I’ve spent my life in politics, but faith has been most central to shaping who I am. My conversations with people of faith have been among the most enriching of my life. Richard Hays, an ordained minister who is an emeritus professor at Duke Divinity School, is one of the world’s leading New Testament theologians. In 1996 he wrote “The Moral Vision of the New Testament,” in which he argued that gay and lesbian sexual relationships distort God’s created order and that churches should not bless same-sex unions. In his new book, “The Widening of God’s Mercy,” written with his son Christopher Hays, Richard Hays says he was wrong. I spoke to Richard Hays about his journey and what changed his mind. This conversation, which has been lightly edited, is the first of what I hope will be a series exploring the world of faith.
1. A Different Way of Looking at How God Sees Gay Relationships
Peter Wehner: You now hold an affirming view, the belief that gay relationships are not sinful and that sexual orientation and gender identity are not justification for exclusion from church membership or leadership. You had a very different view in 1996 when you wrote “The Moral Vision of the New Testament.” What do you see now that you didn’t see in 1996, and what would Richard Hays circa 2024 say to his younger self?
Richard Hays: What I see now has been over the last 10 to 15 years, the experience of having gay and lesbian students in my classes, when I was still teaching, who were very clearly committed to the church and to Christian faith and who were seeking conscientiously how best to serve going forward. That couldn’t help but make an impression on me.
And the other thing closely related to that is that in my own experience in the church, I saw church members who were not theological students or anything like that but who were exercising roles of gracious and meaningful leadership.
The other thing that I’ve seen is that in the conservative evangelical churches, there was a kind of smug hostility toward gay and lesbian people, and the attitudes that I was encountering there didn’t seem to me consonant with the New Testament’s portrayal of what people seeking to follow Jesus should be like. That they should be patient, kind, generous. And I didn’t see that.
I saw ugly condescension in those churches where that was the strongly held view. And the most dismaying thing about that is that people who were manifesting those attitudes were appealing to my book as a justification, which I actually think means they didn’t read my book very carefully. Because back in 1996, at the time when gay marriage was illegal in the United States and forbidden in just about every church, with maybe one or two exceptions, I saw that chapter as, in part, making an appeal for people to be graciously accepting of gay folks.
I even wrote in that 1996 chapter that if gay people are not welcome in the church, then I will have to walk out the door with them and leave in the sanctuary only those entitled to throw the first stone. But I combined that with the opinion that if they’re going to be in the church, they should remain celibate. And I didn’t think that there was any warrant biblically for same-sex unions. But just over time, my opinion on that eroded.
So what would I say to myself from 1996? I would say, first of all, look around you and see the evidence of experience that the spirit is at work in people with a same-sex orientation. And second, I would say that the way I was appealing to the Bible or the way I was interpreting the Bible was too narrowly focused on the few texts in Scripture that do say something explicitly about homosexual relationships. The dictum in Leviticus is that for a man to lie with a man as with a woman is an abomination. And those texts had a certain impact on my opinion. But I think I was I was far too narrow in the way I thought about how the Bible speaks to issues like this.
What I came to think over time is that what the Bible shows is not some isolated proof texts or isolated statements of law, but it shows us a much bigger picture of God as a God who continually surprises us, continually surprises his people with the scope of generosity and grace and mercy. And that bigger picture is the context in which we ought to think about same-sex relationships in our time.
Wehner: Let me home in a little bit on the verses, because that’s obviously an important issue for a lot of people of faith. So in the past, in “The Moral Vision of the New Testament,” you seem to believe that Paul’s condemnation of homosexuality applied to all gay relationships. Is your view now that Paul’s condemnation of homosexuality excluded loving, monogamous gay relationships? Or do you think, as the theologian William Loader has argued, that to truly honor Scripture and respect Paul, we should respectfully acknowledge that we should see Paul’s understanding of human sexuality as no longer adequate, that the Christian faith does not commit us to first-century views about sexuality, which Paul and others assumed? To put it another way, do you think what Paul wrote about gay relationships was wrong, or do you think that many evangelical Christians today misunderstand what Paul was saying?
