60 FEMINIST VIEWS THAT UNDERMINE SCRIPTURE
If the actual stage of implementation in the first-century becomes the
standard for what is authoritative, then those elements which point
toward future implementation become neutralized and absorbed in a
static “biblical view.”... The correct description of first-century
Christianity is not automatically the authoritative and intended stan-
dard for the church throughout the ages. It has no means by which it
can account for the ensuing centuries of church history as God’s his-
tory. It becomes a nostalgic attempt to play “First-Century.”^15This 1966 book by Stendahl is the precursor of much modern egali-
tarian thinking. But Stendahl was not an evangelical in his view of the Bible.
In fact, as academic dean of Harvard Divinity School, he was one of the
most visible liberal theologians in the United States in 1966. Stendahl’s
approach to Scripture (which I could briefly paraphrase as “Yes, this is what
the New Testament commanded for its time, but we don’t have to obey that
today”) is essentially the same as the approach to Scripture taken by France,
Thompson, and Marshall in their “trajectory hermeneutic.” Evangelicals
are just adopting liberal arguments thirty years later.
Another approach similar to Stendahl’s is that of Peter Davids’s
essay on 1 Peter 3:1-7 in this same egalitarian collection of essays,
Discovering Biblical Equality. (Davids is professor of biblical theology
at St. Stephen’s University in St. Stephen, New Brunswick, Canada, and
formerly taught at Regent College, Vancouver, Canada.) However,
Davids does not argue for a “trajectory” of development beyond the
New Testament but argues that when Peter told wives, “be subject to
your own husbands” (1 Pet. 3:1), his main purpose was to tell them not
to give offense to the culture. Davids writes,
However, unless we assume that first-century Greco-Roman society
is the only form of society upholding virtues approved by God (an
unlikely assumption), we may find that a direct application of Peter’s
teaching in modern and postmodern societies would subvert his orig-
inal intentions.... Ironically, interpretations that focus on the uni-(^15) Krister Stendahl, The Bible and the Role of Women: A Case Study in Hermeneutics, trans.
Emilie T. Sanders (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1966; first published in Swedish in 1958), 35-36. I
am grateful to David W. Jones for pointing out how much of current egalitarian argumenta-
tion was first stated by Stendahl in his 1966 book. For a further response to Stendahl, see
Grudem, Evangelical Feminism and Biblical Truth, 358-361.