INTERVIEW – Wayne Grudem, Part Four – Ethical Trajectories, Feminism, and Homosexuality

One of the other egalitarian arguments that you address in your book is the claim that the Bible aims to set us on an ethical trajectory that takes us from where the culture of Bible times was to where God wants us to be ultimately. I have heard very similar arguments made about why the Church was right to reject slavery even though the Bible doesn’t at first glance seem to. How do you respond to the way some people connect the slavery issue and feminism?

Wayne

As I explain in my book (and at www.efbt100.com) the question of slavery is much different from the question of men’s and women’s roles in the home and in the church. God created marriage and God created the church, but slavery was a human institution not created by God. I know that there were some Christians who tried to use the Bible to support slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries in England and the United States. But they were wrong in their arguments, and other Christians looked at the Bible and disagreed with them and argued back. The people who tried to support slavery from the Bible eventually lost those debates, and the proof is that if you look around churches today, there is no denomination that supports slavery! The people who use the Bible to argue against slavery won the argument, and I think they had the best interpretation of Scripture.

One prominent American opponent of slavery was named Theodore Weld. He argued against American slavery from the Ten Commandments. He said, essentially, that when the Bible says, “Thou shalt not steal,” it prohibits taking even one penny from another human being against his will. But slavery robs another man of his entire life! He used other arguments like this to find his opposition to slavery from the Bible itself.

I think the ESV rightly translates 1 Timothy 1:10, which lists “enslavers” among evildoers, because the word there (Greek andrapodistes) means people who capture people or sell them into slavery.

Another point to remember is that the word “slave” is probably not the best translation of the Greek word doulos. The ESV has a footnote at this verse when it occurs in the New Testament, and the footnote says, “Greek bondservant.” That shows that it was an institution far different from the horrible abuses of slavery in the 18th and 19th century in North America, in the Caribbean, and in Latin America. A “bondservant” in the first century could normally earn his freedom by age 30, was protected by an extensive set of Roman laws, and owned private property. These “bondservants” often had significant responsibility as teachers, lawyers, physicians, managers, shopkeepers, and so forth. In the parable of the talents that Jesus tells, the master entrusts one “bondservant” with one talent, another with two, and another with five, which in modern equivalent terms would be equal to $400,000, $800,000, and $2,000,000 in U.S. currency today (or £210,000, £420,000, and £1,050,000). Then the master went away for a long time and these “bondservants” were left with the responsibility to manage the resources well. Such “bondservants” were in a much better situation than the day laborers who had to go into the market square and look for work each day (see Matthew 20:1-7).

However, bondservants could not quit their jobs and go to work for someone else until the period of the bondservice was up, or until they bought their freedom. I think the closest modern parallel (at least in the United States) would be military service, in which, once you get in, you can’t get out for a certain number of years, and there is a separate set of laws to which you are subject.

Now today, what worries me about these “trajectory hermeneutic” advocates is that they seem unaware of this entire history of biblical arguments against slavery, and they wrongly assume that the Bible actually supports slavery of the kind seen in the horrible abuses in America in the 18th and 19th centuries. This is preposterous. To say that the Bible supports such evils would be to say that the Bible, at the time of the New Testament, supported things that were morally evil, and I am simply not willing to do that.

Then these “trajectory hermeneutic” advocates say that we have to go beyond the moral teachings of the New Testament to find an “ultimate ethic” that is superior to that found in the words of New Testament. This is the position of William Webb, for example, at Heritage Theological Seminary, and it is also the position of R. T. France in the United Kingdom. These scholars look for our ethical standards at some point of development after the New Testament was written. And, of course, that is so highly subjective. People can imagine all sorts of developments that might have come “after” the New Testament, and it means that our authority is no longer the words of Scripture but some scholar’s imagination about where Scripture might have lead if the authors had been allowed to ponder a bit longer. This is directly undermining the authority of Scripture and it leads directly to liberalism.

Adrian
You also take up this idea of a trajectory further and claim that evangelical liberalism sets us on a journey that will end in three more consecutive steps:

The denial of anything uniquely masculine.

The acceptance of God as our Mother.

The gradual approval of homosexuality.

How do moderate evangelical feminists who claim to believe in the inerrancy of the Bible respond when you describe that evolution to them?