Book Review: "The Widening of God’s Mercy" by Christopher B. Hays and Richard B. Hays
Summary
Misapplied at best, deliberately heretical at worst.
Detailed Breakdown of the Book
Introduction
The Introduction is trying to do more than preview the later chapters. It is attempting to hand the reader a lens. And this lens is a sweeping claim about the biblical story: God’s mercy “widens” across time, and the way that the Bible talks about God “changing His mind” becomes a key mechanism for that widening. From there, the introduction moves quickly from narrative tensions to ethical implications, espeically around sexuality and the inclusion of people who are LGBTQ. What’s found, rather than a careful analysis of the text, are the authors making small interpretive choices at the front end, that become big theological conclusions by the end.
“God Changes His Mind” in 1 Sam. 15 as a Controlling Idea
The Introduction leans hard on 1 Samuel 15 as a framing text. It sets the tension between 1 Samuel 15:29 (God “does not…change his mind”) and 1 Samuel 15:11, 35 (“I regret…” and “the LORD regretted…”). It then argues that the same Hebrew verb, nacham, stands behind both “change his mind” and “regret,” and it suggests that English translations can hide that connection. On that basis, the Introduction proposes a broader theme: God “repeatedly changes his mind” in ways that expand mercy, preserve relationship, and protect people.
There is real biblical material that supports part of this. Scripture does sometimes describe God as “relenting” in response to intercession or repentance, and it does so in ways that highlight God’s personal engagement with people, not detachment. Exodus 32:14, Jonah 3:10, and Jeremiah 18:7–10 are straightforward examples where God’s announced action is conditioned by human response, and the narrative presents God as responsive and relational. The Psalms also routinely describe God as compassionate and attentive to human weakness (Psalm 103:13–14), which fits the broader picture of God’s personal nearness.
Where the Introduction overreaches is in turning the tension in 1 Samuel 15 into a simple model of divine fickleness, or into a rhetorical hammer against the idea of God’s constancy. The point of 1 Samuel 15 is not that God is unstable. The chapter is pressing the opposite: God’s judgment on Saul is firm, and Saul’s disobedience will not be managed with partial repentance and political spin. When 1 Samuel 15:28–29 says God will not “change his mind,” it is speaking to the finality of God’s decision to remove Saul from kingship, not denying that Scripture sometimes uses accommodated language such as “regret” to describe God’s real opposition to sin and his real involvement in history. The same verb can carry different shades in different contexts. The theological task is not merely to observe lexical overlap, but to read how the author is using the language to communicate God’s settled purpose in the face of Saul’s manipulation.
This is where the wider canon also matters. Scripture repeatedly teaches God’s unchanging character and purposes (Numbers 23:19; Malachi 3:6; James 1:17; Isaiah 46:10). So any appeal to narrative “relenting” language has to be integrated with those claims, not used to relativize them. The category distinction you identified is important: God’s relational dealings in time are real, and the Bible speaks of them in vivid terms, but they are not the same thing as God’s moral will shifting with culture, or God’s character evolving.
The verdict here is not that the Introduction has no textual basis. It does. The verdict is that it uses a real narrative feature of Scripture as a theological engine in a way that risks doing more than the text authorizes. The frame is plausible, but overstated, and it creates pressure to treat “God changes his mind” as the controlling key for later ethical revision.
“Biblical Law is Under Constant Negotiation and Revision”
A second major move in the Introduction is its portrayal of Torah law as repeatedly renegotiated and revised. It highlights differences among Torah collections and speaks as if the biblical story normalizes the idea that law itself is in ongoing revision. It also cites Ezekiel 20:25 (“I gave them statutes that were not good”) in a way that can sound like God himself is admitting that his own commands were morally defective.
Again, there is genuine biblical support for a careful version of what they are gesturing toward. Scripture does show covenantal development and changes in boundary markers as redemptive history unfolds. Food laws and purity boundaries are handled differently under the new covenant (Mark 7:19; Acts 10), and Hebrews 9–10 explicitly frames major aspects of the Mosaic system as typological and fulfilled in Christ. The prophets also apply Torah to fresh situations, exposing how Israel can keep the letter while abandoning the heart of covenant faithfulness. And Moses’ intercession in Exodus 32 shows that the covenant relationship includes real pleading, real warning, and real mercy.
But “development” is not the same as “revision” in the sense of the community rewriting God’s moral will to fit new social realities. Scripture warns against adding to or subtracting from God’s commands (Deuteronomy 4:2; 12:32; Proverbs 30:6). Those warnings do not mean God never brings new covenant administrations or new applications, but they do mean that the people of God are not authorized to edit God’s moral claims as though moral truth is plastic.
Ezekiel 20:25 is the key stress point. It is a notoriously difficult text with a long history of careful interpretation. Many orthodox readings take it as God giving Israel over to punitive consequences, or to the corrupt statutes they chose, rather than God confessing that his Torah was “not good.” In other words, the text is often read as judicial abandonment: God hands them over, in judgment, to what they have demanded, and the result is destructive. Using Ezekiel 20:25 as a quick proof that God’s laws were morally bad is not a stable foundation for anything weighty, and it risks flattening a complex prophetic argument into a slogan.
