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.

The Wisdom of Petru Dumitriu

I started reading Petru Dimitriu's To the Unknown God close to two years ago, but I set it aside to take up course readings. I have yet to pick it up again. What I read, however, was extraordinarily thought provoking, and I know I have referenced his thinking here before. Dumitriu was a Romanian thinker who witnessed the atrocities of communism behind the Iron Curtain first hand and fled to tell the tale. He had a remarkable life which showed through in his remarkable corpus of writings. In Uknown God, he struggles with the problem of evil, not from the position of constructing a theodicy but from the outpouring of deep personal anguish. Here are some quotes which struck me at the time and which I recorded from the portion I read:

Finally, to reduce all these questions to one: how can one love God when he obviously does not exist? And -- putting the same question in a different way -- how can one love human beings, when they are as they are, and when there is no God?

Ever since I reached the age of reason I have been holding a conversation with an unknown and perhaps nonexistent interlocutor. If there is no one listening to me, no one answering me, and if at the other end of this inexhaustible one-way communication there is not one living soul, then I have been cheated, and it has bee the biggest cheat in a life that has known plenty of them: a cheat that is the crowning proof of the nothingness, of the non-value, of the absolute destitution of my existence. The question must be propounded as implacably as possible. No pity for God: it is for him to have pity on us.

Except that spilt blood is never impure, and the hands that spill the blood are never pure.

After assassination and sadistic crime, what I detest most in this world is rape, that rape which is always the violation of someone's will. Women are not its only victims: for one sexual rape, there are a hundred non-sexual ones.

All those who hang themselves in the cells are Jesus Christ on the cross. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken us? But to our cry of distress he could reply: why have you forsaken each other? I granted you forgetfulness of suffering and forgetfulness of offences: why do you use this gift to forget your sins? Is it just so that you need not repent, that you need not learn from your experiences, and ever repeat them?

Then who are we to judge God? I am saying that we must take upon ourselves a part of Evil, but I am not attempting to justify God. Evil is more mysterious, more vast. It is our work; but we are not our own work.

Unlike politics, religion has freed itself from human sacrifices.

Nevertheless, I see what I see, and that is that the universe of living things is permeated with suffering, and that even the spectacle of that suffering is suffering. I cannot carry on my conversation with God and ignore the constituent suffering of life.

For nothing is simple, and the universe is mathematicable, but incomprehensible -- really incomprehensible, and really constructed according to a plan that is not a human one.

The Church in Egypt (Update)

Someone over at USA Today must be reading this. There is no new information about intensified persecution in Egypt during the strife, but it is nice to know that my concerns (or, if forced to display a false sense of humility, the concerns I share with Joseph Bottum) are being published for a wider audience.

About 10% of the Egyptian population (and declining, down more than half over the past century ), these people have suffered discrimination under 30 years of rule by the now-embattled president, Hosni Mubarak. And they've seen that discrimination ratcheted up into open persecution during the current unrest, which began with a car bomb in Alexandria killing 21 at a Coptic church on Jan. 1 and continued through the massacre of 11 Christians in the village of Sharona on Jan. 30.

So why should they expect improvement from a new government? Particularly one in which the radical Muslim Brotherhood is certain to play a major role? The Copts are under the screw, and somehow, every time modern Egyptian history makes a turn, it ends up biting down harder on the nation's religious minorities.

In Other News

Taking its cues from the Nobel Committee, the Orthodox Church has preemptively canonized President Barack Obama and pre-humously (totally a word) memorialized him with this icon:



Venerate it at your leisure.

Pray for the Lord's Church in Egypt

For a number of reasons, it is atypical for me to issue a call to prayer. In this instance, however, the turmoil in Egypt has been gnawing at my conscience. Not for political reasons, obviously. I cannot imagine caring less whether or not the Egyptian people have a truly representative democracy. (Frankly, I don’t think there is anything inherently superior about representative democracy, and I would go so far as to say it is deeply flawed in ways that certain authoritarian forms of government are not…but that is a thought for a different time.) I am concerned about the church in Egypt getting caught in the crosshairs.

Though, from my perspective at least, it ought to be obvious to everyone, a lot of people do not seem to realize that Egypt has a substantial and diverse Christian population. There are well over ten million Christians in Egypt, accounting for somewhere in the neighborhood of 15% of the total population. While primarily the Coptic Church, there are significant groups of Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christians. To put it in more accessible (and perhaps more offensive) terms, you are twice as likely to find a Christian in Egypt as you are to find a Jew in New York. Yet, in spite of being such a sizable minority, the church in Egypt has long been the target for persecution. When I say "long," I of course am talking in terms of centuries not years. This past year saw a number of noteworthy events culminating in the New Years Day bombing of a church that left 21 dead and approximately 100 injured. (The US Senate was kind enough to approve a "symbolic measure" (read "metaphorical fingerwagging" or "hypothetical disapproval" which all amounts to "impotent posturing") in which they officially frowned upon the bombing.) Christians reacted to the attack inappropriately (read "violently") on the grounds that the government ought to be protecting them.

Maybe it should have, but if it wasn't doing enough to protect Christians before then it certainly won't do anything now that the powers that be in Egypt can hardly protect themselves. I haven't heard anything about it yet-- though with the crackdowns in communication I wonder whether or not we will ever have a full picture of what is going on across Egypt right now--but I fear that the "temporary" absence of law and order will only increase the danger to Christians in Egypt. I hope that such violence never occurs, but more strongly even than that I hope that when the Church is persecuted in Egypt that its members keep the faith and their behavior testifies to the Christian message of love in the face of overwhelming hate.

Cow News

This news is relevant to my interests.

Molly B was among an estimated 1,200 animals removed from the Montana Large Animal Sanctuary and Rescue in recent weeks as part of a massive effort to bail out its overwhelmed owners.

Molly B's second retirement will start another chapter in an unlikely story that began January 2006, when a yet-to-be-named 1,200 pound heifer skipped her date with doom by leaping a 5-foot-5-inch fence at Mickey's Packing Plant in Great Falls.

The cow raced through town with police and animal control on her heels, reportedly running into a conflict with a German Shepherd, dodging an SUV and negotiating through a rail yard. She swam across the Missouri River and later took three tranquilizer darts before eventually getting corralled.

Mickey's Packing Plant employees christened the spirited cow Molly B and voted 10-1 to spare her from slaughter.

That has to be the greatest thing I have heard all year.

A Bit of Wisdom from Gregory Akindynos

I don't expect to find a great deal of wisdom as I read through the literature of the anti-hesychasts, but there is a great deal of merit in what Gregory Akindynos said in his rebuke of Barlaam:

For you should have known not only how to write discourses and devise syllogisms, but also where to do this and who ought to do it and from what motives.