The Faith of Jesus Christ: The Narrative Substructure of Galatians 3:1-4:11 / Edition 2

by Richard B. Hays

Overview

Widely praised as a major contribution to Pauline studies, Richard B. Hays's Faith of Jesus Christ now features, in this expanded second edition, a foreword by Luke Timothy Johnson, a new introduction by Hays, and a substantial dialogue with James D. G. Dunn. In this important study Hays argues against the mainstream that any attempt to account for the nature and method of Paul's theological language must first reckon with the centrality of narrative elements in his thought. Through an in-depth investigation of Galatians 3:1-4:11, Hays shows that the framework of Paul's thought is neither a system of doctrines nor his personal religious experience but the "sacred story" of Jesus Christ. Above all, Paul's thought is guided by his concern to draw out the implications of the gospel story, particularly how the "faith of Jesus Christ" reflects the mission of the church.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802849571
Publisher:	Eerdmans, William B. Publishing Company
Publication date:	11/08/2001
Series:	The Biblical Resource Series (BRS) , #56
Edition description:	2ND
Pages:	360
Product dimensions:	6.25(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Richard B. Hays is George Washington Ivey Professor Emeritus of New Testament and former dean at Duke Divinity School. He is internationally recognized for his work on the letters of Paul and New Testament ethics. His book The Moral Vision of the New Testament was selected by Christianity Today as one of the 100 most important religious books of the twentieth century.

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THE FAITH OF JESUS CHRIST

The Narrative Substructure of Galatians 3:1–4:11

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By RICHARD B. HAYS

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Copyright © 2002 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8028-4957-1

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Chapter One

The Search for the Constant Elements of Paul's Gospel

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 Käsemann. Some of his proposals must be evaluated in the course of this study, but one can hardly avoid the impression that, on the whole, Käsemann'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 Paul's encounter with the Kyrios Christos had its locus within the cultic experience of the early Hellenistic Christian communities. These approaches, by insisting on placing Paul within the religious environment of his time, served as a valuable corrective against the 19th-century tendency to interpret Paul as if he had been a professor of theology, and Bousset's proposals for interpreting the Pauline letters against the backdrop of cultic myth provide some suggestive clues for the alternative thesis argued in this study. (See the discussion of Bousset in Chapter II, below.) Nonetheless, these heavily "experience"-centered interpretations do not provide an adequate basis for answering the question about the "core" of Paul's thought. No one contests the fact that Paul underwent intense personal religious experience, but the question is this: what were the structures of thought within which this experience took place and by means of which he tried to communicate it to others? This question cannot be answered by an appeal to a nonverbal mystical experience, because the experience receives its shape in, with, and through the language with which it is apprehended and interpreted.

The same criticism applies also to the effort of Joachim Jeremias to find the "key" to Paul's theology in his conversion experience on the road to Damascus.

Es gibt nur einen Schlüssel zur paulinischen Theologie. Er heisst Damaskus.... In diesem Erlebnis die ganze Theologie des Apostels verwurzelt ist.

Apart from the dubious historical propriety of according the "key" place in Pauline theology to an event which is known to us only through the book of Acts, we must still ask whether a single "experience" can provide a sufficient explanation for Paul's diverse and rather fully articulated theological formulations. The "experience" may provide a causal explanation of how Paul the persecutor of the church became Paul the apostle, but it hardly accounts for the shape and content of Paul's thinking.

The case of the "existentialist" interpretation of Paul, as exemplified by Rudolf Bultmann, is somewhat more complicated. By proposing that the "core" of Paul's gospel is to be found in a new existential "self-understanding," Bultmann finds a center which defies classification within the categories posited in this discussion so far. This "self-understanding," as exposited by Bultmann, is experiential without being mystical and conceptual without being doctrinal. It is experiential because it "determines one's living in its manifold historical reality," and it is conceptual because "faith contains a knowing." Faith has a "'dogmatic' character insofar as it is the acceptance of a word." At the same time, Bultmann is insistent that this self-understanding of faith is never reducible to doctrinal propositions: faith also has "'undogmatic' character insofar as the word of proclamation is no mere report about historical incidents. It is no teaching about external matters which could simply be regarded as true without any transformation of the hearer's own existence. For the word is kerygma, personal address, demand, and promise." The subtlety of this Bultmannian interpretive synthesis of concept and experience may explain in part its widespread influence and staying power. We should note, however, that at least formally, if not materially, Bultmann treats Paul's thought as a structure of theological concepts that may be elucidated through systematic exposition: anthropological concepts, "grace," "faith," and so forth. At the same time, moreover, major portions of Paul's language are declared "mythological" and therefore immaterial to the Sache, the theological substance of Paul's thought.

This aspect of Bultmann's interpretive program has been, of course, the subject of much controversy. Is Paul's thought so readily translatable as Bultmann thinks into non-"mythological" categories? Would it not be possible to give an account of the "constant elements of the gospel" which would be more faithful to the forms in which Paul actually thought?

This is Beker's basic concern when he charges other critics with having bypassed "the investigation of the nature and method of Paul's theological language." If Paul is not working on the basis of a system of theological propositions, what does give form to his thinking? Surely his statements are not purely random. In this study, I propose the thesis that any attempt to account for the nature and method of Paul's theological language must reckon with the centrality of narrative elements in his thought. As we shall see through an examination of Gal 3:1–4:11, in certain key theological passages in his letters, the framework of Paul's thought is constituted neither by a system of doctrines nor by his personal religious experience but by a "sacred story," a narrative structure. In these texts, Paul "theologizes" by reflecting upon this story as an ordering pattern for thought and experience; he deals with the "variable elements" of the concrete situation (for instance, the challenge of his opponents in Galatia) by interpreting them within the framework of his "sacred story," which is a story about Jesus Christ. Thus, this study will explore the hypothesis that if there are "constant elements of the gospel" for Paul, they are to be sought in the structure of this story.