Hays: I think I would say that they don’t misunderstand what Paul wrote. I think Paul, as a faithful Jew who had been formed and well trained in the interpretation of Torah, thought that homosexual relationships were wrong, full stop. What he says in Romans 1, he rolls it out as an example of what happens in paganism, where people have not received the teachings that come from God. He thinks that it produces a distorted set of relationships. He sees homosexuality as evidence of the fallenness of human beings. It’s certainly not the only example.
And at the end of Romans 1, he gives a whole list of other behaviors that are evidence of God’s judgment, of people who don’t acknowledge the one God. So when you put the question the way you did, I would say that Paul was formed by his Jewish tradition to have an unqualified condemnation of homosexual activity. He, of course, had no notion of what we today call sexual orientation. He thought that homosexuality is simply a choice of rebellion against God. So in that sense, I think I would agree with the quote you gave from Loader that Paul’s understanding at that specific point is not adequate to what we would understand today.
And I would say that on other points as well. Paul, on the question of slavery, writes that slaves should obey their masters, and he doesn’t challenge the institution of slavery. He thinks that masters should be nice to their slaves. And he thinks that slaves should be obedient to the masters. And I think we would agree — most Christians, I hope, would agree — that that understanding of the institution of slavery is not an adequate one.
So this has big implications for how we think about how the Bible is authoritative. One of the most amazing passages in the New Testament is in First Corinthians seven. Paul brings up a question which apparently the Corinthians themselves have posed to him — two things, really, in 1 Corinthians 7. One is on the question of divorce. And he says to the married, “I give this command — not I, but the Lord: that the wife should not separate from her husband, and the husband should not divorce his wife.” And then he says, “I say — I and not the Lord: that if any believer has a wife who is an unbeliever and she consents to live with him, he should not divorce her.” So he quotes Jesus saying divorce is categorically forbidden and then immediately turns around and says: Well, however, in the present situation, here’s what I think, which is that it’s a frontal rejection or modification of what he cites as the teaching of Jesus.
And then as the thing goes on and he is talking about the unmarried, he says, “Now, concerning virgins, I have no command of the Lord, but I give my opinion as one who by the Lord’s mercy is trustworthy.” What does it mean to say that this is a text that we now as Christians say: Well, this is sacred Scripture? It’s in the Bible. And what he says in the Bible is: I don’t have a command of the Lord. I’ll tell you my opinion. And I think that creates a kind of freedom. It suggests a freedom for us to discern and engage in serious reflection when circumstances may have changed and we need to say something different.
Wehner: That’s helpful.
Hays: Peter, one other thing that I wanted to mention. In our book, we quote the theologian Karl Barth, who in the opening section of his massive “Church Dogmatics” says that the responsibility of theology is not to repeat what the apostles and prophets said but to say what we must say on the basis of the apostles and prophets. And that’s kind of a shocking thing, I think, for some Christians who haven’t thought as deeply about these matters as Barth has. But it seems to me to be a counsel of wisdom. What we have to say is on the basis of the apostles and prophets but we’re not simply parroting what they said.
Wehner: Let me ask you about God on this cluster of issues. Is it your view that in A.D. 30 and before, God did believe homosexuality was sinful and that he’s since changed his mind? And if so, would you say that God was wrong in the views that he held in A.D. 30 and during the time the Hebrew Scriptures were written and that God has since evolved into the correct view. Or do you have another understanding of God on this question?
Hays: Well, I certainly wouldn’t presume to say that I know better than God, that God was wrong. I think I would say that God had reasons for telling the children of Israel in the wilderness to observe a limitation of sexual relations to heterosexual relationships. And it was tied very much, I think, to the command, from the creation story in Genesis, that human beings are charged to be fruitful and multiply and in the perilous circumstances of life in the desert. Maybe God had very good reasons for promulgating such a law. I think it’s wrong to say that we can presume to say that God was simply wrong.
I don’t understand the purposes of God fully, but the way I understand it is filtered in part through the stories in the Book of Acts about how the church is impacted by the experience of seeing that the gentiles are given the gift of the Holy Spirit. And so even though there would have been previously a lot of restrictions in place about the ways in which Jewish people could or couldn’t have table fellowship with gentiles, a new thing was happening.
