Ben Witherington on Who God Is, Calvinism, and Biblical Theology #TPAuthorInterviews

hi everyone matt o'reilly here excited to be starting a new series on theology project online calling it theology project author interviews i'm even more excited to introduce you to our first author who is a guest for the interview dr ben witherington iii ben is amos professor of new testament and asbury theological seminary new testament for doctoral studies i think is the full title and uh he's been ashbury since 1995 i believe and has written dozens of books over 60 i think then you may have lost count by now uh and married to ann welcome to theology project good to be with you so how many books have you written have you never met do you know stop counting that's good i thought i shouldn't exceed the number of books to to exceed the number of years i am old so yeah and tell us uh tell us viewers will see the background there tell us a little bit about what you're impressing us with today well this is the el dair monastery on top of the mountain in petra which is petra one of my very favorite archaeological sites and all the biblical world and we were there a year and a half ago and uh had a fabulous time it's it's a great place didn't run into indiana jones but oh well i know the way out right um no that's good that's fun with technology so um i'll just tell viewers uh dr withington and i uh have known each other for probably about 12 years now he's been a teacher to me at different levels of my academic training master's degree at asbury seminary he was a teacher to me and then also served as the second supervisor on my phd so it's a joy to have uh this first interview with ben and uh it'll be fun to renew our friendship in this format while we're at it so um what's life been like for you during the pandemic well i'm a social person i'm not a introvert and so for me it's been tough because uh you know i'm i'm also a bookworm fortunately i'm a bookworm so i've done a lot of reading i've caught up in a lot of fields um and we did manage to take a trip to wilmington to see my 93 year old mom and my sister and spend a few days at the beach but you know it's basically been doing gardening mowing the grass staying at home reading did i mention reading and getting my courses ready to go for the full and and try trying to figure out how the heck i'm going to do them and uh you know it's it's it's not been good and but ann and i are fine you know we've been wearing our mask and socially distancing and all that sort of stuff that's necessary and and we've tested negative for coronavirus twice so all's well on that front but we're hoping for better days in not too many months yeah i hope so i hope so um before we talk about your books um i want to mention i don't know if you remember this or if i've ever shared this with you before but uh i often think about and mention to people one of the most important lessons you ever taught me uh when i was a student asbury i was taking i think it was a general epistles exegesis course with you and we were having lunch at solomon's porch in wilmore kentucky and i was experiencing some frustration because i know we were doing some rhetorical criticism i was struggling with the concept whatever it was and uh you kind of stopped and said matt women and men spend their lives studying these texts don't expect to figure it out over lunch exactly that was a moment that really clicked for me on the importance of just long-term year after year after year saturation with the biblical text and don't expect to figure out there's value in sticking with it for a long time so you've been working go ahead now i was just gonna say and that's actually how i got to that most recent book who god is yeah because i've been reflecting on for a long time been reflecting for a long time on why all this concentration on adjectives applied to god in the bible god is right this god is holy god is just god is merciful on and on and on you know i mean i do have an english literature degree and i was taught long ago that adjectives are not as important as nouns adjectives modify nouns so how come it is that in the biblical theologies that i've mostly read over many years there's almost no attention to god is love god is life god is light god is spirit god is one what's up with that yeah you know and so that's actually what prompted me finally to write this most recent book absolutely so the name of the book is who god is meditations on the character of god and uh friends as you heard been say the focus is on nouns as opposed to adjectives say say a little bit more about the difference in that well my assumption behind the book is that nouns are at least a little bit more important than adjectives when somebody is describing a person i mean when you describe me and say i'm a new testament professor that's actually more important than saying he's an average new testament professor right um and so what's the significance of predicating these things of god the god so god is light god is life god is one or unique things like that um you deal with a number and let me just say for for for viewers this book it's a short book it's more devotional material about 100 pages long um really rich drawing on scholarship but you don't get bogged down in academic debates and things like that i noticed that uh you deal with a lot of biblical texts but the johannine literature seems to come up pretty frequently so gospel of john letters of john revelation um that was just an observation on my part um was that part of the strategy ahead of time did it just kind of work out that way well um if you want to go with theology with a capital t in the new testament you can't go far afield before you're dealing with the gospel of john and first john for sure in terms of high christology and high theology as well and so you know i i really wanted to sort of ask the question i mean especially since it's the johanna literature that generated nicea and chalcedon i mean bottom line you're not debating the two natures of christ or whether christ is part of the godhead and what is the trinity if there wasn't the gospel in the first epistle of john right and and so