The Necessity of Redefining Marriage

Ben Witherington has recently commented on a CNN article which lays out, in my opinion, perhaps the strongest case against gay marriage from a strictly secular standpoint. I mention Witherington rather than going directly to the article because he includes many theological considerations which readers here are likely to find interesting. My main concern, however, is the argument of Robert P. George and Sherif Girgis.

Marriage is far more than your emotional bond with “your Number One person,” to quote same-sex marriage proponent John Corvino. Just as the act that makes marital love also makes new life, so marriage itself is a multilevel — bodily as well as emotional — union that would be fulfilled by procreation and family life. That is what justifies its distinctive norms — monogamy, exclusivity, permanence — and the concept of marital consummation by conjugal intercourse.

...All human beings are equal in dignity and should be equal before the law. But equality only forbids arbitrary distinctions. And there is nothing arbitrary about maximizing the chances that children will know the love of their biological parents in a committed and exclusive bond. A strong marriage culture serves children, families and society by encouraging the ideal of giving kids both a mom and a dad.

The authors make a compelling observation that, legally, marriage does much more than standardize a primary relationship (e.g. defaulting who ought to be your medical proxy or to whom your possession belong in the event of your death). If this was its sole function, there would be no need for the legal structure which has been built up around marriage, one which institutionalizes matters of monogamy, sexual exclusivity, and permanence. If it were about formalizing a person's primary affective attachment, it should be as easy to change as a will and open to the possibility of multiple equal levels of attachment. Which it isn't; at least not legally.

In fact, American culture has largely done away with these pillars of marital theory, particularly permanence. It is not quite as easy to change a spouse as it is to change a beneficiary in your will, but it is done with strikingly more regularity nonetheless. Sexual exclusivity is eroding with a startlingly rapidity, so that primary relationships which have not yet been formalized are rarely assumed to be sexually exclusive and even married persons have a wealth of ways to violate the bounds of sexual exclusivity with impunity. (Someone care to look up statistics about the use of pornography by married men?) Only monogamy remains largely uncontested both legally and culturally, although the authors do point out the swelling phenomenon of polyamory.

The solution seems to me to require a redefinition of marriage rather than a feigned conservative defense of the grand old institution. The heterosexual marriage characterized by monogamy, fidelity, and permanence exists more as a convenient fiction than a staid bulwark against social decay. If we care about a definition of marriage that includes these principles than a cultural redefinition of marriage is in order, one that would accord with and allow for the revitalization of marriage laws. If, however, we recognize the cultural shift behind which the law has lagged, then the legal redefinition of marriage seems to be in order, not only to exclude the heterosexual requirement, but also all laws which are artifacts of a time when marriage was permanent, monogamous, and exclusive.

My preference has, traditionally, been for the latter, but only because it divorces what is legal from what is ethical in a way that neatly accords with my view of the world. More to the point, short of a spontaneous, universal, and enduring cultural revolution that recaptures the historic conception of marriage, changing the law to reflect culture seems to be the prudent course.

(None of which, of course, comments at all on the permissibility of homosexuality in Christian ethics.)

How Ben Witherington Renewed My Faith in Disagreeing with Ben Witherington

By way of disclaimer, let me just say that I consider Ben Witherington to be a highly intelligent man who just happens to be afflicted with the unfortunate human shortcoming of being constantly and belligerently wrong. (It is, of course, an affliction with which I could never have an sympathy.) Being directed recently (and reluctantly) to something he had written in commemoration of the World Trade Center attacks, I stumbled upon this rather unnerving paragraph:

Were it not for the U.S. government and the EPA the beautiful state of Kentucky would be one huge pollution cloud of coal dust and other pollutants. Shame on the current Kentucky candidate whose ad, I kid you not, runs ‘man of faith, he will fight the EPA to save our coal jobs and fight Obamacare’. What a platform! What do the latter two have to do with being a Christian??? Nothing! Indeed, creation care and care for the health of the elderly and the poor are part of the Gospel sir! Get with the program or stop posturing as a man of Christian faith.

