Changing Minds about Same-Sex Union: A Critical Analysis of The Widening of God’s Mercy by Christopher Hays and Richard Hays

Ten years ago, Baptist pastor and professor David Gushee published Changing Our Mind (2014), which called the church to become fully inclusive of LGBTQ Christians. Gushee’s book provoked many strong reactions, favorable and unfavorable, for two reasons: because Gushee was a leading ethicist of evangelical Christianity, and because this book presented Gushee’s reversal of view on the matter. A decade earlier, Gushee, along with fellow Baptist co-author Glen Stassen, had presented a traditional Christian view of marriage and sex in their widely acclaimed book, Kingdom Ethics (2003). After Changing Our Mind, Gushee issued a revised edition of Kingdom Ethics (2016) with a different publisher that replaced the prescriptive section on “Homosexuality” with a descriptive section on “LGBT Persons and Same-Sex Relationships” that repudiates his earlier stance.

Now, ten years later, Methodist minister and scholar Richard Hays, along with his son and co-author Christopher Hays, has published The Widening of God’s Mercy: Sexuality within the Biblical Story, which also calls the church to become fully inclusive of sexual minorities. The Hayses’ book has quickly provoked strong reactions, favorable and unfavorable, for two reasons: because both Hays and his son have been leading biblical scholars in evangelical Christianity, Richard in New Testament at Duke Divinity School and Christopher in Old Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary; and because this book presents Richard’s reversal of view on the matter. Two decades ago, Richard Hays presented a traditional Christian view on marriage and sex, including a chapter on “Homosexuality,” in his widely acclaimed book, The Moral Vision of the New Testament (1996). In an epilogue to the Hayses’ new book, Richard repents of his earlier stance and regrets that Moral Vision has been used—in his view, abused—to justify exclusionary practices in evangelical churches. The first endorsement of Widening was, not surprisingly, from David Gushee.

Previously, in my Marriage, Scripture, and the Church (2021), I critically analyzed several arguments Gushee presented to support his change of mind. Here I will do likewise with the Hayses’ book, critically analyzing their arguments from four angles: rhetorical, hermeneutical, logical, and theological. I do so as a confessing Christian, with the intent of offering counsel to the church on whether to follow Gushee, Hays, and Hays in their change of mind.

Rhetorical Analysis

The Hayses’ thesis in Widening of God’s Mercy is that Scripture demonstrates that “God repeatedly changes his mind in ways that expand the sphere of his love,” such that we should read the biblical story of God and humanity as one of God’s ever-widening mercy and ever-expanding grace. This biblical story, they argue, prompts the church to “re-envision how God means us to think and act today with regard to human sexuality.”

The Hayses’ strategy in Widening is to “trace a trajectory of mercy” across the Old and New Testaments that, they think, leads to the “full inclusion” of sexual minorities in the church. They assemble several existing arguments and add a few of their own, threading them together by the theme of God’s widening mercy. From these arguments, they aim to build a cumulative case in support of welcoming sexual minorities and blessing same-sex unions—and thereby “hope to persuade” the church to agree with them. 

Their rereading of Scripture’s story and revisioning of God’s intention leads them to this conclusion: 

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.

The first part of their conclusion seems clear: accepting sexual minorities into church membership and leadership. The latter part, however, is ambiguous. It appears they mean blessing covenanted same-sex unions, but it is unclear whether they intend these unions to be sacramentally equivalent to marriage or distinct from marriage.

This ambiguity matters. If same-sex unions are to be equivalent to marriage, then blessing same-sex unions requires the church to redefine marriage. That is the way Gushee goes in Changing Our Mind, dropping “a man and a woman” from the “covenantal-marital” sexual ethical standard. If same-sex unions are to be distinct from marriage, then blessing same-sex unions requires the church to devise a new sacrament. That is the way theologian Robert Song goes in Covenant and Calling (2014), proposing that the church bless “covenanted partnerships,” including same-sex couples and intentionally non-procreative male-female couples.

