70 FEMINIST VIEWS THAT UNDERMINE SCRIPTURE
answer is incredibly complicated. Webb takes the rest of his book to
explain eighteen fairly complex criteria (to which he gives names such
as “preliminary movement,” “seed ideas,” “breakouts,” and “compet-
ing options”) by which he thinks Christians today should evaluate the
commands of the Bible and thereby discover the more just, more equi-
table ethical system the Bible was heading toward. Once that ultimate
ethic has been discovered, then it becomes the moral standard we
should follow and obey.
Just to give some idea of the criteria that Webb says we must use to
determine if a biblical command is culturally relative, I will quote his
explanation of how to use the first criterion, the one he calls “prelimi-
nary movement”:
Assessing redemptive-movement has its complications. Without
going into an elaborate explanation, I will simply suggest a number
of guidelines: (1) the ANE/GR [ancient Near Eastern/Graeco-
Roman]^14 real world must be examined along with its legal world, (2)
the biblical subject on the whole must be examined along with its
parts, (3) the biblical text must be compared to a number of other
ANE/GR cultures which themselves must be compared with each
other and (4) any portrait of movement must be composed of broad
input from all three streams of assessment—foreign, domestic, and
canonical.^15And this is just his procedure for the first of eighteen criteria! Who
will be able to do this? Who knows the history of ancient cultures well
enough to make these assessments?
Speaking from the perspective of more than thirty years in the aca-
demic world, I will not say that only one percent of the Christians in the
world will be able to use Webb’s system and tell us what moral standards
we should follow today. I will not even say that one percent of the sem-
inary-trained pastors in the world will be able to follow Webb’s system
and tell us what moral standards we should obey today. I will not even
(^14) What Webb means by the “ancient Near Eastern/Graeco-Roman” world is the cultures of
ancient Greece and Rome, and also the rest of the nations and cultures in the ancient Near East
at the time when each part of the Bible was written.
(^15) Ibid., 82. I added the explanatory words in square brackets, which he writes out in full else-
where.