Tish Harrison Warren | God Is A Bad Fairy Godmother

Warren:

In the same way that God can use human effort and work, for instance, or in a lab, or someone, you know, a scientist working on a vaccine, I think God uses prayer, you know, and responds to prayer. And every week, my church has prayed for an end—for God’s mercy and an end to the pandemic. I think God hears those prayers, and that’s part of the work of God on earth.

I’m Tish Harrison Warren. I’m an Anglican priest, in the Anglican Church in North America, and I’m an author and I’m a monthly columnist for Christianity Today, and a weekly newsletter writer for the New York Times where I write a newsletter on faith in public discourse and private life. And I’m a mom of three. And I’m tired. [laughs]

Stump: 

Hey Everybody. Welcome to Language of God. I’m your host, Jim Stump.

The intersection of science and faith can take a lot of different forms. Often, in our conversations on the podcast, our guests have obvious and sometimes dramatic stories of science and faith coming together. That wasn’t the case for Tish Harrison Warren, who for much of her life had little interest in science and faith. Then came the pandemic and the science and faith conversation was dropped right in front of all of us, and it became clear that she would need to participate in the conversation.

And it turns out there are a lot more connections with science and faith that come out in her writing than just COVID—in her thinking about prayer and the problem of evil, what God does versus what we do, about medicine and healing, even angels.

In the episode, we talk about some of her recent columns on the pandemic and about going back to in-person church. And then we talk about her most recent book, Prayer in the Night, a book that speaks poignantly to our current times. 

Let’s get to the conversation.

Stump:

Reverend, can we call you Reverend, by the way? I don’t know all the Anglican rules.

Warren:

So I mean, you can. People typically—reverend is an honorific that is not normally used except for in writing. It’s like Esquire for lawyers. People tend to call Anglican priests Father, if they’re male, or Mother. Mother Tish. But I’m low church enough that you can just call me Tish if you want to. 

Stump:

Well, Tish Harrison Warren, welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining us.

Warren:

Yeah, you’re so welcome. And if you want to call me Reverend, I don’t care. You can call me hey you, Reverend, your highness, whatever you want. 

Stump:

Wow. All right. Well, whatever it is that we call you, I’m excited to talk to you. I’ve just finished reading your book that came out last year, Prayer in the Night. And I really resonate with a lot of what you’ve written there. The topics you address are ones I find myself coming back to frequently. Before reading that though, I’ve gotten to know some of your writing through your regular column at the New York Times, the newsletter you call it, that you write, and I’d like to talk about a couple of those with you. But before even that, we’d like to know more about our guests than what you can find on their CV. So let’s go back a ways to begin with, if we can. Where’d you come from? What were you like as a little kid growing up?

Warren:

Yeah. I am from Central Texas. I lived in a small town called Lockhart, Texas until I was about 11, which is not far from Austin. And then I moved into the city, kind of in the heart of the city, from the time I was 11 until I graduated from high school, and have lived in cities ever since. So I really, so Austin is my home. And I’m super from Texas, like I’m a seventh generation Texan on both sides of my family. So my family has deep roots here and my parents in particular. You would certainly know they’re from Texas, because they would tell you, but also because they have big accents. And you can tell. 

And what was that like as a kid? Man. I was a funny kid, In the sense that I was an odd kid. I’m an odd adult, but I was an odd kid too. I was really curious, really creative and really, like, oddly spiritual, even as a child, was really kind of drawn to theology and kind of the arts. Like, I mean, I’m from this family that is very Texan, very kind of pragmatic. And my father, I love him, but you know, he is a—he’s passed away, but was such a Texas male like, you know, like football. And I’m not from a family that talks about emotions at all. At all. And was real kind of “normal.” We were very, sort of, standard Texan you know, conservative family. I loved my dad, but he never quite knew what to do with me, I think.

Stump:

So when you say you were oddly spiritual, when did you first think “when I grow up I want to be a priest.”

Warren:

Well, yeah, I was not Anglican. We were Southern Baptist.

Stump:

Of course. 

Warren:

So I would have never thought I would want to be a priest. I mean, I think I would be very worried about my soul now, but I think, I don’t know, it was young. I mean, 13 or 14. I was at some kind of, I think it was a camp or retreat, and I had—when you’re in the Baptist Church, if you feel quote-unquote, like, called to full time Christian service, that was the language used, they asked you to come forward. And I didn’t come forward that night. But I remember pulling the leader aside and talking to him about it. 