Either way—redefining marriage or devising a new sacrament—there are important ethical and theological implications to be considered, especially concerning the connection between creation and redemption (see Chapters 5 and 6 in Marriage, Scripture, and the Church). Hays and Hays neither clarify which way they think the church should go nor consider the implications of going either way.

Hermeneutical Analysis

Hays and Hays argue that “this debate should no longer focus on . . . exegetical arguments about” the six biblical texts—three in the Old Testament, three in the New Testament—“that forbid or disapprove of same-sex relations.” I agree with them on this point. The church’s discernment on the question of same-sex union, typically focused too narrowly on those texts, has lost sight of the larger biblical framework within which those texts have their meaning and import for the church.

Hays and Hays argue that instead of focusing on texts about sex we should review the whole biblical story and revise our thinking about marriage and sex, from the perspective of God’s mercy. I agree that the mercy trajectory they trace through Scripture is a necessary perspective from which to interpret the whole story: God’s mercy is a constant theme from beginning to end. Discernment of God’s will, on this or other matters, that does not give due consideration to God’s mercy will be inadequate.

I disagree with Hays and Hays, however, that the mercy trajectory provides a sufficient perspective for interpreting Scripture and discerning God’s will on this matter. While traditionalist approaches to the question often neglect the big picture of God’s purpose, innovationist approaches to the question often neglect the biblical picture that seems most relevant and necessary for discernment on this matter: marriage. We can trace a marriage trajectory through Scripture from Genesis to Moses to Jesus to Revelation, from creation and covenant to new covenant and new creation (see Chapter 3 in Marriage, Scripture, and the Church). Inexplicably, and indefensibly, Widening entirely omits this biblical perspective.

The Hayses’ omission of the marriage trajectory is rhetorically ironic: despite the book’s subtitle, they don’t track “sexuality within the biblical story.” This omission is also hermeneutically awkward considering Richard Hays’s previous position. In Moral Vision of the New Testament, he affirmed two key things. First, that the whole biblical canon witnesses to a normative picture of marriage: “From Genesis 1 onward, Scripture affirms repeatedly that God has made man and woman for one another and that our sexual desires rightly find fulfillment” within man-woman marriage. Second, that Scripture’s marriage picture sets the proper frame within which to interpret biblical texts on sex and discern ethical matters of sex: “This normative canonical picture of marriage provides the positive backdrop against which the Bible’s few emphatic negations of homosexuality must be read.”

Apparently, Richard Hays has changed his mind on both points. I still think both points are correct. But Widening fails to offer the reader any reason to think otherwise—and so no reason to change mind likewise. Without good reason to think that the marriage trajectory is irrelevant or unnecessary to interpreting Scripture concerning same-sex union, the mercy trajectory alone provides an inadequate perspective for discerning God’s will on this question.

Logical Analysis

Whether the mercy trajectory Hays and Hays trace through Scripture leads all the way to their conclusion depends on the arguments they present along the way to build their case. I will examine some of their main arguments, asking of each argument whether it provides support for their conclusion. My analysis will follow their division of the book into Old Testament and New Testament sections, written by Christopher Hays and Richard Hays, respectively. For each section, I will examine two arguments, one weak and one strong, and pose a question about the tension between their thesis and their evidence.

Old Testament—Weak Argument

In Chapter 4, Christopher Hays presents what he thinks is “the most challenging example” of God changing his mind. In Exodus, God apparently commanded the Israelites to sacrifice their firstborn sons (Exodus 22:29)—but later, in Ezekiel, God reversed himself, acknowledging that “I gave them statutes that were not good and ordinances by which they could not live” (Ezekiel 20:25). Jeremiah, however, repudiated both child sacrifice and the very idea that God had ever commanded it: “I did not command them, nor did it enter my mind that they should do this abomination” (Jeremiah 32:35). So, which way was it: God gave a bad commandment and rescinded it, or the Israelites misunderstood and misapplied God’s good commandment? Although we can’t sort that out, Hays says, either way, it comes to the same thing: “Early in Israel’s history a law was given that had potentially tragic consequences” and the prophets agreed to ban child sacrifice. He then draws a parallel regarding sexuality: as a biblical law harmed firstborn children in Israel, so some biblical laws about marriage and sex have harmed LGBTQ children in the church. Whether God gave bad laws, or we have misunderstood and misapplied God’s good laws, it comes to the same thing: we should agree, like Ezekiel and Jeremiah, that these biblical laws should no longer be followed in the church today.

