My Intl. SBL (Rome) proposal accepted

I have just received word that my international SBL (Rome)  paper proposal has been accepted in the Paul group.  My family and I are excited because my wife has never been to Italy and I haven’t visited since I was in high school.

I have dreamed about going back and taking lots of pictures and using them in NT course instruction.  Also, they have some good food too….

OK, here is the abstract and title for the paper:

RULES OF ENGAGEMENT AND THE MILITARY METAPHORS OF PAUL: A CASE STUDY IN APPLYING  METAPHOR THEORY TO PAULINE ETHICS

In recent scholarship on the theological foundations of Paul’s ethics, it is almost  unanimously concluded that Paul was not a systematic ethicist, but rather a passionate apostle whose ambition it was to lead his churches to obey God’s will and imitate Christ.  When it comes to the details of how Paul promotes these moral objectives, there is less consensus.  Some scholars from social-scientific and/or literary backgrounds have found that much of Paul’s ethics is imbedded in his theological constructions.  And his theology is less syllogistic and more narratival and metaphorical.  Drawing from such research, especially on recent developments in conceptual metaphor theory, I consider how one particular group of Pauline metaphors, his militaristic ones, are ripe with moral implications.  When such metaphors are recognized as having deep ethical potential, our own reckoning of his moral vision will become less propositional and more organic.