The mission of Yale Divinity School is "to foster the knowledge and love of God through scholarly engagement with Christian traditions in a global, multifaith context." A variety of Yale Divinity School faculty and alumni have been featured as guests on For the Life of the World, and this episode highlights some of those contributions, including Krista Tippett, Willie Jennings, Keri Day, Kathryn Tanner, and David Kelsey (not to mention Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz). Current Yale Divinity Student Luke Stringer introduces each highlight segment. Special thanks to Harry Attridge and Tom Krattenmaker.
The mission of Yale Divinity School is "to foster the knowledge and love of God through scholarly engagement with Christian traditions in a global, multifaith context." A variety of Yale Divinity School faculty and alumni have been featured as guests on For the Life of the World, and this episode highlights some of those contributions, including Krista Tippett, Willie Jennings, Keri Day, Kathryn Tanner, and David Kelsey (not to mention Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz). Current Yale Divinity Student Luke Stringer introduces each highlight segment. Special thanks to Harry Attridge and Tom Krattenmaker.
Show Notes
Production Notes
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
Evan Rosa: This is for the life of the world, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Evan Rosa with a Yale Center For Faith and Culture.
The state admission of Yale Divinity School is to foster the knowledge and love of God. Through scholarly engagement with Christian traditions in a global multi-faith context. And this year marks the 200th anniversary, the bicentennial of its founding
Now this mission for the divinity school resonates deeply with what we do at the center for faith and culture. Helping people envision and pursue lives worthy of our shared humanity.
For us is informed and animated by seeing the knowledge and love of Christ as the key to this flourishing.
Since we launched this podcast in March, 2020, we've hosted a variety of Yale Divinity School faculty and alumni as guests on the show. And in celebration of the bicentennial. And the ways that these guests have helped foster the knowledge and love of God here on the show.
We're sharing highlights from five of these
But we also thought it'd be fun to share the mic with a current student at Yale Divinity School and a media and communications assistant for the Yale Center For Faith and Culture. And that's Luke
luke is a Yale college alum. Who's now pursuing a master's in religion at the divinity school.
And if you're one of our regular listeners, you might be familiar with some of the amazing graphic art that Luke has contributed to recent episodes.
I asked Luke to reflect a little on his time at YDS so far. And then throughout this episode, he'll introduce all the segments.
Welcome Luke.
Luke Stringer: Thanks, Evan I think for me, one of the things. About studying. Yes, that's been cool and also challenging. Is realizing how interconnected the questions are. Of how to live, how to believe and worship, how to work and serve. How to create. I think in light of all that stands in the way of flourishing life, especially it's been easy for me to. At timescale overwhelmed. At all, I don't know, or don't have the power to address. But. Also the flip side is the interconnectedness and the bigness of the problem. It means that there are so, so many ways. To pursue. Flourishing to pursue goodness. And to sort of look. For God's pursuit of the world that God loves. I think YDS has helped me reappraise. How the stakes are both kind of higher, but also lower. In that. I don't have to have all the answers. To make a difference that still really matters. If it's for me, at least, especially if I believe. And a God whose desire is the flourishing of the world. That God laughs. And that's been really cool and really. I mean a whirlwind of a year and a half so far, but something I'm really, really grateful
Yeah. Thanks, Evan. It's been really fun to work with you and also just, be included in this cool project that we're doing.
Our first segment features Yale Divinity School alum, Krista Tippett. The founder and CEO of the on being project. She's a nationally syndicated journalist has become known for curating conversations on the art. Of being human. Civil conversations and social healing. Miroslav invited Krista onto the show to talk about the importance of engaging other nests on the grounds of our common humanity. Her personal faith journey from the small town Baptists in Oklahoma. To a secular humanism and a divided cold war Berlin. And then back to our spiritual Homeland and mother tongue of Christianity.
Miroslav Volf: Recently, also, you quoted one of the great Christian saints, Julian of Norwich from the 14th Century--her famous line: All shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. And you did that in the midst of a pandemic, in the midst of political division, in the midst of racial injustice, in the midst of generalized, depressed state of most of us: human pain, suffering, disconnection, violence, you name it. All shall be well! Do you believe that?
