Their eyes were opened: an appreciation of Richard Hays’ figural christology

Reading Backwards has two principal goals: (a) to show how the Old Testament teaches us to read the New Testament, and (b) to show how the New Testament teaches us to read the Old Testament (p. 4). Both of these goals have polemical targets: (a) the naïve Marcionism of contemporary Protestant churches that have forgotten the importance of the Old Testament for understanding the New (p. 5), and (b) modern historical criticism, as it has rejected out of hand any significant role the New Testament might play in understanding the Old (p. 3). Hays’ rather devastating salvo against these targets is based in a particular understanding of what he calls ‘figural exegesis’ (passim) that works itself out in detailed and persuasive commentary on selected passages from the four Gospels.

Before we get to the scriptural commentary, we need to nail down exactly what Hays means by figural exegesis, and such a definition requires one to have a grasp of the sources at play in the notion. My contribution here is meant to supplement the quite brief genealogy provided by Hays.

The seminal text for contemporary understandings of figural exegesis is Erich Auerbach's essay ‘Figura’, written in 1938 in Istanbul when Auerbach was in exile from Nazi Germany. By figural interpretation, Auerbach defines a hermeneutical practice that makes a connection between two events or persons, each of which finds meaning or significance in its relation to the other.Footnote ³ The key point here is that neither of the two events or persons has independent significance; the meaning is constituted in the relation between the two. When applied to scripture, this means that if an event or person is interpreted as pointing forward to its fulfilment in a future event or person, that original event or person does not lose its historical importance, for the fulfilment of the figure collapses if the original figure is done away with. The figure is seen as gaining its full significance in correspondence to a later person or event, but it does not thereby lose its original significance or historical reality.Footnote ⁴ Auerbach's overall emphasis in ‘Figura’ is decidedly placed on historical reality rather than significance or meaning; he is above all concerned with preserving the reality of the original figure. Figural interpretation, therefore, allows events or persons to achieve a future fulfilment without losing their own integral reality.Footnote ⁵ In such a way, the New Testament is constantly related to the Old, without ever being able to discard it.

Hays fully takes on this notion of figura, but his focus is different than Auerbach's. Though preserving the historical reality of the original event or person is certainly important to Hays, his own focus is more on how the meaning of the original figure is necessarily preserved and taken forward into its fulfilment. In other words, Hays is interested in the overall pattern of meaning sustained in the literary relation of figure to fulfilment (p. 3). In this literary relation, figure and fulfilment can never be dissolved in favor of fulfilment alone, for in that case the whole meaning pattern breaks down. Such relations of meaning are a concern for Auerbach as well; the difference between the two is only a matter of emphasis.

In taking figural exegesis in such a direction, Hays is following the lead of Hans Frei, his teacher and former colleague at Yale Divinity School (p. xvi). Whereas Auerbach's main concern is the preservation of the concrete, historical reality of the original figure, Frei is focused on how the identity of Jesus Christ is narratively constructed by identifiable patterns of meaning, with figural exegesis of the Old Testament by the Gospel writers being a key component of such construction. Frei's concern is the preservation of the literal meaning of the text: one need not go beyond the literal sense of the text to arrive at overarching patterns of meaning, as fulfilment is simply an extension (rather than a replacement) of the original literal meaning of a given figure. With Frei, one goes from figure to fulfilment without ever leaving the sensus literalis behind. Frei shifts the practice of figural interpretation from the historicality of events towards seeing the ‘complex pattern of meaning’ present in the overall arc of the canon,Footnote ⁶ such that all the individual pieces find fulfilment in the identity of Jesus Christ – an identity which is only made clear as the various figures feed into making up the complex pattern of meaning that is precisely constitutive of the identity in question.

Hays does not essentially diverge from Frei's conception of figural exegesis, which stands in the tradition of Auerbach while modifying it. Hays’ primary focus is registering how the Evangelists ‘read backwards’ and discover in the Old Testament the patterns of meaning which find their fulfilment in Jesus Christ. Hays insists that ‘the discernment of a figural correspondence is necessarily retrospective rather than prospective’ (p. 2), and offers the following succinct summary of his methodology:

Hays then proceeds to cite Frei directly as a precedent for such a theory. Hays’ novelty does not consist in methodological innovation; rather, he takes up Frei's articulation of figural interpretation and adds to it a wealth of exegetical detail that Frei never provided (p. xvi). This is where Hays makes his distinctive contribution.

