Response on Women 2

I thought I would address your important comments on Jesus and Scripture secondly.

Dan:
Jesus linked His own authority inseparably with that of the written revelation. He based His personal authority in large part on His fulfillment of scripture. He gave His strongest unqualified and absolute endorsement of the words and very letters used to convey God's Word to man. You can't logically believe in Jesus without believing in the inspiration and divine character and authority of the written Word, and vice versa. So placing extreme torque on clear scriptures is dangerously parallel to crucifying Jesus immediately after giving loud verbal affirmation to His divinity.


Ken:
One of the things that happens when people look to Jesus is they often create Jesus in their own image. I thought I could just give three examples to make it clear that Jesus' use of Scripture (or slightly more accurately, the four distinct gospel presentations of it) is usually a little different from what you are suggesting it was:

Example 1: Jesus on Deuteronomy 24:1
This verse freely allows for divorce, as Jesus interprets it in Matthew 19:8: "Moses allowed you to divorce your wives." But in his usual way, "You have heard it said, but I say to you," Jesus overturns Moses' law by pointing to a situational reason--and one involving sin nonetheless: "because of the hardness of your hearts."

In other words, Jesus says that something in the Old Testament was there because of the sinfulness of Israel, and he contradicts it.

Indeed, while many of the "you have heard, but I say" passages of Matthew 5 have the character of extending the scope of the original OT, many of them shuffle or even conflict with the OT. "You have heard 'an eye for an eye' (Deut. 19:21), but I say do not resist an evil person" (Matt. 5:38-39).

Example 2: Jesus on Leviticus 24:9
Jesus does not actually quote this text, but he alludes to it when he points out the Scriptural problem with what David and Abiathar did in 1 Samuel 21:1-9. In Mark 2:23-27, Jesus accepts the conclusion of the Pharisees that his disciples are working on the Sabbath (we would have tried to reinterpret their actions in another way). Instead Jesus basically argues that there is a time to make exceptions from even really, really big OT laws like the one that says only the priests are allowed to eat the bread of presentation.

So Jesus not only did not model absolutism in the use of Scripture, he rebuked the Pharisees for it and argued that situations are involved when applying the Bible.

Example 3: Matthew 2:15 on Hosea 11:1
Jesus' fulfillment of Scripture almost always involved a non-literal dimension that was spiritually, not literally discerned. Indeed, you will never convince a studied Jew to convert to Christianity using prophecy-fulfillment as your argument.

Matthew 2:15 says that Jesus' return from Egypt fulfilled the Scripture, "Out of Egypt I called my son." Of course there are spiritual parallels to be found here, but Hosea 11:1 is no prediction about some event in the life of the Messiah: "When Israel was a child, I called my son out of Egypt, but the more I called them, the more they went away from me. They sacrificed to the Baals and burned incense to idols."

The fulfilled verse was clearly about Israel and the exodus on a literal level, and no one could ever apply the last part of this verse to Jesus: "he sacrificed to the Baals." Matthew is taking this verse in a spiritual, "fuller" sense.

So we will not find in Jesus or the NT authors anything like modern fundamentalist (Pharisee-like, Judaizer-like) slavery to the literal meaning of the biblical text. Jesus models quite the opposite.

Perhaps the most dangerous assumption made by modernist conservatives in the church is that there is only one, relatively clear meaning to each biblical text and that the divinely ordained appropriation of every biblical text is to be based on the literal meaning in every case. The New Testament authors themselves beg to differ--BIG TIME.

You can say that Jesus always had other Scriptures in mind when he shuffled biblical texts. But then again, the Wesleyan Church has Scriptural support when it fully affirms women in all roles of ministry. I would not ordain any ministerial candidate in the Wesleyan Church who did not hold this position! I would not hire any faculty in the religion department (or to high level administration) of any Wesleyan college who did not hold this position! I would not allow anyone to work at Wesleyan church headquarters who did not have this position.

But I also want to make clear that the WC has no official position on the husband-headship issue--an issue that I want strongly to distinguish from the question of women in ministry (next post). Many Wesleyans believe that the husband should be the head of the home, and on this I would say, "Feel free to disagree with me." Feel free to express disagreement on the other, but I strongly want to change your mind.