7: “REDEMPTIVE MOVEMENT” TRUMPS SCRIPTURE 69But for Webb, the process is entirely different, and the basis of
authority is different. The commands concerning children and homo-
sexuals are binding on us today not because we are part of the new
covenant age, for which the New Testament was written (I could not find
such a consideration anywhere in Webb’s book), but rather because
these commands have passed through the filtering system of Webb’s
eighteen criteria and have survived. (I have further discussion of those
eighteen criteria below.)^12
In essence, therefore, Webb’s system invalidates the moral author-
ity of the entire New Testament, at least in the sense that we today
should be obedient to the moral commands that were written to new
covenant Christians. Instead, only those commands that have passed
through Webb’s eighteen-part filter are binding on us today.
According to Webb’s system, then, Christians can no longer go to
the New Testament, read the moral commands in one of Paul’s epistles,
and just obey them, as Christians have done throughout history. Webb
thinks that would be to use a “static hermeneutic” that just reads the
“isolated words of the text” and fails to understand “the spirit-
movement component of meaning which significantly transforms the
application of texts for subsequent generations.”^13 Rather, we must real-
ize that the New Testament teachings simply represent one stage in a tra-
jectory of movement toward an ultimate ethic.
WEBB’S SYSTEM MAKES IT IMPOSSIBLE FOR ORDINARY CHRISTIANS TO
DISCOVER WHAT PARTS OF THE BIBLE TO OBEY TODAY
So how can we know what biblical teachings to obey today? How can
Christians discover this “ultimate ethic”? If we use Webb’s system, the
(^12) Actually, the command for children to obey their parents has not entirely survived Webb’s
filtering process, because Webb believes the command means that adult children in New
Testament times were to continue to be obedient to their parents throughout their adult lives,
but this aspect of the command was culturally relative and need not be followed by us today.
That was just what the New Testament taught for its own time (point Y in Webb’s X➝Y➝Z
system). Today we have a better ethic than that (point Z, the ultimate ethic) and so today adult
children do not have to be subject to their parents, even though that is what the New Testament
command means when interpreted according to its original context and original author’s intent.
Webb does not consider the far simpler possibility that first-century readers themselves
would have understood the word “children” (Greek tekna) to apply only to people who were
not adults, and so we today can say that Ephesians 6:1 applies to modern believers in just the
same way that it applied to first-century believers, and no “cultural filters” need to be applied
to that command.
(^13) Ibid., 34.