Review of The Widening of God’s Mercy by Christopher B. Hays and Richard B. Hays

By Preston Sprinkle. Preston is the author of several books, including Embodied and Does the Bible Support Same-Sex Marriage?, and serves as President of The Center for Faith, Sexuality & Gender.

 

Dr. Richard Hays is one of the most prestigious New Testament scholars of the last four decades. His highly celebrated book The Moral Vision of the New Testament, published in 1996, includes a chapter on homosexuality. In that chapter, Hays argued that the best reading of the Bible prohibits same-sex sexual relationships both for early Christians and for the church today. 

 

Hays’ forthcoming book The Widening of God’s Mercy, which releases on September 10, shows how he has changed his mind.[1] He now believes the New Testament “fully includes” LGBTQ people, by which he means that same-sex marriage is blessed by God and therefore should be blessed by the church.

 

Hays has cowritten The Widening of God’s Mercy with his son, Old Testament scholar Dr. Christopher Hays, who teaches at Fuller Theological Seminary. After a dual-authored Introduction, Christopher writes the Old Testament section (chs. 1-7), and Richard covers the New (chs. 8-16).[2] They come together to write the final chapter, which summarizes their main argument and applies it to the “full inclusion of believers with differing sexual orientations” today (p. 214).[3] Richard concludes the book with a brief epilogue where he explains his change of mind and how his current position relates to his previous work. 

 

The central argument of the book is that God often changes his mind in Scripture. He changes his mind about various laws and customs (chs. 3-4, 14), whether to carry out judgment on disobedience (chs. 2, 6), and—most importantly—which kind of people are accepted in the covenant community (chs. 7, 11). 

 

For instance, God used to reject eunuchs and uncircumcised foreigners from being full participants in the community (e.g. Deut 23:1), but now they are fully accepted (Isa. 56:4-5; cf. Acts 8, 15). Christopher writes, “Scripture reflects that God’s grace and mercy towards the whole world was always broader than one might expect. It also says that God may change his mind and his approaches to the world to broaden it further” (p. 108). In the same way that God now accepts foreigners and eunuchs, Christopher argues, God also fully accepts LGBTQ people. 

 

Eunuchs are particularly important to Christopher’s argument because, as “castrated men,” they “were a sexual minority” (p. 98). He writes, “If conservatives today find scriptural warrant for excluding sexual minorities, how much more did religious leaders in Isaiah’s time have warrant to exclude eunuchs?” (p. 100) 

 

 To summarize the authors’ main argument, they write: 

 

The many biblical stories of God’s widening mercy invite us to re-envision how God means us to think and act today with regard to human sexuality. The biblical narratives throughout the Old Testament and the New trace a trajectory of mercy that leads us 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” (Eph 2:19). (p. 206).

 

In this review, I’ll look first at some of the things I appreciate about the book (“The Pros”), then at my most significant disagreements (“The Cons”). I’ll include a lengthy addendum where I discuss several other noteworthy aspects of the book. 

 

 

The Pros 

 

Hands down, my favorite thing about this book is that it exudes a desire to love LGBTQ people. I’ve never met either author, but if the tone of the book represents their hearts, they are zealous about seeing LGBTQ people flourish in the church. And they express righteous indignation for the ways LGBTQ people have been dehumanized by Christians. While I theologically diagnose the problem differently than they do, I found myself resonating with much of the heart behind the book.  For what it’s worth, I too advocate for the full welcome and inclusion of people who experience different sexual orientations. I just disagree with the authors about what sexual ethic followers of Jesus are welcomed and included into, regardless of their sexual orientation.  

 

The book is also very readable. The authors are top-tier scholars, yet they’ve managed to write a book that a popular audience will be able to understand. This is no small feat; it’s much harder than people realize. The Widening of God’s Mercy really does succeed in tackling complex topics and scholarly issues in a clear and winsome way. 

 

I also found several chapters to be biblically compelling. Richard’s chapters on Jesus (especially chs. 8, 10, 11) were particularly beautiful. Jesus certainly “upset people” by challenging their nationalistic ideologies and by welcoming foreigners and outcasts. Stories of Jesus dinning with “tax collectors and sinners” are well known, and Richard does a fine job narrating their scandalous message. Jesus’s encounters with people like the Samaritan woman (John 4), the Canaanite woman (Matt 15), and the chief tax collector Zacchaeus (Luke 19) powerfully illustrate “how Jesus’s teaching and actions encouraged his followers to think more broadly about the expansive grace of Israel’s God” (p. 150). I also found Christopher’s deep dive into the often-neglected story of Zelophehad’s daughters (Num 27:1-3) illuminating. This story shows that “[t]he ability to hear the cries of the oppressed is a quintessential attribute of the God of Israel, who from the beginning of the nation’s story heard his people crying out under oppression (Exod 2:24, etc.) and took notice of them (2:25)” (pp. 56-57). I also appreciated how Christopher showed that, while the Old Testament was mostly ethnocentric, seeds of multi-ethnicity were sown along the way which burst into full bloom in the New Testament (see especially chs. 5 and 7).  