This analogy is a new argument in the debate, as far as I’m aware. It would provide strong support to the Hayses’ conclusion, if it withstands scrutiny. There are two major problems with this argument, however. First, Hays premises the argument on what many biblical scholars would consider a contestable reading of the biblical record concerning child sacrifice. For the sake of analyzing the argument, I’ll let this premise stand.

Second, even granting Hays his reading of the biblical record, making an inference from the biblical record on child sacrifice to biblical laws concerning marriage and sex needs to be premised on biblical evidence for the parallel claim, that God has changed his mind about marriage and sex. But Hays cites no texts to the effect of God saying “I gave them statutes that were not good” regarding God’s ordaining male-female union or “I did not command them” regarding Levitical laws forbidding same-sex intercourse. Without such comparable texts, an essential piece of the alleged analogy is missing: the argument stands unstably on a one-sided parallel. While seemingly suggestive, this argument is logically inconclusive and provides no support for the Hayses’ conclusion.

Old Testament—Strong Argument

In Chapter 7, Christopher Hays appeals again to the prophets. Isaiah envisioned that God, in bringing the exiles back from Babylon and restoring Jerusalem and the temple, will “gather others” into Israel “besides” the Israelite exiles. Isaiah identified two groups of “others” whom God will include: eunuchs and foreigners who “join themselves to the Lord,” “keep my sabbaths,” and “hold fast my covenant.” Not only will these former outsiders belong to God’s people, but faithful eunuchs will also be remembered in God’s house and faithful foreigners will offer sacrifice at God’s altar (Isaiah 56:1–8). Isaiah’s vision implicitly reversed or revised laws in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy that excluded eunuchs from the worshiping assembly and restricted the priesthood to Aaron’s descendants. This reversal-revision, Hays says, “is one of the most striking expansions of divine grace in the Old Testament.” Hays thus draws another parallel regarding sexuality: as God expanded the temple community to include former outsiders in worship and sacrifice, so we should expand the church community to include sexual minorities as members and leaders.

The analogy to eunuchs and proselytes in Israel is not a new argument in the debate. And here the argument stands on a stable basis: the inclusion of eunuchs and gentiles is relevant to and supportive of the first part of the Hayses’ conclusion concerning welcoming sexual minorities in church membership and leadership. Unlike the previous analogy, there are no God-given biblical laws standing in the way—no laws explicitly excluding sexual minorities from church membership or restricting their service in church leadership that would need to be reversed or revised in applying the parallel. The only obstacles are human-made rules, written and unwritten, that we can decide to set aside.

The analogy to eunuchs and proselytes, however, is irrelevant to and not supportive of the second part of the Hayses’ conclusion concerning blessing same-sex unions. There is no biblical evidence indicating that inclusion of eunuchs and foreigners in the temple community either overrode Levitical laws regarding forbidden sexual relations or fundamentally altered the creational institution of marriage as male-female union. Thus, there is no parallel to be drawn in that regard.

