Transposing the Word
Whenever we pick up the Bible and read it, even in a contemporary version, we are conscious of stepping back two millennia or more. We travel backwards in time, behind the information revolution and the Industrial Revolution, until we find ourselves in an alien world that long ago ceased to exist. As a result, the Bible feels odd, sounds archaic, looks obsolete and smells musty. We are tempted to ask impatiently, ‘What on earth has that old book got to say to me?’
Our sense of disorientation when we read the Bible, and the resulting difficulty we experience understanding it, are due primarily neither to the passage of time in itself (from the first century to the twenty-first) nor to the mere distance (from the Middle East to the West), but to the cultural differences which remoteness of time and place have caused.
In fact, two distinct but complementary problems confront us. The first is the problem of our own cultural imprisonment, and the second is the problem of the cultural conditioning of the biblical authors. That is, both the writers and the readers of Scripture are culture-creatures, the products (and therefore to some degree the prisoners) of the particular cultures in which they were brought up. As a result, in all our Bible reading there is a collision of cultures between the biblical world and the modern world. Both God’s speaking and our listening are culturally conditioned. This fact clearly affects our interpretation of Scripture. But we will have to ask whether it also affects the authority of Scripture.
The hermeneutical problem
Biblical hermeneutics, the art or science of interpreting Scripture, has become a major preoccupation of scholars in recent decades. Indeed, all Christians who read the Bible come up against the question of how to understand it rightly.
The problem arises from the extreme cultural particularities of the ancient text and the modern interpreter. Each has a different ‘horizon’, a limited viewpoint or perspective, and what is needed is what Hans-Georg Gadamer called a ‘fusion’ of horizons. ‘Understanding takes place,’ writes Dr Tony Thiselton in his classic and comprehensive study The Two Horizons, ‘when two sets of horizons are brought into relation to each other, namely those of the text and those of the interpreter.’
In this process the interpreter’s first task was called by Gadamer ‘distancing’. This means we have to acknowledge ‘the pastness of the past’, disengage ourselves from the text, and allow it its own historical integrity. We must avoid letting ourselves intrude into it or deciding prematurely how it applies to us. Careful exegesis of the text necessitates studying it on its own cultural and linguistic terms.
But this is only the beginning. If first we stand back from the text, next we seek to enter it. ‘There must be present engagement with the text,’ writes Tony Thiselton, ‘as well as critical distancing from it.’ This is not easy, because the interpreter also belongs to a particular context, one that is different from that of the text. It requires a high degree of imagination, of empathy, if we are to enter that alien world. ‘Historical exegesis is essential, but it is not enough. We need both distancing and an openness to the text which will yield progress towards the fusion of horizons.’
This leads to an active interaction between text and interpreter. However hard we may work at distancing ourselves from the text, we can hardly help bringing to it our presuppositions and our own agenda of problems and questions. The Scripture may respond to these. But, because it has its own agenda, it may not. Instead, it may challenge us to go away and reshape our questions, even replace them with better ones. We then return with our new agenda, and so the dialogue between us goes on. It is part of what is called ‘the hermeneutical circle’, although some European and Latin American scholars have preferred the expression ‘hermeneutical spiral’ because the movement is progressive and upward.
During the 1960s, some German scholars, especially Ernst Fuchs and Gerhard Ebeling, former students of Rudolf Bultmann, went further in developing a ‘new hermeneutic’. They claimed that objectivity is impossible on the grounds that we cannot jump out of our own particular situation into that of a biblical author. Instead, they stressed the need to let the text speak. According to their theory of language, its purpose is not so much to convey ‘concepts’ as to cause an ‘event’ (a ‘language-event’). The roles of text and interpreter are reversed, with the interpreter listening instead of talking. It seems clear that these post-Bultmannians went too far. Denying that the biblical text has an accessible, objective meaning, they lapsed into an uncontrolled subjectivity. What the text said to them might bear no relation to what it actually meant.
