Richard Hays Changes His Mind About Sexuality and God: A Review of ‘The Wideness of God’s Mercy: Sexuality Within the Biblical Story’

For almost two thousand years, Christians of every variety, even if they couldn’t read themselves, even when the text was rendered opaque by hearing it in another language, basically understood the point of the Bible. Whatever ancient believers thought about the relationship between Scripture and tradition, the forensics of soteriology, the authority of the pope, or the formation of the canon (the list of disagreements and controversies down the ages would take me all day to enumerate), every person who made it to Sunday service knew that the center of the biblical story is the birth, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus for — and this is the crucial bit — the forgiveness of sin.

Human beings fell from their original state of grace in the garden when tempted by the devil. God had to do something to rescue and redeem them. Therefore, He set in motion a great salvation that culminated in the death of the Son of God on the cross, His three days in the tomb, His glorious resurrection, and His ascension to the right hand of the Father. The whole story will reach its denouement when He comes again in glory to judge the living and the dead, remake heaven and earth, and assume His place as ruler over the cosmos.

I mention this because somewhere between the late 1990s and 2024, the point of the story — that Jesus died on the cross for our sins — became baffling for many self-identifying Christians. Some prominent theologians and scholars who knew this basic truth even twenty or thirty years ago now believe that the point of the Bible is an accumulation of sub-Christian progressive talking points. They no longer know how to make sense of the text. They have forgotten very basic theological nomenclature like “sin” and “mercy.”

What has brought about this sudden confusion? The answer will not surprise anyone. It is the “question” of sexuality. Western culture has come to embrace a false, anti-Christian view of the human person, one that does not include the consequences of sin and, therefore, does not require a Savior. Jesus, having no redemptive purpose, comes to show us how to be more fully ourselves. We can have sex with whomever we prefer, and, because our sexual proclivities are precious, we ought to identify our whole selves by those desires. To the long list of Christian apostates over the heresy of unbiblical sexuality, we now grievously add Richard B. Hays and Christopher B. Hays, who, in their book The Widening of God’s Mercy: Sexuality Within the Biblical Story (Yale University Press, 2024), come out as affirming the sin of homosexuality.

How Convenient. Richard Hays’s The Moral Vision of the New Testament (HarperSanFrancisco, 1996) was already a mainstay when I entered seminary in the late 1990s. No one studying theology escaped reading it. Dr. Hays’s exceptional chapter titled simply “Homosexuality” cleared away the gathering fog around what the Bible says about sex. My former denomination — The Episcopal Church — though we did not know it at the time, was about to become affirming. The chapter caused a stir among my classmates. Christians, back then, had to contend with the clear biblical teaching that sexual activity is confined to the marriage union of one man with one woman. Those making the case for two men or two women together to have sex contorted themselves in Scriptural and doctrinal knots to make their case. Dr. Hays’s clear exposition of the relevant passages made that task much more difficult.

That was thirty years ago. In the intervening years, as Christians left the relative peace of “Neutral World” for the howling wasteland of “Negative World,”¹ the great scholar and ethicist, together with his son, has reversed himself. Why? “In view of the subsequent developments over the past quarter century,” they write, “in the church and in the wider culture, we now have much more lived experience of the ways in which the Spirit may be at work to expand our vision.” Personal experience proved to be the agent of change. Hays Sr. became involved “in a church where gay and lesbian members were a vital part of the congregation’s life and ministry.” This new relational world brought about a “comprehensive rethinking of the way in which the Bible might speak to these matters.” He, therefore, “repent[s] of the narrowness” of his understanding of God’s mercy (p. 10). It is now his conviction that his former teaching about sexuality is harmful (5). This is at a time when no other change of mind could be more acceptable in a respectable society.

A Satisfying and Important-Sounding Thing to Say. The reader will notice immediately that The Widening of God’s Mercy is a popular-level work. Hays and Hays are not appealing to a scholarly crowd. The writing is breezy and imprecise, if I may be so bold. They are not trying to strengthen the laity’s trust in the biblical narrative. Their task is not to make the difficult bits more accessible. Rather they employ a well-worn, progressive hermeneutic that treats God as one among many characters to appear on the biblical page. He is not the divine Author whose superintending Spirit empowered human writers to communicate His mind and will. No, as God, He is discovering Himself and us, just as we are discovering Him.

Thus, Hays and Hays take the bold stance that God is a being who constantly changes His mind. “We suggest,” they explain, “that for those who would like to make sense of the Bible, these statements about God’s unchanging word must somehow be held together with a long tradition of examples where God does in fact change his mind — and so do faithful people. In particular, God repeatedly changes his mind in ways that expand the sphere of his love, preserve his relationship with humankind, and protect and show mercy toward them” (2, emphasis added).