Each of the four Evangelists receives a chapter in Reading Backwards. What Hays is after in these four chapters is the distinctive style of figural interpretation that each individual Evangelist embodies (p. 94). This is accomplished through close readings of passages where the Old Testament – the Septuagint – is utilised figurally by the Gospel writer. A thorough summary of these close readings lies beyond the scope of this article; instead, what I offer is a brief catalogue of compelling moments.

Through his patient documentation of intertextual allusion, Hays shows that Mark – rather than being an early text with a low christology – should be read as consistently hinting at or suggesting an identification between Jesus and the God of Israel. This is demonstrated in both more and less obvious ways. Mark 1:3b, ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight’, constitutes a fairly obvious allusion to Jesus’ divine identity, at least when one notes that the cited text – Isaiah 40:3 LXX – uses the word kuriou, which is in this case a translation of the tetragrammaton, yod he vav he (p. 20). Mark 6:45–52, however, is a much more veiled allusion, and here Hays’ guidance becomes indispensable. In this story, Jesus walks on the sea, frightens the disciples, then comforts his followers and joins them in their boat. Hays focuses on the strange phrase in Mark 6:48, ēthelen parelthein autous, ‘he intended to pass them by’. This piece of narratival detail has baffled many interpreters, including Matthew the Evangelist and St Augustine (pp. 24–5). Hays convincingly identifies the phrase as an allusion to Job 9:11 LXX, where God the Creator is depicted as ‘passing by’ (parelthē) Job without Job's perception. This allusion, once picked up, suggests a figural identity between how God was depicted by Job and how Jesus is portrayed by Mark. Yet, Hays insists, what we receive from Mark is only a veiled hint (not a triumphant declaration) and we must allow it to remain so (pp. 25–6).

It is here that Hays’ subtle artistry reveals itself: he does not recommend we now read Mark with a full confidence that there is a divine identity christology in each and every passage. Rather, Hays thinks that the power of Mark's Gospel lies in its reticence, which prompts the reader to reverent wonder before the mystery therein depicted (pp. 26, 95–6).

When Hays turns to Matthew, we find him focusing not so much on the many formula citations that Matthew provides, but broadening the scope of those citations to look at the original literary context in which they were articulated. (This is the famous – or infamous – method of metalēpsis, explained at greater length in Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul.) For example, once one is aware of the full context of the lamentation in Ramah and the tears of Rachel mentioned in Matthew 2:17–18, one knows that Matthew is placing this moment of mourning within a prophetic utterance that predicts the imminent end of exile (Jer. 31:15–17). In other words, Matthew uses a text whose overall literary pattern parallels the narrative movement of his own Gospel (from mourning to the end of exile, which Matthew positions as the arrival of the Messiah). Hays then goes on to use this passage to make a point about Matthew as a whole, summarising his conclusion beautifully:

Figures are not isolated bits that can be pieced together to form a proof; rather, a figure gains its meaning as a part of an overall narrative pattern, which Matthew well knows. Anyone who thinks Matthew is just prooftexting is simply not paying sufficient attention to the Septuagint intertexts, as Hays ably shows.

There are many other examples that could be cited. I especially think of how Hays shows the parallels between the Jewish liturgical festivals and the person of Jesus himself in John's Gospel (p. 82), or another passage from Mark where he demonstrates that the calming of the sea story echoes Psalm 107, where it is the LORD who calms the seas (pp. 22–3), thus reinforcing the presence of a veiled high christology in Mark. This wealth of detail makes Hays’ brief book deserving of a close reading (and his long book even more so!). However, here I must go on to analyse what I consider to be the major problem with the text, and it concerns how Hays positions himself with respect to the early church tradition.

Figura in the fathers: on the post-critical difference

Near the beginning of the text, Hays makes the following claim:

In this claim, Hays positions Reading Backwards in continuity with ‘the early church fathers’ – quite a broad claim, at first glance. However, note the characteristic carefulness of Hays: he is not claiming to be in continuity with the early church fathers in general or in total, but only when it comes to figural interpretation and the fourfold Gospel witness. Yet even this qualified claim is problematic, in at least two ways.