Old Testament—Tension between Thesis and Evidence

When taking an overview of the Old Testament segment of the mercy trajectory argument, one observes a tension between the Hayses’ thesis and the biblical evidence. Christopher Hays claims that God’s mind “changes” and God’s mercy “widens” again and again across the Old Testament, as evident in changing laws and customs to promote justice and expanding borders to include enemies. Yet Hays repeatedly acknowledges that the biblical story evidences a divine mercy that has always been wide. From the beginning of creation, God’s mercy has encompassed all creatures within God’s providence (Psalm 145). From the beginning of the covenant, God’s mercy has envisioned all nations belonging to and blessed in God’s people (Genesis 12:1–3; 17:1–6). God’s mercy cannot expand any wider than all creation and all nations. So there has never been any “widening” of God’s mercy or “change” in God’s character: God’s character has always been mercy-full (Exodus 33:19; 34:6).

This fact does not simply imply a rhetorical tension with the book’s title. It poses a logical problem for the Hayses’ thesis. God’s all-creatures-wide and all-nations-wide mercy has always been compatible with his creational institution of male-female union and covenantal restrictions of sexual relations. This counters their case that, aligning with God’s “widening” mercy, the church should rescind Levitical laws forbidding same-sex intercourse and revise Genesis’s picture of marriage to bless same-sex unions. Without biblical evidence to warrant the inference that God has ever changed his mind about what marriage is and whether same-sex intercourse is forbidden, their case for their conclusion starts to collapse.

New Testament—Weak Arguments

In Chapter 9, Richard Hays appeals to Jesus’s ruling on the Sabbath law to build a case for the Hayses’ conclusion. Jesus ruled that healing is “doing good” and thus “lawful” on the Sabbath, in accord with God’s purpose of giving the Sabbath for the sake of human well-being (Mark 2:23–3:6). “Healing on the Sabbath,” Hays interprets the story, “is not defiance of God’s law but rather an embracing of its deeper intent.” He then draws an inference: “That means that actions done for healing and human wholeness should be welcomed rather than forbidden, even if they appear to violate a particular scriptural prohibition.” Hays implies by analogy, I take it, that blessing same-sex unions would also be done for human well-being and, therefore, should also be welcomed in the church even if they appear to violate biblical prohibitions of same-sex intercourse.

A version of the Sabbath argument was presented previously by Karen Keen in Scripture, Ethics, and the Possibility of Same-Sex Relationships. Hays develops the argument with greater exegetical depth and historical detail. Even so, the argument remains weak, for two reasons. First, the argument’s inference does not follow from its premises. As Hays keenly observes, Jesus’s acts of healing on the Sabbath accord with not only the spirit but also the letter of God’s law: there is no God-given law that forbids healing on the Sabbath; it was only human-made rules, intended to define conscientious keeping of the law, that forbade healing on the Sabbath. Thus, the argument’s inference should read: actions done for human well-being, provided such actions do not violate God-given laws, should be welcomed rather than forbidden, even if such actions violate human-made rules.

Second, there is a relevant disanalogy between Jesus’s healing on the Sabbath and the church blessing same-sex unions. Whereas “there is no specific prohibition in Torah of healing on the Sabbath,” as Hays correctly observes, there are specific prohibitions in the Torah of same-sex intercourse as one class of forbidden sexual relations (Leviticus 18 and 20). While Jesus’s healing on the Sabbath did not violate a God-given law, the church’s blessing of same-sex unions would violate a God-given law.

Therefore, Jesus’s merciful acts of healing on the Sabbath do not warrant the blessing of same-sex unions in the church. Nonetheless, I think we can draw a significant implication from Jesus’s healing and teaching on the Sabbath for the church today. Where the church has added to God-given laws human-made rules that, even if intended to define faithfulness, are harmful to believers—such as rules forbidding sexual minorities to belong, preach, and teach—acts done to include sexual minorities in church membership and leadership should be welcomed according to God’s mercy.

In Chapter 16, Richard Hays appeals to Paul’s adjudication of the food dispute among the believers in Rome to strengthen the case for the Hayses’ conclusion. The disputed question concerned eating meat sacrificed in the temples and then sold in the markets. Paul admonished the believers who partook of such meat (the “strong”) not to despise believers who abstained, and admonished the believers who abstained from such meat (the “weak”) not to pass judgment on believers who partook. Each party should make room and take concern for the other, seeking to live peaceably together (Romans 14:1–15:13). Hays applies Paul’s judgment of the food dispute by analogy to the church today in its sexuality dispute: believers who would bless same-sex unions (the “strong”) and believers who would bless only male-female unions (the “weak”) should accommodate one another within a unified church.