And Peter and Paul, along with the whole church, finally came to recognize that that was the case. So if my son Chris were in the interview — he’s fond of quoting the passage from Isaiah where the prophet, speaking in the persona of God, says: See, I’m doing a new thing. Do you not perceive it? And that’s the way I understand it. God is doing a new thing. And it’s beyond me to understand why things are different now. But that’s God’s prerogative. It’s not mine to judge one way or the other.
Wehner: Just a couple more questions, Richard, on this more narrow pathway and then we’ll go more broadly to the theological underpinning of the book. What would you say is the strongest argument against your position today? How would Richard Hays in 1996 have responded to the arguments of Richard Hays in 2024? What would he say you’ve gotten wrong in your analysis today?
Hays: You ask penetrating questions. I think the Richard Hays of 1996 would have said the argument that you’re making based on experience is presumptuous. The Bible’s testimony about homosexuality is just these few passages. It’s not a big concern, if I could put it that way, in the Bible. But there aren’t any contrasting exceptions. We have cases where there are internal conflicts between different witnesses, different texts in the Bible. That gives us latitude to make a judgment one way or the other. But you’ve moved out beyond the scope of biblical revelation to make these claims.
So I think that’s what Richard Hays would have said in 1996. And what I would say back is: Yeah, but the shape of the whole biblical story gives us a pattern, a pattern of grace that is played out again and again, where we see God’s mercy broadening in ways that were unforeseen in earlier experience of the people of God.
I said in “The Moral Vision of the New Testament” unequivocally that the task of making moral judgments is a task of metaphor making. It’s a task of seeing how the shape of the story unfolded in the past and how we see analogies to that in our contemporary experience. And I think that in “Moral Vision,” I didn’t adequately weigh that way of thinking about this particular issue.
Wehner: What would be the most important thing you would want to impart to those who hold the traditional view of human sexuality and homosexuality? What do you think they are missing and that they get wrong today?
Hays: Well, the first thing I would want to say is that I get it. I understand where you’re coming from. I understand why you hold the view that you do. What I don’t want to do is to try to convince you that those biblical condemnations of same-sex relationships don’t mean what they appear to mean. That’s a strategy that a lot of interpreters have tried to do. They say: Well, no, Paul isn’t really talking about what we know; he’s thinking of exploitative pederastic relationships. I don’t think that’s true. So I understand why people hold the view that they do.
I think the only thing I would say to them is to spend some time getting to know gay and lesbian Christians who are actively engaged in seeking to follow Christ faithfully and who are performing significant ministries in the church and then come back and let’s talk. I would also urge them to just read the book and think about the passages we discussed that provide these analogies for a change in the belief and practice of people in the church.
2. Does God Change His Mind?
Wehner: Well, that leads into a new set of questions. The central argument of “The Widening of God’s Mercy” is that God often changes his mind in Scripture. And you and your son Chris cite many examples of that happening in the book. Is it your view that God has gotten wiser and more merciful as history unfolds?
Hays: I wouldn’t put it that way. It would be presumptuous for me or anyone to say God has gotten wiser. I think the way I would put it is that for reasons that I don’t understand, God has chosen to act in ways that gradually, over time, unfold the wideness of mercy. And that over time, God reaches out to embrace more and more folks in the scope of the people that he regards as his own people.
Wehner: Traditionalists or orthodox Christians, Richard, would say that you’ve opened a theological Pandora’s box, that the changes you and your son want in terms of interpreting the Bible and changing doctrine and upending tradition is arbitrary. You might decide that God’s widening mercy now provides for full inclusion of L.G.B.T.Q. people in Christian communities, despite the verses that seem to argue the opposite. But what keeps people from constantly reinterpreting the Bible in order to fit whatever people decide at any moment in time falls under the banner of God’s widening mercy and overturning scriptural teachings in the process? I want to give you a chance to address that concern.
Hays: So is the concern there about the doctrine of divine immutability or is it a concern about the arbitrariness of interpretation?
Wehner: They would argue that it seems capricious and arbitrary, that there aren’t verses for you to link to per se to justify changing your view. You’re simply saying this falls under the banner of God’s mercy. But what are the guidelines? What are the parameters? What are the guardrails that keep people from saying: Well, this clearly falls under “If God was a wise and merciful God, he would surely believe X.” You happen to believe that applies to the issue of homosexuality. But what else? I think that would be a concern of people of the traditionalist view. So how would you address that?
