The Widening of God's Mercy:
Sexuality Within the Biblical Story
by christopher b. hays and richard b. hays
yale university, 288 pages, $28
Over the course of a long and fruitful career, Richard Hays has distinguished himself as one of the premier biblical theologians of his generation. A highly regarded New Testament scholar, the Duke divinity professor (now emeritus) has led the way in developing scholarly approaches that put high-level exegesis in the service of Christian theology. As a virtuosic interpreter who takes the authority of Scripture and the classic Christian theological tradition seriously, Hays has bridged the gap between the Church and the academy like few others. In short, he has been a game changer.
With The Widening of God’s Mercy, Hays seeks to change the game yet again. He has teamed up with his son Christopher, an Old Testament scholar at Fuller Seminary, to argue that, because God has changed his mind about the sinfulness of sodomy, the churches must now do the same. Written for a lay audience, their book is a work of biblical theology that spans the Old and New Testaments, re-narrating them as a story of “widening mercy” that now prompts the churches to set aside biblical prohibitions against homoerotic activity, bless same-sex marriages, and ordain openly gay clergy.
It would be a mistake, however, to take the book as a proposal for understanding biblical teaching on sexuality. Though the subtitle promises a treatment of “sexuality within the biblical story,” the authors, oddly, steer clear of the topic. They see no point in revisiting texts that actually refer to homosexual activity. Debates over these passages, they suggest, have reached an impasse and turned into “repetitive arguments about the same set of verses” and “the meaning of specific words.” Accordingly, they dismiss attempts to draw biblical teaching from relevant passages in Genesis, Leviticus, 1 Corinthians, 1 Timothy, and Romans as “superficial and boring.” Given the enormous amount of attention that has been focused on these few passages, the sentiment is understandable. At this point, what can an exegete say about the men of Sodom, the relevance of purity laws, and Paul’s terms for sexual deviance that has not already been said?
Yet if the desire to avoid rehashing old disputes is understandable, the decision to avoid discussion of any aspect of biblical teaching on sexuality is not. Homosexuality is not a major theme or prominent topic in Scripture, but sexuality undoubtedly is. The Widening of God’s Mercy is silent, however, about the roots of marriage in creational order, the dynamics of sexual difference, Christ’s words about the indissoluble union of man and woman (Matt. 19:6), or the “mystery” by which the union of man and woman figures the relation of Christ to the Church (Eph. 5:25–33). Surely these topics are relevant to “sexuality within the biblical story” and thus ought to inform a biblical discussion of homosexuality.
In truth, a more accurate subtitle for the book would be “sexuality beyond the biblical story.” The authors are open about the fact that they have not produced a work of scholarship. The Widening of God’s Mercy is an intervention in a contemporary debate, and it offers a particular way of construing the Bible’s overarching narrative. Once readers have understood this larger narrative, they will, the authors hope, be prepared to move beyond the clear biblical strictures against homosexual activity and take up “advocacy for welcoming sexual minorities in the church.” Because God changes his mind and continually “widens” the scope of his mercy, they argue, those who once were excluded may later be included. In this way, the authors ask readers to envision a new chapter on sexuality in a biblical story that continues to evolve.
For Hays and Hays, “mercy” is the key to understanding what the Bible is all about. As they note in the introduction, it is a word that refers to “God’s grace, compassion, and favor” and points to “God’s overflowing love, God’s propensity to embrace, heal, restore, and reconcile all of creation.” There is no denying the centrality of mercy to the Bible, rooted in God’s loving and gracious character. What emerges in the main chapters of the book, however, is an understanding of mercy that is thin, flat, and formal. The “mercy” outlined by the authors is not God’s loving and patient will to restore creatures to their divinely intended ends. Nor does this view of mercy change the wayward for the better in spite of their unworthiness. It is rather a willingness on God’s part to break taboos and relax old restrictions in order to become more inclusive. When, in a paradigmatic “mercy” passage (Exod. 34:6–7), God reveals his gracious character to Moses, he says that he is “slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.” He is patient and bears with human weakness. Within the covenantal relation, he “forgives” sin; he does not ignore or redefine it. However, if repentance is lacking, then God “by no means clears the guilty.” Moses gets the point. He thus asks for pardon for sin, not a relaxation of rules or an affirmation of identity (Exod. 34:9).
