Welcome to a breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of

unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

One of politician changes their position on some policy matter, it's called a flip-flop.

And a new book on sexual ethics is describing God this way, a kind of flip-flopping politician

who said one thing for thousands of years, but has in recent years altered his moral demands.

Oddly enough, his new perspective makes him more progressive, more tolerant, more enlightened,

you know, like us.

30 years ago, Richard Hayes, professor of New Testament at Duke Divinity,

produced a classic work of biblical ethics entitled, The Moral Vision of the New Testament.

In that book, he offered a definitive biblical argument against same-sex relationships.

The New Testament, Hayes wrote, offers no loopholes or exception clauses that might allow for the

acceptance of homosexual practices

under some circumstances, end quote. But now in a new book

authored with his son, Fuller Seminary Old Testament professor Christopher Hayes,

he has now reversed this position on

same-sex relationships. The book is titled The Widening of God's Mercy and in it

the authors assert this quote the biblical narratives throughout the old and new testament 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 members of the

household of God."

Now the idea of a moral trajectory in the Bible that eventually points beyond itself to other moral principles, well that's nothing new.

In other words, same-sex relationships used to be wrong, now they're okay.

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