And so it was when I was 18, actually, is when I made kind of like a public commitment in my church, to full time ministry, and the church really supported it, and, you know, people, whatever, clapped or whatever. And people came up to me afterwards and said, “We’re so glad you committed ministry, you’re gonna make such a great pastor’s wife.” And so that was sort of—  Anyway, that gets into a much longer story. But I think pretty young. I mean, I would say 13 or 14 is when I first kind of in earnest started thinking that I wanted to do ministry. I never expected that to be writing. I certainly never thought, you know, I’ll write about God in the New York Times. But, you know, I thought I wanted to, I really wanted to serve the church.

Stump:

Well, give us at least a couple of the highlights of the continuing story there of how you did end up as an Anglican priest.

Warren:

So I sort of accidentally ended up at an Anglican church. We didn’t know—we, my husband and I, were kind of in between things as he was applying for a Ph. D. program. We knew we were going to have to move and we just had to find a church kind of quickly in this weird, it was like kind of a gap year in our life, after seminary and before his program. And so we did not think, hey, we’re making this big lifelong change. We just started going to this little sweet evangelical Episcopal Church. And then we kind of got—it was like contracting an illness or virus. Maybe that’s not a good analogy to use. We just. It maybe, is there a more positive? I don’t know. It was— but it felt like this complete transformation or we just got bitten by this bug and we couldn’t unknow what we knew. We couldn’t un-experience what we had experienced. And so we just, I mean, honestly, we just fell in love with liturgy.

And so started going to this Anglican Church and loved it and ended up five years later—this church ordained women—ended up, five years later, starting that process. I will say it was kind of in seminary that we started, I started, shifting on women’s ordination. My husband did it first actually. He took a New Testament interpretation class and did essays on this particular subject on women in ministry. And through that, through researching and reading, he ended up changing his mind. So he became for women’s ordination about a year, year and a half before I was in it. And so it was like, a year, year and a half of me questioning it, reading things, but also just a lot of arguing with him. I mean, we like, we’re both theological minds. So you know, dinner with us can quickly become like a theological debate. And so, I mean, we, ironically, I argued with my husband, with me being against women’s ordination for a long time, and then eventually, I make this joke too much in public, but it’s true, like I submitted to my husband and got ordained.

Stump:

Submitted and became equal. [laughs] Well, one more—we’ll talk a little bit more about liturgy and such after a bit—but one more question on background things. Since this is a BioLogos podcast, I’m somewhat obligated to ask you a little bit about science growing up, maybe, you said you are an artsy kid, but do you have any kinds of experiences that might at least loosely fall under the category of science and how you thought about the natural world or anything like that?

Warren:

So not really. In ways, honestly, I am a misfit for this podcast, because I am super not a scientist, although I will say that I got an award in the seventh or eighth grade for having my top biology score. [laughter]

Stump:

Good enough for us. We’ll take it. You qualify now.

Warren:

I’m an award-winning scientist in that sense. But that was mostly because I made a really good bug collection that year. So I really don’t feel like I have a very scientific mind. I’m just going to be honest about that. I’m sorry to disappoint you, BioLogos. That said, I am, first of all, just very indebted to science. I’m grateful to science. But I also think I really, really love the natural world. I love creation. And so learning about trees and birds, and you know, glaciers, like this stuff is interesting to me. And in fact, I’ve always—I’m just gonna put this out there in case a scientist is listening. Like, I always have wanted—my kids have these books that are sort of like, weird things about science or like National Geographic, like 100 Weird Animal Facts, you know. And I always wish people would make books like that for adults, because I love reading them. For adults like me, that are non-scientists, but just have a strong sense of wonder about the world. Because I do feel like the natural world is this really beautiful house—this is a metaphor, right? It’s this beautiful mansion. And being a non-scientist, I can appreciate that deeply and write poetry about it. But I can only sort of set in like the entryway in the living room of that. And I feel like I need scientists to help me get kind of under, you know, under the floors and on the roof and look more deeply and understand, you know, what the the walls are made of, you know, and even the let me in new rooms that I don’t think I could find on my own. So, here’s what I’m saying. I’m not a scientist, but I’m curious and I like nature. And so I really like it when people tell me weird and interesting things about nature.

