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Richard Hays Thinks God Changed His Mind About Same-Sex Sex. Is He Right?
For decades, Christians seeking to uphold the Bible’s “no” to same-sex sexual relationships have quoted Richard Hays’s treatment of this topic in his Moral Vision of the New Testament. But Hays (emeritus professor of New Testament at Duke Divinity School) has coauthored a new book, The Widening of God’s Mercy: Sexuality Within the Biblical Story, arguing for “the full inclusion of LGBT+ people in Christian communities.”
Readers might expect to find that Hays has changed his mind about the meaning of the verses that apparently prohibit same-sex sex. But he hasn’t. Instead, he and his son, Christopher (an Old Testament professor at Fuller Theological Seminary), suggest God has changed his mind. If we read the Bible carefully, they argue, we’ll find that “God repeatedly changes his mind in ways that expand the sphere of his love” (2). In light of this, the Hayses “conclude that many religious conservatives, however well-intentioned, are wrong about the most essential point of theology: the character of God” (2).
My conclusions are profoundly different. But we agree on one point. What’s at stake here isn’t theological loose change, as if we can dispense with saying no to same-sex sex and keep the bigger-ticket items. What’s at stake is our understanding of who God is and how we can discern his will.
Is God ‘Learning on the Job’?
The book opens with the prophet Samuel’s rebuke to Saul: “The Glory of Israel does not recant or change his mind! He is not a mortal, that he should change his mind!” (1 Sam. 15:29, C. Hays’s translation). “This is a satisfying and important-sounding thing to say,” they comment. “It’s also a lie” (1).
Of course, the authors aren’t the first to notice the tension in 1 Samuel 15. The Hebrew word nacham, which Samuel uses twice in verse 29, is anthropomorphic language that can mean to change one’s mind, regret, comfort, or feel grief. The same verb is used in the same chapter to describe the Lord’s regret at having made Saul king (vv. 11, 35). But God hasn’t just “changed his mind.” He’s changing his relationship with Saul because of Saul’s sin.
Christopher Hays, who writes the first half of the book, cites multiple examples of God (in his view) changing his mind. He points to God not having Adam and Eve die the day they eat the forbidden fruit and to God putting a protective mark on Cain as evidence that God is “willing to change his mind and reconsider his judgments, out of mercy” (40). Those who (like me) have a high view of God’s sovereignty will take issue with this framing while agreeing that these narratives do illustrate God’s mercy. Surprisingly, however, Hays claims that “this trend continues with the account of the flood” (40).
What’s at stake is our understanding of who God is and how we can discern his will.
As Hays notes, the flood narrative includes the first instance of the verb nacham. As when it describes God’s change of attitude toward Saul (1 Sam. 15:11, 35), nacham here describes God’s response to human sin: “The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the LORD regretted [nacham] that he had made man on the earth” (Gen. 6:5–6).
Rather than preceding mercy, nacham here triggers a massive act of judgment. Hays seeks to fit this story within his judgment-to-mercy paradigm by calling God’s resolution not to flood the earth again, despite human sin, “yet another change of mind” (41). But if God sometimes “changes his mind” toward judgment and sometimes toward mercy, we’re left with no real certainty.
After narrating other stories which he sees as illustrating “God’s propensity to relent from punishment, to show mercy even at the cost of changing his mind and bending his principles of justice,” he concludes, “Although these stories are told as if God is ‘learning on the job,’ the portrait they create is consistent with a recurring image of God throughout the Bible. Even when judgment seems to narrow the scope of blessing, there are signs of the wideness of God’s mercy” (48).
If we look at these stories through the lens of the gospel, however, we find a different resolution to the justice-mercy tension. We don’t see a God who is flip-flopping back and forth and “learning on the job” but one who has a stunning plan for reconciling humans to himself with perfect love and justice. Just as God saved his people from his judgment by sheltering them in the ark, so he’ll save his people from his judgment by sheltering them in Christ. Hays is right that there are signs from the beginning of “the wideness of God’s mercy.” But this isn’t a final compromise of a God who gets there in the end. It’s God’s plan from before the beginning.
Did God Initially Command Child Sacrifice?
