SHOULD WE MOVE BEYOND THE NEW TESTAMENT TO A BETTER ETHIC?

An Analysis of William J. Webb, Slaves, Women and Homosexuals: Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis

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I. INTRODUCTION

How can Christians today know which parts of the Bible are "culturally relative" and which parts apply to all believers in all cultures throughout history?

William Webb has provided an entirely new approach to that question in a book that focuses specifically on slavery, men's and women's roles, and homosexuality, but that also provides a general approach to the question of cultural relativity, an approach that Webb hopes will prove useful for solving similar questions on other topics.

The book provides an extensive and rather complex system of cultural analysis that Webb calls a "redemptive-movement hermeneutic." Because of its amount of detail and the sophistication of its argument, the book has prompted widespread interest among evangelicals, many of whom have enthusiastically embraced its system.

In brief, Webb says that the ancient world in which the Bible was written had gravely deficient moral standards. God in his wisdom knew that it would be best to work gradually to lead his people from the moral practices of the surrounding cultures to much higher standards of moral conduct. Therefore in the OT God gave moral commands that were a great improvement over the standards of the surrounding culture, but were not yet his highest ideal. In the NT, God gave even higher moral standards, making further improvement over what was taught in the OT. But even these NT moral commands were not God's "ultimate ethic." Our task today is to try to understand the direction in which God was gradually leading his people, so that by observing that trajectory we can discover God's "ultimate ethic" on various topics, an "ultimate ethic" that we should seek to teach and obey today.

Webb uses eighteen criteria to attempt to discover the direction of God's "redemptive movement" in three specific test cases: slavery, homosexuality, and the role of women in marriage and the church. Because I will refer to Webb's eighteen criteria throughout this article, I will list them here. They are more fully explained in the material that follows, and I summarize my evaluation of each criterion in section VI near the end of this article. Webb's eighteen criteria are as follows:

1. Preliminary Movement (p. 73)

2. Seed Ideas (p. 83)

3. Breakouts (p. 91)

4. Purpose/Intent Statements (p. 105)

5. Basis in Fall or Curse (p. 110)

6. Basis in Original Creation, Section 1: Patterns (p. 123)

7. Basis in Original Creation, Section 2: Primogeniture (p. 134)

8. Basis in New Creation (p. 145)

9. Competing Options (p. 152)

10. Opposition to Original Culture (p. 157)

11. Closely Related Issues (p. 162)

12. Penal Code (p. 179)

13. Specifie Instructions Versus General Principles (p. 179)

14. Basis in Theological Analogy (p. 185)

15. Contextual Comparisons (p. 192)

16. Appeal to the Old Testament (p. 201)

17. Pragmatic Basis Between Two Cultures (p. 209)

18. Scientific and Social-Scientific Evidence (p. 221)

I expect that most readers will find Webb's explanation of why the Bible regulated but did not immediately prohibit all slavery to be a helpful analysis. Readers may also find helpful Webb's explanation of why the Bible's prohibitions against homosexual conduct are transcultural, not culturally relative. This is because Webb has read widely concerning slavery and homosexuality in the cultural backgrounds that surrounded the writers of the OT and NT, and his book provides a helpful resource in those areas. However, as Thomas Schreiner pointed out in an earlier review,1 Webb's opposition to homosexuality is a dangerously weak basis for evangelicals to use, because he fails to quote or discuss in any detail the strongest NT text on homosexuality, Rom 1:26-27, where Paul bases his argument on the natural order that God created (he gives the text only one paragraph on p. 109, lumping it together with Lev 18:22 and 20:13).2 Webb never argues that homosexual conduct is wrong because the NT says so and the NT is God's final revelation to us in this age (to argue this way would be contrary to Webb's system; see below).

Regarding biblical roles for men and women, Webb's book provides a significant new challenge to those who believe that the Bible teaches that wives should be subject to their husbands today (according to several NT passages), and that some governing and teaching roles in the church, such as the office of elder or pastor, are restricted to men. In contrast to many egalitarians who have argued that the NT does not teach that wives should be subject to their husbands, or that only men should be elders, Webb takes a different approach: he believes that the NT does teach these things for the culture in which the NT was written, but that in today's culture the treatment of women is an area in which "a better ethic than the one expressed in the isolated words of the text is possible" (p. 36, italics added).