 

 

The Cons 

 

Many of the book’s significant problems emerge as the authors begin applying their argument to Christian debates about marriage and sexual ethics today. In fact, one of my biggest critiques is that they don’t really apply their argument. The book contains no definition of marriage (the word marriage is hardly ever mentioned),[4] and there is virtually no biblical argument about how God intends for his followers to faithfully steward our sexuality.[5] There is a passing reference to the (rather secular) notion that any sexual expression is fine as long as it’s not “abusive or otherwise harmful” (p. 18). The authors also write that what they call “covenanted unions” between people of the same sex should be faithful and exclusive, just as opposite-sex marriages should be (p. 216-17). But they give no theological articulation of what marriage is or what sex is for. There is no theology of marriage or sexual ethic in the book. A rather large lacuna for a book that depends on a revised marriage and sexual ethic for their argument to succeed. 

 

Instead, the authors rely on popular catch phrases like “full inclusion” (p. 214), “welcomed fully” (p. 216), and “excluding and harming people” (p. 11) to do the heavy lifting. But the current sexuality debate is not about (or shouldn’t be about!) whether gay people are to be accepted. The debate is about which marriage and sexual ethic they are accepted into. 

 

Is sex difference an essential part of what marriage is? This question is never raised or answered. The authors reduce the theological debate about same-sex marriage to “endlessly repeated exegetical arguments about half a dozen isolated texts that forbid or disapprove of same-sex relations” (p. 2)—arguments they find to be “superficial and boring” (p. 206).[6]

 

I appreciate their reluctance to relegate this debate simply to six passages of Scripture. However, it seems a bit too convenient to wave a dismissive hand at the very passages that directly address the kinds of relationships the authors claim have been wrongly interpreted by the historic, global, and multiethnic church for nearly 2,000 years. More importantly, the authors ignore the very part of the debate that moves beyond these six passages: the way the whole witness of Scripture talks about marriage.

 

The fundamental theological and ethical question in this debate is whether sex difference is an essential part of what marriage is. This question is never mentioned, let alone answered, in The Widening of God’s Mercy. I was eagerly waiting for a robust reinterpretation of Genesis 1-2, which (according to the author’s viewpoint) must argue that sex difference is not a necessary part of the “one flesh” union we now call marriage. Or a rereading of Jesus’s interpretation of the creation story in Matthew 19:4-6, where he says that the two who become one flesh are “male and female.” I was a bit shocked that these fundamental issues are never addressed. The authors never even mention Matthew 19:4-6. 

 

I find it telling that the authors think “[t]he most significant objection to our interpretation of the God of the Bible is one that simply says, ‘This God of widening mercy whom you describe is not one that I have ever experienced’” (p. 220). I’d say the most significant objection to their interpretation is that they offer a revision of the historically Christian view of marriage and sexual ethics without providing any argument for a revision of marriage and sexual ethics. 

 

Second, the main argument of the book—we’ll call it a “trajectory argument”—is well known to anyone who’s been following the sexuality conversation. I’m not sure who the first scholar was to propose it, but it was pretty popular in the ‘90s and early 2000s.[7] The trajectory argument was thoroughly addressed (I would say roundly refuted) by William Webb in his book Slaves, Women & Homosexuals, a book-length treatment of this argument published in 2001. Others have also examined trajectory arguments and found them to be rather weak.[8]

 

It’s certainly true that many things change between the Old and New Testaments: food laws; circumcision requirements; the inclusion of uncircumcised Gentiles, eunuchs, and Samaritans. However, there’s no evidence of a similar trajectory where sex difference is no longer part of marriage or where prohibitions of same-sex sexual relationships are reversed. Some laws change, but not all laws change. We can’t just point to some changed laws and assume that others (of our choosing) have changed as well. There’s simply no evidence of a scriptural trajectory moving away from sex difference in marriage or same-sex sexual relations being accepted by God. 

 

In fact, if a biblical trajectory does exist for sexual ethics, it would move towards greater strictness, not greater openness. Polygamy, for instance, is treated more leniently in the Old Testament, but we see the New Testament moving back toward the creational ideal of one man and one woman (Matt 19:4-6). Divorce too was allowed in the Old Testament (Deut. 24:1-5), but Jesus explicitly tightened Deuteronomy’s looser divorce laws (Matt 5:31-32; 19:1-10). Adultery is condemned across both Testaments. But in the New, Jesus says that even lust is adultery (Matt 5:27-30). When the Bible revisits its vision for marriage and sexuality, it moves towards a stricter ethic, not a more permissive one.[9]

 

To be fair to Hays and Hays, they don’t claim that they’re presenting any new ideas in the book. “We are not really introducing anything new here,” they say (p. 218). “Although we are informed by our years of scholarship, there are few new or controversial ideas here from the standpoint of biblical studies” (p. 4). Fair enough. But the book never addresses the many counterarguments to the trajectory argument. (Webb’s book, for instance, is never mentioned.) It’s one thing to say: This is a popular level book, so we’re not going to bog it down with endless interaction with other scholars. It’s quite another thing to repeat an old and often refuted argument without showing any awareness of how that argument has been treated in the scholarly discussion.

 

In short, The Widening of God’s Mercy is a book that makes no theological defense of same-sex marriage and chooses not to deal with the passages that prohibit same-sex sexual relationships. Instead, the book rehearses an old argument and doesn’t address how that argument has been refuted. Essentially, the argument runs like this: Since God changed his mind about foreigners and eunuchs, therefore… sex difference is no longer part of what marriage is.   