obviously this material has been theology proper for the church all throughout its history and i thought well that's important and a secondary reason was of course john wesley for john wesley when he wanted to talk about the character of god and see that's really what this book is about more than anything else what is the moral character of god what does it mean to say god is love not just god is loving or has love or whatever or endorses love or requires love what does it mean to say god is love well for john wesley this is where you really start with the moral character of god everything else like his sovereignty and etc needs to be exegeted out of the fact that god is love now it's a holy love it's a righteous love but nonetheless god is love what does that really what's the cash value of that yeah you mentioned sovereignty and uh one of the recurring themes that when i read through the book i noticed uh you don't mention calvinism by name i don't think but you critique kind of calvinistic understandings of sovereignty election predestination um talk to us about how the calvinist arminian debate relates to the question of god's character well when you're dealing with god is love and you look at what the bible actually says about holy love it's something first of all it indicates that god's moral character is such that god has choices to make about how he relates to human beings especially fallen human beings he does he didn't have to redeem us he didn't have to do so many things have mercy on us he could have just wiped this clay slate clean started over if he wanted to i mean that would have been perfectly moral but it wouldn't have been very loving to say the least so when you start looking at god as love well the first thing that comes to you is god loves freely nobody's requiring him to do this and even his nature is not making him an offer he can't refuse he's freely choosing to love and indeed there is something inherent about the whole concept of love that requires freedom it's freely given and freely received and freely responded to and if it's not it's not love love cannot be predestined it cannot anybody who's ever courted a member of the opposite sex knows that you can't manipulate your way into getting somebody else to love you it doesn't work that way it's got to be freely given and freely received and and it's certainly not predetermined for sure well now if that's the character of god and the greatest commandments are love the lord your god with all your heart soul mind and strength and love your neighbor as yourself and then jesus adds love your enemies well then there's something about the relationship we have with god that requires freedom to respond in those ways and and respond in those ways to other human beings as well why is that the great commandment well because it reflects the moral character of god he's love and he wants us to be like him so for me that has enormous implications about how i'm going to read the sovereignty of god or the righteousness of god or these other things i noticed too that's helpful and i think sometimes when that debate happens calvinist armenians like i think the armenian wants to insist that our primary commitment here is the exaltation of god's character um and so i think i think your work helps clarify that to some degree you mentioned as well one more question on that topic and then we'll move on but um you talk a little bit about the difference between election and salvation i found myself in some conversations about election lately uh and there seems to be massive just confusion or lack of clarity on what the bible talks it means when it talks about election um and you said that you know whether we're conflating election and salvation how do you distinguish between those two concepts well again if i start with the new testament clearly especially in a book like ephesians christ is the elect one and we are only elect if we are in him but christ didn't need to be saved clearly for christ election is one thing god chose him to do x and salvation is another and if it's two different things for jesus well that's good enough for me it's to do different things in regard to the people of god and when you actually study this in the bible i mean part of the problem matt as you know perfectly well is that we live in a post-enlightenment highly individualistic age whereas in antiquity there was this thing called corporate personality and group think the technical term is dyadic personality a person who gets their primary identity from a group so election has to do with a group in the old testament israel an election has to do with a group of those who are in christ in the new testament jew and gentile united in christ salvation however is an individual matter because each individual person created in the image of god needs to be redeemed in the image of god so these two concepts though there are places where they overlap um are not identical i mean when you actually study the old testament you discover that though all of israel was god's elect people they were chosen for specific historical purposes and this doesn't tell us anything about which individual israelites ended up being saved that had to do with their relationship personally with god and how they responded to god whether they were faithful to god so many other things anyway the concept of salvation in the old testament is not a specifically christian one it has to do with being rescued or saved or having a relationship of some kind with yahweh and or being healed salvation in christ is nowhere on the horizon in the pettitude at all and so i mean this gets into our discussion of biblical theology and the progress of the canon but but still the important thing here is that election is one thing and salvation is another and and we need to be able to make meaningful distinctions about that yeah so you may even have election to vocation right for christ he is elected to the vote the real tip-off is with somebody like cyrus my anointed one i mean the only person called messiah or my anointed one in the old testament is a pagan persian named cyprus cyrus that that god chose to set his people free from persia okay