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I’ve been reading through Slaves, Women & Homosexuals: Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis (who knew you could pack so much controversy into a title?) by William J. Webb with a friend. Though a book about hermeneutics, Webb is primarily interested in showing how his specific hermeneutic, which he dubbs the “Redemptive-Movement Hermeneutic,” can be applied to the ethical issues of patriarchy/women in leadership and homosexuality. He seems particularly concerned to counter an argument made by some patriarchalists that since egalitarians claim many of the passages relating to the submission of women are culture-bound then any softening of “biblical patriarchy” necessarily entails an acceptance of homosexaulity (a kind of “we can see where this road is leading you tricky non-patriarchalists, and it’s not back to Kansas!” argument). Webb rightly argues that all Christians, even the most literal readers of Scripture, dismiss certain passages as culture-bound. Here he uses slavery as an example to prove his point, though you could add a host of others such as the enemy love passages (i.e. Matt. 5:38) which many dismiss as impractical. Webb then lays out his hermeneutic which is a method for scientifically determinning which (ethical) passages are culture-bound and which are transcultural. While there is much that is interesting, such as his discussion on primogeniture and 1 Tim. 2:13 or his comparison of penal codes in Israel and the Ancient Near East) I am ultimately unconvinced of his hermeneutic.

At the heart of the Webb’s Redemptive-Movement Hermeneutic is, as the name implies, a search for movement in a redemptive direction, both within the whole canon of Scripture and in relation to the surrounding culture. So, for example, you have slavery as a widespread and pretty abusive institution in much of the Ancient Near East, then you have passages in the Old Testament which treat slaves better than the surrounding culture (c.f. giving slaves the Sabbath off, Ex. 23:12), and finally you have Paul advocating for Onesimus, a runaway slave, to be treated as a brother by his owner, Philemon. This movement within Scripture and away from the local culture lets us know that certain passages such as Col. 3:22—“You slaves must obey your earthly masters in everything you do”—are an accommodation to the surrounding culture. But wait, why is that Colossians passage culture-bound, it’s part of the New Testament isn’t it? The answer, says Webb, is that it has not yet reached the ultimate ethic that we detect in the redemptive movement of Scripture which is that “slavery is eliminated, improved working conditions, wages maximized for all….” (p. 37).

When Webb reaches this idea of an ultimate ethic I balk. It’s one thing to detect movement in Scripture—I think if you’re going to do something sane with some of the Old Testament war passages or the Levitical laws that basically treat women as property (c.f. Ex. 20:17 where women are listed along with servants and cattle or Deut. 22:28-29 where a man that rapes a woman must pay her father 50 shekels) you have to recognize a progressive revelation and an accomodation to a sinful culture—but it’s another to try and determine some sort of rarefied ethical principle that tells us the goal we’re trying to reach. Heck, why not just sift through Scripture to discover all these great ultimate ethical principals and discard all the messy stories?! Moreover, it always worries me when an ethical system can be formulated without reference to Jesus, the author and perfector of our faith and the clearest revelation of who God is. Finally, whenever there is talk of systematically determining transcultural principles my Modernism alert goes off, for such an idea sounds too much like the endeavor of the Enlightenment era.

All that to say, my real beef with the book is Webb’s attempt to come up with a system that will tell you whether any Scripture passage is culture-bound.  Like I said, I do see movement in Scripture, but I don’t see any reason to try and determine which of the Levitical laws or what parts of Paul’s household code are cultural or transcultural.  They’re all formulated in a culture and for a culture.  The better way to do ethics is to start and end with Jesus and the Kingdom he brings.  This is an alternaive to this sort of “separate the wheat from the chaff” type hermeneutic.  For an example of a Jesus-centered, Kingdom-oriented ethic I would point you to Richard Hayes’ The Moral Vision of the New Testament which argues that the themes of Creation, Cross, and New Creation are the axis around which the New Testament revolves. The reason those three things are not three new “universal ethical principles” is that they are themes not ethical principles, and, more importantly, because they have meaning and content only as they arise out of Scripture and the life of Jesus.