 Stump:

So I’m very glad to hear you say that. We have had this little mini series kind of thing at BioLogos on our social media channels every once in a while, that’s just called Cool Creations, where we’d ask scientists, what’s your favorite creature out there and they’d write, you know, we’d get a picture or something and a little short description of why this is so cool. And those always do really well on social media. And I think it’s this demographic that you just represented there of people that just tell us interesting things. This is amazing. Let us just see more of that. So I’m making a mental note here to reinvigorate the cool creation series that we might put out. 

But I want to ask you a little further about the relationship between science and religion. You wrote last fall, one of your New York Times columns about science and faith. And you interviewed our president, Deb Haarsma, in an attempt to sort out what’s going on with the cultural conflict we often see between science and religion. But I’m a little curious how you, growing up in the Southern Baptist Church, belt buckle of the Bible Belt almost, and being interested in the natural world and curious about things, but you never really saw any tension between scientific claims about the world views of the science, scientific views of the world and religious ways of seeing the world.

Warren:

Yeah, so I will say, I am not from, at all, a fundamentalist family. I mentioned earlier that my family was kind of conservative Texans, which is true. In the sort of, like, if you’ve seen Friday Night Lights, like, that’s what I mean by conservative Texas.

Stump:

Football. Barbecue. 80 mile and hour speed limits on roads down there. I love it.

Warren:

That’s right. That’s right. And, you know, in that show, they sort of, they go to church on Sundays, and that’s important, but they don’t spend a lot of time kind of, you know, praying around or talking about it. And they also don’t, you know, participate much in this sort of like Evangelical subculture. So there was never any kind of limits on what I was allowed to listen to, or not listen to, or movies I could see or not see. And so, when it came to this, I mean my parents are certainly not scientists. I don’t even think that they’re particularly curious or interested in that. So for them, it was just like, God made the world. I don’t really care how. It’s all kind of a mystery. And I think partly this was just not something that I personally wrestled with. And because my parents, they didn’t feel like they had to choose between this, that it made me, this didn’t feel like a deep conflict for me. And I know we had doctors that went to our church, we have quite a few— I went to a large church and it was close to University of Texas and the Medical Center. So I think, you know, I was kind of around folks in the medical community, and scientists who were Christians, so maybe that was it, too.

Stump:

Yeah. So let’s talk a little closer to medicine here. In that regard, in that column, you wanted to talk about the science and religion divide that came more apparent to you through COVID. And we’ve talked a lot about that on this podcast. So you don’t need to rehash all those details. But I’d like to ask you then about a more recent column you wrote that gets in, a little bit, to the science and religion arguments, at least, in that you argued it’s time to end Zoom church services, go back to meeting in person. And to be clear, you aren’t discounting the science there at all, but simply weighing risks, calculating costs and benefits and saying that meeting in person should be viewed not like some frivolous activity, but an important and necessary one. Is that right? Is that the view?

Warren:

Yeah, it ended up being a really controversial column, or newsletter. I didn’t realize that it would be as much. I mean, there’s a lot to say about that. One thing I would say is, just in case your listeners don’t know, you know, I strongly, I’ve spent the last two years strongly, publicly, again and again, in writing, advocating for masks and social distancing. And so I’m—and I think the vaccine is a complete and utter gift from God and gift from science. So I am super pro Vax. And so this isn’t coming out of any denial of the medical reality of COVID. But I am saying that for the majority of people, which is not all people, I mean, I know that— I know that, particularly for folks who are, let’s say, undergoing treatment for cancer, or have kind of unique immune system needs—but I’m talking for the vast majority of Americans, the situation on the ground with COVID has changed, that the vaccine and with with a booster is remarkably effective. Thanks be to God. And, I mean, at this point, I read recently that—I think this was Damon Linker, this was a not a scientist, but he was quoting he was he was quoting a scientist, and I think the New York Times is often also shown this, like linked to this—but that if you are double vaxxed and boosted there’s a seven times greater chance that you will die from being struck by lightning, then die from COVID at this point. And so, I was a big proponent of stopping church gatherings in person at the beginning of the pandemic. But I also think I and many others underestimated the mental health cost of all of that. I mean, like the loss of life that has come from suicide, mental health problems—that humans really do need in person interaction. And part of this is, I mean, I remember making these decisions about church and thinking, well, this is only a couple of months, you know, and—we’re two years in. So some of this is like, for all, I mean, public health is really, really, hard. And it is not my job. And I’m not a public health expert. But it’s difficult because there’s always more than one public health issue on the table, right? And sometimes doing interventions to help one situation makes another public health situation a lot worse.