well that had nothing to do with the individual salvation of cyrus the great yeah so it's crucial to distinguish the different ways these terms are used in the text instead of just sort of systematically lumping it all into one category and unfortunately what happens with conservatives whether they be protestants or or catholics or even orthodox is they just sort of mush everything together say well what this word means here is what it also means here and it's what it means there because that's how biblical theology works there's a consistency throughout the canon no there is a progression of concepts and understandings throughout the canon as well so uh yes i think it's consistent if you start at the end and work backwards but along the way there is development and understanding of god so one more question on the character of god before we sh uh shift over to biblical theology because i have some questions about that too um when you're writing this book was there one noun that really resonated with you more than the others or uh was it more kind of an even playing field well the goddess loved one was big that's why it's first gets the most treatment i noticed that when i was really wrestling with and and now just this week i've read chris tillings book paul's divine christology and that's really helped me better deal with god is one various ways and and what does it mean to say that paul saw christ as part of the godhead what does that really mean to say dealing with what did god is one mean uh what what's clear to me for example is what it means in the old testament when what echad means in the old testament in the shema hero israel the lord our god the lord is echad is not what muslims later understood it to me that god is a singular individual period exclamation point now what the what they're saying is that god is unique he's the only real god he's the only living god but he's not the only supernatural being out there called an elohim at all and and so i mean what really exploring god is one did for me is i realized that in first corinthians 8 6 paul is not really changing the shema when he says but for us there is one god the father and one lord jesus christ he's just being more specific as to the complex nature of god god has represented himself to us in multiple persons but still there is only one divine identity there's only one divine nature if you want to put it that way shared by multiple persons so for me the first one and the last one we're super big who do you have reads this book well the way it's been marketing first of all i didn't know it was going to be called a meditation this happened because joy vaughn now dr joy von teaching at asbury university um did the sort of thought questions and whatnot for it and that led the lexan press to say oh this is a meditation i'm going okay fine with me um but but the good thing about that is i really did want to get pastors thinking theologically thinking hard about the moral character of god yeah this is the kind of book as a pastor i would feel very comfortable handing to someone who doesn't have seminary training non-specialist absolutely hey let's talk about biblical theology the convergence of the canon 2019 cambridge university press recently won the 2020 pros award for excellence in theology and religious studies um before we talk about this book i want to sketch out a little bit of what i think is a trajectory in your career you can correct me if i miss a few pieces so earlier on you you're doing more monographs on jesus paul commentaries on every book of the new testament then a few years ago you write a new testament theology and ethics then you dip into some old testament work which most new testament scholars don't publish books on torah or isaiah but you've done that and then we get to a biblical theology dealing with both testaments the canon as a whole it looks like there's a progression there from exegesis of specific texts to more synthetic constructive theological work talk to us about that is that a strategy ahead of time did you figure that out halfway through what's going on there well it was not a strategy ahead of time i can tell you that right now but the thing that uh and you know this as well as by being a united methodist the thing about our tradition unfortunately is that we don't have a detailed rich theological tradition from wesley to the present and we haven't had major theologians along the way apart from say richard watson in the early 19th century who were developing a biblical theology let's put it that way and so first of all i mean i discovered long ago that there is no methodist who's ever done what calvin did and write a commentary on every book of the new testament you know and i thought this is a huge lacuna a huge gap how come that never has happened you know and and for me i thought i want to serve the biblical community to which i've been called and whom i serve the united methodist church very good so i i decided i did decide a long time ago if i had brain power and time and opportunity i would try to write a good commentary on every book of the new testament and then if there was still time deal with issues of intertextuality between the old testament and the new testament and i mean for 11 years when i was at ashland seminary i taught the old testament as well as the new testament yeah i just loved that you know i mean it made me think more synthetically about the whole canon and and usually what happens as you know in our discipline is that people become specialists in some particular cubbyhole of the new testament and sometimes they never come out again you know i mean some people keep writing on mark 16 8 3 or 4 down from their dissertation you know and i i'm going no somebody needs to be a general practitioner and see that's the other part of what i felt i was called to be a general practitioner of uh the interpretation and theological reflection on the new testament and then on the whole canon so before i could get to a biblical theology i first of all i read some of the ones that were out there and honestly i was not thrilled with most of them and some of them were better than others i thought reverend childs