Among the distinctive features of this slender treatise is its co-authorship by two biblical scholars who happen to be father and son, who have both taught Scripture at significant theological schools (Duke and Fuller), who are both serious Christians, and who have both changed their minds concerning the issue of same-sex love and the Church.
Richard Hays (the father) is a world-renowned scholar of the New Testament, recognized especially for his sensitive interpretation of the ways Paul and the Gospels engage the Old Testament. In 1996, his Moral Vision of the New Testament took up a number of ethical issues within the framework of the Wesleyan Quadrilateral, which employs reason, tradition, and experience in the interpretation of Scripture. One of the issues he considered was homosexuality, and his conservative position on the topic enhanced his already strong reputation among Evangelicals.
His more recent experience within liberal communities, however, has led him to repent of his earlier conclusion (though not of the exegesis on which he based his argument) and to adopt the position advanced some thirty years ago by other scholars—namely, that the experience of the Church guided by the Holy Spirit suggests an embrace rather than a rejection of believers who happen to be gay or lesbian and whose lives bear witness to the Lord Jesus Christ.
Christopher Hays (the son), though less widely known, is regarded as a fine scholar of the Old Testament. He is also an ordained elder in the Presbyterian Church USA who has found himself increasingly at odds with his father’s earlier position (which he had at first accepted) and with Evangelical attitudes and behavior toward those espousing same-sex love, especially at Fuller Seminary, where he teaches.
In the case of both father and son, then, life experience—increased contact with gay and lesbian believers and those accepting them into communion, as well as increased concern with the effects of condemning such believers—proved persuasive in pushing them to repent of their earlier disposition. It is appropriate to applaud both authors for learning from their experience of God’s work among others, and for having the courage to admit the deficiency in their previous understanding. That the Christian approach to complex issues of sexuality should be marked by an openness to the leading of the Holy Spirit is a position with which every reader should agree.
True to their Evangelical roots, however, the authors are not content with the conversion of just their own minds. They seek to change the minds of others as well, not only about sexuality, but also about how best to understand the Bible and, indeed, God. As Richard Hays declares:
What is needed now is a comprehensive rethinking of the way in which the Bible might speak to these matters. In this book I want to start over—to repent of the narrowness of my earlier vision and explore a new way of listening to the story that scripture tells about the widening scope of God’s mercy.
Their book seeks to communicate that new way of listening.
After an introduction in which each author relates his experience and changing convictions, Christopher Hays takes on the Old Testament and Richard Hays considers the New Testament. Both discussions are guided by the conviction that changing one’s mind about sexuality is legitimated by the way Scripture shows God changing his mind—usually in the direction of “widening his mercy.”
This review will focus on the adequacy of the argument they make. Let’s start with the subtitle. “Sexuality Within the Biblical Story” could lead readers to expect a close interrogation of biblical texts on sexuality, but what the authors intend to offer is a general account of Scripture that can provide a new way of thinking about sexuality. The issue of same-sex love is addressed as a corollary of the lesson Scripture teaches about God, and as a matter not of personal morality but of ecclesial disposition.
The authors’ consistent employment of the acronym LGBTQ can, in this regard, be disconcerting, since they use it to describe a “people” or “community” or even a population of “sexual minorities” without acknowledging that gay and lesbian people do not, in fact, constitute a “community,” or that they pose issues for Church discernment that are quite distinct from those posed by people who identify as bisexual, queer, or transgender. By failing to make such important distinctions, the authors seem to accept as a given the construction of LGBTQ people as an oppressed “class” on the scale of intersectionality.
The authors similarly claim to simply convey “the story that scripture tells about the widening scope of God’s mercy,” without acknowledging how vastly that oversimplifies the complexity of Scripture’s “stories.” They admit that they have rejected the pleas of kindly previewers that they supply a hermeneutical framework for their way of engaging Scripture. They have chosen, they say, to read literarily and theologically without such an apparatus—as though literary and theological readings are innocent and without presuppositions.