Hays: Well, I think that anybody who’s proposing a change as momentous as what Chris and I are arguing for would recognize or should recognize that we’re doing this with fear and trembling, that we’re not doing it lightly. But our culture over time has advanced in a number of ways. For example, some of the Bible’s teachings about roles of women are terribly restrictive. So we’re saying this is not the only thing. Slavery is another one that I’ve already mentioned. There are a lot of things that we look at and say: Well, that was then; this is now. That there’s a new, I would put it — I presume to put it as strongly as this — that there’s a new movement of God’s spirit in the world in our time and that we need to recognize where that is happening, in just the same way that the first-century church understood that a new thing was happening with the inclusion of gentiles.
And this is of no less magnitude, really, than that as a change. I think people in modernity tend to underestimate how momentous the change was for Jewish people to say: OK, gentiles can come be part of our Jesus community. That was a shocker. And for them, table fellowship was as critical a taboo area as sex is for some people in our time. In a sense, I can say it took me 25 years to come to the position I have now. So I certainly don’t propose this lightly.
One of the texts that I write about in the book is where Peter is summoned to go to a meeting with a gentile centurion. And he goes, and he starts his meeting with the unpropitious words that it’s unlawful for a Jew to associate with a gentile. But then he says: Well, God has sent me. God has told me to go and tell you about Jesus. And so he does. The spirit falls on the assembled people. And Peter says: Wow, you know, I didn’t expect that. But then when he goes back and talks to his fellow believers back in Jerusalem, he says: Who was I to block God? Who was I to block God when the spirit is poured out on them? I think that’s an extraordinarily interesting instance of what I was describing as metaphor making. I think that for me, I can only say for me and I think for Chris, we see what’s happening with gay and lesbian people, and we say: Who are we to block God?
Wehner: I want to circle back to the issue of the immutability of God. Why do you think the idea of God changing his mind, that God is mutable rather than immutable, is anathema to so many Christians? What would you say to reassure those who believe that you’re attacking a fundamental attribute of God?
Hays: Well, again, some of the people who would say that have proof texts. Hebrews 13 says Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever. So they read that verse and they say: Case closed. And there are other passages, in the opening page of our book, which was written by Chris, that really powerfully poses the issue where the prophet Samuel is talking to Saul. Saul is sort of begging Samuel to intercede for Saul’s rejection as king to be changed, and Samuel says the glory of Israel does not recant or change his mind: “He is not a mortal, that he should change his mind.” Chris says that if it were an internet chat board, it would be in all caps. But it’s also a lie. How do we know? Because God said so in the very same chapter. He says: I regret that I made Saul king. And Chris has, in the Old Testament material, more interesting and better examples of that than I can offer in the New Testament.
But there’s a whole tradition, actually, among the rabbis in debating this question of whether God is like a man and can change his mind or whether God isn’t. Then the other thing, of course, is that the church’s later tradition of systematic theology operates with a conception of God as unchangeable. And it gets rooted in the church’s hymns occasionally, but I just think it’s problematic. I think that the idea that the concept of God as beyond change is something that is refuted repeatedly in the Bible. We do see God as a dynamic personal entity or force or however you want to understand who God is. Repeatedly, there are changes, modifications, adaptations of the way that God is relating to human beings. And I know that that claim is pretty explosive to some people. But what Chris and I keep doing is saying: Look at the text. Look at the examples we can find.
Wehner: In a way, I suppose from your perspective, it must be ironic that people who claim to believe the Bible is inerrant and read the text so closely don’t really wrestle with or, in some respects, reject the text that you mentioned, presumably because they consider it a threat to some deep core belief about God.
Hays: Right.
Wehner: I’ll ask one more question on the theology and then a couple of questions just about your own journey of faith. It’s a two-part question, so hear me out. In “The Widening of God’s Mercy,” you ask the question, Does the authority of present experience eclipse the authority of Paul’s understanding of God’s intention for human sexual relationships? The way one reviewer put it is that you conclude, “The only way to endorse same-sex sexual relationships in the church today is by prioritizing experience over the authority of Scripture and tradition.” Is that a fair assessment? And then I’ll ask the second part. Beyond that, it certainly seems to me that for you today, human experience and in this case, knowing gay people whom you respect and consider faithful Christians has played a key role in reshaping your theological understanding. If that is right, can you dilate on how you have come to think about human experience as an influence on understanding the teachings of the Bible? Do you at times prioritize it over the authority of Scripture?