This was by no means the only objectionable content in the article but it did strike me as a stand out and one that bolstered my strong opposition to Christian politics. While I absolutely agree with the general outrage of "man of faith" being part of a political slogan, I think it is even more appalling that Witherington objects not to the very fact of Christian political activism but merely of the route which is being taken here. In one fell swoop, Witherington calls into question the very quality of this current candidate's faith merely because he has had the audacity not to endorse the current administration's policy's regarding "creation care" and charity.

Witherington seems to have made the fatal, incomprehensible error of collapsing Christ's call to care for the sick into Obama's attempt to actualize that call (if you want to naively impute such pure motives to the president). Witherington has merged the Christian responsibility to creation with the particular policies of the EPA. Suddenly to care for the sick is to support the president's health care plan and to preserve creation is to endorse the EPA. Any dissent from this new Christian political maxim calls into question not merely right judgment but the very character of the dissenter as a Christian. Heaven forbid (literally perhaps, if Witherington is followed) that anyone might suggest that charity and environmentalism are personal and ecclesiastical imperatives rather than political ones. (After all, the government has always been better about doing good in the world than the church.)

Once again, we have a clear picture of the confusion and schism which political involvement injects into the Christian community. Perhaps it is time to realize that someone can oppose a "charitable" political policy and yet be themselves charitable. (Would Witherington like to compare his personal charitable giving to that of the candidate from Kentucky? Perhaps the former would still be vindicated, but it would certainly be a better gauge.) What more, someone might even have an appropriately Christian view of the morality of homosexuality and yet not oppose the legalization of gay marriage. A Christian may support a restrained view of humanity's privileges in creation and still not support the policies of the EPA. Still another might believe that prayer is inappropriate in public schools and still raise righteous, prayerful children. What disturbs me more than two Christians who differ politically is the Christian who thinks that disagreements over means in politics reveals spiritual flaws.

In other words, Dr. Witherington, mutual forbearance is part of the Gospel, sir! Get with the program.

Have Prophecies Ceased: Exposition of 1 Cor. 13

I recently promised someone a face-to-face on the subject of cessationism but was unfortunately unable to follow through on that promise. It is my hope that a series of posts in this venue will suffice as an alternative.

Cessationism, the belief that the miraculous gifts of the Spirit have ceased since the times described in the New Testament, is biblically justified almost exclusively with reference to 1 Corinthians 13:

1If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

8Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. 9For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. 11When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. 12For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

13So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

I quote the full chapter rather than just verses 8-10 because the context is so very critical. The verses on the cessation of spiritual gifts are too frequently treated in isolation, which allows for a radically broad interpretation of what “the perfect” is. Christians, and even non-Christians, are largely familiar both with Paul’s definition of love (i.e. “Love is patient…”) and the triumvirate of Christian virtues (i.e. “So now faith, hope, and love abide…”). In the wake of Pentecostalism, Protestants--particularly those groups with a penchant for controversy--are equally familiar with the promise that speaking in tongues will cease. What seems to be entirely forgotten is that the prediction of cessation is sandwiched neatly in between Paul’s two most memorable statements about love. The verse about tongues-speaking and prophecy are not out of place. It is intimately related to Paul’s argument here, and the true meaning of these verses about cessation are wrapped up in precisely what that argument is.

Paul is writing in 1 Corinthians to a church that is perhaps more troubled than any other represented at length in the New Testament. In Corinth, they prefer human names to the name of Christ (Chapter 1), they prefer wisdom to divine folly (Chapter 2), they prefer libertinism to holiness (Chapter 5), they prefer “justice” to forgiveness (Chapter 6), and in this chapter Paul is dealing with their preference for spiritual gifts over the fruits of the Sprit (if I may subtly propose an intertextual relationship between 1 Cor. 13 and Gal. 5). The purpose in this chapter is neither merely to define love in a list of primary Christian virtues nor to stamp an expiration date on spiritual gifts. Paul’s aim is to show the superiority of love to spiritual gifts.

Paul achieves this aim in three broad strokes that roughly correspond to the paragraph divisions that we see in our modern English translations. First, Paul insists that love is what constitutes the value of the Christian life. Spiritual gifts, knowledge, charity, and even faith (which, incidentally, ought to qualify any valid understanding of sola fide) without love as their primary content and motive are all worthless.