The “story” that they work out through a series of interpretive exercises is, in truth, a highly selective one, which would be fair enough if the reader had been provided with the reasons this selection is preferred to other possible ones—reasons that a hermeneutical framework could have provided. One might ask, for example, whether an exclusive emphasis on the inclusion of the Gentiles in the New Testament might obscure the difficult question of the apparent exclusion of God’s first people, the Jews. Or whether an exclusive attention to God’s tenderness and mercy might neglect the many accounts, throughout the entire Bible, of God’s wrath and punishment.
In the same way, the authors’ failure to recognize that one cannot simply read theology off the face of narrative texts, or claim, without mediation, to capture the “character of God” from such reading, warrants some degree of skepticism about their approach. The authors risk falling into unfortunate anthropomorphisms when they fail to acknowledge that scriptures are human compositions that participate in, rather than contain, revelation, and that the image of God found in various scriptural compositions represents different human conceptions of God—none of which can be taken as absolute, and all of which must be assessed in light of the scriptural witness as a whole and of the Church’s tradition. Thus, rather than follow the Frederick Faber hymn that speaks of a “wideness in God’s mercy,” where mercy is an enduring quality of God, the authors advance as their theme “the widening of God’s mercy,” which, unfortunately, suggests that prior to such “widening,” God was either less merciful or without mercy altogether.
The notion of a mutable God, one who “changes his mind,” is essential to the authors’ argument, however: “If we take the biblical narratives seriously, we can’t avoid the conclusion that God regularly changes his mind, even when it means overriding previous judgments.” This premise, in turn, provides the legitimation for their own change of mind concerning sexuality. Christopher states that because Scripture “says that God may change his mind and his approaches to the world…faithfulness to God means sometimes doing the same”; and Richard says, “Because God sometimes changes his mind and his approaches to the world, faithfulness to God means sometimes to do the same.”
But although the notion that there is a divine precedent for changing one’s mind on sexuality may be comforting, one wonders whether the issue is really one of changing one’s mind or, rather, one of reaching the proper conclusion. Humans scarcely need to appeal to God’s variability when they change their minds; it is enough for them to change their minds in accord with God’s righteousness.
In his survey of Old Testament compositions, Christopher Hays puts particular emphasis on God’s mental mutability in his interactions with Adam and Eve, Cain, Abraham, and Moses, before spending significant time on the mutability and inadequacy of biblical laws: “Biblical laws were not unchanging, nor can they easily resolve ethical issues.” He quotes Ezekiel to the effect that “we have been following statutes that are not good,” and makes a contemporary application: sometimes, “we find that we were wrong about the things we once believed that God wanted.” He turns the theme of mind-changing more explicitly in the direction of mercy when he considers the scriptural evidence that minorities like sojourners and eunuchs were a constitutive part of Israel and that God’s mercy extends to all people, a point made spectacularly by the Book of Jonah.
The tenor of Christopher Hays’s statements, however, has the occasional effect of subtly undermining the authority of the very texts he is using to make his argument. At the very start of the introduction, for example, he calls Samuel’s declaration to Saul that God, unlike mortals, “does not recant or change his mind” (1 Samuel 15:29) a “lie,” because it conflicts with the repeated narrative statement that God had “repented” of choosing Saul (1 Samuel 15:11; 35). But is it? A lie is a deliberate attempt to deceive someone, and that is clearly not what Samuel, or the text of Scripture, seeks to do. Wanting to make a strong point, Christopher Hays makes the wrong point. Precision matters.
His section of the book also contains some obiter dicta whose tone and tendency suggest a generalized animus against conservative theological and social positions that perhaps he once shared. He declares that Jonathan Edwards had not “rightly captured God’s character” and that his exclusivist preaching was tainted by his connection to slaveholding and led to suicidal ideation among his congregants. In his citation of one biblical passage, he avoids a translation of YHWH as “Lord” because, he says, “the image of God as ‘lord’ or ‘king’ brings with it cultural and emotional baggage”—although he uses the title elsewhere. He links the daughters of Zelophehad with strong sisterhood and asks, “What if powerful people more often affirmed their subordinates when they challenged unrighteous aspects of systems?” He slides from the child sacrifice to Moloch practiced in ancient Canaan to contemporary failures at gun control, and from there to suicides caused by “social pressures on LGBTQ youth.” He avers that “[s]ome of the nations most interested in biblical interpretation—the United States, England, and Israel—are also some of the most invested in the idea of their own exceptionalism and chosenness.” And he notes, finally, that “[t]he United States is also a nation of immigrants, and yet anti-immigrant and racist sentiments flourish here as well.” Even if such animadversions were accurate, they would not accord with the authors’ stated goal of widening mercy and fostering empathy.
