Walter Wink: Collected Readings

Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction Walter Wink died on May 10, 2012, at the age of 76, leaving behind a legacy of progressive Christian thought and practice that powerfully integrated social justice concerns and biblical scholarship. Throughout his long and productive career, Wink wore many hats, all of them well—a biblical scholar who made significant contributions to the discipline and brought interdisciplinary skills to the study of the Bible; a prolific writer of books, essays, and articles that speak to the inquiring ordinary man or woman as well as to practitioners and scholars; an activist for peace and nonviolent but aggressive resistance to evil who “walked the talk” and placed himself at risk in Latin America and South Africa; a pastor with a pastor’s heart; a champion of gay rights; and a much in demand speaker and workshop leader with his wife, June Keener Wink. Walter Wink’s life and work demonstrate the reciprocal relationship between one’s biography and one’s bibliography. Indeed, one of his chief critiques of many of his colleagues in the guild of biblical scholars was the pervasive “false consciousness” of objectivism that separates “theory from practice, mind from body, reason from emotion, knowledge from experience.”1 The ideology of objectivism encouraged and enabled a false perception of distance between life and work that blinded scholars to the impact that biography necessarily has on bibliography. As Wink noted in the first chapter of The Human Being: “Objective view” is itself an oxymoron; every view is subjective, from a particular angle of vision. We always encounter the biblical text with interests. We always have a stake in our reading of it. We always have angles of vision, which can be helpful or harmful in interpreting texts.2 In The Bible in Human Transformation, a devastating critique of the way the historical critical study of Scripture was being carried out—a critique that eventuated in his not receiving tenure at Union Theological Seminary—Wink asked two sharply pointed questions: Is anything but intellectualism possible when our questions do not arise primarily out of the struggle with concrete problems of life and society, from the blistering exposure to trial and error, from the xi need for wisdom in the ambiguous mash of events? Can historical criticism, practiced in the academy, ensnared in an objectivist ideology, ever do more than simply refer the data of the text away from an encounter with experience and back to its own uncontrolled premises?3 It is not hard to understand why, when the time for a tenure vote came, Wink’s fellow biblical faculty at Union voted it down. In spite of the cost, throughout his career Wink demonstrated great courage in continuing to stand for objectivity in research while standing against the ideology of objectivism that, in his estimation, stultified the practice of biblical scholarship in the academy. At the same time, he insisted on recognition of the roles “emotions, will, interests, and bias” play in the life—and thus the work—of scholars, while warning against equally stultifying subjectivism. Wink’s concern to integrate experience and reason began in his college years. In an autobiographical piece, “Write What You See” (the title itself points to such integration), Wink traces his journey from a childhood steeped in Methodist perfectionism under the influence of a liberal Methodist pastor in Dallas, Texas to an “atheist phase” during college. In the summer of his sophomore year, Wink went to Oregon to work in a lumber mill. For a month or so he wrestled with the idea of God. Finally, his internal struggle led him to once again affirm the reality of God, but it was belief in a God with no content. In his own words: “I said the word ‘God,’ and something resonated as true, but I had abandoned my childhood faith and had not arrived at anything else.”4 Before the summer was over, Wink, at the invitation of another roomer at his boarding house, attended a Pentecostal church where he experienced “the gift of the Holy Spirit.” It was a deeply powerful, profound, transformational experience, the reality of which could not be denied. After his return to college, however, Wink discovered that this not-tobe -gainsaid experience “threatened to split [him] in half, between reason and experience.”5 He could not tolerate the intellectual aridity and theological rigidity of Pentecostal fundamentalism, but neither could he repudiate his religious experience to satisfy his intellect. He found himself, still a student, with a...