was pretty good but but what i realized is it was like the period of the judges each person was doing what was right in their own eyes and too often it was a matter of anachronism well i'm gonna read reformation theology back into the canon and show how that's biblical theology yeah i'm going no no no no you start with the bible and work forward but i realized i couldn't do a biblical theology before i really dealt with the issue of intertextuality so i started lining up the dominoes and said okay what are the portions of the old testament that are most influential on the new testament what are the ones that are most quoted alluded to or echoed in the new testament well clearly isaiah was number one on the billboard hit chart by a lot sure and then after that it was the psalms and then after that interestingly enough it was genesis and exodus and deuteronomy uh so those big five right so i decided that what i needed to do is think about reading both backwards like the new testament writers did in light of the christ event and also reading those same old testament texts forward and comparing and contrasting what's going on there and and that was sort of stage two and i got that done seven or eight or nine years ago and then talking to my friend richard bockham who wanted to write a biblical theology i think he still does but i don't think he's ever going to get there because he's got all these other little projects he wants to get done first i thought well if i ever was going to do this now would be the time before as the british say my brain goes off the boil you know if while while the exegesis is still fresh while the intertextuality is still fresh now would be the time now i'll be honest with you i don't think any one person is sufficient unto the day to write an all-encompassing exhaustive and exhausting biblical theology on the basis of really knowing everything you really need to know to do that properly you know i mean the only scholar i know that that really had that kind of scope died in the 19th century it was jb lightfoot he could have done it but he never got there but not least because he spent so much time on the apostolic fathers so i decided i would you know i would stop asking who is sufficient for this task and give it a go and i found out that you know if you do the methodology right all kinds of things emerge and so there were certain givens for me one is the concept of progressive revelation god in his graciousness didn't download everything on adam upfront or noah or moses or elijah or king david or anybody he progressively revealed his character his plan his uh relationship with his people and he wasn't being coy about it either you know i mean you remember the encounter at the burning bush where where he says the most moses says who shall i say is calling you know and god says which means i will be who i will be go and find out tell him i will be who i will be is coming yeah it's like okay who's behind the curtain the wizard of oz all right um there there's a certain in richard balcom's new book who is which is entitled who is god question mark not who god is he really deals with that whole thing of god's sovereign freedom to reveal himself progressively over time he's the reason god doesn't just give moses a name is because of all of that name theology that was out there in the ancient near east if we know the name of the god we've got him by the short hairs and he's going to do what i want him to do in other words it was a means of manipulation and control of a deity by knowing the name sure god is the biblical god is so not going to do that and so you know i i wanted to really get at the progressive nature of how god revealed himself but then there was this parallel thing i ca i kept scratching the back of my head and saying but wait a minute there's also progressive understanding of the revelation in the canon i mean it doesn't really dawn on god's people that other than dying and going to be with your being gathered to your ancestors that there is some kind of really exciting positive afterlife for somebody whose name doesn't begin with e i mean enoch and elijah got beamed up great for them where does that leave the rest of god's people uh you know there just really isn't a theology of dying and going to heaven in the old early part of the old testament and indeed it's not till the exile and after the exile that they begin to talk about resurrection and eternal life and all these sorts of things and and it's only in and after the exile that they begin to have a theology of the devil and demons and all that well that's a progressive understanding of the actual nature of the theological reality of the supernatural world and uh so i wanted to deal with progressive revelation of god's character but also the progressive understanding of god's people realizing that the climax of all that doesn't come until the christ event yeah so that's a big picture idea and and i wanted the old testament to be allowed to be the old testament right i mean i i spend so much time i've spent so much time with a jewish scholar like amy jewel levine and i i believe in the integrity of the old testament i believe it has sustained god's people for millennia and and that uh god was while god gave some previews of coming attractions in the old testament he did not download a huge christology or a bunch of other things in the old testament on god's people and so i wanted to allow the old testament to have its own voice and and speak in its own way in its own contextual setting and do do do justice to that but then when we get to the christ event well there's value added and all kinds of things start coming up typologies from the old testament the new testament fulfillment of scripture from the ultimate on and on and on but you don't really have a revelation of the trinity before you get to the baptism of jesus sure not really and so when i talk about the conversion of the convergence of the canon what i'm saying is that it becomes clear during the ministry of jesus that god is multiple and that we need to treat god as multiple uh that that from there on we are on a very quick moving roller coaster towards a full