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  "PageContent": "<h3>Dave's Deliberations | David Matthew chews over some [mostly Christian] issues</h3>The debate among Christians about homosexuality and same-sex marriage continues unabated. While there is an undoubted trend towards greater acceptance, including of LGBTQ people generally, opinions generally remain sharply polarised, with ‘good evangelicals’ expected to toe the ‘prohibition’ line.Most of the books on the subject focus on detailed exegesis of the half-dozen key Bible passages. And most take the line, ‘This is what the Bible says, so that settles it.’ Few have tackled it from an angle of trying to understand the situation of sincere Christians struggling with their sexual orientation and how to counsel them beyond requiring a strict imposition of celibacy.That’s why it is so refreshing to find this book, which focuses on the broader picture of the ‘biblical story’ and the God it reveals. The authors are father (Richard, NT scholar) and son (Christopher, OT scholar), both of them biblical scholars of stature, and they have changed their views on this key topic in recent years. The book isThe Widening of God’s Mercy: Sexuality within the Biblical Story by Christopher B. Hays &amp; Richard B. Hays (Yale University Press, 2024)Richard, who is now in his 70s, published The Moral Vision of the New Testament nearly 30 years ago. It took the traditional line that, while gay and lesbian people should be welcomed as genuine Christians, the Bible’s teaching forbids them to engage in sexual activity. The book was translated into several languages and was widely quoted as a scholarly ‘last word’ on the subject.In this new book, co-authored with his son Christopher, he apologises profusely for that and stresses that he has done a 180-degree turnaround in his convictions. On what basis has he done so?The book makes no attempt to re-examine the key Bible passages, which it agrees are all of a negative nature. Nor does it look at any sexual specifics. That may frustrate some readers, but the book’s purpose is a different one: it is about hermeneutics. It steps back to look at the broader picture presented in Scripture and the nature of the God it reveals. It concludes that this picture is of a God who frequently ‘changes his mind’ and adapts to changing situations. In particular, it highlights a clear trend in the ‘widening of God’s mercy’ to embrace those excluded in earlier periods of his developing purpose.I found this wonderfully heartening, because my own thoughts on the subject developed along similar lines in recent years, as I have outlined in my e-book A Poke In The Faith. Christopher Hays opens up the OT to show God’s expanding mercy at successive stages of Israel’s experience, while Richard follows that same pattern through into the NT. I found it all utterly persuasive, though I admit that they are ‘preaching to the converted’ in my case.I encourage you to read this book carefully and take its proposals seriously. I believe they chart a way forward that more and more churches and individual Christians will in due course follow as they escape an unhealthy bondage to the letter of the Bible and embrace more of its spirit.Up to now, I have found non-affirming ‘traditionalists’ to be totally unable to give any meaningful help to sincere Christians who, through no fault of their own, are locked into a homosexual or other sexual orientation. That is not, in my view, compatible with the Spirit of Jesus. I pray that this book will widen readers’ perspectives to match the widening of God’s mercy that it opens up so well.I have prepared a synopsis of this book which you can access here.Here are a few quotations, with page numbers.In 1 Samuel, the great prophet 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 Sam 15:29)… It’s also a lie. How do we know? Because God said so, earlier in the same chapter: “I regret that I made Saul king” (1 Sam 15:11).  (p11)The repetitive arguments about the same set of verses, and the meaning of specific words, have reached an impasse; they are superficial and boring. We have lost the forest for the trees, and we need to return to a more expansive reading of the biblical story as a story about the wideness of God’s mercy.  (p11)There is an ongoing conversation within the Bible in which rules, boundaries, and theologies are repeatedly rethought. If God’s Spirit is still at work in the communities of faith that are grounded in the Bible, then that process must surely continue even now.  (p13)In 1996 I published a book titled The Moral Vision of the New Testament. That book includes a chapter on homosexuality that has been widely cited and discussed in the ensuing debates about sexuality—usually by voices defending the church’s traditional teaching, which categorized acts of same-sex intercourse as sinful…  In this book I want to start over—to repent of the narrowness of my earlier vision and to explore a new way of listening to the story that scripture tells about the widening scope of God’s mercy.  (p17, 20)Even our best instincts—our desire to read texts closely and understand them—can mislead us if they cause us to overlook the main outlines of the biblical story. Exegetical debates can become red herrings and distract us from the character of God and the fact that in many cases clear biblical rulings and laws have been set aside by Christians—for example, laws allowing the ownership of slaves or instructions that women should wear head coverings…  I’ve come to realize that the more basic issues at stake in the sexuality debates involve who God is, and who we’re supposed to be in response to that.  (p22)Some people assume that “faithfulness to the Bible” inevitably leads to a traditionalist view of human sexuality. This book upends those expectations and offers a positive way forward.  (p25)For some readers, the term “mercy” in our title, and in the hymn on which it is based, may strike an unfamiliar note. It is a word with a rich history in the Christian tradition, describing God’s grace, compassion, and favor, and this is the primary sense in which we use it. To speak of God’s mercy is to point to God’s overflowing love, God’s propensity to embrace, heal, restore, and reconcile all of creation.  (p28)This book is an exercise in narrative interpretation; our goal is to demonstrate that the biblical story, taken as a whole, depicts the ever-widening path of God’s mercy. We seek to commend that story as the truth by which Christians should shape our moral judgments and our own lives.  (p32)The fact that we exist at all is an effect of the initial expansion of God’s grace and love to include things other than himself, and that expansion of grace and love is consistent with who God is.  (p38)[Jonathan] Edwards [18th century] ends up being a microcosm of much biblical interpretation since: He channeled the incredible power of the Bible, but because his understanding of divine love was skewed, the trajectory of his theology and ministry now looks far off target.  (p41)In Genesis 2:17, God warns the humans: “You shall not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” Of course, they go on to do just that. And yet, they do not die on that day. Interpreters have long struggled with this problem…  Perhaps God has simply changed his mind and shown mercy to Adam and Eve.  (p46-7)Cain cries out: “My punishment is greater than I can bear!” (Genesis 4:13). God doesn’t completely reverse himself, but he does address Cain’s fears. He puts a mark on Cain, “so that no one who came upon him would kill him” (4:15). Here again, God seems willing to change his mind and reconsider his judgments, out of mercy.  (p48)And now, in the wake of this latest example of stiff-neckedness in Numbers 14, Moses reminds God of who he has declared himself to be and asks him to do it [i.e. relent] again. And God does forgive (Num 14:20–21). Or, better to say: He compromises, yet again (14:22–25). As in the other stories we’ve looked at so far, God’s heart is softened, and he doesn’t follow through on his own plans.  (p54)…God’s propensity to relent from punishment, to show mercy even at the cost of changing his mind and bending his principles of justice. Although these stories are told as if God is “learning on the job,” the portrait they create is consistent with a recurring image of God throughout the Bible. Even where judgment seems to narrow the scope of blessing, there are signs of the wideness of God’s mercy. God’s plan for the world is broader than some think.  (p56)The story of Zelophehad’s daughters [Numbers 26]…reveals that God responds to the agency of humans, and also that biblical laws and customs change.  (p57)God can handle being challenged. Both of these stories [Zelophehad’s daughters, and Job] reflect that challenging God and tradition can be one of the most profound forms of piety. A God who cannot be challenged is too small to be the God described in the Bible.  (p62)Biblical laws were not unchanging, nor can they easily resolve ethical questions. They present us with complex interpretive dilemmas for real life and invite us to wrestle with the meaning of the laws and stories of the Torah.  (p64)When people stand up today to challenge biblical statutes and ordinances, the best biblical response is to ask whether they are correct. That was the way of Moses with the daughters of Zelophehad, and the principle that Jesus applied to the law: “The Sabbath was made for humankind and not humankind for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). This is what it means, quite literally, to be humanitarian. God is more humanitarian than some people give him credit for being.  (p64)In the midst of this speech, God says that because of the people’s disobedience, “I gave them statutes that were not good and ordinances by which they could not live. I defiled them through their very gifts, in their offering up all their firstborn, in order that I might horrify them, so that they might know that I am the LORD” (Ezek 20:25–26).  (p68)Jeremiah goes farther than the other texts; in one of the book’s divine speeches, God similarly recounts “all the evil of the people of Israel and the people of Judah that they did to provoke me to anger” (Jer 32:32), including, “They built the high places of Baal in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to offer up their sons and daughters to Molech, though I did not command them, nor did it enter my mind that they should do this abomination, causing Judah to sin” (32:35). He doesn’t simply forbid the practice; he denies that God ever commanded it. This is irreconcilable with Ezekiel 20:25, which says God did command it. It’s possible that Jeremiah hoped Deuteronomy would replace the earlier law codes and settle some of the internal scriptural debates. But it did not.  (p72)Many in the church…understand that traditional church teaching about sexuality can be harmful, and they often have people in their families and networks whom they know are affected, but because of their faith and their reverence for God and tradition, they feel unable to support a systematic rethinking of the questions. The situation is especially excruciating for parents of LGBTQ teens who feel pressure to choose between the teaching of their church communities and support for their own children.  (p74)As with the law of the sacrifice of the firstborn, the laws about sexuality in the Torah have done harm to children. I and many other biblical scholars are in a camp analogous to Jeremiah’s, believing that the laws have been misunderstood and misapplied. Others may prefer to take a stance like Ezekiel’s and simply say that the laws given were not good. But hopefully like the two prophets we can agree that they should not hold today. We consider these laws, with their conflicted interpretations, to be superseded by the overwhelming divine command to love, and by the expansion of God’s grace.  (p75)It is sometimes observed that Abraham is a changed man after this “near-death experience” [the near-sacrifice of Isaac]—it is perhaps not an accident that he never speaks to God again in the Bible.  (p76)There is no better example of God changing his mind and doing new things in the course of the Bible than warfare.  (p78)A reader who took these violent texts as reflective of the will of God today would be making a grave error, and in danger of doing worse. The story goes in a different direction.1 Still, faced with the reality of divinely commanded violence in the Old Testament, Christians should not make excuses or practice apologetics. We know that this is not now the plan of God, but we cannot deny that it is part of the account that our own Bible gives of our “family story.”  (p79)It is clear that some of the most trusted people in David’s administration were foreigners.  (p81)Miriam and Aaron are trying to use Moses’s marriage to a foreign, dark-skinned woman to undermine his prophetic authority: “Has the LORD spoken only through Moses? Has he not spoken through us also?” (Numbers 12:2). God is not happy about this: He confirms that Moses has a unique relationship with him, unlike other prophets, and adds, “Why then were you not afraid to speak against my servant Moses?” (12:7–8). We are left with the impression that Miriam and Aaron were simply trying to capitalize on popular bigotry, and that this is condemned.  (p82)What Amos is saying here is that God has also been working to liberate and establish the Cushites, just as he did the Israelites…  Amos goes on: “Did I not bring Israel up from the land of Egypt, / and the Philistines from Caphtor and the Arameans from Kir?” (Amos 9:7). The allusion here is unmistakable: The confession that the Lord “brought Israel up from the land of Egypt” was an essential credo of the people’s faith (Lev 11:45, Deut 20:1, Judg 6:13, Mic 6:4). Amos says that Israel’s proud tradition of the exodus was not unique: The Lord had been at work in the same way in the histories of other nations—even Israel’s enemies. The Philistines in this period remained one of Israel’s rivals and competitors to the south (2 Kgs 18:8); the Arameans played this same role in the north (13:22, 15:37, 16:5). Caphtor and Kir are known from other sources as the places where these nations originated; Amos says that the Lord has brought them all to the Levant.  (p84)The passage reaches its pinnacle in Isaiah 19:24: “On that day Israel will be the third with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth.” Then the Lord says to the assembled nations, “Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel my heritage” (Isa 19:25). In the world the prophet envisions, it will not be “Israel First!” Instead, Israel will be third, behind two of its historic enemies. Israel “will be a blessing,” just as Genesis 12:2 said, so Isaiah reaffirms God’s original plan for the people. But in other respects the vision is much broader and more inclusive: Egypt (to the southwest) and Assyria (to the northeast) were essentially the extremities of the known world.  (p86)“Thus says the LORD to his anointed, to Cyrus…” (Isaiah 45:1)…  Why would Isaiah have been concerned about a reaction against Cyrus? Perhaps because his anointing as king was a violation of the Mosaic law, which said: “you may indeed set over you a king whom the LORD your God will choose. One of your brothers you may set as king over you; you are not permitted to put a foreigner over you, who is not your brother” (Deut 17:15). That was the word of the Lord—but now the Lord has changed his mind.  (p88)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.  (p92)One of the clearest statements that God changes his mind about the fate of nations is in Jeremiah 18:7–10, in which God says:“At one moment I may declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, but if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will change my mind [nacham] about the disaster that I intended to bring on it. And at another moment I may declare concerning a nation or a kingdom that I will build and plant it, but if it does evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I will change my mind [nacham] about the good that I had intended to do to it.”That is, the prophet may announce judgment only to have God change his mind about it.  (p93)Jonah goes on to say that this is simply who God is known to be: “Isn’t this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and one who changes his mind [nacham] about punishment” (4:2).  (p93)Although God and the narrator both say in 1 Samuel 15 that God changed his mind about Saul, Calvin takes the irritated Samuel’s word for it that he doesn’t.  (p95)Calvin also mentions Malachi 3:6: “I the LORD do not change”—but this statement is in the perfect tense and should better be translated, “I the LORD have not changed.” God is emphasizing he has not changed his mind about a specific list of sins—adultery; swearing falsely; and oppressing workers, widows, orphans, and aliens. God is not saying that he never changes.  (p96)Scripture repeatedly testifies that we have a living God who does new things. Faithfulness to a living God means seeking to know him face-to-face, as Moses did—to bring questions and wait for the answers.  (p97)Isaiah 56:1–8 is a great example of a prophetic re-envisioning of the divine will that doesn’t make much of an impression on most readers now but was scandalous in its time. It undermined some key things that people thought they knew. In fact, it took a couple of the prevailing ideas about God and the temple, looked them in the eye, and contradicted them.  (p102)If conservatives today find scriptural warrant for excluding sexual minorities, how much more did religious leaders in Isaiah’s time have warrant to exclude eunuchs? The prophet [Isaiah 56:4-5] has no time for those traditions.  (p106)It has also often been assumed that Nehemiah was a eunuch: He was a high-ranking servant in the Persian court at Susa (Neh 1:1, 11); no family is ever attributed to him; and he is preoccupied with the way that he will be remembered, appealing directly to God rather than relying on descendants (5:19; 13:14, 22, 31). He also suggests that someone like him should not enter the Temple (6:11). If this is so, then readers have a prominent example in the Bible of a eunuch’s longing for inclusion in the story of God.  (p106)Isaiah 56 goes further than offering to the foreigners to be joined to the people: It invites them into the house of the Lord as priests:“And the foreigners who join themselves to the LORD, to minister to him, to love the name of the LORD, and to be his servants, all who keep the sabbath, and do not profane it, and hold fast my covenant— these I will bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer; their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar; for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.” (Isa 56:6–7)This declaration flew in the face of ancient laws concerning the priesthood. To “minister to” the Lord is a technical term for serving as priests, which had been expressly forbidden to foreigners in the Torah. Earlier texts had sought to make it a “perpetual ordinance” that the priesthood was limited to a specific group of Israelites (Exod 29:9), and Nehemiah drove even men married to foreigners out of the priesthood: “they have defiled the priesthood, the covenant of the priests and the Levites. Thus I cleansed them from everything foreign” (Neh 13:29–30).  (p108)Practically all ancient copies of the Bible contain minor errors and variations, but we can tell that this one [Isaiah 56] is a particularly controversial one because the copies and translations show a conflagration of attempts to change what it says. One of the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example, simply leaves out the phrase “to minister to him.” The Septuagint normally uses a special Greek verb (leitourgein) to translate the Hebrew verb “to minister” (šārēt); but here, seemingly scandalized by the implications, it makes an exception, instead using a verb for common work (douleuein). And so on.  (p110)A lot of what Jesus walked around shocking people with was straight from the Hebrew scriptures. In particular, a lot of it was from Isaiah.  (p113)The rabbinic tradition out of which Jesus came could serve as a helpful model for Christians, because it inherently records and recognizes differing opinions.  (p113)Jesus upset a lot of people. He came proclaiming good news of hope, liberation, and healing. But he also troubled many of his own people. Why? Because his teaching and actions penetrated to the heart of Israel’s sacred scriptures and disclosed there a generous, unsettling vision of the wideness of God’s mercy.  (p116)As Luke tells the story, from the very beginning of his ministry, Jesus interpreted his own work in light of Isaiah’s prophetic message. And he understood Isaiah’s message to signify—as we have seen earlier in this book—not only the restoration of Israel, but also an expansion of the grace of Israel’s God to encompass foreign nations and to embrace outcasts.  (p120)God’s good news is meant not just for his band of early followers and not just for the people of Israel but also for a wider circle of those who were previously—as the Letter to the Ephesians later declares—“aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world” (Eph 2:12). Might they—or better, might we—also be counted among the poor, captive, blind, and oppressed for whom the year of the Lord’s favor has dawned? If so, we might also ask ourselves how our own lives, our own communities, reflect and embody the great reversal that Jesus proclaimed. How do we become conduits for the unexpected mercy that we have received?  (p124)These foundational texts [the four Gospels] might offer us…a collection of stories that teach us how to reframe ethical questions in light of God’s scandalously merciful character.  (p125)Are there times when the human desire for conscientious obedience to biblical law actually produces actions contrary to the spirit and intent of God’s commandments? This paradoxical tension is nowhere more clearly illustrated than in the Gospel stories of Jesus’s healings on the Sabbath day.  (p126)[Re Mark 3:1-6]  Jesus takes the initiative in provoking debate. He frames his healing of the man with a pointed question: “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath, to save life or to kill?” The silence of the legal authorities reveals their recognition of the compelling force of the question: It challenges them to reflect on the purpose of the Sabbath law—and to interpret it as an ordinance given for the sake of human wholeness and flourishing.  (p129)In the silence of these scribes in the synagogue, I see a reflection of my own longstanding reticence to speak about the question of same-sex relationships in the church: uncomfortably aware of aching human need but constrained by my interpretation of scripture from responding with grace or generosity. And so I kept silent.  (p130)The Pharisees believe they are seeking to practice righteousness—but their silence is self-condemning: They refuse to change their minds about the rightness of Jesus’s healing. 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.”  (p131)In these Sabbath healing stories, then, Jesus acts with compassion and justifies what he has done by appealing to the wideness of God’s mercy. Healing on the Sabbath, he says, is not defiance of God’s law but rather an embracing of its deeper intent. Healing on the Sabbath is a decision to do good and to save life rather than to do harm. The command to rest on the Sabbath is not an arbitrary restriction; it is given for the sake of human well-being. That means that actions done for healing and human wholeness should be welcomed rather than forbidden, even if they appear to violate a particular scriptural prohibition.  (p133)Matthew’s quotation of Hosea 6:6 [in Matt 9:9-13] follows the Greek Septuagint, which uses the word eleos to translate the Hebrew h˙esed. This word carries the connotation not of “pity,” but rather of “passionate, steadfast love.” So the passage doesn’t call readers to feel sorry for “sinners”; rather, it calls them to participate in God’s desire to embrace sinners in love. When Jesus says “Go and learn what this means,” he’s telling the Pharisees to go back and study Hosea; he is pointing them back to Hosea’s prophetic revelation of the all-encompassing, restorative love of God.  (p137)The Gospel of John features an account of Jesus’s extended conversation with a Samaritan woman. (Recall, by contrast, Jesus’s stricture for his disciples’ mission in Matthew 10:5: “enter no town of the Samaritans.”)  (p149)[Re the ‘good Samaritan’]  Jesus and the scholar have already agreed that the central imperatives of the Torah are the commandments to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself” (Luke 10:27, quoting Lev 19:18). In Leviticus the intended “neighbor” is one of “your people,” that is, a fellow Israelite. Jesus, however, has spun a mind-expanding story that forces the Torah expert to acknowledge a more expansive definition of “neighbor.” Here, as we saw in the controversies about Sabbath observance, Jesus is not overturning the law; instead, he is arguing for a wider interpretation of it, driven by a vision of God’s mercy. In this case, the widening tears open the veil of ethnic separation.  (p152)A consistent theme of these stories is that Jesus does not reject Israel’s scriptures; instead, like the prophets before him, he insists on reinterpreting them in light of the conviction that love and mercy lie at the root of God’s purposes. That insistence on God’s wide-ranging mercy brought him into conflict with some others, including scholars and religious leaders, who were passionately committed to the authority of Israel’s God-given law but interpreted it in a more restrictive way, a way that sought to protect Israel’s obedience, purity, and distinctiveness. Here we should pause to reflect: Should this contrast of perspectives inform the church’s present conflicts over sexuality?  (p154)The default assumption of many of the earliest Jewish Jesus-followers was that they—as bearers of the good news of the coming kingdom of God—should maintain a judicious separation from corrupting foreign influences. That is why the earliest church endured a painful struggle to reach a common understanding concerning inclusion of gentiles in the community.  (p158)The [Ethiopian] eunuch is wondering whether to see himself reflected in the prophetic text. “About whom,” he asks Philip, “does the prophet say this, about himself or someone else?” (Acts 8:34). Precisely because he is a eunuch, perhaps the man sees himself—despite his wealth and status—included in the category of “someone else”: as one who has been led to slaughter (by castration) and humiliated, as one whose life will be “taken away from the earth” because he is incapable of generating descendants who will carry forward his story.  (p162)Acts provides no explanation for Philip’s thinking. Why did he decide to embrace this gentile eunuch and to initiate him without hesitation into the new community of God’s people in Christ, despite the proscription of Deuteronomy 23:1? Perhaps it was because Philip had been explicitly directed by the Spirit to encounter this man and to tell him about the good news of Jesus. Perhaps Philip, on the basis of his experience in Samaria, was able to recognize that God was doing a new thing to widen Philip’s previous understanding of the boundaries of the people of God.  (p163)The contrast is striking: Philip generously reaches across cultural and ethnic boundaries to extend grace to outsiders, while Saul zealously polices the boundaries of God’s people and punishes those who deviate from his strict norms.  (p166)Saul, the rigid and self-righteous defender of a narrowly rigorous vision of Israel’s traditional faith, found himself overthrown and conscripted by God to become the apostle Paul, a “chosen instrument” to carry the message of Jesus to the gentiles.  (p169)Anyone who knew Israel’s scripture would already take it as axiomatic that “God shows no partiality.” But that maxim would have been understood chiefly in relation to God’s care for the poor, as in Deuteronomy 10:17–18: “For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe, who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing.” Peter newly interprets and expands the principle of divine impartiality: It must mean also that God accepts anyone in every nation (“every people”) who fears him.  (p175)[Re the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15]  The citation of scripture is crucial to the fledgling church’s effort to understand what is happening. Once the community had listened carefully to the stories about the experience of gentiles who have responded to the preaching of the gospel and received the Spirit, it was necessary for the church corporately to consider whether and how this unexpected set of experiences could be understood in light of Israel’s long tradition of hearing and responding to God’s word. To put it another way, how was the community’s new experience of the Spirit’s action to be interpreted within the story of Israel? This process of “reading backwards” to discover previously unrecognized meanings in Israel’s scripture occurs pervasively throughout the New Testament, including in many of the apostolic speeches in Acts.  (p182)[Re the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15]  Three observations may be especially noteworthy here:The community’s discernment depends on an imaginative reinterpretation of scripture.The community’s discernment depends on paying attention to stories about where God was currently at work… So when the apostles and elders say “it seemed good to the Holy Spirit,” they aren’t referring to some ineffable sense of unanimity that descended mysteriously like a fog upon the assembly in Jerusalem; instead, they are referring to specific events in which God’s Spirit testified to the inclusion of gentiles in the church by transforming their lives.The discernment is made in and by the community. (p188)Does Luke’s account of the Jerusalem Council offer a model for how the church today might address controversial issues concerning inclusion of sexual minorities? Indeed, it is a promising model, fully consistent with the flow of the Bible’s ongoing story of God’s expansive grace. The model suggests that just as the early Christians deliberated together and decided to remove barriers to gentile participation in the community of Jesus-followers, so also the church today should open its doors fully to those of differing sexual orientations.  (p189)[Re the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15]  One of the requirements was to abstain from porneia—sexual misconduct. If the church today looks to the council as a pattern—and if it decides that same-sex unions are no longer to be automatically classified as porneia—we would need to ask what analogous transformative guidance the church would offer to its members of differing sexual orientations. This is a conversation that will require careful listening on all sides. One reasonable suggestion is that same-sex relationships should aspire to the same standard of monogamous covenant fidelity that the church has long commended and prescribed for heterosexual marriage. And, at the same time, the church should be no less careful to uphold that same standard consistently for its members of heterosexual orientation.  (p189)The entire New Testament bears witness that from the church’s beginnings there have always been fierce arguments about ethical standards and identity-defining boundaries. Never was there an idyllic time of unanimity in the community.  (p191)[Re 2 Cor 5:17-19]  The ministry of reconciliation—that is the mission of the church. To be reconciled to God is to be drawn into the task of making reconciliation real in embodied human communities. And yet within these new communities of Jesus-followers conflicts persisted. That explains why Paul’s letters repeatedly and urgently call for unity in the church.  (p193)Romans—for all its complex theological twists and turns—should be understood at its root as Paul’s passionate appeal to the Christians at Rome to accept one another in love despite strong differences of opinion and cultural norms.  (p195)[Re ‘the weak’ and ‘the strong’ in Romans 12-13]  The Torah’s dietary laws were no less salient for devout Jews in antiquity than are rules about sexual morality for conservative Christians today. Keeping that analogy in mind may help us comprehend both the intensity of the disputes in Rome and the extraordinary character of Paul’s pastoral response to these controversies. The “strong” ones today are the liberated advocates of unconditional affirmation of same-sex unions; they are tempted to “despise” the “weak,” narrow-minded, rule-following conservatives who would impose limits on their freedom. And the “weak” ones today are the devout, strict followers of what they understand to be God’s law given in scripture; they are tempted to “pass judgment” on the sinful laxity of the “strong” who condone same-sex unions.  (p202)Because God sometimes changes his mind and his approaches to the world, faithfulness to God means sometimes doing the same.  (p207)So here is the proposal we offer in this book: The many biblical stories of God’s widening mercy invite us to re-envision how God means us to think and act today with regard to human sexuality. The biblical narratives throughout the Old Testament and the New trace a trajectory of mercy that leads us to welcome sexual minorities no longer as “strangers and aliens” but as “fellow citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God” (Eph 2:19).  (p208)We believe that this debate should no longer focus on the endlessly repeated exegetical arguments about half a dozen isolated texts that forbid or disapprove of same-sex relations. (The regularly cited texts are Gen 19:1–9, Lev 18:22, 20:13, 1 Cor 6:9–11, 1 Tim 1:10, and Rom 1:18–32.) In this book, we have not revisited them. It is relatively clear that these texts view homosexual sex negatively, even if they do not envisage covenanted same-sex partnerships as we know them today. But drawing conclusions based only on these passages would be like basing a biblical theology of slavery on Exod 21:2 (which assumes one can buy a slave) and 1 Pet 2:18 (which tells slaves to be subject to their masters), or a theology of immigration on Ezek 44:9’s exclusion of foreigners from the sanctuary.  (p208)We hope to refocus the conversation on larger narrative patterns and precedents in the Bible. The stories we’ve summarized in the foregoing chapters disclose a deeper logic, a narrative pattern in which God’s grace and mercy regularly overflow the prohibitions and restrictions that exclude and condemn fixed classes of human beings—even when those prohibitions were explicitly attributed to God in earlier biblical texts. We believe that our contemporary debates about sexuality should be shaped by that deeper logic.  (p208)The work of the Spirit is ongoing, and the exegesis of texts does not excuse us from the need to recognize it. In fact, on the contrary, faithful exegesis may open our eyes to discern ways in which the Spirit is unexpectedly at work in our midst.  (p213)Why should God’s mercy trump and override the Levitical laws about same-sex intercourse? There is of course no simple, irrefutable answer to that question. But we can offer some reasons that seem to us compelling. First, it isn’t hard to find other examples of biblical laws or teachings that the church has subsequently abandoned or overturned. For many readers, the most obvious case is the issue of slavery.  (p213)Second, in many cases where the church has changed its understanding of God’s will, the impetus for change has come from careful and compassionate attention to human experience. Why have we rejected slavery? Because we see the suffering it causes, its cruelty and contradiction of human wholeness. Why have many churches rejected the subordination of women to men and supported their full inclusion in church leadership? Because we see in our experience the arbitrary way in which it denies and stifles the evident gifts and graces of half of the human race.7 For many, the evidence of experience outweighs the inertia of tradition and the force of a few biblical prooftexts on these questions. In the same way, we see LGBTQ Christians all around us who are already contributing their gifts and graces to the work of God in the world and in the church.  (p214)Third, and most decisively, the vision that informs this book rhymes with the Bible’s pervasive portrayals of God’s ever-expanding mercy. To put that in more technical theological language: The acceptance of sexual minorities in the church reenacts a narrative pattern that is pervasive in the Bible. There is a powerful analogy, a metaphorical correspondence, between the embrace of LGBTQ people and God’s previously unexpected embrace of foreigners, eunuchs, “tax collectors and sinners,” gentiles, and people with conflicting convictions about food laws and calendrical observances.  (p215)We advocate full inclusion of believers with differing sexual orientations not because we reject the authority of the Bible. Far from it: We have come to advocate their inclusion precisely because we affirm the force and authority of the Bible’s ongoing story of God’s mercy.  (p216)In light of the freely acting God whom we have encountered in the Bible, we cannot point to the Bible as if it timelessly settled all the issues about human sexuality. It remains our responsibility to decide what we must say.  (p217)After spending many years with the Bible, we present this holistic interpretation with full confidence. We believe that sexual minorities who seek to follow Jesus should be welcomed gladly in the church and offered full access to the means of grace available to all God’s people: baptism, the Lord’s Supper, ordination, and the blessing of covenanted unions, with the same expectations as for heterosexuals.  (p217)This book is therefore not just an argument about the meaning of the Bible in the past, but an invitation to readers to make new meaning in the present by listening to the Spirit and joining God now in saying, “I will gather others to them / besides those already gathered” (Isa 56:8). It is only the latest in the long line of scandals caused by the gospel (1 Cor 1:23–24). This goes out as an invitation to readers who may have felt sympathy with LGBTQ friends and neighbors—perhaps along with some uneasiness about the church’s traditional exclusionary practices—but felt constrained by their understanding of “the authority of the Bible” from offering a full welcome. For such readers, we hope that this book offers encouragement to see that the inclusion of sexual minorities is not a rejection of the Bible’s message but a fuller embrace of its story of God’s expansive mercy.  (p222)[From the Epilogue by Richard Hays]  When writing Moral Vision, I fear, I placed myself in the company of those who devote intensive scholarly labors to straining out gnats, while neglecting what Jesus called “the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith” (Matt 23:23).  (p225)",
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