Quotes from Richard B. Hays

The gospel is not a summary of "the necessary truths of reason"; rather, it is a revelation that shatters and reshapes human reason in light of God's foolishness.

As Zabelka remarked, the just war theory is "something that Christ never taught or even hinted at."6

When we ask, "Is the fetus a person?" we are asking the same sort of limiting, self-justifying question that the lawyer asked Jesus: "Who is my neighbor?" Jesus, by answering the lawyer's question with this parable, rejects casuistic attempts to circumscribe our moral concern by defining the other as belonging to a category outside the scope of our obligation.

One consequence of this hermeneutical guideline is that interpretation of the New Testament cannot be performed by isolated individuals; the embodiment of the Word happens in the body of Christ, the church. Hermeneutics is necessarily a communal activity.29

It is not possible to use the just war tradition as a hermeneutical device for illuminating the New Testament, nor have the defenders of the tradition ordinarily even attempted to do so.

where the Torah restricts retaliation, Jesus forbids it altogether.

When the topic of pseudonymous composition arises, I like to ask my students whether all those albums issued under the name of Bob Dylan for the last fifteen years can possibly be the work of the same person who performed "Highway 61 Revisited.")

To define the unborn child as a nonperson is to narrow the scope of moral concern, whereas Jesus calls upon us to widen it by showing mercy and actively intervening on behalf of the helpless. The Samaritan is a paradigm of love that goes beyond ordinary obligation and thus creates a neighbor relation where none existed before.

For the church, it is perhaps important to know that the obedience of faith was lived out in history by the flesh-and-blood man Jesus, for his example teaches us that to trust in the power of God over history is not to trust in vain.

This would mean, practically speaking, that Christians would have to relinquish positions of power and influence insofar as the exercise of such positions becomes incompatible with the teaching and example of Jesus.

Those who can naively affirm the bumper-sticker slogan, "God said it, I believe it, that settles it," are oblivious to the question-begging inherent in the formulation: there is no escape from the imperative of interpreting the Word. Bumper-sticker hermeneutics will not do.

It is increasingly the case in Western culture that Christians can participate in public governance only insofar as they suppress their explicitly Christian motivations. Paradoxically, the Christian community might have more impact upon the world if it were less concerned about appearing reasonable in the eyes of the world and more concerned about faithfully embodying the New Testament's teaching against violence.

The narrative and theological force of this story is analogous to that of the saying, "Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you" (Matt. 21:31); just as that saying does not necessarily commend extortionate tax-farming and prostitution as continuing practices, so these stories about centurions cannot be read as endorsements of military careers for Christians.

Confronted with the diversity of New Testament witnesses, we are often tempted to dissolve the plurality of perspectives by appealing to universal principles (love, justice, and so on) or dialectical compromises. Such conceptual movements away from a text's specific imperatives are often escape routes from its uncomfortable demands.

community, cross, and new creation.

The question for her is not whether to exercise violence but how to survive it, how to denounce it in a way that will effectively set women free from its destructive effects.

As great-grandchildren of the Enlightenment, we like to think of ourselves as free moral agents, choosing rationally among possible actions, but Scripture unmasks that cheerful illusion and teaches us that we are deeply infected by the tendency to self-deception.

The Bible undercuts our cultural obsession with sexual fulfillment. Scripture (along with many subsequent generations of faithful Christians) bears witness that lives of freedom, joy, and service are possible without sexual relations. Indeed, however odd it may seem to contemporary sensibilities, some New Testament passages (Matt. 19:10–12, 1 Cor. 7) clearly commend the celibate life as a way of faithfulness.

There can be no understanding of the church as community in New Testament terms apart from the prior reality of God's election of a covenant people, as narrated in the Old Testament.

A reader who senses the echo of the exodus/conquest18 language in Mark 1:2 will find the intuition immediately reinforced by what follows.

This is one of the passages in the letter that could hardly have come from the pen of Paul. The assertion that women will be saved through bearing children clashes flagrantly with Paul's profound conviction that all human beings are saved only by virtue of the death of Christ. The lame exoneration of Adam (2:13–14) also sits oddly in conjunction with Paul's portrayal in Romans 5:12–21 of Adam as the source of sin and typological representative of sinful humanity.

Despite the smooth illusions perpetrated by mass culture in the United States, sexual gratification is not a sacred right, and celibacy is not a fate worse than death.

God overcomes the world not through a show of force but through the suffering and death of Jesus, "the faithful witness [martys]" (1:5).

Rome rules by the power of violence, but the one who is the true King of kings and Lord of lords rules by virtue of his submission to death—precisely the opposite of armed violence against the empire. That is why he alone is worthy.