Slaves, Women and Homosexuals - William J Webb

I've had this book for just under a year, recommended by Stephen Murray, but my Masters got in the way and I never read it. I picked it up now, thinking it would challenge my ideas about what the Bible says about homosexual relationships. I am not sure that it will - the writer seems to read my mind in terms of my understanding of a good Bible hermeneutic. It is amazingly affirming when one picks up a recommended book and finds it saying all the same things that you are! I am only two chapters into the book, so I may yet be surprised.
Chapter 1 -talks about cultural analysis. Familiar material on how the Bible was written from within a culture and that preliminary application needs to come from that understanding.
Chapter 2 - presents the idea of a 'redemptive movement' hermeneutic. In many ways this seems to be a restatement of what I have always understood as progressive revelation. Webb says that the Bible does not present guidelines to an ethically perfect Utopian society, but rather draws the reader further on into a 'better' ethic in manageable steps. For example, the Biblical teaching of slavery needs to be seen in the context of the slavery at the time. Although we see discussion about slavery as very backward, the Bible was moving people to a more humane form of slavery - and there we see the redemptive movement. We could just leave it there, or we can ask how this movement would and should progress - in this case ultimately to the abolition of slavery and beyond that to good and humane working conditions for all. So that the Biblical description is not final and what is indicative is the nature and direction of the movement away from the local culture.