Some places the reader encounters God changing His mind are when He does not immediately put Adam and Eve to death for eating the fruit (37–38), when He lightens Cain’s curse (38–40), His repentance for creating the world in the first place (40–42), His change of mind about destroying His rebellious people (43–46), and the gift of land to the daughters of Zelophehad (49–60). Much later, God decides He no longer believes in child sacrifice like He did in Genesis (62–66). He gradually comes to feel that nationalistic warfare is unproductive (71–73). For Drs. Hays and Hays, it appears God is “learning on the job” (48). Part of that learning is to become less wrathful and more expansive in mercy (85).

But what about the places where God is said not to change His mind? Hays and Hays acknowledge that, in the Bible, occasionally God is described as not changing His mind. “Samuel thunders,” they write, “‘the Glory of Israel does not recant or change his mind! He is not mortal, that he should change his mind!’ (1 Sam 15:29). This is a satisfying and important-sounding thing to say. If there were red-letter Hebrew Bibles, it would probably be printed in red. If it were posted on an internet chat board, it would likely appear as ALL CAPS” (1). These rare instances, they explain, must be harmonized against all the instances of nacham, the most common word used for when God changes His mind. They maintain that the best way to do this is simply to disregard the places where God is immutable in favor of the places where He is described as mutable (1).

Hays and Hays make no effort to work through the devastating spiritual and eternal implications of trying to relate to a changeable God. They offer God’s supposed mutability as something that will be a net benefit for humanity, as God appears to be adjusting His own moral and ethical stance towards the cosmos in much the same way North American progressive biblical scholars do. It is important for people to accept each other, an ethical value that God appears to have embraced on His journey toward greater mercy.

A Catchall Designation. But why does anyone need mercy? Mercy, according to Hays and Hays, is “God’s overwhelming love, God’s propensity to embrace, heal, restore, and reconcile all of creation” (18). The words “heal,” “restore,” and “reconcile” all suggest some kind of alienation, some wound or sickness that needs to be mended, some kind of destruction that cries for a remedy. The traditional word for this condition is “sinner,” a category that includes everyone in every time in every place, except for Jesus.

Unfortunately, Hays and Hays do not articulate a doctrine of sin, nor what the mercy God increasingly has might be for. Instead, in the New Testament portion of the work, Richard Hays addresses the many instances recounted wherein Jesus “ate with sinners,” explaining that the term “sinners” has a “far broader meaning” than merely a “slur” that “refers particularly to people habitually engaged in sexual misconduct.” It is “a catchall designation used by people who regard themselves as righteous…to express disdain for people they perceive as being less respectable,” those who are “undesirable” (132–33). It is best, they feel, to be careful about the term “sin,” especially in regard to sexuality. They offer a warning in their introduction: “The belief in human sinfulness can become a weapon,” they say, “when it is wielded by those who believe that other people’s sins are more significant than their own” (19). They draw in C. S. Lewis’ admonition in Mere Christianity that “the sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins” (19).

Remarkable in its absence is any discussion of the reason for Christ’s death on the cross. Somehow, God’s mercy, which appears to increase in its outflow through the Scriptures, is not related to any particular event, nor a quality within God. It is almost as if God sometimes felt sorry for the world and healed some people, though not all of them. Perhaps Hays and Hays assume that the entire world already knows about the death and resurrection of the Lord and the reasons the New Testament gives for His death — as a “ransom for many” (Mark 10:45), as “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29), as a “propitiation for the sins of the people” (Hebrews 2:17), as the preeminent image of the invisible God who makes “peace by the blood of his cross” (Colossians 1:20).²

Mea Culpa. Throughout, Richard Hays finds many faceted ways to apologize for ever having written against the sin of homosexuality. He likens himself to the scribes whom Jesus rebukes after restoring the man with the withered hand on the Sabbath. “In the silence of these scribes in the synagogue,” he confesses, “I see a reflection of my own longstanding reticence to speak about the question of same-sex relationships in the church: uncomfortably aware of aching human need but constrained by my interpretation of scripture from responding with grace or generosity. And so I kept silent” (126). The work of the Lord Jesus to heal the man points towards God’s intent to prosper “human wholeness and flourishing” (126), a view of healing and wholeness that “should be welcomed rather than forbidden,” even if it appears to “violate a particular scriptural prohibition” (130).

Later, perhaps in an effort at self-deprecation, Hays Sr. likens those unwilling to affirm sexual immorality to “the weak” in St. Paul’s letter to the Romans. “The ‘strong’ ones today,” he asserts, “are the liberated advocates of unconditional affirmation of same-sex unions; they are tempted to ‘despise’ the ‘weak,’ narrow-minded, rule-following conservatives who would impose limits on their freedom. And the ‘weak’ ones today are the devout, strict followers of what they understand to be God’s law given in scripture; they are tempted to ‘pass judgment’ on the sinful laxity of the ‘strong’ who condone same-sex unions” (200).