This appeal-to-Paul argument was extensively developed previously by Ken Wilson in A Letter to My Congregation. The main problem with the argument is that it is only halfway done. The argument draws a direct inference from Paul’s judgment of the food dispute to our debate over same-sex unions. That inference implies an assumption: that the respective matters—food and sex—are substantively alike and thus should be dealt with in like manner. That assumption begs the question. Because the argument appeals to Paul, we need to ask: Would Paul deal with sex matters in like manner as food matters? And the answer is, clearly, no.

Paul dealt with both the idol meat issue and sexual morality issues in the church at Corinth—and he judged sex matters in Corinth in very different terms from how he judged food matters in both Corinth and Rome. As Hays puts it, Paul considered “disputes about food” to be “relatively inconsequential.” Yet Paul considered disputes about sexual morality to be most consequential. Paul characterized this difference of consequence in relation to God’s kingdom: whereas Paul affirmed that “the kingdom of God is not food and drink” (Romans 14:17), Paul warned that “Fornicators, idolaters, adulterers . . . none of these will inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Corinthians 6:9–10). Paul could not draw the contrast more sharply. His respective judgments followed suit: whereas Paul allowed freedom of conscience (“Let all be fully convinced in their own minds”) and encouraged mutual accommodation (“Welcome one another”) regarding eating meat (Romans 14–15), he emphatically denied freedom of choice (“Flee sexual immorality!”) and rejected accommodation (“Do not associate with sexually immoral persons”) on sexual morality (1 Corinthians 5–6).

Paul’s contrast disrupts Hays’s argument: the substantive difference between food matters and sex matters prevents a direct inference from the former to the latter. Making an inference from Paul’s dealing with the food dispute to our dealing with the same-sex union question thus requires making a further argument: that the early church food dispute is more relevant than the early church sexual morality issues to the same-sex union debate in the church today, such that we should follow Paul’s judgment on the food dispute rather than Paul’s judgment on the sexual morality issues in discerning the same-sex union question. Without this additional argument, which seems a hard case to make, the appeal to Paul remains tenuous and at most only weakly supports the Hayses’ conclusion.

New Testament—Strong Argument

In Chapters 12 to 15, Richard Hays presents an extended discussion of the early Christian mission to gentiles and the eventual inclusion of gentile believers in the church (Acts 10–15). Hays recounts how this mission surpassed boundaries set by human-made rules around Jews relating to gentiles: Peter, led by the Holy Spirit, visits the house of Cornelius even though by tradition it was forbidden for Jews to associate intimately with gentiles (Acts 10). Hays further recounts how the decision by church leaders at the Jerusalem Council revised expectations concerning how gentile believers were to be initiated into the church and were to behave once belonging to God’s family in Jesus: gentile believers could be baptized without being circumcised and would not need to observe the whole Torah (Acts 15). This decision meant that a gentile believer did not need to become a Jew first in order to become a Christian: a believer could remain gentile and be Christian.

Through the gentile mission and the Jerusalem Council, the early church, guided by the Holy Spirit, “changed mind” about gentile believers. Hays thus asks whether the early church decision for inclusion of gentile believers presents “a model for how the church today might address issues concerning inclusion of sexual minorities?” He claims it does and draws an analogy: “The model suggests that just as early Christians deliberated together and decided to remove barriers to gentile participation in the community of Jesus-followers, so also the church today should open its doors fully to those of differing sexual orientations.”

The gentile analogy might be the argument most frequently presented favoring inclusion of sexual minorities in the church today. Among the numerous versions of this argument offered over the years, Hays’s presentation is one of the more robust and responsible versions I have encountered. Yet the vital question is: What inferences can we draw from the gentile analogy? Does it fully support the authors’ conclusion—both welcoming sexual minorities into the church and blessing same-sex unions?

