The Widening of God’s Mercy: Sexuality within the Biblical Story by Christopher B. Hays and Richard B. Hays

Richard Hays (Photo/YouTube Screenshot)

New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2024, 272 pages

Reviewed by Fisher Humphreys

Christopher Hays is a Presbyterian Old Testament professor at Fuller Theological Seminary, a highly respected evangelical graduate school in California, and a research associate of the University of Pretoria in South Africa. His father, Richard Hays, was a Methodist New Testament scholar who taught at Yale Divinity School and at Duke Divinity School and was for a time dean of the school at Duke. He died in January 2025 of pancreatic cancer.

Richard was the author of The Moral Vision of the New Testament (1996) which included a chapter on homosexuality. In it, he wrote that churches should welcome gay and lesbian Christians, but he also said that the handful of passages in the Bible that refer to homoerotic activity “express unqualified disapproval.” In the new book, he says “that statement still seems to me to be correct” (page 8), but he qualifies it: “It is relatively clear that these texts view homosexual sex negatively, even if they do not envisage covenanted same-sex partnerships as we know them today” (206). The texts to which he is referring are Gen. 19:1-3, Lev. 18:22, 20:13, 1 Cor. 6:9-11, 1 Tim 1:10, and Rom 1:18-32.

Richard also wrote in 1996 that God calls gay and lesbian Christians to live unmarried, celibate lives. Since then he has changed his mind about that, principally for two reasons. First, in his classes and in his church he has observed God’s Spirit at work in the lives of LGBTQ persons. This is exactly what happened when Peter preached the gospel to Cornelius. The Spirit came to the gentiles, so Peter felt compelled to accept and baptize them (Acts 10:34-48).

Second, instead of focusing on the handful of passages about homoerotic love, in this new book Richard and Christopher have given their attention to what might be called a metanarrative of the Bible. The metanarrative is that God’s mercy has been widening to include more and more groups of people. I’ll say more about this below.

In 1996, Richard hoped that his call to churches to welcome homosexual persons would result in greater compassion and acceptance for them. Instead, traditionalists used the chapter to condemn and reject homosexual persons. This pained Richard deeply, and he felt responsible for it. “The present book is, for me, an effort to offer contrition and to set the record straight on where I now stand” (225). “In this book I want to start over—to repent of the narrowness of my earlier vision and to explore a new way of listening to the story that scripture tells about the widening scope of God’s mercy” (10, his italics).

Chris’ story is not as dramatic as Richard’s, but he confesses that when he saw gay and lesbian people being hurt in his early years at Fuller Seminary, “I was too often silent” (13). Now, he says, “I’m done being safe while many others are not” (11). He suggested to his father that they write this book together in order “to right some past wrongs” (16).

Although the authors do not mention it in the book, the title is a play on words found in a beloved 1854 hymn by Frederick Faber. It has multiple verses, including these:

There’s a wideness in God’s mercy,

Like the wideness of the sea;

There’s a kindness in His justice,

Which is more than liberty.

But we make His love too narrow

By false limits of our own;

And we magnify His strictness

With a zeal He will not own.

For the love of God is broader

Than the measure of one’s mind;

And the heart of the Eternal

Is most wonderfully kind.

In ordinary speech the word mercy is usually used to mean not punishing or not hurting. The Hayses use it in a broader, richer sense: “To speak of God’s mercy is to point to God’s overflowing love, God’s propensity to embrace, heal, restore, and reconcile all of creation” (18). So the title The Widening of God’s Mercy refers to the extending of God’s love, embrace, healing, restoration and reconciliation to more and more people and, importantly, to more and more groups of people.

When I think about what the Bible says about God embracing more groups of people, two stories come immediately to mind. One is the story of Jonah. God commissioned Jonah to call the gentile people of Ninevah to repent of their sins, but Jonah tried his best not to do it. When he finally did go to Ninevah and the people repented, “God changed his mind about the calamities that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it” (Jonah 3:10). This made Jonah so mad he wanted to die. Clearly God’s mercy reached a lot further than Jonah thought it should.

The other story that comes to mind is told in Acts and is reflected in the epistles of the New Testament. It is the story of how the early church came to incorporate gentiles into its life on an equal footing with Jews. Philip’s witness to Samaritans and later to an Ethiopian (Acts 8), Peter’s visit with the Roman Cornelius (Acts 10), Paul’s wide-ranging mission to gentiles, and the Jerusalem council’s decision to welcome gentiles (Acts 15) all bear witness to the church’s success in welcoming gentiles. They did it so well that Paul could later write, “In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek” (Gal. 3:28).

The authors provide convincing accounts of the widening of God’s mercy for Jonah in chapter 6 and for the early church in chapters 12-16. They also demonstrate in chapters 8-11 that Jesus talked about and acted out a wideness of God’s mercy that included lepers, tax collectors, women, Samaritans, and, even though he did not conduct a mission to them, gentiles. The authors provide multiple other biblical examples of the widening of God’s mercy.