Nevertheless, there is abiding value in what these scholars are feeling for. They take seriously the cultural gulf between the past and the present. They recognize the independent historical particularity of both text and interpreter, and they seek to develop a dialectic between them. The old hermeneutic put into our hands a set of universal rules of interpretation, which we applied to the text; the new hermeneutic is concerned to allow the text to apply its message to us. The old hermeneutic concentrated on the text as object – an object that we stood over, studied, scrutinized, applied our rules to, and almost took control of. The new hermeneutic, however, concentrates on the text as subject. The text stands over us, and we sit meekly ‘under it’, as the Reformers used to put it. It addresses, confronts, challenges and changes us.
Here, then, is the danger of a new polarization between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’. Each is perilously lopsided without the other. For the text is both object and subject. We address it, and it addresses us. But as these two processes develop, we must insist that the object and the subject are the same text and have the same meaning.
We now return to the two cultural problems, and consider each separately.
Our own cultural imprisonment
Every human being who has ever lived has been a creature of culture. Culture is a convenient term with which to describe the complexity of beliefs, values, customs and traditions which each generation receives from its predecessor and transmits to its successor, and which binds a society together. We have all drunk in our cultural inheritance with our mother’s milk. The way we think, judge, act, talk, dress, eat, work and play are all to a large extent determined by our culture, and we usually do not realize how much our cultural upbringing has enslaved us.
Hence the great value of travel, for then we learn to listen to ourselves through the ears of another culture, and look at ourselves through another culture’s eyes. I well remember my first visit to the United States. After the first address I had given on American soil, a woman said to me, ‘I do like your English accent.’ Accent? Me? She of course had an American accent, but surely I spoke the Queen’s English? My speech was the norm; hers was the deviation from the norm. Then, not so long afterwards, I was in Manila, and a little Filipino boy of only about eight years old came up to me, cocked his head, looked into my face and commented cheekily, ‘You do talk funny!’ He was right. I do. But then so do you, and so does everybody.
Our culture includes not only the general views and values, standards and customs, of our society, but also those which apply to our particular sex, age and class. They all affect the way we read the Bible. For example, how can I, as a man, read Scripture in the same way as a woman who has been hurt by male chauvinism? Or how can I, as an old man, hear from Scripture what young people hear when they read it? Or again, how can I, as a member of an affluent society, really listen to what Scripture says about the poor?
Men and women, old and young, black and white, African and Asian, capitalist and socialist, waged and unwaged, middle-class and working-class, all read Scripture differently. Our spectacles have cultural lenses. It is so difficult, as to be almost impossible, for us to read the Bible with genuine objectivity and openness, and for God to break through our cultural defences and to say to us what he wants to say. Instead, we come to our reading of the Bible with our own agenda, bias, questions, preoccupations, concerns and convictions, and, unless we are extremely careful, we impose these on the biblical text. We may sincerely pray before we read, ‘Open my eyes that I may see wonderful things in your law,’ but still the same failure of communication may continue. For even that introductory prayer, even though it is taken from the Psalter, is suspect because it lays down the kind of message we want to hear.
‘Please, Lord, I want to see some “wonderful thing” in your Word.’
But he may reply, ‘What makes you think I have only “wonderful things” to show you? As a matter of fact, I have some rather “disturbing things” to show you today. Are you prepared to receive them?’
‘Oh no, Lord, please not,’ we stammer in reply. ‘I come to Scripture only to be comforted. I really do not want to be challenged or disturbed.’
In other words, we come to the Bible with our agenda formulated by us alone, our expectations pre-set, our minds made up, laying down in advance what we want God to say to us. Then, instead of hearing the thunderclap of his voice, all we receive are the soothing echoes of our own cultural prejudice. And God says to us, as he did to his servant through Isaiah, ‘Hear, you deaf; look, you blind, and see! Who is blind but my servant, and deaf like the messenger I send?’
