6: “LATER DEVELOPMENTS” TRUMP SCRIPTURE 59Thus Marshall’s argument applies to the marriage texts the same
procedure that France applies to the church: The passages taught that
wives should be subject to their husbands for that day, but today other
moral standards apply.
Then how do we know what the new standards are that should
replace the New Testament commands? Just as France finds his con-
trolling principle in the “fundamental equality” of Galatians 3:28, so
Marshall takes his preferred New Testament principle, that of “mutual
love,” and finds that this principle eventually should override Paul’s
teaching on the submission of wives to their husbands. He says, “Mutual
love transcends submission.”^13
What Marshall fails to recognize is that his argument for nullifying
Paul’s commands to wives is completely unlike other later doctrinal
developments such as the doctrine of the Trinity or of Christology
(which he mentions as parallels),^14 for Marshall is saying the New
Testament commands on “mutual love” nullify the commands for wives
to be subject to husbands, but no Trinitarian doctrine had to nullify and
contradict the explicit teaching of any New Testament passages. If we
take the entire New Testament as the very words of God for us in the
new covenant today, then any claim that the “mutual love” commands
should overrule other texts, such as Ephesians 5:22-24 and Colossians
3:18, should be seen as a claim that Paul the apostle contradicts himself,
and therefore that the Word of God contradicts itself.
This “trajectory hermeneutic” argument of France, Thompson, and
Marshall, and now featured so prominently in the major egalitarian
work Discovering Biblical Equality, is a striking example of the way that
arguments adopted forty years ago by theological liberals are now being
endorsed by evangelical feminists. Krister Stendahl, the former academic
dean at Harvard Divinity School, wrote something remarkably similar
to Marshall’s argument in a 1966 book arguing for women’s ordination:
(^13) Ibid., 194. It seems to me that several places in his chapter Marshall also fails sufficiently to
recognize that the moral standard Christians are to obey (whether in the first century or today)
is not the practice of current culture regarding marriage or anything else, but what Paul com-
mands as he writes the Word of God for believers. Regarding Marshall’s other argument, the
claim that we have to move beyond the New Testament to advocate the abolition of slavery,
see my discussion in the next chapter (pages 76-79); and in Grudem, Evangelical Feminism and
Biblical Truth (Sisters, Ore.: Multnomah, 2004), 339-345.
(^14) Ibid., 203.