Be not confused. The Widening of God’s Mercy is a call for a new religion to replace Biblical Christianity. What it calls for is not a revised vision of Christian morality. This is a call for complete theological surrender.

In case you haven’t caught on, here’s how the world now works. If you want major attention and applause from the cultural left and its influencers, offer a loud and apologetic shift to a more liberal position on an issue of cultural obsession—especially an issue related to LGBTQ priorities. If you have ever affirmed a Biblical vision of human sexuality, you had better apologize profusely. If you ever put your more Biblical convictions into print as a book, you better be ready with another book that explains your newfangled beliefs.

That is exactly what New Testament professor Richard B. Hays, for decades a major figure at Duke Divinity School, has done in the new book he has co-authored with his son Christopher B. Hays, an Old Testament professor at Fuller Theological Seminary. In The Widening of God’s Mercy, the father and son team now offer a call for the full inclusion of LGBTQ persons in the Church and its ministry. This book is sending shockwaves through the Christian community, precisely because a book released almost 30 years ago by the elder Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament, is one of the most-cited works of New Testament scholarship that presents a clear argument that the Bible condemns homosexual behaviors.

Back then, Hays argued that “the New Testament offers no loopholes or exception clauses that might allow for the acceptance of homosexual practices under some circumstances.” As he rightly noted, the New Testament “requires a normative evaluation of homosexual practice as a distortion of God’s order for creation.” As he wisely said then, the church must be ordered by “the univocal testimony of Scripture and the Christian tradition” on such issues. What was not so clear, even then, is that Richard Hays meant for now.

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