Krista Tippett: I do believe it with a cosmic sense of mystery and time. I also think, yeah, I did that on Twitter, which is a strange choice to do it because I had just use those lines; I had just sent those lines out to someone. And I've thought about that line of Julian of Norwich often across the years: And all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. And I know that the only reason it is not absolutely absurd and even offensive to use those words is because Julian herself was living in circumstances worse than ours, right? The black death was raging all around. And they've been there for people across generations, not just in the best of times.
It's a mystical statement. Julian of Norwich was also calling God "She" --I can't even imagine how that was received in her time. So yeah, it's a mystical statement. It doesn't add up with what we can see and hear and touch, and yet it made sense for her and on some cosmic level that I cannot be articulate about it. It makes sense for me. But what I want to say is that I don't think that using that phrase is an invitation to just sit back and expect things to be all right. It doesn't absolve --if I believe that, then I have to throw my body, my life, and all of my energy at that possibility, at making that real and visible.
Miroslav Volf: You called it a mystical statement and you're right. But it's a mystical statement of hope, which is what you just added, and the hope which takes us into it's own realization. So it makes you busy. It's a kind of waiting...
Krista Tippett: Gives me a work to do. Yeah.
Miroslav Volf: And in fact, if you didn't have that hope, you might end up being despondent and not doing anything. So rather than making you lazy, it energizes you. Jürgen Moltmann called it a cup of coffee for the present. Religion is a cup of coffee for the present. A kind of old critique of Marx was that religion was opiate of the people, and so he turned it into...
Krista Tippett: I see. Oh, that's so good! I had never heard that.
Miroslav Volf: So upper rather than downer.
Krista Tippett: I think Netflix is the opium of the masses. There's a tendency coming that's really gotten in the way.
Miroslav Volf: At the beginning, I mentioned to you briefly in our offline conversation that we here at Yale teach this course, Life Worth a Living, which is to say, we try to examine from the perspective of various traditions how people imagine--greats spiritual masters and ordinary people as well--how they imagine. What kind of life is truly worthy of our humanity? And so my last question to you is what do you think? What kind of life is worthy of our humanity?
Krista Tippett: I think we are really in a time where we're opening more deeply to the truth about ourselves, which is also where you and I started, that we are alone and that we are here for each other, and that both of those things are true. The question of what it means to be human in our century, with every single challenge before us as a species, has made the question of who we will be to each other --that is now inextricable from the question of what it means to be human.
And everything we're learning through science is backing up this deep spiritual truth. It sounds beautiful. It's a little bit like "all shall be well." It's actually very hard. It's very hard to be inextricable from other human beings. And we're just on that line of that fault line and that line of friction. I think we are, on the one hand, experiencing in a time of tremendous stress on the planet and in our bodies--just even below all the stresses, all the things that are happening to us, which makes it just impossible actually for us to be our best selves, except for brief snatches of time. And, we're also very fitfully gaining knowledge and tools to--I would say--to befriend complexity, to befriend our complexity. I even think--we don't have time to go into this, but I even think the way gender is being revisited is about revisiting the notion of binaries. Because our binaries are dead ends for the things we have to grapple with.
And so that's just a fascinating development that has happened in some ways so quickly. It's civilizational. It's a species development. And I would also look at how the practices of meditation and mindfulness and contemplation, how those are emerging for modern people. It's really fascinating. At the turn of the century, that was very much a fringe thing and Buddhism, which has been cultivating these traditions of knowing ourselves for thousands of years and really privileging the cultivation of those things, has come along and that is something 21st-Century people are reaching for. But it's not a Buddhist phenomenon. It's these spiritual technologies that are also in the other traditions. But these become ways for us to settle and calm, and befriend reality in all its complexity, and do that very messy work of being our best selves and engaging with otherness.
I think it's just such a fascinating time. And somehow, that's my answer to that question. It's also this move of understanding our inextricability from each other. I think you and I talked about this years ago, this very challenging implication of Christianity and theology that we are in fact shaped as much by how we treat our enemies as by how we treat those we love. That's actually just a reality. That's a truth about life. It could not feel more counter-cultural to how we're living right now, and yet I think it's the kind of truth that is at the same time--as we are in such a mess in so many ways--that truth is also surfacing. And that I think for me is what it's about--is my answer to this question. .
