7: “REDEMPTIVE MOVEMENT” TRUMPS SCRIPTURE 75We should permit a woman to teach and to exercise authority over a
man.Webb tells us that this is “a better social ethic” than what is writ-
ten in the New Testament. So how can he still say that this “is the Bible’s
ethic”? Only by giving a different sense to “is,” making the word “is”
mean “is a system that results from projecting development beyond the
Bible’s ethic.” This is hardly the normal sense of the word “is.”
Webb then restated his system for the 2004 release of the egalitar-
ian book Discovering Biblical Equality, in his chapter, “A Redemptive-
Movement Hermeneutic.”^20 Here he more clearly stated the question:
All agree that the New Testament moves beyond the Old Testament
in its development or realization of ethic; that is, it takes the Old
Testament redemptive spirit further. However, the New Testament is
still like the Old Testament in expressing the unfolding of an ethic at
certain points in an incremental (not absolute) fashion. In the end,
therefore, the issue is not the New Testament’s status as final revela-
tion but the degree to which the New Testament is similar or dissim-
ilar to the Old Testament with respect to its realization of ethic. Do
contemporary Christians need to move with the redemptive spirit of
the New Testament toward a realization of that movement beyond
certain concrete, frozen-in-time particulars?^21Here Webb reinforces his idea that, just as New Testament
Christians had different moral standards than those in the Old
Testament, and no longer had to follow all the Old Testament laws, so
we need to explore how we can “move with the redemptive spirit of the
New Testament” and go beyond the New Testament’s moral commands
when our culture “happens to reflect a better ethic.”^22
How then is Webb’s system “based on” the Bible and “subject to”
the Bible’s authority? Not in the normal way that people have under-
stood those expressions, but only in the sense that he uses the moral
(^20) William Webb, “A Redemptive-Movement Hermeneutic: The Slavery Analogy,” in
Discovering Biblical Equality, ed. Ronald W. Pierce and Rebecca Merrill Groothuis (Downers
Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2004), 382-400.
(^21) Ibid., 393.
(^22) Ibid., 383.