On the new Hays & Hays book

Thy compassions, they fail not

Fellow Pilgrims,

There’s a lot of buzz about The Widening of God’s Mercy: Sexuality Within the Biblical Story, by Christopher B. Hays and Richard B. Hays. I’m here to express my appreciation for Hays and Hays for continuing to draw our attention to the rich and beautiful story of God’s mercy. And I’m here to complain about a thing in the book I find baffling and deeply problematic.

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Charles Sharp, Panther Chameleon, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Widening of God’s Mercy is by father/son team, Christopher and Richard Hays (I’m going to refer to them as CH and RH). I don’t know CH, who works in Old Testament studies, and I’m not familiar with his other work. RH, whose work is in New Testament, was my professor in seminary, and I have the greatest respect for him as a biblical scholar, a Christian, and a human being. Listening to RH lecture on the gospels—bringing to them the love of language of an English teacher turned Bible professor—changed my life and opened those texts to me in profound ways.

The Widening of God’s Mercy is a weird book. It’s weird because, while it’s about sexuality, it talks very little about sexuality. It’s a weird insider conversation — insider to theological studies, CH talks to Fuller, RH to Duke, both to their students and even to their family members — held on a public stage.

And it’s a weird book, because it puts enormous focus on a very problematic premise which—and I find this maddening, friends— the authors don’t even need to advance their thesis. This is the weirdness that has me up in arms.

That premise is that God changes God’s mind. CH, in particular, makes much of this in his narration of the Old Testament story, and—I’m just going to say it—the idea that God is an anthropomorphic god who changes with the wind has heavily infected Old Testament studies in recent decades.

CH draws on biblical stories which speak of God changing: God regretting making Saul king, interactions between God and Abraham, God and Moses, etc. The stories are well known; I don’t need to retell them.

I found myself repeatedly shocked by the wooden literalism of the readings of these texts, a literalism which would deny God’s eternal nature, the difference between God and creation, and—most horrifically—the truth of God’s goodness. CH writes of a God who does bad things and has to learn better. He writes of a God who needs correction from humans, a God to whom we 21st century folk are morally superior. Against this, the scriptures introduce us to a God who IS GOOD, full stop. God is good and always has been good. God is unchanging love. The wideness of God’s mercy was and is and is to come.

Says CH:

God repeatedly changes his mind in ways that expand the sphere of his love, preserve his relationship with humankind, and protect and show mercy toward them.

What could that possibly mean? Why would we worship a God who is so much less than us that he needs, according to CH, us (or Abraham, or Moses) to be his conscience? Why would we worship a God who is not fundamentally good?

I’m not denying that the Bible says things like “the Lord regretted.” I’m denying that we should read those words as though “regretted” when said of God means the exact same thing as “regretted,” when said of human beings. I’m denying that God is the same as human beings and that divine regret is the same as human regret. I doubt that Hays and Hays would read the text and Genesis and say; “so, it’s obvious that God created the world in seven 24-hour days,” but that is exactly the sort of reading of God’s character we get in The Widening of God’s Mercy. It’s baffling.

This reading of the texts ignores genre, and theology, as if the biblical accounts were articles in a newspaper. It ignores literary device and the way texts work. The idea that the scriptures straightforwardly say that God changes ignores the fact that the scriptures are God’s gift to us, as human beings with limits, who can only understand God on analogies to human understanding. It forgets that the scriptures are gifted to us in context, and they speak in ways that work for and in context. It denies that the scriptures are, in part, testimony to how human beings understand God and to how God accommodates the eternal to human understanding. This doesn’t make the scriptures any less true; it makes them more true that if we give an “aww-shucks, the Bible just says it, obviously,” reading.

As CH says, language like “the Lord regretted” is there in scritpure, alongside language like “the word of our God will stand forever” (Isaiah 40:8). For CH the first kind of language (change language) shows the second kind (eternity language) to be a lie.

This is not a traditionally Christian way of interpreting scripture. Instead, the great history of interpretation has said something like, “here is what looks like a contradiction, but this is scripture, so there must be a way to hold these things together.” CH dismisses the idea that the two things might both be true and simply opts for the truth of one thing over and against the other. The theological tradition has looked for ways to see the truth of both things. CH does not explain why he assumes that change language trumps eternity language.

The main way the tradition has held change language together with eternity language is by remembering that all human language for God, including biblical language, is analogical. If God is truly God, we cannot capture God fully in our words. Our words for God are analogies, not obvious and wooden facts. I invite you (implore you?) to read my three part series: analogy school (one of my favorite things I’ve written here at Church Blogmatics). It’s an introduction to the way theological language works, but there are also cats and marshmallows. You know, to make it fun. I hope it will make it clear why assuming that “God regrets” means the same thing as “Beth regrets” is a grave error.

The Hays and Hays book says,

“in many cases clear biblical rulings and laws have been set aside by Christians—for example, laws allowing the ownership of slaves or instructions that women should wear head coverings.

I object. Christian faith is not abolitionist and feminist because it has decided to set aside the biblical text. Christian faith is abolitionist and feminist because it has followed the trajectory of the biblical text. Change in context does not equal change in God.

Old Testament scholar Ellen Davis speaks of “critical traditioning,” a process she identifies within scripture, in which the tradition wrestles with itself in order to speak in new contexts. I agree with Hays and Hays that context can call for tradition to be imagined anew; the Christian tradition doesn’t always agree with itself, and the process of adjudicating competing claims within the tradition happens in conversation between those very claims. But claims which need to be reworked are not dropped; they are imagined anew in light of greater faithfulness to the unchanging truth of God’s goodness and love.

