Evangelical Feminism: A New Path to Liberalism?

74 FEMINIST VIEWS THAT UNDERMINE SCRIPTURE

November 17-19, 2004.^18 He denied that his system nullifies in princi-
ple the moral authority of the New Testament, because it is grounded in
the New Testament. Here is the heart of his response:

There is a solid link in meaning between the underlying redemptive

spirit (movement meaning) and an ultimate ethic that is hardly for-

eign to what the Bible says. The better social ethic is not “Webb’s bet-

ter ethic” (contra Grudem) but an expression of an ethic that is deeply

rooted within the Bible. It is the Bible’s ethic, not mine!^19

But this response only confirms my concerns. He says his ethic is
“the Bible’s ethic” because he uses the Bible to see the direction of
progress that can be made beyond the Bible! Therefore he uses the Bible
as an authority to prove that we should move beyond the moral stan-
dards taught in the Bible. This is exactly what I mean by undermining
in principle the moral authority of the New Testament.
The fact remains that Webb claims that the moral standards of his
“better social ethic” (his point Z in his X➝Y➝Z system) are an
improvement on the moral commands stated in the New Testament. Of
course he says there is a “solid link” and his new moral standards are
“hardly foreign” to what the Bible says, because he can always trace
some similarities between these different standards, but they are still new
standards, “better” standards that he says improve on the moral stan-
dards of the Bible. And so we can never know, without Webb’s system,
which commands of the New Testament we should obey and which we
should improve on. This is what I call nullifying in principle the moral
authority of all the New Testament commands.
To give one specific example, the New Testament says, in 1 Timothy
2:12:

I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a

man...

But Webb’s system concludes that

(^18) Webb’s response, “A Redemptive-Movement Hermeneutic: Responding to Grudem’s
Concerns,” is available online at http://www.etsjets.org.
(^19) Ibid., 25, italics added.