Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness. By Richard B. Hays. Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2014. xxii + 155 pp. $34.95 (cloth).Richard B. Hays has always maintained a distinctive theological voice, even within his most specialized New Testament work. A remarkably lucid expositor of scripture and a salient (if somewhat controversial) voice on New Testament theology and ethics, Hays has always been important for theologians to read. The groundbreaking thesis of The Faith of Christ, so resonant with Barth's Church Dogmatics IV/1, was a tour deforce for Pauline exegesis, bearing profound Christological and soteriological implications. In this present work, based on his 2013 Hulsean Lectures, Hays gives us a lucid and important reading of the place of figuration in the Gospels, one that explicitly seeks to adumbrate a figurai Christology. Hays underscores repeatedly that, in distinctive ways, each of the Gospels identifies with the embodied presence of Israel's God.Figurai interpretation is central to a large segment of postliberal hermeneutics. Taking their cue from Erich Auerbach's Mimesis (Princeton University Press, 1953) and Hans Frei's The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (Yale University Press, 1974), thinkers like Ephraim Radner, R. R. Reno, Lewis Ayres, David Dawson, Christopher Seitz, and others have established an important and formidable body of work on the topic. Sharing this ethos and combining it with the Christological concerns of Nils Dahl and Donald Juel, and Larry Hurtado and Richard Bauckham, Hays has written the first major study of the role of figuration in the Gospels, which also makes a substantial contribution in its own right to the developing body of literature arguing for a high Christology in the Gospels.The book has six chapters. The introduction identifies the overarching themes and vision of how the New Testament reads the Old Testament figurally. Hays proposes a hermeneutics, beginning in the New Testament and continuing in the community of disciples, that is admittedly circular: We learn to read the by reading backwards from the Gospels, and ... we learn how to read the Gospels by reading forwards from the OT (p. 4). The influence of George Lindbeck's intratextuality is in the background here. Four chapters follow on each of the Gospels, focused on the evangelists' use of the Old Testament to identify Christ. Mark is presented, in chapter 2, as a carefully layered evocation of the mystery of Jesus' identity with Israel's God (pp. 18-19). Hays acknowledges that Mark, commonly viewed as having the lowest Christology, does distinguish from God in key places, but interprets these differences in Chalcedonian terms: Jesus seems to be at one and the same time . …