Next, Paul gives an exposition of how love appears when it is manifest. The qualities which are listed are not so subtle jabs at the way the Corinthians have been treating one another. In fact, let’s break it down to see just how Paul’s description of love links back in to Paul’s earlier teachings in the same book:

• Love does not boast.


• Love is not arrogant.


• Love is not self-seeking.


• Love keeps no record of wrongs.


• Love does not delight in evil.

In all this it becomes quite clear that the point Paul is trying to get at is that love is characterized by behaviors and dispositions quite contrary to what the Corinthians are presently practicing. Notably, he once again elevates love even above both faith and hope by saying that love both believes (the verb is “πιστευει”) and hopes all things.

Finally, Paul concludes that--though all things are contingent on love, even faith and hope--love is contingent on nothing, not even time. “Love never ends,” and with this phrase Paul introduces the part of his argument that includes the reference to cessation. The spiritual gifts which the Corinthians are delighting in and allowing to disrupt their services, these things are ultimately transient. There was a time when they began; there will be a time when they end. Love, however, is without end. Ben Witherington has noted that even here love supersedes faith and hope, which both become obsolete eventually. In the final analysis, faith becomes sight and hope is fulfilled. Love only ever increases into eternity.

In the final rendering then, Paul is concerned first and foremost with the perfect nature of love in contrast not only to spiritual gifts, but to the knowledge that the Corinthians professed to have and to the childish behaviors that they have been exhibiting. When Paul speaks of the cessation of miraculous gifts, it is not as a passing statement of fact meant simply to inform the church at Corinth that their prophecies had a "best by" date on them. It was to illustrate that even these great gifts which they had would one day pass away, but love never would. Love, therefore, is the proper object of pursuit, the proper quality for boasting and pride (except that love does not boast and is not proud). There is nothing to glory in except love which is an all-sufficient and eternal glory.

Though I believe this analysis will be fruitful in time, the above does not really immediately solve the problem of precisely when spiritual gifts like prophecy and tongues-speaking will cease. The only thing that seems self-evident to me is that every Christian ought to be in some sense a cessationist. There will be a time when prophecies cease. The only thing left to decide is exactly when that time is.

A Day with Ben Witherington: Ethics and Act

At the end of this series on A Day with Ben Witherington (which has ironically lasted for a full week now), I would actually like to turn to ethics proper. In particular, I will argue that the ethicality of an act is not limited to the outward appearance of that act. I wish on this point I could engage Witherington more directly, either critiquing him as an opponent or drawing on him as a source. Unfortunately, he seemed to be occupying different opinions at different times. At least I can say that, regardless of where he stands, he acted as the catalyst for my formulating these thoughts more concretely.

At one point Witherington made the claim that he knew many good people who were not Christians. By this he meant that there were people who did not murder, who did not steal, who did not X (where X is some feature of the Christian ethos). It strikes me that the very fact that someone does not steal does not make their stance on personal property ethical necessarily. Ethics extends beyond the mere act. For example, a man who refuses to steal because it is wrong is generally considered to be more ethical than a man who refuses to steal because he fears he will be caught. The motive for the ethical act bears on the ethicality of the behavior.

This is the essence of virtue ethics, and later on Witherington would say that he believes that virtue ethics align most closely with the biblical view of ethics. The focus on the character and motive of the moral actor are legitimate, but they do not necessarily preclude the sentiment that there are many good non-Christians. Witherington, as a self-described good Weslyan, believes that grace pervades creation allowing for humanity to do good that would otherwise be impossible. It is possible for an atheist and a Christian alike to operate out of a genuine motive of self-sacrifical love.

Yet, I would go further still and argue that a common motive or a common virtue still does not ensure a common rightness in an act. Just as the motive for the act must be examined, so too must the ground for the motive be examined. Motives of self-sacrifice can be derived from a belief in the virtue of self-abasement because the self does not truly exist. It is an illusion. Therefore, self-sacrifice is no more or less self-interested than selfishness, since there is no self. It is only more enlightened and therefore nearer to escape. Such a self-sacrifice is not truly ethical. The motive is grounded in a lie, which precludes the possibility of virtue.

