This interview is part of The Reconstruct, a weekly newsletter from Sojourners. In a world where so much needs to change, Mitchell Atencio and Josiah R. Daniels interview people who have faith in a new future and are working toward repair. Subscribe here.
Take a peek at the shelf of many divinity students over the last 25 years, and you’re bound to find a thick manila book with red cover text: The Moral Vision of the New Testament.
Authored by prominent New Testament scholar Richard B. Hays and published in 1996, the book spans nearly 500 pages and touches on everything from abortion and Christology to wealth and violence. In one chapter, Hays addresses homosexuality. The chapter is not the fire-and-brimstone and dehumanization that came from many Christians in the 1990s, but it was not affirming of same-sex relationships. That chapter, however, had its origins in this magazine.
In a 1991 article in Sojourners, which was then reprinted in The Moral Vision of the New Testament, Hays begins with several hundred words recounting his friendship with a gay man who had died of AIDS. He then dives into biblical exegesis and concludes with a survey of church tradition, modern science, and scripture’s wider scope.
“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,” Hays wrote. “On the issue of civil rights, there is no reason at all for the church to single out homosexual persons for malicious discriminatory treatment: Insofar as Christians have done so in the past, we must repent and seek instead to live out the gospel of reconciliation.”
Over the years, Christians with conservative sex ethics have held up Hays’ work as an example for their own projects of excluding LGBTQ+ Christians and refusing same-sex covenants or marriages. Over that same time, Hays came to believe he got it wrong.
It was in conversations with his son, Old Testament scholar Christopher B. Hays, that he realized he wanted to do something about it. As the two talked and discussed the issue, they came to see the question as bigger than Bible verses about sex or marriage. The question was ultimately about the character of God and the wideness of God’s mercy.
So, in The Widening of God’s Mercy: Sexuality Within the Biblical Story, the two co-author the Bible’s multi-testament witness to a God who is willing to be petitioned, argued with, and convinced to live up to a standard of mercy and inclusion. Then, they apply that standard to the question of sexual relationships.
For Richard, this is an act of repentance. He said in our interview it is a chance to take responsibility for his failures and mistakes and to live into the “renewing of the mind,” as Paul writes in Romans 12. For Christopher, the book is an invitation for others to encounter the God of the Bible, a God who might change “as a gracious response to humankind’s questioning.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Mitchell Atencio, Sojourners: What were the origins of this book?
Christopher B. Hays: You could tell this story at almost any length, because it runs through decades of all of our lives, but when you think about the actual origins of the current book it really came out of conversations that we had — my father and me — with the rest of our family in the sort of late [2010s]. It became clear, some years after [The Moral Vision of the New Testament] came out, that my father’s thinking on this was already shifting. And certainly mine was too.
Of course, this goes back in some ways to both of our personal experiences of LGBTQ+ people in the church and how they have lived their own faithful witness. We really admired many friends in that group. But the book is not about that process of how our minds changed.
Instead, it’s a book where we look at how we have this view of God who can make room for LGBTQ+ people — even when there are some texts in the Bible that would seem to cut the other way, which is what Moral Vision laid out.
We were both pretty clear at a certain point that this was not a battle the church was being called to fight. So then we had to ask, “OK, so how is it that we have this picture of God?” How is it that we both share this idea of a God who might say one thing at a certain time, but then, as a gracious response to humankind’s questioning, the passage of time, the changes of culture, that God would want something different done here and now?
We tried to write this whole book taking account of the whole canon and trying to lay out who we see God being portrayed as — which is not unchanging as some theologians or pastors would like to claim. The God of the Bible is a little bit more wild and sometimes unpredictable.
Richard B. Hays: Going back to 1996, which was the publication date of Moral Vision, I have always known that what I wrote there was an attempt to think my way through how the Bible might speak to this question of same-sex relationships. What I wrote there in 1996 was intended as a proposal to start discussion, not to end it. And it wasn’t received that way.
