The Quality of God's Mercy

Two pathways to mercy structure Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, which beautifully encapsulates the hazards and burdens of judgment. The chaste novitiate Isabella names the false path while chastising her oppressor, the demonic Angelo: “Lawful mercy is nothing kin to foul redemption,” she says, after he offers to pardon her brother if Isabella will yield her body to his lust. 

The true mercy is given by the Duke, whose secret machinations as Vienna’s ‘undercover boss’ overcome Angelo’s designs: the very “mercy of the law cries out…,” the Duke announces when setting things right, “haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure; like doth quit like, and measure still for measure.” In the play’s controversial but thoroughly Christian resolution, everyone receives justice, even if Angelo’s redress is seasoned by mercy: the Duke had secretly rescued Isabella’s brother, sparing Angelo from the crime of hypocritically putting an innocent man to death. Angelo suffers the social death of being publicly unmasked even while he is rescued from actual death for his crimes, after which he is compelled to marry the woman he had previously defrauded.

In the eschatologically-pregnant concluding gesture, the Duke offers his hand to Isabella, whose haunting silence indicates the suspension of time that has hovered over the play and that we are still in: we can only anticipate the crowning of justice with the chaste hand of the church—and so ought not sin by coercing such a union prematurely. Shakespeare’s mercy reinforces the norms of chastity through expressing leniency in judgement and so offering offenders more time to repent. 

Shakespeare’s construal of mercy plays almost no role in Christopher and Richard Hays’ new theological blockbuster, The Widening of God’s Mercy: Sexuality within the Biblical Story. In a single footnote, they observe that Shakespeare “memorably evokes the character of God’s mercy” and its implications for how we treat others in Portia’s oft-quoted speech from The Merchant of Venice: 

The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
'Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown:
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God's
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy. I have spoke thus much
To mitigate the justice of thy plea;
Which if thou follow, this strict court of Venice
Must needs give sentence 'gainst the merchant there.

Hays and Hays economize by cutting the speech’s italicized portions in their footnote. The omissions are significant, as they distort Shakespeare’s fundamental vision of mercy as a gracious mitigation of punishment we deserve: mercy seasons justice, but can never stand without it. 

In the text to which that footnote belongs, Hays and Hays emphasize a different (complementary) version of mercy, which takes the form of inclusion and welcome. They lean heavily on Paul’s admonition in Romans 15:17 to “welcome one another as Christ as welcomed you,” and so speak of mercy primarily as “God’s grace, compassion, and favor,” which signals “God’s overflowing love, God’s propensity to embrace, heal, restore, and reconcile all creation.” They also want to claim versions of mercy that associate it with “clemency” shown to guilty parties, but only in ways that implicate us all in an equal human sinfulness. In this light, it is not surprising that they cut the inegalitarianism from Portia’s speech, in effect reducing Shakespeare’s mercy to a form of contemporary inclusion predicated on our universal shortcomings and failures. The result is not quite Angelo’s “foul redemption”—but it is not far from it, either. 

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The Widening of God’s Mercy is an attempt to locate “sexuality within the Biblical story,” as the subtitle puts it—with an accent on “the,” rather than “a.” The “biblical story,” they write, “taken as a whole, depicts the ever-widening path of God’s mercy.” On its own, this claim is uncontroversial: God’s generous offer of grace extends to all people and groups, regardless of their “identities” or practices. The pertinent question of the same-sex marriage debates, though, is what kinds of moral transformation the mercy of God demands of us: Does God’s mercy sanction our way of life or tacitly condemn it? What norms does God’s merciful judgment reinforce, and on what basis do we identify them?  Flattening God’s relationship to humanity into a single story about “mercy” is mistaken not for what it includes, but for what it omits: How might our understanding of God’s action be inflected if we also attended to beatitude, life, justice, purity, and peace alongside mercy in our judgment of what God requires of the world? 