doctrine of the trinity and that's already evident in a prayer like maranatha where jews in aramaic are praying to the exalted jesus in heaven and they only pray to god for heaven's sake right and we're on the way the raw data of a trinitarian way of thinking is is there and being developed in the new testament in real time and so the canon is eventually going to converge on a much broader and more complex view of god and that's where all this is going yeah that's helpful you mentioned progressive revelation what are there other kind of methodological keys that you need to that you employed in this book well yes but let me just give you one example of what that means okay one of the things it means is there are some primitive concepts that are not false but they are inadequate but that's not shown to be the case until later so for example let's take the concept that god is the ultimate source of all things okay fine ultimately everything goes back to god but when you compare what's going on for example in samuel and kings to what goes on in the chronicles in samuel and kings they don't have a concept of secondary causes it's just not in there so if somebody is attacking saul or causing bad things to happen to saul well it's predicated ultimately of god but when you get to chronicles guess what all of a sudden it's satan who's doing these things because they had begun it had begun to dawn on them that if god is good and god is great he's not the author of evil in the world and that took a long time for them to figure out so a more primitive concept becomes more complex when you allow for secondary causes like angels and demons and human beings and this that and the other i mean that's just one example but that's why a flat reading of the canon and just mushing together on basis of word studies just doesn't work the other thing is their whole methodology of doing theology is just not ours i mean that's the other thing that really uh bothered me about doing this book they had what i would call a symbolic universe every author in the bible takes for granted there is one living god period exclamation point and they grow in their understanding of what that really means but they don't argue for that for the most part they take that for granted that's their symbolic universe that's their givens if you will that's their starting point and out of that symbolic universe they began to think about the implications of that in terms of story so that's why i dealt with the narrative thought world of the old testament in the narrative thought world of the new testament so the first layer is the symbolic universe the givens the priest presuppositions then there is the articulation of what does it mean to have a living god and have a relationship with a living god in old testament terms or new testament terms and then the theologizing comes out of the narrative thought worlds it doesn't it doesn't spring like like athena from the head of zeus it's not an abstract idea biblical theology is not an abstract this theology idea leads to this theology idea which leads to this theology idea that's an enlightenment or post-enlightenment way of thinking about these things no the theology arises out of a personal relationship or a group relationship with god and and leads to rethinking an awful lot of things covenant salvation everlasting life election on and on and on but that thinking is not done in the way that modern western persons would think i mean for example let's just take paul just for a second in the case of paul when he thinks about sin he thinks of the story of adam read romans 7 or romans 5. when he thinks about faith he thinks of the story of abraham read genesis 12 and 15 and they'd read romans 4 and galatians 3. okay or when he thinks about salvation he thinks of the story of christ and i could keep going when he thinks of law he thinks about the story of moses most most tellingly in second corinthians 3 he's thinking out of story into theologizing that's how he conceives of all of this and frankly we don't much do that yeah we tell stories and then call them sermon illustrations but we do not think narratology and that's how ancient people thought about things sure stories were the way you did theology in antiquity this is what jesus told parables i mean that's the way it was so i really tried hard to follow methodology that would have made sense to the biblical writers and only do theologizing which is what's actually happening it's not a can of frozen theology it's theologizing into specific situations for specific purposes at specific times and then out of a particular mindset or way of thinking about these things um that's that's sort of the big structure of what happened in biblical theology that's helpful and it sounds like there's a balance there because i mean you theology is necessarily a synthetic discipline where you're looking at different texts and how the doctrines emerge out of that at the same time as a biblical scholar you're very interested in textual contexts and you know which sometimes uh us biblical folks get a little frustrated at the theologians for not taking the context into enough uh account but so i mean was that a constant thing i mean how much are you thinking about navigating that balance between the contextual you know socio-historical reading of this text in balance with a theological reading of it i mean how do you navigate that well see one of the things i would say is that doing theology is not just a particular reading of the text doing theology is what's happening in the text yeah and in my you know like my calvinistic teachers at gordon conwells used to say your job is not to think unique thoughts about god your job is to think god's thought after him well okay it's my job to think the biblical writer's thoughts after them that's that's my job as an exegete in the biblical scholar and hope to do a coherent biblical theology as a result of that the other thing that came really clear to me is biblical biblical theology is not historical theology it's not reform reform theology it's not arminian theology it's not patristic theology it's not systematic theology it's theology based in the deep