I bear some responsibility for that; I wrote it as though I were attempting to produce closure. It was written at a time when same-sex marriages were illegal in the U.S. and nearly universally discounted in churches.
My own thinking [since then] was shaped by having a deeper experience of knowing LGBTQ+ Christians — both among my students and eventually in the churches that I was participating in — and seeing the gifts of the Spirit being evident. What I had written before didn’t take account of that.
I began to feel more and more strongly over the years that I didn’t want my legacy to be tied to that one chapter in one book that I wrote. It’s [27] pages out of the book … I wanted to write something to set right and rethink what I had said before and actually to express repentance about that, as I do in the epilogue to The Widening of God’s Mercy.
It was a long process, and it was one that has led to a richer appreciation of the extent to which the merciful character of God is very much at the heart of Scripture. It has reinforced my view that we shouldn’t read the Bible to find prooftexts on moral questions. We need to see the whole scope and sweep of the biblical narrative and understand how, in that narrative, God continues to act surprisingly to open up grace and mercy to more and more people.
Richard, I was caught by your use of the word metanoia — the Greek for repentance. What does that repentance look like for you, beyond the major part of writing this book?
Richard: Back in the 1970s my wife, Judy, and I lived in a community called Metanoia Fellowship in Springfield, Mass. We’ve long understood that the Christian life is a call to what Paul says in Romans 12 — “By the mercies of God, I appeal to you, be transformed by the renewing of your minds.”
That process of renewing of the mind is integral to what it means to live as a follower of Jesus.
One of the most formative experiences for me is being part of the worship music team at my church in Durham, N.C.
For several years, the leader of that group was a young man who identified as queer. And it was such fun. It was just great to be part of that group and a congregation that had other people in roles of active participation and leadership, and for me to become friends with those folks and to know them personally.
To share in the leading of worship and the service in the community would be where it most actively, for me, hit the ground in terms of forming real relationships with people with different sexual orientations.
hays_hays.jpg
Christopher, what have you learned about fatherhood — and I suppose about God — through your dialogue with your own dad?
Christopher: Some people out there in the readership are all in a tizzy that “Richard Hays has changed his mind! He’s changed sides! He’s not on our team anymore!” They think this is some kind of a radical reversal. In spite of what he wrote in the first book, [The Widening of God’s Mercy] is consistent with the man that I had grown up with and known my entire life.
He’s someone who’s thoughtful, who wants to be kind, who wants to truly know God’s will and be attentive to what God is doing. In spite of the shift, I see lots of continuity.
It’s a little leading, but it’s a fair question; we talk a lot about the father language for God and to what extent the paternal metaphor is one that we ought to use in our theology. I wouldn’t say that I’ve ever been confused between my actual father and God the Father. But you can make some analogy.
God, too, seems to want human flourishing. God seems to be willing to be in touch with us as his creatures and be responsive to the concerns that we raise, and even to be willing to be held accountable for God’s justice. People like Abraham, [say to God], “Shall not the judge of all the earth do what is right?”
Or Job. God says at the end of the book — even after all the challenges that Job raised — “Job spoke truly of God.” That’s a model of a faithful relationship toward God that too many Christians forget about.
The response to this book has really brought into focus that, for many people, their faith in the Bible is a way of having control over other people, over what’s right and wrong, and over how God is perceived. And they are very upset to have that certainty destabilized.
To actually be in relationship with God is to not have all the stability that we would like to have all the time. Faith is comforting — and should be — but that doesn’t spare us from having to ask over and over, “Am I doing God’s will? Am I listening?”
Richard: The father-son relationship in writing this book was very interesting, because each of us was entirely willing to not only encourage the other, but also to challenge the other.
There were plenty of times back and forth, one of us would say to the other, “Wait a minute, you can’t say that; think differently about this point.” Chris wrote the Old Testament chapters, and I wrote the New Testament chapters. But even there, we were offering engagement and critique.
