Let God Interpret the Bible
The Widening of God’s Mercy—Sexuality Within the Biblical Story. Christopher B. Hays and Richard B. Hays, Yale University Press (2024).
Reviewed by Jack Hoehn
I was introduced to this new book by a critical review in First Things magazine, a publication that prides itself on supporting Christian traditions, including male headship, fetal personhood, and gender inflexibility. The reviewer admitted that coauthor Richard B. Hays “has distinguished himself as one of the premier biblical theologians of his generation.” It also affirmed him as “a virtuosic interpreter who takes the authority of Scripture and the classic Christian theological tradition seriously.”
Then a recent laudatory and personal memorial note on Facebook by Adventist theologian Sigve Tonstad about Richard B. Hays confirmed his recent death, and then affirmed his credentials as someone to be carefully listened to. Hays’ co-author is his son, Christopher B. Hays, an Old Testament scholar at Fuller Seminary—another bastion of conservative Christianity.
When the First Things reviewer could not restrain himself from using biased words such as “sodomy” and “sexual deviance” in his three-plus pages of dismay, my curiosity was raised. So I ordered the book—and so should you. Because it is about a lot more than how conservative churches like ours should handle sexual diversity. This book is about how we think of the Bible. About prophets. And perhaps most of all about the God they are presenting.
Knowing
Some people irritatingly think they know everything. Some claim to know nothing. But in fact all of us do think we know something.
Religious conservatives tend to know that no matter what happens, at least we know that “God is in control” because we have all read in our Bibles that “With Him is no shadow or variableness of turning.” The great prophet Samuel said this with strong emphasis when King Saul begged him to ask God to change his rejection as king.
“Samuel thunders: ‘The Glory of Israel does not recant or change his mind! He is not a mortal, that he should change his mind!’ (1 Samuel 15:29). This is a satisfying and important-sounding thing to say. If there were red-letter Hebrew Bibles, it would probably be printed in red. If it were posted on an internet chat board, it would likely appear as ALL CAPS. It’s also a lie” (page 1).
Why a lie? Because in the same chapter God says so: “I regret that I made Saul king.” And at the end of the chapter, “And the Lord regretted that he had made Saul king over Israel” (1 Samuel 15:11, 35). To regret means you are sorry, you made a mistake, you were wrong, you have changed your mind.
This is a metaphor, of course: it is a metaphor of change. God’s change. Is this possible?
Unmoved Mover?
I have not read a lot of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Jerome, or Thomas Aquinas, but I know of their classical God, The Unmoved Mover, Eternal and Immutable. We can’t change God, so must just worship him, resplendent in glory and wielding sole power without any needs from creatures except obedience and acquiescence to his will. (In rigid Calvinism even this acceptance is entirely ordained by God’s almighty hand. Our Adventist heritage from Methodism grants us at least some freedom of choice.)
We find Bible texts that we must “Be still and know that [he is] God,” “It is He that has made us and not we ourselves.” His only begotten Son and their Holy Spirit are “the same yesterday and today and forever” (Psalm 46:10, 100:3, Hebrews 13:8). So what gives here?
The mutable God
God contradicted Samuel’s opinion that God never changes. Actually, the Bible is full of examples where God does in fact change his mind. He tells Eve “in the day” they eat of the tree of knowledge, “dying they will die.” And then they live for a thousand years, expelled but not dead. Astounded and dismayed by the violence on earth, God says that after constructing his six-fold/days creations for humans that he found not only “good” but “very good,” now “the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart” (Genesis 6:6). So God decided to wipe out both humans and the “very good” animals and plants he once found “pleasing to the eye and good for food.”
This God is changing, at a minimum, his plans and actions.
Moses, ages later, hurries to consult with God, who has just about had it up to here with ungrateful ex-slaves who have been rescued from Egypt. They danced about a golden calf and, tiring of heaven’s granola, set up an executive committee to return to the hamburgers and hot dogs of Egypt. Moses is not happy with what this God of the burning bush now reveals.
“I will strike them with pestilence and disinherit them.” “I will make of you, Moses, a nation greater and mightier than they.”
Moses doesn’t agree. He reminds God of the probable damage to his reputation, “the nations who have heard about you will say….” and then quotes to God a Bible text: aren’t you supposed to be “slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, forgiving iniquity and transgression…?” (see Numbers 14:12-19).
God compromises; his heart is softened. He doesn’t follow through with his plans. He changes his mind. He regrets. He repents. He is sorry. He warns Cain not to kill his brother, and mandates the death penalty for murder but then protects Cain from justice. He expels guilty Adam and Eve who “in that day dying are to die,” but then makes them clothes to keep warm and not die right away outside of Eden.
The Bible as science, history, or inspired myth is not the issue here, but the character of God is. Is God unchanging and his laws beyond reproach? Is he the unmovable holy? Or is he the personal god, an interactive Creator, a God whose justice is always tempered by mercy, who debates with Abraham, protects rejected Hagar and Ishmael, wrestles with Jacob, and listens to Moses? A God whose love never changes, but whose actions and interactions in the application of that love do?
Yes, they are metaphors—but they are metaphors for growth and change.
A New Testament change
The first part of the book, written by Christopher Hays, shows how God changes.
The Old Testament from the Torah forbade any of the priestly class with damaged testicles from performing the job and entering the temple (Leviticus 21:17—23)—then later in the time of Isaiah (Isaiah 56:4-5), eunuchs are specifically invited “in my house and within my walls.” The first excluded sexual minority, by divine law, are now encouraged and welcomed into God’s temple service. God’s rules change over time with different circumstances.
Both statements claimed divine authority. “That was then,” God seems to say. “This is now.” Hays’ book is urging that these changes are always in the direction of expanding the reach of God’s mercy and enlarging the sphere of his care.
The second half of the book is by Christopher’s father, the now-late Richard B. Hayes, on Jesus’s, and then his followers’, widening of God’s mercy in the New Testament. We today may forget how upsetting Jesus was to God’s people. He was proclaiming good news of hope, liberation, and healing. But he was crucified by believers because he was also requiring of his followers significant change.
“He called people to rethink their identities and their relationships with others—including others whom they may have previously regarded as alien, undesirable, immoral, or threatening. In short he called them not only to receive mercy, but also to give it.” [page 111]
“The idea that God does not foresee and control everything, and feels pity and regret even concerning his past judgments, is troubling for some theological views, but if we take the Bible seriously, it is hard to deny.” [page 86]
Jesus changed rules
Jesus’s intentional reform of Sabbath observance in favor of human wellbeing over religious standards brought death threats to him.
“Jesus’s opponents were operating on the basis of a traditional interpretation that sought to safeguard the sanctity of the Sabbath day. Jesus certainly didn’t disapprove of Sabbath observance. Instead he sought to deepen the meaning and intent of the day in a way that recognized the expansive scope of God’s mercy…. [There are] two of the Gospel accounts of Jesus’s healing activity on the Sabbath, one in Mark [3] and the other in Luke [13]” (page 125).
We all know those stories of Jesus’s intentionally healing chronically ill people on the Sabbath in synagogue. But Richard Hayes draws a personal application to himself that as Sabbath keepers we may not have done for ourselves over other religious Bible-based rules that are harming people we should be protecting just as Jesus was protecting human needs from harmful Bible-based rules.
“Like Isaiah’s audience centuries earlier [Isaiah 58], the Pharisees believe they are seeking to practice righteousness.… Their strict adherence to their traditional interpretation of the law overrides any concern for the afflicted man who stands before them. That is why Jesus is both angry and ‘grieved at their hardness of heart.’ I now suspect that the Lord may have been also grieved with me” (page 127).
Richard Hays is saying it is not God’s will to use anything the Bible says (or doesn’t say) to harm, diminish, or deny participation to honest people doing the best they can with what they have been given. Jesus showed this regarding Sabbath rules. The church was to ignore previous “Sabbath rules” if the rules were keeping humans from health or even hunger. Human welfare was God’s will—unswerving love, not unswerving obedience.
The Holy Spirit changed rules
Acts of the Apostles tells the story of how the Holy Spirit began to change the church’s mind. Christians were first Jews. Their thoughts about races, about circumcision, about idolized meats, about inclusion and exclusion of gentiles, women, and slaves were traditional Jewish thoughts. Changes challenged them, as they will us, about our assumptions on God and the Bible.
They and we have thought the texts that affirm God’s faithfulness and reliability mean change in God, or his laws would be heresy. Somewhat arrogantly we have assumed our job is to defend God and his Bible from change.
We parse the grammar and explore the words to get it just right about “what the Bible really says.” I have done the same on Biblical sexuality in my book Adventist Tomorrow in a chapter “For All Love, Against All Abuse.” I have suggested that the Bible rules in context are about ancient prostitution and sexual abuse of boys and girls, not the born condition of homosexual men or women.
This book is not doing that. This book says even if what you read in your translation or application of the Bible regarding sexual prohibitions was true (or not true), when previous rules made at one time by God’s will begins to do harm to people, the rule God once made may need to be abandoned. And we have all done this.
- There are Bible rules for slavery.
- There are Bible rules for women covering their heads and males not having long hair.
- There are rules about management of menstruation and wet-dreams.
- There are rules about eating blood.