It is not surprising that Hays and Hays need recourse to some kind of normative account of humanity’s flourishing to get their argument for “welcome” going. What is surprising is that they do not draw on Scripture for it. Hays and Hays (rightly) think the argument about the standard verses invoked in debates about same-sex sexual acts are tedious—but they say nothing at all about marriage’s role and ends in God’s relationship to humanity. Instead, they admit at the outset that their book “starts from the recognition of the harm that modern conservative Christianity has done by fighting battles that God doesn’t call us to fight, and from the recognition that faithful LGBTQ Christians are all around us.” I agree conservative churches have (often unintentionally) done considerable damage in upholding sexual norms, but setting up the argument this way preemptively secularizes the account of “harm” at work in their moral reasoning. They write that “God wants humankind to flourish,” and that some sexual practices “are abusive or otherwise harmful.” But which ones? And does Scripture have anything to say in answer to the question? 

Hays and Hays want to avoid such questions, because they want to “maintain a certain modesty” about their work as biblical scholars. They think they “know something about God that is relevant to the sexuality debates,” but defer to others about the practical details of how this view should be worked out. Their reluctance is understandable and even, in a sense, admirable. But in a debate where practical questions of ‘inclusion’ invariably involve questions of guardrails and limits, their methodology is a form of theological and moral malpractice.

Hays and Hays’ narrow focus on “the” story of God’s widening mercy means they do not ask why Scripture contains its moral prohibitions in the first place, which leaves our assessment of sexual practices entirely untethered from Scriptural norms. It is telling that one reason they give for not addressing specifics is that they are “confident that these conversations will continue to unfold and change shape in years to come, and it is likely that our thinking will continue to evolve as well.” Evolve into what, though? When, on the final page of the book, Hays and Hays write that they believe “welcoming people of different sexualities is an act of faithfulness to God’s merciful purposes,” how many sexualities and of what sort do they think should be licit? On their view, such questions cannot be conclusively addressed without listening to “scientists and theorists of human sexuality.” This is no real comfort, though: it is easy to think of all manner of acts Scripture would prohibit that are currently being softly (or openly) de-stigmatized with the full endorsement of those vaunted “theorists of human sexuality” to whom Christian moral reasoning must apparently pay homage. 

A reductio of this kind can be a cheap score: no doubt Hays and Hays would recoil from accepting the implications of their view and invoke all manner of scriptural texts for doing so. Whether they can do so consistently based on The Widening of God’s Mercy alone, however, is another question. Hays and Hays are explicit that no prohibition in Scripture provides a definitive reason for saying “no” to contemporary practices, sexual or otherwise, provided that our revision of them can be made on the basis of God’s mercy.

In their chapter on Sabbath norms in the New Testament, Richard Hays writes that Christ’s willingness to heal on the Sabbath teaches us “how to reframe ethical questions in light of God’s scandalously merciful character.” In this way, Christ’s teaching is not “defiance of God’s law but rather an embracing of its deeper intent.” The moral he draws is expansive: “actions done for healing and human wholeness should be welcomed rather than forbidden, even if they appear to violate a particular scriptural prohibition” (emphasis his). It seems as though Hays wants to draw a straight line from this principle to overturning traditional Christian prohibitions on sexual practices so long as doing so is for the sake of “healing and human wholeness”—whatever these might be.  

The shortcomings of this strategy are considerable. For one, Hays has to assume that the Pharisees’ interpretation of the Sabbath prohibitions on work is the right one in order to construe Jesus as “appearing” to overturn it. Hays thinks Christ’s question about whether it is permissible to do “good or do evil, to save life or to kill” on the Sabbath is an invitation to reflect on “the purpose of the Sabbath law—and to interpret as an ordinance given for the sake of human wholeness and flourishing.” While Christ’s question does that, it also restricts the scope of the Sabbath prohibition: the “work” that the Sabbath prohibits does not include relieving immediate human needs if one is able to do so. Framed positively, Christ’s action indicates that healing is permitted on the Sabbath—because it is not work. 

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. 

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The Widening of God’s Mercy is a theological blockbuster because Richard Hays has changed his mind about the status of same-sex unions in the church. His defense of the traditional position in The Moral Vision of the New Testament was widely cited, cementing Hays’ position in the decades since as the last remnant of a theological mainline that still took the traditional sexual ethic seriously. This latest book is a painful form of penance for his “harmful” views. 