Christopher Hays tries to position the Old Testament prohibition of same-sex sex as a terrible mistake by arguing that God also made a terrible mistake when he commanded child sacrifice. He cites Ezekiel 20:25–26, where God says concerning Israel, “I gave them statutes that were not good and ordinances by which they could not live. I defiled them through their very gifts, in their offering up all their firstborn, in order that I might horrify them, so that they might know that I am the LORD” (NRSV).
He ties this back to Exodus 22:29–30, where we read, “The firstborn of your sons you shall give to me. You shall do the same with your oxen and with your sheep: seven days it shall remain with its mother; on the eighth day you shall give it to me” (NRSV). Hays comments, “And how did they give oxen and sheep to God? By blood sacrifice” (62). So is this really what God originally meant?
The younger Hays later notes that “in the end, the Bible bans child sacrifice,” citing 13 Old Testament texts, including four from Ezekiel. But he claims “it took time” (64). Only then does he mention the passages before and after Exodus 22 that make clear the firstborn humans should be redeemed: “You shall set apart to the LORD all that first opens the womb. All the firstborn of your animals that are males shall be the LORD’s. Every firstborn of a donkey you shall redeem with a lamb, or if you will not redeem it you shall break its neck. Every firstborn of man among your sons you shall redeem” (Ex. 13:12–13; cf. 34:19–20).
It turns out the argument hinges on Exodus 22 being in a portion of Exodus that “is generally taken to be the oldest legal collection in the Bible” (64). But even if Exodus 22 predates Exodus 13, a command to the Israelites to sacrifice their firstborns makes zero sense within the book’s narrative. At the Passover, God protected the Israelite firstborns with the blood of lambs. It’s wild to think God would undo this as soon as the Israelites were out of Egypt by having them sacrifice their sons. Indeed, God explains that it’s because the firstborns were redeemed at the exodus that they must be redeemed going forward (13:14–15).
Hays’s interpretation also makes no sense in the context of Ezekiel 20. Rather than these “statutes that were not good” being given first and then revised (as per Hays’s argument, 62), verses 25–26 describe God’s response to his people’s rebellion against his good statutes in the wilderness: he gives them over to their own statutes, which included idol worship and child sacrifice (cf. v. 39; Rom. 1:24). This interpretation is confirmed by the previous verse, where the Lord contrasts “my rules” and “my statutes,” which he gave to Israel in love and which they rejected. Now, in judgment, he gives them over to “statutes”—not my statutes, but statutes—“that were not good” because they were of Israel’s own evil making.
Hays cites God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac as evidence that “child sacrifice was commanded” (62). It was common within pagan worship, which is why it’s repeatedly condemned in the Old Testament. But God dramatically stops Abraham from sacrificing his son and redeems him with a ram.
Once again, if we look at this recurrent motif through the lens of the gospel it makes sense. God’s firstborn Son is also the sacrificial lamb who takes away the sins of the world (John 1:36). God isn’t learning on the job, first commanding child sacrifice and then correcting his mistake. He’s pointing forward to the one blood sacrifice that has ultimate power to redeem.
What About the Bible’s Texts on Sex and Marriage?
In a book that claims to situate “sexuality within the biblical story,” we might expect the authors to explain how their argument fits with the Genesis-to-Revelation story of male-female marriage as a metaphor for Jesus’s love for his church. But they don’t. We might also expect some engagement with the verses that prohibit same-sex sex. Instead, these verses are dismissed.
The authors state up front that “repetitive arguments about the same set of verses, and the meaning of specific words, have reached an impasse; they are superficial and boring” (2). This makes it sound like we should all just throw our hands up because there’s no way to know what these verses mean. But referencing The Moral Vision of the New Testament, Richard Hays writes,
My chapter argued that most of the then-current proposals to explain away the Bible’s condemnation of [same-sex sex] were exegetically unsustainable and that “though only a few biblical texts speak of homoerotic activity, all that do mention it express unqualified disapproval” (389). As a judgment about what these very few biblical texts say, that statement seems to me to be correct. (8)
So, contrary to what the Hayses implied on page 2, the jury is not out. And contrary to what authors like Matthew Vines have argued, Richard Hays doesn’t think we can legitimately reinterpret what these verses mean.