 

The authors mention one other theological argument in passing which forms a significant part of their viewpoint (especially for Richard). They say that the kinds of same-sex sexual relationships addressed by the Bible are not the same kinds of relationships we have today (p. 12; p. 145 n. 2). This is a crucial claim which, again, has been treated extensively by scholars. Unfortunately, the authors state it in passing as if it’s a historical fact. (It is not.)[10]

 

Third, while I appreciate Richard’s description of Jesus hanging out with tax collectors, prostitutes, and sinners, he doesn’t always make a clear distinction between sinners and sin. Jesus wined and dined with tax collectors, prostitutes, and sinners, but this obviously doesn’t mean he supports tax collecting, prostitution, or sin. Richard is clear about the ethics of tax collecting; it was an “oppressive tax-farming operation,” and tax collectors who decided to follow Christ would need to repent by “the generous setting right of economic wrongs” (p. 136). Sinners who are accepted are still called to repentance. 

 

But this clear ethical distinction between tax collectors and tax collecting disappears when Hays tries to map these gospel stories onto modern questions about sexual minority people and sexual ethics. It’s assumed throughout the book that God blesses same-sex sexual relationships and marriage. But the authors offer no biblical defense of how or why. God’s blessing is just assumed under the umbrella of catchphrases like “full inclusion” and “fully welcome.” 

 

Fourth, the authors argue that the New Testament does not bring “complete and final closure to God’s revelation,” but that “the Holy Spirit will continue to lead the community of Jesus’s followers into new and surprising truths” (p. 3). They believe the modern church should not just listen to what God has said through Scripture in the past, but that we should join God by listening to what his Spirit might be saying to us today (p. 221). “Any religious tradition,” they say, “that fails to grow and respond to the ongoing work of the Spirit will stagnate or die” (p. 5). They imply that any church that doesn’t “fully accept” all people of differing sexual orientations by affirming same-sex marriage is not listening to the Holy Spirit. These churches should “repent of the narrowness of [their] earlier visions and…explore a new way of listening to the story that scripture tells about the widening scope of God’s mercy” (p. 10, emphasis in the original).  

 

I don’t necessarily disagree with the premise of this argument; God’s Spirit might open our eyes to fresh revelations, provided that these revelations follow the trajectory of the storyline of Scripture. This is, of course, debated, but let’s assume the Holy Spirit can open our eyes to “a new way of listening to the story.” Well and good. But the way Hays and Hays employ this argument is profoundly ethnocentric. 

 

The global church is growing exponentially in the Global South, Southeast Asia, China, the Middle East, and elsewhere in the majority world. Almost all of these churches believe that sex difference is an essential part of what marriage is and that all sexual relationships outside this covenant of marriage are sin. The Widening of God’s Mercy implies that all these non-western Christians are not listening to the Holy Spirit, who is allegedly opening up fresh ways to read Scripture. 

 

The ethical viewpoint advocated for in The Widening of God’s Mercy is held primarily by a relatively small number of (mostly white and affluent) modern Christians living in the West. Is the Holy Spirit really speaking much more clearly to western Christians than those in the majority world? 

 

Christopher bemoans the fact that the Church is in decline. He must be thinking of the Western church, since the Church is not at all in decline in places like Nepal, China, the United Arab Emirates, or Saudi Arabia.[11] It’s bold of Christopher to argue that “the church…is in decline because of its lack of curiosity and hardness of heart” (p. 16). Not only is this a very Western perspective, but it also implies that Christianity’s explosive growth in hard-to-reach places is being carried out by hard-hearted Christians who aren’t listening to the Holy Spirit. The authors of The Widening of God’s Mercy essentially call on the non-Western church “to repent of its narrow, fearful vision” (p. 220) and “lack of curiosity and hardness of heart” (p. 16).

 

And so we come full circle. The authors paint a beautiful picture of the widening of God’s mercy, which includes the poor, the outcast, the marginalized—indeed, many of the same people who live throughout the majority world. But these same people end up being scolded and shamed for believing that sex difference is part of what marriage is.[12]

 

 

Conclusion 

 

I have to admit, the scholarly side of me was excited when this book was first announced. Some Christians immediately trashed the book on social media—something no thoughtful Christian should ever do with books they haven’t read—but I was genuinely excited to read it. Richard is a brilliant scholar (I wasn’t familiar with Christopher’s work), and his article on Romans 1 in particular was one of the most thorough and exegetically responsible treatments of this tough passage.[13] I was deeply curious how he was going to refute his previous argument. I also wondered if The Widening of God’s Mercy would tease out a fresh argument for same-sex marriage that hadn’t yet been made. 

 

To my surprise, the book did neither. Instead, it simply repackaged an old trajectory argument to make a questionable logical leap: since God welcomes foreigners, eunuchs, tax collectors, and sinners, therefore sex difference is no longer part of what marriage is.  

 

* * * 

 

Addendum

 

In addition to what I’ve discussed in my main review, many things in The Widening of God’s Mercy struck me as uncompelling, unclear, or downright wrong. Here are six of the most notable.

