Christopher B. Hays and Richard B. Hays, The Widening of God’s Mercy: Sexuality Within the Biblical Story (Yale University Press, 2024).
When announced earlier this year, this book immediately gained much attention, even notoriety. Before it was even released, people knew that the book would represent a major change of mind by distinguished New Testament scholar Richard Hays, and that he was rejecting his earlier, influential defense of a traditional view on sexuality. That earlier position is captured in his Moral Vision of the New Testament. This new book, written with his son, Christopher Hays, an Old Testament scholar based at Fuller, is clear that both authors now support some form of inclusive position, and the book’s subtitle implies that it offers a biblical account of sexuality in defense of this new stance. The book proves, for me, disappointing as the expected defense is so weak.
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. This certainly makes the book well worth reading. In a clear and accessible account, rooted in biblical scholarship, the book highlights the amazing wonders of God’s mercy and how it regularly disturbs and challenges those who have already received that grace, 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 the Creation has no consideration of the significance of being made male and female and this is despite our sexually differentiated bodies being essential to procreation and thereby “the widening of God’s love and mercy” (36) to more and more creatures that 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 or the meaning of porneia in the chapters discussing the gospels. Richard Hays notes that he earlier rejected some of the arguments he now advances 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” (223). But he also says he stands “fully behind the descriptive exegetical judgments” of his earlier work (n2, 245). He does not 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 (Moral Vision, 396).
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” (206). Nevertheless, it is astonishing that the authors fail to discuss how their proposal now 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. Although they seem to take this view (n2, 245), an important and controversial theme, one found especially in the book’s discussion of the Old Testament, suggests that their more fundamental argument is that these 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 not to focus on these few texts. Rather, traditionalists have asked, in the earlier words of Richard Hays himself, “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?” (Moral Vision, 389). The book, despite its subtitle and central argument that the church needs to change its mind on sexuality, simply ignores this crucial question.
The book nevertheless represents an important contribution to sexuality discussions within Christian circles, especially in terms of church decision-making. For those committed to traditional teaching, the book highlights that Christian responses have often been experienced as unmerciful. Hays and Hays implicitly ask whether and how the contemporary Christian response can be articulated and embodied in a way that acts as a witness to the God of mercy and the mercy of God. Here those LGBTQ Christians committed to traditional teaching and groups like Revoice in North American and Living Out in the United Kingdom (unmentioned in the book) have a crucial part to play.
For Anglicans, there are a number of interesting connections with the personal journey and theological argument of the Methodist and Presbyterian authors. Richard Hays’ account of how his mind changed and he was led to revisit his understanding of Scripture — in part through belonging “to a grace-filled church community where gay and lesbian Christians participate fully as members and as leaders, without making it into a church-defining issue” (8) — echoes the case made by the Episcopal Church to the wider Anglican Communion nearly 20 years ago in To Set Our Hope on Christ (para. 2.23). Their argument in the book is also important, as it has been a significant theological factor in the thinking of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Justin Welby has recently spoken more fully on this subject than he has done previously (which I have discussed here and here).
Although not a major theme in the book, the implications of disagreement in this area for the life of the church are touched on, and here the authors are refreshingly honest. They recognize that, “As a practical matter, it is difficult to see how strong differences over same-sex marriage could be maintained within an individual congregation, or even in some cases within an individual denomination” (216).
Richard Hays seeks to relate the disagreements over this to those over food as addressed in Paul’s argument in Romans 14 and 15. In The Windsor Report (para. 87ff), this passage was considered in discussion of the subject of adiaphora. As Tom Wright has argued (in Good Disagreement?: Grace and Truth in A Divided Church and this 2004 interview), it is difficult to believe that Paul would have treated disagreement over sexual conduct in the same way as he treated it over food laws. Furthermore, even if that parallel is accepted, then the “strong” (which is how Richard Hays understands his new position), in advocating change and a loosening of historic constraints, need to show what the Primates of the Communion in 2009 described as “gracious restraint” (a phrase picked up by Communion Partners when this was not exercised in the Canadian context) in order to enable “deeper communion.”
The sad reality is that every church that has moved to embrace this stance has experienced impaired, rather than deeper, communion. This is despite that fact that 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’” (206 and 207) — is a goal most would share. The difference is that for them this welcome now includes “the blessing of covenanted unions, with the same expectations as for heterosexuals” (216). Hays and Hays do not make clear whether they view these covenanted unions as “marriage.”
The deeper theological issue here is that this “re-vision” of the nature of our welcome and the implications of God’s mercy can only be seen by many as “a rejection of the Bible’s message,” and one of the book’s aims is to address and counter that concern (221). The difficulty is that the case presented here 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” (8, quoting Moral Vision). After reading the book, one is left to ask whether a convincing or even credible biblical and theological argument can ever really be advanced to justify such a “re-visionary theology” (218) simply by appealing to one or more of the biblical story’s central themes, for example, God’s mercy.
In his earlier book, Richard Hays had argued that claims about divinely inspired experience that contradicts the witness of Scripture should be admitted to normative status in the church only after sustained and agonizing scrutiny by a consensus of the faithful (Moral Vision, 298).
The book’s argument, although claiming to show how the authors’ stance is biblical, appears to be — on the specific ethical question of sexual ethics and same-sex unions — a privileging of experience over Scripture. It is also clear that in the church catholic and within the Anglican Communion we are very far from a new “consensus of the faithful.” In this situation, the crucial ecclesiological question is whether, despite our deep differences, it is still possible, in the authors’ words,
to imagine that different Christian congregations might hold different norms and practices on this question while still acknowledging one another as members of the one body of Christ — just as Catholic and Protestant churches already do with respect to their different standards on clerical celibacy and women’s ordination (216)
If the authors’ vision were to become an ecclesial reality, the pressing question becomes one of what new structures need to be put in place to enable the highest degree of communion possible with integrity so that “churches with different beliefs and practices” can “coexist peaceably and work together in an ecumenical spirit as history takes its course” (217-18). Whether in the form of Communion Across Difference in the Episcopal Church, the work of IASCUFO and the “reset” of the Communion being developed by the Global South Fellowship of Anglicans, or discussions over the nature of “reassurance” and “structural provision” to be provided within the Church of England’s Prayers of Love and Faith process, this tragically is where implementing the book’s proposals inevitably leads at present.
I have written a more fulsome essay on this book and its attendant questions for Psephizo. As we wrestle with these questions, however, which are not the book’s concern, its central argument provides us with an important encouragement that must shape our life together: God is merciful, and although he “has bound everyone over to disobedience,” this is “so that he may have mercy on them all” (Rom.1:32).