There is, first, the more basic matter that the early church fathers by no means form a unified voice when it comes to figural exegesis. Auerbach, for example, draws a sharp distinction between the exegetical practice of Tertullian and Origen.Footnote ⁸ Hays, presumably, would want to be on the side of Tertullian (figure) against Origen (allegory) – though that positioning of Origen (the positioning of him as a pure allegorist against the more historically invested Tertullian) is itself problematic,Footnote ⁹ a problem not addressed by Hays. And there are, of course, other figures from whom Hays would more surely want to distance himself; would he desire, for instance, to echo Sedulius when he writes Pellitur umbra die, Christo veniente figura?Footnote ¹⁰ In short, the many difficulties involved in placing oneself in continuity with the figural exegesis of the early church fathers are simply not attended to by Hays. The result is a simple positioning of this text as in line with the church's exegetical tradition without due attention to the complexity of that tradition.

There is a deeper problem with Hays’ claim, however. Here the work of John David Dawson, Christian Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Identity, is essential and illuminating. In the following passage, Dawson's goal is to reveal the presumptions that modern readers bring to ancient texts:

Hays (following Frei) clearly shares the assumption Dawson here critiques: namely, that texts – including scriptures – are fundamentally about meaning, which they construct through various literary devices.

Hays understands figural correspondence as a literary relation whereby a pattern of meaning is constructed. The literary orientation is clear in the terms Hays uses: the Gospels ‘evoke’ the Old Testament (p. 12); Jesus is a ‘narrative climax’ to the story of Israel (p. 15); the Gospel of Mark uses ‘riddle’, ‘allusion’ and ‘inference’ (p. 20), indeed Mark utilises a ‘poetics of allusion’, an ‘intertextual narrative strategy’ and ‘paradoxical veiled communication’ (p. 28); Matthew gives us ‘a figural template . . . that can be applied to subsequent historical circumstances’ (p. 41); Luke offers ‘implicit correspondences, suggested through the literary devices of allusion and echo’ (p. 58); and John uses the temple as a ‘hermeneutical device’ (p. 85). All this sounds strangely unlike the early church fathers, and Dawson helps us see that the difference is not simply lexical.

The early church fathers surely did practise figural exegesis, but they believed that a figure corresponded to its fulfilment because God had authored that figure. In the following passage, Dawson makes quite clear the type of belief that lies behind figural exegesis in the early church fathers:

Such a way of thinking is nowhere present in Hays.Footnote ¹³ His literary approach is based on the meaning of texts and how one can see fulfilments extending a pattern of significance that is earlier established in a figure. Nowhere in Reading Backwards is there a discussion of God as the author of these figures (or any discussion of inspiration whatsoever, for that matter). But such a belief is omnipresent in the early church fathers.Footnote ¹⁴ Therefore, precisely in regard to this issue of figural exegesis, Hays is in fundamental discontinuity with the early church fathers – including Irenaeus – in a quite significant way. That is to say, regardless of whether there is a material difference in terms of what an early church father and Richard Hays think a scriptural text means (often, there is no difference here), there is yet a fundamental difference in how they think a scriptural text means. Thus, Hays and the early church fathers may frequently agree about the meaning of a text, but they do not agree about how that meaning got there, thereby having vastly different views of what is going on when figural exegesis is practised.Footnote ¹⁵

This difference can be shown briefly from Irenaeus’ delightfully compact and lucid On the Apostolic Preaching. After laying out the whole story of the Septuagint scriptures and the coming of Christ in part I of the text, Irenaeus turns in part II to describe how the prophets foresaw the Messiah. In other words, he answers the question: how does one testament relate to the other? Irenaeus is quite clear that, when it comes to Abraham, Jacob and Moses, these prophets were able to foresee things about Christ because Christ had visited them in person and in event. Here is how Irenaeus explains the story of Moses:

According to Irenaeus, it is Jesus Christ himself, the Word of God, who spoke to Moses and acted in Israel's history. The scriptures register these divine performances. According to the ancients, it is the transcendent God who shapes the correspondences between the Old and New Testaments through the active causation of events.

