Until his death in 2012, Walter Wink was one of the most influential Christian intellectuals of our time. He was a pastor and theologian, a political activist and a writer. He first becme a practitioner of active nonviolence during the Civil Rights Movement in Selma Alabama, and continued to seek social justice for all under dictatorships in Chile and the apartheid in South Africa. Always through the lens of Jesus, Wink's life and work demonstrate just how important the need to understand "the Son of the Man" is in today's modern world. Wink shows us that inspiration and insight can come from any source: a Pentecostal Church in Oklahoma, dreams, Buddhist meditation centers, childhood traumas, an empty forest, illness, and the Gospels. Wink's work in social justice and his life as a theologian are inextricably entwined, finding evidence for nonviolent resistance in the Bible and seeing the need for Jesus in daily struggles. "An autobiography of my interest in Jesus, perhaps that is too ambitious," writes Wink. "What I have done here is far less grand. I have simply written down vignettes, or excerpts of my life's story that I find interesting. These autobiographical reflections are in no way exceptional. Everyone has a life story. My story may, at the very least, show why I theologically think the way that I do." Just Jesus is the jubilant autobiography of the man who sought justice in all walks of life, including his own.

Just Jesus: My Struggle to Become Human

Biographies & Memoirs

WINK, WALTER

Berry, Steven

Leaders & Notable People

Image+

In our fast-paced secular world, God and theology are second-class citizens. Money, politics, sports, and science seem better suited to the hard realities of our world. As the church steeple has been eclipsed by the skyscraper as the centerpiece of the urban landscape, so has the divine realm been set aside in favor of more immediate human experience. One sad consequence of this shift is the loss of spiritual and theological bearings, most clearly evident in our inability to understand or speak about such things. If the old way of viewing the universe no longer works, something else has to replace it. The Powers That Be reclaims the divine realm as central to human existence by offering new ways of understanding our world in theological terms. Walter Wink reformulates ancient concepts, such as God and the devil, heaven and hell, angels and demons, principalities and powers, in light of our modern experience. He helps us see heaven and hell, sin and salvation, and the powers that shape our lives as tangible parts of our day-to-day experience, rather than as mysterious phantoms. Based on his reading of the Bible and analysis of the world around him, Wink creates a whole new language for talking about and to God. Equipped with this fresh world view, we can embark on a new relationship with God and our world into the next millennium.

The Powers that Be

Religion & Spirituality

Christian Books & Bibles

DOUBLEDAY

In our fast-paced secular world, God and theology are second-class citizens. Money, politics, sports, and science seem better suited to the hard realities of our world. As the church steeple has been eclipsed by the skyscraper as the centerpiece of the urban landscape, so has the divine realm been set aside in favor of more immediate human experience. One sad consequence of this shift is the loss of spiritual and theological bearings, most clearly evident in our inability to understand or speak about such things. If the old way of viewing the universe no longer works, something else has to replace it. The Powers That Be reclaims the divine realm as central to human existence by offering new ways of understanding our world in theological terms. Walter Wink reformulates ancient concepts, such as God and the devil, heaven and hell, angels and demons, principalities and powers, in light of our modern experience. He helps us see heaven and hell, sin and salvation, and the powers that shape our lives as tangible parts of our day-to-day experience, rather than as mysterious phantoms. Based on his reading of the Bible and analysis of the world around him, Wink creates a whole new language for talking about and to God. Equipped with this fresh world view, we can embark on a new relationship with God and our world into the next millennium.

The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium

Self-Help

Personal Transformation

Harmony

Why is John the Baptist accorded such an important role in the Gospel tradition? Dr Wink examines the treatment of John in the Gospels, Acts and the Q source to establish why the evangelists were so preoccupied with him, and how the early Church absorbed John into the Gospel message to put an end to competition between John's disciples and those of Jesus: he suggests that the early Church had an additional purpose: to use the image of John to personify and reinforce its own proselytizing functions. The historical facts were clearly modified by the Church during this process of absorption: Dr Wink shows that this was done in order to preserve the actual historical impact of John upon the Church.

John the Baptist in the Gospel Tradition

Cambridge University Press

"For years I had been looking for a way to heal the split between the academic study of the Scriptures and the issues of life.  For it was the Bible's way of addressing me that had led me into biblical scholarship in the first place.  The sharing of those life-shaking truths was the very vocation to which I had felt so unmistakably called.  For a time my generation of scholars was able to light our lamps at the fading flames of what Barth and Bultmann had achieved.  When we were on our own, however, it was back to academic scholarship-as-usual.  Even our concern for 'biblical theology' was largely academic; we assumed that pastors and laity could make the connections to their own lives.  More disastrously, we assumed that the ideas were all that counted, all that had to be applied.  So we were a little hurt, and considerably mystified, when a growing chorus of voices outside academia insisted that what we were doing was not addressing human existence." "It was not until I became a parish minister in southeast Texas, however, that I recognized how profound this split had become.  There, faced with the need to speak meaningfully twice a week from the biblical tradition, I discovered how isolated scholars had become from the pressures of living, how little of what they found fit to say had any applicability to preaching, to counseling, to the human struggles of those who regarded the Bible as somehow the key to life." "This was the pattern: scholars to the one side--like musicians so enamored of technique that they only practice scales; clergy and laity to the other--like people who love music but are too busy to learn to play." (excerpts from Chapter 1: Transformed by the Renewal of Our Minds)  

Transforming Bible Study

ABINGDON PRESS *

Transforming Bible Study: A Leader's Guide

Author Walter Wink puts forward a revolutionary new approach to group Bible Study, incorporating the group-encounter method, biblical form criticism, and Jungian psychology. Specifically targeted at those who would lead such study groups, it is appropriate for clergy and laity alike.

Transforming Bible study: A leader's guide

Reference

Abingdon

The Bible in Human Transformation: Towards a New Paradigm for Biblical Study

Fortress Press

Naming the Powers: The Language of Power in the New Testament (The Powers : Volume One)

Walter Wink was professor emeritus of biblical interpretation at Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City. He also taught at Union Theological Seminary. From 1989 to 1990, he was a Peace Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace. He authored several books, including the award-winning Fortress Press trilogy: Naming the Powers, Unmasking the Powers, and Engaging the Powers.

Unmasking the Powers: The Invisible Forces That Determine Human Existence (Powers, Vol 2)

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