The elder Hays suggests we ask, “How might the Gospel stories of Jesus’s convention-altering words and actions affect our thinking about norms for sexual relationship in our time?” (121). This is a great question. But we cannot answer it by ignoring Jesus’s teaching on sexual ethics. Yet this is what he does.
Hays writes at length about Jesus’s interpretation of the law regarding the Sabbath. But he spends no time on Jesus’s interpretation of the law regarding marriage and regarding sexual sin. In both these cases, Jesus seems to make the law more strict, reemphasizing God’s original design of one man and one woman in a one-flesh union for life (Matt. 19:2–6) and calling even lustful thoughts adultery (5:27–30).
Hays asserts, “If we go to the four Gospels looking for Jesus’s explicit teachings about homosexuality, we will look in vain; there’s not a word on this topic in the Gospels” (120). But this statement is misleading. Jesus lists porneia (usually translated “sexual immorality”) alongside murder, adultery, theft, false witness, and slander as something that comes out of people’s hearts and defiles them (15:18–19; cf. Mark 7:21–23). As Hays himself later explains, porneia is “a nonspecific umbrella term for any kind of sexual immorality—presumably including any and all forms of illicit sexual relations elaborated in Leviticus 18 (adultery, incest, lying ‘with a male as with a woman,’ and so forth)” (183). From Hays’s own definition of porneia, therefore, it isn’t true that there’s “not a word on this topic in the Gospels.”
Hays rightly points to Jesus’s reputation for befriending notorious sinners, including sexual sinners, as evidence that Jesus would associate with those known for their sexual sin today—no doubt in ways that would offend some religious people. But this isn’t because Jesus has no problem with sexual sin. It’s because he has the solution. Just as God’s justice and mercy revealed in the Old Testament come together at the cross, so the resolution of the seeming tension between how hard Jesus is on sexual sin and his welcoming of sexual sinners is the gospel: Jesus died to pay the price for sin so sinners who repent could be forgiven and embraced by God.
God’s Mercy Is Already Wide Enough
Like others before him, Richard Hays suggests a parallel between the Gentiles’ inclusion in the early church and “the full inclusion of LGBTQ people” in the church today. I’ve addressed this argument more fully elsewhere. In short, there are two vital differences between the Gentiles’ inclusion and what Hays proposes.
First, the inclusion of the Gentiles is anticipated in the Old Testament and established by multiple New Testament texts. Paul was especially emphatic about this. But he was also emphatic about the need for Gentile Christians to repent of sexual immorality, including same-sex sex (see Rom. 1:26–28; 1 Cor. 6:9–11; 1 Tim. 1:10).
Jesus died to pay the price for sin, so sinners who repent could be forgiven and embraced by God.
Second, God’s mercy revealed in Scripture is already wide enough to reach those who (like me) are drawn to same-sex sexual sin. After explaining that those who continue in unrepentant sin—including the sin same-sex sex—will not inherit God’s kingdom, Paul writes, “And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Cor. 6:11).
All of us will likely at times find sinful sexual desires arising in our hearts. For some of us, those desires will be directed toward people of our same sex. Some of my closest friends have come to Christ with a history of same-sex sexual relationship. Like me, they have repented and believed in Jesus, and they have been washed, sanctified, and justified. Now we have the Spirit’s help to fight against sinful desire, whatever form it takes.
The authors write, “We believe that welcoming people of different sexualities is an act of faithfulness to God’s merciful promises. Let’s not make God’s offer of grace a lie” (221). But while God’s grace is universally available to any who repent and trust in Jesus, we must repent. Ultimately, it’s the Hayses who are deceiving people when it comes to God’s offer.
We have no evidence that God has “changed his mind” when it comes to same-sex sexual relationships, and we don’t have “Spirit-led freedom to set aside biblical laws and teachings [we] deem unjust, irrelevant, or inconsistent with the broader divine will” (212–13). But we do have God’s grace abounding to repentant sinners and the Spirit’s power to “flee from sexual immorality” (v. 18). To experience the wideness of God’s mercy, we must enter through the narrow gate of Christ, who shed his blood to pay for all our sin (Matt. 7:13–14).
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