Hays: Well, first of all, I would say that it’s a misreading of our book to say that we’re prioritizing experience over Scripture. What we’re really trying to do is read Scripture attentively and see how it provides precedents, patterns, examples of a different judgment on the question of human sexuality. The move that we’re proposing is not one that is made in the Bible per se, but the Bible tells us stories in which we repeatedly see human beings adjusting and modifying their understanding of what God requires, based on new manifestations of God’s grace, however those may be understood.
So we’re not at all rejecting the authority of the Bible; we’re proposing a different model for how the Bible is authoritative. This is a very important point, Peter. I think that many people are going to think what you just read out, but that’s not the case at all. In my own tradition as a United Methodist, there’s long been a way of thinking about theological judgments that’s called the Wesleyan quadrilateral. That gives weight to Scripture, tradition, experience and reason.
A lot of people would actually address the sexuality question on grounds of what they would call reason. They would say scientific studies have shown that people’s sexual orientation is oddly immutable, that the attempts to promote conversion therapy of sexual orientation have been disastrous and unsuccessful. When I talk about experience, I’m thinking more about the positive experience of the ministries of gay people in the church. The quadrilateral certainly gives Scripture primacy as a ground for judgment, but it also tries to take into account what we know scientifically or through experience or through the church’s tradition. And certainly the church’s tradition on this point is different from what we’re now advocating. So it’s not that we’re giving more weight to experience. It’s that we’re trying to give due weight to experience, as part of this ongoing pattern of the way that God’s mercy — and kindness — is infinitely expansive.
3. The Role of Faith in Your Life
Wehner: Two final questions, more to do with the role of faith in your life. You were diagnosed in 2015 with pancreatic cancer. You, thankfully, lived longer with it than many people and perhaps than you had thought. I wonder if you could share with me and with readers more broadly the role faith played as you processed that diagnosis. Was it any source of comfort? Do you think you processed it differently from if you were not a person of faith? And if so, in what ways?
Hays: Yes, I think I did process it differently. When I was first diagnosed, as you said, in 2015 with pancreatic cancer, a physician friend of mine came to visit our house and talk with us about it. And it was midsummer at the time; it was July. And he said to me: Well, you should know, and you should plan accordingly, that you could be dead by Christmas. And that was a wake-up call for my wife, Judy, and me. But we realized as we went into that whole process — the whole round of chemotherapy and radiation and surgery — that my future was very uncertain, and it produced a great deal of grief for me. There were times, I don’t mind saying, when I would just sob uncontrollably at the thought of losing my life, of not being able to see my grandkids grow up. It was all just nearly overwhelming.
But one of the things that Judy and I did at that period was to start reading Psalms together every night. After dinner, we would sit down and read a Psalm. And that was a really powerful and eye-opening experience that I think is shared probably by many Jews and Christians. The psalmist cries out to God: Why are you letting this happen? But so many of the Psalms go through that recitation of grief and end up on a note of praise. It’s an amazing pattern.
And what I came to think then was that the metaphor that we hear so often of battling cancer is not really appropriate. There’s a sense in which I can’t battle cancer. I can’t make it go away. I can go through this medical treatment. But whether it’s the medical treatments or crying out to God for help, what I’m doing is not fighting with a clenched fist. What I’m doing is opening my hands to receive whatever God has for me. And that was such a liberating recognition for me.
One reason I don’t like the battling cancer metaphor is that anybody who has cancer and then dies has lost the battle in terms of that metaphor. And I don’t think that’s the way that Christians, at least, ought to think about it. We ought to think that we are given every day by the sheer grace of God. In Psalm 118 there’s the acclamation, “This is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it.” So I moved through the grief into a mind-set of opening my hands to God. And then as it happened, the whole surgery process was successful. I went back and taught one more semester in the divinity school because I wanted to have a last go at it. And then I retired.