I do want to say all of this is caveated by the biggest critique of that piece, which is valid, and is that it hit a nerve with communities of people with disability, saying that online church is a way they felt sort of more included in their community. So I just want to name that. I don’t know how much you want to get into that. I do feel like we are conflating two different questions there, which is one: how do we emerge from the pandemic as a church? For that, I would say that I think online church is not ideal. I think it’s not great for people. I think it reduces church to receiving content, or information. And I think it’s—online church is pretty bad for children, for, I mean, we’ve seen the same in online schooling. You can’t do the sacraments. 

But I also think that the critique that the church has done a bad job, even before COVID at times, making accommodations, and supporting those with disabilities is also true. I just don’t think we can conflate that into the same, the same exact topic, because I think the issue of how does the church do better with a disability community is a much longer, broader, bigger and needs to be more comprehensive than just, you know, online church, which I don’t think is a silver bullet for that, for lots and lots of reasons, including that certain—online church is terrible for certain people with disabilities. So that said.

Stump:

Yeah, this is a really important conversation and thank you for bringing it up and being honest and transparent about it. Part of the question for me continues to be, not on the disability side at all, but just strictly on the COVID side of things. I live in a state where only 50% of the people are vaccinated still. And so there continues to be a question in my mind of do we just say, okay, all us vaccinated people, we’re tired of living like this, we’re just going to go back to doing things like normal and sorry, the rest of you who never got vaccinated. You had your chance. Or do we have some greater duty to continue to throttle our own lives because of the people who won’t take this vaccine that’s very readily available and safe at this point? Do you get that part of the dilemma?

Warren: 

Yeah, I’ve heard that from a lot of people. And I’m absolutely sympathetic to that. And it’s so frustrating. I mean, I guess part of what I am wrestling with, my question to you would be sort of, what’s the alternative? I think, at this point, I don’t think, I mean, I could be wrong, I hope I’m wrong, but a year into this vaccine I don’t think that percentages of vaccination is going to radically spike. It’s not. And that’s, again, very frustrating. But I think it’s not going to change much, I think. There are small interventions we can do. Like, I think they have shown that even folks that are vaccine hesitant, if literally, if you’re sitting in front of them and offering them a vaccine, sometimes they will take it. So I mean, one thing that churches could do is ask the health department to bring the vaccines to church, right? And that would be great. 

Being that that is the case, if you know, we both agree, we’re probably not going to see a huge spike in this, then I’m, what do we do? Because I don’t think it’s going to be radically different a year from now, I don’t think the information is going to change much right now. And I do think there was a time when there were so many lives, that I mean, there was no vaccine, there was nothing we could do. And so all that we could do is the best we could do at the time. 

I’m just saying that as the science changes, I think the societal response and the ecclesial response—because there’s deeply there’s like undergirding theological questions here of what churches, and if our bodies matter in church and that sort of thing, that are also big. But I think the societal and the ecclesial and the theological response kind of has to shift as the science shifts. And it’s fine if you think differently, but I would say if you think, if you think no, it’s not time yet, because we’re still having, you know, large numbers of folks who aren’t getting vaccinated. You—it’s fine. I think that’s fine. But you have to ask the question. If that’s not going to change, how long do we take that stance?

[musical interlude]

BioLogos:

Hey listeners. I’m just here with a quick plug for the BioLogos forum, a place filled with active discussions about many of the topics covered in this podcast. In fact, each episode of the podcast has a specific thread where you can discuss what you’ve heard. The forum is a place where questions are welcome and where conversation is civil and gracious, even when topics are controversial. Bring your questions or share your story with a community filled with experts and other curious learners from a variety of viewpoints.You can find a link to the forum at the top of any page on the biologos website, biologos.org.

Stump:

Well, let’s shift ourselves here and talk about something different. Your most recent book, Prayer in the Night is an extended meditation on compline. For many who grew up in what are sometimes called low church traditions, where the liturgy is much more informal. Can you explain a little what compline is, where it came from, where it fits in the bigger picture of the church and worship?

