58 FEMINIST VIEWS THAT UNDERMINE SCRIPTURE
But that is far different from what France and Thompson advocate,
because Trinitarian doctrine was always based on the actual teachings
of the New Testament, and its defenders always took the New
Testament writings as their final authority. By contrast, France and
Thompson do not take the New Testament statements as their final
authority but “go beyond” the New Testament to a “target” that con-
tradicts or nullifies the restrictions on women’s ministry given by Paul.
No Trinitarian doctrine was ever built by saying we need a view that
contradicts and nullifies what Paul wrote in the New Testament itself.
This is also the problem with another “trajectory hermeneutic”
approach, adopted by I. Howard Marshall, honorary research professor
of New Testament at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, when he dis-
cusses Paul’s teachings on marriage in a chapter in the egalitarian book
Discovering Biblical Equality. Marshall acknowledges that Paul told
wives to submit to their husbands in the first century, but he says that
those commands need not be followed by Christian wives today:
Paul wrote as he did about marriage because in his world he did not
know any other form than the patriarchal. As he did with other rela-
tionships, he worked within the structures of his time and gave direc-
tions for Christian behavior within them. The danger is to think that
this validates the setup for all time.^11Marshall also writes:
The concept of marriage between equal partners is just beginning to
be perceived in the New Testament, and Paul should not be expected
to step outside his time and see the consequences of his teaching....
in the first-century context submission can be seen as appropriate, but
the element of authority is not inherent for all time.... A recogni-
tion of the fully egalitarian implications of scriptural teaching thus
takes place at the level of the application of Scripture to the contem-
porary reader, rather than solely at the level of what individual texts
were saying specifically to the original readers.^12(^11) I. Howard Marshall, “Mutual Love and Submission in Marriage: Colossians 3:18-19 and
Ephesians 5:21-33,” in Discovering Biblical Equality, ed. Ronald W. Pierce and Rebecca
Merrill Groothuis (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2004), 204.
(^12) Ibid., 195, 199, 203.