We do not, of course, all agree within our communities, let alone among the various Christian traditions, about how norms derived from Scripture and from the church’s experience over time should be formulated, interpreted and adjudicated. Each ecclesial body works out its own interpretation.

Deriving norms from ancient texts is a complicated process. For instance, as Clarice Martin shows, African Americans over the generations have passionately rejected as contrary to the Gospel the exhortation that slaves should submit to their masters in the “Household Codes” of three New Testament letters (Colossians 3:18—4:1, Ephesians 5:21—6:9 and 1 Peter 2:18—3:7). Yet they have accepted in literalistic fashion the admonition that wives should submit to their husbands.* “How can a Black preacher,” Jacquelyn Grant asks, “preach in a way which advocates St. Paul’s dictum concerning women while ignoring or repudiating his dictum concerning slaves?”* Or more broadly, how can black male preachers and theologians use a “liberated hermeneutic” in speaking about slavery, but a “literalist hermeneutic” with reference to women?* We may pose a similar query in regard to the New Testament’s treatment of Jews. How can preachers and teachers today use a “liberated hermeneutic” to interpret texts about women but a “literalistic hermeneutic” to render texts that depict Jews in negative fashion? How can they continue to preach about the Pharisees as hypocrites or suggest that “the presence of Jesus is the epiphany of this new and different God—not a God of fear and punishment, distant from us and delighting in sacrifices but instead a God who is close.”* It is crucial to situate texts in their historical and literary contexts in conversation with the church’s historical traditions.

New Testament scholar Sandra Schneiders’s work offers intriguing possibilities for thinking about the relation of norms to Scripture. Her notion of “developing historical consciousness” widens the horizon in which to interpret revelatory texts.* She argues: Texts can come to mean something different from what they originally meant or were understood to mean because of their surplus of meaning and the character of effective history. For instance, the Declaration of Independence affirmed that “all men are created equal,” by which its eighteenth-century authors meant white, adult, property-owning males. When it was written, the term “men” was a generic term referring to all human beings. Although the framers of the Declaration did not intend to include women, children and slaves in the phrase, the text permits us to read “men” as human beings. Further, in the expanding effective historical consciousness of the American people, greater awareness has arisen about what humanity entails. We have come to understand “all men are created equal” to mean that all people possess equal rights. The words of the Declaration of Independence have not changed, but the text has insofar as its textual meaning has expanded.*

So too with the biblical text. The meaning of Second Testament texts about Pharisees or “the Jews” or the old covenant or the ordination of women or homosexuality is not restricted to what its first-century authors intended to say. Through our developing historical consciousness—and a deepening grasp of the Gospel we have been painfully slow to live—we Christians now have a clearer vision of the moral unacceptability of such texts, just as we do with texts presuming the legitimacy of slavery and patriarchy.