interpretation of biblical texts and that really should be done before all of these other forms of theology i mean i understand why somebody like john webster i was at a conference at saint andrews on hebrews which was fascinating because we had both theologians and exegesis and they were all presenting papers and john webster was bless his heart reading hebrews through the grid of systematic theology and richard bachman and i both got upset we went no no you have jumped the broom here no this is what's going on with biblical theology and of course the criticism coming back the other way is y'all can never decide what the exegesis really means so we're going to get on with doing theology and the heck with you and i'm going well okay but that exercise needs to happen after a proper interpretation of the meaning of the text in their original context yeah that's helpful so there's a trend in biblical studies to talk about the diversity of early christianity or diversity of voices in the old testament and kind of putting different authors against one another different theologies the cambridge university press is marketing your book is being focused more on the unity of the canon um how much do you push back against the distinctive those the voices trying to push distinction in amongst christians how much is that how do you navigate those those pieces well i mean i think jimmy dunn's old book unity and diversity in the new testament strikes the right kind of balance there is unity in the biblical theology of the canon and development but there's also diversity as well now the question is does the diversity operate as a contradiction to various aspects of the unity or is it just a complex way of exploring and expressing the unity in various different kinds of contexts and and i would say it's more the latter than the form for example i mean i i'm not happy with the idea that uh luther came up with that james is a right stroy epistle and james and paul were like dueling banjos in the early church and the heck with james we don't need it in the canon no first of all i think that's a travesty of an interpretation of james that's a misrepresentation of what james is doing uh what james is doing among other things is explaining to his jewish christian friends in the diaspora that that view of paul is garbled paul paul is just as big on obedience as he is on faith and so uh you know i i i'm i agree with lightfoot that unfortunately what happened as a result of the tubagen school and fc bauer and their successors is that there was increasingly this view that the diversity in the canon does amount to dueling banjos on and on and on and uh i mean so we still have the representation of that kind of view this text contradicts this text see bart ehrman yeah right oh and and i'm going really that's not what's going on here um you know i mean i even if you were to go back to the old tobagon thing that jewish christianity is over here and gentile christianity is over here and gentile christianity won the battle of the wwe cage match and went on to form the church really that's not doing justice to either side of what went on in the first century a.d at all the theology of the new testament is profoundly jewish and mostly written by jews right and so i i realized that neo-nazis and nazis like franz dielich and adolf von harneck and some of those folks were not comfortable with that but that's precisely why later you have people like otto betts and martin hingle screaming at their fellow germans saying right you know it's the new testament isn't profoundly jewish document so you know i'm not happy with the idea that within the canon we have contradictory voices take your pick right so shifting gears just a little bit we've talked about one book that's more accessible popular level we've talked about another major book that is more scholarly and is making a scholarly contribution throughout your career for a long time at least you have written both kinds of books um most new testament scholars are probably not writing op-level works um talk to me about the decision to write outside of the scholarly guild um what's this you know what motivated that what's that been like for you it's not always looked favorably upon as i'm sure you know by the guild well yes i understand the talking heads are not terribly happy with with that but i'm a churchman and i pass through six united methodist churches and everything i do whether it's more technical or more laid friendly i do in service to the church i i don't just do it because i'm interested in abstract discussions in the guild i i do it in service to the church and and so you know one of my goals was to raise the level of biblical literacy in an increasingly illiterate united methodist church yeah and you know i'll be honest matt i i have gotten discouraged in the last couple of decades about that because the literacy level and a level of understanding and even interest continues to decline in many circles right and and what the only alternative to good theology ground in the bible is not no theology it's bad theology and you could really see that on one of the flash points is when the da vinci code came out you know and and i read a book called the gospel code that critiqued the dementia code and showed it had over 150 historical arrows in it and the number one reaction i got going around the country and speaking in churches as well as in public forums was really you mean this is not true you mean dan brown hasn't discovered that jesus was really married to mary magdalene there was a level of gullibility which was astounding for even very intelligent people but what i realized after a while is they wanted this to be true they were not merely abstractly interested they wanted to hear something other than orthodox christianity about the origins of christianity and and and i mean the sad truth was that that trend has just kept on going and going that train is still got plenty of cars on it and plenty of coal in the burner so you know i have up to be honest i have gotten discouraged over the years about this not to the point of just giving up but but i have gotten discouraged uh and the thing i have