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You can find previous episodes of “The Stone Chapel Podcast” at Lanier Theological Library.
“The Stone Chapel Podcast” is part of the ChurchLeaders Podcast Network.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and space.
David Capes
Welcome to the Lanier Theological Library. Thank you so much for being a part of our day here.
Amy Orr-Ewing
Thank you for having me in this gorgeous, amazing library. It’s like being in Oxford at home.
David Capes
It is. You came today to be a part of a panel discussion with Ed Stetzer, Tim Dalrymple and Nicole Martin on looking at evangelical identity. But I want to talk about your book. Your book is entitled, “Mary’s Voice: Advent Reflections to Contemplate the Coming of Christ.” Now for those who don’t know Amy Orr-Ewing, who is she?
Amy Orr-Ewing
I’m British, you can probably tell from my accent. And I’m a theologian and author. My interest has been in what we would call in Britain, public theology. So how theology lands with people who don’t have faith or who have different perspectives, and sometimes called apologetics as well. I’ve spent the last 25 years giving talks and lectures writing books, and speaking about the Christian faith in contexts where people are either hostile or interested. But they are seeking to really engage those questions that people have and through questions, to point people to the person of Jesus.
David Capes
Are you married?
Amy Orr-Ewing
I’m married, and I have three sons. Yes, married to a wonderful person called Frog. That is his nickname. His real name is Francis. But he’s been known as Frog since he was a baby. And people don’t really know why but it’s possibly because Francis means Frenchman. And we call the French the frogs. So it might be that. We have three sons, twins who’ve just turned 18 and a 15-year-old as well.
David Capes
You did a PhD, you said. Where was that?
Amy Orr-Ewing
We call it a DPhil in Oxford, but it is a PhD. And it was looking at the work of Dorothy L. Sayers. And particularly looking at all of her genres of writing from the detective fiction through her religious plays, and her essays and her work on Dante’s as well. I was analyzing her apologetic method and what was so brilliant about her communication. Because in the 1940s, she was regarded, along with C.S. Lewis, as the two foremost voices for the Christian faith in their generation.
David Capes
Now, this is not your first book. You’ve written other books. Let’s talk a little bit about those. Give us a little bit of context for what those books are about. What was your first book?
Amy Orr-Ewing
So, my first book is called “Why Trust the Bible?” and I wrote it in 2005. But I did a complete rewrite in 2020. Essentially, by 2005, I’d been working in the field of apologetics in European mainly contexts, universities, workplaces, answering people’s questions about faith. And I realized that questions people had about the Bible weren’t the questions Christian apologetics addressed about the Bible. So there’s great apologetics about textual development of the text or the manuscript tradition.
But actually, people had other questions. Questions like, don’t you just make the Bible say what you want it to say. It’s all just interpretation. Questions, like, isn’t all history, just the victor’s history? So all you have is the powerful man’s interpretation of historical events. Isn’t the Bible sexist? And isn’t it out of date on sex? Questions like, what’s different about the Bible from other holy texts like the Koran or the Hindu Vedas? That book was a best seller, it did really well. But then it got really out of date. And so I rewrote it in 2020.
David Capes
What about your second book?
Amy Orr-Ewing
I think the other one, because I have written some others, but the other one you’re referring to is probably “Where is God in all the Suffering?” And that book came out in 2020. And that was really after 20 years of working in the field of questions and faith. And also, having spent 20 years as a pastor’s wife, and involved in pastoral ministry, in quite difficult contexts. My husband and I lived in the inner city in Britain’s most violent neighborhood for seven years and led a church there. You know, when you pastor people, you walk through trauma, abuse, all sorts of things.
And I wanted to write a book on suffering that didn’t do what I felt a lot of apologetics does, which is to say look, here’s the suffering world, one blob. And here’s the apologetic answer, often the free will defense and let’s just apply it to the blob. But actually, to break down the question of suffering into the more heartfelt and hard questions like, where is God when violent sexual assault happens? How could God be loving and that young person that we love die of cancer? Where is God when there are natural disasters? And where is God in a mental health struggle? So to take those different kinds of questions about suffering, and ask the question does the Christian faith have anything meaningful to say to these real questions. And it was a really hard book to write. But I don’t think it would have been right to write it until I thought about it for 20 years.
David Capes
It takes some maturity to write about it. My wife and I lost a son four years ago. He was 36. And we’ve often commented about how a lot of Christians want to try to say the right thing. But there’s always kind of a ‘but’. This is terrible, but he’s in a better place. Or this is terrible, but he’s no longer suffering.
There’s often a ‘but’ by Christians. Some people have learned enough just to say, you know, this is really terrible. And just full stop. Do not try to add anything to that. Because though you may know all of that it doesn’t help in the moment. And I know, being a pastor’s wife, you had to walk with your husband, through a lot of this, and had to hear about a lot of it as well.
