Richard B. Hays, the New Testament scholar who taught the narrative unity of Scripture and changed his mind late life about the morality of homosexuality because, he said, of the narrative of Scripture, died on January 3. He was 76.

Hays was the author of Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul, New Testament Ethics, The Conversion of the Imagination, Reading with the Grain of Scripture, and The Moral Vision of the New Testament, which Christianity Today named as one of the 100 most important Christian books of the 20th century.

“Hays has hit a home run every time he has stepped to the plate,” CT reported in 1999. “What makes his approach hard for skeptics to resist is the quality of his mind: supple, clear, and persuasive, extremely well informed. It is hard to find a hole in his arguments.”

In his final book, however, which he cowrote with his son, Hays announced that he had found a hole himself. He had changed his mind about the biblical teaching on sexual ethics. In fact, he argued, he believed that God had changed God’s mind, so while the New Testament clearly condemns homosexuality, God doesn’t anymore. God’s mercy got wider.

Hays argued this late development in his thinking was grounded, however, in his view of the Bible.

“Scripture, read as narrative, offers a vision of a God who is dynamic and personal, and can constantly surprise us by reshaping what we thought we knew as settled matters,” he told CNN.

While many Christians are startled by the idea that God might change his mind, Hays argued that idea has more to do with Greek philosophy than the revelation of Scripture. 

“There are plenty of stories that do show God changing his mind,” he said. “That’s the God of Scripture. … He’s unchangeable in that he has revealed himself as a god who changes.”

The argument of The Widening of God’s Mercy was unconvincing to many of Hays’s longtime readers. 

British New Testament scholar N. T. Wright asked him how he thought he could be confident in any ethical claim. Robert A. J. Gagnon, author of The Bible and Homosexual Practice, said Hays’s argument is nonsense, capitulates to cultural pressure, and has no basis in Scripture. Denny Burk, president of the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, said he learned a lot from Hays over the years but was “deeply grieved” by the turn in his thinking. 

Hays said he understood why people were upset. He really didn’t want to burn any bridges. But he had to be faithful to his reading of the Bible, and change is part of Christian discipleship. 

“It’s something that Scripture itself calls us to all the time: repentance,” he told National Public Radio. “The Greek word for it is metanoia, which means a change of mind.”

He added that he hoped the book would be his “final word.” A few months later, he was admitted into hospice care.

Hays was born in Oklahoma on May 4, 1948. His father was an airline pilot, his mother a Methodist church organist. His parents got divorced when he was 3 and Hays was raised by his mother, spending a lot of time in the church where she worked.

The experience led him to reject Christianity. 

“By the time I was in late high school, I had decided that the church was full of hypocrites and I didn’t want anything to do with it,” he told Duke Divinity School professor Kate Bowler on her podcast Everything Happens.

Hays’s belief that all Christians are hypocrites was challenged when he went to university at Yale. He met the school’s famous chaplain, William Sloane Coffin, and was impressed by the way his faith led him to social activism, including opposition to the war in Vietnam and support for the Civil Rights Movement.

Then Hays had a conversion experience reading the Bible. He went to church in Oklahoma with his mother over winter break his sophomore year for a Christmas Eve service. In the darkened church before the service, he picked up a pew Bible and opened it at random. His eyes fell on Mark 8:35: “For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it.”

“Bang,” he later said, “that hit me right in the chest.”

He didn’t know exactly what it meant to lose your life for the gospel and somehow, with Christ, enter into the mystery of death and resurrection. But the words brought him up short and, as he put it, “stunned me into offering my life to Jesus.”

When he asked his wife Judy to marry him a few years later, Hays told her he thought he was going to become a preacher. Or a rock ’n’ roll star. 

What he actually did after graduating from Yale was get a job teaching high school English in Longmeadow, Massachusetts. The young couple joined a nondenominational house church that was attempting to live out “radical Christianity.” The group was deeply formed by the teachings of German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who wrote The Cost of Discipleship and Life Together. 

After a few years, Hays was dissatisfied teaching English and returned to Yale to enroll in the divinity school. He decided to study the Bible.

He found he thought about the text differently than most of the other seminarians and seminary professors, though. They were mostly interested in a form of biblical criticism that “sought to probe behind the canonical texts by postulating multiple hypothetical sources and hypothetical historical facts that had been covered over by layers of tradition and redaction,” Hays said. He was drawn, on the other hand, to the literary quality of the Bible, the shape of the narrative, and the unity.

“It has a deep and subtle narrative unity—not because unity has been superimposed by ecclesial fiat or by some clever editorial design, but because the diverse biblical witnesses bear common witness to God’s grace-filled action in the story of Israel,” he said. “You have to read the thing whole and see how the parts relate to the whole.”

He started trying to teach Scripture that way at Yale in 1981, the same year he got ordained in the United Methodist Church. His book, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul, explored the way the apostle quoted the Old Testament. Where many scholars said Paul was taking the Bible out of context, Hays argued he was using a literary device known as metalepsis, quoting fragments in order to draw readers into the context. 

In 1991, Hays moved to Duke Divinity School, where he worked alongside theologians Ellen Davis and Stanley Hauerwas. He published The Moral Vision of the New Testament in 1996, arguing that Christians shouldn’t attempt to extract a few moral principles from the Bible and then apply those principles to particular ethical dilemmas. They should, instead, pay attention to the overall narrative and the themes that emerged from it: community, cross, and new creation. 

The book has been, by some estimations, “one of the most-cited works of New Testament scholarship.”

Wright called it “a breath of fresh air” and even “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.”

Hauerwas said, “There are few people I would rather read for the actual exposition of the New Testament than Richard Hays.”

Hays himself, however, came to regret the part of the book where he wrote about sexual ethics. 

“We must affirm that the New Testament tells us the truth about ourselves as sinners and as God’s sexual creatures,” he wrote in 1996. “Marriage between man and woman is the normative form for human sexual fulfillment, and homosexuality is one among many tragic signs that we are a broken people, alienated from God’s loving purpose.”

He began to rethink the issue when he started to form relationships with LGBTQ people serving in his Methodist church in Durham, North Carolina. Hays joined the worship team, playing guitar, and the worship leader identified as queer—and as a deeply committed disciple of Christ.

Hays came to think that, with sexuality, he had not actually examined the larger narrative of Scripture, but had just grabbed a proof text.

His opposition to LGBTQ affirmation eroded.

“The Bible … shows us a much bigger picture of God as a God who continually surprises us, continually surprises his people with the scope of generosity and grace and mercy,” Hays said. “It’s beyond me to understand why things are different now. But that’s God’s prerogative.”

Hays was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in July 2015. Doctors told him they expected him to die by Christmas.

He was devastated by the news and wept uncontrollably at the thought of not seeing his grandkids grow up. But he found comfort, again, in Scripture. He and his wife started reading the Psalms together every night. 

His diagnosis brought him back, he said, to the mystery of the words of Jesus that had first called him to faith. He would lose his life; only then would he find it. 

“It’s a matter of letting go of life itself and entering the mystery of death and resurrection,” he said. “My own brush with literal death has deepened my conviction that our hope lies in our union with Christ and the ultimate promise of resurrection of the body.”

After treatment and surgery, Hays was cancer-free for seven years. In the fall of 2024, however, a scan showed metastases to both lungs. He spent Christmas surrounded by his family and then died at home in Nashville.

Hays is survived by his wife Judy and their children Christopher and Sarah.