Does acceptance equal mercy? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.
In looking through this chapter to see what I highlighted as worth discussing, I realized something unusual about Richard Hays’s chapters. He really doesn’t do much in the way of unique exegesis. Some of it is actually quite fine. He takes the passage about God wanting mercy and not sacrifice to emphasize God’s mercy on His people.
Okay. Nothing problematic about that.
The problem is that he never really does anything with that from the text itself. When he wants to move to the hobby horse he wishes of justifying LGBTQ behavior, then he steps outside of the text and goes to experience. After that, the experience then interprets the text.
Normally throughout history, experience has been the last ground of interpretation with a text. For Hays, it appears to be the trump card. It is what goes over everything.
Recently, I was reading some of Craig Carter’s book Interpreting Scripture With The Great Tradition and saw him critique another author taking a similar approach.
Fowl is talking about extending the meaning of that text in such a way that the spiritual sense would permit a positive moral evaluation of homosexual acts. This sets the spiritual sense in direct contradiction to the literal sense, so it clearly is a wrong exegetical move.
Carter, Craig A.. Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition (p. 21). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
So let’s look at what I had highlighted in Richard Hays’s chapter. Hays reads from Hosea:
How can I give you up, Ephraim? . . . My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender. . . . for I am God and no mortal, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath. (Hos 11:8–9) (Note carefully: This is a classic expression of God changing his mind, rescinding his earlier declaration of judgment and destruction.)
Hays, Christopher B; Hays, Richard B. The Widening of God’s Mercy: Sexuality Within the Biblical Story (p. 142). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
Yet how is this a change of mind? He does not say. Hays is doing what Carter warned against. What Richard Hays and his son have done in this book has been to say “Let’s take out all the doctrine of God in church history and throw it in the trash and then reinterpret all of Scripture in light of what we think it should say and see if it comes out differently.
Surprise, surprise! Not only does it come out differently, it also comes out exactly the way that they want it to!
So what about the original question? God does have mercy for sinners, including those in the LGBTQ community. That mercy means that they are sinners. Acceptance of sinners is fine, but that requires mercy takes place. God would be fully right in judging all sinners as deserving of death. In this, all Christians are no different from the LGBTQ community. We all deserve death and we all need forgiveness and mercy the same way.
Yet the Hayses are telling the LGBTQ community that God has changed His mind on them and apparently, only them. Interesting isn’t it? It’s always the group that’s in popular acceptance that the position needs to change on.
Yet mercy doesn’t come without repentance, which the Hayses are robbing the people of. That puts the Hayses in a dangerous position. Richard has passed on. Let us pray for Christopher.
In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)
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