discovered that sort of renewed my faith in things is spending more time overseas i mean in january before the pandemic hit i went to the philippines and there were people from all over southeast asia that came to the lectures at asia pacific theological seminary to hear my lectures and they were profoundly interested in getting straight what does the bible say about this that and the other and you know being there or in africa or various other places i you know i mean god is doing things even if the west we are not leading the charge to biblical orthodoxy yeah and so you know that's kind of the trajectory i've been on yeah i think um those of us who've worked with you have been your students appreciate deeply that sense of scholarship for the church uh as a service and ministry to the church so we're grateful for that and uh so keep keep fighting the good fight um let's talk about one more book before we uh before we start to wrap up voices and views on paul co-authored with jason myers 2020 ibp academic uh you've written on pauline scholarship before the paul quest late 90s a lot's changed since then tell us one or two of the major things why was it necessary to write another book on uh on what they're saying about paul well as you know there's an appalling number of books on paul out there and it's no wonder that people can't keep up even those who are really diligent about wanting to keep up with literature on paul it's it's just impossible i mean i have books sent to me about paul like you know every two or three weeks and it's just it's absurd nobody can keep up with all of that stuff but but here's the thing the the character of the discussion about paul back in the 90s began to change about the time the paul quest came out what had happened was that the real impact of the work of ep sanders had come to full fruition and there developed what was called the new perspective on paul and this has taken many different forms and it's even spawned a jewish coterie of people of scholars doing the paul within judaism dance how really he never left judaism and this was just a form of judaism and okay he was a quirky jew but this he he was not renouncing the mosaic covenant the new covenant was just the fulfillment of the mosaic covenant and on and on well partly that was spawned by this new perspective on paul and the real sort of leaders of the charge of that were first ep sanders and and then jimmy dunn for sure and then the response to those chaps by richard hayes of duke and nt wright and me and various others along the way and so the character of the discussion changed the paul quest book was really an exploration of what kind of person was paul paul the the jew paul the roman citizen paul the christian and various aspects of that this book is more of a exploration of major studies of paul since then or coming to full fruition since then along the way and so it deals with the major voices and where they came from and trace is the sort of history of where did the new perspective come from how did it lead to a view of two parallel tracks for salvation mosaic covenant for jews and jesus for gentiles and that sort of thing you know is that actually paul's view well no it's not but that's a matter we'd have to discuss on another day so we're trying to descriptively show what the recent discussion of major voices has been about these things and then critique them gently but clearly along the way and show how this has helped or hindered our better understanding of paul and that's what this book is really about it's more of a review book than anything else who's who's the audience is it i mean something a pastor could pick up and kind of get familiar with the field i mean not without reading that's what intervarsity wanted and really that's what it is now of course there are footnotes as there always are you want to go further and explore more yeah but we're really dealing with the big ticket ideas in these ways of reading paul and what is the promise and what are the problems with these big ticket ideas and how it will change the discussion of paul yeah we've mentioned uh the guild of new testament studies a few times i was curious to ask uh like what what what trends in the guild after looking this book but not just paul other aspects of new testament as well what trends are encouraging to you right now oh my goodness just pick one or two yes i hear you i do like the ongoing discussion that stephen moisey and others have had about intertextuality i mean my own take on all of that is we really don't need a reader response epistemology to do intertextuality i mean some of the literature on intertextuality really does believe meanings in the mind of the beholder or meaning happens in the interaction between the reader and the text itself but there's no meaning in the text itself that you're going to go figure it out well i'm a much more traditional epistemologist in regard to that i think there's actually meaning of the text and we need to discover it not create it out of my own creative imagination or my interaction with the text that part of the intertextuality discussion i'm not happy with but the detailed looking at not just quotations of the old testament but illusions and echoes looking more broadly the influence and the impact of the old testament of the new testament writers and how they use the old testament i mean yes sometimes they are doing what i would call contextual exegesis of the old testament but most of the time they're doing what pastors are doing they are homiletically using the old testament to show how christ is the fulfillment of everything that came before he's the fulfillment of of the sacrificial system he's the fulfillment of the law he's the fulfillment of the royal line of kings and so on and so on um it's one stop shopping in jesus if you will and uh you know understanding how the new testament uses the old testament prevents a lot of misreadings of the old testament it really does because when you realize they're not doing it when when paul says in first corinthians 10 to give one example and the rock was christ and talking about the experience of the wilderness wandering generation in in in