We believe that sexual minorities who seek to follow Jesus should be welcomed gladly in the church and offered full access to the means of grace available to all God’s people: baptism, the Lord’s Supper, ordination, and the blessing of covenanted unions, with the same expectations as for heterosexuals” (216).
This sentence appears at the end of the book by the late Richard Hays, and his son Christopher Hays, “The Widening of God’s Mercy: Sexuality Within the Biblical Story” (Yale University Press, 2024). While they never define what they mean by the term “sexual minority,” it seems to be anyone from the LGBTQ community: lesbians, gays, bisexuals, trans, and queer.
The book has 17 chapters: Christopher Hays is the lead author for the first half of the book looking at the Old Testament (chapters 2–7), and Richard Hays covers the second half focusing on the New Testament (chapters 8–16). They want Christians to embrace the LGBTQ community on all fronts as an expression of God’s boundless love. I disagree with their arguments and will explain why.
The Witness of the Old Testament
In his chapters on the Old Testament, Christopher Hays argues that God frequently changes his mind, reversing his earlier commandments, because he is gracious and merciful. For example, Adam and Eve should have died after sinning in Eden (Genesis 2:17), but they did not die immediately. “Perhaps God has simply changed his mind and shown mercy to Adam and Eve,” Hays writes (38). Or, again, God teaches retributive justice in Exodus 21:23–25 (“an eye for an eye”) and therefore should have destroyed Cain after he murdered his brother, yet God spares him instead.
According to Hays, since God is always merciful, often changing his mind as a result, we should do the same. The picture of God changing his mind becomes a theological criterion for modern-day Bible readers. Since same-sex behavior is condemned throughout Scripture, Christians have traditionally viewed same-sex intercourse as sinful. However, those stipulations should no longer be morally binding today. If we are gracious and merciful like God, then we should extend mercy to the LGBTQ community. We should change our minds too.
This argument misunderstands progressive revelation, the idea that God does not reveal himself all at once but over the span of history, from the infancy of the Old Testament to the maturity of the New Testament. Hays latches onto instances of progressive revelation and takes them as evidence that God changes his mind about morality. However, while Hays is correct that God’s relations with non-Israelites evolve over time, this does not indicate a change in God’s nature or moral character. Rather, it reflects the unfolding of his eternal plan, progressively revealed in history.
In God’s promises to Abraham, we already see that the inclusion of Gentiles in God’s purposes took time to be fully realized. “Changing his mind” is not the point, as if God were figuring things out along the way. This was his plan from the very beginning!
Chapter 5 is a classic example of Hays misunderstanding progressive revelation. In wrestling with difficult passages where God commands violence against Israel’s neighbors, Hays says that those texts do not reflect God’s will for us today. After all, in the New Testament, God’s family is a diverse and multiethnic people including those who were once Israel’s enemies. Even in the Old Testament, many non-Israelites were incorporated into the people of God such as Ruth and Rahab.
Hays portrays God as holding two conflicting perspectives: commanding Israel to destroy its enemies on the one hand and showing mercy to foreign nations on the other. He concludes that God changed his mind from a narrow tribalism to a widening mercy. Notice the takeaway: “These stories point to a surprising broadness in God’s grace toward the world, throughout its whole history. In much the same way, we can use our theological imaginations to perceive where God is at work today in the lives of people who are not like us” (78, my emphasis).
In response to Hays’ reasoning, we should note that God used Israel to mete out justice under the old covenant, but that no longer holds with the coming of Christ. Judgment is solely God’s responsibility (Romans 12:19). God’s mercy is more fully revealed in the New Testament, but never at the expense of his judgment on sin, which too is more fully revealed. Jesus spoke about hell more than anyone else in the New Testament. At the final judgment, sinners not united with Christ will be condemned to hell forever, a fate infinitely worse than any violence in the Old Testament.
