In 1996, Richard Hays, a highly regarded Scripture scholar and professor at Duke Divinity, published The Moral Vision of the New Testament, a text which became something of an instant classic in evangelical circles. In that book, Hays argued for a more compassionate stance toward LGBTQ persons, decrying forms of ostracization and discrimination, but ultimately defending the traditionally understood biblical definition of marriage. Hays, now retired, has co-authored a book with his son, Christopher, a professor of Old Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary. The book, The Widening of God’s Mercy, was released in September.
Hays has reversed course and now argues, along with his son, for full acceptance of LGBTQ persons and relationships on the basis of a biblical hermeneutic of mercy. Hays and his son have provided what they believe to be a biblically faithful framework for greater LGBTQ inclusion in Christian communities, maintaining their own experience of seeing the Spirit of God clearly at work in LGBTQ believers was a major impetus for rethinking the view laid out in Moral Vision. The authors write: “we see LGBTQ Christians all around us who are already contributing their gifts and graces to the work of God in the world and in the church” and they assert firmly that LGBTQ Christians today “abundantly manifest the fruits of the spirit.” Catholic readers will no doubt recognize a similar impulse in Pope Francis’ invitation, especially through the synodal process, to embrace a willingness to learn from the lived experience of those who do not fit into traditional religious categories and to discern with them the Spirit’s activity in their lives.
The Widening of God’s Mercy
by Christopher B. Hays and Richard B. Hays
288 pages, $28
The book is divided into three major sections. Christopher, a scholar of the Jewish Scriptures, wrote the first, which reexamines the narrative arc of the first half of the Christian Bible. While many passages in the Jewish Scriptures regarding Israel’s election can be interpreted as exclusionary, Hays proposes that when read as a consistent whole, the Jewish Scriptures clearly trace a trajectory of ever-expanding mercy and the universal invitation to covenant relationship with the God of Israel.
Richard, a scholar of the Christian Scriptures, wrote the second major section of the book, tracing a similar pattern therein. From examining Jesus’ own words and deeds, to the movements of the early Christian community, to the Apostle Paul, Hays confidently concludes, “the gospel is a word about mercy, all the way down.”
In the final section, the authors argue for a new Christian sexual ethic, following theologian Karl Barth’s insight that the task of any contemporary Christian community is not simply to ask what the apostles and the prophets said but what we must say on the basis of the apostles and the prophets. The authors assert that a renewed Christian sexual ethic must be contextualized in a more integral vision of the mission of contemporary believers: “a church that cannot find more urgent issues than the sexuality debates…is probably not very interested in being the church of Jesus Christ at all.”
While this will be a welcome text for many who are hoping for greater LGBTQ inclusion in the church and for rethinking traditional positions regarding human sexuality—positions which have often led to discrimination and even violence against LGBTQ persons—the book leaves a great deal to be desired. Even though the authors are professional academics, experts in Scripture studies, the text is not a scholarly work. Very early on, Hays and Hays admit that they do not intend to advance any scholarship surrounding the actual biblical texts which are invoked in traditional doctrinal formulations regarding human sexuality. This will be a disappointment for those looking for a fresh exegesis of those passages.
Another weakness of the text is its ambiguity. No central argument is made, aside from the assertion that a hermeneutic of ever-widening mercy is the best way to interpret the Scriptures in light of debates surrounding LGBTQ inclusion and affirmation. It is never entirely clear if the authors intend to redefine the moral status of non-heterosexual sexual acts or relationships.
Hays and Hays do point to several instances in Scripture where God has “changed his mind,” suggesting a position which will make anyone who believes in the immutability of God’s will very uncomfortable. It could be that the authors are suggesting that our understanding of God’s will continues to develop through discernment and the active inspiration of the Holy Spirit, but in that case, why muddy the waters by highlighting passages that suggest God’s will itself, and not our own understanding, is ever-evolving?
The authors do provide a fresh reading of various passages from the Jewish and Christian Scriptures in defense of their hermeneutic of mercy, such as the episode of Zelophehad’s daughters from the Book of Numbers, the rethinking of the covenantal status of eunuchs in the Book of Isaiah and the possibility for communal discernment of God’s will such as that undertaken by the early church in the Book of Acts. Yet their proposed hermeneutic represents another “trajectory theory” of biblical interpretation that follows biblical data to a conclusion that is not explicated in the text (even to the point of contradiction), a type of theory whose strengths and weaknesses have already been debated for decades.
Catholic readers of the text hoping for a firmer biblical basis for the rethinking of traditional doctrinal categories regarding human sexuality will recognize that because the authors are Protestant, there is no magisterial authority to which they can appeal or with which they must wrestle. Understandably, there is no consideration of authoritative doctrinal statements, with which Catholics must contend, nor is there any reference to a developed natural law theory, which is also invoked in official Catholic teaching on human sexuality.
These observations have more to do with fundamental disagreements between Catholics and Protestants on the authority of Scripture and the revelatory significance of tradition, which means that many of the authors’ conclusions will not easily translate into Catholic categories.
Nonetheless, The Widening of God’s Mercy will be a welcome text for those committed to greater LGBTQ affirmation and inclusion in Christian communities, and especially for those seeking to uncover in the Bible a “narrative pattern in which God’s grace and mercy regularly overflow the prohibitions and restrictions that exclude and condemn fixed classes of human beings—even when those prohibitions were explicitly attributed to God in earlier biblical texts.”
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