(RNS) — Professor Richard Hays, a Scripture scholar of huge affect, each by means of his scholarship and thru his management in theological schooling, died on Friday, January 3, the results of an extended journey with pancreatic most cancers and the tip of a exceptional life.
When New Testomony specialists confer with the scholarship of Richard Hays, we’re apt to resort to shorthand expressions. “Narrative substructure,” “subjective genitive,” and “echoes of Scripture” are three that come instantly to thoughts, and rightly so, as Richard’s publications on these matters set waves of analysis in movement. However Richard was greater than a set of propositions in want of protection. His work was enriching as a result of it was itself enriched by the English language he so cherished. His early devotion to poetry paid off, not as a result of he raided Harold Bloom, however as a result of he learn Milton and Yeats and Arnold and Eliot. Each phrase mattered, whether or not it was an historic phrase or a contemporary one, and that made Richard’s personal phrases extra highly effective.
Richard pursued his work with a confidence that manifested itself in his early willingness to tackle scholarly positions that had been usually regarded as “settled.” We had been at a Columbia Seminar dinner collectively someday within the early Nineteen Eighties — nicely earlier than even his dissertation had been printed — when he instigated a heated dialogue concerning the “religion of Christ” amongst senior students on the desk. Neither on that night nor later did I sense Richard was being provocative simply to be provocative, however out of real conviction concerning the matter at hand.
That confidence was coupled, even mellowed, by a well-honed willingness to listen to and reply to criticism. When “The Ethical Imaginative and prescient of the New Testomony” was nonetheless in draft type, he hosted a small convention at Duke, inviting quite a few colleagues to work together with its chapters. Richard gracefully endured a number of days of critique — a few of it fairly forceful — within the curiosity of bettering his work. Some years later, after the publication of “Searching for the Id of Jesus” — a ebook we edited collectively by means of the auspices of the Middle of Theological Inquiry in Princeton — Tom Wright issued a stinging critique of the amount in a ebook evaluation panel at a nationwide assembly. True to his personal character, though Richard was dismayed by the critique and disagreed with it, he maintained his respect and deep affection for Tom.
I skilled that dedication to friendship myself, as Richard and I navigated our personal disagreements. Conversations round a number of matters, most notably human sexuality and abortion, discovered us on reverse sides, and awkwardly so at occasions. But I by no means thought-about that Richard may see these as friendship-terminating moments, and I belief he by no means skilled nervousness over that chance. To make certain, we each lived with privileges that allowed us to keep up the friendship, however I feel one thing aside from privilege was at work. We had been given to one another as associates, and that present was to not be questioned or solid apart.
Within the closing years of his life, Richard demonstrated in a public means that confidence about one’s work must be coupled with the flexibility to vary one’s thoughts. When he and his son, Christopher B. Hays, printed “The Widening of God’s Mercy” in 2024, Richard made public what many people knew, particularly, that he had modified his thoughts concerning the interpretation of Scripture and the query of same-sex relations. Richard was conscious that his earlier place, argued in “Ethical Imaginative and prescient,” had contributed to a hardening of the classes in some church circles, and he wished very a lot to provide public voice each to his change of thoughts and to his change of coronary heart. It’s a testimony to the divine mercy of the title of that ebook that it was printed earlier than Richard’s loss of life.
The depth that characterised Richard’s work additionally characterised his assist of scholars and associates. I can recall heat introductions to Love Sechrest, Ross Wagner, and Brittany Wilson, amongst others — college students Richard wished to carry to the eye of his personal scholarly associates — friendships he hoped to generate. And I’m deeply grateful for his assist in occasions of non-public disaster, to say nothing of his encouragement of my very own work. Throughout one season when each of us had been in Princeton, we met a number of occasions to work by means of a translation of Romans. These conversations had been wealthy and valuable, even when we did strive the endurance of restaurant employees who wanted us to maneuver alongside.
Such depth can come on the expense of household, and Richard was painfully conscious that his family typically paid a steep worth for his vocation. He acknowledged that worth explicitly within the preface to “Echoes of Scripture within the Gospels,” which is devoted to his spouse, Judy. In lots of conversations through the years, nevertheless, he at all times reported on Judy’s work with delight and real curiosity. And no dialog was full till we had shared studies on our kids and, with time, the grandchildren. Unquestionably, Richard cherished and was cherished in a means that sustained him and allowed all of them to flourish.
All of this full and good life was funded by an unapologetic conviction concerning the mercy of God at work within the gospel of Jesus Christ. Whereas Richard held that there was worth in historic crucial investigation, it was not for him a mere parlor recreation however half and parcel of a quest to grasp what God has finished on the planet and to search out our place in that story. It stunned me under no circumstances to search out that his personal final message on his CaringBridge web site got here from Romans 14:
We don’t stay to ourselves, and we don’t die to ourselves.
If we stay, we stay to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord;
So then, whether or not we stay or whether or not we die, we’re the Lord’s.
Richard knew who his Lord was, and he knew what his personal vocation was. The church and the academy have been the beneficiaries of that life.
(Beverly Roberts Gaventa is Helen H.P. Manson Professor of New Testomony Emerita at Princeton Theological Seminary and Distinguished Professor of New Testomony (retired) at Baylor College. Her most up-to-date ebook is “Romans: A Commentary” (WJK, 2024). The views expressed on this commentary don’t essentially mirror these of Faith Information Service.)
