Category: <span>Online Resources</span>

Category: Online Resources

Online Resources

Learning to Read the Bible Again (with Ellen Davis), (Hays, 2004)

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A cartoon in the New Yorker shows a man making inquiry at the information counter of a large bookstore. The clerk, tapping on his keyboard and peering intently into the computer screen, and peering intently into the computer screen, replies, “The Bible? . . . That would be under self-help.”

As the cartoon suggests, in postmodern culture the Bible has no definite place, and citizens in a pluralistic, secular culture have trouble knowing what to make of it. If they pay any attention to it at all, they treat it as a consumer product, one more therapeutic option for rootless selves engaged in an endless quest of self-invention and self-improvement. Not surprisingly, this approach does not yield a very satisfactory reading of the Bible, for the Bible is not, in fact, about “self-help”; it is about God’s action to rescue a lost and broken world.

Online Resources

A Season of Repentance: An Open Letter to United Methodists (Hays, 2004)

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A PROPOSAL: Let us stop fighting one another, for a season, about issues of sexuality, so that we can focus on what God is saying to the church about our complicity in the violence that is the deepest moral crisis of our time. And let us call the church to fasting and prayer in repentance for the destruction our nation has inflicted upon the people of Iraq.

Online Resources

“The Faith of Christ”: Engaging the Writings of Richard B. Hays by A.A. Just (2003)

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When Richard Hays published The Faith of Jesus Christ in 1983 it sent a ripple through the New Testament community that still may be felt today. Its re-publication in a more accessible form for Eerdmans in 2002 signaled that his book had real staying power. This new volume is not a rewrite of his original work but its presentation again, accompanied by a winning foreword by Luke Timothy Johnson and a reflective introduction by the author himself about the theological implications of his thesis. It also includes two appendixes, one by James D. G. Dunn and Hays’s response to Dunn that represent part of the debate in the Society of Biblical Literature of the Pauline Theology Group from 1991 over the question of “the faith of Jesus Christ.”

Online Resources

…And They Shall Prophesy (Hays, 2005)

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Baccalaureate Sermon, Duke Divinity School, May 2005.

“When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place.”

Now, one of the things that we have worked hard to teach you here at Duke Divinity School is the difficult art of
discerning when you can and cannot take the biblical story and apply it straight off to the situation in which you find yourself. This art is called, as you know, “hermeneutics.” Let me give you an illustration.