In one page [of draft manuscripts], Chris had written in the margins, “You cannot say this in a book with my name on it.” [Laughs] and sometimes having to say, “Oh, I guess I was wrong about that.”
In some ways, what we’re proposing here is that as humans, our relationship with God is an actual dialogue. God is a dynamic, personal God who listens and responds with grace. With grace always, but not in ways we might expect.
As it relates to the book content itself, I hesitate at the idea of LGBTQ+ inclusion being a widening of God’s mercy. What makes God’s mercy wider now than in 1946 or 1996?
Richard: I agree that this is a kind of puzzling idea. But it’s, in principle, no different from what we see in the New Testament stories of the expansion of the early church as Gentiles start to be received into the community of Jesus followers.
That shocks a lot of people. Peter says, when he’s called by the Spirit to go to the house of Cornelius the Centurion, “You know that it’s not permitted for Jews to go into the presence of Gentiles” — not exactly a friendly way to start a conversation. But what Peter is saying there is consonant, actually, with what many devout Jews would have thought was the appropriate stance towards Gentiles: You don’t eat with them.
Another example is when the man with the withered hand is in the synagogue on the Sabbath. The Pharisees are standing around to see if Jesus will do something that they think is a violation of God’s law, which is to heal on the Sabbath. And Jesus challenges that. And the Pharisees are silenced.
And actually, there is no prohibition in the Torah of healing on the Sabbath. But they have deduced it as an extension of what is in the Torah and what constitutes “work on the Sabbath.”
The Bible is full of instances where God gives a law or a direction to God’s people which is then subsequently revoked by God and transformed by God into a more inclusive, receptive vision for what obedience to God means.
Chris likes to quote the passage from Isaiah where God says, “I’m doing a new thing. Do you not perceive it?” We have to take account of that somehow.
Christopher: There is a fundamental tension in the book because there’s a fundamental tension in the Bible between the idea that God’s plan is always broader than we perhaps see in the Bible story itself, and the fact that we do see this ongoing sequence of new things. God does seem to include more and more people in divine grace.
It’s an attempt at a faithful reading of the Bible, to say “both/and.”
There is an urge to want to have God in a box and to know finally and for sure who God is and what God wants, and I don’t think that’s quite what we’re given with the Bible.
This seems correct to me, but it also makes me deeply uncomfortable.
Richard: At the end of Romans 11, the end of this long discussion about God’s faithfulness to Israel, Paul writes, “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom of, and knowledge of God. How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways.”
Paul bumping up against this same problem and coming to that as a kind of conclusion. That may be seen as puzzling or unsatisfactory to some, but I think it captures the strangeness and inscrutability of exactly the problem you have raised.
Whether it’s others worrying about Christians accepting polyamory or me worrying about artificial intelligence “relationships,” I want to know what you two think about the right posture to take toward those things that seem to be outside what God desires. How do we have a posture of mercy?
Richard: The first thing I would say about the appropriate posture is one of seeking to understand without rushing to judgment. Understand what drives or motivates — or perhaps even justifies — modes of being or behavior that are, at first glance, offensive or inappropriate. It’s hard to do. It’s hard for me to do.
Christopher: I think that the story about Moses and the daughters of Zelophehad is one that has impressed itself upon me.
The daughters of this man — who’s died with no sons — are supposed to lose their land. Based on the common practice, it appears that daughters weren’t supposed to inherit land. So they come and speak to Moses at the tent of meeting and they say, “Hey, this doesn’t seem right. We should have the right to have our father’s land just as a son would.”
This is obviously something new. It’s not how things are done. So what does Moses do? He sets a good example. He goes and he takes this to God and says, “What do I do about this?” And sure enough, God says, “You know what? They’re right. We’re gonna do this that way from now on.”
This story stands as this etiology of why daughters can inherit.
That’s a nice model as far as stance. Moses is a powerful guy. He’s a busy guy. He’s got all kinds of reasons not to want to be hassled about this issue, but he takes the time and actually tries to listen to God’s voice.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!