Warren:

So Compline is a prayer service that many folks including Anglicans and Catholics, Lutherans pray. And it’s a collection of readings, mostly from the Psalms, but other scriptures as well and prayers that are done at night. So usually right before bed.

Stump:

Well, the prayer itself, taps into some of the concerns and fears we have that might more naturally arise at night, even in the way you unpack this and reflect on the prayer you don’t steer us away from looking straight on at the hard bits. And the hook of the book, at least for me, comes on page 22, where you say you’re sitting in church during college, and the pastor says “you cannot trust God to keep bad things from happening to you.” That claim seems at the same time to chafe against our polite religious sensibilities. And to be so obviously true. That kind of conflict makes for a compelling story. And it allows us to dig deeper to find some nuggets of wisdom here that maybe aren’t as easy but are a little more solid and lasting. So describe a little bit the shift that this forces in us for how we think about prayer, how we think about God.

Warren:

Yeah, absolutely. I remember him saying that. And I feel I think exactly how you just articulated it, said that. It’s so shook me and was so obvious at the same time, but it was sort of like, we don’t say that out loud. We don’t say that about God out loud. But it was, it’s so self evident. And I’m so—what I wrestle with in this book is the concept of what’s called theodicy, which is how can God be good and all powerful and bad things still happen in the world? And how can we be honest about the fact that they do and who God is in the middle of that and not give kind of easy, pat answers to that, but really wrestle with that. And I came out of my own kind of struggle with those questions in a season of grief. And honestly, like, I had answers to these questions when I wrote this book, you know, I’d been to seminary. I could give answers. I think I’d probably even spoken about this before. But I think in a new way, it became clear that the answers I had were really not emotionally satisfying to me, and not spiritually satisfying to me. And so, I didn’t want to write this book. I wanted to move on and write a book that was much more kind of heady, about the creeds. And I just felt like God wouldn’t let me, he wouldn’t leave me alone about this book. And it was because these were the questions that I was kind of avoiding. And so in that same chapter, I think I wrote this question. “So if we can’t trust God to keep bad things from happening to us, how do we trust God at all?” And I did not have any answer to the question I was writing, when that question kind of flowed out of me, which sometimes in writing happens. I often write things I don’t know that I am wondering. And I stopped writing. And I sat there, and I had nothing to say. And I sat there and eventually got up from my desk and closed the computer and did not come back for four weeks, because I just didn’t have any—I said, I don’t have anything else to say. And that’s only the second chapter. So this can’t, this isn’t, this can’t be a book. And the rest of the book, when I finally came back to the computer, is me kind of working my way into the answer to that question. And it took me two years, and writing 80,000 words plus and chipping them down to about half that, to be able to sort of answer that question. And it doesn’t answer it, there’s no sort of like, rabbit out of a hat, like this new theological discovery that no one has thought about. And I would say, it’s not really until the final chapter of the book that I kind of, can fully answer that question. And I think that it, I had to sort of, I think you have to kind of walk through the darkness of the rest of the book before you can adequately answer that question truthfully, in a way that is real and doesn’t deny the real suffering and sorrow in the world.

Stump:

And part of this you give an interesting discussion about trusting in the story of Jesus rather than trusting in facts. I think this is part of that distinction you’re making about before all this, you had what the right answers were, in a kind of academic sense. But that doesn’t necessarily speak to the emotional experience of all of this. And I’ve wondered if the English language hasn’t done us any favors in this regard, since we only have the one word for knowledge and we collapse together some pretty important distinctions that other languages make. So the Greek of the New Testament for example, using episteme, for the kind of factual or scientific knowledge, but gnosis for more intimate knowledge by acquaintance. So in Second Timothy begins with Paul telling the story of the gospel and saying he’s suffering because of it, but he’s not ashamed, because I know the one in whom I have put my trust. Gnosis right? Or I can’t get away from the King James version of that, because it’s a song from my youth, I know whom I have believed. Right? Does that kind of distinction have any traction for you and how you’re thinking about answering this question in the sort of dry academic sense versus the more knowledge in that acquaintance, that intimacy side rather than just, I know these facts and these propositions? 

