Holy Mercy? | Book Review

Twenty-eight years ago, when Richard Hays¹ published The Moral Vision of the New Testament, he stated,

We must affirm that the New Testament tells us the truth about ourselves as sinners and as God’s sexual creatures: marriage between man and woman is the normative form for human sexual fulfillment, and homosexuality is one among many tragic signs that we are a broken people, alienated from God’s loving purpose.²

In a new book, co-authored with his son, Christopher Hays, the elder Hays has reassessed his former position and admitted, “I have come to think I was wrong.”³ Their purpose for writing The Widening of God’s Mercy⁴ is

to demonstrate that the biblical story, taken as a whole, depicts the ever-widening path of God’s mercy. We seek to commend that story as the truth by which Christians should shape our moral judgments and our own lives.⁵

The book zeroes in specifically on the question of LGBTQ⁶ inclusion in the church, a very controversial topic in the present cultural climate.

Hays’s admission highlights the humble perspective that permeates this project.⁷ The Hayses are to be commended for their willingness to step into conservative crosshairs in order to challenge deep-seated assumptions about who God loves. It can be hoped that this book receives a wide reading and is listened to as humbly as it was written. It should be understood as starting, not ending, this conversation. What follows is my attempt to keep this conversation going.

The Hayses depict God as a God of immense mercy. This is accurate; the portrait of a God who takes pleasure in smiting sinners is not a biblical portrait. God could have smote Adam and Eve,⁸ but instead he promised a savior and covered their shame. According to the Law, David (and Bathsheba?) should have been put to death, but God showed mercy. Even prior to David, his great-grandmother, Ruth, was a Moabite, and—according to Deuteronomy 23:3—neither she nor her children should have been admitted entrance to Israel, but God showed mercy. The woman caught in adultery (like David) should have died, but Jesus (God!) spared her. The Christian God is a God of immense mercy, and the Hayses clearly convey this throughout their book (using different examples than those given above).

The Hayses are to be applauded for their bold and innovative reading of Scripture, but the more they try to equate LGBTQ practice with monogamous, heterosexual practice,⁹ the more their exegesis betrays gymnastic leaps. This is likely a result of the book failing to delineate an interpretational methodology.¹⁰ However, some sense can be made of the overarching methodology if one is familiar with Richard Hays’s earlier work: Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul.

In its concluding chapter, he paved the way for The Widening of God’s Mercy by identifying two hermeneutical constraints that must guide Christian readings of Scripture if we are to read and hear Scripture as Paul did. First, a proper reading of Scripture must uphold “the faithfulness of Israel’s God to his covenant promises.” Second, a proper reading of Scripture must “shape the readers into a community that embodies the love of God as shown forth in Christ.”¹¹ When these two constraints are kept in mind, The Widening of God’s Mercy appears to accomplish its task.

However, faithfulness to covenant promises necessarily includes following through on promised curses for disobedience (Deuteronomy 27:20–23).¹² And this is where the argument of the book starts to flounder. Leviticus 19:1 commands the Israelites to “be holy because I, Yahweh your God, am holy” (a command reiterated in 1 Peter 1:16).¹³ When Christians refuse to pursue holiness, then it implies to perceptive observers that God is less than holy, which calls his faithfulness into question. Now certainly, holiness can be redefined so that it boils down to “love” (Leviticus 19:18, 34) or being “set apart.” But the chapter immediately prior to the one in which God commands holiness and love of neighbor is the very one that delineates the Old Testament sexual ethic¹⁴ (which is reiterated in the New Testament). While the traditional understanding of biblical sexuality is not to be equated with holiness, it cannot be denied that it is one aspect of holiness. If God’s definition of holiness has suddenly changed, then it throws his reliability into question. Thus, this book fails to uphold God’s faithfulness to his covenant promises, since it has changed the plain meaning of several texts.¹⁵

Now, admittedly, the book starts off by calling into question the classic claim that God does not change:

In 1 Samuel, the great prophet Samuel comes to announce to King Saul that the Lord has torn the kingdom of Israel from him and given it to David. Saul begs him to reconsider and to pardon him, to which Samuel thunders: “the Glory of Israel does not recant or change his mind! He is not a mortal, that he should change his mind!” (1 Samuel 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.

It is also a lie.¹⁶

They substantiate this declaration (rightly) by noting that 1 Samuel 15:11 and 15:35 both use the same Hebrew word (nacham) to state the exact opposite (the first from God’s mouth and the second from the narrator). So as early as the first words of their book, it seems to be within the realm of possibility that the Holy Spirit might also change his mind about Leviticus 18:22; 19:1; and even Acts 15:28–29.¹⁷

But what if the point of 1 Samuel 15 was to highlight that sometimes when people claim to speak for God they are wrong? Just as deceitful as it was for Samuel to declare that God does not change his mind when he just had, so also it is deceptive—not to say dangerous—to claim that God has changed his mind if he has not actually done so. Samuel’s lie cut Saul off from the possibility of repentance; may Christians’ attempts to speak for God not do the same to others.¹⁸

A final less-than-compelling argument put forward by this book to support the idea that God changed his mind about this issue is the age-old example of slavery. The Hayses write:

It isn’t hard to find other examples of biblical laws or teachings that the church has subsequently abandoned or overturned. For many readers, the most obvious case is the issue of slavery.¹⁹

The problem with this line of argumentation is that you never read a text in Scripture that says, “Thou shalt have a slave,” but there are plenty of explicit places outlawing certain sexual practices. To compare these issues is to commit the fallacy of false equivalence, and it thus fails to win the ground it claims.

