A Kingdom Perspective on Labor
Ben Witherington III
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Grand Rapids, Michigan / Cambridge, U.K.
All rights reserved
Published 2011 by
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
2140 Oak Industrial Drive N.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49505 /
P.O. Box 163, Cambridge CB3 9PU U.K.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Witherington, Ben, 1951–
Work: a Kingdom perspective on labor / Ben Witherington III.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-8028-6541-0 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Work—Religious aspects—Christianity. 2. Work—Biblical teaching. I. Title.
BT738.5.W58 2011
261.8′5—dc22
2010040497
Preface: Caution—Work in Progress
1. An Opus That Is Magnum: On the Goodness of Work
2. A Theology of Work as Vocation
3. Slackers and Sloths of the World, Unite!
4. Call Forwarding and Vocation’s Variation
5. Work as Ministry, Ministry as Work
6. Seeing the World from the Crouch Position: Work as Culture Making
7. New Balance: The Relationship of Work to Faith, Rest, and Play
Caution—Work in Progress
I was leafing through a newspaper shortly before Thanksgiving and came across a political cartoon. It depicted two Indians carrying a dead turkey on a pole toward a table at which several New England Puritans were sitting, apparently waiting to eat their Thanksgiving dinner with the Natives. The Indians were far enough out of earshot not to be heard when one said to the other, “I don’t care if they have a good work ethic, they are illegal aliens. They should go back to where they came from and enter the country legally and with our permission.” I laughed for a good while about that reversal of the common perspective we hear in America today about so many illegal aliens. But the cartoon also alluded to something that it was assumed a broad audience would readily know all about—the so-called Puritan work ethic.
Christianity in general, and Protestant Christianity in particular, seems to raise to a peculiar degree the issue of how we should view work. Is it a blessing or a bane? Is it a duty or a privilege? Do we work to live, or live to work? Yet in spite of the stereotype of the Puritan work ethic, modern Americans, including many Christians, have little or no understanding of what the Bible actually says about work, and it hardly informs their views on questions of work versus play, or career versus retirement, or other related subjects. And in one sense, they can hardly be blamed—Christian theologians have seldom addressed the topic of work, which is what we intend to explore in this little study.
On Defining Work
In his recent study on work, David Jensen puts it this way: “[The] topic—human labor—is rather foreign to most systematic theologies. Not often have the codifiers of Christian doctrine explored the topic of work as an explicitly theological theme.”1 If you survey the topical indexes in works of biblical and systematic theology you will find the topic ...
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About Work: A Kingdom Perspective on LaborMost Christians spend most of their waking hours working, yet many regard work as at best a necessary evil—just one more unfortunate by-product of humanity’s fall from grace. Not so, says Ben Witherington, and in Work: A Kingdom Perspective on Labor, he considers work as neither the curse nor the cure of human life but, rather, as something good that God has given us to do. In this brief primer on the biblical theology and ethics of work, Witherington carefully unpacks the concept of work, considering its relationship to rest, play, worship, the normal cycle of human life, and the coming kingdom of God. Work as calling, work as ministry, work as a way to make a living, and the notably unbiblical notion of retirement—Witherington’s Work engages these subjects and more, combining scholarly acumen with good humor, common sense, cultural awareness, and biblically based insights from Genesis to Revelation. |
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