#614: Mercy, the Bible and Same-Sex Marriage
#614: Mercy, the Bible and Same-Sex Marriage
Also, the politics of the pro-life movement.
I have an essay out at Mere Orthodoxy on Richard Hays’ (coauthored) new book, in which he argues that a biblical notion of ‘mercy’ should lead churches to affirm same-sex sexual unions. If anyone besides Hays had penned the book, I would not have paid it any heed.
But The Widening of God’s Mercy is Hays’ explanation of how he changed his mind: prior to this, he was the most high-profile defender of a traditional sexual ethic inside of a mainline divinity school.
There is much more I could say about Hays books, but I’ll just leave this excerpt here instead:
More fundamentally, Hays’ approach fails to discriminate between why Scripture’s various prohibitions are there in the first place; doing so would have led him to assess how they contribute to “human wholeness and flourishing.” The reason for the prohibition on work on the Sabbath is not the same as the reason to honor our parents or to abstain from idols. Christ’s apparent violation of the obligation to show filial piety when he tells a man to “let the dead bury the dead” has nothing to do with the logic of mercy, much less the person’s “healing and wholeness.” (If anything, Christ’s apparent callousness would likely trigger a flood of critics today, as it likely did then—though for different reasons.) By collapsing everything together under the banner of “flourishing” and “mercy,” Hays loses the distinctions necessary to interpret Scripture’s prohibitions well, thereby reducing them to inconvenient hurdles on our way to endorsing the version of “human flourishing” decided upon in advance.
To their credit, Hays and Hays think that decisions to reinterpret Scripture should be made communally through a deliberative process like the Jerusalem Council’s determination that circumcision is not required for the gentiles’ salvation (Acts 15). The community’s discernment “depends upon an imaginative reinterpretation of Scripture,” which requires heeding “stories about where God [is] currently at work.” The Jerusalem Council’s practical requirements are minimal, they suggest, but also significant: Gentile converts who followed them would be “leaving behind their identity as citizens of the pagan social world and entering a relation of solidarity with the Jewish community of Jesus-followers.” Hays and Hays suggest that the four abstentions—from things polluted by idols, strangled animals and blood, and porneia (15:20)—function to make new gentile believers analogous to “resident aliens” and so subject to the constraints of the Holiness Code articulated in Leviticus 17-26. Despite having argued that prohibitions on Sabbath work were fundamentally aimed at “human flourishing,” Hays opts to prioritize here the Law’s sociological justification: “A major purpose of those rules,” Hays writes (emphasis mine), “was to set Israel apart from the other nations around them…” Having bracketed Scripture’s broader teaching about marriage, fertility, blessing, and life, the logic of distinction and inclusion is all Hays has left to work with.
The upshot of these constraints for today is that the church can make a similar decision to disregard Scripture’s prohibitions on same-sex sexual activity—with the qualification that we “would need to ask what analogous transformative guidance the church would offer to its members of differing sexual orientations.” As Hays writes, one “reasonable suggestion is that same-sex relationships should aspire to the same standard of monogamous covenant fidelity that the church has long prescribed for heterosexual marriage.” Even if Hays were right about his methodology, is adherence to “covenant fidelity” sufficiently analogous to gentiles who leave behind their “identity as citizens of the pagan social world?” I have my doubts: “covenant fidelity” goes no farther than what the state requires couples to show to receive tax benefits, after all. Moreover, Hays himself struggles to stay within the boundaries of distinction and inclusion. He rightly admonishes churches to uphold the same standard for “members of heterosexual orientation,” but cannot say why they should do so: merely because it makes us different, or because of reasons intrinsic to the marital union?
Invoking Acts 15 analogically also presupposes empirical judgments about the modern day “gentiles” (same-sex couples) whom the church would affirm. Questions arise at this juncture, too. Hays dilutes the “signs and wonders” of Acts 15:12 to “stories about where God was currently at work.” Are they the same, or do “signs and wonders” demarcate an apostolic dispensation, a unique disclosure of the Holy Spirit’s transformative power for the spread of the Gospel? If the latter, what should we make of the empirical fact that the contemporary strand of Christianity most prone to continue to seek and embody those ‘signs and wonders’—Pentecostals—are also some of the most strident opponents of same-sex marriage in the Christian world? Hays and Hays write that “any religious tradition that fails to grow and respond to the ongoing work of the Spirit will stagnate or die.” Well?
Christopher Hays proposes that the church is not in decline “because of its impurity,” but because “of its lack of curiosity and hardness of heart”—citing as evidence Kristin Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne. He acknowledges the need to write another book to properly defend the claim, so I will simply comment that I eagerly anticipate the effort: Du Mez’s book has nothing to do with the decline of the mainline, which has been embracing the liberal pieties Hays defends for half a century.
The concern is not pedantic: If The Widening of God’s Mercy is meant to be a serious effort to persuade the church to change her mind about same-sex relationships, then we need substantive arguments that the situation of same-sex couples today is equivalent to gentiles in the early church. If we should think that God is ‘changing His mind,’ as Hays and Hays want us to conclude, we need some reason He is doing so this way. They give us none, which should leave us wondering whether there are any to give.
In sum, Hays and Hays’ invocation of “mercy” as an interpretative paradigm neuters Scripture’s witness to sexual ethics. They thus leave the church incapable of saying “no” to contemporary phenomena on any terms besides those offered by “scientists and sexual theorists.” In a revealing footnote, Hays writes that the “biblical authors did not have in mind the sort of homosexual relationships that the church now considers blessing, and it is not possible to imagine what they might have said about them” (emphasis mine). Sed contra: It is in fact easy to imagine what the New Testament authors might have said about partnerships that participate in the same acts they proscribed. By erecting an impenetrable barrier between the New Testament’s sexual ethics and our own day, Hays and Hays ensure their reading of Scripture can generate the moral conclusions to which they have already arrived on independent grounds. Where their thinking will “evolve” next, nobody knows.
Read the whole thing. And subscribe to Mere Orthodoxy.
Pro-Life Politics and the 2024 Election
I have done not one, but two different conversations about pro-life politics. I take up slightly different themes in both (I think). Together, they are enough to ensure I do not get invited to pro-life cocktail parties for the next decade.
Around the Web
Theater companies are performing Shakespeare less often. Nothing about this is good for America.
Freddie de Boer is never more incisive than when he is talking about the politics of media:
The trouble, of course, is that the prestige economy operates through alchemy and innuendo, communicates through Slack channels and off-the-books conversations, rewards deference to insider mores and fealty to in-group status hierarchy, treats actual ability as a tertiary concern, and (especially) amounts to one of those strange games of telephone where everyone is developing a sense of prestige not through their own organic perceptions but by trying to deduce what everyone else things is and is not prestigious. It’s all a lousy basis through which opportunity might be distributed; that some degree of status hierarchy is an inevitable part of all human competitive cultures does not make it less lousy.
The Penultimate Word
“But, on the contrary, when the minds of the elect perceive that all things transitory are nought, they seek out which be the things for which they were created, and whereas nothing suffices to the satisfying them out of God, thought itself, being wearied in them by the effort of the search, finds rest in the hope and contemplation of its Creator, longs to have a place among the citizens above; and each one of them, while yet in the body an inhabitant of the world, in mind already soars beyond the world, bewails the weariness of exile which he endures, and with the ceaseless incitements of love urges himself on to the country on high.” — Gregory the Great