Warren:

Yeah. Man, you know, I have done so many podcasts on this book, and I’ve literally never thought about this before. No one has asked me this particular question. And I like, I really like the distinction you’re making. So I think yes. I think I’m drawn to that. And I’d also say it’s slightly different than that. And so I think the answer is yes to your question. And also, I think that we want intimacy and knowledge of God, gnosis. But I also think we want action. And that’s, I bring this up in the book, but I think part of this longing we have for a quote-unquote answer to questions of the problem of pain is we don’t just want an answer. And we do want intimate knowledge like you are saying, and I allude to this, actually talking about this book, Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis, where, at the end of the story, Orual goes and encounters God, who she has railed against, railed against, railed against the whole book. And it says, “I know now why there’s not an answer, you are the answer, you alone are the answer. What other answer would suffice,” or something like that. And it’s this beautiful moment in the book. And I think that’s true. But I also think we have this great hope. And also expectation of Jesus making all things new, of things actually changing, of things actually being set right. And I think that, so I think part of this question is actually a longing for justice and beauty and truth and goodness, right? That we actually really are wanting action on the part of God. And we see that action in the person of Jesus. And we see that action by the work of the Spirit here on Earth. I mean, even through the restoration that science brings, right, we see the action of God through healing, through this vaccine, right? We see God at work, but it’s not complete. And I think we’re longing for completeness. So absolutely. I think there’s, we’re longing for intimacy, and we’re also longing for God to work.

Stump:

So let me ask about that, then.

Warren:

See I tied that into science. [laughs]

Stump:

Very nice. So this might not be a scientific question. But I’m asking, this longing for action, what exactly does prayer do, in your view? And I’m not suggesting that your book was intentionally trying to answer that question. But I started keeping a list in the back in the back flap of the book of things you said, that might be construed as giving some answers toward that. So here are a couple of them. For example, you said, “prayer adjusts our eyes to see God in the darkness.” You said, “prayer expands our imagination about the nature of reality.” You said, “we pray to endure the mystery of suffering and the mystery of suffering teaches us to pray.” You said “the shape of our prayers determines the shape of our life.” I think these are all really nice, certainly not exhaustive descriptions. But nowhere in there does it say anything about what God does. On the face of it, the compline prayer is asking God to do things. But because of this, the hook that we mentioned earlier about not trusting God to keep bad things from happening to you, does that turn prayer then into, it’s just about what it does to me?

Warren:

Yeah, that’s a great question. I think prayer does many things. So that’s the first. I don’t think prayer can be reduced to kind of one thing. And there’s a difficulty here, right, there’s a difficulty in the Scriptures themselves. And in experience of saying, on the one hand, we can come to see prayer as calling down the almighty butler or sky fairy, or you know, to do our bidding. And this is kind of the kind of crass way of putting this right? Or putting a quarter in the machine so you can get the results we want. And on the other hand, you know, that sort of the bad extreme of this, the other sort of bad extreme would be saying prayer does nothing. And it’s all about sort of an internal spiritual experience that has no impact on the world in any way. Or maybe not even internal spiritual experience, but sort of an internal emotional experience or something. Both of those I think are erroneous. The Scripture is clear. It just calls us to ask God for things because it, you know, calls us to trust that God is a good father, that we can ask for a loaf of bread and he won’t give us a stone. And we can ask for a fish and he won’t give us a snake, right? And we ask these things just like my kids ask my husband and I for things. 

And also, I think prayer is more than just asking God for things because I think, for instance, silent prayer has become really important to me, where you’re not asking God for anything. You’re in the present, you’re silent and with God. So I think prayer is also opening ourselves to the ongoing and constant presence of God in every moment of our life and the ongoing conversation between Christ and His Church. And so I think prayer does change us and form us, spiritually form us. I also do think God uses prayer. So, in some sense, God doesn’t need prayer, right? Like, God knows what we need. If we all stopped praying, God would be fine, we would not be fine, but God would be fine. The rocks would cry out. But I think, just like—okay, I’m gonna bring this back to science. And I’m not even entirely meaning to here, but I talk about how, in a piece that I wrote about the vaccine, actually, I talked about this idea of competitive agency, and I talked about this in the book as well, that we tend to either see something as God’s work, or our work. And if it’s human work, then it’s not God. And if it’s God’s work, then it has nothing to do with human effort. And I think that’s a deeply faulty and also un-Christian way of seeing the world. So in the same way, I think, in the same way that God can use human effort and work, for instance, or in a lab, or in someone, you know, a scientist working on a vaccine, I think God uses prayer, you know, and responds to prayer and that. Every week, my church has prayed for an end—for God’s mercy and an end to the pandemic. I think God hears those prayers, and that’s part of the work of God on earth. I think sometimes, I think that what’s holding our very polarized nation back from the brink is just 1000s of old monks and nuns that pray day after day for us. So God uses those prayers. And this is a great mystery—every Christian who has spent time praying, has prayed and prayed and prayed for something and it not happened.