The first seven chapters, written by Christopher, concern the Old Testament. Loosely structured, they follow a rough narrative sequence that begins with Genesis and ends with the return from exile. Christopher offers no explicit rationale for the selection of topics and makes no attempt to analyze “mercy” in a rigorous way. Rather, topics are chosen to illustrate certain things about God that make the notion of a perpetually widening divine mercy plausible. Chief among these things is the notion that God changes. In spite of what the broader theological tradition says about divine immutability or impassability, the Bible, argues Christopher, shows clearly that God changes. Although some scriptural passages assert flatly that God does not change (e.g., Mal. 3:6; Num. 23:19; 1 Sam. 15:29; Heb. 13:8; Jas. 1:17), these verses, when set alongside examples of God changing his mind, show not only that God changes but that he also “changes his mind about whether he changes his mind.”
Several stories in the Pentateuch, Christopher argues, show “God’s propensity to relent from punishment, to show mercy even at the cost of changing his mind and bending his principles of justice.” God changes earlier laws and customs such as those pertaining to child sacrifice. Over time, God mitigates the ethnic chauvinism that comes of being the chosen people, and prophets like Amos and Isaiah proclaim God’s “broader vision” of inclusion for all nations. The book of Jonah, for example, shows that God has changed his mind concerning the Ninevites and spared them.
Christopher’s final contribution contains a thought-provoking discussion of Isaiah 56, in which God welcomes into the assembly two groups formerly barred from participation in Israel’s worship: eunuchs and foreigners. The Mosaic Law stipulated that men with mutilated genitals could not bring offerings (Lev. 21:20) or even enter the assembly (Deut. 23:1). Yet God later “throws open the doors” and welcomes them (Isa. 56:4–5). Christopher thus cites eunuchs as an example of a “sexual minority” who received mercy. God broke an old “taboo” and acknowledged “the eunuchs’ existence” while “proclaiming their full inclusion in the temple community.” This is the closest Christopher comes to discussing a divine change of mind that concerns sexuality. Though Isaiah 56 bears reflection, it is not clear that the situation of eunuchs and foreigners, who accepted Israel’s laws before they were included in the assembly, is analogous to today’s “sexual minorities,” who often—not, of course, always—insist on an alteration of law as a condition for entry.
Overall, Christopher’s examples do not so much prove that God changes as much as demonstrate that, in Scripture, humanity’s relation to God is dynamic and personal. Scriptural language, which is necessarily anthropomorphic, reflects this. If these passages demand acknowledgment of divine mutability, then others require us to affirm that God literally has hands, feet, nostrils, and so on, and, on occasion, wakes from sleep as a warrior whose liquor has worn off (Ps. 78:65). When Christopher’s examples are set against clear scriptural testimony that God’s character is faithful and unchanging, that he is perfectly just and perfectly merciful in ways that humans cannot grasp, it makes more sense to understand God’s “changing his mind” as a way of describing the changeable ways in which humans interact with a God who is responsive but not acquiescent. Chief among these interactions in the Bible is the experience of feeling God’s displeasure, coming to him in repentance, and obtaining mercy. In this scenario, who really is changing?
The second half of the book, written by Richard, is noticeably different in tone and strategy. Whereas Christopher flags examples of supposed “change” and uses them to show a widening of mercy, Richard largely sidesteps the issue of divine mutability and argues for the surprising wideness of God’s mercy. “Widening” suggests that God has become more merciful than he was, whereas “wideness” does not necessarily imply any such change. Wideness may pertain, instead, to how God’s mercy is perceived. As Richard puts it: Jesus’s “teaching and actions penetrated to the heart of Israel’s sacred scriptures and disclosed there a generous, unsettling vision of the wideness of God’s mercy.” In other words, mercy was always “there” in Israel’s Scriptures; Jesus simply spoke of it and enacted it in ways that caused people to see and understand it differently.
As in the first half of the book, the chapters on the New Testament are loosely organized. Richard portrays Jesus as a radical prophet in the tradition of Isaiah and Jeremiah, who reframes Sabbath observance in terms of God’s mercy and enacts this mercy by eating with “tax collectors and sinners.” The Gospels also tell of Christ’s mercy to “foreigners and outsiders” such as the Roman centurion and Canaanite woman. Subsequent chapters follow the apostles as they witness and participate in the work of the Spirit to show mercy to the nations: the Ethiopian eunuch, Saul (Paul), Cornelius, and Gentile Christians as a whole.
