Has God changed his mind?

“Psst! Did God really say?” The very first words of the serpent slyly whispered to Eve in the Garden of Eden haunted me as I wrestled with the Bible’s prohibition of homoerotic sex.

I was teaching a module on Biblical Sexuality at the London School of Theology in 2009. I was overwhelmed by the volume of new scholarly arguments challenging me to rethink my conservative position on same-sex relationships.

Of course, I believed the Bible was inspired, inerrant, and infallible — but in the light of new exegetical evidence, was I correct in holding to a traditional interpretation of the texts prohibiting homogenital relations?

Moreover, several of my students who claimed to be “evangelical” had adopted rather worrisome postmodern and permissive perspectives on sexuality. It wouldn’t be easy to persuade them to accept an orthodox interpretation of the biblical texts.

Gagnon’s Bombshell

Robert Gagnon’s 2002 opus magnum The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics answered my Sisyphean struggle. The meticulously researched and rigorously argued 500-page tome refutes every possible argument progressive scholars have raised in the last three decades. Its use of the Bible’s original languages and insight into the ancient world is unparalleled.

Gagnon is an evangelical Presbyterian scholar who has devoted his life to almost single-handedly dissecting and debunking every avant-garde argument that raises its serpent-like head against the biblical teaching on homosexuality. Unlike most scholars, he does this through his online lectures, website, debates, articles, and Facebook and X accounts.

I got my students to read Gagnon’s book. It was like dropping a thermonuclear bomb. It won the battle for the Bible against the babble of the gay brigade. The serpent sulked and slithered back into his hole.

But the serpent has now returned with a state-of-the-art argument: “Psst! Maybe God did really say homosexuality is wrong. But can’t you see He’s now changed his mind?”

This is the reasoning of the evangelical father-son duo Richard B. Hays and Christopher B. Hays in their book The Widening of God’s Mercy: Sexuality within the Biblical Story, published in September 2024.

Richard teaches at Duke Divinity School; Christopher is chair of the Old Testament department at Fuller Theological Seminary. 1996 Richard published The Moral Vision of the New Testament, arguing that “though only a few biblical texts speak of homoerotic activity, all that do mention it express unqualified disapproval.”

Deeper or Flawed Logic?

Richard has changed his mind because he (and Christopher) believe that “a deeper logic” shows the biblical God frequently changing His mind to “reveal an expansive mercy that embraces ever wider circles of people, including those previously deemed in some way alien or unworthy.” It is this “trajectory of mercy” in the Bible that “leads us to welcome sexual minorities.”

“The acceptance of sexual minorities in the church reenacts a narrative pattern that is pervasive in the Bible,” they argue. How dare we call “unclean” what God declares “clean”?

Further, there is a “metaphorical correspondence” between those formerly “unclean” foreigners, eunuchs, tax collectors, gentiles, non-kosher folk and LGBTQ people.

The book trumpets:

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.

In other words, God has really said, but God has also changed His mind. He’s become more inclusive. He’s repented of His homophobia. Richard states that he wants “to repent of the narrowness of my earlier vision,” and he wants us to join him (and God) in his metanoia. And since the Holy Spirit promised to lead the church into all truth (John 16:12–13), that’s just what He’s doing, the Hayses claim.

Spirit of the Age

Gagnon, however, demolishes this woke reading of Scripture. “None of the other groups that get included in God’s ‘ever-expanding mercy’ … get a pass for immoral behaviour,” he notes. 

God embraces Gentiles — but far from permitting their sexual licentiousness, Paul insists they must “abstain from sexual immorality” and “no longer live like Gentiles who do not know God” (1 Thessalonians 4:3, 5).

And while Jesus does change His mind on sexual ethics, “he does so in precisely the opposite direction of a ‘widening of God’s mercy,’ closing remaining loopholes based on a rigorous application of the moral logic of God’s intentional creation of a sexual binary,” Gagnon writes.

As for the Holy Spirit, Gagnon observes:

If only the Hayses had read on from John 16:13, they would have discovered that the Spirit’s job is to “take from [Jesus] and report it to you” (16:14–15). … Yet this “spirit” the Hayses speak about is not elaborating or expanding on Jesus’s teaching about a male-female prerequisite for sex for a new context but rather diametrically opposing that teaching.Thus, it is far more likely that the Hayses are imbibing from the spirit of this age rather than from the Spirit of Jesus Christ.

As for the overall hermeneutical grid the Hayses impose on Scripture, he argues:

The “widening of God’s mercy” is not even a universal theme of the Bible … Even when present in the biblical story, the theme of God’s expansive mercy everywhere presupposes repentance from immoral conduct. And, finally, not only is this theme never applied in the Bible to an acceptance of homosexual practice, but it is categorically rejected whenever homosexual practice is mentioned.

What About Incest, Bestiality, Polyamory?

In a second essay pointing out “12 Disqualifying Errors in Richard Hays’ ‘Biblical’ Case for Gay Relationships,” Gagnon stresses how the authors “fail to recognize that the biblical theme of God ‘changing his mind’” nowhere entails a radical loosening of God’s moral standards but “entails God extending unfathomable kindness that is supposed to lead people to repentance from sins (Romans 2:4).”

So is God going to change His mind on adult-consensual incest, bestiality, and polyamory? As a biblical scholar, I must agree with Gagnon that the Hayses never deal with counterarguments and neither engage the relevant scholarship from the past 30 years.

In a 2016 essay, I wrote:

I have explored every conceivable avenue for an exegetical get-out clause on the issue of homosexuality. For over 10 years I have considered every major publication on the issue. Quite honestly, I wish we could interpret the Bible with academic integrity in a manner that would permit rather than prohibit gay relationships.

Slaves, Women, and Homosexuals

I investigated a line of reasoning similar to the Hays’ using William J. Webb’s book Slaves, Women & Homosexuals: Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis. Like the Hayses, Webb explores what he calls a “redemptive hermeneutic”, showing that the Bible demonstrates a progressive attitude to excluded groups like women and slaves.

However, Webb reaches a conclusion diametrically opposed to the Hays’, demonstrating that as it moves from Old to New Testament, the issue of homoerotic relationships is decided and closed from beginning to end.

Moreover, Webb observes,

the same canons of cultural analysis, which show a liberalizing or less restrictive tendency in the slavery and women texts relative to the original culture, demonstrate a more restrictive tendency in homosexuality relative to the original culture. While continuing a negative assessment of homosexuality today, even of its least offensive form, the Christian community should reserve its greatest denouncement for the vilest forms of homosexual activity.

So, does God even change His mind? Gagnon warns that the Hayses have capitulated to a form of “open theism”, which may be “nothing more than a rhetorical smokescreen on their part, a means to shift the blame to God for the changing of their own minds about homosexuality.”

I was curious how the Hayses had dealt with the last chapter of the last book of the Bible. Does God change His mind again when we reach Revelation 22:15? Here, God shuts the gates of the New Jerusalem to “the dogs and sorcerers and the sexually immoral and murderers and idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices falsehood.”

Several scholars conclude that “the dogs” in this verse refer to homosexuals. Gagnon suggests that the term “primarily has in view emasculated male cult prostitutes, without excluding a wider reference to any who engage in homosexual practice.”

Even if the scholars are wrong, the Bible is clear that the “trajectory of mercy” does ultimately exclude the “sexually immoral.”

I wasn’t surprised that the Hayses had failed to mention this text even in a footnote.

 

Dr. Jules Gomes, (BA, BD, MTh, PhD), has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.