A Critique of The Widening of God’s Mercy by Richard Hays
It’s hard to overstate the influence of Richard Hays’s 1996 book The Moral Vision of the New Testament on a generation of Christian ethical reflection. Rarely is academic theology so lucid and compelling. Hays’s book quickly became required reading in many seminaries and attracted a surprisingly wide lay readership. It achieves for biblical exegesis and hermeneutics, what Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book achieved for the everyday reading of literature. It was a seminal text for me personally, even coming to it with several years of exegetical training under my belt. Its elucidation of the role of metaphor-making in interpretation put language to instincts I’d already developed and permanently sharpened my reading.
“Whenever we appeal to the authority of the New Testament,” writes Hays, “we are necessarily engaged in metaphor-making, placing our community’s life imaginatively within the world articulated by the texts” (MV 299). To understand the metaphor “is to stand under its authority, to allow our life and perception of reality to be changed in the light of the ‘ontological flash’ created by the metaphorical conjunction, so that we confess with Peter, ‘Lord, to whom [else] can we go? You have the words of eternal life’ (John 6:68)” (MV 301).
Hays’s book is most famous (or infamous) for its explication of the New Testament’s “unqualified disapproval” of homosexuality. It has been an indispensable resource for orthodox believers seeking to remain faithful to the biblical text—and an obstacle to progressives who seek to twist Scripture into alien shapes. That a scholar of Hays’s stature had written the classic defense of the orthodox position was for decades a rhetorical and pedagogical boon.
Now, in his 76th year, Hays has had a change of heart. In a new book, The Widening of God’s Mercy, Hays renounces his position in Moral Vision and advocates for full inclusion in the church, not just of practicing homosexuals, but of the entire LGBTQ+ panoply. He even offers a mea culpa:
Many traditionalists and conservatives have seized upon that one chapter as the final word, as a cover for exclusionary attitudes and practices wrapped in more ‘compassionate’ packaging. I fear that the rhetoric of my chapter left itself open to such uses. I acknowledge that I bear responsibility for the pain such developments have caused to many believers who belong to sexual minorities. And for that I am deeply sorry.
Progressives are already crowing. “Conservative Christians just lost their scholarly trump card on same-sex relationships,” declares the National Catholic Reporter. Needless to say, this about-face is a significant betrayal—one that threatens to lead many astray.
Co-authored with his son Christopher, an Old Testament professor at Fuller Theological Seminary, The Widening of God’s Mercy argues a simple thesis: because the scope of God’s grace is ever-expanding in the biblical story, it must also include “[t]hose who do not conform to traditional expectations for sexual orientation.” If the church would only listen to the “lived experience” of faithful gays and lesbians, the authors contend, it would recognize “the ways in which the Spirit may be at work to expand our vision.”
The claim that God’s grace expands to include those formerly outside the covenant community is uncontroversial, and the Hayses demonstrate the narrative pattern ably enough. But they make virtually no effort to show that the pattern can be coherently employed to “re-vision” particular sins as no longer sinful. Sodomites (qua sodomites) are simply presumed to be analogous to Gentiles (qua Gentiles). As a result, their book is a tendentious exercise in question-begging non sequitur.
It’s always dispiriting to see one’s intellectual heroes fall, but I had hoped at least to discover in the Hayses’s book an argument worth contending with. Alas, The Widening of God’s Mercy is embarrassing even for a work of eisegetical sophistry. “We are setting aside theoretical and methodological reflections for another day,” write the authors in the Introduction, “and we think the book is basically self-explanatory: It is written by and for people who think it matters what the Bible says, and who believe that the best way to do it justice is to read it carefully.” This eschewing of hermeneutical due diligence amounts to strategic intellectual cowardice: because their thesis is merely presumed, never defended, they must maintain the illusion that to prove their case they need only to show that God’s grace expands inexorably; identifying, let alone examining, their interpretive assumptions would break the spell.
Readers unfamiliar with Richard Hays’s earlier work can be forgiven for mistaking deceit for honest ignorance. But those who have read Moral Vision know that Hays is now implicitly rejecting sound methods he spent a long career refining. For example, Hays writes in Moral Vision that “Our interpretation of ‘biblical principles’ must be constrained and instructed by the way in which the New Testament writers themselves applied these principles” (MV 395). This constraint applies also to biblical paradigms. In Widening, both Hayses shirk the constraint with impunity, transforming God’s mercy into a universal solvent that renders the biblical text superfluous.