So God doesn’t work like you know, a fairy godmother. God is a really bad fairy godmother. And if what you’re after is a fairy godmother don’t look to God. So I think here’s what I’m saying: prayer is a mystery. So we can more easily talk about what it’s not than what it is, I think, a lot of times. But I think I want to make space, I just want to make space in our conversation for prayer, for it to be that God really does hear and respond and calls us to tell, I mean, in Scripture, he says, to present a request to God, right? To talk to God and give request. But at the same time, prayer is—I almost said mostly, but I mean, maybe I do think mostly—about opening our eyes to God’s work on the earth and joining God’s work. That’s our participation in God’s work through our prayers. But it’s also to notice and to respond and open ourselves up to God’s work on Earth. 

Stump:

So I had the quote from your book all queued up, ready to go about the competition between our work and God’s work because I think that’s really the crux of the problem in understanding prayer and understanding the relationship between science and religion more generally, as you know, how God acts versus what can be described scientifically and what we are doing as opposed to God doing in direct answer to prayer. And there’s another theme then that, if I could just get you to, I know we’re about out of time here, but if I could you to say one more thing about this, I think this is really interesting. There’s a theme that we can’t just think that God is sitting there waiting to stop all the bad things from happening, and is just waiting for us to ask and then he’ll do it and he’s not going to otherwise. And, you note, from the novelist Francis Spufford, that for all the healing Jesus did, he barely moved the needle on the number of lepers in the ancient Near East or the number of women hemorrhaging or the number of people who died. This isn’t the point, somehow, in responding to the evil and the hardship of the suffering in the world to just stop at all. Instead, what is that? Draw that out, just one more time, if you would. Where are we? And I’ll queue this up here for you too, that taken together, you say, working watching and weeping these are these come straight from the the competent prayer, working, watching, weeping are a way to endure the mystery of theodicy. Can you just unpack that just a little for us in closing here?

Warren:

Yeah. Okay, those are two big things. So Spufford said, in the kind of the rest of that quote is, Jesus, obviously, was not here to just make all leprosy go away. But he was showing what the Kingdom of God looks like. The Kingdom of God is a place where people are healed. The Kingdom of God is a place where people who have been shamed and marginalized and outcast, have shame removed, have deep healing, are brought into community, are brought into knowing God intimately, as we were talking about. So he’s showing what the Kingdom of God will look like. And he’s, and in the action of Jesus, particularly the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, he’s bringing the Kingdom of God on earth. And we’re continuing to participate in that. And we do that through our work. We do that through science. We do that through writing books. We do that through having children. We do that through planting a garden. And we’re participating in the Kingdom of God. But God is still bringing his kingdom. Jesus is still making things new. 

And so there’s more to say there, but that, and then moving on to sort of working, watching, weeping. In the book, I start with weeping, maybe in light of my question, but the thing I just said, I’m going to start the opposite here, with working. So I think we can part—God has called us into participation with God, with the work of God. So God is bringing his kingdom,. but we participate in that. We can be part of bringing that to the world. I had an old friend, this didn’t make it in the book, but my friend, Jay, who is a pastor, and he would say, before you go preach, or before you go, you know, visit someone in the hospital or before you go, you know, build a home with Habitat for Humanity or whatever, he would say, like people say, “give him hell,” he’d say, “give him heaven.” And what he meant was, you’re offering a picture of heaven of the new heavens and the new Earth of God, completing his work of His kingdom being established forever on Earth. And so through our work, we are participating in that. And that’s not going to be complete until Jesus himself returns, until the new heavens, new Earth, right? Until the eschaton. And so, in the meantime, we watch for the kingdom at work, and we watch for both, for the eschaton, for God to set things right, but also for the ways God is at work now, for beauty and truth and goodness here on earth, the way that God is bringing that. 

