Shane Williamson’s Reviews > Biblical Philosophy: A Hebraic Approach to the Old and New Testaments > Status Update

All pedagogical and cognitive activities are inherently ritualistic and embodied...by "ritualist," I mean that the biblical authors are openly aware of the epistemic function of rituals and unashamedly employ them for the sake of accurate knowing. Not just knowing, but Israel is to become a particular kind of community, which includes but is not limited to their intellectual world shared between them. (98)

Something as religiously loaded as "fear of Yahweh" acts philosophically in the Hebrew Bible. The fear of Yahweh, including the discernment that develops from that fear, is intellectually formative. According to Proverbs, there is something about trusting that "Yahweh is the creator" that will change the way you think about justice and political structures and ethics and knowledge itself. (48)

The question I will try to answer in this book is: Does the Christian Scripture, consisting of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, maintain a stable and discernible philosophical style despite the employment of philosophical vocabulary and constructs from surrounding cultures? (46)

If we define philosophy by the stylistically distinct discourses of Hellenism, then only the Greeks and their direct intellectual/literary descendants can do philosophy. However, if speculative thinking is that which entails rigorous and sustained second-order reasoning, then Scripture certainly contains philo-sophical speculation. (33)

I want to propose that one of the purposes of the biblical literature is to prescribe a ritualized method for thinking about the world in both its historical and its abstract-transcendent granularities. Throughout, a discrete epistemological method is prescribed, developed, and presented again and again in its genus form (proper knowing) and differentia (erroneous knowing). (26)