I agree with Hays that the Jerusalem Council presents a model that the church today can follow in discerning questions concerning sexual minorities. I agree, further, that the gentile analogy is relevant to and supportive of the first part of the Hayses’ conclusion concerning welcoming gay believers into church membership and leadership (see Chapter 10 of Marriage, Scripture, and the Church). But what to infer about blessing same-sex unions? There is more of the story to consider.

Hays observes what most advocates of the gentile analogy ignore: that the Jerusalem Council not only decided that gentile believers could be baptized without circumcision, but also decided that gentile believers should observe a subset of the Torah. The “requirements” for gentile believers included, among other things, abstaining from idolatry and sexual immorality. These requirements derived from laws given by God to be observed by gentiles residing in Israel (Leviticus 17–18) that had long been declared among gentiles in the synagogues (Acts 15:19–21). The early church discerned that those laws now applied to gentile believers belonging to God’s renewed Israel in Jesus. It is the Jerusalem Council’s full decision—membership inclusion plus moral restriction—that “seemed good to the Holy Spirit” and to the early church leaders (Acts 15:28–29).

Hays acknowledges that the prohibition of sexual immorality (porneia) prevents making a direct inference from the gentile analogy to blessing same-sex unions. In the New Testament context, the porneia prohibition included specific forms of illicit sex—adultery, promiscuity, prostitution, incest, and same-sex intercourse—and generally any sexual relations outside man-woman monogamy. To discern whether the gentile analogy might warrant blessing same-sex unions, the church must first discern whether same-sex union should be considered porneia. Hays thus draws a conditional inference: “If the church today looks to the council as a pattern—and if it decides that same-sex unions are no longer to be automatically classified as porneia,” then the church would need to define the moral boundaries within which same-sex unions could be blessed.

I will make two comments on Richard Hays’s inference from the gentile analogy. First, it assumes that were the church today to follow the Jerusalem Council model on the same-sex union question, we would have the authority to set aside the Jerusalem Council’s decision about moral restrictions: we could declare permitted what the Jerusalem Council declared prohibited. Yet the Jerusalem Council itself did not presume any authority to alter the laws that God had given for gentiles or to create new standards of sexual morality. What would give the church today authority to rescind what had “seemed good to the Holy Spirit” and create new moral standards for marriage and sex?

Second, there is a subtle but significant difference between Richard’s inference from the gentile analogy and the Hayses’ conclusion in their final chapter. Richard’s conditional inference (“if the church decides”) seems to leave the question of same-sex union undecided. But the Hayses’ imperative conclusion (“the church should”) treats the question as already decided. The intervening thirty pages, however, do not offer the reader an explicit explanation for this shift from a tentative “if” to a confident “should.” The Hayses’ conclusion, in effect, leap-frogs the discernment that was supposed to be necessary to decide the moral status of same-sex union. What has happened to the need for discernment? On what grounds was it decided that same-sex union is not to be considered porneia?

Unfortunately, Hays and Hays pass over these questions in silence.

New Testament—Tension between Thesis and Evidence

When taking an overview of the New Testament segment of the mercy-trajectory argument, one observes a tension between the Hayses’ thesis and the biblical evidence. Richard Hays presents several stories of Jesus and early Christians enacting the widening reach of God’s mercy: healing the sick on the Sabbath, eating with tax collectors, forgiving sinners, commending the faith of Roman soldiers, associating with gentiles, and so on. Taken together, Hays and Hays argue, these stories plot a trajectory of widening mercy that warrants the church today widening moral boundaries around marriage and sex to allow the blessing of same-sex unions.

