William Webb 2: Redemptive Movement Hermeneutic

Earlier in the week I started reviewing William Webb's Slaves, Women, and Homosexuals: Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis.

Chapter 1: The Christian and Culture

Chapter 2: A Redemptive-Movement Hermeneutic
1. The second chapter is where he lays out his general "hermeneutic," his philosophy of appropriating the biblical texts. He calls it a "redemptive movement hermeneutic."

I found this chapter fascinating and maybe a little jarring. I've been tip-toeing around sensitive issues for my whole teaching career. He just kind of lays it down. I try to be so careful how I present these things--sometimes I may have danced so gingerly that students haven't even really fully understood what I was getting at.

Meanwhile, he just lays out a sentence like, "From one direction the Bible looks redemptive (and is); from the other direction it appears regressive (and is)" (31). "There is much within Scripture that needs an infusion of greater justice, greater compassion and greater equity in the treatment of human beings" (43). He argues that in some cases our culture reflects a better ethic than the words of the Bible isolated from the spirit they had in their context. For example, "surely there is a more humane and just treatment of women POWs than what is reflected in the biblical text" of the Pentateuch (33).

Now, if you dig into what he is saying, I think we will generally agree. There are some pretty harsh and cold laws in the Pentateuch. An America where women can vote and have equal rights to men is arguably a more Christian world than the world in which the women of the first century lived--and the New Testament does not entirely revolutionize that world.

On the other hand, there is some whiplash in the way he treats those who go further than him in the other direction. For example, he seems fairly harsh to me on what he calls "secular egalitarianism." To be fair, I almost always react to a book like this with the thought, "I'd like to rewrite this book in my own way." :-)

2. In the end, I generally agree with what he is getting at, even if I might put things slightly differently. Here is the main gist:

The words of the Bible are more than what they say. They had a spirit, a direction, in their original contexts. We do not necessarily fulfill what they are saying by taking them in an "isolated" sense. The words of the Bible have an "underlying spirit." You might say they have a "vector"--the Bible is pointing in a particular direction. This direction is redemptive.

This reminded me of something I read in a book by Ken Schenck, "Doing what the ancients did is not doing what they did if the significance of the action is different."

He thinks in terms of two vantage points from which we might look at the Bible. The first is the standpoint of the original meaning in its original context. When the Bible is viewed against the backdrop of the Ancient Near East or Greco-Roman culture, we find that the Bible is progressive. It has a "radically redemptive spirit" (34).

However, at times we look at biblical texts and they seem less redemptive than we would be today. For example, Leviticus 19 has a lesser penalty for the sexual violation of a slave woman than for a free woman. We would not consider that a very Christian position today. Parts of the Old Testament follow the thinking of ancient culture and assume that barrenness is purely the woman's problem. Improvements in our knowledge of reproduction clue us into the fact that this is not the case.

These are places where he boldly suggests that our culture sometimes has a "better ethic" than some parts of the Bible. This is where it gets a little touchy. Take slavery. He would say that the abolition of slavery fits the redemptive movement of Scripture and the "ultimate ethic" or logical conclusion of Scripture better than any position finally taken in Scripture itself. Even in 1 Peter 2, slaves are expected to endure wrongful beatings by their masters.

I have used phrases like "kingdom trajectory" and "trajectory of heaven" [2] for what he calls an ultimate ethic. I have been a little more hesitant to use the phrase "progressive revelation" because it seems a bit more of a land mine. In my booklet on women in ministry, for example, I ask what slave-master and wife-husband relationships will be like in the kingdom of God as an argument against slavery and an argument against the subordination of women to men today if we can enact such things. This is essentially the same move.

In this chapter, he presents charts on slavery and women with Scriptures that demonstrate his point. In these charts, verses on the left demonstrate places where the Bible shows redemptive movement in relation to the culture of its day. Then the column on the right reflects verses in the Bible that have not yet reached the ultimate ethic or what I call the kingdom trajectory. The trick will be to see what criteria he sets up to tell us what the ultimate ethic is.

As in the first chapter, he is working against what he calls a "static" hermeneutic that reads the words of the Bible in isolation from their spirit and underlying redemptive direction. I have spoken of a "flow of revelation" in the Bible, which is less of a concept for him so far. I also in recent years have focused on Jesus as the "last Word," taking a clue here from N. T. Wright.