Luke Stringer: For the life of the world launched in 2020. During an immensely chaotic and troubling year. The painful and confusing early days of the pandemic. Gave away to the horrifying footage of George flight's murder. In the days following this event, we aired or reflection by Yale Divinity School, professor Willie Jennings, and a conversation with Princeton, theological seminary, theologian, and yell deaf school alum, Carrie day. Here's an excerpt from Willie Jennings reflection on the murder of George Floyd. Or reflection, he entitled. My anger. God's righteousness.
I was pulled over or stopped on the street or stopped in a store. I had done nothing. They were looking. I sat or stood, waiting, and then they left. Each encounter returned that feeling of helplessness that said to me, if I make one wrong statement or gesture or sudden movement, I would be jailed or killed. This kind of helplessness forms you for a lifelong fight against a menacing hopelessness.
I felt that helplessness again, as I watched the life drain out of George Floyd. And I sensed even more deeply, once again, the struggle against that hopelessness, which today I have to say feels like it's winning. I repeated many times the lesson that my parents and my people taught me about hope. Hope is a discipline; it is not a sentiment.
But what I have also learned is that living the discipline of hope in this racial world, in this white supremacist-infested country called the United States of America, requires anger. I am angry. As long as I can remember, I have sensed this anger in me like a constant low humming sound, sounding from my very being.
In truth, there is something quite noble in being the proverbial angry black person. Of course, it is not a proverb. This anger is the result of a history that will not relent. A history that constantly seeks to bind black people to death itself. But I've also come to realize that this anger, my anger, is connected to the righteous indignation of God.
Now, as a theologian, I know that it is very dangerous to suggest the connection between human anger and God's righteous indignation. All kind of mischief can happen with such a connection. There is great danger and great power. Insane. What I am angry about, God is angry about. That connection can only be made if it has two abiding characteristics.
First, it must be about the destruction of life. Quick or slow, it does not matter. The point is that life is being taken away, being drained away. There is no doubt that this first characteristic is in place because black life is constantly stolen life. Only God gives life and only God can take back life.
There's always been the height of hubris and idolatry to think that we can, like God, take life, especially when the taking of that life is to protect property or a particular economic and social order.
There is a second characteristic that is necessary, if that connection is real. It must be shareable. In fact, it must be shared. I don't think enough people, especially enough Christians, understand that the righteous indignation of God is to be shared. I have had so many dear friends, really dear friends, well-meaning all of them, call me or text me or email me this week with their condolences each in their own way saying to me, I can't imagine what you are feeling right now.
Yes, you can. My anger is shareable. Indeed, one of the most stubborn barriers to overcoming this racial world is the refusal of so many people to take hold of black anger. It is a particular sickness of whiteness that invites people to imagine themselves as spectators of racial suffering and observers of black pain who are allowed to feel only assorted forms of white guilt.
Those of us who are Christian, we should know better. God wants us to hate what God hates. God invites us into a shared fury, but only the kind that we creatures can handle. You all know that anger is frightening because it is not easily controllable. Anger can easily touch hatred, and if anger enters into hatred, then we will be drawn into violence, and way too many people in this world have been drawn deeply into violence. What Christian faith knows is that the way to keep anger from hatred is not to deny anger, to pretend that it is not real. No, we can't do that. What keeps anger from touching hatred is not the cunning of reason or the power of will. It is simply Jesus.
For the Christian, Jesus stands between anger and hatred, prohibiting the reach, blocking the touch and saying to us, "Don't go there. There is nothing there, but death." Anger bound to God's righteous indignation has a different purpose for us. It points us to the change that must happen, that is the overturning of an unjust world order, this racial order.
Luke Stringer: Here theologian Cary day shares the core motivations of Christians to embrace the other. Across lines of difference.
Miroslav Volf: So if somebody were to ask you, "give me a sketch of what in Christian faith should motivate me to stand for not just inclusion, but a full fledged embrace of difference," how would you respond to that?
Keri Day: What should motivate us as Christians first is what's in the life of Christ, right? What do we see playing out in the life of Christ? Because this gives us sort of vision into the very life of God. Now this is important, right? But it's connecting that--how does that apply then to what we are experiencing today? So for example, if we're talking about Jesus as a part of the Jewish community that was underneath--they were underneath Roman imperial oppression--what are the ways in which today African-Americans are underneath white American oppression? Making these particular connections, I think the first motivation is that --you can see I keep invoking scripture, right? There is something about the scriptural text that is meant for our freedom and liberation. It frees us towards a life that is lived with and for others, but it means making these connections, I think, Miroslav. So I think that's the first motivation.
