There’s Trajectories, then There’s Trajectories

Tony Jones Interview with Bart Ehrman

Let me get three things out of the way so that I don’t have to clutter the post up with them later:

1. Bart Ehrman is a petulant man-child who gets the press he does because he plays the evil henchman to Ditchkins so nicely.
2. Tony Jones should have taken him to task a number of times for his bad historical methodology, not to mention his inconsistent hermeneutics.
3. Homebrewed Christianity is a fun little podcast and well worth the listen.  And besides that, if you look at their links page, I’m a Deacon!

Alright.  That’s out of my system.  I had meant to link to this episode a while ago because Ehrman, true to form, has taken hold of what he calls “the trajectory theory,” reified it, and dismissed anyone who deviates from what he dreamed up in his university office, and I figured, since I wrote a post about what I called the vector approach to ethics a while back, I should say a thing or two about what Ehrman says and how my hermeneutic differs.

When Ehrman lays out “the trajectory theory,” his working assumption seems to be that it starts in the earliest-composed books and ends with the latest-composed books (and assumes that Bart Ehrman’s dating of things is right), claiming that “women’s roles” get better uniformly as one progresses.  As Tony Jones chuckles along without so much as a “let’s reconsider,” he moves on to the next point.

I’ve not read much Rob Bell (to whom Jones makes reference at this point), but when I talk about ethics as vector, I’m thinking of taking each Biblical text as speaking out of and to a particular moment in history, taking stock of which direction the text moves ethically and how radically that move is (hence vector).  In other words, I don’t look to Titus as some kind of “next step” after 2 Corinthians any more than I expect Isaiah to proceed from Exodus in any simplistic progressive manner.  Instead I look at the assumptions and expectations (the building blocks of culture) that surround men and women in the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire, then I look at 1 Timothy.

When one reads 1 Timothy and other texts-accused-of-misogyny in that light (as John Howard Yoder did in The Politics of Jesus), one discovers not anything one should call feminism positively but certainly a negation of the systems and structures that make patriarchy intelligible.  In other words, whereas I would not call Paul a feminist writer, I would say that, in the context of the Roman provinces and their culture, he makes space for what I could call feminism.

That making-space, I think, is what makes possible a Christian feminism that does not derive from a positive liberalism but attempts to live together in new ways where Christ breaks open the old wineskins.  Paul did not articulate an intelligibly feminist theology for the same reasons that he did not articulate a post-Hegelian phenomenology, but he does make intelligible moves away from the ontologically strong divisions on national, traditional, and gender lines.  That 20th-century reactionaries used Paul’s texts in order to enforce an order that’s not much to Bart Ehrman’s liking seems a rather shoddy reason for anyone with any historical sense to label the letters of Paul the way he does.

But I already said that in item one already.

At any rate, I’d recommend this podcast to anyone who listens to podcasts, and this episode I commend as an exercise in catching what Tony Jones (who should know better) seems to have missed because he was starstruck by a modern atheist celebrity.