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A book recently published by Yale University Press and much hyped by the media for promoting a “biblical” case for homosexual unions falls woefully short: The Widening of God’s Mercy, by Christopher and Richard Hays, has been hyped by Religion News Service, CNN, and The New York Times. It generated attention because Richard, professor emeritus at Duke Divinity School, was regarded in the 1990s as the main go-to person for Evangelicals seeking to defend Scripture’s opposition to homosexual relationships. His co-author and son, Christopher, is chair of the Old Testament Department at Fuller Seminary, supposedly an Evangelical institution.

Their thesis is that “the biblical narratives … trace a trajectory of mercy that leads us to welcome sexual minorities.” They see this as a Spirit-driven move, a new chapter in an “ongoing story,” where “God repeatedly changes his mind” to “widen” or “expand” “the scope of his mercy” to once-excluded “fixed classes of human beings.” “There is a powerful analogy, a metaphorical correspondence, between the embrace of LGBTQ people and God’s previously unexpected embrace of foreigners, eunuchs, ‘tax collectors and sinners,’ gentiles.”

Not Living Up to the Hype

The authors fail to provide a credible defense of their thesis. They ignore virtually all the weight of scholarship since 1996, when Richard Hays’ Moral Vision of the New Testament was published. They also intentionally ignore discussion of the most important biblical texts that counter their claims. I would expect more from an undergraduate thesis.

There are 12 key areas where this failure to acquaint themselves with the scholarly literature becomes most problematic:

1. Ignoring the Key Jesus Sex Text

They ignore the key Jesus sex text in Mark 10:2-12 (parallel Matt 19:3-9) that establishes a male-female requirement for marriage as foundational for biblical sexual ethics. When Jesus cites therein Gen 1:27 (“male and female [God] created them”) and 2:24 (“For this reason a man … may be joined to his woman and the two will become one flesh”), the reference to two sexes in marriage is not incidental to Jesus’ overarching point. It is the foundation for his conclusion.

According to Jesus’ moral logic, God’s intentional creation of two primary sexes is the basis for limiting the number of persons in a sexual union to two, whether concurrently (no polygamy) or serially (no remarriage after invalid divorce). For Jesus, the twoness of number for a sexual bond was predicated on the twoness of the sexes. Once the two halves of the sexual spectrum are united to form an integrated sexual whole (“one flesh”), a third party or more is neither necessary nor desirable.

We know this was Jesus’ moral logic because a group of sectarian Jews known as the Essenes (think Dead Sea Scrolls) cited the same one-third of Gen 1:27 more than a century before Jesus to prohibit polygyny among their members. They rejected “taking two wives in their lives” because “the foundation of creation is ‘male and female he created them’ [Gen 1:27]” (Damascus Covenant 4.20-5.1).

By such moral logic, homosexual unions are automatically precluded as the only form of sexual behavior that attacks the male-female foundation of sexual ethics directly and, by implication, all sexual standards built on that foundation, including monogamy. God hasn’t “changed his mind” about the foundation of sexual ethics promulgated at creation and enunciated by our Lord Jesus. The Hayses have.

2. Confusing Infrequency of Mention with Insignificance

They adopt a puerile principle of interpretation that the infrequency of biblical mention regarding homosexual practice equates with relative insignificance. Infrequency of mention for sexual offenses can indicate that the offense is severe — so severe that it is scandalous even to mention, let alone commit (Ephesians 5:3-12). Surely the Hayses would not contend that incest, mentioned only once in the New Testament (1 Corinthians 5) and bestiality (no New Testament mentions) are minor sins.

Moreover, while explicit biblical mentions of homosexual practice may be limited, every text in the Bible involving sexual ethics presupposes a male-female prerequisite. These are two sides of the same coin. Able historians know that ancient Israel and early Christianity viewed homosexual practice as a particularly heinous offense to God. In denying this, the Hayses isolate Scripture from historical communities.

3. Ignorance of Committed Homosexual Relationships in Antiquity

They assume that biblical prohibitions of homosexual sex “do not envisage covenanted same-sex partnerships as we know them today.” Yet they are “envisaged” and rejected within an absolute, no-exception prohibition of homosexual practice, coupled with a male-female prerequisite for sex, in both Testaments. Moreover, the ancient world was acquainted with the idea and practice of committed same-sex relationships.

For example, already in Plato’s Symposium (ca. 380 B.C.) one finds expressions of committed same-sex love. Lovers who love rightly “are prepared to love in the expectation that they will be with them all their life and will share their lives in common,” “as if having been fused into a single entity with” the soul of the beloved. From the first century A.D. on, we have texts speaking of semi-official marriages between males and even between females, known to Church fathers and rabbis who still rejected such as “contrary to nature.”

4. Ignorance of Orientation Theories in Antiquity

They wrongly assume that biblical writers, including Paul, had no awareness of sexual orientation. As it happens, theories circulated in the Greco-Roman milieu of the New Testament that posited a congenital basis for some homosexual attraction. Again, already in Plato’s Symposium we read of men who “are not inclined by nature toward marriage and the procreation of children but are compelled to do so by the law or custom,” with the result that two joined males have to “live their lives out with one another unmarried.” Theories for homosexual orientation included a particular mix of male and female “sperm” elements at conception and an inherited disease analogous to a mutated gene.