 

1. Lack of interaction with, or apparent awareness of, scholarship in the sexuality conversation.

 

The book contains very little interaction with major scholarly works on same-sex sexuality, whether revisionary or historically Christian. There’s no mention of scholars like Robert Gagnon, Darrin Snyder Belousek, William Webb, or Stephen Holmes—not even scholars who address head-on the very argument Christopher and Richard Hays are advocating. There’s also no mention of key affirming works by James Brownson, Karen Keen, Robert Song, or Bill Loader. 

 

Hays and Hays say up front that, while they’re scholars, they’re writing to “lay-people in the pews,” and “the reader will find few footnotes” (p. 4). This is fair. But my concern isn’t just that the authors don’t explicitly interact with important works in biblical sexuality; my concern is that, based on their arguments, they don’t seem to even be aware of these works. Many of the logical holes in The Widening of God’s Mercy could have been filled by paying attention to thoughtful scholars who have gone before them.

 

Plus, it’s not like Hays and Hays are neglecting scholarship altogether in this book. They cite Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics (p. 227), several articles from academic peer-reviewed journals (including one in German on p. 227), and an unpublished Ph.D. dissertation by Richard Gardiner (p. 230), among scholarly works. They know how to interact with a scholarly source when they want to. But for some reason, they’ve chosen to ignore large swaths of scholarship on biblical sexuality. And, if I’m honest, it shows. 

 

They also talk about sexuality in a way that assumes a very strong essentialist view: that is, the view that sexual attraction is purely innate, never shifts, and must be expressed in sexual behavior. LGBTQ people are considered “fixed classes of human beings” (p. 207). Statements like this betray a good deal of ignorance about transgender identities and experiences (which are anything but fixed), but also seem unaware of scholars who hold more of a social constructivist view of sexuality including Hannah Blank, Lisa Diamond, and Rebecca Jordan-Young among many others. The authors’ view of sex and sexuality sounds like not just a revision of sexual ethics, but also a resurrection of the purity culture assumption that people can’t survive without a romantic and sexual partner. There’s no mention of Lisa Diamond’s work on sexual fluidity, the human capacity for celibacy, or the possibility that a gay person could have a flourishing marriage to someone of the opposite sex. Hays and Hays seem to assume a questionable (and, I would say, outdated) ontology of sexuality, where all humans exist in rigid, fixed boxes of sexual attraction and each person’s flourishing depends on acting on their desires.

 

 2. An unclear posture toward those who hold the historically Christian view of marriage.

 

It’s unclear how Hays and Hays now feel about Christians who hold the historically Christian view of marriage. In chapter 16, they argue that such Christians are like the “weak” believers of Romans 14 who “fail to recognize the freedom that Jesus Christ offers” (p. 196), while the “strong” believers are “the liberated advocates of unconditional affirmation of same-sex unions” (p. 200). As in Romans 14, they say, the strong are “tempted to ‘despise’ the ‘weak’, narrow-minded, rule-following conservatives who would impose limits on their freedom” (p. 200). The authors encourage the strong today not to despise the weak but to seek the unity of the Body: “‘Welcome one another, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God’” (p. 202).

 

But in many other places in the book, any church that holds the historically Christian view of marriage is “summon[ed]…to repent of its narrow, fearful vision” (p. 220). The authors accuse these churches of making “God’s offer of grace a lie” (p. 221), demonstrating a “lack of curiosity and hardness of heart” (p. 16), “continuing to do harm” (p. 68) against LGBTQ people, and “attempting to block God” (p. 175) by not listening to the Holy Spirit. 

 

I’m not sure if Hays and Hays are extending me a hand of grace or a millstone for my neck. 

 

Moreover, invoking Romans 14 and calling historically Christian churches to repentance are conflicting messages. Paul never encouraged the “strong” to summon the “weak” to repentance in Romans 14, nor did he accuse the weak of making “God’s offer of grace a lie” or of being hard-hearted uncurious people clinging to a fearful vision of exclusion. In fact, if Hays and Hays want to map Romans 14 onto the current discussion and call those who affirm same-sex marriage the “strong” believers, wouldn’t it be the strong who should give up their freedom (to affirm same-sex marriage) for the sake of the weak? 

 

As I said in my main review, it’s unclear how the authors feel about the overwhelming majority of global Christians who hold to a historically Christian view of marriage. Are they calling these Christians to repentance, or are they striving to welcome them as weaker siblings, just as Christ has welcomed us all for the glory of God? 

 

 3. Ambiguity about what has changed in Richard Hays’s view. 

 

Richard now affirms the morality of same-sex sexual relationships. But his recollection of what he used to believe feels a bit unclear. In the two main sections where he reflects on his journey (pp. 5-10 and pp. 222-226), the primary concern he expresses about his past work is not that it was wrong but that “[m]any traditionalists and conservatives have seized upon that one chapter [in Moral Vision] as the final word” (p. 9). According to Richard, his previous work was only intended to be “a thought experiment, a proposal for how to think about a certain type of methodological problem in theological ethics” (p. 224). He wanted to “start a conversation rather than end one” (p. 9). But according to Richard, many conservative Christians—including his own brother—have wrongfully “appropriated” that chapter and used it as “ammunition” to argue for “the uncompromising ‘conservative’ position” (p. 8). This use of his words has, “contrary to my intention, caused harm to many over the past quarter century” (p. 224). He says he “bear[s] some responsibility for that, and [is] grieved by it” (p. 224). He has written The Widening of God’s Mercy in order to repent from the harm caused by his previous work: “I regret the impact of what I wrote previously” (p. 223).

