The Indelible Image

In the second volume of his two-volume comprehensive overview of the theological and ethical thought world of the New Testament, Ben Witherington III focuses on the collective witness of New Testament writers--the convergences and divergences of their theological and ethical thought.

Shortly after his father’s death, Terence began writing a weekly blog about his life adventures as a memoir for his children. What begins as a journey of grief evolves into a series of evocative, candid and often humorous adventures about his life as a child in rural Australia to his current cosmopolitan life in Canada. This emotional and powerful series of short stories begin with his father’s diagnosis of terminal brain cancer and his stark realization that he knows so very little about his father and the harsh reality that he only has a short time to get to know him. The similarities between his relationship with his children and the one he had with his father mirror each other, especially given his high demands as a senior executive that take him away from his family on a regular basis. His decision to change the nature of his relationship with his children beginning with his weekly story allows him to gain perspective in his life, which undoubtedly leads to wholesale change. His now celebrated blog is read by more than 30,000 people from around the world and is regarded, as a weekly “must read”.

All too often, argues Ben Witherington, the theology of the New Testament has been divorced from its ethics, leaving as isolated abstractions what are fully integrated, dynamic elements within the New Testament itself. As Witherington stresses, "behavior affects and reinforces or undoes belief." Having completed commentaries on all of the New Testament books, a remarkable feat in itself, Witherington now offers the first of a two-volume set on the theological and ethical thought world of the New Testament. The first volume looks at the individual witnesses, while the second examines the collective witness. The New Testament, says Ben Witherington, is "like a smallish choir. All are singing the same cantata, but each has an individual voice and is singing its own parts and notes. If we fail to pay attention to all the voices in the choir, we do not get the entire effect. . . . If this first volume is about closely analyzing the sheet music left to us by which each musician's part is delineated, the second volume will attempt to re-create what it might have sounded like had they ever gotten together and performed their scores to produce a single masterful cantata." What the New Testament authors have in mind, Witherington contends, is that all believers should be conformed in thought, word and deed to the image of Jesus Christ--the indelible image.