Hays, Watson, and NTW

Richard Hays presented an SBL paper disputing with Frances Watson’s view that the gospel preached by Paul cannot be narrated. According to Hays, Watson’s main concern is that the story of the gospel will be immanentized and become a story of human self-salvation instead of a story of God’s salvation of helpless humanity. But, as Hays says, this criticism only stands if “story” by definition refers to an immanent series of events, and excludes God’s action from the beginning. An apocalyptic story is still a story. Moreover, if, as Watson argues, the cross is an “absolute event” and not an event within a temporal flow, then the very soteriological power of the event is undermined. Hays heard echoes of the early Barth in Watson’s concern, and urged Watson (who was not present) to read the later Barth as a corrective.

In responding to Hays, NT Wright suggested that Watson was not only borrowing from the early Barth but attacking the early Watson. In his earlier work, Watson had, fairly explicitly according to Wright, reduced the soteriological to the sociological, and his emphasis on the “vertical” and apocalyptic elements of Paul’s gospel is a corrective to that earlier emphasis. As Wright pointed out, this is also the concern of Kasemann, who does not want the gospel to become immanentized and susceptible to totalitarian manipulations.