And I talk in the book about when I was in a season of grief, how important beauty became to me. And all kinds of beauty, moral beauty, but also I mean, art, music, nature. We’re all kind of seeking to notice God’s presence in the darkness. Notice the ways the kingdom is coming even today, even as we wait for Jesus to come. 

And then I talk about, also in the book, about weeping. Because all of this is incomplete, right? Like, even though we participate in the Kingdom of God, even though Jesus will make all things new, they’re not new yet, right? And so in the meantime, we live in the words of—I think of Origen, in this world of tears. And I think we need to be really, really honest about how broken, how dark the world is, and we need to grieve it and lament it, and name it. And even with good work we’re doing, even—well, first of all, even our very good work cannot take away the reality of the fall. Even though we have, for instance, great scientific achievement in medicine, we die, and we’re all going to die and everyone we love is going to die. And science cannot rescue us from the limits of mortality, from the limits of the human body. Of course, it can alleviate that, it can help extend life. Those are gifts from God and that’s part of how we participate in the healing that God is bringing. But it’s not complete. And we cannot stop. God does not stop bad things from happening. And science does not stop all bad things from happening either. Right? And so and that’s the same with art. That’s the same with humanities. None of this can take away the great brokenness of the world. And even our good work, even our best work participates in that brokenness. And not only do we feel the frustration, the toil of thorns and thistles, that work is hard, and often fruitless. But also we participate, all of us, I mean, even just sitting here, like wearing the clothes I’m wearing and driving a car and getting gasoline, we participate in systems that are broken, where people are oppressed, where it’s built on marginalizing folks. I mean, for instance, we have more worldwide slavery than we’ve had in the history of the world, right? The bonded labor is a part of supply chain, and for a lot of the products that we consume. So work itself, no matter what work we participate in, it bumps up at least against systems that are oppressive and that are broken and that are marred by sin. And I can say this, even as someone who I mean, I work for the church, and the church is part of systems that are broken and marred by sin. I mean, if you spend any amount of time around the church, you’ll see that there’s all kinds of ways that sin has shaped the American church culture. And so what do we do in that? We weep, we grieve, we have to do the work of lament. We have to admit that we are not going to make all things right, we’re not going to save the world. And we need to actively lament and grieve. 

And then we watch for the ways God is at work and the ways that the reality of the fall is very real, in grief, but that also the reality of redemption is real. And so we watch for that redemption. And then we work to participate in that redemption. But it’s not complete. And that sends us back into grief, you know? And so I think these all— We kind of have to hold all of these three together at the same time. And if we don’t, we end up you know, if you grieve without watching and weeping, you end up in despair. If you watch without the reality of grief and work, you end up in this kind of pietism where it’s just like, Jesus will take care of it and we don’t have to do anything. And if you work without the real important work of grief and watching, you end up thinking that you can save the world. And inevitably you end up burning out and often making things worse than when you started. So we really have to hold all three.

Stump:

That is good, good, rich stuff and resonates a lot with me, and provokes lots of other questions I’d like to ask, but we’ll leave off our conversation here without resolving all the questions just as your book did not resolve all of them. But instead, we will do what we can, which is to commit to faithfully work and watch and weep for the good of the kingdom. And to pray. Could we end by having you pray compline for us?

Warren:

Just this one compline prayer that I base the book on? Yeah, that’s great. 

Keep watch to Lord with those who work or watch or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ, give rest to the weary. Bless the dying. Soothe the suffering. Pity the afflicted. Shield the joyous. And all for your love sake. Amen.

Stump:

Amen. Thank you so much. Tish. It’s a delightful conversation. And I hope we might do it again someday.

Warren:

Yeah, I really appreciate you having me on.

Language of God is produced by BioLogos. It has been funded in part by the John Templeton Foundation, the Fetzer Institute and by individual donors who contribute to BioLogos. Language of God is produced and mixed by Colin Hoogerwerf. That’s me. Nate Mulder is our assistant producer. Our theme song is by Breakmaster Cylinder. 

BioLogos offices are located in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the Grand River watershed. If you have questions or want to join in a conversation about this episode find a link in the show notes for the BioLogos forum or visit our website, biologos.org, where you  will find articles, videos and other resources on faith and science. Thanks for listening.