16 Quotes by Richard B. Hays

Hoarding is both unnecessary and an affront to God, who is perfectly capable of providing abundantly for those who trust in him.

To be trained for the kingdom is to be trained to see the world from the perspective of God’s future—and therefore askew from what the world counts as common sense.

Jesus’ death on the cross is not an accident or an injustice that befell him; it is, rather, an act of sacrifice freely offered for the sake of God’s people.

To live faithfully in the time between the times is to walk a tightrope of moral discernment, claiming neither too much nor too little for God’s transforming power within the community of faith.

The value of our exegesis and hermeneutics will be tested by their capacity to produce persons and communities whose character is commensurate with Jesus Christ and thereby pleasing to God.22.

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. The Word is known in contingent human form, and only there. That is the scandal of the gospel.

The living out of the New Testament cannot occur in a book; it can happen only in the life of the Christian community.

The New Testament has a normative role in Christian theology and ethics that is different from the Old Testament’s role. We do not have a simple, undifferentiated canon running from Genesis to Revelation. The claim that Jesus’ death and resurrection is the central decisive act of God for the salvation of humankind means that the cross becomes the hermeneutical center for the canon as a whole. Thus, within the canon the New Testament has a privileged hermeneutical function.

When the identity of the community is understood in these terms, participation in any form of ethnic division or hatred becomes unthinkable, and ethnic division within the church becomes nothing other than a denial of the truth of the gospel. ‘That is why racism is a heresy. One of the church’s most urgent pragmatic tasks in the 1990s is to form communities that seek reconciliation across ethnic and racial lines.