This explains the dismal record of the church’s unfaithfulness. Seldom in its long history has it been sensitively in tune with God’s Word. More often it has been exactly what it has been forbidden to be, namely conformist. It has been influenced more by the world than by the Word. Instead of challenging the status quo with the values of the kingdom of God, it has acquiesced in it. Instead of resisting the encroachments of secularism, it has surrendered to them. Instead of rejecting the value system and lifestyle of the world, it has assimilated them. The church has accommodated itself to the prevailing culture, leaped on all the trendiest bandwagons, and hummed all the popular tunes of the day. Whenever the church does this, it reads Scripture through the world’s eyes, and rationalizes its own unfaithfulness.
Is this unfair? I do not think so. Consider some examples from the past. For church history is full of the church’s cultural blind spots.
How is it, I ask myself, that the Christian conscience not only approved, but actually glamorized, those terrible medieval Crusades as a Christ-glorifying form of mission, so that European Christian knights in shining armour rode forth to recover the holy places from Islam by force? It was an unholy blunder, which Muslims have never forgotten, let alone forgiven, and which continues to obstruct the evangelization of the Muslim world, especially in the Middle East. Or how is it that torture could ever have been employed in the name of Jesus Christ to combat heresy and enforce orthodoxy, so that the thumbscrews were turned on some miserable dissident until he capitulated? One might almost characterize it ‘evangelization by torture’, and all in the name of the Prince of Peace! Or how is that, although the Franciscans organized missions in the thirteenth century, and the Jesuits in the sixteenth, Protestant churches were so inward looking that they had virtually no missions until the time of the Pietists two centuries after the Reformation? Even then, towards the end of the eighteenth century, when William Carey proposed a mission to India, he was greeted with the patronizing retort, ‘Sit down, young man; when God wants to convert the heathen, he will do it without your help or mine.’ Had his critic never read the Great Commission? Again, how is it that the cruel degradations of slavery and of the slave trade were not abolished in the so-called Christian West until 1,800 years after Christ? Or how is it that racial prejudice and environmental pollution have become widely recognized as the evils they are only since the Second World War?
This is a catalogue of some of the worst blind spots that have marred the church’s testimony down the ages. None of them can be defended from Scripture, although tortuous attempts have been made to do so. All are due to a misreading of Scripture or to an unwillingness to sit under its authority. God’s people were blinded by tradition. They had other agendas. They were not in a mind or mood to listen to God.
What then about our own contemporary blindness? It is comparatively easy to criticize our forebears for their blindness; it is much harder to be aware of ours. What will posterity see as the chief Christian blind spot in our day? I cannot say with any degree of certainty, because of course I share in the same myopia myself. But I suspect that it will relate to two main areas.
First, we Christians who live in the affluence of the West still do not seem to have felt sufficiently the injustice of continuing North-South economic inequality. Quite apart from macro-economic questions of trade and development, we do not even seem to have allowed the situation to affect our lifestyle. While about 20,000 people die of poverty each day, should not the Christian voice of protest be louder and more strident? And should we not continue to simplify our own economic lifestyle, not because we imagine that this will solve the problem, but because it will enable us personally to share more, and to express appropriately our sense of compassionate solidarity with the poor?
A second blind spot of evangelical Christians seems to me to be our comparative failure to condemn as immoral and indefensible all indiscriminate weaponry – both those that are indiscriminate by nature like nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, as well as the indiscriminate use of conventional weapons. We should surely be denouncing this as incompatible with the ‘just war’ theory, let alone with Christian pacifism. It was back in 1965 that the Roman Catholic Church condemned such weapons as ‘a crime against God and man himself’. Ecumenical pronouncements followed, declaring indiscriminate warfare ‘increasingly offensive to the Christian conscience’. But the evangelical voice, with notable exceptions, has been irresponsibly muted.
