7

“REDEMPTIVE MOVEMENT”

TRUMPS SCRIPTURE

Some evangelical feminists adopt William Webb’s

“redemptive-movement” approach and cast all the

ethical commands of the New Testament into doubt

Avariation of the “trajectory hermeneutic” discussed in the previous

chapter is found in the “redemptive-movement hermeneutic” of William
Webb, author of Slaves, Women, and Homosexuals: Exploring the
Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis,^1 whom we considered in another
context in chapter 3.
Webb’s book is similar to the “trajectory hermeneutic” approach of
R. T. France and David Thompson discussed in the previous chapter, but
I think it is even more harmful because it proposes an entirely new,
highly complex process for evaluating all New Testament ethical com-
mands; and, for Christians today, Webb’s principles cast all of the New
Testament’s ethical commands into doubt. Because Webb’s system is so
complex and wide-ranging, I have given it a chapter of its own.
Webb says that the New Testament teachings on male headship in
marriage and male leadership in the church were simply points along the
path toward an ethic superior to that of the New Testament, an “ulti-
mate ethic” toward which the New Testament was heading. Webb pro-
poses a system that he calls a “redemptive-movement hermeneutic” to

(^1) William Webb, Slaves, Women, and Homosexuals: Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural
Analysis (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2001).