7: “REDEMPTIVE MOVEMENT” TRUMPS SCRIPTURE 73New Testament commands to see if they are culturally relative or trans-
cultural, before deciding whether to obey them?”
No, we do not at all have to use Webb’s kind of test. There is a sig-
nificant difference between Webb’s approach and that of traditional
evangelicals. Most evangelicals (including me) believe we are under the
moral authority of the New Testament and are obligated to obey its
commands when we are in the same situation as that addressed in the
New Testament command (such as being a parent, a child, a person con-
templating a divorce, a church selecting elders or deacons, a church
preparing to celebrate the Lord’s Supper, a husband, a wife, and so
forth). When there is no exact modern equivalent to some aspect of a
command (such as “honor the emperor” in 1 Pet. 2:17), we are still obli-
gated to obey the command, but we do so by applying it to situations
that are essentially similar. Therefore, “honor the emperor” is applied
to honoring the president or the prime minister. In fact, in several such
cases the immediate context contains pointers to broader applications
(such as 1 Pet. 2:13-14, which mentions being subject to “every human
institution” including the “emperor” and “governors” as specific
examples).
But with Webb the situation is entirely different. He does not con-
sider the moral commands of the New Testament to represent a perfect
or final moral system for Christians. They are rather a pointer that “pro-
vides the direction toward the divine destination, but its literal, isolated
words are not always the destination itself. Sometimes God’s instruc-
tions are simply designed to get his flock moving.”^16 In this way Webb’s
system undermines the moral authority of the Bible. Once people adopt
Webb’s system, all sorts of new “redemptive movements” will be dis-
covered whenever someone wants to justify disobedience to some other
part of Scripture. The moral authority is no longer the teaching of the
Bible itself but some standard that people imagine as coming after the
Bible. In this way, Webb’s redemptive-movement hermeneutic is a major
step down the path toward liberalism.
Webb responded to my earlier critique of his position^17 in a paper
read at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society,
(^16) Ibid., 60.
(^17) See Grudem, Evangelical Feminism and Biblical Truth, 600-645.