Even worse, Hays refuted Widening’s argument in Moral Vision, and refuted it definitively. In response to Luke Timothy Johnson’s argument that homosexuals in the twentieth century are analogous to the “unclean” Gentiles of the first century who were drawn into fellowship, Hays argues that the New Testament treats of homosexuality in “the mode of symbolic world construction,” which must consequently be our mode of hermeneutical appropriation.
Romans 1 presents, as we have seen, a portrayal of humankind in rebellion against God and consequently plunged into depravity and confusion. In the course of that portrayal, homosexual activities are—explicitly and without qualification—identified as symptomatic of that tragically confused rebellion. To take the New Testament as authoritative in the mode in which it speaks is to accept this portrayal as ‘revealed reality,’ and authoritative disclosure of the truth about the human condition. Understood in this way, the text requires a normative evaluation of homosexual practice as a distortion of God’s order for creation. (MV 396)
The New Testament’s symbolic world, not our experiences or desires, delimits the proper extension of analogies. Valid analogies will not only accord with the symbolic and narrative logic of Scripture, but will also illuminate it.
[I]t is crucial to remember that experience must be treated as a hermeneutical lens for reading the New Testament rather than as an independent, counterbalancing authority. This is the point at which the analogy to the early church’s acceptance of Gentiles fails decisively. The church did not simply observe the experience of Cornelius and his household and decide that Scripture must be wrong after all. On the contrary, the experience of uncircumcised Gentiles responding in faith to the gospel message led the church back to a new reading of Scripture. This new reading discovered in the texts a clear message of God’s intent, from the covenant with Abraham forward, to bless all nations and to bring Gentiles (qua Gentiles) to worship Israel’s God. That is, for example, what Paul seeks to establish in the complex exegetical arguments conducted in Galatians and Romans. We see the rudiments of such a reflective process in Acts 10:34-35, where Peter begins his speech to Cornelius by alluding to Deuteronomy 10:17-18 and Psalm 15:1-2 in order to confess that “God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.” Only because the new experience of Gentile converts proved hermeneutically illuminating of Scripture was the church, over time, able to accept the decision to embrace Gentiles within the fellowship of God’s people. This is precisely the step that has not—or at least not yet—been taken by the advocates of homosexuality in the church. Is it possible for them to reread the New Testament and show how this development can be understood as a fulfillment of God’s design for human sexuality as previously revealed in Scripture? In view of the content of the biblical texts summarized above, it is difficult to imagine how such an argument could be made. (MV 399)
In Widening, Richard Hays explains that “experience”—not new evidence or argument—led him to reconsider his position. He offers no other warrant; indeed, he stands by his exegesis in Moral Vision. And yet he does not explain why he has now elevated experience, not merely to “an independent, counterbalancing authority,” but to an authority superior to Scripture, tradition, and reason. He doesn’t even acknowledge having written the above passage, let alone explain why he no longer believes its argument “decisive.”
The reason for this omission is simple: affirmation of sodomy is not prefigured anywhere in the canon, and reading it backwards into Scripture not only does not prove “hermeneutically illuminating,” it destroys the symbolic world of both Testaments. Christ is no longer the bridegroom, the church no longer his bride. The peaceful union of difference that is the Trinity is no longer imaged in marital union. Nor is God’s creative act imaged in human procreation—not if the procreative act is ontologically analogous to intrinsically sterile sodomy. The very idea that humans are made in the image of God is rendered vacuous. (Gen. 1:27: “God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.”) Affirmation of sodomy entails the hermeneutical unmaking of the created order. This is why Paul singles it out in Romans 1 as the condensed symbol for the rejection of God’s sovereignty. Sodomy is symbolic decreation.
(N.B.: By conflating “homosexuality” with “LGBTQ+” and “sexual minorities,” the Hayses are using the issue of same-sex attraction to smuggle in acceptance of transgenderism as well. It is unsurprising that they refuse to write directly about transgenderism: it would make the ontological stakes much more apparent, and their rhetorical performance depends on leaving those stakes off-stage.)