 

While Richard’s repeated apologies and repentance felt at times like a mild struggle session, I admire his willingness as a scholar to change his mind about a previous publication. Still, it remains unclear what exactly Richard has changed his mind about. For the most part, he doesn’t seem to disagree with his previous exegesis of the New Testament. In one footnote, he writes, “I (Richard) stand fully behind the descriptive exegetical judgments I made there about the meaning of all these texts” (p. 245). But in the same paragraph, he argues:

The biblical authors did not have in mind the sort of homosexual relationships that the church now considers blessing, and it is not possible to imagine what they might have said about them. As it is, many of the passages are unambiguous in their disapproval of homosexual activity.

 

In other words, Richard does not disagree with his previous interpretation of Scripture. Rather, he now believes that the kinds of same-sex sexual relationships the biblical authors were thinking of aren’t “the sort of homosexual relationships that the church now considers blessing.”[14]

 

Unfortunately, Richard doesn’t provide any evidence for this assertion. He might say it’s beyond the scope of the book, which is fair. But it’s such an important point that it would have been helpful to at least note that this argument has been addressed and refuted by many scholars, even by scholars who affirm same-sex marriage.[15] The existence of consensual, committed, adult same-sex relationships in the ancient world has been well established. Even ancient forms of what we now call “sexual orientation” have been documented.[16] Richard, I assume, disagrees with these findings, but his argument would be more convincing if he showed an awareness that his assumption has been thoroughly challenged. As it stands, he seems unaware of where the conversation has been over the last few decades.

 

What about Richard’s frustration that his work was misused by conservatives and taken as a definitive treatment rather than a thought experiment? From my vantage point, his chapter in Moral Vision doesn’t feel like a thought experiment. It feels like a robust ethical argument. In that chapter, he says: 

 

“[T]he New Testament offers no loopholes or exception clauses that might allow for the acceptance of homosexual practice under some circumstances. Despite the efforts of some recent interpreters to explain away the evidence, the New Testament remains unambiguous and univocal in its condemnation of homosexual conduct” (p. 394).

 

“I think it prudent and necessary to let the univocal testimony of scripture and the Christian tradition order the life of the church on this painfully controversial matter. We must affirm that the New Testament tells us the truth about ourselves as sinners and as God’s sexual creatures: marriage between man and woman is the normative form for human sexual fulfillment, and homosexuality is one among many tragic signs that we are a broken people, alienated from God’s loving purpose” (pp. 399-400 emphases mine).

 

Hays himself quotes this last paragraph in The Widening of God’s Mercy and says his words were meant to “start a conversation rather than end one” (p. 9). But his language in Moral Vision feels stronger and more confident than someone simply starting a conversation by engaging in a thought experiment. 

 

Also, Richard never mentions in The Widening of God’s Mercy that his chapter in Moral Vision wasn’t the only time he published on the topic of same-sex sexual ethics. He also wrote a lengthy article on Romans 1:24-27 in 1986.[17] It’s one of the most thorough scholarly treatments of the passage. In this article, he argues, “There is no doubt that Paul condemns homosexual practice. We must determine, however, what normative force that condemnation carries in shaping our vision of a life lived faithfully before God” (p. 205, emphasis mine).

 

Hays goes on to explore this crucial question: “Does the practice that Paul condemns correspond exactly to the phenomenon of homosexuality that exists in the present?” (p. 209). He takes Paul’s explicit condemnation of same-sex sexual behavior and runs it through the Wesleyan quadrilateral: Scripture, Tradition, Reason, and Experience. That final category is the most important for us to consider, since this is the primary category that has caused Richard to change his view more recently. I’ll quote his 1986 article at length: 

 

“Experience” is notoriously difficult to employ as an authority for theological formulations. Whose “experience” counts, and where do we derive the categories for describing and evaluating the experience? 

 

These are great questions, by the way. Unfortunately, he doesn’t provide the same scrutiny toward the role of experience in The Widening of God’s Mercy. In any case, he continues: 

 

Nonetheless, the experience of some Christians in our time surely may function at least to raise questions about the authoritative role of Scripture and tradition in our deliberations about the morality of homosexual relations. If there are individuals who live in stable loving homosexual relationships and claim to experience the grace—rather than the wrath—of God therein, how are such claims to be assessed? Was Paul wrong? Or are such experiential claims simply another manifestation of the blindness and self-deception that Paul so chillingly describes? Or, beside these irreconcilable alternatives, could we entertain the possible emergence of new realities that Paul could not have anticipated? Could God be doing a new thing in our time? (Cf. Johnson, 1983:95-97.) Does the practice that Paul condemns correspond exactly to the phenomenon of homosexuality that exists in the present? If not, does the authority of present experience eclipse the authority of Paul's understanding of God's intention for human sexual relationships? These are the sorts of questions that we must grapple with as we seek to assess the place of Romans 1:16-32 in shaping normative judgments about sexual ethics. (p. 209, emphasis mine)

 

Having wrestled with these questions, Richard concludes that the only way to endorse same-sex sexual relationships in the church today is by prioritizing experience over the authority of Scripture and tradition: 

 

Arguments in favor of acceptance of homosexual relations find their strongest warrants in empirical investigations and in contemporary experience. Those who defend the morality of homosexual relationships within the church may do so only by conferring upon these warrants an authority greater than the direct authority of Scripture and tradition, at least with respect to this question. (p. 211, emphasis mine)

 

Hays concludes by suggesting that he does not buy this sort of reasoning: “We must forthrightly recognize that in Romans 1 Paul portrays homosexual activity as a vivid and shameful sign of humanity's confusion and rebellion against God; then we must form our moral choices soberly in light of that portrayal” (p. 211).

