7: “REDEMPTIVE MOVEMENT” TRUMPS SCRIPTURE 71
say that one percent of the seminary professors will have the requisite
expertise in ancient cultures to use Webb’s system and tell us what moral
standards we should follow today. That is because the evaluation and
assessment of any one ancient culture, to say nothing of all the ancient
cultures surrounding the Bible, is a massive undertaking, even for one
narrow subject such as laws concerning marriage and divorce, or prop-
erty rights, or education and training of children. It is time-consuming
and requires much specialized knowledge and an excellent research
library. Therefore I will not even say that one percent of the seminary
professors who have academic doctorates in Old Testament or New
Testament will be able to use Webb’s system and tell us what moral stan-
dards we should follow today. No, in the end Webb’s system as he
describes it above can only be used by far less than one percent of the
professors of New Testament and Old Testament in the Christian world
today, those few scholars who have the time and the specialized knowl-
edge of rabbinic studies, of Graeco-Roman culture, and of ancient
Egyptian and Babylonian and Assyrian and Persian cultures, and who
have access to a major research library—only this very select group will
be able to use Webb’s “redemptive-movement hermeneutic” in the way
he describes in the paragraph just quoted. This tiny group of experts will
have to tell us what moral standards God wants us to follow today.
And that is only for Criterion 1 in his list of eighteen criteria!
If the evangelical world begins to adopt Webb’s system, it is not hard
to imagine that we will soon require a new class of “priests,” erudite
scholars with expertise in the ancient world who will be able to give us
reliable conclusions about what kind of “ultimate ethic” we should fol-
low today.
But this will create another problem, one I have observed often as I
have lived and taught in the academic world: scholars with such spe-
cialized knowledge often disagree. Anyone familiar with the debates
over rabbinic views of justification in the last two decades will realize
how difficult it can be to understand exactly what was believed in an
ancient culture on even one narrow topic, to say nothing of the whole
range of ethical commands that we find in the New Testament.
Where then will Webb’s system lead us? It will lead us to massive
inability to know with confidence anything that God requires of us. The
more scholars who become involved with telling us “how the Bible was