A crucifix in front of the U.S. Supreme Court Photo: Shutterstock
Richard Hays, a United Methodist minister and the soon-to-be dean of Duke Divinity School, wrote the traditionalist Christian argument against same-sex marriage three decades ago.
Now, he’s backtracking.
Related:
Hays wrote in his new book, The Widening of God’s Mercy, that he is “deeply sorry” for the pain caused to LGBTQ+ individuals who have been excluded from Christian churches.
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“I want to repent of what I wrote before,” Richard Hays told WSPD Local 6 in an interview alongside his son and co-author, Christopher Hays. “Where I now stand on the question is that Scripture, read as narrative, offers a vision of a God who is dynamic and personal, and can constantly surprise us by reshaping what we thought we knew as settled matters.”
“It was, I thought, what needed to be said in order to put myself right with God and with my brothers and sisters in the church,” Hays said about speaking publically about his regrets. “The whole story of the Bible, I think, regularly summons us all to the practice of repentance.”
Hays wrote about homosexuality in his 1996 book, The Moral Vision of the New Testament. That book said that the Bible regards homosexuality as “unambiguously and unremittingly negative in their judgment.”
He says he deeply regrets how Christians have used his book to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people. “That position has been, I would say, weaponized — I don’t think that’s too strong a word — by people on the conservative side of the evangelical churches who use it as ammunition to act in what I guess are rightly described as oppressive ways towards gay and lesbian people.”
Hays said he no longer views the Bible in that way. “We need to read the Bible as narrative, and to take its stories as formative of our character and our role as readers and interpreters of the text.”
“We need to back off a step and say, why is this particular prohibition taken to be normative, but other passages, including passages that describe what is necessary to do when holding slaves, are disregarded?”
“My exegesis of those half dozen passages, it hasn’t changed. I think the Bible says what it says, and disapproves of gay sex, full stop,” Hays continued. “But there’s a very arbitrary selectivity about picking out those two verses in Leviticus as the foundation for an opinion on this subject.”
Christopher Hays is an Old Testament professor at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. He said that the Bible’s authors didn’t have an understanding of modern-day same-sex relationships when they wrote the Bible: “We don’t think that that’s the same thing as what Paul meant or what the authors of the Torah meant in the laws.”
Christopher Hays also says he is proud of his father for acting as a model.
“I feel like his heart has always been kinder and softer and more gracious than how that chapter has been taken. So, I’m just proud of him for having modeled for people out there how they can change their own minds with grace.”
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