Review Article Should We Move Beyond The New Testament To A Better Ethic? -- By: Wayne Grudem
Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 47:2 (Jun 2004)
Article: Review Article Should We Move Beyond The New Testament To A Better Ethic?
Author: Wayne Grudem
JETS 47:2 (June 2004) p. 299
Review Article
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
[Wayne Grudem is research professor of Bible and theology at Phoenix Seminary, 13402 N. Scottsdale Road, Suite B-185, Scottsdale, AZ 85254]
1 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.
JETS 47:2 (June 2004) p. 300
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:
- Preliminary Movement (p. 73)
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