The first step towards the recovery of our Christian integrity will be the humble recognition that our culture blinds, deafens and dopes us. We neither see what we ought to see in Scripture, nor hear God’s Word as we should, nor feel the anger of God against evil. We need to allow God’s Word to confront us, disturbing our security, undermining our complacency, penetrating our protective patterns of thought and behaviour, and overthrowing our resistance.
It is not impossible for God to do this. Once we realize how strong a barrier to his communication our culture can be, we will be alert to the problem. Then we will begin to cry to him to open our eyes, unstop our ears and stab our dull consciences awake, until we see, hear and feel what (through his Word) God has been saying to us all the time.
The Bible’s cultural conditioning
It is not only Bible readers who are the products of a particular culture; so too were the biblical authors. And God took this into account when he communicated with his people. That is, when he spoke, he neither used his own language (if he has one), nor expressed himself in terms of his own heavenly culture. Such communication would have been unintelligible to human beings on earth. Nor did God shout culture-free maxims out of a clear, blue sky. On the contrary, he humbled himself to speak in the languages of his people (classical Hebrew, Aramaic and common Greek), and within the cultures of the Ancient Near East (the Old Testament), Palestinian Judaism (the Gospels) and the Hellenized Roman Empire (the rest of the New Testament). No word of God was spoken in a cultural vacuum; every word of God was spoken in a cultural context.
True, the cultural contexts in which the Bible was written are often alien to us. But we must not resent this on the grounds that it causes us problems. We should rather rejoice in the divine condescension. God has stooped to our level in order to reveal himself in linguistically and culturally appropriate terms. This truth applies both to the incarnation of his Son, who took human flesh, and to the inspiration of his Word, which was spoken in human language.
Nevertheless, we are also faced with this question: how can a divine revelation given in transient cultural terms have permanent validity? How can a revelation addressed to a particular cultural situation have a universal application? Does not the cultural conditioning of Scripture limit its relevance to us, and even its authority over us? Must we not say with David Edwards, ‘I admit that a lot in the Bible . . . is culturally conditioned, and therefore out of date’? Is his deduction logical?
My response to David Edwards is to agree that the Bible is a culturally conditioned book (as indeed are all books which have ever been written, including his and mine!), but to disagree that it is therefore necessarily out of date. How then shall we handle the cultural element in Scripture?
The principle, as I see it, can be set out through an everyday illustration. We have little difficulty in distinguishing between a person and the particular clothing that he or she happens to be wearing. Most of us have several sets of clothes at home. Sometimes we dress up in maximum finery, for a wedding or party perhaps, or in our national costume. At other times we put on more sombre clothing, as when we attend a funeral. Occasionally we dress up in archaic garments, perhaps when going to a fancy-dress party. We also have our work clothes, our sports clothes and our night clothes. In other words, there is variety in our wardrobe. But the person underneath the clothing remains the same. The clothing changes; the person does not.
Now, just as we distinguish between individuals and their clothing, so we need to distinguish between the essence of God’s revelation (what he is teaching, promising or commanding) and the cultural clothing in which it was originally given. However dated the cultural setting may be, the essential message has permanent and universal validity. The cultural application may change; the revelation does not.
When we are faced with a biblical passage, therefore, whose teaching is obviously clothed in ancient cultural dress (because it relates to social customs that are either obsolete or at least alien to our own culture), how shall we react? We have three options.
The first possibility is total rejection. ‘Because the culture is out of date,’ we could say to ourselves, ‘the teaching here is irrelevant. It has nothing to say to me. I may as well take a pair of scissors, cut this passage out of my Bible, and throw it away.’ I am not recommending this response!
The second and opposite possibility is wooden, unimaginative literalism. The literalist says, ‘Because this text is part of God’s Word, it must be preserved and followed just as it stands, without modification. Both the substance and its cultural expression have equal authority. To discard either would be to tamper with the Word of God and be guilty of an incipient liberalism.’ I do not recommend this response either.