In short, it seems to me that to achieve the belief that there can be truly ethical acts performed by non-Christians, we must be willing to admit one of two things. ON the one hand, God does not need to be the grounds for ethicality (which Witherington rejects), in which case our own ground for ethics has been undermined and we are undone. On the other, God must be the ground of ethicality but that humanity need not be conscious of it (which Witherington accepts), in which case we have allowed that we may be accidentally virtuous and eliminated any full volitional activity from ethics. The latter suggestion seems to run startlingly contrary to the Arminian views of Witherington.

Regardless, I have serious doubts as to whether anything can be said to be good without God and whether any activity born out of a ground which rejects God can be said to be ethical.

A Day with Ben Witherington: A Brief Note on Women

It should not have really surprised anyone that Witherington, when asked, came out in favor of having women in all the same ecclesiastical roles as men. He is a Methodist, and their movement has historically been associated with championing the "rights" of women. I am not even sure why someone asked him his opinion, or why someone else asked him to defend it, or why someone else asked him to defend his defense of it. I suppose the presumptuousness of youth tricks us into believe that ideas which seem novel and irrefutable to us are in fact neither novel nor irrefutable. They are instead merely tired and flawed.

I would like, nevertheless, to engage a fairly common argument which Witherington employed with reference to appeals to creation as a defense for complimentarian gender economics. Witherington argued that all economic disparity between the genders is a result of the Fall and the curse which God placed on woman as a result. I do not agree with that, but let us accept it for the sake of argument. Witherington then argued that in undoing the Fall, Jesus inaugurated a society (the church) which erased the consequences of the Fall for gender relations.

The most productive way I can imagine to evaluate this is to look at the effects of the Fall as a group. They are these:

There will be enmity between the serpent (the devil) and humanity.
There will be pain in childbirth.
There will be a disparity in gender economics.
There will be toil as a prerequisite for food.

Looking at that list, if Jesus has undone the curse of the Fall, he seems to have overlooked every aspect except gender economics. Humanity still wars against the devil, and Paul exhorts us in Ephesians not to stop this warfare but to intensify it with spiritual weapons. There is still pain in childbirth. Humanity still toils for food. If we are going to reject complimentarian gender economics, I suspect we will need firmer grounds than simply because it was part of a curse which is no longer in effect.

A Day with Ben Witherington: Bad Arguments

After spending three consecutive days critiquing Witherington's concept of theosis and attempting to demonstrate ways in which a proper understanding of theosis would correct the deficiencies in his thought, I think it is appropriate to turn away for a moment from critiquing Witherington. Instead, I would like to use him as a vehicle to critique the way people interact with bad arguments.

I was surprised and excited (read "giddy like a little school girl") when Witherington "confessed" that he is a pacifist. I am always delighted to find scholars outside the historic peace churches who have come to an honest conviction about the necessity of non-violence as part of Jesus' ethos. In the deep South and at the new Harding--the one totally inimical to the ethical stances of both its namesake and its founder and totally ignorant of its history--pacifism is the kind of sin you can still be lynched for, if only intellectually in a coffee house by an irate undergraduate.

After the shocking revelation took the time to sink in, a student interjected with what he expected, I am sure, to be a damning argument: "That's all good in theory, but let's talk about practice. I mean, Tolstoy died penniless at a train station!"

I'll let the force of that impressive argument sink in for a moment.

Just think on it.

Has it sunk in?

No?

I imagine not. In fact, the argument is bad on so many levels that I'm sure I could spend the better part of a day dissecting all the ways in which it is obviously wrong. Witherington, for his part, responded with a certain grace that Tolstoy was by no means the typical pacifist and that even utopian style pacifism was not typical pacifism. Witherington is, of course, right to point out that Tolstoy cannot be said in any sense to be a representative of all Christian pacifists. Judging the majority by the radical minority is the same way we came up with the rhetoric about homosexuals molesting little boys. It doesn't fly.

Of course, there are other angles that can be taken. For example, what is so bad about the fact that Tolstoy died penniless at a train station? Tolstoy elected to give up his wealth and to live an itinerant life. He expected to die penniless, and had you told him in advance that he would die this way, it would likely not have bothered him. The mention of the train station is particularly odd. Is there virtue to dying on a hospital bed? Death is inglorious regardless of its locale.