Every story of Jesus’s mercy, however, is fully in keeping with God’s law. Richard Hays repeatedly emphasizes this point: healing on the Sabbath did not violate God’s law; eating with tax collectors and forgiving sinners did not overturn any biblical laws; associating with gentiles was not forbidden by Torah; and so on. Moreover, Jesus gave strict readings of biblical laws on sexual matters (divorce and adultery) and commanded a stringent discipline of sexual desire (Matthew 5:27–32; 19:3–12). Evidently, Jesus’s rigorous approach to marital fidelity and sexual holiness ran along, rather than cut across, the grain of Jesus’s merciful ministry to the sick, poor, women, sinners, and gentiles. Likewise, in his mission work extending God’s grace to gentiles, Paul drew the moral lines narrowly around marital fidelity and sexual holiness (1 Corinthians 5–7).

This fact confounds the Hayses’ thesis. The ministries and teachings of Jesus and Paul show that the widening reach of God’s mercy to outsiders and sinners is fully compatible with the narrowing of moral boundaries around marriage and sex. This counters their case that, aligning with the biblical trajectory of widening mercy, the church today should widen moral boundaries around marriage and sex to show God’s mercy for sexual minorities. Without biblical evidence that Jesus or the early church widened moral boundaries around marriage and sex on account of widening the reach of God’s mercy to outsiders and sinners, their case for their conclusion continues to collapse.

Theological Analysis

In their opening chapter, the authors opine that Christian “conservatives” who oppose the “full inclusion” of sexual minorities within the church do so primarily because of their erroneous theological beliefs. Such Christians, they say, maintain a mistaken view about “the most essential point of theology: the character of God.”

Hays and Hays reprise this theme in their final chapter, where they address what they deem the strongest objection to their view. They write: 

The most significant objection to our interpretation of the God of the Bible is the one that simply says, “This God of widening mercy whom you describe is not the one that I have ever experienced.” That objection is a condemnation of the church . . . our argument is . . . a summons to the church to repent of its narrow, fearful vision and to embrace a wider understanding of God’s mercy.”

To paraphrase: either you agree with our biblical interpretation and accept our claims about the implications of that interpretation for marriage and sexuality in the church today—or you subscribe to, and must repent from, a “narrow, fearful vision” of God and God’s mercy.

It seems to me that the authors have set up a false dichotomy.

When some Pharisees asked Jesus about the divorce law, a hot topic of debate at the time, Jesus refocused the question on marriage and cited Genesis as witness to God’s will for marriage (Matthew 19:3–9; Mark 10:2–9). Jesus’s response to the Pharisees about divorce implies that he affirmed three things about marriage: Genesis presents God’s institution of marriage from the beginning of creation; God originally instituted marriage as “the two” of “male and female” joined into “one flesh”; and God’s original institution of marriage continues to be God’s intention for marriage (see Chapter 4 of Marriage, Scripture, and the Church). In effect, Jesus affirmed that God has not changed his mind about marriage since the beginning—and that God’s constant mind concerning marriage sets the normative baseline for discerning questions of marriage.

Jesus responded to the divorce question in a way similar to how Christian “conservatives” often respond to the same-sex union question: appealing to God’s will for marriage as revealed in Genesis. Jesus opposed a lax allowance of divorce for much the same reason that many Christians oppose blessing same-sex unions: it would be contrary to God’s original institution and continuing intention for marriage. What, then, are we to say about Jesus? Did Jesus, by citing Genesis as witness to God’s will for marriage, and by maintaining that God’s will from the beginning remains God’s will for today, show that he subscribed to a “narrow, fearful vision” of God’s mercy from which he needed to repent? Seems unlikely to me.

I thus think that the most significant objection to the Hayses’ thesis and vision—that following the biblical trajectory of God’s “widening mercy” leads us to conclude that God has “changed mind” about marriage and sex, such that we should change mind likewise and bless same-sex unions—is Jesus. Jesus evidently held his teaching of God’s unchanged mind about marriage and sex together with his ministry of God’s expansive mercy to outsiders and sinners.