Furthermore, when Hays encourages us to use “our theological imaginations,” are there any boundaries to this process? Can anything be re-imagined? Is anything off limits? And what if later interpretive communities change their minds and want to revert to what the authors are now saying should be changed? These questions expose a deep flaw in the argument. Hays has chosen a very plastic criterion to use as a theological hermeneutic without ever defining its use or limits.
Hays marshals Old Testament examples to argue that Christians should accept the LGBTQ community within the fold of God’s people, but this conclusion does not follow from the Old Testament examples he investigates. God promised Abraham he would be a blessing to many nations, so it is not surprising that God worked among Gentile individuals and nations. But his kindness was always an invitation to repentance and the forgiveness of sin. God wasn’t “changing his mind,” but kept the same attitude towards sinners: they deserve judgment, but he offers redemption.
Throughout the first seven chapters, Hays treats God as if he’s a normal character in a story. He takes everything at face value: God changes his mind, he gets annoyed at Israel and can’t make up his mind whether to destroy them or not. But to what degree are these depictions of God anthropomorphic? Are we meant to take them literally or as a form of accommodation?
These are not easy questions, but Hays only presses one side of this tension, inviting superficial interpretations (he touches on the issue on pages 46–47, but then trivializes it). He makes the same mistake as Open Theists—philosophers and theologians writing within American evangelicalism in the 1990s and early 2000s—who cherry-pick Scripture passages to argue against classical doctrines like divine omnipotence and omniscience.
The Witness of the New Testament
In his chapters on the New Testament, Richard Hays invokes the same widening of God’s mercy in the New Testament and then applies it to the LGBTQ debate. God’s Old Testament law mandated strict Sabbath observance, but Jesus loosened those requirements by healing on the Sabbath. He emphasized mercy, not sacrifice, repeatedly showing compassion to Gentiles like the Roman centurion in Matthew 8:5–13, the Syrophoenician woman in Matthew 15:21–28, and the Samaritan woman in John 4:4–42.
The gospel extends beyond Israel to Samaritans and Gentiles. As Paul realized, the issue is not circumcision or observing dietary laws—there is no Jew or Greek, we are all one in Christ (Galatians 3:28). The radical implications of the gospel dawned on Peter, too, after his encounter with Cornelius. In the New Testament, Hays argues, we see God’s mercy widening to include more and more people who had been previously excluded from God’s embrace.
Much of what Hays highlights from the New Testament is wonderfully true in so far as he highlights God’s amazing mercy, but he misinterprets why God shows mercy. The apostle Paul is a better guide: “Or do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?” (Romans 2:4).
Like his son’s earlier chapters, Hays keeps appealing to the mere act of “widening” without ever considering the grounds for that widening. Since he gives no criteria, the target of God’s widening mercy potentially includes whatever people groups or behaviors the reader can imagine. Is pedophilia off limits? Human trafficking? Incest? If so, on what grounds? These are not rhetorical questions.
In addition, Hays puts Christians who view same-sex practice as sinful in the same category as the Pharisees. Like the self-righteous Pharisees, we deny the wideness of God’s mercy. This, again, does not follow. While the Pharisees missed the deeper intent of the Sabbath and other elements of the Law, the morality of same-sex behavior is something else entirely. The biblical view of same-sex behavior is uniform across the entire canon; there is no “deeper intent.” Like other sins, same-sex behavior violates God’s holiness. The point is that it is sin, and Jesus nowhere says that people should continue in sin because “it’s okay now.”
Ironically, Hays undermines his entire thesis when he clarifies why Jesus extended God’s mercy to outsiders: “Jesus explains his action by using the metaphor of a physician whose calling is to help the sick. He declares that he has come for the precise purpose of calling those who are actually in need of help, not the self-proclaimed ‘righteous’ who have no need of healing” (133).
That’s right. Jesus shows mercy to outcasts and sinners for the precise purpose of calling them to repentance. It is impossible to imagine Jesus saying that Christians should no longer condemn same-sex behavior—or any other sexual sin, for that matter. If it’s not a sin, there’s nothing to repent of!