 

It appears that he has now reversed his position. While he formerly prioritized the authority of Scripture and tradition over the authority of experience, he now prioritizes the authority of experience over the authority of Scripture, since, in his own words, he “stand[s] fully behind the descriptive exegetical judgments I made there about the meaning of all these texts” (p. 245).

 

Richard also states that he was aware of the “trajectory argument” when he wrote Moral Vision. He just says that he “rejected it in light of the New Testament’s few but emphatics statements—especially Romans 1:24-27—that portray same-sex intercourse as a tragic distortion of the created order” (p. 223). He describes himself as “straining out gnats, while neglecting what Jesus called ‘the weightier matters of the law’” (p. 223). In the end, he writes, “I have come to think I was wrong” (p. 223).

 

While he calls himself “wrong,” he doesn’t seem to believe his old exegesis of Scripture is wrong. Instead, he’s shifted in how much weight he gives to Scripture in answering today’s ethical questions.

 

 4. Questionable assumptions about God changing his mind. 

 

One of the book’s major premises, especially in the chapters authored by Christopher, is that God changes his mind (see, for example, pp. 1-2, 37-38, 40-41, 81, 85, 87, 108, 138, 205, 207). The authors argue that God changes his mind about whether he is going to judge people and about certain laws he once gave but later rescinded. Jeremiah, for instance, “may announce judgment only to have God change his mind about it” in Jeremiah 18:7-10 (p. 87).

 

Some Christians might quickly reject the theological assumptions of this argument. (“But God knows the future! He doesn’t actually change his mind!”) Personally, I’ll leave these theological debates to the theologians. I’ll just say that, as a biblical scholar, I wasn’t impressed with the exegetical arguments Hays and Hays offer for their position. 

 

For instance, Jeremiah 18:7-10 says that God will judge the nations, but if they repent, he won’t judge them: “[I]f that nation… turns from its evil, I will change my mind (nacham) about the disaster that I intended to bring on it.” To say that “the prophet may announce judgment only to have God change his mind about it” doesn’t feel like the best way to frame what’s going on. There’s a big difference between God not judging people who repent and God changing his mind about whether a sin deserves judgment.

 

In another section, Christopher argues that God commanded child sacrifice early on in Israel’s history but later changed his mind about it (see ch. 4, especially p. 65). And he’s not just thinking of God telling Abraham to kill Isaac (Gen 22), though that does come up. Christopher says that God codified into law in Exodus 22:29-30 (cf. Ezekiel 20:25) that faithful people should sacrifice their first-borns. 

 

The texts in question read: 

 

“You must not hold back offerings from your harvest or your vats. Give me the firstborn of your sons. Do the same with your cattle and your flock. Let them stay with their mothers for seven days, but on the eighth day you are to give them to me.” (Exod 22:29-30)

 

“I also gave them statutes that were not good and ordinances they could not live by. When they sacrificed every firstborn in the fire, I defiled them through their gifts in order to devastate them so they would know that I am the Lord.” (Ezek 20:25-26)

 

Of course, the notion that God commanded human child sacrifice and then changed his mind about it is theologically disturbing. But for now, my primary concern is exegetical, not theological. The view that Exodus 22 refers to child sacrifice is held by some scholars, but from what I’ve read, it doesn’t seem like a popular view. I couldn’t find any evangelical Old Testament scholar who interprets the passage this way. Doug Stuart, for instance, says, “The firstborn male offspring of all other animals and humans were to be redeemed instead, bought back from God by the payment of a price that substituted for their lives.”[18] The text doesn’t say that firstborn sons given to God should be literally killed. Stuart goes on to point to Exodus 13:13-15 and 34:19-20, which explicitly say that an animal is offered as a substitute for the firstborn human male.[19]  

 

Even non-evangelical scholars agree that the text is not commanding child sacrifice. Terence Fretheim says, “The consecration of the firstborn and the gift of first fruits are basically statements about God’s claim on all.”[20] W. H. C. Propp, in his massive commentary on Exodus, concludes after a lengthy discussion: “I do not imagine that this necessarily means sacrifice; it could simply indicate setting apart.”[21] John I. Durham says plainly, “Firstborn sons were dedicated in Israel to Yahweh both actually and vicariously, but in service, not by sacrifice,” and cites Roland de Vaux (Early History, pp. 443–44) in support.[22] Keep in mind that none of these scholars is worried about protecting Scripture against uncomfortable laws.  

