How do we approach Bible interpretation honestly?

There’s an old joke about a tourist who gets lost on backroads, so asks a local farmer for directions to “City-of-your-choice”. The farmer replies, “Well, if I were you, I wouldn’t start from here.”

It’s certainly a humorous way to point out that sometimes the starting point matters more than the destination.

This is my last of four posts in a series on how different ways of approaching the Bible affect our views about women’s place within the home and the church.

As already stated, I’m not a theologian. For the actual Biblical arguments I would refer you to works like Philip Payne’s “The Bible vs Biblical Womanhood” and Terran Williams “How God Sees Women”. Also, I am not an apologist. So I am not writing any of this to convince opponents or to give you a manual to do so. I am just a Christian who takes the Bible seriously and who takes real world evidence seriously and my goal is simply to share how I put those together in the hopes that it will also help you.

There are three key differences I see between the way I and those who oppose mutual submission in marriage interpret Scripture.

1. The first is how we balance individual verses with the whole.

As I discussed in the first post, I (like others who would empower women) see a metanarrative of freedom in Scripture which should inform how we interpret the verses that seem to restrict women.

The counterargument by those who would restrict women is that we are reading our culture into the Bible and that overarching themes like Galatians 3:28 (“There is no longer…male and female”) are vague and need to be interpreted in light of verses such as Ephesians 5:22 (“wives, submit to your husbands”) which are clear.

I addressed the first half of that counterargument in my second post where I showed that equality is an idea, not a “culture”, and it is in fact they who are caving to culture by trying to preserve a male-centric society despite the evidence of women’s equality. I addressed the second half in my third post where I showed how their definitions of clear and vague are highly suspect.

But let’s leave the argumentation aside for a second and just note that we have two hermeneutical options in sorting out Gal 3:28 and Ephesians 5:22.

2. The second difference is that complementarians say you can’t use anything to intepret other than the Bible.

I also addressed this in my third post, but essentially the issue is that  those who argue for the limitation of women distrust logical and philosophical arguments as “worldly notions” and want to keep the discussion strictly to the text of the Bible. Using philosophy, logic or evidence of the actual effects of theology in the real world as a basis for argument are all “off-limits”.

For example, the argument that it is philosophically impossible for two people to be equal while one is in a permanent, arbitrary, unchangeably lower position falls on deaf ears. It doesn’t have to make sense, because “God said it” and “His ways are higher than our ways”. Similarly, how do we handle the fact that marriages that function as a team of equals have better results than those who practice hierarchy? Is that admissible data or not? Should it aid us in our interpretation of Scripture, or do we need to view such data with suspicion?

We again see two approaches:

3. The third difference is how we handle things that offend our moral sensibilities

I haven’t dealt with this one yet, and that’s what I’d like to do with the rest of this article. How do we handle our natural reactions to things we find in the Bible that seem unjust or otherwise objectionable?

Here we find again two starkly contrasting approaches:

For those who wish to ensure the submission of women in the church and home, allowing “emotional” data into the equation is completely forbidden. In their mind, challenging the justice of what seems normative in Scripture undermines the authority of Scripture itself. If it is prescribed in Scripture, who are we to challenge it? One man told me that in interpreting Scripture we are surely in error if we start “appealing to personal experience as proof, appealing to emotions rather than exegesis…[and]…elevating personal conviction above Scripture.”

That’s when a light bulb switched on in my brain. The wording of the argument sounded so familiar that it triggered an aha moment. For example, consider this argument:

This quote, which sounds like it could easily come from the current online discussion about women’s roles in the church and home, in fact comes (as you may have guessed) from an address promoting the practice of chattel slavery given by George D Armstrong in Missouri in 1855.

In fact, all three of the hermeneutical choices I have laid out here have clear echoes in the debate that raged through the nineteenth century between the abolitionists and slaveholders. For instance, consider the first difference in hermeneutics I listed and this quote about Galatians 3:28 from Dr. Albert Taylor Bledsoe in an “An Essay on Liberty and Slavery” (1856):

In other words, to resolve the tension between the ideals of Scripture and day-to-day practice, Abolitionists argued in favour of the broad themes while slaveholders argued that verses instructing practice (Eph 6:5) rendered Gal 3:28 as “only spiritual”.

Sound familiar?

Next, consider how each side framed the utility of human logic and philosophical argument.

As far as logic vs “only the Bible” argumentation goes, consider this quote from (pro-slavery) Robert L Dabney:  

Finally, in the case of the third hermeneutical dichotomy, the abolitionists’ appeal to the inhumanity and cruelty of the practice of slavery (i.e. to conscience), were met by:

1. a variety of paternalistic arguments that mixed lies downplaying the realities of what the slaves were experiencing with suggestions that equality for them would be worse; and
2. the argument that, in any event, emotional reaction to the practice was no justification for it being abolished as God had clearly allowed it.

In fact, they argued that the idea that humans would oppose what God clearly allowed was the height of hubris. For example, George D Armstrong, whom I quoted previously, described it as “impiously to presume to be wiser than God.”

What I find mindboggling is how many current evangelicals agree with the abolitionists’ conclusions, while opposing the hermeneutical choices that abolitionists made to get to those conclusions.

Most evangelicals I dare say, given each of the three hermeneutic dichotomies I have presented here, in any other context would argue for the opposite choice as the abolitionists did in each case. Their overwhelming fear that they might dilute the authority of Scripture (based on the way they have been discipled) leaves them no other choice.

But then they give no serious thought to the uncomfortable fact that if a literal Biblical exegesis divorced from external evidence or experience is the most faithful way to interpret Scripture then unfortunately (in that paradigm) the pro-slavery argument becomes more compelling than abolitionism! To tritely say that slavers “misunderstood those Bible verses” will make you feel better only until you ask the logical question: “WHY did they misunderstand them?” The only honest answer is because the Biblical hermeneutic they were employing led them inexorably there. Asked how to start with that hermeneutic and get to freedom for the slaves, one has to give the answer the local farmer gave the lost tourist in that old joke: “Well, I wouldn’t start from here.”

The arguments against women’s full equality in the church and home rely on this same hermeneutic as the arguments promoting slavery.

And many people are swayed because they think this hermeneutic is “more faithful to Scripture” because it relies on nothing else. But it is clearly a broken hermeneutic. The fact that it led us down the wrong path two hundred years ago may not prove it will always lead us astray, but it certainly proves that it’s not 100% trustworthy. If I type 6×8 into a calculator and get 47, I don’t dismiss it as a fluke and trust it to give me other answers reliably. If a literalist, “Bible-only” hermeneutic failed in the 1800s to such a disastrous degree, why would you trust it to work now?

And the truth is that you can still have a high view of Scripture and hold it as your guide for life and faith, while also allowing your interpretation of it to be informed by things outside of it.

Interestingly, one famous way to do this is the “Wesleyan Quadrilateral” wherein Scripture is the foundation, but it is “affirmed by tradition, aligned with reason and vivified in our experience.” There are other paradigms as well and this is not meant as a specific plug for Wesleyanism. But as I was preparing and writing this post, I found it interesting how close each of these components (tradition, reason, experience) maps onto the three hermeneutical choices.

And I thought about how John Wesley fought for abolition his whole life, even writing a note from his death bed to William Wilberforce encouraging him to continue the fight against “that execrable villany.” And that the Wesleyans were one of the first churches to ordain women.

I can’t help but think that all of that is linked.

Why do you think complementarians refuse to see that they’re using the same hermeneutic that slavers did? Can we fix this? Let’s talk in the comments!