You might just have readily argued that thousands upon thousands of pacifists have died quite "respectable" deaths (whatever that is), at home in their beds surrounded by family and with their modest financial means in tact. Examples like Lipscomb, Harding, and Armstrong spring immediately to mind. None of them were rich men, by any means, but they lived full lives and died peacefully by all accounts. The thousands of nameless, faceless members of the historic peace churches who die all the time without consequence probably deserve to be counted as well. If we are really measuring the value of a person by the circumstance of his death, then we should say that pacifism is a delightful system. After all, a pacifist is less likely to die in the field of battle. And wars happen more often than Tolstoys.

I was tempted to blurt out, "Your savior had died penniless on a cross."

All of this, however, is actually my problem. Arguments such as these are so simple to refute that we do it automatically. There was no reason for Witherington to hesitate in distancing himself from Tolstoy. The comparison was made, and his immediate thought was, "I am not Tolstoy or even a disciple of Tolstoy." Yet, when you take time to refute the content of an argument whose very nature is corrupt, you legitimize the argument. If Witherington was a follower of Tolstoy, would the critique have then been applicable? If most pacifists died poor and ingloriously, would pacifism be undone? If Jesus had died rich, if utopian pacifism was typical, if some of the facts were changed, would the reasoning of the argument be valid?

The real problem with the appeal to Tolstoy is that it doesn't speak to the value of pacifism at all. It doesn't deal with the question of whether or not violence is ethical. How Tolstoy died is not directly related to ethics, or if it is, then that connection is not self-evident. Yet, every time we chase down an opponent's red herring, no matter how simple it is to prove wrong, we reinforce the practice of flawed argumentation. When that argument (so well crafted that it just had to come from the website of a right wing militia) finds its rhetorical niche among people who already agree with its unrelated conclusion, they will have no reason not to embrace and repeat it. We ought to be developing a culture of intellectual honesty, and the first step is to start calling bad arguments what they are. Stop refuting them as if they warranted our attention. The correct response to "Tolstoy died penniless at a train station" is "So what?

A Day with Ben Witherington: Theosis, Against an Anemic Christology

Theosis is so critical a doctrine in Orthodox theology that it is essentially impossible to escape it in any aspect of Orthodox thought. It relates to soteriology (obviously), epistemology, theology proper, anthropology, and, among countless others, Christology. In this final aspect, I think that once again Witherington would have profited from a fuller, better understanding of theosis. During a very informal Q&A, Witherington made the assertion that the human nature in Christ was identical for all intents and purposes to the unfallen nature of Adam. (I mention the venue in the hopes that it may merely have been that Witherington, without having prepared, misspoke or spoke imprecisely.) This creates a theological quandary: would human nature inexorably but unconfusedly united to divine nature really have not been any different than human nature not so united? In the Orthodox tradition, the divine nature divinized the human nature, not in a way which was supernatural (that is to say, not in a way that exceeded the potentiality of any other human nature) but in a way that made that humanity something functionally other than all other human nature. It is only by being somehow different, not merely by virtue of the volitional activity of the human nature in Christ, that Christ can truly represent the new man, the true humanity.

I think the appropriate language to speak about the difference between Adam's nature and the human nature of Christ, other than merely that one was united to divinity (which is theosis) and the other was not, is the language of potentiality and actuality. Adam always had the potential for increase, for union, for participation in the divine life, but that participation and its inevitable consequences had not occurred. He elected sin instead. Certainly, that participation in and union with divinity would have resulted in a radical change in him. Panagiotes Nellas has said that this potential was never truly possible before the Incarnation and argues that, even if there were no Fall, the Incarnation would have been necessary as a means of opening the path for union between God and man. Regardless of the merit of that argument, it was never beyond Adam's nature to be in union with God. In that sense, the human nature of Christ and Adam were identical in their potential. After all, the human nature of Christ was truly human and no more. The suggestion, however, that they were no different in any respect seems to suggest (as I have accused Witherington of suggesting before) that the encounter with the divine can somehow leave all or part of human nature unaffected. I cannot accept this.

I dare say that a Christology which views the humanity in Christ as unremarkable misses something of the promise which we have in salvation. We are being transformed into something remarkable by our participation in the divine life. Christ, as the living embodiment of that participation, was already something remarkable even in his human nature.

