Is it true that the statement of 1 Cor 7:4 about husband and wife not having authority over their own bodies within a marriage context is nowhere to be found in Babylonian, Greek or Roman philosophy?

This text is from a letter written by David Gooding in 1998.

Firstly, your remark that the statement of this verse is not to be found anywhere in Babylonian, Greek or Roman philosophy, may well be true. I am not expert enough in the whole of Greek, Roman and Babylonian philosophy to know offhand whether that is so or not. But it seems to me that it is not the only place in the Bible which talks of these matters. Exodus 21:10 forbids a husband to deprive his wife of what is there called 'the duty of marriage', and that is precisely what Paul is talking about in 1 Corinthians 7:4. The husband has a duty to the wife, and the wife has a duty to the husband. The Old Testament insisted on it long before Paul repeated the same thing in his letter to the Corinthians.

Secondly, when you write in your letter that 1 Corinthians 7:4 covers other statements by Paul on this issue, I wonder what exactly you mean. If you are saying that, wherever else Paul mentions the 'duty of marriage' between husband and wife, his statements must be governed by 1 Corinthians 7:4, I ask: where else does he explicitly mention this question of the 'duty of marriage'? If, on the other hand, you mean what some expositors nowadays suggest, that this passage regarding the duty of marriage must be used to control what Paul says about the roles of men and women in the church, that, I must confess, seems to me a non sequitur.

To take a similar example, Paul tells Christian slaves that they are to obey their masters. If I were then to say that, in the church, this rule must govern the behaviour of slaves in the church, that would obviously be a non sequitur. When, therefore, in 1 Corinthians 11:8–9, Paul bases his instruction regarding the behaviour of men and women in the church on the foundational principles of creation (see Genesis 2:18–25), in what sense do you wish me to understand your exegetical principle that 1 Corinthians 11:8-9 ought to be controlled by 1 Corinthians 7:4? Would you say the same in the case of the two Old Testament Scriptures, that Genesis 2:18–25 must somehow be controlled by Exodus 21:10?

The contention that certain passages in Paul have to be discounted and devalued in the light of one, possibly two, other verses in Paul's own writings, seems to me to raise very serious issues. Dr R. T. France published a series of three lectures which he gave in England, and in these lectures he openly suggests that not all the New Testament is to be regarded as equally authoritative. In other words, there is, according to him, 'canon within a canon'.

That is a view which those evangelicals who founded Tyndale House in Cambridge would have resisted strenuously. Since the 1940s such views have been put forward by the confessedly liberal theological establishment, and people like J. I. Packer and Alan Stibbs wrote vigorously to refute the idea, and to maintain that all Scripture is given by inspiration of God.

It was a novelty when F. F. Bruce—that immensely learned and much beloved brother and scholar—in his older days began to advocate the view that Paul's insistence on freedom in his Epistle to the Galatians was to be taken as normative and authoritative; while anything else he said in his epistles elsewhere that might seem to conflict with liberty was to be completely discounted as being perhaps only a temporary injunction, devised to deal pro tem with a particular temporary situation.

When Bruce first made this kind of remark, the leaders of InterVarsity Fellowship raised their eyebrows quite high; and Professor D. A. Carson pointed to such remarks as evidence of the way evangelical and conservative scholarship has in recent times departed from its initial principles.

Now, as I say, Dr R. T. France advocates a more extreme version of this view, which was the very thing, amongst others, that Tyndale House was originally set up to oppose.

The implication of this new attitude to Scripture, therefore, goes quite beyond the matter of men/women relationships in the church, and affects in a fundamental way our attitude to the authority of the whole of the New Testament.

Yours very sincerely in Christ,