Position 1 Statement to Annual Council

Only one day after delegates voted down divisional autonomy in 1995, AR’s Johnsson perceptively observed: “Cut through all the side arguments and you see what the debate is really about, why we have such a difficult time in reaching consensus. The crux is how Adventists interpret the Bible.”
What Whalen recently provided for the Adventist Church, aside from his excellent AR summary on Position 1, was a helpful synopsis on how the NAD’s use of evangelical hermeneutical principles in crafting Position 2 seemingly minimized the historical-grammatical method’s plain-reading principle.
For example, using Felix’s concepts in “The Hermeneutics of Evangelical Feminism” as a template, Wahlen in his I Timothy 3:2 TOSC treatise, first of all, wants us to understand “when certain principles are guiding an interpretation” (p. 5). Secondly, he then analyzes Kyoshin Ahn’s NAD paper and says it employs three feminist interpretive principles as described by Felix:
“[1] the Ad Hoc Documents principle” which is meant “to limit the scope of 1 Tim 2:12-13 to a local problem” (p. 8); “[2] the Interpretive Center principle” created “to filter out texts that do not fit this metanarrative,” or what is “the overall picture of God” (p. 8); and “[3] Slavery…used as a model in connection with discussion of the “redemptive movement hermeneutic” and the importance of recognizing the notion of a ‘trajectory’” (p. 9).
Further, on this last idea, Wahlen suggests the NAD’s “principle-based historical cultural” (PBHC) approach “enables the Bible to be read as supporting women’s ordination even though some passages on a plain reading suggest otherwise. It is essentially arguing for pluralism in hermeneutical method” (p. 9).
Wahlen then turns his attention to Carl Cosaert’s TOSC paper on 1 Timothy 2:8-15—the presenter for Position 1 at Annual Council and Adventist Review—and under the heading “Extra-biblical Historical Context,” he explains that “some have begun to argue for quite a different situation in the Ephesian church compared to other Pauline churches, based primarily on three sets of extra-biblical sources: Gnostic writings, the cult of Artemis (Diana), and socio-historical findings about the ‘new Roman woman’” (p. 16).
Indeed, Cosaert believes I Timothy 2:8-15 “contains advice directed to a specific situation in Ephesus” and, too, “women being deceived by the false teachers” of heresy (p. 36). But Wahlen quickly dismisses Cosaert’s culturally-conditioned refrain and then concludes: “A careful reading of the epistle reveals nothing that is of exclusively local relevance” (p. 18).
What Wahlen doesn’t overtly state—which by definition and simple deduction he easily could have—is that Cosaert has essentially applied the “Ad Hoc Documents principle [AHDP]” in order “to limit the application of 1 Timothy 6 2:8-15 to the local situation in the first-century on the basis of an alleged ‘Ephesian heresy that Timothy faced'” (p. 6).
So we’re clear, the AHDP is a “feminist hermeneutical principle…operat[ing] within the evangelical feminist perspective,” according to Wahlen (see Felix) which, we’re reminded, “can help us recognize when certain principles are guiding an interpretation that would seem to be at odds with a plain reading of the text” (p. 5).
Finally, as Johnsson candidly pointed out after witnessing firsthand Utrecht’s vast hermeneutical divide—as if for the first time: “Now the crux emerges in sharp relief.”