There is a third and more judicious way, which is called cultural transposition. The procedure now is to identify the essential revelation in the text (what God is saying here), to separate this from the cultural form in which he chose to give it, and then to re-clothe it in appropriate modern cultural terms. ‘Transposition’ is a good word for this practice, since we are already familiar with it in musical contexts. To transpose a piece of music is to put it into a different key from that in which it was originally written. To transpose a biblical text is to put it into a different culture from that in which it was originally given. In musical transposition the tune and harmonization remain the same; only the key is different. In biblical transposition the truth of the revelation remains the same; only the cultural expression is different.
Cross-cultural missionaries illustrate the need for cultural transposition, although they have to wrestle with three cultures. Their task is to take the essence of the gospel, which was first revealed in the cultural settings of the Bible, which they have received in their own cultures, and transpose it into the culture of the people to whom they go. And they need to do so without thereby either falsifying the message or rendering it unintelligible. That, at least, is the theory. In practice, missionaries have often taken with them what Dr René Padilla at the Lausanne Congress in 1974 called a ‘culture-Christianity’. In other words, they exported with the gospel their own cultural inheritance.
I remember the shock I felt on my first visit to West Africa and its churches. I saw Gothic spires rising incongruously above the coconut palms, and African bishops sweating profusely in the tropical heat because they were wearing medieval European ecclesiastical robes. I heard Western hymn tunes being sung to the accompaniment of Western instruments, and African tongues attempting to get around Jacobean and even Elizabethan English! It is, of course, easy to criticize, and, if we had been in the position of the early missionaries, we would probably have made the same mistake. Nevertheless, this imposition of Western cultural forms was a serious blunder. What is needed instead is what Stanley Jones in India called the ‘naturalization’ of the gospel, which means its transposition into indigenous cultural forms.
Looking again at the three options before us, we might perhaps say that
Examples of cultural transposition
The Bible is concerned about both doctrine and ethics, belief and behaviour, and in both areas cultural transposition is necessary.
Take first the doctrinal or theological teaching of the Bible. It seems obvious that we must learn to distinguish between the truth being affirmed, and the cultural terms in which it is presented; between meaning (the revelation) and medium (its communication). It is in this connection that we have to face the challenge posed by the German scholar Rudolf Bultmann and his ‘demythologization’ programme, which continues to shape the way many liberal churches read the Bible. Bultmann’s argument may be reduced to three points without too much distortion, relating respectively to the biblical authors, their modern readers and theological communicators. First, he argued that the intellectual framework of the biblical writers was pre-scientific and therefore ‘mythical’. For example, they envisaged heaven above and hell below in a three-decker universe, so that they imagined Jesus literally ‘descending to hell’ and ‘ascending to heaven’. Second, if modern scientific men and women are presented today with the gospel (kerygma) couched in terms of such an obsolete cosmology, they will reject it as, frankly, incredible. Third, the task of theologians is therefore to strip away the mythical elements in the Bible, or ‘demythologize the kerygma’, because the purpose of myth is to speak not of historical events but of transcendent reality.
Let us agree at once with the spirit of the second point above. Our priority concern is how to communicate the kerygma to people today in a way that is credible. In order to do so, we have to proclaim biblical truth, but not necessarily use biblical terms. We may (and must) transpose revealed truth into modern idiom.
With regard to Bultmann’s first point, however, I am not myself at all convinced that the biblical authors were the literalists he imagines. It is true that they used the imagery of the three-decker universe, for it was part of their intellectual framework. But were they actually affirming it? I think not. Take Psalm 75. God is said, when the earth quakes, to ‘hold its pillars firm’. So here is the earth (the middle deck) resting on pillars. But in the same psalm God commands the wicked not to lift up their ‘horns’ or these will be cut off, and warns that in his hand there is ‘a cup full of foaming wine mixed with spices’, which he will shortly pour out for the wicked to drink. Now nobody (least of all the psalmist) believed literally that the wicked sprout horns or that God holds a cup of wine in his hand. If, therefore, these are examples of dramatic, poetic imagery, is it not gratuitous to insist that the earth’s pillars are meant to be understood literally?
