In an interview posted November 2024, New Testament scholar Richard Hays, author of the acclaimed The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics (1996), declared, as the fruits of his most recent book promoting homosexual unions in the church (2024), that “it’s kind of funny really that people think that what the New Testament gives us is a stable moral code because it is anything but that.”
This is how far from the truth of Scripture Richard Hays had deviated near the end of his life, in order to persuade others of the view that God had “changed his mind” on homosexual practice.
The Yale Press Interview of Richard Hays and His Son Christopher Hays
Richard made this outlandish statement in an interview, posted by Yale Press on November 11, 2024, of Richard (emeritus prof of NT, Duke Divinity School) and his son Christopher (OT professor at Fuller Seminary). The interview revolved around their recently published book, The Widening of God’s Mercy (2024). The interviewer is Fuller Seminary professor Tommy Givens (assistant professor of New Testament at Fuller).[1]
1. A note to readers: I have written two online critiques of this book, a longer one with the Gospel Coalition’s journal Themelios (“The Deepening of God’s Mercy through Repentance: A Critical Review Essay of The Widening of God’s Mercy: Sexuality within the Biblical Story”) and a shorter one with the Federalist (“12 Disqualifying Errors In Richard Hays’ ‘Biblical’ Case For Gay Relationships“). They each have material that the other article does not have. I have still more unpublished material on how bad the book is.
The book promotes homosexual unions in the church on the basis that God has allegedly “changed his mind” on this issue just as he allegedly has changed his mind on other issues (Gentile inclusion, slavery, women’s roles, eunuchs). Richard changed his own mind about the issue from his earlier publications (a change that he imputed on God as well). It is important to note, though, that from the start Richard had a diluted approach to the biblical witness on that subject. In this article, I will show some of these cracks in Richard Hays, by extension Christopher Hays, and Tommy Givens, and I will briefly respond to the claim that the New Testament has “no stable moral code” by looking at the apostle Paul’s ethics.
Early Cracks in Richard’s Wall and the Present Condition of Fuller Seminary
Even when Richard wrote that homosexual practice was sin (in two articles,[2] plus a book chapter in Moral Vision in 1996), he did not regard homosexual practice or a male-female prerequisite for sex as a matter of great significance in Scripture (an historically absurd view on Richard’s part). He also thought that unrepentant, homosexually active persons should be allowed in as members of the church or even perhaps as pastors. It was no surprise to me, then, though it shocked many when it happened, that Richard eventually rejected completely Scripture’s (including Jesus’s) position on a male-female prerequisite and homosexual relations.
2. See Richard Hays, “Relations Natural and Unnatural: A Response to John Boswell’s Exegesis of Romans 1,” in Journal of Religious Ethics 14.1 (1986):184–215. Hays followed this up five years later with “Awaiting the Redemption of Our Bodies,” in the magazine Sojourners 20 (1991): 17–21, which was republished under the same title in Homosexuality in the Church: Both Sides of the Debate (ed. Jeffrey Siker; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1994), 3–17.
Richard passed away of cancer on January 3, 2025. Yet we should not lose sight of the fact that his view that the Bible does not provide us with a “stable moral code” lives on in two Fuller Bible professors: his son Christopher Hays as well as Tommy Givens. Givens clearly came out publicly in this interview as one who also affirms homosexual unions in the church.
I have been told that there are many other professors at Fuller who share an acceptance of homosexual unions, including other professors in the Bible department. Fuller is supposed to be an evangelical seminary, though that has been questioned for decades by many. If the administration and faculty fail to deal with this heresy, the institution will cease to be “evangelical” in any meaningful sense.
Jesus: Revoking Accommodations to Hard-Heartedness Does not Mean “No Stable Moral Code”
Givens starts by saying,
What we find in the Bible . . . is not a stable moral code. . . . Can you talk about what we have in the Bible in terms of the framework for making moral judgments since we don’t have a stable moral code? We have difference, we have dynamic sort of personal action of God. So, what do we have when it comes to the directives of the Bible for how we are to live if we are honest and recognize that what we don’t have is a stable moral code?
After a later exchange, Givens adds:
In my experience in the church we are real comfortable with all kinds of incompatible directives within the Old Testament. . . . And we sort of brush that aside because we think that the New Testament . . . by contrast is some kind of stable code that the Old Testament isn’t. So, I want to get at the sort of testamental distinction that impinges on the way people draw judgments from the Bible about sexuality.
Somehow Givens thinks that, if he repeats three times that we don’t have a stable moral code in the Bible, it will be so (somewhat like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz clicking her heels three times). But that’s nonsense. The fact that God sometimes ends accommodations to human hardness of heart that were not present in his creational will, and the fact that he does so in order to intensify his demand for moral righteousness, does not mean that there is not a “stable moral code” in the Bible.
This is Jesus’s hermeneutic on marriage in Mark 10:2–12 (parallel in Matt 19:3–9): God ends an accommodation to male “hardness of heart” as regards polygyny (multiple wives) and a revolving door of divorce and remarriage for virtually any cause. God does so based on a rigorous understanding of the logic of God’s intentional creation of a sexual binary. Jesus did not regard this as evidence of an absence of a “stable moral code,” but rather an elimination of inconsistent allowances.