The New Testament’s covenantal shifts also do not occur because Israel or the church revised the ethic. They occur because God fulfills his promises and restructures covenant life in the Messiah (Matthew 5:17–20; Hebrews 8). That is a crucial difference. Fulfillment is a redemptive act of God; revision implies human authority over what God has spoken.
The verdict, then, is that the Introduction is at best imprecise and at worst setting a trajectory. A careful account of covenantal development is biblically warranted. The way the Introduction frames it, especially with Ezekiel 20:25 as a proof-text, leans toward “we can revise this, too,” and that is exactly the instinct that the Bible repeatedly resists.
“The Spirit Will Lead Into New Truths” as Warrant for New Sexual Ethics
The Introduction also leans on John 16:12–13 to argue that the Spirit continues to lead the community into new and surprising truths, and it characterizes the Bible as an “ongoing conversation” where rules and boundaries get rethought. The rhetorical implication is that, if the Spirit continued to lead beyond the moment of Jesus’ earthly ministry, the same Spirit may be leading the church beyond traditional conclusions today.
A biblical account of the Spirit’s guidance is real and necessary. John 16 does teach that the Spirit guides into truth, and Romans 8 speaks of the Spirit’s leading in the life of believers. Acts 15 shows the church wrestling faithfully with a live controversy, listening, arguing, and discerning what faithfulness looks like in a new moment. There is nothing anti-biblical about saying the Spirit helps the church apply Scripture wisely amid changing cultural circumstances.
The problem is how John 16 is being used. In John’s farewell discourse, the Spirit’s ministry is tethered to Jesus: the Spirit will not speak on his own authority, will bring Jesus’ words to remembrance, and will glorify Jesus (John 14:26; 16:13–14). That is not a blank check to overturn apostolic teaching. It is a promise that Jesus’ revelation will be carried forward, clarified, and applied as the apostolic witness is established.
The New Testament treats the apostolic witness as foundational and binding (Ephesians 2:20; 2 Thessalonians 2:15; Jude 3). Paul explicitly rejects “new” messages that contradict what has already been delivered (Galatians 1:8–9). So if “the Spirit is doing a new thing” becomes the argument for setting aside clear apostolic instruction later in the book, the method would clash with the Bible’s own account of Spirit-led truth.
Similar to the earlier points: this is plausible in part, but drastically overstated in the way it is framed, and dependent on how the Introduction cashes it out later. The Spirit leads, but never as a rival authority to Christ and his apostles. Any use of John 16 that functions like an override switch is a theological misuse, even if it is dressed in spiritual language.
“The Contested Passages Were Not Envisioning LGBTQ Christians Today”
Another key claim is that the “contested” texts do not directly address the reality of modern LGBTQ Christians, particularly those who display the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22–23). The Introduction signals that anachronism is the great danger, and it suggests that many debates are about importing modern categories into ancient texts.
There is very limited but important biblical support here. Responsible interpretation does require historical context. It is true that the biblical writers were not using modern acronyms, modern psychological frameworks, or the current categories of identity. The church should be allergic to sloppy arguments that ignore genre, context, and authorial intent. And it is also true that spiritual fruit matters. Jesus teaches that fruit is a meaningful category for discernment (Matthew 7:16–20), and Galatians 5 does treat Spirit-shaped character as a real marker of spiritual life.
But “context” cannot be used as a pre-emptive dismissal of what the texts actually say. The New Testament does not ground sexual ethics merely in shifting cultural assumptions. It repeatedly grounds them in creation, in the meaning of male-female union, and in a theological account of the body (Genesis 1–2; Matthew 19:4–6; Romans 1:26–27). Even when Paul is addressing a Greco-Roman world, he anchors his argument in creation logic, not merely in local custom. And likewise, “fruit” cannot become a trump card over the teachings of Scripture. Jesus warns that religious appearance is not the same as final approval (Matthew 7:21–23). Further, John ties love and obedience together rather than pitting them against each other (1 John 2:3–6). This does not mean the church should ignore spiritual struggle, complexity, or the reality that sanctification can be slow. What it does mean, is that the church cannot redefine sin simply because someone appears sincere or because their community experience feels spiritually rich.
Passages like 1 Corinthians 6:9–11 is important precisely because it holds two realities together: real welcome, real cleansing, real new life, and a real moral boundary that is not treated as disposable. The pastoral path forward must hold dignity and discipleship together. A method that sidelines the relevant texts before doing careful exegesis is not compassion or love; it is a way of ensuring the conclusion before the argument is ever formed in the first place.
This claim, as a controlling premise, is in tension with Scripture. Careful contextual reading is definitely required. But the Introduction’s framing risks becoming a mechanism for functionally emptying apostolic texts of authority.
