William Webb 6: Persuasive Extrascriptural Criteria

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

Previous chapters:
Chapter 1: The Christian and Culture
Chapter 2: A Redemptive-Movement Hermeneutic
Chapter 3: Persuasive Criteria
Chapter 4: Moderately Persuasive Criteria
Chapter 5: Inconclusive Criteria
Almost done. Now Chapter 6: Persuasive Extrascriptural Criteria
1. This chapter reminded me of the Wesleyan Quadrilateral. This material would relate to experience and reason. In it he gives his last two criteria.

Criterion 17: Pragmatic Basis Between Two Cultures
This criterion has to do with whether the pragmatic basis for instruction in the Bible can be sustained from one culture to another. "A component of a biblical imperative may be culturally relative if the pragmatic basis for the instruction cannot be sustained from one culture to another. The converse is that a biblical command is more likely to be transcultural in its articulated form to the extent that the pragmatic factors are themselves sustainable across various cultures" (209).

An important observation here is that "pragmatic factors played at least a limited role in shaping the biblical text." "Our discussion of a pragmatic basis needs to be clearly distinguished from the ultimate basis that underlies every biblical command and imperative" (210).

He gives as an example the instruction not to reap at the corners of a field to allow the poor to feed. This would not make sense in most contexts today. Therefore, we move up the "ladder of abstraction" and apply the principle in relation to making sure the poor get fed.

2. Examples most would agree with:

• foot washing - we wear enclosed shoes now, so we don't have to follow concretely.
• children submission to parents - young children are still less developed in knowledge and intellectual capacity than most parents. Young children should in general continue to submit to parents... but probably not once they are adults. That was cultural.
• submission to the king -- a representational democracy is different, so the specifics are cultural, although we should respect those in authority
• congregations and church elders - some continuity, but our culture has a more "empower the laity" approach that fits our democratic context.

3. Women submission to men
The practicality here had to do with the lack of education of women, their general lack of exposure and experience and their lack of physical strength for agriculture. These practicalities do not apply today, suggesting that the instruction to submit to husbands was cultural rather than transcultural.

4. Homosexual prohibitions
He argues quite a bit against Walter Wink in this section. Wink suggests that the need for many children in the ancient world no longer applies--indeed that our problem is overpopulation--and thus that homosexuality should be promoted as an option. Webb shows fairly easily that this is a pretty weak argument in favor. Would the overpopulation argument validate every non-procreative form of sexuality?

Criterion 18: Scientific and Social-Scientific Evidence
5. Webb makes a distinction between two types of scientific/social scientific data--absolute scientific data that would hold true in any culture and time and relative scientific data that would only hold true within a particular culture.

Agreed upon examples:

• Scripture functions with a geocentric (earth-as-center) view of the world. He argues this was "phenomenological." It was the way the world appeared to them. "The geocentric component is cultural; the theological and phenomenological components are transcultural" (222).
• Flat earth -- "Scripture accommodated itself to the cosmology of its day" (223).

6. Now for the topics of the book:

• Women are not reproductive gardens. The understanding of reproduction, which underlies some biblical language, is no longer held. The woman is not just an incubator. She contributes just as much "data" to reproduction as the man, and infertility is often the man's fault.
• Women as poor leaders -- This simply is not true in our culture, even if it would have primarily been true in biblical times because of cultural conditions (but note that the Bible itself defies the culture in several instances).
• Women more easily deceived than men. This was probably generally true in ancient times, but it is certainly not true today. He takes Schreiner and others to task for skewing their interpretation of 1 Timothy 2:14 to make it more palatable while retaining complementarianism. Historically, Christian commentators have seen an innate intellectual capacity difference between men and women. Schreiner and Doriani reject this side to the interpretation of 1 Timothy 2:14 while retaining that women are less discerning than men because they are more relational. 
• In the end, he argues that the educational level of women in Paul's day has to be taken into account. 

Webb moves up the ladder of abstraction and summarizes the take away of 1 Timothy 2:14 as "seek teachers and leaders who are not easily deceived" (230).

7. With regard to homosexuality, he examines in this final section whether homosexual activity is determined behavior. He indicates that both environmental and biological factors can play a role in homosexuality. However, "the influence of nonvolitional forces upon any human action is no help in determining the ethical status of that action" (233).

This is quite true. The question whether homosexual activity is moral or not is not determined by the nature of the origins of such desires. "Environmental and biological factors are not sufficient grounds for assessment of any behavior" (234). Non-volitional factors in behavior "moderate the degree of personal culpability, but they do not change an assessment of the behavior itself" (234).