Paul does not, of course, simply retell the story in his letters, although he alludes to it constantly. He assumes that his readers know the gospel story, and his pervasive concern is to draw out the implications of this story for shaping the belief and practice of his infant churches. Thus, because the text of any particular Pauline letter is a complex "production" shaped by many factors, it is impossible to isolate the story as though it were a mathematical coefficient capable of being factored out of an equation. It is possible, however, to identify Paul's allusions to his story of Jesus Christ, to discern some features of its narrative "shape," and to examine the way in which this story operates as a constraint governing the logic of Paul's argumentation.

This claim must be stated very carefully: the gospel story does not determine Paul's discourse in the sense that the latter follows directly and inevitably from the former — indeed, Paul's letters may be read as running arguments with opponents who draw different inferences from the same story — but the story provides the foundational substructure upon which Paul's argumentation is constructed. It also provides, therefore, certain boundaries or constraints for the logic of Paul's discourse. Thus, the narrative structure of the gospel, while not all-determinative, is integral to Paul's reasoning. The task of this study will be to demonstrate the truth of this hypothesis with reference to the text of Gal 3:1–4:11.

At this point, the distinction between my undertaking and Beker's may be usefully clarified. In his major study, Paul the Apostle, Beker works out in considerable detail his understanding of the interplay between contingency and coherence in Paul's letters. There he declares that "the coherent center of Paul's gospel is constituted by the apocalyptic interpretation of the Christ-event." The basic theme of the book is Beker's claim that for Paul the Christ-event is permanently welded into the framework of Jewish apocalyptic thought, so that this framework itself is constitutive of the "core" of Paul's message. Although Beker has ably formulated the problem of contingency and coherence, my differences with him concern the substance and structure of the gospel "core," which Beker tends to describe in general phrases about the cosmic triumph of God. As Luke Johnson remarks in a review of Beker's work, "the frame is sharp, but the picture within it somewhat fuzzy." I do not propose, however, to engage in a critique of Beker, with whose position I am, in fact, in general agreement; instead, I intend to undertake a more precise examination of the gospel "core" as it is manifested in Galatians, a letter that, as Beker acknowledges, "threatens to undo what I have posited as the coherent core of Pauline thought, the apocalyptic coordinates of the Christ-event that focus on the imminent, cosmic triumph of God." Before we can attend, as Beker wants to do, to the process whereby the gospel core is brought into conjunction with various particular situations in Paul's churches, it is necessary to identify more carefully the structure of the "core" itself.

In Galatians, the gospel message is manifested in a kind of shorthand through allusive phrases such as "Jesus Christ crucified" (3:1). My thesis is that these allusive phrases are intended to recall and evoke a more comprehensive narrative pattern and that we may learn something new through a fresh attempt to delineate this pattern, tracing its structure through Paul's various allusions to it. Thus, my project in some respects closely parallels Leander Keck's attempt to sketch "The Gospel Paul Preached" in distinction from "What Paul Fought For."

The letters do not summarize what Paul preached to elicit faith, but interpret aspects of that preaching and its foundations. In developing his arguments, he alludes to his prior preaching/teaching; these references furnish the foundation of any reconstruction of Paul's preaching.

At the same time, however, I go beyond Keck's position by suggesting that the heart of "what Paul preached" was a story of Jesus Christ, and that Paul's "gospel" therefore has a narrative structure. In this way I hope to do justice to Beker's concern for attention to the nature and method of Paul's theological thinking. The "interpretive fluidity" that Beker observes in the "core" of Paul's message is a direct consequence of that core's narrative character; stories are by nature polyvalent, i.e., susceptible to various levels of interpretation and application. If Paul's theological thinking is grounded in a narrative structure, this raises some provocative questions for our understanding of his "method," and it also requires us, as I hope to demonstrate, to reconsider the meaning of certain key passages in Galatians and Romans. The central contention of this study is that we can best "follow" Paul's thought when we know the outline of the story; otherwise, when we read a Pauline letter, we are overhearing one side of an argument over the interpretation of a story that we have never heard.

Two clarifications are necessary to avert possible misunderstanding. First of all, this investigation intends neither to deny nor to minimize the importance of non-narrative elements in Paul's letters. The letters are, after all, letters, and their form is certainly influenced by epistolary and rhetorical conventions. Furthermore, among the diverse contents of the letters there are, of course, blocks of material, such as the "halakic" material in 1 Corinthians 7, which are not in any discernible way related to a narrative substructure. No claim is made here that everything in Paul's letters must be explained on the basis of a narrative structure; instead, I am seeking to highlight a dimension of Paul's thought which has heretofore received insufficient emphasis by suggesting that a gospel story is foundational for the explicitly theological portions of Paul's discourse, the sections in which he seeks to articulate the fundamental features of his proclamation. This suggestion will be tested in detail through an analysis of Gal 3:1–4:11.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from THE FAITH OF JESUS CHRIST by RICHARD B. HAYS Copyright © 2002 by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Excerpted by permission of William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Contents

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

Editorial Reviews

Religious Studies Review
"This rich and remarkably mature study provides new perspectives on all of Paul's thought and his place in earliest Christianity."

Journal of Theological Studies
"Hays's thesis makes an exciting contribution toward understanding Paul's soteriology."

Journal of Biblical Literature
"This book makes a contribution to the study of Paul's phrase 'faith of Jesus Christ' as well as of Galatians in general. It should be used by all who wish to engage in further consideration of these issues."

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