Sexuality within the Biblical Story
By Christopher B. Hays and Richard B. Hays
Yale, 288 pages, $28
When announced earlier this year, this book was presented as articulating a major change for distinguished New Testament scholar Richard Hays, rejecting his earlier, influential defense of a traditional understanding of sexuality in The Moral Vision of the New Testament. Both Richard Hays and his son Christopher, an Old Testament scholar at Fuller Theological Seminary, support some form of an inclusive position, and the book’s subtitle implies that it offers a biblical account of sexuality in defense of this stance. On that point, the book proves disappointing.
The book is primarily a survey of biblical material related to the title: the extension of God’s mercy to all as this is progressively unveiled through the canon. Here — in seven chapters on the Old Testament by Christopher Hays and nine on the New by Richard Hays — there is much excellent material that makes the book well worth reading. It highlights in a clear and accessible account, rooted in biblical scholarship, how the extent of God’s mercy regularly disturbs and challenges those who have already received that mercy, particularly those concerned about the integrity and holiness of God’s people.
In contrast, there is no serious discussion of any of the biblical material relating to sexuality or sexual ethics. The first chapter on creation has no consideration of the significance of being made male and female. This is despite our sexually differentiated bodies being essential to procreation within humanity, and thereby “the widening of God’s love and mercy” to more and more creatures, which is the book’s focus.
Genesis 2:23-24 does not appear in the extensive index of biblical references. Similarly, there is no engagement with Jesus’ appeal to these texts (Matt. 19 and Mark 10) or discussion of marriage in the chapters discussing the gospels. Richard Hays notes that he earlier rejected some of the arguments he advances here on the basis of “the New Testament’s few but emphatic statements — especially Romans 1:24-27 — that portray same-sex intercourse as a tragic distortion of the created order.” He says he stands “fully behind the descriptive exegetical judgments” of his earlier work. He does not, though, explain how or why in revisiting his hermeneutical and pragmatic tasks in relation to Scripture he has now apparently abandoned what he then saw as the clear and authoritative “symbolic world” of the apostle Paul and the wider canon.
Many will sympathize with the authors’ conviction that “this debate should no longer focus on the endlessly repeated exegetical arguments about half a dozen isolated texts that forbid or disapprove of same-sex relations.” Still, it is astonishing they ignore how their proposal relates to these texts. It is also unclear whether they think the texts’ prohibitions simply never addressed the phenomenon of committed, loving, same-sex unions or rather, picking up an important and disputable theme found especially in the book’s discussion of the Old Testament, that the texts reflected the past mind of God, which God has now for some unexplored reason changed.
More regrettable still is the failure to recognize that traditionalists have for many years also sought to look beyond these few texts. They too have asked, as Richard Hays wrote in The Moral Vision of the New Testament, “how Scripture frames the discussion more broadly: How is human sexuality portrayed in the canon as a whole, and how are the few explicit texts treating homosexuality to be read in relation to this larger canonical framework?” The book, despite its subtitle and central argument that the church needs to change its mind on sexuality, simply ignores this crucial question.
Amid its weaknesses, the book nevertheless represents an important contribution to discussions of sexuality in the Church. For those committed to traditional teaching, it highlights that this has often been experienced as unmerciful. It implicitly asks whether and how it can be articulated and embodied in a way that witnesses to the God of mercy and the mercy of God. Groups like Revoice in North American and Living Out in the U.K. (unmentioned in the book) have a crucial part to play in that discussion.
What the authors seek — the Church welcoming “sexual minorities no longer as ‘strangers and aliens’ but as ‘fellow citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God’” — is a goal most would share. The difference is that for the authors this includes “the blessing of covenanted unions, with the same expectations as for heterosexuals” (they do not make clear whether they consider these unions marriages).
The question is how people can recognize such a position as “not a rejection of the Bible’s message” when the case presented for it does not address “sexuality within the biblical story,” the biblical witness on humanity created as male and female and marriage, or that, as Richard Hays still acknowledges, every biblical text speaking of homoerotic activity expresses “unqualified disapproval.” Can a convincing or even credible biblical and theological argument ever really be advanced to justify such a “re-visionary theology” in relation to marriage and sexual ethics simply by appealing to one or more of the biblical story’s central themes, such as here — very fully and powerfully — the central message of God’s mercy?