A Day with Ben Witherington: Theosis, Multiform Salvation

The series of lectures that Witherington presented were on ethics, and so it is unsurprising that his focus was on moral aspects of the New Testament. In fact, I would have been annoyed had it been otherwise. After all, I did not come to hear a lecture on the role of the intellect in salvation or on the eschatological hope for life. Unfortunately, Witherington did not merely ignore other aspects of soteriology but actively subordinated them to his moral agenda. After his rejection of theosis as a proper interpretation of 2 Peter 1, Witherington insisted that our participation in the divine nature was a moral participation: a grace-empowered imitation of the divine moral attributes. He spoke of knowledge as a means of understanding those characteristics but not as an area in which we partook of divinity. He explicitly rejected the idea that we should partake of any characteristic of divine being. It is precisely in these areas that I think theosis improves on the deficient Western means of understanding salvation.

Witherington provided me with the pedagogical tool to lay out my opposition to his "moral only" view of participation in God, his ethics-driven view of salvation. He noted that in Scripture there are three predicates for God: God is love, God is life, and God is light. Witherington insisted that the first of these was most critical as it represented the moral character of God. I would suggest that there is a corollary between the way in which salvation grants increase and participation in the characteristics of God and these three predicates.

God is love, and I certainly do not mind Witherington pointing out the critical importance of this affirmation. Salvation does include moral perfection, as it should. Ours is a holy God, a God for Whom love is the highest expressed good. Our experience of the divine is one of love: love in the very act of creation, love in the governance of that creation, and love in the plan of redeeming creation. To encounter the divine is necessarily to be changed into the image of love, to love God and to love neighbor. The entire ethos of the New Testament is constructed on this axis and, if we trust the testimony of Christ, so is the Old Testament. To participate in God requires a holiness which manifests as love and a love which drives holiness. In the process of salvation, God cures us of the disease of sin, cooperates with us in keeping us morally healthy, and finally eliminates the potential for the disease altogether. That is an appropriate, even crucial, understanding of salvation. It is not, however, exhaustive.

God is also life, and life is not a moral characteristic of God. Yet, the most common images for salvation are those of the "new life" and of "eternal life." Unless we view this life as the mere absence of physical death and as a consequence of moral health--which I find to be a shockingly shallow understanding of the "life abundant" that we are promised--we must understand our being given life as being given a divine characteristic which is not moral. Life is a characteristic of being, and in that sense we may speak about it as an "ontological" quality of God (thought I realize how much qualification that would require). Salvation includes not merely a moral perfection and the elimination of evil, but also the elimination of sin's handmaiden, death, and a kind of perfection of our being. Salvation is not merely a process of God helping us to do good and forgiving us when we do evil, it is a an initiation into being good, not in the ethical sense of having good virtues which motivate good actions but in the metaphysical sense of having being which is being perfected by its contact with Being. Unless we view being as a static category which includes both Creator and creature, than we admit that a communion with a transcendent "being" can affect our very being.

Finally, God is light. In this we see that God is Truth and the revealer of truth. The fourteenth century hesychasts spoke of divine light as an object which was seen and the means by which that object was seen and the seeing subject by virtue of the transformative power of the light. This, I believe, is a fuller view of knowledge than Witherington suggests when he speaks of knowledge a means of revealing the moral character of God. Again, Witherington seems to limit knowledge merely to a possible bank of knowable facts. In Scripture, however, what the light exposes is not facts but Truth (a distinction which is both rhetorical and substantial, however trite it may seem). Knowledge is a means of encountering God, of unlocking or decoding the facts which are rationally perceived, and of combating ignorance which is a sinister force in the order of sin and death. Certainly as a part of this, we better understand both the moral and ontological character of God and of our own salvation, but knowledge has merit which transcends the auxiliary function Witherington wants to assign to it. To know is something in itself, provided that we understand knowing in a way that ignores the limitations that science is attempting to artificially impose on knowledge.

