The very idea that humans are made in the image of God is rendered vacuous. (Gen. 1:27: “God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.”) Affirmation of sodomy entails the hermeneutical unmaking of the created order. This is why Paul singles it out in Romans 1 as the condensed symbol for the rejection of God’s sovereignty. Sodomy is symbolic decreation.

It’s hard to overstate the influence of Richard Hays’s 1996 book The Moral Vision of the New Testament on a generation of Christian ethical reflection. Rarely is academic theology so lucid and compelling. Hays’s book quickly became required reading in many seminaries and attracted a surprisingly wide lay readership. It achieves for biblical exegesis and hermeneutics, what Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book achieved for the everyday reading of literature. It was a seminal text for me personally, even coming to it with several years of exegetical training under my belt. Its elucidation of the role of metaphor-making in interpretation put language to instincts I’d already developed and permanently sharpened my reading.

“Whenever we appeal to the authority of the New Testament,” writes Hays, “we are necessarily engaged in metaphor-making, placing our community’s life imaginatively within the world articulated by the texts” (MV 299). To understand the metaphor “is to stand under its authority, to allow our life and perception of reality to be changed in the light of the ‘ontological flash’ created by the metaphorical conjunction, so that we confess with Peter, ‘Lord, to whom [else] can we go? You have the words of eternal life’ (John 6:68)” (MV 301).

Hays’s book is most famous (or infamous) for its explication of the New Testament’s “unqualified disapproval” of homosexuality. It has been an indispensable resource for orthodox believers seeking to remain faithful to the biblical text—and an obstacle to progressives who seek to twist Scripture into alien shapes. That a scholar of Hays’s stature had written the classic defense of the orthodox position was for decades a rhetorical and pedagogical boon.

Now, in his 76th year, Hays has had a change of heart. In a new book, The Widening of God’s Mercy, Hays renounces his position in Moral Vision and advocates for full inclusion in the church, not just of practicing homosexuals, but of the entire LGBTQ+ panoply. He even offers a mea culpa: 

Many traditionalists and conservatives have seized upon that one chapter as the final word, as a cover for exclusionary attitudes and practices wrapped in more ‘compassionate’ packaging. I fear that the rhetoric of my chapter left itself open to such uses. I acknowledge that I bear responsibility for the pain such developments have caused to many believers who belong to sexual minorities. And for that I am deeply sorry.

Progressives are already crowing. “Conservative Christians just lost their scholarly trump card on same-sex relationships,” declares the National Catholic Reporter. Needless to say, this about-face is a significant betrayal—one that threatens to lead many astray. 

Co-authored with his son Christopher, an Old Testament professor at Fuller Theological Seminary, The Widening of God’s Mercy argues a simple thesis: because the scope of God’s grace is ever-expanding in the biblical story, it must also include “[t]hose who do not conform to traditional expectations for sexual orientation.” If the church would only listen to the “lived experience” of faithful gays and lesbians, the authors contend, it would recognize “the ways in which the Spirit may be at work to expand our vision.”

The claim that God’s grace expands to include those formerly outside the covenant community is uncontroversial, and the Hayses demonstrate the narrative pattern ably enough. But they make virtually no effort to show that the pattern can be coherently employed to “re-vision” particular sins as no longer sinful. Sodomites (qua sodomites) are simply presumed to be analogous to Gentiles (qua Gentiles). As a result, their book is a tendentious exercise in question-begging non sequitur.

It’s always dispiriting to see one’s intellectual heroes fall, but I had hoped at least to discover in the Hayses’s book an argument worth contending with. Alas, The Widening of God’s Mercy is embarrassing even for a work of eisegetical sophistry. “We are setting aside theoretical and methodological reflections for another day,” write the authors in the Introduction, “and we think the book is basically self-explanatory: It is written by and for people who think it matters what the Bible says, and who believe that the best way to do it justice is to read it carefully.” This eschewing of hermeneutical due diligence amounts to strategic intellectual cowardice: because their thesis is merely presumed, never defended, they must maintain the illusion that to prove their case they need only to show that God’s grace expands inexorably; identifying, let alone examining, their interpretive assumptions would break the spell.

Readers unfamiliar with Richard Hays’s earlier work can be forgiven for mistaking deceit for honest ignorance. But those who have read Moral Vision know that Hays is now implicitly rejecting sound methods he spent a long career refining. For example, Hays writes in Moral Vision that “Our interpretation of ‘biblical principles’ must be constrained and instructed by the way in which the New Testament writers themselves applied these principles” (MV 395). This constraint applies also to biblical paradigms. In Widening, both Hayses shirk the constraint with impunity, transforming God’s mercy into a universal solvent that renders the biblical text superfluous.

Even worse, Hays refuted Widening’s argument in Moral Vision, and refuted it definitively. In response to Luke Timothy Johnson’s argument that homosexuals in the twentieth century are analogous to the “unclean” Gentiles of the first century who were drawn into fellowship, Hays argues that the New Testament treats of homosexuality in “the mode of symbolic world construction,” which must consequently be our mode of hermeneutical appropriation. 

Romans 1 presents, as we have seen, a portrayal of humankind in rebellion against God and consequently plunged into depravity and confusion. In the course of that portrayal, homosexual activities are—explicitly and without qualification—identified as symptomatic of that tragically confused rebellion. To take the New Testament as authoritative in the mode in which it speaks is to accept this portrayal as ‘revealed reality,’ and authoritative disclosure of the truth about the human condition. Understood in this way, the text requires a normative evaluation of homosexual practice as a distortion of God’s order for creation. (MV 396)

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