 

Some scholars do interpret the phrase “no good laws” in Ezekiel 20:25 as a reference to child sacrifice, but they see this as Israel’s abuse or misinterpretation of Exodus 22, not a representation of what the law actually meant.[23] Also, Ezekiel 20 is notoriously rhetorical, much more than it is historical. “Ezekiel is a preacher, not a chronicler or a systematic theologian,” writes Daniel Block. “[H]e offers an interpretation of Israel’s history, not an objective record of the past.”[24] Several years ago, I threw my hat into this discussion by arguing that the “no good laws” which Israel “could not live by” (Ezek 20:25) directly correspond to the three-fold refrain of the law’s intention to bring life in Ezekiel 20:11, 13, and 21. God’s laws were intended for life, but Israel disobeyed, so the law ended up bringing death. God’s agency behind the “no good laws” is sort of like God hardening Pharaoh’s heart. God is responding to Israel’s prior disobedience. Good laws given to bad hearts constitute Ezekiel’s “no good laws.” 

 

In any case, my main point is that regardless of how we interpret Exodus 22 and Ezekiel 20, these passages are exegetically complicated. The child sacrifice view (that God actually commanded child sacrifice) seems to be a rather fringe interpretation. Yet Christopher refers to God commanding child sacrifice in Exodus 22 as if it’s an undisputed interpretation. 

 

I felt the same about how he handled the Hebrew word nacham, the word used in passage where God appears to change his mind. The word can mean several different things. It can mean “to regret,” have “a change of heart,” “repent,” “feel sorry,” “find comfort” or “consolation,” “obtain satisfaction” or “take relish in,” among other things.[25] Yet, Christopher consistently interprets the term in every passage he examines to mean that God “changed his mind.” He does mention in passing that nacham “has two primary meanings: it can refer to a change of mind and to a feeling of regret” (p. 40), but goes on to consistently interpret it to include the meaning of “to change one’s mind.” 

 

While the picture of God painted by Christopher feels like a scatter-brained deity figuring things out on the fly (God changes his mind a lot according to Christopher’s reading of Scripture), my main concern here is not theological but exegetical. He takes a polysemous word like nacham and narrowly interprets it to mean “to change one’s mind,” which is problematic for at least two reasons. First, the term can easily mean “regret,” among other things, but regret isn’t the same as to change one’s mind. I can regret that I let my son take my convertible Mustang for a joy ride after he ran it off the road. But this doesn’t mean I changed my mind about my previous decision to let him take it. (Unfortunately, I don’t have a convertible Mustang.) Second, it’s possible to interpret the “change of mind” passages about God anthropomorphically—depicting God in human-like terms. From a human perspective, it seems like God is changing his mind, but this is the author’s way of trying to communicate humans about the mysterious activity of a God who is wholly other. 

I’m not saying the God “changing his mind” passages are anthropomorphic. Some evangelicals punt to the anthropomorphic view, not for exegetical reasons, but because they are simply offended at the very idea of God changing his mind. I’m not at all arguing for this. I’m only saying that anthropomorphisms are a common part of the literary genre of the Bible (e.g. God walking in the garden, Gen 3) and should be considered as a legitimate exegetical possibility. To my recollection, Christopher never mentions this.

 

 5. Traditional views on sexuality leading to LGBTQ suicides. 

 

The book is filled with “harm” language, where traditional views on marriage and sexuality (and those who hold to these views) are said to harm LGBTQ people (e.g. pp. 5, 11, 67, 68, 70, 216). Included in this harm is suicide. Christopher cites one study from the APA, which says that “20.1 percent of sexual minority teens reported attempting suicide in 2017,” which is “3.8 times the rate of heterosexual teens” (p. 68).[26] While “religious adherence generally correlates with reduced suicidal thoughts and behaviors” for the general population, the same is not true for LGBTQ youth and adults. Christopher argues that such increase in suicidal thoughts and behavior is due, in part, to the “negative messages about their sexuality form people in their environments” (p. 68). Hays goes on to compare the biblical prohibitions against same-sex sexual behavior (e.g. Rom 1:26-27) with the “no good laws” that command child sacrifice in the Old Testament: “As with the law of the sacrifice of the firstborn, the laws about sexuality in the Torah have done harm to children” (p. 68). Whether the same-sex prohibitions have been misinterpreted (as Hays believes) or were simply “no good laws,” he believes that like the child-sacrifice laws, they “should not hold today” (p. 69). 

 

I can think of few things more tragic than suicide. I’ve had loved ones who have committed suicide or struggle seriously with suicidal ideation. It’s a topic I care deeply about. While I appreciate Christopher’s concern as well, I found this section deeply problematic. He fails to mention (or is simply unaware of) that there have been many studies done on the suicide rates and causes among LGBTQ people. And the results are lot more mixed than Christopher would have us believe.[27]

 

For instance, one study looked at LGBTQ kids raised in religious (not just Christian) environments. It showed that “increased importance of religion was associated with higher odds of recent suicide ideation for both gay/lesbian and questioning students.” It also noted that “religious-based conflict over sexual identity is often associated with conversion therapy.”[28] I don’t love the imprecision of the language used in this study; “conflict over sexual identity” being “associated with conversation therapy” can mean many different things and describe a vast array of different scenarios. In any case, it certainly doesn’t show that traditional views of marriage and sexual ethic contribute to suicide attempts. 

 

Another study showed that LGBT people who identified as religious reported higher levels of happiness than those who didn’t identify as religious. And, to the surprise of the leaders of the study, “there are no significant differences in subjective well-being between LGBT individuals who identify as evangelical Protestants…despite that conservative denominations do not affirm same-sex relations…compared to those who identify as mainline Protestant.”[29] So this study show the exact opposite of what Christopher was arguing for.

