For decades, conservative Christians opposed to homosexuality cited the Bible scholarship of Richard B. Hays, the dean of Duke Divinity School, who provided a full-on argument from Scripture against gay relationships.
“Homosexuality is one among many tragic signs that we are a broken people, alienated from God’s loving purpose,” Mr. Hays asserted in his book “The Moral Vision of the New Testament” (1996), which was read by a generation of seminary students.
Then, last year, Mr. Hays released a thunderclap into the evangelical world by recanting his earlier views and asserting that a deeper reading of the Bible revealed that same-sex relationships are not sinful after all.
Just as surprising as his about-face was his explanation for why: Mr. Hays changed his mind about same-sex relationships, he said, because God changed his mind.
The New Testament “fully includes” L.G.B.T.Q. people, he wrote in what would be his last book, written as he knew that he was dying. Because same-sex marriage is blessed by God, he argued, the church should bless it as well.
Mr. Hays, an ordained Methodist minister who was one of the world’s leading New Testament theologians, died on Jan. 3 at his home in Nashville. He was 76.
His death, from pancreatic cancer, was announced by Duke Divinity School, where he taught for 27 years before retiring in 2018.
In “The Widening of God’s Mercy,” published in September by Yale University Press and written with his son, Christopher B. Hays, Mr. Hays maintained that if the Bible is read holistically, as a complete narrative, it reveals a God who continually extends grace and mercy to ever wider circles of people, including those who once were outcasts.
“The biblical narratives throughout the Old Testament and the New trace a trajectory of mercy that leads us to welcome sexual minorities no longer as ‘strangers and aliens’ but as ‘fellow citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God,’” the authors wrote, quoting the Book of Ephesians.
In Mr. Hays’s view, the Bible repeatedly presents a portrait of a God who changes his mind and evolves his thinking — a concept that might make many Christians flinch.
“I think that the idea that the concept of God as beyond change is something that is refuted repeatedly in the Bible,” he told the New York Times opinion writer Peter Wehner in November. “We do see God as a dynamic personal entity or force or however you want to understand who God is. Repeatedly, there are changes, modifications, adaptations of the way that God is relating to human beings. And I know that that claim is pretty explosive to some people.”
Reactions to “The Widening of God’s Mercy,” predictably, were mixed.
Conservative theologians labeled it sophistry, or worse. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., said it was “a call for complete theological surrender.” Robert A.J. Gagnon, the author of “The Bible and Homosexual Practice,” said Mr. Hays had “backslidden into heresy.”
Progressive Christian scholars embraced Mr. Hays’s about-face as a further step in the welcoming of gay couples by many Christian denominations that had begun with the 2015 Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage across the country.
By contrast, same-sex marriage was legal nowhere in the U.S. in 1996 when Mr. Hays wrote “The Moral Vision of the New Testament,” which Christianity Today called one of the 100 leading Christian books of the 20th century. In it, he argued that the New Testament should be read as a whole and that its themes applied to the ethics of contemporary life.
The British scholar N.T. Wright, in a blurb, praised the book as “a hurricane, blowing away the fog of half-understood pseudo-morality and fashionable compromise, and revealing instead the early Christian vision of true humanness and genuine holiness.”
The book’s chapter on homosexuality argued for churches to accept gay and lesbian people as members, but to insist that they remain single and celibate. Mr. Hays based his position on a half-dozen brief Bible passages condemning same-sex relations, such as Paul’s speech in Romans about women who practice “unnatural” intercourse and men “consumed with passion for one another.”
He came to see that analysis as falsely narrow, the equivalent of a modern Christian arguing that slavery was moral because the Bible, in places, condones it.
But the book was widely cited to exclude L.G.B.T.Q. people from churches, even as it was pressed on Christians who came out as gay to show them the error of their ways.
That greatly pained Mr. Hays, he told The Times. His views began to shift as he got to know gay students in his classes who were committed to their faith, as well as through gay members of his church in Durham, N.C.
In contrast, he said, he saw “ugly condescension” toward L.G.B.T.Q. people in many evangelical churches.
“The Widening of God’s Mercy” was written as an act of repentance and to ensure that his earlier condemnation of same-sex intimacy would not be his legacy, he said.
“When you come across something that is wrong, the thing to do is to confess and seek forgiveness,” Mr. Hays told a large gathering of L.G.B.T.Q. Christians in Dallas in October.
A woman in the back of the room shouted, “In the name of Jesus Christ, you are forgiven!”
A silence fell across the 500-person gathering, according to an account in Baptist News Global, and Mr. Hays bowed and held his hands in prayer.
Richard Bevan Hays was born on May 4, 1948, in Oklahoma City. His parents divorced when he was 3, and though he grew up around the Methodist church where his mother played the organ, he forcefully rejected Christianity in high school.
As an undergraduate at Yale, where he received a B.A. in English in 1970, he was impressed by the social activism of the school’s famous chaplain, William Sloane Coffin.
He rediscovered his faith after a conversion experience in his mother’s church during a college vacation.
After marrying Judy Cheek in 1970, he briefly taught high school English before enrolling in Yale Divinity School. He received a Master of Divinity degree from Yale and a Ph.D. from Emory University in Atlanta.
He joined the faculty of Yale Divinity School in 1981, the same year he was ordained in the United Methodist Church. A decade later, he moved to Duke, where he was named George Washington Ivey professor of New Testament in 2002 and dean of the Divinity School in 2010.
His other books include “Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul” (1989), “New Testament Ethics: The Story Retold” (1998) and “The Conversion of the Imagination” (2005).
Besides his wife and son, he is survived by a brother, Lloyd Hays; a daughter, Sarah Coomer; and four grandchildren.
When Mr. Hays’s pancreatic cancer was discovered in 2015 and he was told he might not live out the year, he sobbed uncontrollably at the thought that he would not see his grandchildren grow up.
During his treatment, he and his wife began to read from Psalms nightly. A favorite was Psalm 118 and the acclamation “This is the day that the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it.”
“So I moved through the grief into a mind-set of opening my hands to God,” Mr. Hays said.
His cancer went into remission, and he returned to Duke to teach a final semester before retiring. A scan last year showed that the disease had returned, metastasizing to both his lungs.