This Christian preacher spoke out against same-sex marriage in the 1990s. He just apologized.

Crucifix in front of the US Supreme Court Photo: Shutterstock

Richard Hays, a Methodist pastor and future dean of Duke Divinity School, wrote a traditionalist Christian argument against same-sex marriage three decades ago.

Now he is withdrawing.

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Hays wrote in his new book: The spread of God’s mercythat he is “deeply sorry” for the suffering caused to LGBTQ+ people who have been excluded from Christian churches.

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“I want to regret what I wrote earlier,” Richard Hays told WSPD Local 6 with his son and co-author, Christopher Hays. “I now believe that Scripture, read as a narrative, offers a vision of God who is dynamic and personal, and who can continually surprise us by changing what we thought were settled matters.”

“I thought it was the right thing to say to repair my relationship with God and my brothers and sisters in the church,” Hays said of speaking publicly about his grievances. “I think the whole story of the Bible regularly calls all of us to practice repentance.”

Hays wrote about homosexuality in his 1996 book. The Moral Vision of the New Testament. This book states that the Bible views homosexuality as “unequivocally and consistently negative in its judgment.”

He says he deeply regrets the way Christians have used his book to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people. “I would say that this position has been weaponized — I don’t think that’s too strong a word — by people on the conservative side of evangelical churches who use it as ammunition to act in ways that I think are rightly described as oppressive toward gay and lesbian people.”

Hays said he no longer sees the Bible that way. “We need to read the Bible as a narrative and see its stories as shaping our character and our role as readers and interpreters of the text.”

“We need to take a step back and ask why this particular prohibition is considered normative while other passages, including those describing what must be done while holding slaves, are ignored?”

“My exegesis of those half-dozen passages has not changed. I think the Bible says what it says, and it condemns gay sex, period,” Hays continued. “But there is a very arbitrary selectivity in choosing those two verses in Leviticus as the basis for an opinion on this.”

Christopher Hays is a professor of Old Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif. He said the biblical writers did not understand contemporary same-sex relationships when they wrote the Bible: “We don’t think it’s the same thing as Paul or what the Torah writers meant in the laws.”

Christopher Hays also said he is proud of his father, who became a model.

“I feel like his heart was always kinder, gentler, and more gracious than it is in this chapter. So I’m proud of him for being a model for people to change their thoughts gracefully.”

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