Reading Backwards Summary

In this attempt to understand what it means to be made in the image of God the researcher plans to adopt Richard Hays method of reading backwards. He puts this method forward in his book Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness. In this work Hays presents the idea that “the Gospels teach us how to read the OT, and—at the same time—the OT teaches us how to read the Gospels. Or, to put it a little differently, we learn to read the OT by reading backwards from the Gospels, and—at the same time—we learn how to read the Gospels by reading forwards from the OT.” Reading backwards in the process of reading the OT in light of the story of Jesus. This for Hays opens the text and the reader to new understandings for the text that were previously unimaginable. In the opening of his book he gives two summary remarks, based on Luke 24, that help the reader understand what he means by reading backwards: (1) The Gospels teach us to read the OT for figuration. The literal historical sense of the OT is not denied or negated; rather it becomes the vehicle for latent figural meanings unsuspected by the original author and readers. It points forward typologically to the gospel story
(2) If
we learn from the Gospel of Luke to read the OT, we will see that the whole story of Israel builds to a narrative climax in the story of Jesus.

Figuration plays a key role in Hays understanding of intertextuality. His desire is for the reader to see how Scripture as a whole is connected. This intertextual connection links all of Scripture to Christ. The text in its original meaning is significant, but a greater understanding of the text van be discovered in a texts link to Christ.

For this paper the researcher plans to take advantage of what Hays refers to as figural reading. Figural reading is defined as “the discernment of unexpected patterns of correspondence between earlier and later events or persons within a continuous temporal stream.” Figural reading is the opinion that “an earlier text can illuminate a later one, and vice versa.” For the authors of NT, the OT text was a resource the narration of the life of Christ. These different texts found within the OT were not to be confined to their original context, but instead they were freed to speak meaning into new spaces. The desire for Hays is to read Scripture along the same path of the NT Evangelists. This yearning to read Scripture along with the Gospel writers can be best categorized as “Gospel-Shaped Hermeneutics.” In his book he gives ten different ways this hermeneutic teaches one to read, but for this paper, the first idea presented in this list is of impotence. Here Hays states:

A Gospel-shaped hermeneutic necessarily entails reading backwards, reinterpreting Israel’s Scripture in light of the story of Jesus.
Such a reading is necessarily a figural reading, a reading that grasps patterns of correspondence between temporally distinct events, so that these events freshly illuminate each other. This means that for the Evangelists that ‘meaning’ of the OT text was not confined to the human authors original historical setting or to the meaning that could have been grasped by the original readers. Rather, Scripture was a complex body of texts given to the community of God, who had scripted the whole biblical drama in such a way that had multiple senses. Some of these senses are hidden, so that they come into focus only
retrospectively.

The objective of this paper is to take this idea given here by Hays and apply it to the image of God found in Gen. 1:26-28. If one is willing to accept that Scripture is a complex group of texts that are linked together by intertextual references, then the possibility of a clearer understanding for the image of God through textual links conceivable. Hays work focuses on the Gospel accounts of Jesus, but the researcher hopes to take his idea and apply it to the image of God. This will allow for the student to gain knowledge of image of God that is not found in Gen. 1:26-28

Before moving into the heart of this paper it is important to present how the researcher plans to identify intertextual references to Gen. 1:26-28. As stated above the text has very few direct quotations and allusions, but these connections to the original text carry a great deal of importance for our understanding of the image. Before a text can be used to inform us on the image of God, we must be sure that a connection to Gen 1:26-28 is present within the text. For this paper the student will attempt to identify three different forms of intertextual references that have a connection to the text under consideration. The first way of identifying a textual connection is through direct quotation. These references are few, but these references can be places to find information upon the image of God. The next two forms of intertextual reference that will be considered in this paper are allusions and echoes. Within the field of intertextuality there is some debate between the difference of allusions and echoes. Some scholars view these two terms as synonymous terms, while others make a qualitative distinction between these two expressions. “Another way to say this is that an echo is an allusion that is possibly dependent on an Old Testament text, in distinction to a reference that is clearly or probably dependent.” This distinction is of importance for this paper because of the different uses of Gen 1:26-28 found within Scripture. In some areas of the text, example Psalm 8, the biblical author seems to purposely bring the text into his writing, but in other areas the mention of the image or likeness of God seems to be an echo not originally meant to be a textual reference. In summary, the researcher will identify texts that either quote, allude, or echo Gen. 1:26-28 and seek to discover any information for these texts that can shed light to what it means to be made in the image of God.