The gap between the two books’ on sexual ethics is smaller than people might realize. Hays proposed in Moral Vision that ‘experience’ which contradicts the witness of Scripture “should be admitted to normative status in the church only after sustained and agonizing scrutiny by a consensus of the faithful.” Such stories are not an “independent, counterbalancing authority” to the New Testament, but a “hermeneutical lens”: only because the “new experience of the Gentile converts proved hermeneutically illuminating of Scripture” in Acts 15 “was the church, over time, able to accept the decision to embrace Gentiles within the fellowship of God’s people.” The seeds for Hays’ “conversion” on sexual ethics were planted even in Moral Vision. 

Additionally, Hays’ principle in Moral Vision that truthful interpretations of Scripture can happen only in communities that embody it helps explain why, after communing in an affirming church, he has suddenly discovered Scripture supports his new view. There is “a hermeneutical feedback loop,” Hays wrote in Moral Vision, “that generates fresh readings of the New Testament as the community grows in maturity and as it confronts changing situations.” Though this might seem like a paradox, Hays observed that we approach Scripture “as heirs of a community that has been reading and performing these texts for nineteen hundred years already” (305).

Knowing “the will of God follows the community’s submission and transformation.” If Hays sees in his affirming church reason to believe they are following God’s will on sexual ethics, he also is extremely critical of the church’s failure to uphold monogamy for everyone. But if truthful discernment follows faithful practice, a church community’s failure on divorce should make us more skeptical of its claim to have rightfully discerned the path on same-sex marriage, not less—unless, that is, we completely untether sexual ethics from marriage, which is more or less what Widening does. 

At the same time, Hays’ affirmation of same-sex unions because of God’s ever-expanding “mercy” contradicts more of Moral Vision than Hays might want to give up. For instance, Hays’ newfound way of reading Scripture might imperil his careful defense of pacifism. After evaluating the arguments, Hays concluded that the New Testament offers “no basis for ever declaring Christian participation in war ‘just.’” Hays acknowledges that the Gospels contain stories of soldiers, which he thinks simply stand “in tension” with the dominant pacifistic strain of the New Testament. Hays also grants that his pacifism sits outside the mainstream Christian tradition since at least the time of Constantine—even though he claims the church in the first three centuries “was decidedly pacifist in orientation.” Invoking reason and experience to justify war is insufficient, since “reason must be healed and taught by Scripture, and our experience must be transformed by the renewing of our minds in conformity with the mind of Christ.” 

If, however, reason and experience are not “independent authorities,” could they be “hermeneutically illuminating” for how we understand Scripture’s construals of peace and violence? In his critique of Hays’ pacifism, Nigel Biggar offers a number of specifications and distinctions that he identifies from both reason and experience to show how Matthew 5:28-30 might be interpreted in ways that are compatible with Christian participation in warfare. While the disagreement between the two thinkers is wide-ranging, concerns about reason’s role in interpretation are paramount. As Hays wrote in a rejoinder to Biggar’s argument, “You import distinctions that are neither stated nor implied in the texts you are addressing, and then you insist that this is what the texts really ‘mean’…Jesus never said or implied that legitimately authorized military force was necessary to resist evil, but that is what he must have meant. How do you know? Because experience tells us such force is necessary.” Hays does not repudiate the need to make distinctions outright, but he maintains that distinctions should be taken from Scripture itself: “I want to insist that if our concern is to seek guidance from the NT, the distinctions must be the distinctions actually made by its authors, not distinctions projected backwards anachronistically” (emphasis mine).  

