Erasing God's Mercy

My CRJ Review of Richard and Christopher Hays' book

File: Manuscript Illumination with the Descent from the Cross, from a Book of Hours MET sf32-100-476as1b.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

Good Moaning. I’m over at CRJ today with that long-promised review of The Widening of God’s Mercy. Check it out:

For almost two thousand years, Christians of every variety, even if they couldn’t read themselves, even when the text was rendered opaque by hearing it in another language, basically understood the point of the Bible. Whatever ancient believers thought about the relationship between Scripture and tradition, the forensics of soteriology, the authority of the pope, or the formation of the canon (the list of disagreements and controversies down the ages would take me all day to enumerate), every person who made it to Sunday service knew that the center of the biblical story is the birth, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus for — and this is the crucial bit — the forgiveness of sin.

Human beings fell from their original state of grace in the garden when tempted by the devil. God had to do something to rescue and redeem them. Therefore, He set in motion a great salvation that culminated in the death of the Son of God on the cross, His three days in the tomb, His glorious resurrection, and His ascension to the right hand of the Father. The whole story will reach its denouement when He comes again in glory to judge the living and the dead, remake heaven and earth, and assume His place as ruler over the cosmos.

I mention this because somewhere between the late 1990s and 2024, the point of the story — that Jesus died on the cross for our sins — became baffling for many self-identifying Christians. Some prominent theologians and scholars who knew this basic truth even twenty or thirty years ago now believe that the point of the Bible is an accumulation of sub-Christian progressive talking points. They no longer know how to make sense of the text. They have forgotten very basic theological nomenclature like “sin” and “mercy.”

What has brought about this sudden confusion? The answer will not surprise anyone. It is the “question” of sexuality. Western culture has come to embrace a false, anti-Christian view of the human person, one that does not include the consequences of sin and, therefore, does not require a Savior. Jesus, having no redemptive purpose, comes to show us how to be more fully ourselves. We can have sex with whomever we prefer, and, because our sexual proclivities are precious, we ought to identify our whole selves by those desires. To the long list of Christian apostates over the heresy of unbiblical sexuality, we now grievously add Richard B. Hays and Christopher B. Hays, who, in their book The Widening of God’s Mercy: Sexuality Within the Biblical Story (Yale University Press, 2024), come out as affirming the sin of homosexuality.

How Convenient. Richard Hays’s The Moral Vision of the New Testament (HarperSanFrancisco, 1996) was already a mainstay when I entered seminary in the late 1990s. No one studying theology escaped reading it. Dr. Hays’s exceptional chapter titled simply “Homosexuality” cleared away the gathering fog around what the Bible says about sex. My former denomination — The Episcopal Church — though we did not know it at the time, was about to become affirming. The chapter caused a stir among my classmates. Christians, back then, had to contend with the clear biblical teaching that sexual activity is confined to the marriage union of one man with one woman. Those making the case for two men or two women together to have sex contorted themselves in Scriptural and doctrinal knots to make their case. Dr. Hays’s clear exposition of the relevant passages made that task much more difficult.

That was thirty years ago. In the intervening years, as Christians left the relative peace of “Neutral World” for the howling wasteland of “Negative World,”¹ the great scholar and ethicist, together with his son, has reversed himself. Why? “In view of the subsequent developments over the past quarter century,” they write, “in the church and in the wider culture, we now have much more lived experience of the ways in which the Spirit may be at work to expand our vision.” Personal experience proved to be the agent of change. Hays Sr. became involved “in a church where gay and lesbian members were a vital part of the congregation’s life and ministry.” This new relational world brought about a “comprehensive rethinking of the way in which the Bible might speak to these matters.” He, therefore, “repent[s] of the narrowness” of his understanding of God’s mercy (p. 10). It is now his conviction that his former teaching about sexuality is harmful (5). This is at a time when no other change of mind could be more acceptable in a respectable society.

A Satisfying and Important-Sounding Thing to Say. The reader will notice immediately that The Widening of God’s Mercy is a popular-level work. Hays and Hays are not appealing to a scholarly crowd. The writing is breezy and imprecise, if I may be so bold. They are not trying to strengthen the laity’s trust in the biblical narrative. Their task is not to make the difficult bits more accessible. Rather they employ a well-worn, progressive hermeneutic that treats God as one among many characters to appear on the biblical page. He is not the divine Author whose superintending Spirit empowered human writers to communicate His mind and will. No, as God, He is discovering Himself and us, just as we are discovering Him.

Thus, Hays and Hays take the bold stance that God is a being who constantly changes His mind. “We suggest,” they explain, “that for those who would like to make sense of the Bible, these statements about God’s unchanging word must somehow be held together with a long tradition of examples where God does in fact change his mind — and so do faithful people. In particular, God repeatedly changes his mind in ways that expand the sphere of his love, preserve his relationship with humankind, and protect and show mercy toward them” (2, emphasis added).

Some places the reader encounters God changing His mind are when He does not immediately put Adam and Eve to death for eating the fruit (37–38), when He lightens Cain’s curse (38–40), His repentance for creating the world in the first place (40–42), His change of mind about destroying His rebellious people (43–46), and the gift of land to the daughters of Zelophehad (49–60). Much later, God decides He no longer believes in child sacrifice like He did in Genesis (62–66). He gradually comes to feel that nationalistic warfare is unproductive (71–73). For Drs. Hays and Hays, it appears God is “learning on the job” (48). Part of that learning is to become less wrathful and more expansive in mercy (85).

But what about the places where God is said not to change His mind?

Read the rest over at CRJ! And check out the podcast I recorded with Melanie: