This is a bit outside my wheelhouse, since I haven’t exactly been a follower of Christianity in any sense for nearly 60 years now, but this preview of an explosive new book by one of the former icons of Conservative Christianity is almost certain to send shockwaves throughout the Fundamentalist faction for whom opposition to gay rights and same sex marriage is part of their core belief system. As reported by the Religion News Service today:
Nearly 30 years ago, a revered New Testament professor at Duke Divinity School named Richard B. Hays published “The Moral Vision of the New Testament,” a sweeping 508-page meditation of Christian ethics in which Hays concluded that the Christian Bible condemns homosexual acts. Hays called homosexuality “one among many tragic signs that we are a broken people” and said that churches should not sanction or bless homosexual unions.
The book made Hays a darling among conservative evangelical Christians who opposed LGBTQ acceptance in their churches and the broader culture and frequently cited Hays’ work in debates.
But the 75-year-old Hayes, since retired, now admits that his moral vision wasn’t exactly 20/20 when it came to this issue in 1996, and he’s ready to set the record straight. In a book scheduled to be released in September, “The Widening of God’s Mercy: Sexuality Within the Biblical Story,” written with his son, Christopher B. Hays, the elder Hays makes an about-face that is already causing an uproar in evangelical circles.
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If you carefully attune your ear, you are liable to hear not only moral indignation but tinges of fear. These thinkers know well Hays’ about-face is no small matter. Once dean of Duke Divinity School, he is widely considered a “heavyweight” in the field of biblical studies, and “Moral Vision” has long provided conservative Christians cover, bolstering their anti-LGBT arguments with academic heft.
As religion professor Anna Sieges said of Hays’ reversal, “When faced with movement in larger Christian culture toward inclusion, white evangelicals could whip out chapter 16 and say, ‘The guy all of you read in your seminaries agrees with us and has ended all debate on this issue.’”
That trump card has just fallen out of conservative Christians’ deck, and the loss couldn’t come at a worse time for them.
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Faithfulness means always being humble enough to acknowledge that you haven’t fully figured everything out, being curious enough to evaluate new scholarship and arguments as they arise, and being honest enough to admit when you realize you’ve gotten something wrong. And when someone else does the hard work of walking this path, our mercy for them should be as wide as God’s for us all.
To which this old Agnostic Deist/Secular Humanist would simply add, Amen!