Echoing Genesis 3:1, a series of blog posts on ViaMedia.News
asks "Does the Bible really say...?" and features most
recently Dr Meg Warner, Biblical Scholar in Old Testament Studies and the
Hebrew Bible, affiliated with both Kings College, London and the University of
Exeter on Does
the Bible Really Say…that Sex Outside of Marriage is Wrong?
Her "few essential principles of biblical reading and interpretation"
offer a typical example of a sectarian approach to the Bible. (The nature of
sectarianism is that an aspect of the truth is taken as the whole truth with
consequent distortion of everything.) Here are the principles:
1. The phrase ‘the Bible says’ is nonsensical.
It is claimed that this is so because the Bible is a library offering a variety of perspectives which are not always consistent and even in contradiction with each other. The church catholic recognises diversity and development within Scripture but it also acknowledges a fundamental harmony and coherence in the Bible, as one might expect of a book whose ultimate author is God. Denying the unity of Scripture goes hand in hand with denying that Scripture is God-breathed and truthful. The phrase 'the Bible says' is not always properly used but it is not nonsensical although it may be inconvenient for those who prefer to pick and choose which parts of Scripture to recognise as truthful.
2. The Bible is not an ethical guide-book.
It is a common place that there are many different genres within the Bible, not all of which offer clear ethical guidance. It would be reductionist to consider the Bible merely "an ethical guide book" but from this it does not follow that the Bible cannot be considered a collection of writings that taken as a whole among other things offer ethical guidance. If the claim is merely, as maybe with the first and the third point, that one must not pluck a verse and absolutise it as a rule to be followed, fine - but this is hardly what serious theologians have been doing over the last two thousand years.
3. Mind the Gap
It is obviously necessary to carefully consider how an instruction given within the Bible would have functioned within its original historical context and how this is to be translated into our context, taking into account not only our different historical circumstances but also, e.g., the difference between being the people of God BC and AD. So, yes, "mind the gap" but this is very different from "don't enter this carriage" as if our contemporary context renders any part of Scripture irrelevant. With regard to examples such as the one give, it is important that we say both "this is not to be implemented as law among us" (understanding the reasons why) and ask "what does this say about God and his agenda for his people" (reflecting on what this case law says about Christ and whether there is still a moral imperative for us, even if implemented very differently).
4. Cultural Borrowing
There is cultural borrowing in every communication. But there is subversive as well as affirmative ‘borrowing’ within the Bible and there may well be ‘assuming’ due to shared convictions as well as ‘assuming’ for the sake of argument. The specific marital rules within the Torah work from within a cultural context but they are given towards an ideal of marriage that is not simply borrowed or assumed. It would be methodologically problematic to identify as positive teaching only what is unique within the Bible (similar to identifying as genuine words of Jesus only those that no-one else could have said).
A word on the specific example: Warner observes that men and women are treated
differently in Deuteronomy 22 and claims that the disparity "has to do
with cultural ideas about men and women in biblical times." The ancient
cultural background is indeed relevant here but so are biological realities
about child-bearing. In our cultural context we take for granted that
"having sex" and "having children" are two altogether
separate things. Maybe this makes it difficult to appreciate that in a
different cultural context the two were much more closely related. This is a
serious shortcoming, given that Meg Warner thinks she has discerned what the
Biblical laws were all about (protection from shame and financial loss) based
on her reconstruction of the relevant background.
In addition, Warner's atomistic approach (reading a passage merely in the light
of its presumed historical context rather than as part of the whole of
canonical Scripture) fails to consider how Deuteronomy 22 relates to biblical
teaching elsewhere on sexual union and sexual immorality and also fails to
explore whether there is a development from Old to New Testament. (E.g., the
case law takes the marital status of the woman into account when defining
adultery but not of the man. Jesus, in contrast to both the OT and the
Greco-Roman world, does not limit the definition of adultery to what a man does
or wants to do with a married woman. The category of sexual
immorality is of course considered broader than adultery in both testaments and
in particular is not limited to acts punished under the law which makes it
curious to take Deuteronomy 22 as "foundational" for the question at
hand.)
