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
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