However artificial that schema may be, I think it appropriately conveys the point: salvation is comprehensive. When we encounter God, which is itself the means of salvation, the result is not merely moral perfection. It is not "merely" anything. The come into contact with the divine is transformative experience whose ramifications are total. It is perhaps even inappropriate to speak in even so broad of categories of moral, ontological, and epistemological aspects of salvation. In truly apophatic style, it may be best to keep silent as to the true scope of salvation. Certainly, however, a view of salvation which involves only the erasure of sin and the perfection of moral virtue leaves much of the human person unaffected by the intervention of the divine, something that contact with divinity would seem to preclude by its very nature.

A Day with Ben Witherington: Theosis, Vanquishing a Strawman

On the list of doctrines that Witherington took ever so subtle jabs at (so subtle, in fact, that the person sitting next to me in the lecture did not even remember it) was "theosis." I put that in quotes because the doctrine that Witherington opposed was nothing like the doctrine of theosis espoused by the Orthodox Church. Reading 2 Peter 1, Witherington scoffed at those who held to a view of "theosis," people who thought that we would become omniscient, omnipresent, and so on.

Frankly, I can understand why that concept of theosis would be unnerving for Witherington. After all, the Orthodox Church for centuries has worked deliberately to resist any understanding of theosis which would equate divinization with becoming God in any absolute sense. Witherington inexcusably confused taking on divine characteristics as becoming divine absolutes. The Orthodox doctrine of theosis does not allow for people to appropriate the absolute characteristics of God. In fact, it positively precludes it.

The doctrine of theosis is one of perpetual ascent, the expansion of finite beings into an infinite plenitude of God. It doesn't matter to what degree a finite reality grows, it can never fill infinity. The point at which a being reaches omniscience, for example, is the moment at which knowledge ceases to be finite and becomes infinite. Unless you view God's omniscience as merely His comprehensive knowledge (in some way analogous if not identical to our own mode of knowing) of things extant rather than as His infinite capacity to contain everything as cause, there is no reason to assume that without a dramatic ontological shift that the finite human should ever expand to a point where he has reached complete knowledge. Complete knowledge is not something absent in humanity merely from some lack of information. Absolute knowledge requires an absolute being who transcends knowledge and knowing as cause.

Theosis never allows for humanity to make that transcendent leap from finitude to infinitude. In fact, the idea of perpetual ascent absolutely excludes the possibility that we should ever arrive at an absolute. To be saved as creatures, we must remain creatures even as we are united with divinity. Notice the language is of "union" and not of "absorption." Perhaps Witherington had in view the doctrines of the Latter Day Saints, in which people themselves become deities, or of certain forms of Buddhism, in which people are absorbed into a universal Nothingness. That is not, however, "theosis" properly speaking. Theosis has its type in the Incarnate Word: a union of two natures without confusion, in which both retain their essential characteristics. (This Christological aspect of theosis is a problem to be dealt with later.)

Witherington in his brief and subtle critiques of theosis only managed to display and undo his own misconception of the doctrine. Theosis has always rejected the confusion of deity with humanity. It has nothing to fear from accusations that it will lead to omniscience, omnipresence, or really omni-anything in the way that God possesses those qualities.

A Day with Ben Witherington: Impressions of a Man

Great men are reducible to their great ideas. That, at least, is the way society and, even more so, posterity tends to interact with them. Every school child in a secularized country can recite Darwin's maxim "survival of the fittest," even if they don't know what it means. None of them (and I'm no better) can tell you how Darwin liked to unwind after a long day of looking at tortoises and doodling in his sketch book. What sort of man was he? What sort of man was Plato? What sort of man was Kant? That information certainly exists in the historical record. We know Emily Dickinson was an agoraphobe. We know that Barlaam was a litigious know-it-all (a sort of cautionary tale for my own life). Yet, those facts are relegated to introductory chapters of textbooks on the great thinkers and personalities of history. I believe that an encounter with a historical figure is an encounter with a person. That may, of course, be the contemporary emphasis on psychology bleeding subconsciously into my own expectations of history, but much of the value of the historical encounter is marginalized or done away with altogether when we dehumanize our history...even our intellectual history. Descartes was a person, not unlike me as I write this or you as you read it. He was not an ontological argument for the existence of God. His ideas have life and merit because of the "his" not the "ideas," which is to say that ideas as such are valueless unless they are human ideas. They did not arise in an impersonal void and we do not appropriate them in an impersonal void. It is only the presumption of omnipotence (at least in the realm of thought) that deludes the human mind into believe it can divorce a person from his thought.

