62 FEMINIST VIEWS THAT UNDERMINE SCRIPTURE
This is a ridiculous conclusion, but if we accept the “trajectory” prin-
ciple of France and Thompson, it would be hard to say it was wrong.
Or we could take a “trajectory” argument on divorce:
FROM JESUS’ TO PAUL’S TO THE FINAL APPLICATION
TEACHINGS TEACHINGS TARGET FOR THIS TODAY
TRAJECTORY
Only one ground Two grounds for Divorce for any God approves
for divorce: adultery divorce: adultery or hardship divorce for any
(Matt. 19:9) desertion hardship in
(1 Cor. 7:15) marriage
We may think these trajectories are foolish, but they use the same pro-
cess as France and Thompson use in moving from earlier to later biblical
writings. And these trajectories all have one thing in common: we no
longer have to obey what the New Testament teaches. We can devise our
own ideas about the direction things were heading at the end of the New
Testament, even ideas that contradict direct New Testament commands.
This method has no controls on it. It is subjective, and the final authority
is not the Bible but anyone’s guess as to where the trajectory was heading.
One of the distinctive differences between historic, orthodox
Protestants and the Roman Catholic Church has been that Protestants
base doctrine on “Scripture alone” (once again, the Latin phrase com-
monly used for this is sola Scriptura), while Roman Catholics base doc-
trine on Scripture plus the authoritative teaching of the church through
history.^18
This “trajectory” argument of France, Thompson, and Marshall is
disturbingly similar to Roman Catholicism in this regard, because they
place final authority not in the New Testament writings but in their own
ideas of where that teaching was leading. Yet Roman Catholics could
argue that more reliable than egalitarian speculation on where New
Testament teaching was leading are the historical facts of where the
teaching did lead. So the trajectory (which actually was fulfilled in
church history) would look like this:
(^18) The book Catechism of the Catholic Church (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), which
Pope John Paul II approved as “a sure and authentic reference text for teaching catholic doc-
trine” (5), says, “Both Scripture and Tradition must be accepted and honored with equal sen-
timents of devotion and reverence” (paragraph 82, page 26).