Here is a portion of Colin James Smothers' blog post review of Richard B. Hays' book, The Conversion of the Imagination: Paul as Interpreter of Israel’s Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), describing St. Paul's method, which has been helpful to my study of First Corinthians:
In Chapter 1, Hays turns to the book of
1 Corinthians to examine the question of the eschatological identity of the
church of Corinth in Paul’s correspondence. He begins by looking at the direct
quotation of Isaiah 45:14 in 1 Corinthians 14:25. Via the concept of
metalepsis, Hays analyzes the context of Isaiah 45, which is alluded to in
Zechariah 8:20-23 and Daniel 2:46-47, to point out that in their original
contexts these passages are about the Gentile outsider being brought to worship
Israel’s God after having recognized God’s presence with Israel (3). Hays
argues that Paul has intentionally placed the predominantly Gentile church into
the theological shoes of OT Israel by identifying the church not simply with OT
Israel but as OT
Israel. Hays calls this Pauline reading of these texts “apocalyptic,” since it
makes use of an “eschatological hermeneutic” that has been shaped by the
revealed event of the cross (4). According to Hays, this was “Paul’s missionary
strategy in his confrontation with pagan culture … [to] draw[] upon
eschatologically interpreted Scripture texts to clarify the identify of the
church and to remake the minds of his congregations” (5). Hays sees this
“hermeneutical move” deployed by Paul elsewhere—this time typologically—in 1
Corinthians 10:1-22. Here Hays argues that Paul describes the Corinthian church
in terms reminiscent of the wilderness generation, which again identifies the
church as occupying the theological space of OT Israel. Hays argues for the
same church-Israel re-identification in 1 Corinthians 1:18-31 and 1 Corinthians
5:1-13, and from all of theses passages taken together Hays makes the case that
Paul intentionally connected the NT church with OT Israel in order to effect a
“conversion of the imagination” in NT believers, an imagination that allows the
NT church to read Israel’s history as their history, and even to read
themselves into Israel’s
history.