“I regret,” he laments in the book’s conclusion,

the impact of what I wrote previously….I am now mindful that my chapter titled “Homosexuality” in Moral Vision has, contrary to my intention, caused harm to many over the past quarter century. Writing at a time when same-sex marriage was illegal in the United States and forbidden in nearly all Christian churches, I intended my chapter as an appeal for compassionate traditionalism, arguing for acceptance of gay and lesbian people in the church — but also opining that they should without exception embrace the difficult vocation to remain single and celibate. That judgment, sadly, was not informed by patient listening to my fellow Christians who found their identity indelibly stamped by same-sex attraction and by the longing for companionship. Instead, it was — to put it bluntly — the presumptuous judgment of an eager young scholar seeking to develop a theoretical model for “doing New Testament ethics,” that is, working out a model for processing biblical texts into a clear system of teaching. (223–24, emphasis in original)

Story Telling. The little engagement Drs. Hays and Hays undertake with the biblical text is shaped by their acknowledgment that they do not believe the Scripture to be a closed canon. “Contrary to the common idea that the New Testament brings complete and final closure to God’s revelation,” they write, “the New Testament itself promises that the Holy Spirit will continue to lead the community of Jesus’ followers into new and surprising truths” (3). The way the Spirit does this work of leading through “imaginative reinterpretation of scripture” (184) or “creative leap[s]” (185) is best illustrated in the way the early church began to include Gentile converts without requiring circumcision or keeping Old Testament dietary restrictions (184–86). Whereas God, in Ezekiel, apparently admits that He “gave them statutes that were not good and ordinances by which they could not live,” that He “‘defiled them through their very gifts, in offering up all their firstborn, in order that I might horrify them, so that they might know that I am the LORD’ (Ezek 20:25–26)” (61–62), in the New Testament the church, because “it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit…and to us’ ([Acts] 15:28)” (186), should be able to discern by “careful listening on all sides” that “same-sex unions are no longer to be automatically classified as porneia [sexual misconduct]” (187).

His Property Is Always to Have Mercy. A deep and dark irony emerges from The Widening of God’s Mercy. If God is ever-changing, why must He always change in ways suitable to a twenty-first century progressive academic? Couldn’t He just as easily decide to become a merciless war god? Westerners will answer that objection by saying that no, He is getting better…evolving to be “good.” But where does one derive the notion that mercy is good? Who or what laid down that eternal standard toward which God is supposedly evolving? To evade the source of true goodness — God Himself — Drs. Hays and Hays read the Bible in a woodenly literal, almost fundamentalist way. Their posture causes them to miss the mercy at the very heart of God’s self-revelation.

God is merciful. Indeed, it is His “property” always to have mercy.³ That is, embedded in His unchanging character and nature is mercy. But what is mercy? Mercy is not getting something you deserve. Mercy is, when you have bitten down on the unctuous Edenic fruit and discovered death (Genesis 3), being the first to be covered by the righteousness of Christ who would die, so many millennia later, for your sins (John 19). Mercy is when you have sacrificed your children to a foreign god, against the commandments of the Lord, and you are taken away in chains by a foreign army, and yet you repent and cry out for help, and you are restored to your throne (2 Chronicles 33:6–13) because hundreds of years in the future Christ would take up your sins. Mercy is, when you had looked into the face of Saint Stephen as he was dying and believed yourself to be righteous (Acts 7:54–60), you are met by Christ on the road in the heat of the day, struck to the ground, and given the chance to see that you had been persecuting the very one you thought you loved because that one had died a few years earlier on the cross for that very sin (Acts 9).

In each case, God is not the one who changes His mind so that He can more fully affirm the sinfulness of His creature. Not at all. God has the kind of mercy that rescues the most lost, the most impoverished, and ruined creature out of the mire by purchasing forgiveness in His blood. You are not let off the hook for sin. You repent and turn to the God who endured His own perfect wrath against sin on your behalf because His property is always to have mercy.

One of the greatest demonstrations of God’s mercy is His gift to us of the Scriptures, where story after story of His unchanging, never-ending love is told. All you have to do when you read it is admit that you are a sinner and that Jesus, the Savior, has the power and desire to rescue you out of that sin. When you do that, the abundance of His mercy falls into place, and you meet the Lord as He really is, right there on the page. —Anne Kennedy

Anne Kennedy, MDiv, is the author of Nailed It: 365 Readings for Angry or Worn-Out People, rev. ed. (Square Halo Books, 2020). She blogs about current events and theological trends on her Substack, Demotivations with Anne.

NOTES

1. Aaron Renn, “The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism,” First Things, February 2022, https://www.firstthings.com/article/2022/02/the-three-worlds-of-evangelicalism.
2.  My quotations of the Bible are from the ESV.
3. The Prayer of Humble Access, in The Book of Common Prayer (Huntington Beach, CA: Anglican Liturgy Press, 2019), 119, https://bcp2019.anglicanchurch.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/BCP-2019-MASTER-5th-PRINTING-05022022-3.pdf.