Widening’s argument may be risible, but it remains a useful specimen for autopsy, as it tells us something important about the structure of heresy. To be genuinely heretical, as opposed to merely heterodox, a teaching must logically entail a rejection of the church’s creeds, in particular a rejection of the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity, which are logically indiscerptible.
In the Introduction to Widening, Richard recalls a dispute with his brother over the gravity of a church’s affirming sodomy. “This isn’t about the doctrine of the Trinity or justification by faith,” he recounts saying. “It’s not about Nazism’s ‘German Christianity’ or apartheid. Surely you don’t think that a congregation’s decision to offer hospitality to gay and lesbian folks is a heretical betrayal of the Christian faith?” But as a matter of logical entailment, it is precisely that, at least when defended as it is in Widening.
The Hayses face the same trilemma as every other progressive Christian seeking to justify sodomy while remaining honest about what Scripture actually says. They must choose among three claims:
- The biblical authors were wrong and misrepresented God as judging homoerotic behavior to be sinful when it is not;
- human nature has changed since the first century A.D. with respect to sexuality;
- God has himself evolved on the issue, recognized his own error, and is now correcting course through the Spirit.
The Hayses reject 1) because, to their credit, they refuse to abandon a high view of Scripture’s authority. They understand that if the apostles and prophets were wrong on so fundamental an issue as human sexuality—that is, the very order of creation—there is no warrant for trusting other elements of their witness. Instead, they argue for a muddled combination of 2) and 3). The conceptual ambiguity may simply reflect a difference of opinion between father and son, or the sloppy thinking of both. Either way, the muddiness misdirects from the fact that both arguments constitute denials of the Trinity.
Regarding 2), if our nature as beings has changed so fundamentally that actions that were formerly “abominations” are now equal in dignity to procreative intimacy, then we no longer possess the nature that Christ took on in the Incarnation. Our redemption through his death and resurrection is thus voided. The story of Christ is downgraded to a local, rather than cosmic and transhistorical, event. The Logos is no longer universal, and thus no longer one in substance with the Father—and thus no longer the second person of the Trinity. A further implication arises if we insist that we in the present are still “human.” (Presumably, the Hayses do not deny that they and their “faithful” LGBTQ+ friends are “human” in nature.) But if our nature, which is different from that taken on by Christ, is affirmed by the Spirit as “human,” the nature taken on by Christ cannot be “human,” or at least not fully so. Thus is the Incarnation denied.
Regarding 3), if Yahweh is capable of changing his mind (and of being “wrong”) in any ontologically real sense, as the Hayses repeatedly affirm, then he is not impassible. Instead, he is bound by time, fallible (subordinate to a good higher than himself), and thus a being among other beings—a creature—and therefore not the God of Trinitarian doctrine. Process theology is ineluctably heretical. By reducing God to a being, rather than the source of all being, it is not only metaphysically incoherent, but also intrinsically anti-Trinitarian. If God is a being, then either the three persons of the Trinity are mere “modes” of that one being (and thus not really three), or they are themselves distinct beings (and not really one). The doctrine of the three-in-one presumes divine impassibility and simplicity, and cannot be affirmed apart from those metaphysical grounds.
In pursuit of the commendable goal of showing Christian hospitality to sexual minorities, the Hayses have elevated empathy above charity. The practice of true Christian charity is predicated on our submission to the theologically real. In Moral Vision, Richard Hays exemplified true charity when he wrote that the New Testament’s blanket restriction of sexual activity to marriage between a man and a woman leaves homosexual believers “in precisely the same situation as the heterosexual who would like to marry but cannot find an appropriate partner (and there are many such): summoned to a difficult, costly obedience, while ‘groaning’ for the ‘redemption of our bodies’ (Rom. 8:23).” In Widening, however, both Hayses have abandoned charity in favor of hollow affirmation and cheap grace. Their argument cuts straight to the heart of our faith’s claims. To accept it is tantamount to apostasy.
We had better to affirm, with a younger, wiser Richard Hays, that “God gives the Spirit to broken people and ministers grace even through us sinners, without thereby endorsing our sin” (MV 399). Let us affirm the “widening” of God’s mercy—not its prolapsing.
Image Credit: Unsplash
