portions of the letters are argued using theological categories unrelated to the doctrinal center of Paul's thought.

An alternative interpretive strategy is to expand the concept of justification so that it subsumes all the other conceptual schemata in Paul's letters. Among contemporary NT scholars this strategy (which can trace its origins to Martin Luther) has been most resourcefully advocated by Ernst Ksemann. Some of his proposals must be evaluated in the course of this study, but one can hardly avoid the impression that, on the whole, Ksemann's highly elastic interpretation of "righteousness" stretches the concept nearly to its breaking point.

Attempts to discover the "core" of Paul's gospel in something other than a set of theological ideas have taken two fundamental directions: (1) the attempt to interpret Paul's theology as an expression of his personal subjective religious experience, and (2) the attempt to interpret Paul's gospel within existentialist categories. Let us consider each of these briefly in turn.

Early in this century, Adolf Deissmann reacted against the prevalent interpretation of Paul as a dogmatic theologian and argued that his letters should be read as expressions emerging from his personal experience of mystical union with Christ. To understand Paul, according to Deissmann's romantic interpretation, it is less important to worry over his accidental theological formulations than to grasp the experiential intensity of this unitive mysticism. Wilhelm Bousset, writing from the perspective of the religions-geschichtliche Schule, also stressed Paul's religious experience, emphasizing especially that...