Even though they do not address the passages that speak directly of homoerotic activity, the authors do address them indirectly by pointing out that across the centuries “biblical laws and customs change” (55, their italics). They provide multiple examples of this. By far the most dramatic is found in Ezekiel 20 to which Chris devotes an entire chapter (chapter 4). Writing from exile in Babylon, Ezekiel delivers a long speech recounting the people’s history. At some point in their history God says that, because of their disobedience, “I gave them statutes that were not good and ordinances by which they could not live. I defiled them through their very gifts, in their offering up all their firstborn in order that I might horrify them, so that they might know that I am the Lord” (Eze. 20:25-6). God commanded the people to sacrifice their children! Needless to say, this command was later reversed and child sacrifice was repudiated—the prophets repeatedly condemned child sacrifice. Jeremiah claimed that God never commanded them to sacrifice children: “I did not command them, nor did it enter my mind that they should do this abomination” (Jer. 32:35).

The point of all this is that, since some of God’s commands are later rescinded, that may be true of commands prohibiting homoerotic activity.

This brings us to the difficult issue of God’s mutability. We might put it this way: It is one thing to say that God changes. In the biblical stories God is seen as engaging in relationships with human beings and as responsive to them and as doing new things, and in those senses God changes. But it is another altogether to say that God changes from not loving to loving certain groups of people, something the Bible does not say.

Or we could phrase it this way: It is one thing to say that over time the people of God learned that God’s mercy reached more widely than they had realized before. That is something that people of all theological persuasions can accept. It is another thing entirely to say that over time God’s mercy—God’s love, embrace, healing, restoration and reconciliation—has been extended to groups of people towards whom in the past God did not show mercy.

Do the Hayses really believe that across time God came to love and accept people that God had previously had not loved? They don’t seem to have said it directly, though there are passages, including the book’s title itself, when they seem to be saying it indirectly. But I am not so sure.

In November 2024, the New York Times published an interview with Richard Hays. The interviewer, Peter Wehner, asked Hays: “Is it your view that in A.D. 30 and before, God did believe homosexuality was sinful and that he’s since changed his mind?”

Hays replied: “Well, I certainly wouldn’t presume to say that I know better than God, that God was wrong. I think I would say that God had reasons for telling the children of Israel in the wilderness to observe a limitation of sexual relations to heterosexual relationships … I don’t understand the purposes of God fully.”

In his extensive unpacking of Ezekiel 20, Chris Hays says something similar to what his father said in the interview: “As with the law of the sacrifice of the firstborn, the laws about sexuality in the Torah have done harm to children. I and many other biblical scholars are in a camp analogous to Jeremiah’s, believing that the laws have been misunderstood and misapplied. Others may prefer to take a stance like Ezekiel’s and simply say that the laws given were not good. But hopefully like the two prophets, we can agree that they should not hold today. We consider these laws, with their conflicted interpretations, to be superseded by the overwhelming divine command to love, and by the expansion of God’s grace” (68-9).

So I suspect that when the authors write about “the widening of God’s mercy” they are usually thinking “the widening of [the people’s awareness of] God’s mercy” or of God taking new steps to extend God’s mercy to new groups of people through the work of the covenant people. It makes me uncomfortable to offer this interpretation of the book because other reviewers have come to the opposite conclusion. But this seems right to me. In any case, I think readers should be alert to the ambiguity.

The authors said: “Our goal is to demonstrate that the biblical story, taken as a whole, depicts the ever-widening path of God’s mercy” (22). Bearing in mind the qualification I just offered, I think they have succeeded in this.

They had a secondary goal also: “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” (206). They want their book to encourage the church today to welcome and affirm LGBTQ persons: “To say it one more time, our vision is this: 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.’ Full stop” (207, their italics).

I believe the Hayses achieved this goal also. I think they have earned the right to claim: “We advocate full inclusion of believers with differing sexual orientations not because we reject the authority of the Bible. Far from it: We have come to advocate their inclusion precisely because we affirm the force and authority of the Bible’s ongoing story of God’s mercy” (214).

This is a remarkable achievement, and one I welcome.

I have two concluding comments. First, their achievement is not dependent on the idea that over time God came to love groups of people, LGBTQ or any other, whom God had previously not loved. The hints of that idea found in the book and its title have gotten a lot of attention for the book, but the idea is not necessary for the achievement of their two goals. All that is necessary is the recognition that over time

• God’s covenant people have come to understand more and more fully that God loves all people.
• God has taken new steps to reach out in mercy to new groups of people through the work of the covenant people.
• God has rescinded some of the commands and prohibitions that God had previously given to the covenant people.

My second concluding comment concerns the extent of their achievement. The authors have not proved that the church should accept and affirm LGBTQ persons. They do not claim to have proved this. What they have done is to show that when the church accepts and affirms LGBTQ persons as full members, it is following faithfully a pattern that appears repeatedly in the Bible. “Because God sometimes changes his mind and his approaches to the world, faithfulness to God means sometimes doing the same” (205).

This book is a beautiful example of theology in the service of the church. It is also a major contribution to the church’s ongoing conversation about homosexuality. I commend it to readers of this journal enthusiastically.

Share on Facebook

Tweet

Follow us