The Old Testament writers affirmed God’s sovereign control of the world by saying that he held earth’s pillars firm, without committing themselves to a three-decker cosmology. They affirmed God’s power over evil by referring to his destruction of the primeval monster Leviathan, without committing themselves to the Babylonian creation myth. They also affirmed his general revelation through nature by saying that the sun runs across the sky, without committing themselves to a pre-Copernican universe. These forms of thought and speech, whether we call them ‘imagery’, ‘poetry’ or ‘myth’, were common currency in the Ancient Near East. Old Testament writers used them to convey truths about God as Creator and Lord, without affirming the literal truth of the imagery or mythology they were using.
This brings us to Bultmann’s third point. We should be able to agree with the need, in some degree, to ‘demythologize’, if what is meant is the need to transpose truth from one set of images to another, as we have just seen. But Bultmann goes much further than this, especially in relation to the New Testament. He attempts to reconstruct the kerygma (especially the death, resurrection and return of Jesus) by dissolving these historical events into a ‘meaning’ that is not historical. Thus, according to Bultmann, when the apostles said that ‘Christ died for our sins’, they were not referring to any literal sin-bearing sacrifice, but affirming God’s love and our own existential experience of being crucified with Christ. When they said that ‘he rose’, they were referring not to an event, but to an experience, namely that he rose in their own revived faith. And when they said that he is coming again to judge, they were referring not to a future event, but to a present challenge to make a responsible decision for Christ today.
The key question, however, is whether the affirmations that Christ died, rose and will return were deliberately mythical ways of referring to something other than historical events, or whether they were real happenings which were themselves part of the kerygma being proclaimed. The natural interpretation of the apostolic kerygma is that the apostles intended to proclaim events in the career of Jesus which were both historically true and theologically significant.
It is, then, legitimate to distinguish between the meaning and the medium, between what is being affirmed and how the affirmation is made, between the revelation of truth and its communication. But it is also essential to ask whether the words and images used are literal or mythical. The defeat of Leviathan is a myth; the death, resurrection and coming of Jesus belong to history. The intention of the author will usually help us to know which is which.
We turn now to three examples of cultural transposition in the ethical field.
I will begin with a fairly easy example of foot-washing, so that we may firmly grasp the principle and its application. After Jesus had washed the feet of the Twelve in the upper room and resumed his place, he said, ‘Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet.’ In Jesus’ day, foot-washing was a common cultural practice. If we had been invited to a meal in a friend’s house, we would have walked there barefoot or in sandals through dusty streets, and when we arrived a slave would have washed our feet. Today, however, at least in the West, the whole culture has changed. We visit a friend by car or public transport. On arrival, there is certainly no slave to meet us and wash our feet. How then shall we handle a text in which reciprocal foot-washing is commanded?
Think of the three options. Shall we go the way of total rejection, on the ground that foot-washing has no place in our culture? No. Shall we obey Jesus’ command literally, and go round asking people to take their shoes and socks off so that we may wash their feet? No. Although the Mennonites, and some African and Asian churches, have a ritual foot-washing as part of their communion service, it seems clear that Jesus’ reference was to a social custom, not to a religious ceremony. We are left then with the third option of cultural transposition. We ask what Jesus was getting at, what was the essence of his instruction. The answer is not hard to find. He was teaching that if we love one another, we must serve one another, and no service will be too dirty, menial or demeaning for us to perform. If, then, we cannot wash people’s feet, we will gladly shine their shoes, or wash the dishes for them, or even clean the toilets. Nothing will be beneath our dignity. Whatever in our culture is regarded as unpleasant work of low status, that will be our privilege, out of love, to undertake.