wandering around in the you know sinai desert or wherever they were wandering uh he's not really saying jesus was a piece of igneous matter back then he's talking about the pre-existent christ being involved all along in providing sustenance and help to god's people because christ pre-existed but he's not saying what he's not saying is that christ is the angel the lord or christ is melchizedek in disguise or etc he he's he's doing a homiletical reading of the old testament not a strict exegesis of those wilderness wandering texts so intertextuality is a encouraging thing then what about um what pick one thing that you are a bit discouraged with with regard to the field of new testament studies well in the forest and myriad of readings of the bible in various different post-colonial readings radical feminist readings queer readings etc etc i i uh a lot of that not all of it but a lot of that really presupposes what i would call a very faulty epistemology and what it really amounts to is using the text to justify your own agendas along the way and and you know and then you're off to the races yeah then you're doing isa jesus and reading things into the text and you think you have license to do that uh because dale martin said it's okay and that's how meaning really happens and i'm saying to that no and honestly we don't need radical feminist readings of the new testament what we need is to appreciate the role of women the rather surprising and revolutionary role of women in the ministry of jesus and in the early church along the way you don't need to reinvent the wheel they were already a vital part of the ministry of the early church [Music] what needs to be done what's uh what kind of things are you encouraging your students to work on what are the you know the next thing in new testament studies that need some attention well they have all kinds of ideas and you know the thing that has been encouraged to me is we now have 57 freaking doctoral students in old and new testament at atmosphere excellent part of that's because the big mainline schools whether it's duke or emory or harvard yale or princeton they're only taking like two students a year in biblical studies to do doctor work and there are all these super bright students some of them are very conservative some of them are moderately conservative some of them are not but but they want to do a good doctoral degree and i'm happy to have any and all of them to be honest because this is our opportunity for the sake of a more orthodox approach to the bible to have influence on the next generation of scholars i'm really happy bring it on i mean it's kind of like when president harold lachen gay at gordon conwell said well somebody said to me we shouldn't be letting liberals into our seminary he said bring them on if we can't convert them we're doing a poor job you know and so to me one of the things that has fired me up is seeing their excitement and their aha moments and watching them develop their own voice and and have support their own research and in ways that and write meaningfully about that and go on to to teach like jason myers has done at greensboro college and several other students of ours have gone on to teach at colleges and seminaries along the way including you um and so that's one of the things that floats my boat is dealing with the doctoral students but i have to tell you 57 is too many be sure to send a few to pastor churches while you're at it some of those of us who want to do our scholarship from the from the pulpit and the pastors both of them know that if first especially if they're white males yeah they already know that their chances of getting a job uh it would have to be as wesley said a singular providence of god at any sort of major university or a thing like that i mean their chances of getting a job at harvard yale or princeton or slim and none is slim left town so most of them are very much committed to the church yeah and want to want to be teachers in the church and just like you and and that's a great thing it's huge i really appreciate i i don't know if we've talked about it before but uh david bauer dr bauer and i he's the to the viewers dr bauer is a dean of biblical interpretation the school of biblical studies at asbury um have been leading student fellowships of the center for pastor theologians kind of help students say you know yeah there are a multiple of ways to use your academic training in service to the church you may be called to teach in a academic setting but there are a growing number of pastors who are doing serious theology serious theological writing from a pastoral setting and that's a healthy thing for the church and we want to encourage people to consider so i think hasbro is a great place to be training folks to do that kind of thing as well so well it is and and on top of that i mean think of some of the great theologians of the 20th century think of carl bark for a minute he pastored churches bonhoeffer he absolutely pastored churches he just were to go down the line and say you know going and pastoring a church is not a death sentence it may very well be the means by which you most help the kingdom of god uh amen to that zoom into that ben thank you so much for taking the time to discuss your work with us uh i'm excited that you're the first in what's hopefully a long line of interviews with theologians and authors um again i'm so grateful to you for your work your ministry and for taking the time to do this thank you my pleasure matt it's been great

Channel: Theology Project

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Keywords: Ben Witherington III, Dr. Ben Witherington, ben witherington calvinism, ben witherington biblical theology, ben witherington election, ben witherington salvation, calvinism debate, calvinism vs. arminianism, ben witherington who god is, ben witherington voices and views on paul, apostle paul, gospel of john, asbury theological seminary, ben witherington interview, ben witherington author, theology project author interview, dr. matt o'reilly, theology project, seedbed

Id: TlEPg5lJWu0

Length: 62min 18sec (3738 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 31 2020