However, just like Scripture never outlawed slavery, but did demand proper treatment of slaves, so also Scripture—while outlawing certain sexual practices—does demand the proper treatment of people made in God’s image. And The Widening of God’s Mercy helpfully reminds us of this fact (ultimately serving as an exposition of Jesus’s words in Matthew 9:13),²⁰ even if its specific application goes beyond what Scripture and Tradition²¹ will allow.

The storyline of the Bible makes it clear that God loves the world (John 3:16), which naturally includes the LGBTQ community. This book reminds Christians to represent their merciful and loving God better than they often do, especially toward those who are different. Because God loves the world, LGBTQ persons might have experienced his love and his grace and his mercy no less than a heterosexual pornography/sex addict. Both people deserve love, grace, and mercy, even though neither are yet what they will be. But the answer is not to twist Scripture to make certain sins no longer sins; the answer is to be conformed into the image of the God of love.²² Even if the journey is the most difficult thing a person has ever experienced before. Even if the journey is filled with multiple stumbles and setbacks.

“Though a righteous man falls seven times,
he will get up,
but the ungodly²³ will stumble into ruin.”

Proverbs 24:16

In this with you.

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Notes and References

1. I owe much to the work of Dr. Richard B. Hays. He reiterated the importance of hearing Scripture anew, and I relied on the methodology he proposed in Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul as I wrote my Master’s thesis last fall. ↩︎
2. Richard B. Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics (New York: T & T Clark, 1996), 399–400. ↩︎
3. Christopher B. Hays and Richard B. Hays, The Widening of God’s Mercy: Sexuality within the Biblical Story (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2024), 223. See further discussion on pages 7–10, 222–226. Since chapters 1–7 were written by Christopher and chapters 8–16 were written by Richard, only references to the introduction and chapter 17 will be henceforth cited as “Hays and Hays.” ↩︎
4. To be as unbiased as possible, I have not yet read any reviews of this book. However, the press it was receiving upon announcement of release this past spring made it clear it would be controversial. ↩︎
5. Hays and Hays, Widening, 22. ↩︎
6. The book repeatedly refers to “LGBTQ,” but it only substantially discusses the L and G of that initialism. ↩︎
7. “We do not remember ever writing anything that made us conscious of the limitations of our own perspective to the degree that this book did” (Hays and Hays, Widening, ix). ↩︎
8. See Hays, Widening, 37–38. ↩︎
9. For instance: “One reasonable suggestion is that same-sex relationships should aspire to the same standard of monogamous covenant fidelity that the church has long commended and prescribed for heterosexual marriage” (Hays, Widening, 187). In general, though, they—wisely—do not offer much application (see Hays and Hays, Widening, 17–18). ↩︎
10. See Hays and Hays, Widening, 21–22, where they admit that they were asked by early readers about including some words on methodology, but decided to forego it for now. This negatively affects the ability to continue the conversation that this book desires to start. ↩︎
11. Richard B. Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 191; he argues for continuity between Old Testament scripture and New Testament application on pages 123, 156–160, and 191. ↩︎
12. Admittedly, same-sex acts are not mentioned in this text, but animals are, and the verse immediately following Leviticus 18:22 (outlawing homosexuality) outlaws bestiality (Leviticus 18:23). The context would naturally include this. ↩︎
13. This is important to note due to Hays’s earlier work regarding the New Testament’s moral vision. ↩︎
14. Before chapter breaks and verse numbers, the text would have run straight from sexual ethic to “Be holy!” ↩︎
15. The case studies in Echoes of Scripture cannot be charged with changing the plain meaning of Scripture. ↩︎
16. Hays and Hays, Widening, 1. ↩︎
17. On Acts 15, see chapter 15 of Hays, Widening, 176–187. ↩︎
18. The Hayses write, “Even if we were mistaken in our vision, it is better to be wrong in love” (Widening, 220). For an oncologist to fail to tell her patient about his terminal cancer diagnosis to spare him the pain and inconvenience of that diagnosis is not loving; it is lying. ↩︎
19. Hays and Hays, Widening, 211. ↩︎
20. “I desire mercy and not sacrifice” (a quotation of Hosea 6:6). ↩︎
21. I do not mention tradition here in the sense of “The Church has said x, y, and z about this issue.” Tradition here refers to proper hermeneutical practices and the historical understanding of God and his word. ↩︎
22. But love—true, biblical love—will neither lie to people about what will lead to their destruction, nor make someone’s sin the entirety of his or her identity. ↩︎
23. This translates from the LXX (ἀσεβής) rather than the Hebrew (רָשָׁע; “wicked”). ↩︎