I then talk of everything after Christ as "unzipping the file" or clarifying the final revelation in Christ. While the central aspects of this unpacking take place in the New Testament, there were still some details to refine in the earliest centuries of the church (e.g., the Trinity).

Webb points out that many advocates of a static hermeneutic actually have already incorporated some of the movement of Scripture into their positions, although they might deny it. The soft patriarchy of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood have already snuck into their work a perspective that is actually softer than some of the biblical texts. No mentally stable person would stone rebellious children today.

3. He also speaks of "canonical movement," particularly between the Old and New Testaments, although he has not yet spelled this out. I also speak of a "flow of revelation" in my work.

This movement of Scripture is one reason why a "find the principle" approach is valuable but inadequate. In fact, I would suggest it is why Steve Lennox's "what does this passage tell me about God" approach is missing one element. This is the fact that the older parts of the Old Testament do not have as precise an understanding of God as the later parts, and the Old Testament does not have as complete an understanding of God as the New Testament.

This has been one of my critiques of Duvall and Hays' Grasping God's Word. We are taught to cross the "principlizing bridge" from each Scripture to today. But this implies that the individual bridges all lead to a final destination today. Rather, we must take the whole counsel of God in all of Scripture into account before the bridge will lead us to an ultimate destination. In other words, crossing the bridge from certain parts of Leviticus does not get us to the final point on the other side of the river. We need the book of Hebrews and other passages in the New Testament for help with that.

A hermeneutical thought tool he mentions is a "ladder of abstraction" (54). The idea here is that if we abstract far enough from the concrete biblical text, we ultimately find a principle to apply to today. This is not entirely wrong, but it is not the whole story because it does not take into account the movement of the text.

5. In the final section of the chapter he provides a theological rationale for his approach. He affirms the authority of Scripture but claims that a static hermeneutic "cannot provide credible answers for the inquisitive seeker, the critical secularist or the troubled Christian" (57). I would have walked a little more gingerly here.

He presents what I call God's "incarnational" approach to revelation. God "takes on the flesh" in terms of the worldviews and paradigms of those to whom "he" is revealing himself. God wants to be understood, so he meets us within our own paradigms and moves us along. "Good teachers set the level of instructional material at the level of their students" (61).

This also relates to what Webb calls the pastoral dimension of God's revelation. "Pastors lead their people in soothing, quiet ways along a path toward where they ought to be" (60). It is when an audience of Scripture is near the edges that the revelation gets stark and sometimes harsh. So Paul at times is harsh in 1 Corinthians but at other times much more gradual.

There is also an evangelistic component. You meet people where they are at to move them toward the kingdom. It's more important to get them in the door first. Then you can refine their understanding later in discipleship. This is not just a technique we use outside of Scripture. I believe Webb is correct to discern that this is the approach God took within Scripture in relation to its original audiences.

It cannot be denied that there is even some accommodation to less than God's ideal in Scripture. Jesus says as much in Matthew 19 when he says that divorce was never God's preference. God gave this allowance in Scripture because of the hardness of Israel's heart. God sometimes compromises, playing a long game with humanity. The nature of revelation suggests that God is relational and practical more than idealistic.

6. I am not entirely clear on the criteria he will use to critique "going too far." He mentions for example, that while abolition is the ultimate ethic in relation to slavery, it would be incorrect to assume that we should get rid of hierarchy altogether (49). I am not entirely clear yet on how he discerns the stopping point.

Another possible critique is that he does not acknowledge the role that early Christianity played in finalizing certain aspects of Christian thinking. Admittedly, he is focused on ethics rather than doctrine. He also aims to establish criteria internal to the Bible. However, it seems to me that his approach is based on reason in this regard.

I have heard nothing yet of the actual core biblical ethic: "Love God and love neighbor." From an inductive standpoint, this is the biblical center point for all kingdom ethics, and it is clear within Scripture. This is the revealed criterion of the kingdom. That is how I would approach these issues.

I'll end today's post by pointing out that I have worked my version of this hermeneutic in a self-published book called, Who Decides What the Bible Means? I initially submitted it to Westminister John Knox and Abingdon but finally decided to publish it on my own. I also employ the hermeneutic in Why Wesleyans Favor Women in Ministry.

[1] In Making Sense of God's Word.