Christopher M. Hays  

Dr. Christopher M. Hays (DPhil, New Testament Studies, University of Oxford) is a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Oxford. He completed his undergraduate and masters studies at Wheaton College in Illinois, and was a wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter in Church History on the Evangelisch-Theologische Fakultät of the Universität Bonn. He will conclude his postdoctoral fellowship at Oxford in August of 2013, after which he will move to Argentina to serve as a missionary scholar at the Instituto Universitario ISEDET.

Christopher spends most of his time examining how early Christians believed that money ought to be used, a subject he calls “Christian wealth ethics”.  He is the author of Luke’s Wealth Ethics: A Study in Their Coherence and Character (Mohr Siebeck, 2010), and his current research moves beyond the New Testament to investigate the teachings and practices of early Christians in the era before the rise of Constantine. He is also the co-editor (with Christopher B. Ansberry) of Evangelical Faith and the Challenge of Historical Criticism (SPCK/Baker Academic, 2013).

As a biblical scholar, Christopher is passionate to engage with other disciplines in order to help refine the Church’s witness to and way of being in the world.  Accordingly, he is an associate of the Centre for Enterprise, Markets, and Ethics in Oxford, in which context he ponders how the teachings of Jesus and the early Church might constructively inform human enterprise and flourishing in the 21st century. He also leads an ecumenical and interdisciplinary colloquium on eschatology, the results of which will appear in the volume When the Son of Man Didn’t Come (Fortress Academic, 2014). Finally, he contributes to the faith-science debate as part of a team of Oxford scholars working on a Biologos-funded project called “Configuring Adam and Eve”.