In his treatment of the New Testament, Richard Hays first follows the ministry of Jesus as portrayed in the synoptic gospels, asking, “How might the gospel stories of Jesus’ convention-breaking words and actions affect our thinking about norms for sexual relationships in our time?” The phrase “convention-breaking” is key to his analysis. Jesus consistently appeals to God’s mercy in his acts of healing and in his inclusion of society’s outcasts: “The consistent theme of his surprising words and actions is that God’s mercy is wider and stronger than we might expect.” Hays aligns Jesus’ pharisaic opposition with contemporaries who resist change in sexual mores on the basis of Scripture: “If the well-meaning attempt to honor God’s law leads to hardness of heart and blindness to the need of afflicted people, something has gone badly awry.” Characteristically, Hays includes his former self among such resisters: “The Lord may also have grieved with me.” Apart from his desire that this analysis of Jesus should shape thinking about sexuality—precisely how is not elaborated—Hays’s analysis of Jesus’ ministry is standard stuff and unexceptionable. Jesus’ ministry was indeed convention-breaking and was indeed resisted by those protecting their own privileged positions.
More interesting is Hays’s analysis of the narrative of the Acts of the Apostles as a process by which “the Holy Spirit began to change the church’s mind.” He traces the way in which the early Church’s decision to include Gentiles without requiring that they first become Jews (by being circumcised and keeping the law of Moses) was both startling—seemingly at odds with both Scripture and Jewish tradition—and a result of discerning God’s activity among humans through the power of the Holy Spirit. His analysis correctly observes how the perception of human experience—as the experience of God in human lives—was the key factor in changing the Church’s mind, thus opening the way for the Church to include those formerly regarded as unclean by nature and sinful in practice.
Recognizing that the Acts narrative provides a hermeneutical analogy for the acceptance or rejection of same-sex love within the Christian community is helpful and—for Richard Hays, who spent decades resisting the implications of this experiential side of the Wesleyan Quadrilateral—impressive. He is certainly right to claim that “the work of the Spirit is ongoing and the exegesis of texts does not excuse us from recognizing it.”
It should be noted, however, that contrary to the argument of this book, Acts shows us that human beings changed their minds in response to God’s leading, not that God changed his mind. Indeed, the entirety of Luke–Acts makes clear that God had always intended that “all flesh shall see God’s salvation” (Luke 3:6) and that Jesus would be a “light to the Gentiles” (Luke 2:32). The narrative of Acts does not support the authors’ premise that we can change our minds because God has changed his mind. Hays’s reading of the New Testament also confirms that, according to the witness of Scripture, God has specifically not changed his mind about human sexuality; the issue is whether God’s continuing self-revelation in human experience can lead humans to change their minds on the subject.
Finally, the narrative of Acts reminds us not only how difficult the process of discernment concerning Gentile admission was, but also how careful the Church was to ensure communion between Jewish and Gentile Christians. By demanding that Gentile converts observe certain practices that enabled Jewish believers to meet with them while still remaining culturally Jewish, and by taking care to communicate the Church’s decision to other communities through trusted delegates, the Church gave comfort to those confused and troubled by the controversy (Acts 15:24–32).
The authors invite readers to join them in their own “revision” with regard to sexuality, and to “welcome sexual minorities no longer as ‘strangers and aliens’ but as ‘fellow citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God’ (Ephesians 2:19).” Their own repentance is undoubtedly sincere; their commitment to change in the Church is unquestionably earnest. But while the authors’ scholarly reputation may make their invitation attractive to those who still hold the views that the authors once did, it is unclear whether their argument is sufficiently consistent or coherent to effect such a conversion of mind.
The Widening of God’s Mercy
Sexuality within the Biblical Story
Christopher B. Hays and Richard B. Hays
Yale University Press
$28 | 288 pp.
