The Dedication of the Witherington Collection

On a gloriously sunny day in Charlotte, Dec. 2nd, the library I have built for over forty years, was dedicated at the Gordon-Conwell Charlotte campus in south Charlotte. The picture above is of course a NASA picture showing where in the world the light is visible from space. As it happened, I was preaching on John 1—‘the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it’, so it was a singular providence that this picture had been left up on the screen on the chapel platform when I preached.

This next picture is of a painting by my friend Leighton Ford, the brother in law of Billy Graham. Leighton is one of the trustees who was present for the library dedication.

Here is my Mom, Joyce Witherington, standing proudly at the entrance way into the collection.

Here are my beloved Loeb Classical Library volumes. It was hard to give them up. Most of them I bought second hand from the oldest continuously operating antiquarian bookstore in America— Brattle’s in downtown Boston.

Here you see Kittel and Barth’s Dogmatics, and the works of Luther, among other things. I must tell you a story about how I came to have the full set of Barth’s dogmatics. My wife and I heard that T+T Clark, the publishers of Barth in the English-speaking world, was having to move from one location on George Street in Edinburgh to another. So in 1978 we got on the train, road to Edinburgh, and we went up to the large door at No. 42 and knocked. The door was opened by a wee little Scotsman who asked “Are you here for the Books (pronounced ‘Booooches’)? When I told him we were, he ushered us in to a little alcove with a divan. He said ‘I’ll be right back,” and he went down some stairs into a basement. He began hauling up all of Barth’s Dogmatics, then a bunch of ICC commentaries, then McIntosh’s History of the Reformation. It filled up the whole counter of the divan! He then asked…. ‘will ye be havin ’em’?’ I explained I was an impecunious doctoral student with little money and could not afford them all. ‘What about a pound a piece?’ My heart leapt and I said ‘I’LL BE HAVIN EM!’ And so it was Ann and I dragged two huge boxes of books to the train, and headed back to Durham. My 12 fellow doctoral students of Barrett at Durham could hardly believe my good fortune. A couple got on the train and went to Edinburgh hoping for a similar outcome. Alas, by then the books were gone. So the Dogmatics quite literally went from the publisher to me to a little collection in Charlotte.

Here is a nice display of some of the book awards I have won, and some framed pictures of other books I have written as well.

Here is the seminary chapel where I preached, with its wonderful painting of Jesus the sower. Notice the animals in the picture. It reminded me of my own Christmas cat (see below our Minny cat in a box of Christmas wrapping).

And here is the old boy himself with his mom (that fellow looks like he has had one too many turtle mocha’s from Caribou). A good time was had by all.