The unsettling surprise of God’s mercy

Should Christians who uphold the Bible as the word of God have to choose between love of God and love of the queer people in their lives? While the answer may seem obvious to most readers of this magazine, to many Christian it isn’t at all obvious. In posing the question, I am reminded of an openly gay teenage boy I knew whose parents sent him to an evangelical school. His classmates probably did not realize the psychological and spiritual harm they were causing him when they lobbed Bible verses at him like grenades. They were children themselves—well-mannered, well-intentioned ones—who were doing what the well-intentioned (albeit misguided) adults in their lives had taught them to do.

In The Widening of God’s Mercy, father-son duo Richard and Christopher Hays provide what those parents needed: an argument that biblically faithful Christians cannot exclude queer people from the mercy of God. We cannot block God’s mercy, nor should we give in to the tribalistic identities that compel us to try. God’s mercy is expansive enough for all.

Richard, a retired Duke Divinity School professor of New Testament, is author of the 1996 book The Moral Vision of the New Testament, which has been cited extensively in arguments against queer inclusion in the church. He acknowledges the harm that book has caused to the church and to queer people, and he presents The Widening of God’s Mercy as a “comprehensive rethinking of the way in which the Bible might speak to these matters.” Christopher, his son, is a PCUSA minister and a professor of Old Testament at Fuller Seminary, an evangelical bastion that, despite more progressive stances on some issues, has resisted LGBTQ inclusion. He identifies several flaws in his father’s past arguments, while also admitting that he has been “too often silent” as he’s watched Fuller move away from inclusion.