Richard saves the most pointed contribution for last. In his final chapter, titled “Mercy All the Way Down,” he discusses Paul’s letter to the Romans. In the space of ten pages, he guides the reader through this famously intricate epistle, summarizing it in this way: “Romans—for all its complex theological twists and turns—should be understood at its root as Paul’s passionate appeal to the Christians at Rome to accept one another in love despite strong differences of opinion and cultural norms.” In Paul’s time, the most divisive differences had to do with food; in our time, food has been replaced by sex. Paul referred to dietary rigorists as “weak” people who considered some foods unclean, whereas the “strong” believed that no food was unclean. Today, according to Richard, the “strong” see no impediment to same-sex unions while the “weak” feel bound by Scripture to oppose them. As Paul called for both sides to “welcome one another,” Richard calls for unity of “strong” and “weak” in the midst of “conflict and difference.” Notwithstanding this rather deft mapping of current controversy onto Pauline categories, the emphasis on charity in Romans 14 and 15 is not a replacement for substantive teaching on sexuality and creational order such as we find in Romans 1; it rather assumes it.
To their credit, the authors recognize that they have not actually made a substantive case for departing from traditional Christian teachings on homosexuality. This would require work that they do not even pretend to carry out, namely a thorough investigation of what sexuality is and what it is for in the Bible. They would also need to show that a “widening of God’s mercy” with respect to sexual ethics is consistent with what Scripture already indicates. The authors explain, for example, that the inclusion of the nations was already anticipated in Abraham’s blessing (Gen. 12:1–3) and that Christ’s outreach to the poor and marginalized fulfills the earlier words of the prophets. But which passages in Scripture anticipate the abrogation of the sacramental union of man and woman? Which passages suggest that marriage will no longer serve as an icon for the relation of Christ to the Church, the Bridegroom to the Bride?
Instead of making a substantive case, based on explicit biblical teachings, for setting aside prohibitions of homoerotic activity, the authors seek to shift the terrain on which the contemporary debate is carried out. Awkwardly enough, Richard did the needed exegetical analysis in his 1996 book The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics, which—in a masterful exposition of relevant passages (especially Romans 1)—concluded that the relevant scriptural passages “express unqualified disapproval” of homoerotic relations. Though Richard now regrets that conservatives have used Moral Vision to defend the traditional view, he nevertheless stands by his earlier work: “As a judgment about what these very few biblical texts say, that statement still seems to me to be correct.”
Because the explicit teaching of the Bible on homosexual activity is unambiguous, as Richard admits even now, Christians who advocate same-sex marriage must shift the debate away from actual biblical exegesis. In arguing that God is prone to change his mind, Christopher clumsily moves into the realm of theology and makes divine mutability a key issue. For his part, Richard acknowledges the clear sense of biblical texts but seeks to shift the focus of debate to hermeneutics, to the way that one reads Scripture: Whatever the Bible may say about sexuality, he assures readers that it ultimately points to a “trajectory of mercy that leads us to welcome sexual minorities.” In other words, taking the two arguments together, God has changed his mind about sexual morality, and a new hermeneutic of mercy allows us to discern what he now wills.
In the end, neither flat-footed assertions of divine mutability nor a hermeneutic based on eloquent but vaporous evocations of mercy is enough to unsettle a substantive reading of Scripture and its clear teachings. The authors have done well to remind readers of the surprising wideness of God’s mercy. Yet it is necessary to remember that, in Scripture, God’s mercy calls people to repentance—Judahites, Ninevites, Samaritans, and the rest. The point of mercy, then, is not that God changes but that people do: He graciously calls men and women of all sexual orientations to embrace humility, forsake pride, and become as he is. As Richard himself says, Jesus’s purpose in eating with tax collectors and sinners is “to summon them to repent and change their ways.” For us sinful and fallen humans, divine mercy must be received with repentance before it is experienced as inclusion.
Michael C. Legaspi is Associate Professor of Old Testament at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary.
Image by Caspar Jacob van Opstal the Younger, public domain. Image cropped.