Most Christians don’t follow these rules.
We have extrapolated from Sodom about attempted rape of males as the big sin. What about the even bigger sin of offering your daughters to a mob for gang-rape by a nervous father afraid of spoiling his Middle East precious reputation as a good host? Why have we dared used texts against pagan temple son- and daughter-prostitution as applying to monogamous, consensual, covenantal same-sex marriages?
The Spirit of God had to teach Peter with the zoo vision (Acts 10; 11) that he may not consider a person defiled or unclean based on his understanding of Bible texts or national and religious traditions. God was wanting participation of all willing humans in his newly reformed church. Can we not now see how God wants Jews, gentiles, women, slaves, centurions—immigrants with or without documents, all skin colors or languages, divorced, remarried, LGBTQ+-lovers—all willing believers and their talents welcomed, protected and beloved in God’s churches?
Organizational response
There are many individual cases: the African wife of Moses (Zipporah), the prostitute (Rahab), the Moabite (Ruth), eunuchs in the priestly functions, a Roman centurion, the Samaritan woman, a pagan Sidonian and daughter, or an Ethiopian eunuch.
But this dropping of previous rules and widening of God’s mercy required more than an individual, case-by-case approach. The central authorities of the apostolic Christian church were being hounded by upset members that God’s standards and regulations were not being enforced! Jesus, after all, was himself a circumcised Jew. Case closed. Gentiles might be permitted, but only if they followed “the B-I-B-L-E rules!”
It was time for a general church conference (Acts 15). So “the brethren” assembled in Jerusalem and listened to the experiences of Peter, Barnabas, and Paul with the uncircumcised. Their General Conference leader James quotes from the Greek translation of Amos and Isaiah, instead of the Hebrew version, because this translation was clearer that God wanted gentiles in his family. James sought and found scriptural confirmation that God intended inclusion of the previously excluded. And that some of the rules therefore must change. How did their General Conference accept the changes God was wanting?
- They used an imaginative reinterpretation of scripture and reheard God’s inspired messages using new translation giving unnoticed inferences. As this book does.
- They listened to current stories of what God was doing with the previously subordinated or excluded. Let the women and the gay and their friends speak.
- They acted on accepting changes to previous rules and regulations as a community because they saw those rules were harming people and retarding God’s present will.
- A letter approving the changes in customs and regulations, allowing inclusion of the previously excluded, was sent out to all the churches “with the consent of the whole church” (Acts 15:22). “It seems good to the Holy Spirit and to us” would be a wonderful thing to hear from a General Conference leader today.
Here then is a model for our church business meetings, institutional boards, conference-union-division-General Conference sessions. Regarding actions we must take supporting God’s will for inclusion and utilization of all moral, honest, faithful, loving, kind, and capable believers, including those who happen to be previously subordinated as women or those with minority sexual orientation.
Church standards
Does anything go? Are there no standards for church membership? Yes, of course. Here are a few:
- Do you wish to be a follower of Jesus Christ, the God who is freeing and rescuing us?
- Are you ready to live in constant anticipation of his promised return?
- Are you honestly ready to promote Jesus’s, his Father’s and their Spirit’s goals in this world?
- Will you help promote the welfare and healing of humans, animals, and our planet?
- Will you avoid racial, ethnic, gender, economic, political, social, and religious discrimination or abuse, especially of the marginal and vulnerable?
- Are you willing to listen and permit differences of opinion while still cooperating with others?
- Is it your intention to be healthy, happy, helpful, generous, and kind to the best of your ability?
- Do you understand the church’s history, culture, and traditions, including Sabbath and Ellen White, used by God to establish us?
- Will you help make the good in our traditions better and more applicable for the world’s needs today?
What then hinders us from baptizing any like this into Jesus and unrestricted church membership and participation?
This review is clearly inadequate. Please get the book. Then reread chapters in my and many other books on following the living Jesus as the Spirit leads today. Read Richard Rice’s books and rethink the openness of God. Turn off the political propaganda and the moral distortions of media. Demand our aging administrators and evangelists do the same.
We need to take a deep breath and swallow our pride of opinion. We may also need to ask forgiveness of those who now have to have “pride parades” asking for our respect. The book itself closes with a chapter by Richard B. Hays asking for that forgiveness.
Moral, honest, faithful, loving, kind, and capable LGBTQ+ people and all our women, please do forgive us, but perhaps not now but after we have responded to The Widening of God’s Mercy.
As God changes and repents of any failed or harmful rule or action because of his unchanging mercy and love, so must we.
Jack Hoehn is a retired physician and former missionary, retired now in Walla Walla, Washington. He is the author of Adventist Tomorrow: Fresh Ideas While Waiting for Jesus.