Amy Orr-Ewing
Yes, and my husband is also a survivor of child abuse and has complex PTSD, as well. So has had a real trauma journey. It strikes me as extraordinary that the Christian faith and the scriptures actually hold space for a whole range of responses to suffering in the world, including anger with God. Where the hell are you, God? That’s in the Psalms. Deep, deep, profound lament. If we believe the Bible is inspired by the Holy Spirit, then God actually arranged for that to be there. I find that there are no trite answers. You’re absolutely right.
David Capes
Let’s come to your new book, “Mary’s Voice,” published just this year, by Hackett publishing. It’s entitled “Mary’s Voice: Advent Reflections to Contemplate the Coming of Christ.” It has become very quickly my favorite Advent kind of devotional. And I say that because of the profound prose that you write. I say that because of the beautiful artwork that’s in here, I want you to comment about that. And also your choice of prayer moments toward the end of each chapter. So how did you come to write this particular book about Advent and this season that we’re approaching in our church calendars.
Amy Orr-Ewing
As part of my work in the last four years, through a different series of events in my own life, I’ve become involved in advocacy. Supporting people who have experienced sexual abuse, including in religious contexts. And I was supporting a woman who had been abused as a child by a very high-profile perpetrator in Britain. And this often doesn’t happen for victims of this kind of crime. But actually, there was a criminal trial. And so I was there for it. We have a public gallery. So you have Crown Court, big city, the public gallery. Obviously, there are journalists there, but I could sit through the trial to support this individual. And on about the second day, obviously, it’s horrific. The evidence is presented to the court. The witnesses are cross-examined. It’s a very, very traumatic experience. And by the end of the day, you’re just praying desperately for justice. You’re praying, asking God, where are you again, in this suffering, in this darkness.
And I was feeling really low. It had been a really hard day. And I decided to go to the cathedral in this city. It’s a beautiful, beautiful cathedral. And so I went in and I thought, I’m just going to sit here and pray and just sort of decompress a bit. And it happened to be evensong which is a beautiful service of liturgy, and choral music. But I wasn’t really there for that. But they finally gave me a sheet and I took it. And as the service progressed, I looked at the sheet as the choir got up. And they were singing the Magnificat, which is Mary’s words after the angel Gabriel has announced to her that she’s going to give birth to a son. And the Magnificat is just an extraordinary, defiant declaration of faith and hope of who Jesus is going to be and what he is coming into this world to do. But as I was reading the sheet, the choir sang, “He has brought down the rulers from their thrones and He will exalt them of low degree”.
It hit me between the eyes, this beautiful statement of profound Christian hope that in Jesus, there is and will be justice in this dark world. And I was really encouraged by that. And the trial went on. There was a guilty verdict, which was wonderful. In the course of that it got me thinking about Mary. In my work in apologetics obviously, I’ve thought a lot about the role of female witnesses in the New Testament. And in particular, arguments around the resurrection. We see that the way women are positioned in the narrative means that a very strong case can be made that the gospel narratives are true. Since if you were making up a story about God becoming flesh, dwelling among us, dying by crucifixion and rising again, you would never position women in the narrative in the way they’re positioned, if it weren’t true. So that’s great evidence for that.
And I began to realize how significant the central other aspects of the Christian faith being witnessed by women were. The heart of what we’re thinking about Christmas, the idea of the Incarnation, God becoming flesh and dwelling among us, the primary witness to that is a teenage girl called Mary. Now, in the UK, I don’t know what it’s like here, but at Christmas time school children, including in state schools would do a kind of reenactment of the nativity story every year. One year, I got to play Mary for the whole hour-long production of everything going on. You know, knocking at the innkeeper’s door, and the donkey and everything. And in the whole hour-long production, I didn’t say a word. Mary has been reduced, often in Protestantism as this kind of mute figure we’d hardly dare look at in case like Catholics, we might worship her. That’s the sort of the stereotypical idea.
I’ve been a theologian for 20 plus years, I’ve been a Christian for three decades. I know that women are central to the gospel narratives as witnesses. I’ve never really listened to Mary’s voice, her witness and her word. Never really considered it deeply. I was going also in the aftermath of having been part of an organization where very serious abuse had gone on by the founder. And you know, there was real devastation in the wake of that for me personally, but also other people. I was in a kind of this season of lament in my Christian life. And it just was extremely profound to journey with Mary’s words of defying hope, in the context of oppression that she lived in. And to see Jesus afresh through recentering the perspective of the Christian faith’s most important female witness. That’s how it began. So, it sounds like a juxtaposition from apologetics. But I hope that it isn’t. It is a devotional. There’s some theology in there. There’s still some apologetic engagement in there too. And a journey through December.
David Capes
Well, we’re going to talk about day 5, December 5th in just a minute, but tell us a little about the artwork. Because there’s this Florentine artist. There are paintings of church ceilings, and triptychs, and just a variety of beautiful manuscripts.
