(RNS) — Richard Hays, a renowned New Testament scholar and former dean of Duke Divinity School known for his influential books on Christian ethics and his change of mind about same-sex marriage, died Friday (January 3) at his home in Nashville, Tennessee, from pancreatic cancer. Hays was 76.
“He was surrounded by his books, overseen by photos of his parents and wide family, and with Christmas music from Kings College Cambridge playing softly in the background,” his wife Judy wrote on Caringbridge.com, in announcing his death.
A former English teacher and pastor, Hays was a graduate of Yale University and Yale Divinity School and earned his doctorate from Emory University in 1981. He then returned to teach New Testament at Yale from 1981 to 1991 and then at Duke Divinity School until his retirement in 2018.
For much of his career, he was perhaps best known for his 1996 book, “The Moral Vision of the New Testament,” in which he argued same-sex relationships were “one among many tragic signs that we are a broken people, alienated from God’s loving purpose.” His well-respected scholarly work was cited by Christian leaders who viewed same-sex relationships as sinful and who opposed LGBTQ affirmation in churches.
This past year, Hays publicly changed his mind — in what he described as an act of repentance for the way his work had been used to harm LGBTQ people and to divide Christians — in a new book “The Widening …