A second example of the need for cultural transposition relates to the eating of meat offered to idols. The question was whether it was permissible for the followers of Jesus to eat the meat of animals, which, before being put on sale in a butcher’s shop, had been offered in an idolatrous sacrifice. New converts, freshly rescued from heathen idolatry, had conscientious qualms about doing so. Would not the eating of idol meats contaminate and compromise them? Paul was clear that it would not. Idols were nothing, he said. There was only one God, the Father, and only one Lord, Jesus Christ. So he saw no reason why he should not eat idol meats. His conscience was ‘strong’, that is, well educated. But then there were the ‘weak’ believers to consider. Their ‘weakness’ was not in their will but in their conscience, which was under-educated and therefore over-scrupulous. If Paul were to eat meat previously offered to idols in their presence, they might be encouraged to follow his example against their better judgment, in which case their conscience would be defiled. As a result, out of deference to the weak Christians, Paul refrained.
This heated controversy in the New Testament sounds very alien to our context, at least in the West. There are no pagan temples in our culture where animals are sacrificed to idols, nor are there any meat markets in which we could buy food which had been used in idolatrous worship. Yet at least two principles remain, which were laid down by Paul, and which are relevant to Christians in every culture today. The first is that conscience is sacred. To be sure, it needs to be educated. But, even when it is weak, it must not be violated. ‘Conscientious objection’ not only to military service, but in other situations as well, is allowed in those countries which have had a Christian influence. Second, love limits liberty. Paul had liberty of conscience to eat, but he denied himself this freedom out of loving concern for those who would be offended if he did. These two principles can be applied in many different cultural contexts today.
My third example is the most controversial. It concerns the position and roles of women. Whole books have been written on this topic. I can hope here only to consider how far cultural transposition may be appropriate and helpful in this area. We are familiar both with Paul’s prohibitions, that a woman may not ‘teach or . . . assume authority over a man’, and with his commands, that women are to wear veils and remain silent in public worship. The question that these texts raise is this: are all these instructions of permanent and universal validity? Or do they contain some cultural elements which could allow us a little flexibility in interpretation, and which may need transposition into our own culture? My response necessitates first making two affirmations and then asking two more questions.
The first affirmation is that the sexes are equal. This is taught in Genesis 1:26–28. Men and women are equal bearers of the divine image, and equal sharers in the earthly dominion. Moreover, if they are equal by creation, they are even more equal (if that is possible) by redemption. For in Jesus Christ ‘there is neither . . . male nor female’. We are absolutely equal in worth, dignity and relation to God. The second affirmation is that the sexes are complementary. This is taught in Genesis 2:18–24. Equality does not mean identity. Nor does it necessarily imply roles that are completely interchangeable. Moreover, within this complementarity Paul affirmed the principle of masculine ‘headship’. He derived it from the facts of creation in Genesis 2, namely that woman was made after, out of and for man. Evidently he did not see any conflict between this and Galatians 3:28. I do not myself feel at liberty to disagree with the apostle Paul or to dismiss his teaching as rabbinic, cultural or mistaken. On the contrary, he roots it in creation, and what creation has established, no culture is able to destroy.
From the two affirmations I come to the two questions. First, what does ‘headship’ mean? I do not think we shall find our answer from the etymology of the Greek word kephalē, ‘head’, or from its use in secular Greek where it may sometimes mean ‘source’. The meaning of a word in Scripture is determined less by its origin or its use elsewhere than by its use in the biblical context. Given this, Ephesians 5:21–32 comes to our aid, since there Paul uses ‘head’ to convey responsibility rather than authority. He argues that the husband’s headship (and therefore perhaps masculine headship in general) is to be modelled both on Christ’s headship of the church (which led him to give himself up for her) and on our relation to our own body (which leads us to nourish it and care for it). In both cases ‘headship’ means sacrifice and service. It is the headship of care, not control. Its purpose is not to inhibit, let alone to crush, but to facilitate. Husbands are to create conditions of love and security in which women are free to be, and to develop, themselves.