The church’s discernment on the same-sex union question, as with other vital matters for Christian faith and life, should be anchored to Jesus, who is the beginning and end, the center and fulfillment of every biblical trajectory. Both Jesus who says, “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice’”—and Jesus who says, “Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female’?” (Matthew 9:13; 19:4). Both Jesus who says, “Come to me all . . . and I will give you rest”—and Jesus who says, “Enter through the narrow gate” and walk the road that leads to life (Matthew 11:28–30; 7:13–14). This Jesus—the full Jesus of the whole Gospels, the Jesus who came not to abolish but to fulfill the law and the prophets (Matthew 5:17–20)—will lead us beyond false choices into God’s truth and mercy.

Conclusion

Christopher and Richard Hays have presented plausible arguments supported by biblical warrants for welcoming sexual minorities into church membership and leadership. Yet their mercy trajectory approach falls far short of building a coherent, convincing cumulative case to support their vision of blessing same-sex unions in the church.

Reading Widening and thinking through its overall argument, I have returned to the conclusion I had reached in Marriage, Scripture, and the Church: the case for blessing same-sex unions rests entirely on extra-biblical considerations. I think there are only two plausible sources for such extra-biblical considerations—personal experience or spiritual revelation—and thus I see only two possible paths the church might take toward blessing same-sex unions.

Path A: Claim that our personal experiences of sexuality outweigh biblical revelation (and Christian tradition) and authorize the church to override biblical laws restricting sexual relations and set aside Jesus’s teachings concerning marriage and sex. This path has been advocated by biblical scholar Luke Timothy Johnson, who honestly acknowledged: “We appeal explicitly to the weight of our own experience” as “authority” to “reject the straightforward commands of Scripture” and “declare that same-sex unions can be holy and good.”

Path B: Claim that the church has received from the Holy Spirit a post-biblical revelation of God’s will and entered a new dispensation of God’s grace, such that not only Genesis’s institution of male-female union and Leviticus’s restrictions of sexual relations but also Jesus’s teachings on marriage and sex have been superseded and relegated to a past era of salvation history no longer relevant in the church age. This path has been advocated by the late biblical scholar Dan Via and by theologian Eugene Rogers. These two paths are not mutually exclusive but could be combined by the claim that personal experience contains spiritual revelation.

Hays and Hays appear to be open to both paths. Relating to path A, Christopher Hays observes in the first chapter: “This book upends . . . expectations” that “biblical studies and theology” should “serve as conservative counterweights to all our experience” in the church’s discernment. The authors repeat this point in the final chapter: “The evidence of experience outweighs the inertia of tradition and the force of a few biblical prooftexts on these questions.” Relating to path B, the authors write in the first chapter: 

Contrary to the common idea that the New Testament brings complete and final closure to God’s revelation, the New Testament itself promises that the Holy Spirit will continue to lead the community of Jesus’s followers into new and surprising truths. 

And they quote Rogers approvingly in the final chapter: “We must mine Scripture and tradition under the Spirit, who will rule new rules for us.” 

In support of path B, Hays and Hays cite Jesus’s statement to his disciples before his death: “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth” (John 16:12–13). Yet Jesus did not say or suggest that the Holy Spirit might lead the church into new truths that contradict Jesus’s own teachings. Instead, Jesus assured his disciples that the Holy Spirit “will testify on my behalf,” will “remind you of all that I have said to you,” and “will not speak on his own” but “will take what is mine and declare it to you” (John 14:26; 15:26; 16:13–14). All the truth into which the Holy Spirit will lead the church, therefore, will be true to all the teachings of Jesus as witnessed by the apostles in the Gospels.

Both paths A and B are fraught with substantial theological questions, especially concerning Jesus as Lord and Savior. Both paths are also marked with heretical historical associations, especially in connection to the Montanist movement of the patristic period (see Chapters 5 and 9 in Marriage, Scripture, and the Church). Neither path seems to me one of “right paths” in which the Great Shepherd has promised to lead his flock (Psalm 23:1–3).

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