Slaves, Women, & Homosexuals
At the conclusion of my last I raised the hermeneutical question. I’ll state it again here. Is there interpretive reading strategy that takes into account the cultural context in which Paul and others are writing that allows us to supersede the univocal voice of Biblical writers?
The most obvious examples that give reason for pause are slavery, which the church has nearly unanimously condemned and the leadership role of women in the church, which the church is splintered on. The good news is that William Webb has written a book, Slaves, Women & Homosexuals: Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis, that is given specifically to this comparative task. I begin by including a graphic from Webb’s book.
This picture is visual description of what Webb calls the redemptive spirit. A hermeneutical trajectory that enables one to take away broader principle of permission where particular texts might seem to say otherwise. I’ll begin where Webb does, with an example with texts on the treatment of females.
As the picture shows, the figure standing at point X represents the original culture. Within the biblical parameters of patriarchy, the capture and claim of a virgin women during military conquest is openly permitted. One finds this treatment of women as spoils of battle documented in the legislative texts and illustrated in the narrative stories of Israel’s wars (Webb 32). But as Webb notes we should the “somewhat redemptive” spirit the Deuteronomy 21:10-14 text (for example). Here Israelites must wait one month, marry the girl, and in the case of divorce he could not sell her or treat her as a slave. Admittedly these “redemptive movements” leave us as modern readers (see figure on the right in the picture above) as feeling though these texts locked in time are archaic and morally repulsive. Here Webb is helpful in pointing out that compared to the horrible rape scenes that often accompanied ancient warfare … these biblical texts are clearly redemptive (Webb 32).
From this starting point (and now I’ll depart from Webb and add my own thoughts) we could move to Jesus sitting by and consequently validating the Samaritan Woman in John chapter 4, to Paul’s recognition of Junia, Priscilla, Syntyche, Euodia as leaders in the church, to Lydia’s leadership in Acts 16, and ultimately to Paul’s statement that there is neither male nor female in Christ Jesus in Galatians 3:28 (here let me say to a complementarian reader, yes I’m aware of the differences in reading this texts, let’s just agree to disagree) to recognize the hermeneutical trajectory is one of a redemptive spirit. One might argue that the trajectory is one of loosening the chains patriarchy and so the church so with regards to women as they have done with slavery.
Here is another picture that implements Webb’s strategy.
The question becomes, does this strategy work with the homosexuality texts? Webb’s answer is that it does not. Because, he argues, the texts remain consistently restrictive on this issue throughout the Bible, the Bible does not offer readers a hermeneutic of redemptive movement.
One’s judgment about Webb’s strategy is entirely dependent on a prior commitment to the exegetical work. Should one conclude something akin to Richard Hays, then I think Webb’s strategy and suggestion work. Should one disagree with Hays and read these texts in congruence with Gomes, then the strategy and conclusion Webb offers fail.