Second, how does ‘headship’ apply? Does it forbid ordination or other forms of ministry? In 1 Corinthians 11, Paul requires women to wear veils in public worship and refers to the veil as a symbol of authority, which in those days it was. It still is in some cultures, but not in the West. Wearing hats in church is a good example of bad transposition, for Western women’s hats tend to symbolize liberation rather than submission!
What then about the requirement of silence? My own belief is that commentators have not sufficiently noticed that Paul draws a double contrast when he writes, ‘A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be silent.’ The first contrast is between authority and submission. This seems to be permanent because creational. The second contrast is between teaching and silence. Is it possible that silence, like the veil, was a first-century cultural symbol of submission to masculine headship, which is not necessarily binding today? Certainly the situation has changed considerably. Women in many cultures today are just as educated as men. And the teaching office today, now that the New Testament canon has been finalized, is much less authoritative. So, then, supposing (I ask myself) a woman were to teach men under the authority of Scripture (not claiming an authority of her own), in a meek and humble spirit (not throwing her weight about), and as a member of a pastoral team of which a man were head – might those three conditions enable her to teach men without exercising an improper authority over them, and without infringing the principle of masculine headship? Would this be a legitimate example of cultural transposition?
My tentative answer to my own questions is, ‘Yes, I think so.’ I realize that this may seem to some nothing but an irrelevant theory, since in several denominations and in many parts of the world women’s ordination is already a reality. But at least I hope it is clear what I have been trying to do. This is to identify and preserve the essence of God’s revelation (in this case the creational relation of the sexes), while at the same time seeking to discern appropriate contemporary cultural symbols to express it.
I conclude this rather long chapter with two words of reassurance about the practice of cultural transposition.
First, cultural transposition is appropriate only where the biblical text contains two levels of discourse – first, doctrinal or ethical teaching, and, second, its cultural or social expression; first (for example) the command to love and serve one another, and second the foot-washing. Cultural transposition is impossible where there is only one level of discourse. So it cannot be used to justify the rejection of what Scripture teaches, forbids or commands.
Take as an example the attempt to justify homosexual partnerships by declaring the biblical prohibitions to be culturally conditioned. The argument developed by some liberal thinkers runs like this: ‘We grant that some forms of homosexual behaviour were forbidden by Moses in the Old Testament and by Paul in the New. But they were referring to particular cultural practices. In Leviticus they referred to the ritual prostitution which was part of ancient Canaanite fertility religion, and in Paul’s letters to promiscuous sexual behaviour, together with the corruption of the young. They were not referring to tender, loving, faithful relationships between two adult men or two adult women. Besides, Moses and Paul had a very limited understanding of human psychosexuality. We know much more than they did. So, then, because the biblical prohibitions were of culturally specific taboos, they are irrelevant to us, and they cannot be taken to forbid a committed homosexual partnership which is equivalent to a heterosexual marriage.’
But this is a specious argument, which needs to be firmly rejected. The reason for the biblical prohibitions of homosexual conduct was not cultural, but creational. They arose from the biblical definition of marriage, which was personally endorsed by Jesus Christ: ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’ In other words, the only kind of marriage or sexual partnership envisaged in Scripture is heterosexual monogamy, which is also the only God-given context for the ‘one-flesh’ experience. So what limits sexual intercourse to heterosexual marriage, and forbids it in all other relationships, is not culture, but creation. No attempt at cultural transposition would be legitimate here.
Second, cultural transposition is not the thin end of the liberal wedge. It is not a conveniently respectable way to dodge awkward passages of Scripture by declaring them to be culturally relative. It is not a sophisticated way of rejecting biblical authority. No. If we go in for total rejection, we certainly cannot obey God’s Word. If instead we embrace a position of wooden literalism, our obedience becomes artificial and mechanical. Only if we transpose the teaching of Scripture into modern cultural dress does our obedience become contemporary. Not disobedience, but meaningful obedience, is the purpose of cultural transposition.