Inclusion, Dignity, and the Harm Done by the Church
The Introduction’s strongest material is its insistence that the church has often done real harm, and that cruelty, partiality, and self-righteousness have no place among the people of God. It argues for explicit inclusion of those excluded by “traditional expectations” around sexual orientation, and it frames this as consistent with God’s widening mercy. The Bible clearly supports much of the moral diagnosis. Every person bears God’s image (Genesis 1:27), and the tongue sins against image-bearers when it curses or dehumanizes (James 3:9). Jesus rebukes self-righteous religion that uses moral standing as a weapon (Luke 18:9–14), and James condemns partiality in the assembly (James 2:1–9). The church should repent where it has mocked, rejected, or treated people as projects rather than neighbors.
At the same time, “inclusion” is not a self-defining term in the New Testament. Jesus welcomes sinners, but He also repeatedly calls sinners to repentance (Luke 5:32). Paul’s pastoral letters hold together tenderness and moral formation, and 1 Thessalonians 4:3–8 is explicit that holiness includes sexual holiness, framed not as mere rulekeeping but as life under God’s call. And further, the New Testament’s inclusion is never “no moral boundaries.” The church is given real boundaries for membership and discipline (Matthew 18:15–20; 1 Corinthians 5). While those passages are often (and easily) mishandled, their existence means we cannot define love as boundaryless affirmation. The task is to hold “welcome” and “discipleship” together in a way that is neither harsh nor hollow.
The call to dignity and repentance from mistreatment is thoroughly biblical and should be received as correction where needed. The question mark with this topic brought up in the introduction, is what “inclusion” is made to mean. Simply put, the authors should have clearly defined what they mean with this term. If it means belonging, hospitality, protection from cruelty, and patient shepherding toward holiness, it can fit the New Testament. If it means affirming what Scripture calls sin, then the Introduction is setting up a collision with the Bible that it will not be able to reconcile.
“God is Not Male” and Pronouns for God
The Introduction includes a section on pronouns for God that states, plainly, that God is not male and is beyond human male and female identities. It observes that Scripture predominantly uses masculine pronouns and that “Father” and “Son” are primary images, while also highlighting feminine imagery for God (Isaiah 42:14; 49:14–15; Matthew 23:37; Luke 13:34). It then argues that one can avoid pronouns altogether or use gender-neutral pronouns, but it chooses to keep traditional masculine pronouns for readability while urging readers not to constrain their understanding of God to human masculinity.
This can be affirmed, but with careful theological verbiage.
God is spirit (John 4:24).
God is not a creature with a male body.
Scripture does use both masculine titles and feminine metaphors, and the feminine metaphors should not be treated as embarrassing or off-limits, since the Bible itself uses them.
The caution is that “Father” and “Son” language is not optional in historic Trinitarian Christianity. It is revealed biblical naming (Matthew 28:19; John 1:18). Feminine metaphors can enrich our understanding of God’s care without rewriting God’s self-naming. The thing to watch from from here on out is whether the book moves from “God is not male” (true, He is Spirit that revealed himself through masculine verbiage) to treating Father-Son language as merely a cultural artifact that can be replaced (and therefore not consistent with the Bible’s own pattern of revelation).
Comparing Yahweh’s Warrior Imagery to the goddess Anat
Lastly, the Introduction makes a comparative move: it notes that imagery of the Lord as a warrior (Isaiah 63:1–6) is commonly read as masculine, but claims its closest analogy in the ancient West Semitic world is a story about the warrior goddess Anat of Ugarit. I’m cautious here, but at this point, I’ll say that this is not automatically heresy. That is because conducting comparative background studies can illuminate how images would have landed in the ancient Near East.
But it is a severe methodological risk because it can easily become more than a comparative background study. If the argument shifts from “this helps us understand the cultural world of the imagery” to “Israel derived its understanding of God from pagan sources,” the result can undercut Scripture’s insistence on Yahweh’s uniqueness and self-revelation (Isaiah 45:5–7), which therefore is heretical. There is also a difference between polemical engagement and theological borrowing. The prophets routinely mock the nations’ gods, and biblical theology often positions Yahweh as categorically distinct. Any appeal to Ugaritic parallels has to be handled with that Biblical posture in mind.
Ultimately, this method can be used responsibly, but it needs careful guardrails, and the Introduction does not pause long enough to build them.
Is anything in the Introduction “outright heresy”?
If we define heresy strictly in historic terms, the Introduction does not explicitly deny the Trinity, the deity of Christ, the resurrection, or salvation by grace through faith. On that standard, it is not openly/deliberately heretical.
What it does do is set trajectories that often end in conflict with Scripture, depending on how consistently they are pursued. The main risks are these:
treating biblical sexual ethics as culturally bound in a way that empties apostolic texts of authority
using “the Spirit is doing something new” to justify reversing clear commands
making “the story” override direct moral teaching rather than letting narrative, law, wisdom, and apostolic instruction speak together in a coherent way.
The Introduction contains true and needed calls to repentance and dignity, but it also plants interpretive stakes that can function as a method for an attempt at revising Biblical ethics. After examining this introduction, the burden of proof, if the book takes that route, will be extraordinarily high, because it will be asking readers to believe that faithfulness means setting aside moral instruction the New Testament treats as binding.