 

Another large study was performed on gay people living in the Netherlands. It revealed that, “contrary to our expectations, younger homosexual men were at higher risk than older homosexual men comparing them to their heterosexual counterparts for suicide contemplation.… In spite of a more tolerant society in the last decades, younger homosexuals were still at high risk for suicidality.”[30] This was shocking, since the Netherlands has been ranked the number one most LGBT-friendly country in the world. Again, this study puts into question Christopher’s assumptions about traditional sexual ethics and suicide attempts.

 

Another study agrees to some extent with the one cited by Christopher. It showed that “individuals who received religious or spiritual treatment had higher odds of later attempting suicide than those who did not seek treatment at all.” However, the closest this study came to defining “religious or spiritual treatment” was its mention of “therapists who focused inappropriately on sexual orientation or who suggested that sexual minority patients should change or hide their sexual identity.”[31]

 

A large US study on the religious background of LGBT people showed that 83 percent were raised in the Christian church and about 50 percent left after they turned eighteen. But only 3 percent of those who left said they left primarily because of the church’s theological teaching on marriage and same-sex sexual relationships.[32] This wasn’t a study of suicidality, but it showed that most of the 1,712 LGBT people surveyed left the church more for relational reasons than theological disagreements about marriage and sexual ethics. 

 

Another study done by the Family Acceptance Project, showed that “suicide attempts nearly tripled for LGBT young people who reported both home-based efforts to change their sexual orientation by parents and intervention efforts by therapists and religious leaders (63%).” It also showed that kids who were “highly rejected” by their parents (that is, yelled at, shamed, verbally or physically abused, made fun of, etc.) are “more than 8 times as likely to have attempted suicide.”[33] So it was not simply traditional views on sexuality that contributed to suicide attempts, but a toxic and emotionally/physically abusive environment where kids were forced into conversion therapy. 

 

This small sampling shows that the results about LGBTQ people and suicidality are quite mixed. This should prevent anyone from making blanket statements like, “Studies show that …” followed by some ideologically driven point about why traditional views of sexuality cause people to attempt suicide. The studies are mixed, sometimes contradictory. And no study has shown (and probably could never show) that simply being around a grace-filled church environment that believes in the historically Christian view of sexual ethics contributes to suicide attempts. 

 

In short, it feels like Christopher selected one study that fit his narrative and weaponized the tragedy of suicide as an argument for his ethical position. 

 

 6. Unclear and uncompelling treatment of porneia (“fornication”). 

 

Richard toys with the question of sexual ethics in his treatment of the term porneia (“fornication”) on pp. 183-87. In my opinion, his discussion, while crucial for his overarching argument, lacks the same exegetical precision so evident in Richard’s previous scholarly works.  

 

In Acts 15, the Jerusalem council agreed that Gentile converts must abstain from porneia, which includes same-sex sexual behavior (Acts 15:20, 28). Richard agrees that porneia includes all the forbidden sexual activities of Lev 18 including “lying ‘with a male as with a woman’” (p. 183). He also agrees that this prohibition is applied to Gentile converts in Acts 15 through “an imaginative reinterpretation of scripture” (p. 184 emphasis his), since the apostles were applying laws about resident aliens in Israel (e.g. Lev 17-18) to first-century Gentiles being included in the church. This imaginative reading of Scripture is put in conversation with the Spirit’s work among the Gentiles and the community’s agreement about their acceptance (pp. 185-186)—an acceptance, to be clear, that according to Acts 15 and the rest of the New Testament, includes repenting from porneia.

 

Richard then suggests that “If the church today…decides that same-sex unions are no longer to be automatically classified as porneia,” then “we would need to ask what analogous transformative guidance the church would offer its members of differing sexual orientations.” His language here feels muddy to me. But if I’m understanding him correctly, he assumes that accepting gay people means accepting same-sex marriage. This is a given. The only question is whether there are other aspects of a traditional sexual and marriage ethic that are applicable to gay couples. He goes on to say that “[t]his is a conversation that will require careful listening on all sides” and then proposes “One reasonable suggestion is that same-sex relationships should aspire to the same standard of monogamous covenant fidelity that the church has long commended and prescribed for heterosexual marriage” (p. 187).

 

“Covenant fidelity,” of course, means faithfulness to the stipulations the Creator has determined, which includes how we steward our sexual desires. In any case, the one requirement for same-sex couples—which the historic global church would consider immoral—is that they don’t cease this relationship.  

 

So, on what basis can the church decide that porneia no longer includes same-sex sexual behavior? It really comes down to the church’s “imaginative attention to scripture.” That is, interpreting New Testament words like porneia against their clear meaning and revising the church’s historical and global consensus that sex difference is an essential part of marriage and all sex outside this covenant bond are sin. This would certainly be imaginative; I’m not sure it’s persuasive. He goes on to add that in order to revise the church’s sexual ethic, we must give “attentive listening to stories of how God is already at work, and careful conversation in community” (p. 187). 

 

The reader will have to determine the whether she or he find this reasoning compelling. Personally, I’m not convinced. But it does reflect his position described in point 3 above, that the authority of modern (western) experiences trump the authority of Scripture and tradition.