Scholasticism relies on basic assumptions like a blue fish cannot be both blue and not blue at the same time, God created the world and it has order, and truth is objectively real. God did create an orderly world where can recognize that absurdities are, well, absurd. A human cannot be both the moon and human. The law of non-contradiction is a real law. 

Evangelical Christians face a threefold challenge concerning sex. First, many evangelicals have split over the issue of women in pastoral ministry. Second, gender identifies and gay marriage have challenged traditional evangelical understandings and caused yet another rift in the church. Lastly, transhumanism promises to soon create another theological chasm: ought Christians to remain in their natural bodies, or can they augment themselves via technology?

Are we stuck in schism and statemate? How might we address these questions? As strange as it might seem, we already have powerful answers to these potent challenges. Scholasticism, a method to understand the truth, has provided us with the framework to understand these challenges and overcome them. Before explaining why that it is, it is worth surveying how the above three challenges typically work out in the church.

Gender roles

Cynthia Westfall interprets passages like Galatians 3:28 as setting a course for gender equality in terms of roles. So women may preach and pastor. Others, like Thomas Schreiner, see Galatians 3:28 as overcoming societal schisms by becoming one in Christ. Yet this oneness still allows for gender roles. So women may not pastor.

The debate over specific texts such as Galatians 3 ends up restricting the question to: can a woman pastor or not? It is an important question. But the current debate unintentionally limits the discussion to key, controversial texts (e.g., Gal 3:28; 1 Tim 2:9–15). To be clear, biblical texts should lie at the centre of the discussion. But I am arguing that we have more tools to approach these texts than usually are used in debates like these. I want more biblical exegesis, not less.

LGBTQ+

The debate over being “affirming” or “non-affirming” of LGBTQ+ Christians works similarly, albeit with a larger set of arguments. First, some argue from the biblical text for the affirming view such as Matthew Vines. Others rebut such an argument. Yet a second argument often follows. It goes something like this: does a biblical interpretation harm others? If so, then reject it. Again, to defeat such an argument, the other side interprets specific biblical texts.

Interpreting texts stands at the centre of Christian ethics. So prosecuting the case according to Scripture is entirely the right thing to do. Yet even here the debate could engage with other biblical data or more specific ways of understanding the biblical data at hand.

Transhumanism

While this debate lies in the future still, we already see it in the vaccination debate or in nutrition. Many feel that natural (no vaccinations, no processed food) methods lead to better results. Augmenting our body with chemicals hurts it. Others claim that these things can only benefit our body since they were designed to do so.

I am not sure where the fault lines will lie here exactly. But once we can augment or transform our bodies, I am sure biblical texts will stand at the centre as they should. Yet despite this, Christians will invariably argue back and forth over the text. So how do we get closer to the truth? And how can we be more convincing?

I think the answer lies in developing our exegetical toolset. In this case, I mean using the tools that scholasticism has bequeathed the church.

Scholasticism

Despite its reputation for being a theological movement, scholasticism merely signifies a method to read the biblical text (or to think about truth at any level). It is not a system of theology. Like the historical-grammatical method encourages studying history and grammar to understand a text, so scholasticism fine-tunes how we can distinguish truth from falsity.

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