In this light, Hays’ invocation of experience in Wideness as a basis for reinterpreting Scripture’s explicit prohibitions looks like special pleading. Any distinction between the prohibited sexual acts and covenanted same-sex relationships is not Scripture’s—yet Hays must invoke it for his view to succeed. And if the experience of gay people (as if there could be a single experience) is ‘hermeneutically illuminating’ enough to reinterpret the meaning of Scripture’s prohibitions, is the experience of love on the battlefield Biggar recounts sufficient to do the same for violence? The tensions—if not outright contradictions—in Hays’ respective positions are especially acute given his principle that Scripture is rightly discerned in communities that embody it: If Hays wants to lean on the dominant witness to pacifism in the church’s first three centuries for support against the next sixteen hundred years, what should we say about that church’s overwhelmingly consistent interpretation of the prohibitions on same-sex sexual activity? 

It might be tempting to counter that Scripture’s teaching on nonviolence is in a different category than its teaching on same-sex sexual unions, given that the former is (ostensibly) pervasive in the New Testament and prohibitions on same-sex relationships are few. The argument is common, but it is a canard. Indeed, it is beneath any semi-literate reader of the Bible: For if Scripture says little about same-sex sexual relations, it says much about marriage—and all of it is normatively oriented toward male and female. 

One might even say that marriage has a legitimate claim to sit alongside community, cross, and creation as one of Hays’ “focal images” that guide our attention as we read Scripture. Focal images in Hays’ hermeneutics function like a ‘rule of faith’: they simultaneously summarize the story and “govern the interpretation of individual texts by placing them within a coherent narrative framework.” Though Hays did not include it, marriage satisfies the criteria for such an image: it has a textual basis in all the canonical witnesses, it does not stand in tension with any other major emphasis in the New Testament, and it highlights “central and substantial ethical concerns of the texts” where it appears. In fact, Hays’ own proposed images of “community,” “cross,” and “new creation” are unintelligible without the nuptial imagery that encompasses them. Hays’ failure in Wideness to locate sexual prohibitions inside of a comprehensive story about God’s covenant with his people began with how he read Scripture in Moral Vision.

More damningly, though, mercy cannot function as a “focal image” on the terms Hays lays out in Moral Vision. Hays contends there that love “is unsatisfactory as a focal image” because it is “not really an image; rather, it is an interpretation of an image.” Love gains its content from the cross and apart from that “specific narrative image, the term has no meaning.” When Hays turns to rhetorical objections to using “love” as an interpretative rubric, he is unsparing: “The term has become debased in popular discourse; it has lost its power of discrimination, having become a cover for all manner of vapid self-indulgence….Indeed, love is sometimes invoked even to sanction sexual relations outside marriage or the use of violence. Surely in such cases the term has been emptied of its meaning.” The same critique could be made about “mercy” without loss. In the event, Hays and Hays tacitly repudiate this aspect of The Moral Vision as well: “love looms large in our thinking,” they write. “Is there a simpler and more direct statement about God in the Bible than ‘God is love’?” The ironies are too palpable for comment. 

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The church desperately needs to become a community of mercy. And Shakespeare is right: we learn to render the deeds of mercy only when we grow comfortable asking for it. The collateral damage from our culture wars is real, and Christian churches bear responsibility for it. Having long lost our way on matters of sexual ethics, conservative Christian churches have neither the credibility nor the ability to ensure our prohibitions on sexual misconduct are encompassed by “good news.” Hays is right about this much: the truth of the gospel’s teaching will be clarified for the world only when our communities embody it ourselves.

But the mercy we need is not the mercy on offer in Hays and Hays’ book. In the end, their version of mercy offers only a sentimentalized, secularized account of “welcome” that has no purchase on the justice of marriage as given in creation or revealed in the Scriptures. The doctrine that marriage is between a man and a woman remains a pillar of the church’s orthodoxy; repudiating it would imperil our communion with the faith of the apostles and the heirs of Christ’s teachings. 

Hays and Hays want their proposal to be novel: “It’s time to see new visions and dream new dreams,” they say. But nothing is more tired than their effort to conscript mercy to their purposes. In fact, the effort was predictable—because G.K. Chesterton predicted it: 

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.

The mercy of the Lord is unfailing and unchanging, as is His justice. As Gregory the Great wrote nearly 1500 years ago, “each particular virtue is to the last degree destitute, unless one virtue lends its support to another.” So it has always been, and so it will always be.