This convoluted thinking pervades chapter 15 where Hays holds up the Jerusalem Council as a model for current sexuality debates (Acts 15). Just as the early church urged Gentile converts not to treat the Law as salvific, so too “the church today should open its doors fully to those of differing sexual orientations” (186). But this comparison falls apart because Gentile inclusion was long anticipated in the Old Testament, especially the prophetic literature. This was part of progressive revelation.
There is nothing in the Old Testament anticipating the inclusion of same-sex relationships. Gentiles in the New Testament are repeatedly urged to flee their former sexual practices, including same-sex behavior (Romans 1:24–32; 1 Corinthians 6:9–11; 1 Thessalonians 4:3–7). In fact, Jesus makes sexual ethics even more restrictive: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:27–28). If anything, the moral arc of sexual ethics is getting tighter not looser.
Moreover, the New Testament never abrogates the teaching of Genesis 1–2 that marriage is between a man and a woman. This doctrine is consistently assumed throughout the New Testament since it was God’s original design. Hays wants to overturn this creation order, which is a far cry from the situation in Acts 15. The apostolic decisions at the Jerusalem Council are motivated by cultural, ethnic, and perhaps covenantal shifts, but they have nothing to do with changes in morality.
After Adam’s fall, God sometimes tolerated his people living in sinful ways (e.g., polygamy), not because he approved but because he is merciful and patient. He only seems to change his mind later because he now holds us to the objective standard that was there all along.
Conclusion
In sum, using biblical evidence that God changes his mind as a theological norm for changing our own minds does not hold up to scrutiny, especially when no criteria are given for the use of this supposed hermeneutical principle. “The Widening of God’s Mercy” implies that cultural norms—not the canon of Scripture—should drive theology. That’s a poison pill.
The authors take a particular view of God’s mercy, and then use it to flatten out everything else God has revealed. Worse yet, modern sensibilities about ethical issues determine what counts as sin. C. S. Lewis warned against this, calling it “chronological snobbery.”
In the logic of Scripture, Genesis 1 and 2 set the stage for everything that follows. Jesus cites those chapters to shed light on divorce (Matthew 19:4–6; Mark 10:6–9). He grounds Sabbath observance in the original creation week (Mark 2:27–28). Paul adjudicates debates about worship by quoting Genesis 2:21–23 (1 Corinthians 11:8–9; see also 1 Timothy 2:13) and appeals to Genesis 1:27 and 2:24 when defending sex between a man and a woman as normative (Romans 1:26–27).
The traditional position is not based on a few prooftexts. Rather, those prooftexts are part of a rich moral ontology that undergirds the entire Bible. The authors misinterpret the shape of the biblical story, in which God’s later actions only make sense in light of the beginning.
My review has been largely critical, but a big question remains: Why do books like this keep being published? Here, I think, traditionalists like me need to face up to our own shortcomings. Many Christians who struggle with same-sex desires often feel marginalized, hurt, or deeply disappointed by local churches. I have dear brothers and sisters in Christ who steadfastly mortify the sin of same-sex desires, shaming me as I stumble through my own sins. I have witnessed them sacrifice their longing for a partner because they see Jesus and eternal life with him as more beautiful than any sinful temporal relationship this world may offer.
Traditional Christians must do more than just criticize revisionists. That bar is too low. We should be known for our doctrinal orthodoxy and for loving people who struggle in this area. That’s the tragedy of this book: The love at its motivational core disappears when it matters the most.
True love compels us to preach repentance from sin—including the sin of same-sex behavior. It calls us to repent when we fall short, especially if we become calloused to the difficult experiences of others instead of being driven to compassion. True love moves us to care deeply about our brothers and sisters who struggle with same-sex desires. May God help us be a spiritual family united to each other and to Christ by a love deeper than blood.
Hans Madueme is professor of theological studies at Covenant College and the author of Defending Sin: A Response to the Challenges of Evolution and the Natural Sciences.