Walter Wink’s memoir “Just Jesus” is definitely worth the read

I just finished reading the late Walter Wink’s recently published memoir Just Jesus: My Struggle to Become Human. I highly recommend you read it whether or not you’ve read his other work (which I highly recommend you read, especially Engaging the Powers). Here’s a nugget from Just Jesus to whet your appetite:

Where the Bible mentions homosexual behavior at all, it clearly condemns it. I freely grant that. The issue is precisely whether the biblical judgment is correct. The Bible sanctioned slavery as well, and nowhere attacked it as unjust. Yet today, if you were to ask Christians in the South whether the Bible sanctions slavery, virtually everyone would agree that it does not. How do we account for such a monumental shift? The same goes for the changing role of women in the churches. The way out, however, is not to deny the presence of sexism in Scripture, but to develop an interpretive theory that judges even Scripture in the light of the revelation of Jesus. What Jesus gives us is a critique of domination in all its forms, a critique that can be turned on the Bible itself. The Bible thus contains the principles of its own correction… So we must critique the sexual mores of any given time by the love ethic exemplified by Jesus.