One of his arguments is that contemporary evangelical advocates of spanking (e.g., James Dobson, Focus on the Family, Wayne Grudem, Albert Mohler, Andreas Köstenberger, Paul Wegner) have gone “beyond the Bible” and “softened” what the Bible really teaches about corporal punishment.

William Webb’s first book, Slaves, Women and Homosexuals(IVP, 2001), advocated a “redemptive-movement hermeneutic.”

He argued that certain things in the Old Testament (like slavery and the treatment of women) are “less than ultimate,” “not so pretty,” and “problematic.” Webb argues that “God in a pastoral sense accommodates himself to meeting people and society where they are in their existing social ethic and (from there) he gently moves them with incremental steps towards something better. . . . Incremental movement within Scripture reveals a God who is willing to live with the tension between an absolute ethic in theory and the reality of guiding real people in practice towards such a goal.”

In that book he concluded that the spirit or movement in the biblical text itself suggests the abolition of slavery and the establishment of egalitarianism with regard to men and women, but that the commands regarding homosexuality are transcultural.

In 2002 Tom Schreiner provided a long review of the book, taking pains to explain Webb’s position and to highlight many of his good insights, and then showing some of the book’s key weaknesses. For example:

Many good insights are contained in these principles, but his approach to solving the questions raised falls prey to abstraction and overlooks the rich texture of redemptive history. Despite some good insights, the book tends towards an artificial workbook approach in solving the issues raised. In other words, the book fails because it is not clearly founded on biblical theology.

In other words, Webb “tends to raise issues of application in an abstract fashion instead of integrating them well with the story line of the Bible.”

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