Smith again: Step #3 is to “notice the Bible’s inability to settle matters in dispute.” He points to “the women’s issue,” war and pacifism, creation, the millennium, mode of baptism, etc.

Several responses. On the surface, he’s right. The church has had trouble settling disputes for centuries now. But I don’t think that’s due to reliance on Scripture. I’d place the blame more on the fact that we ignore essential teachings of Scripture, particularly its teaching about the unity of the church. We suffer “pneumatic deprivation” because we grieve the Spirit with our divisions, and that deprivation only deepens our divisions. I also suspect that the issue is not altogether to do with the question of what Scripture says, as with the question of whether we want to follow Scripture. It seems to me there’s less dispute about what Paul actually says about women than there is about whether we’re bound by it. Even some evangelicals regard the Bible as a book that reflects the primitive prejudices of its time.

Some historical perspective helps, though. Evangelicals have been unable to come to one mind about sex roles, but we have been debating this for how long ? It took most of the fourth century for the church to come to one mind on so essential a point as the deity of Christ, and the church never really did come to a single mind about the divine and human in Christ, Chalcedon notwithstanding. A Catholic like Smith should show more patience: It wasn’t until the thirteenth century that a council of the Catholic Church affirmed transubstantiation, and it wasn’t until Trent that the Catholic Church formulated an authoritative dogma on justification. Give us another half-millennium, and we’ll get “the women’s issue” sorted out.