It is in light of that revelation and with it in mind that I write the following. I came to Searcy this weekend to hear a daylong series of lectures at Harding University by Dr. Ben Witherington III. I naturally have a wealth of responses to his thought and to the thoughts of others expressed to him, but before I give my impressions of what he believes I think it will be profitable to give my impressions on the man. I do not, in this, pretend to know him in any real sense. I certainly am not qualified to write authoritatively about what sort of man he is. That is why I chose, very deliberately, the term "impressions" to describe what I am doing here. This is a Monet and not a photograph. I do not aim at scientific realism but at giving myself (and whoever my eavesdropping) a psychological context, a grounding in the world of concrete reality with which to read whatever intellectual interchange may follow.

Witherington was certainly, in my estimation, one of the top five New Testament scholars writing in English today. With that comes a necessary an admission that the New Testament is not my field of study and that I could very well have been entirely ignorant of who was truly at the forefront of New Testament scholarship. The moment he entered the lecture hall, however, my expectations were confirmed: not, of course, in some kind of academic glow that he carried around him but in the deferential way the professors (my professors) treated him. For all intents and purposes, they all had the same set of degrees that he did and yet he was quite clearly not their peer. They did not treat him that way, and he did not carry himself that way. His deportment was that of a man who both knew his own importance and the expectation that he should display it with dignity. He did not shy at the good professors' gushing comments that he "meant so much" to conservative academics; he only explained why he had undertaken the monumental task of commenting on every book of the New Testament (a fact which was repeated almost as though it were an official part of his title). His answers were, so far as he was concerned, entirely authoritative, and why shouldn't the be? After all, in the Harding classroom no one disputed his authority about anything.

Much to my surprise though, it seemed to me that his excellence was not a product of his exegetical aptitude (which is certainly not to dispute his exegetical prowess) or his striking erudition (which did not, as a matter of fact, strike me at all) but of his impressive skills as a rhetorician. He needed only to open his mouth and the room belonged to him. (In the case of many of the more obsequious professors, he did not even need to do that.) He began his lecture with a joke which by all rights should have been wildly offensive (after all, what is so funny about relating a story of a former Church of Christ student who was willing to commit crimes warranting jail time but, once in prison, refused to sing in the choir because it had piano accompaniement) but for whatever reason seemed to endear the crowd to him. He had a special gift for speaking in the vernacular in a way which showed that he was above you but not so far above you that he could not speak to you when necessary. He slid words rich in negative connotation imperceptibly into his speech about various forms of thought he did not embrace, all with the effect that those who already agreed with him felt righteously justified and those who did not felt inexplicably defensive and hesitant. He laced his lectures with humor and idiom and left the audience with a warm feeling that they had been entertained, whether or not they had learned anything.

I imagine that he would be a good person to converse with as a peer, though I doubt many people do. I confess, that may be as much a product of the intrinsic deference so many feel the need to pay him automatically rather than a personal belief in his own superiority. He knows precisely what he believes and was prepared to defend those beliefs. He at least made a show of meaningfully engaging positions that he obviously disdained. I think that if someone, anyone, had been willing and capable of pressing his points more fully the interchanges would have become much more interesting. That should have been the professors' job.

The look of him was unimposing. He was not too tall. Not too short. He was not overly thin or overly stout (certainly not for an American). He had a full head of hair and no outstanding facial features. He moved and behaved very normally, with the exception of a strange habit of blinking in way that looked very deliberate. In all, I think I would have been no less comfortable seeing him behind a cash register as a lecture.

The most genuinely endearing quality, and the one I will close this entry with, was that he truly has the air of a man who is a churchman first and an academic second. He preaches like a preacher. With the obvious exception of the actual content of his talks, he would have been totally at home behind the pulpit of a congregation every Sunday. He expressed concern about real (rather than purely theoretical) pastoral concerns. When personal problems arose from students, thinly disguised as academic hypotheticals, he immediately perceived the underlying issue and answered like a spiritual father and not like a scholar. I will never be that kind of scholar, and I recognize that as a personal deficiency. The church needs to return to a time when brilliant churchmen were at the helm of Christianity, steering it toward a better future.