Note that some Greco-Roman moralists, while conceding that some homosexual attraction is so “by nature,” still referred to the behavior as “contrary to nature” — produced by defects in nature that do not accord with the natural design and function of male-female bodies. They operated with a notion of anatomical and physiological complementarity between the sexes.

There is no chance that Paul, who viewed sin itself as an innate impulse, passed on by an ancestor, circulating in bodily members, and never entirely within human control, would have overridden the biblical indictment of homosexual practice for those who have an innate homosexual orientation.

5. Dishonest Application of Analogical Reasoning

They dishonestly apply analogies to the Bible’s indictment of homosexual practice, favoring remote analogues (Gentile inclusion, slavery, women’s roles) over proximate analogues (incest, polyamory) that do not get them to their desired ideological destination.

6. Missing the Point of Jesus’ Outreach to ‘Tax Collectors and Sinners’

In citing Jesus’ outreach to Jewish “tax collectors and (sexual) sinners” as an analogy favoring “the full inclusion of sexual minorities,” they fail to acknowledge the obvious point that (as with outreach to Gentiles) this outreach was predicated on a call to repentance from the very sins that led to their initial exclusion in the first place.

7. Distorting What God ‘Changes His Mind’ About

They fail to recognize that the biblical theme of God “changing his mind” nowhere entails a radical loosening of God’s moral standards. It primarily entails God extending unfathomable kindness that is supposed to lead people to repentance from sins (Romans 2:4).

8. Missing that Eunuchs Were Not a Willing ‘Sexual Minority’

They cite the inclusion of eunuchs over time (Isaiah 56:3-5; Acts 8:26-40) as an important analogue for including homosexually active persons, while ignoring the obvious difference that Israelite eunuchs were not a willing “sexual minority” but rather had a portion of their masculinity forcibly taken from them.

9. Not Realizing that the Jerusalem Conference Is an Anti-Model for Their Position

They cite the Jerusalem Conference in Acts 15, organized to resolve the question of whether Gentile male converts should be circumcised, as “a model” for changing the church’s stance on homosexuality. However, they distort a critical step of the model: reexamining Scripture with new eyes to see if an alleged new work of the Spirit can be validated directly from God’s word. Richard used to know this but has now loosened the requirement to “an imaginative reinterpretation of scripture … derived by analogical inference” (p. 184). I concede that the Hayses’ “reinterpretation of scripture” is “imaginative” (but not “faithful”) and “derived by analogical inference” (but not honest).

What the Hayses advocate is not a mere extension of the principles of the Jerusalem Conference. They absurdly equate a change that had ample Old Testament precedent (Gentile inclusion) with a change vigorously opposed by both Testaments of Scripture (acceptance of homosexual practice). They advocate not just for a loosening of ritual law but an eradication of the foundation for sexual ethics despite the Conference’s insistence that Gentiles abstain from sexual immorality (including homosexual practice). They confuse welcoming people with accepting their immoral sexual behavior. It is a bridge too far.

10. Not an Agree-to-Disagree Romans 14 Issue

They wrongly state that Paul’s position in Romans 14 on unity in the face of disagreements over diet and calendar is “a helpful model” for showing “forbearance toward those with whom we disagree” about homosexual practice. Paul’s remarks apply only to matters of indifference and not to matters over which inheritance of eternal life in the kingdom of God is at stake. Their interpretation makes Paul out to be a “weak” believer for holding allegedly false scruples against homosexual practice. The relevant text for churches struggling with homosexually active members is not Romans 14 but 1 Corinthians 5: the case of the incestuous man.

11. Using God’s ‘Ever-Widening Mercy’ to Eviscerate Christian Sexual Ethics

Their view of the Bible as the story of God’s “ever-widening” mercy overlooks key parts of the biblical story that put guard rails on this “widening.” They ignore the intensified ethical demand of Judaism and Christianity that arises from the insistence on worship of one God, including the more rigorous standard for sexual ethics.

The Hayses allege that Christians who do not jump on the bandwagon of LGBT approval are missing the forest for the trees. The truth is that the Hayses, by abandoning Jesus’ male-female foundation for sexual ethics, are burning down a major part of the forest.

12. Prioritizing Experience over Scripture, Including Jesus

The Hayses repeatedly deny in their book that they are rejecting biblical authority; for example, “The inclusion of sexual minorities is not a rejection of the Bible’s message but a fuller embrace of its story of God’s expansive mercy.”

The denial doesn’t fly. The “big picture” of Scripture includes (per Jesus) a male-female foundation for sexual ethics. The Hayses’ attempt to compare God’s alleged new embrace of “sexual minorities” to the extension of God’s grace and mercy to “tax collectors and (sexual) sinners” and ultimately to Gentiles totally ignores the theme of repentance from the very sins that led to their exclusion. The Hayses further rig the game and cheat the system by dishonestly ignoring the closest analogues to the Bible’s rejection of homosexual practice (incest and polyamory) while highlighting distant analogues (slavery, women’s roles).

There is no question that they adopt what I call an “inverted revisionist hermeneutical scale” where, instead of Scripture (preeminently Christ) being at the top and experience being at the bottom, they put their own experience at the top and Scripture dead last. Time and again, they appeal to their “positive experience of the ministries of gay people in the church” as the basis for changing their view. They then go back to Scripture to find a way to force their conclusion on Scripture. That is why their whole program comes across as forced, inconsistent, and unconvincing.

Robert A. J. Gagnon is a visiting scholar at Wesley Biblical Seminary and the author of “The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics.”