Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ben Witherington is Amos Professor of New Testament for Doctoral Studies at Asbury Theological Seminary and on the doctoral faculty at St. Andrews University in Scotland. He is now considered one of the top evangelical scholars in the world, and is an elected member of the prestigious SNTS, a society dedicated to New Testament studies. Witherington has written over fifty books, including The Jesus Quest and The Paul Quest, both of which were selected as top biblical studies works by Christianity Today. He also writes for many church and scholarly publications, and is a frequent contributor to the Patheos website.

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Work

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Contents

Preface: Caution — Work in Progress................................................vii1. An Opus That Is Magnum: On the Goodness of Work.......................................12. A Theology of Work as Vocation........................................................233. Slackers and Sloths of the World, Unite!..............................................534. Call Forwarding and Vocation's Variation..............................................675. Work as Ministry, Ministry as Work....................................................796. Seeing the World from the Crouch Position: Work as Culture Making.....................997. New Balance: The Relationship of Work to Faith, Rest, and Play........................129Overtime: Take This Job and .............................................................155

Chapter One

What is — "Paradise" — Who live there — Are they "Farmers" — Do they "hoe" — Do they know that this is "Amherst" — And that I — am coming — too — Emily Dickinson

Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made By singing: — "Oh, how beautiful!" and sitting in the shade. Rudyard Kipling

Though Jesus stilled a storm, he didn't remove all storms from the life of the world; though Jesus cured individuals of diseases, he didn't rid the world of those diseases. To use the Gospel of John's "sign" language, Jesus' actions point to a future world, thereby signaling that the kind of world Isaiah envisioned is on its way. Jesus provided signs of a different future that God has in store for the natural world. Terence Fretheim

A Creation and New Creation Perspective on Work

Somewhere along the line, Adam got a bad rap, or at least the God of Adam did. Someone somewhere misread the story of Creation and Fall and came to the conclusion that work was a result of the Fall, not part of God's original creation design for human beings. On closer inspection, it is perfectly clear that God's good plan always included human beings working, or, more specifically, living in the constant cycle of work and rest. Permanent rest was to come only when one was "gathered to one's fathers," to use the patriarchal term. Permanent rest was to come only when one had been interred and had an R.I.P. sign over one's head. Barbara Brown Taylor writes that many readers of Genesis 1–3 "have somehow gotten the idea that physical labor is part of God's curse — labor pains for the woman and field labor for the man — until labor itself gets all mixed up with punishment. Clearly, this is not so. The earthling's first divine job is to till the earth and keep it."

Even just a momentary glance at the creation story tells us that work was meant to be in our DNA from the outset — God called humanity to fill the earth and subdue it. As Terence Fretheim has recently pointed out, the verb subdue in Genesis 1:28 indicates that even before the Fall, while the creation God made was "good," this does not mean it was tranquil and tame. There was a built-in wildness to it, and various kinds of inherent potential for growth and development. Furthermore, there is no reason for us to think that subduing the world is supposed to be easy or idyllic. Think of the back-breaking, bone-wearying work of someone like Daniel Boone, trailblazing and subduing the Kentucky wilderness. And here is where the Fall comes into the picture.

It is not work itself but the toilsomeness of work that was added to the equation as a result of the curse involved in the Fall. Both man and woman would experience "labor pains," indicates Genesis 3 — man in manipulating the good earth, woman in giving birth to children. But even here, what is said about the woman is that her pain in childbirth would be increased, which implies there was pain already inherent in the process of giving birth. Pain itself is not entirely a result of the Fall. In this case, "no pain, no childbirth" is what Genesis suggests. And there is another factor. Paul reminds us in Romans 8 that the whole of creation itself was subjected in the Fall, subject to futility, as he puts it, and therefore longs for liberation as much as we do. The earth itself is not at its best and some of it is quite resistant to use or change, much less to subduing or tending.

But it's not just all about subduing an unruly and unruled earth. In fact, the earliest full images of human work and purpose are found in Genesis 2:15: "The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it." The first profession for humans, it would appear, was gardening. "Here human work is shown to have worth and dignity as a service to God and as something that gives purpose to human life. Work here is a creation ordinance, a God-appointed necessity for human life." W. R. Forrester, in reflecting on Genesis 1–3, concludes, "Man was meant to be a gardener, but by reason of his sin he became a farmer."

None of this, however, should lead us to the conclusion that good work, of whatever sort, is inherently futile or a result of the Fall. Indeed, even hard work, even hard manual labor is commended in the Scriptures, and sloth, as we shall see, is roundly condemned. In his crucial discussion of the matter Terence Fretheim makes the following key observation:

Genesis does not present the creation as a finished product, wrapped up with a big red bow and handed over to the creatures to keep it exactly as originally created. It is not a one-time production. Indeed, for the creation to stay just as God originally created it would constitute a failure of the divine design. From God's perspective, the world needs work; development and change are what God intends for it, and God enlists human beings (and other creatures) to that end. From another angle, God did not exhaust the divine creativity in the first week of the world; God continues to create and uses creatures in a vocation that involves the becoming of creation.

But my concern in this study is not merely to rehabilitate our notions of work by correcting bad exegesis of Genesis 1–3. My concern is to ask and answer the question of how work looks different in the light of Kingdom come, how work looks different if one believes Christ has changed the eschatological situation by his coming and that this affects the way we look at all we do as Christians.

The first thing to point out about the coming Kingdom is that Jesus did not come to declare an eternal holiday for his followers. The year of Jubilee, which Jesus invoked in his teaching, did not mean a year of no work of any sort. It meant, rather, a newfound dedication to doing the Lord's work. Listen for a moment to how Jesus describes why he came to this earth in John 9:4: "I must work the works of the One who sent me while it is day; the night comes when no one can work." In this passage Jesus is not talking about the twenty-four-hour cycle of light and darkness, of work and rest, that we all experience all the time. No, he is looking at things from an...