Readers may have noticed that my posts on Williamson’s book haven’t been very critical. That’s in part because I think he’s right about a lot of things. But it has more to do with the fact that I was mainly trying to get clear in my own mind about what he’s saying.
I think a large part of the value I got out of reading this book is analogous to what I got from reading Elizabeth Johnson’s She Who Is last year. (See post here, here, here, and here.) Just as I was familiar with the concerns raised by feminists about traditional theology, I was aware, in a general sort of way, that anti-Judaism was part of the baggage of the church. But I had never thought about its pervasive effect on theology and what it would take to fix it in any deep or systematic way. And just as I came away from Johnson’s book convinced that incorporating feminist insights and addressing feminist concerns was a critical task for theology (even as I didn’t necessarily agree with all of Johnson’s specific positions), Williamson has convinced me that the same is true for Christianity’s legacy of anti-Judaism.
A Thinking Reed 