This image is the cover for the book Reading with the Grain of Scripture

Reading with the Grain of Scripture

Christianity Today Book Award in Biblical Studies (2021)

“All these essays illustrate, in one way or another, how I have sought to carry out scholarly work as an aspect of discipleship—as a process of faith seeking exegetical clarity.”

Richard Hays has been a giant in the field of New Testament studies since the 1989 publication of his Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul. His most significant essays of the past twenty-five years are now collected in this volume, representing the full fruition of major themes from his body of work: 

the importance of narrative as the “glue” that holds the Bible togetherthe figural coherence between the Old and New Testamentsthe centrality of the resurrection of Jesusthe hope for New Creation and God’s eschatological transformation of the worldthe importance of standing in trusting humility before the textthe significance of reading Scripture within and for the community of faith

Readers will find themselves guided toward Hays’s “hermeneutic of trust” rather than the “hermeneutic of suspicion” that has loomed large in recent biblical studies.

Richard B. Hays

 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.

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.