CH and RH tell a story of the miraculous and surprising wideness of God’s mercy; it’s is a beautiful story, and they don’t need a changing God to tell it. We can be surprised with God without God being surprised. We can learn things we didn’t know about God without attributing change to God. Why adulterate the story of the wideness of God’s mercy with this damaging premise, which, again, fundamentally denies that mercy is the truth about God?

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CH and RH rightly emphasize the continuity of God’s character throughout the story of salvation and between the old and new testaments. God has always intended to draw the nations in. This is the unchanging nature of God’s love and mercy.

RH says that a:

process of “reading backwards” to discover previously unrecognized meanings in Israel’s scripture occurs pervasively throughout the New Testament, including in many of the apostolic speeches in Acts.

Yes, exactly. We may discover previously unrecognized meanings that were always there. I’m not at all persuaded that the “meaning” of the biblical text is exhausted in what the human authors of scripture might have understood, though I wouldn’t put it past, say, Moses or Isaiah to know perfectly well that they were being analogical when speaking of God.

Here’s how I talk about the unchanging nature of God in my book Practicing Christian Doctrine:

… God is perfect, and God is the perfection of all good things. God’s goodness is perfect. God is perfect kindness and perfect justice, and God’s immutability is a corollary of this divine perfection. How can perfect goodness change? Can it become less good? More so? Different in its kind of goodness?…

…Theologians like Augustine are thinking with Scripture when they affirm divine immutability and its close cousin, impassibility (not being subject to the passions or suffering). Augustine does not think that God has emotions that “disturb the mind,” but he wants nothing to do with a cold, hard impassibility; if impassibility “is to be defined as a condition such that the mind cannot be touched by any emotion whatsoever, who would not judge such insensitivity to be the worst of all vices?”¹ Theologian David Bentley Hart … argues that, for the ancient church, immutability and impassibility were pastoral affirmations of God’s goodness and faithfulness, comforting truth that “is also an affirmation that God is truly good, that creation is freely worked and freely loved.”² The immutable, impassible God is the faithful God of the Bible, the God of the hymn “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” which references James 1:17 in the lyric “there is no shadow of turning with thee; thou changest not, thy compassions they fail not; as thou hast been, thou forever wilt be.” God is the faithful, steady, and sure God whose passions are truly with us. God’s passions are unfailing compassions, seen in the passion of Christ, whose faithfulness led him to the cross for love of us.

Changing Skin, Anju Dodiya, 1986, via the Art Institute of Chicago

I am not exhaustively familiar with recent developments in biblical scholarship and exegesis, but most of the story of God’s mercy described by CH and RH is a perfectly familiar story, and they say as much. This book is not filled with new exegesis, nor do the authors intend that, though I think many readers will be disappointed not to find more in that line.

The one bit of exegesis that was new to me comes in RH’s account of the council of Jerusalem, when the church decided that Gentile converts would not be required to be circumcised. Instead,

It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us not to burden you with anything beyond the following requirements: You are to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from sexual immorality. You will do well to avoid these things. (Acts 15:28-29).

I’ve always been intrigued by the early church’s choice of essentials here, centering on food laws and sexual morality.

RH gives this insight into that choice:

Here is the common thread: The four “essential” requirements have the effect of classifying the new gentile converts as analogous to aliens who reside among the people of Israel.

And this:

This interpretation brings into focus the careful compromise that James crafted. Gentile converts who observe the four “essentials” are thereby renouncing idolatry; they are symbolically leaving behind their identity as citizens of the pagan social world and entering a relation of solidarity with the Jewish community of Jesus-followers.

For me, this provides a plausible explanation for how quickly the church revises its understanding of the essential nature of those food laws. Perhaps it is not food laws that are essential, but instead it is whatever identity markers speak to the renunciation of idolatry.

Hays and Hays conclude the following:

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, and people with conflicting convictions about food laws and calendrical observances.

They don’t need a changing God to get to this conclusion, and their recounting of the biblical story of God’s mercy would, in my opinion, be much stronger without it.

In the Moral Vision of the New Testament, RH gave a reading of the new testament which showed community, cross, and new creation to be the markers of our identity as those who belong, not to idols, but to the mercy of the true and living God. Those markers are also markers of God’s mercy, and I wish this new book made those connections.

I clearly have a methodogical gripe with the book, but I also have a methodological appreciation. That is, I appreciate and admire scholars who are willing to change, when they are convinced that their past views were unfaithful. I appreciate and admire scholars who care about the way their work hits the church and the way it affects real human beings. I admire a lifelong wrestling with the scriptures in openness to being transformed. I admire a scholar, a Christian, a teacher who will say, “I’m sorry,” “I was wrong,” “God is changing me.”

I pulled this beautiful photo from my church’s social media feeds, celebrating faithful third grade bible teachers. The sign on the table reads “We change when we know who God is.”

Humans always have more to learn of the mercy of God. We need to be open to change, to being reformed. Humans change, thank God, while the mercy of God never has and never will. When I was a student, Richard Hays showed me how the scriptures render a God who is ever faithful to God’s promises, and that has helped me to trust in that faithfulness, no matter what else may change.

There’s a wideness in God's mercy
I cannot find in my own
And He keeps His fire burning
To melt this heart of stone
Keeps me aching with a yearning
Keeps me glad to have been caught
In the reckless raging fury
That they call the love of God

Now I’ve seen no band of angels
But I've heard the soldiers’ songs
Love hangs over them like a banner
Love within them leads them on
To the battle on the journey
And it’s never gonna stop
Ever widening their mercies
And the fury of His love — Rich Mullins

Grace & peace,

BFJ

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1. Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, ed. and trans. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 14.9.600.

2. David Bentley Hart, “No Shadow of Turning,” Pro Ecclesia 11, no. 2 (2002): 184–206.