Note that Jesus, rather than depart from a male-female requirement as foundational for sexual ethics, doubles-down on that very foundation, insisting on its moral logic to eliminate a deviance from the number two (in other words, two sexual counterparts leads to only two persons in marriage). Does Richard Hays care? No. According to him, the Spirit is now doing something new!
Richard Hays’ Misreading of Paul’s Ethics
Richard bought completely into the erroneous contention of Givens’ question. After Richard asserts, “it’s kind of funny that people think that . . . the New Testament gives us is a stable moral code,” he says:
And we have Paul saying that ‘the letter kills; it is the Spirit that gives life. In fact, there is a traditional antithesis between gospel and law, which is sometimes taken as a distinction between the Old and New Testaments, but I don’t think that is what it is really. But Paul is a champion of freedom in the Spirit. He’s not a lawgiver. And he enters into dialogue in his letters with communities that are wrestling with various moral issues.
Rather than make the sensible observation that the Bible offers a stable moral code with some adjustments over time that bring God’s expectations for humans into closer alignment with his perfect will, Richard makes the rather absurd claim that the New Testament has no stable moral code.
His examples do not prove his point. God’s overthrow of the might and blessing of the poor who remain faithful to God are obviously not evidences that the Bible provides no “stable moral code.” For example, there is a consistent witness in the Bible against the powerful who exalt themselves and in favor of the lowly who put their trust in God (e.g. Ps. 113:4–9; 1 Sam. 2:1–10; Luke 1:46–55).
Particularly shocking is Richard’s view of ethics in Paul. Is it true that Paul did not think Scripture had provided “a stable moral code,” that he was a “champion of freedom of the Spirit” understood as freedom away from moral codes? Is it true that by “the letter kills” (2 Cor. 3:6) Paul meant “a stable moral code,” and that he always “entered into dialogue” with his Christian communities whenever they “wrestled with various moral issues”? On all counts Hays shows a gross misunderstanding of Pauline theology.
Let’s take what should have been an obvious counterexample for Hays: Paul did not “enter into dialogue” with the Corinthian community over a man sleeping with his stepmother (treated in 1 Corinthians 5). Paul told them quite clearly: In the name of the Lord Jesus put this man out of the community—as a remedial measure—in the hope that he may come to his senses and be restored, for otherwise he will not inherit the kingdom of God (1 Cor. 6:9–10).
Nor did Paul “enter into a dialogue” with the Corinthian community over other types of pornoi (sexually immoral persons), including “men lying with a male,” “soft men” (female-identifying males), adulterers, men who have sex with prostitutes, and fornicators (1 Cor. 6:9, 15–20; 7:2, 9). The same is true of non-sexual classes of unrepentant sinners such as “idolaters or “thieves” and “robbers” (1 Cor. 6:9).
Paul “entered into dialogue” only over matters of indifference, like whether one should eat meat or observe special holy days (Romans 14). Over matters of sexual impurity or immorality, Paul—in line with the Old Testament—was quite clear in nearly all his extant letters that engaging in sexual immorality of these sorts would exclude one forever from God’s kingdom (1 Thess. 4:2–8; Gal. 5:19–21; 6:7–9; 1 Cor. 5; 6:9–20; 7; 2 Cor. 12:21; Eph. 4:17–19; 5:3–6).
Hays seems not to understand the meaning of Paul’s letter/Spirit contrast (2 Cor. 3:6; Rom. 2:29; 7:6), which is not about rampant change in morality but rather about the difference between weakness and power. “The letter” in Paul refers to the law of Moses as mere script written on tablets outside the human heart, unable to empower the very obedience that it legislates, whereas “the Spirit” refers to the power of Christ within human hearts that now enables us to do that which the Law legislated.
Paul does not use the contrast to imply fluidity in God’s moral demand. He uses it to emphasize the moral transformation of the inner human to comply with God’s stable moral demand. The gift of the Spirit is the fulfillment of Jeremiah’s prophecy that in the new covenant the law will be written on the hearts of God’s people (Jer. 31:31–34).
Conclusion
The claim that the Bible, even the New Testament, does not give us “a stable moral code” is an embarrassingly bad misunderstanding of a significant gospel theme by a major New Testament scholar (and two Bible professors at Fuller). When God retracts allowances that had been made to human “hardness of heart”, it is not a sign that we are ever bereft of “a stable moral code.” It is rather an indication of God’s larger program of intensifying his demand for moral righteousness.
The New Testament does not move us in a direction away from a male-female prerequisite for sexual relations. It directs us, through Jesus, to a more consistent application of the moral logic of that principle self-evident in the creation texts of Genesis 1:27 (“male and female [God] created them”) and Genesis 2:24 (“For this reason, a man . . . may become joined to his woman and the two shall become one flesh”). This stable moral foundation for sexual ethics is not eradicated by doing away with accommodations to human sin but rather strengthened and reaffirmed.
An attempt to justify acceptance of homosexual unions through an appeal to Scripture requires a reconfiguration not just of this one issue but of a whole network of issues, the very foundation of scriptural ethics itself. Richard and Christopher Hays would agree with that assertion, but from the wrong end. Like a brain on crack, it forces otherwise fine minds to arrive at conclusions about Scripture and ethics that would be intolerable for Jesus, the writers of his Scriptures, and the apostolic witness to Christ.