This quotation from Irenaeus helps to summarise the difference between Hays and the early church fathers, for whom Irenaeus will have to stand as a type (here, I would argue in line with Dawson that there is in fact a universal agreement). In Hays, the Gospels are approached as literary texts that articulate sophisticated patterns of meaning when seen in concert with the Old Testament scriptures they reference. In the early church fathers, God – who directly intervenes in history – is the direct author of the Old Testament figures, and it is God who brings them to fulfilment in the events recounted in the Gospels.Footnote ¹⁷ In the early church fathers, figural exegesis is not so much a matter of careful rendering of the meaning of various corresponding literary texts; rather, it is the simple acknowledgement of how God has acted in history, with literary correspondences following only secondarily upon those facts.

Such a difference is only confirmed by Hays’ resistance to prophetic understandings of figural exegesis. In his methodologically focused Introduction, Hays writes:

Here, the difference between the early church fathers and Hays’ post-critical approach – which is, I would add, much more amenable to the modern academy – could not be clearer. For, of course, if it is God who is authoring these figures we find in the Old Testament, it is silly to be concerned about whether the author of the text has a knowledge of what is being predicted or prefigured. The distinction between prediction and prefiguration would not have made much sense to Irenaeus, nor would it have come up as a potential problem or issue in the first place. And so, all of a sudden, the whole worldview that separates Hays from the early church fathers begins to yawn like a great shuddering gulf before us. One begins to wonder if the ancient practice can be recovered quite so easily.Footnote ¹⁸

A further complication and conclusion

The critique just offered is now complicated by a passage in the conclusion of Hays’ longer book, Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels (the full-blown companion piece to his earlier Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul). Here Hays does directly address the issue of the relation of God to figural exegesis, and the results are fascinating. The passage I am referring to, on what it means to have a ‘Gospel-shaped hermeneutic’, reads as follows:

What is more, just after this passage Hays approvingly references John David Dawson, the author I have just used extensively to critique the exegetical programme of Reading Backwards, and Hays does so without any recognition that the central argument of Dawson's text could be taken as directly critical of his own approach.Footnote ²⁰ Nor does Hays acknowledge any tension between these paragraphs on divine agency and the rest of the book (which is focused on detecting exactly the same methods of literary construction as mentioned above in reference to Reading Backwards).Footnote ²¹

The invocation of God-in-history at this late point in the text does not save it from the critique just levelled; instead, it challenges the whole idea of reading backwards. Hays still insists in the larger book that the ‘authors of the Old Testament's narratives’ did not intentionally predict Jesus.Footnote ²² Yet this insistence can hardly stand if the true author of these narratives is God. Carried to its logical conclusion, the position Hays articulates means that the events recorded in the Old Testament were always ultimately about Jesus Christ and were intended to be so by the God who was/is their author.Footnote ²³ This means that the attentive reader or witness should have been able to read forwards, following God's simultaneously literal and predictive activity in history and thus recognising Christ as Christ, as indeed Jesus seems to imply in John 5:46.Footnote ²⁴ In short, the aporia between post-critical and ancient exegesis remains, and the difficulty of bringing the two trajectories together is not sufficiently grappled with here.

In light of this post-critical/ancient difference, Hays’ positioning of Reading Backwards as in continuity with the figural exegesis of the early church fathers is a claim that should be resisted. However, all is not lost: all the figural correspondences so carefully registered by Hays would be gladly embraced by the early church fathersFootnote ²⁵ – though, of course, they would have consistently traced them back to apostolic witnesses of God's economic artistry and not the poetic sensibilities of literary geniuses.Footnote ²⁶

Hays’ exegetical project still has much value, then, even if one does not share the beliefs that lie behind its practice of figural interpretation. This is important to note, especially when the gnawing suspicion arises that Hays’ understanding of figural interpretation is not only in discontinuity with the early church fathers, but possibly also with Evangelists themselves. The Evangelists were, of course, ancients, and thus they presumably do not share Hays’ assumption that texts are about meaning. This suggestion is troubling on account of the fact that Hays’ notion of figural exegesis is intended to be descriptive of what the Evangelists are doing. However, such a large matter can be left for further debate at a later point, as it does not affect the minimal claims I am making here, concerning Hays’ lack of continuity with the ancient patristic exegetes of scripture. Thus, with all this in mind, we may appreciate Hays’ consistently illuminating attention to the literary aspects of both the Septuagint and the Gospels (not to mention Paul), while also resisting his equation of post-critical exegesis with the ancient approach. That, in my opinion, is where judgement should rest on Hays’ undoubtedly profound foray into gospel scholarship.