Two years ago, summer of 2022, I was diagnosed with a recurrence of the cancer — they had cut out half of my pancreas in 2015, and then they had to go back and take out the other half. Then I was fine for several months. But now I’ve had a scan that shows metastases in my lungs. So I’m back where I was in 2015. You know, oddly, at the moment, I feel fine. But once you get the metastases appearing, that can go badly.
All of that is not unrelated to this book. Chris and I had been talking about this book for three or four years before we finally wrote it. But I was mindful of my own legacy as a scholar and teacher. I didn’t want what I had written in 1996 to be my last word on the subject. And I don’t think that changing my mind is a bad thing. Paul writes in Romans 12, “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” And so this whole process of repentance and changing one’s mind is deeply ingrained in the picture of Christian life that we get in the Bible. I readily claim that, as I do in the epilogue of the book.
Wehner: That was a beautiful set of reflections. Thank you. Last question: If you had never become a Christian, what would you say are the most important ways in which you’re a different person besides, obviously, from you having had a different vocation? To put it another way, how would Richard Hays be different if you had never become a follower of Jesus?
Hays: When I asked my wife, Judy, to marry me almost 55 years ago now — Judy is a strong-minded person, and she didn’t say yes immediately — she said: What will it be like? What are you going to do with your life? So I’m 21 years old at the time, and I said: Well, one of two things. Either I’m going to become a preacher or a rock ’n’ roll star. And I actually think if I hadn’t developed the sense of vocation to be a minister of the Gospel and a teacher, I think I probably might have tried to pursue a life in music. Music moves me deeply. I’ve long played the guitar. The rock ’n’ roll star was not just pulled out of the air. In retrospect, I think being a rock star would have been a bad idea. I don’t think that’s a very healthy lifestyle, but, no, I’m sure I would be different in many ways.
I like to think that for people who are Christians, we find ourselves embodying what Paul calls the fruit of the spirit. A life lived with peace and patience and generosity. And one of the things that’s most troubling to me in our contemporary American political life is that so many Christians who ardently proclaim themselves Christians so grievously fail to embody those qualities and support political leaders who fail utterly to embody those qualities. So that’s a side note, but I think I would have been a much more arrogant person, if I could put it that way. I think I would have thought, “Yeah, well, I’m smarter than everybody else, and so people ought to just get in line and do what I say.” I really think that that has been significantly tempered for me by seeking to live as a disciple of Jesus.
Wehner: You’ve been such a significant figure, scholarly and otherwise, in faith. What’s the short version of your journey to faith? How did you come to fall in love with Jesus? Was it intellectual, or was it more aesthetic? What brought you to a place where you came to fall in love with Jesus?
Hays: I grew up in the church. My mother was a church organist. And when I was very little, I would go and hang around and listen while the choir was rehearsing. So I grew up with that. And I went to an Episcopal day school at the secondary level where there was daily chapel. So I had a lot of Scripture and hymns and things that were very much embedded in my memory and awareness.
But by the time I was finished with high school, I was very disillusioned with my experience in the church. I thought, “People are not living what they profess. And I just think it’s dumb.” When I went to Yale, I started out thinking I might be a philosophy major, but I gravitated more to literature, so I was an English major. And when I was at Yale, one of the powerful influences in those days was the chaplain, William Sloane Coffin, who was a leader in both the civil rights movement and in opposing the Vietnam War.
Listening to him preach had a big impact on me. I’m thinking, “Oh, well, this is different from the kind of lowest-common-denominator Christianity that I experienced in the church growing up.” And there was not a thought-out process, but I gradually came to the point where I had an experience where I felt the presence of God and felt that I needed to turn my life over to God and to stop trying to think I could outthink everybody and construct my own worldview apart from the church in this tradition.
There was a specific moment, actually, that I can point to, where I was sitting in a church, a darkened church before Christmas Eve service, and there was a pew Bible, and I picked it up, reading at random, like St. Augustine, I guess. I opened it up, and the passage that my eyes fell on was from Mark 8: “Whoever tries to save his own life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” And — bang — that hit me right in the chest. And so that was a beginning point, a long-ago beginning point.
Wehner: That’s lovely. Thanks, Richard, for your time, and thanks for sharing your insights and part of your life story, which I think will be meaningful to a lot of people. It was to me.
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