A Steady Path Forward: Some Direction for the Gender Debate, Part 2 - Speaking of Ethics

Note: You can read Part 1 which includes Dr. Tom Schreiner’s helpful contribution.

This is Part 2 of our series on how gender issues have developed into today’s current opposition to a biblical understanding of manhood and womanhood.  A special note: this Part 2 on systematic theology will be split up into three subordinate sections: 1 - ethics, 2 - Trinitarian issues, 3 - a reflection on creation and new creation.  Today's post will include ethics.

Ethics

When the hermeneutical and exegetical work of pivotal “Gender Debate” passages are synthesized, many theological and ethical questions come to the forefront.  I asked Dr. Vern Poythress, professor of New Testament Interpretation at Westminster Theological Seminary, a few questions concerning some issues that have been of recent interest in current scholarship.  One helpful thing that I picked up early on in Dr. Poythress’ answers to my questions was how important issues of ethics were in the interpretation of  Scripture.  For example, one pressing question Poythress provides is “How do we interface permanent ethical principles from Scripture with the changing situations in various modern cultures, with their pressures on marriage, work, church, economics, etc?”

What Poythress has observed is that now, sociological thinking influences modern theology and hermeneutics.  However, “The influence need not be one way.”  What would be helpful, according to Poythress, is a “more critical, biblically-based analysis of sociological ideas about culture (and therefore gender) as malleable and constructible.”  

As Christians, Scripture must be our standard for formulating our ethics.  Divine revelation is our foundation.  As John Owen writes, those who rest in the foundation of divine revelation “enjoy the best improvement of reason.”  Yet, this does not give Christians the allowance to be antagonistic to all things culturally new, says Poythress.  He suggests that some work should be done applying a biblical ethic that shows its absolutes and flexibility.  “The people who are capitulating to egalitarianism in gender are, by and large, also people who are tempted to compromise all across the spectrum of cultural issues.”  On the other hand, observes Poythress, those antagonistic to cultural change “may run the danger of making a kind of ghetto Christianity that no longer robustly reaches out to the struggles in the mainstream of the surrounding culture.”  A happy medium between the two spectrums or a middle position is not the ideal that is sought after, but rather a robust, biblically-based ethic that flexes when the Gospel flexes.

Special thanks to Dr. Vern Poythress for his help and contribution to this post.