This is what is supposed to be the great pushback against the orthodox witness? It is extremely disappointing as a challenge. Even term papers at seminary (hey, even for an undergraduate college) have to treat the counterarguments and some of the scholarship against the position one is espousing. This doesn’t even rise to that level. They clearly don’t want readers to know about the massive arguments against their espoused view. Shocking for scholars.

I have just received for review an advance copy of the book that is supposed to rock the orthodox position on homosexual practice and transgenderism: Christopher and Richard Hays, The Widening of God’s Mercy: Sexuality Within the Biblical Story (Yale University Press, scheduled for public release early September). After scanning it for a few hours, I can already say that it doesn’t live up to the press build-up that it has received from “Christian” promoters of “LGBTQ+” immorality.

Remarkably, they don’t interact with virtually any scholar who has written significantly on the topic, on either side: Not me, or even Sprinkle, or even William Loader, Martti Nissinen, and Bernadette Brooten on their own side. It is as if virtually nothing was published since Richard Hays’ *Moral Vision of the New Testament* over a quarter of a century ago (1996). There is a passing mention to Eugene Rogers, a gay revisionist theologian, to Jeff Siker, a revisionist NT scholar, to Luke Timothy Johnson (ditto), and that’s about it.

They don’t treat any of the biblical texts that establish a foundational male-female prerequisite for sexual ethics. They don’t interact with Jesus’ divorce texts that establish a God-ordained sexual binary as a basis for limiting the number of partners to two (except to mention in a single clause that Jesus prohibited divorce which we don’t follow today). Indeed, they don’t even mention Gen and -24 specifically, let alone treat the implications of Gen and -24 for ruling out homosexual practice. They don’t treat the Levitical prohibitions, Romans -27 (mentioned only in a half sentence), 1 Corinthians 6:9, 1 Timothy, let alone the constellation of Sodom related texts and the deuteronomistic “shrine guys,” inter alia. They latch onto the Apostolic Conference in Acts 15, and misinterpret that.

Nor do appear to deal with the multiple counterarguments that have been raised for years regarding their revisionist position. I have written hundreds of pages over the years (including 145 pages in *The Bible and Homosexual Practice*) refuting hermeneutical revisionist arguments for discounting the biblical witness (refuting the exploitation, orientation, and misogyny arguments for example, as well as the use of analogies like slavery, women’s roles, and divorce). There is no response to any of this.

This is what is supposed to be the great pushback against the orthodox witness? It is extremely disappointing as a challenge. Even term papers at seminary (hey, even for an undergraduate college) have to treat the counterarguments and some of the scholarship against the position one is espousing. This doesn’t even rise to that level. They clearly don’t want readers to know about the massive arguments against their espoused view. Shocking for scholars.

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