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The Moral Vision of the New Testament: Community, Cross, New Creation:A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics, by Richard B.Hays (Harper San Francisco, 508 pp.; $25, paper). Reviewed by Thomas E. Schmidt,a New Testament scholar and author of Straight and Narrow? Compassion and Clarity in the Homosexuality Debate (InterVarsity).

In The Moral Vision of the New Testament, Richard B. Hays demonstratesthat a passionate faith can be expressed in a scholarly treatise. Hays's manner is every bit as significant as his subject. Indeed, here may be asignal that evangelical scholarship has at last found its voice. For hereis a university professor who writes for the church, a first-rate exegete who suggests that the Holy Spirit must guide the interpretation of texts,a denizen of the ivory tower who maintains that believers must practice obediencein community to realize Scripture's moral vision.

Hays demonstrates all the academic competence that landed him a professorship at Duke, but in and through his scholarship he preaches (powerfully), he discusses the moral challenges of real people he knows, he concedes that some of his conclusions are tentative, he even—gasp—admits to personal moral struggles and shortcomings.

Such a readable, superbly organized, substantial volume will quickly become the standard seminary text for New Testament ethics, supplanting the widely used works by Rudolf Schnackenburg (The Moral Teaching of the NewTestament), Wolfgang Schrage (The Ethics of the New Testament),and others. That is good news, but it will be a shame if the book does not move far beyond the walls of the pastor's study into the hands of lay Christians who should take up its challenge.

The Moral Vision of the New Testament is so clearly laid out in the table of contents and introduction that the reviewer is hard-pressed to improve on "see pp. vii-x and 1-7." Each section focuses on one of the four tasks—descriptive, synthetic, hermeneutical, and pragmatic—of New Testament ethics. The descriptive task is to convey the visions of the moral life in the New Testament text, preserving the distinctive and even disparate emphases of the various writers. The synthetic task is to find coherence in this diversity; such coherence Hays finds in three images—community,cross, and new creation—employed to guide or focus our reading of New Testament texts. With respect to the hermeneutical task of using Scripture in ethics, Hays evaluates five representative theologians against clearly defined criteria and then lays out his own approach. Finally, addressing thepragmatic task of living under the Word, Hays applies his method for New Testament ethics to five "test cases": violence, divorce, homosexuality,anti-Judaism, and abortion.

So much for the outline: now on to execution. In his descriptive section,Hays first surveys the New Testament witnesses and singles out those thatare "most important by virtue of their substance and historic influence":Paul's undisputed epistles, the Evangelists (including Acts with Luke), and Revelation. Hays argues that the other New Testament writings are not intension with those he treats, and he limits his treatment further by avoiding speculation about historical development. In a helpful excursus on the role of "the historical Jesus" in New Testament ethics, Hays affirms a fairly conservative reconstruction of the Lord's life and teachings (including astrong statement on the Resurrection), but he eschews attempts to base viewson the ever-elusive "objective Jesus" independent of the canonical witnesses. Nevertheless, Hays's treatment of the Gospels owes much to redaction-critical notions of post-Jesus development; and his treatment of the Pauline tradition involves late and pseudonymous authorship of at least three Epistles. This will be problematic for those who are unwilling to relieve tensions by choosing, say, Luke's Jesus over John's or Romans' Paul over Timothy's. Some might take issue with Hays's critical conclusions, but my point is merely to caution the reader against a simplistic view of Hays's preference for the canonical approach over the historical.

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July 14 1997, Vol. 41, No. 8