Shane Williamson > Recent Status Updates

We think, not just communicate, in metaphors. A metaphorical utterance is, in other words, the written or spoken expression of a concept in our minds that itself is structured as a metaphor. (20)

However, יהוה תורה the Torah/Law of the Lord is not just a law in the legal sense: as a set of commandments and teachings it narrates the biblical account of God's will and God's deeds. It is therefore, in the broadest sense, both the totality and the promulga-tion of God's revelation. (36)

The construction of the meaning of metaphorical expressions in biblical texts often involves intertextuality. Vehicles include not only individual verb expressions, phrases, or whole passages of text, but also, as we will see below, generic narrative structures. (29)

At the same time, the medieval church began to emphasize that the male body—which represented Christ—was worthy to perform the Eucharist. (120)

In the 11th and 12th century the medieval church began to redefine ordination as bestowing sacramental power. It began to differentiate clergy from secular men by requiring celibacy and providing a financial incentive for the ordained. A new masculine identity emerged, one built on resisting female sexuality. (120)

We have taken a position never mentioned directly in scripture and turned it into the highest ministry calling for contemporary Evangelical women, allowing it to supplant other ministry roles. (44)

'Becoming the Pastors Wife' is the history of how Christian women gained a new and important leadership role. But it is also a history of how this gain came at a cost for women too. Both the cost and the gain are bigger than we yet realize. (18)

Once we view Jesus' ministry to Israel through the lens of a Jewish theology of creation and covenant it becomes apparent that the renewal of Israel implied nothing less than the renewal of Israel's mission which was to be the vehicle through which God's saving power would be manifest to all the nations of the earth. (56-57)

I would contend that Jesus' message was political in that it addressed the tide of Jewish nationalism and Israel's increasing penchant for a bloody and pointless confrontation with Rome...Jesus did not de-politicize or spiritualize hopes for restoration, but his conception of restoration redefined or shifted the political problem from Rome to Israel herself. (37)

My objective is to develop a historically plausible solution to this diverse evidence by postulating the way in which the Gentile mission relates to the aims and actions of the historical Jesus. Such a solution must be plausible in view of Jesus' mission to Israel, but it must also account for the missionary drive in the early church. (11)

"Belief, as moderns view it--the sincerity or the authenticity or intensity of some inner disposition or psychological state of an individual believer--is not native to this [Greco-Roman] worldview. Ancients focused instead on acts of deference, on offerings, or on what we might designate 'cult,' which enacted affection and esteem." (70)

"It was impossible to live in a Greco-Roman city without living with its gods." (63)

"Ethnicity was an expression of cult." (64)

"Heaven and earth ran along ethnic lines." (64)