By Rev. Henry Sun
Special to the Herald

Early on in my study of ethics, I was introduced to the leap of faith that is required by any moral decision.  For example, one can claim that murder is wrong.  (For the record, I agree.)  Nonetheless, the claim that any specific murder is wrong is an entirely different kind of decision to make.  Some have called capital punishment “state-sponsored murder.”  Others have wondered whether civilian deaths in war are an illicit kind of murder.  And throughout history, theologians and philosophers have struggled and disagreed around the question of when killing is justified, even though there is widespread agreement that murder is wrong.

These differences highlight the difference between truth as something descriptive and truth as something prescriptive.  Truth as something descriptive involves the accurate and unbiased reporting of something in an attempt to understand it as well as possible.  Truth as something prescriptive involves the argument that this something that we now understand is morally authoritative for the 21st century.  I might, for example, describe the social institution of slavery in the Bible in its ancient context, attempting to understand it as well as I possibly can, without prescribing slavery as an acceptable social institution in the 21st century.

It is this difference between the truth as an accurate description of the past and truth as a normative prescription for the present that makes reading the Bible in the 21st century such a challenging task.

I mentioned in my last column the mistake Mark makes in the introduction to his gospel.  Descriptively, it is clear that Mark 1:2-3 is quoting from Exodus 23 and Malachi 3 before he gets to the main quotation from Isaiah 40.  Interestingly, Matthew and Luke omit the extraneous quotations and thus “correct” Mark’s error.

But it has been argued that this isn’t really a mistake because Jewish sources regularly quote passages under the longest, most important part of the quotation.  F. F. Bruce, for example, puts it this way:  “When we accuse him [Mark] of inaccuracy, far from pointing out a reality in Mark, we are exposing our own lack of knowledge about how he and other ancient authors used Scripture” (Hard Sayings of the Bible, 404).  Bruce’s argument boils down to this:  Mark’s method of combining ancient texts and quoting them under the name of the most important author is a cultural artifact of his time, and applying a modern standard of scholarly citation and quotation to an ancient culture is inappropriate.

That’s all well and good.  Indeed, we often apply a similar argument when we read something from the Old Testament. We describe the plural marriages of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and others without prescribing polygamy as a moral requirement because we realize that these plural marriages are cultural artifacts from the 2nd millennium B.C.E.  We describe the laws forbidding interracial marriages in Ezra and Nehemiah without prescribing that Christians renounce biracial marriages because we realize these laws are cultural artifacts from the 5th century B.C.E.

And yet, those who point out that Paul seems clearly and unambiguously to express his view that women cannot be leaders of a church (1 Corinthians 11 and 14, or my least favorite chapter in the New Testament, 1 Timothy 2) often insist that one can only be faithful and obedient to Scripture if we take Paul’s texts as prescriptive truth and therefore normative for Christians in the 21st century.

Now lest I be misunderstood, my question is not, “Should we take Paul’s text as prescriptive and normative?”  That’s a worthwhile conversation to have, but I’m not interested in it today.

My question instead is this:  If we can – and since we do – treat Mark’s mixed quotations from Exodus, Malachi and Isaiah, the stories of plural OT marriages, and the prohibitions about interracial marriages as “cultural artifacts from antiquity” that were true in and for their time but are not prescriptively normative today, then why can’t Paul’s prohibition against women leadership be another “cultural artifact from antiquity” that was true in and for Paul’s time but is not prescriptively normative today?  Indeed, more generally, on what basis do we determine which parts are cultural artifacts but are still prescriptively normative in the 21st century?

That is where the hard questions come, because everyone excuses some parts of Scripture as not prescriptively normative today.  The hard question is why we excuse this part but we don’t excuse that part.  Why excuse plural marriage but not women’s leadership?  Why excuse divorced pastors but not gay pastors?  Why excuse interracial marriage but not gay marriage?

Reading Scripture in the 21st century will require Christians to be more thoughtful, more honest, and more open-minded.  May God grant us the strength and the courage we will need to be the thoughtful, honest, and open-minded readers of Scripture required by a vibrant faith in the 21st century.

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