The second motivation that Christians should have is that we are called to be the hands and feet of Christ in the earth. We are called to serve, which means that it is not simply about asking whether issues that arise: is it serving our interests or our present views? And in this case, I would say white communities, this is a very important point. But rather, it is asking what are the ways in which I can come into contact and engaging African American folks, in ways that allow me to be shocked and surprised by their stories in order to realize the inadequacies of my own thoughts about the world, and in this case about America, in relationship to their stories and experiences. I think that kind of surprise--and we see that going on in the gospels that constantly, we are shocked and surprised by what Jesus has to say about those that are seen as marginalized and oppressed and ostracized and even criminal.
Miroslav Volf: So do I understand correctly, it's almost like an intersection between the gospels and how the gospels have been read by African American communities through the centuries?
Keri Day: That's right. Exactly. I think that African American communities, because of what they've experienced, they've had to precisely what I'm talking about. They've had to read the gospels in some ways with attention to those the least of these, to those who have been counted out and marginalized, as well as, for example, the prophetic literature of the Old Testament, which talks about attending to the poor and the widow to those who have been discounted. Yes, I think that is precisely what I'm trying to say is that we need less of hermeneutics above that don't take seriously our call as Christians to address injustices as central to our identity. We need more of a hermeneutics from below that allows us to do that.
Luke Stringer: This next segment features theologian Catherine Tanner. Who spoke to Ryan McAnally lens about the virtue of patients through the lens of economy and capitalism. She's the Frederick Markwan professor of systematic theology at Yale Divinity School. And her latest book is Christianity and the new spirit of capitalism.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: So that's at the level of corporations and their financial instruments and mechanisms that have a similar sort of presentizing effect. How does the urgent focus on the present seep into the lives of those of us who aren't directly tied to trading and financial markets, or aren't running a corporation and having to keep an eye on the stock price every day?
Kathryn Tanner: Part of this has to do with workplace practices, but I'm also generalizing from poverty studies, mostly by sociologists who are just showing that a lack of time and resources makes you fixated on the present. That again goes back to this sense of everything being an emergency. It's an emergency because you don't have any reserves. You don't have any savings, if you want. There's nothing that you can bank on to help you out in life's difficulties. So that's, I think, something that everybody has an experience of, but probably primarily people who have a lack of time resources because they're working like two jobs just to feed themselves. But I think most people, even if they're not in dire economic circumstances, have this sense of there's never enough time and that if anything bad happens, you have to throw everything at it because you don't have any other choices.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: It just struck me hearing that there might be a relationship between that and the stuff you were saying about being chained to the past because if any particular present emergency can become that definitive pass to what you're chained, then at each time there's a life altering crisis that's looming, anytime something crops up.
Kathryn Tanner: Yeah. Being in debt has the effect of putting more pressure on every moment because debt has to be serviced. And that means you have that much less money, resources to direct in any other form.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Falling behind has the threat of an exponential increase in behindness whenever there's compounding interest going on. This is not a great place to be with respect to one's relation to the present. You suggest in your book that certain Christian ways of seeing things might help get some leverage in a different kind of formation. Can you contrast what you see as a Christian sense of the urgency of the present with these ways that contemporary economic systems wash out the past and the future and leave nothing but this urgent present?
Kathryn Tanner: Yeah. A lot of what I was trying to do in the book is just go through a number of different Christian ways of looking at things, trying to find ways of looking at, say, the past, present, and future, that would give you some kind of maximum contrast from what you're presently being subjected to. Just so that your Christian commitment is going to distance you from what's happening to you under these economic conditions so that it gives you a kind of critical leverage with respect to them.
Like the present, I was trying to suggest the ways in which Christianity can also focus you on the present, but with very different implications for the way you live your life. And you might be focused on the present because there is an urgency to the present. You need to do what you should do as a Christian, make the appropriate Christian witness and act in the ways that you should act if you're a Christian, and you need to do that now. You shouldn't put that off. It shouldn't be deferred. But my point would be that this is very different from the kind of urgency that you feel under present day finance-dominated capitalism because you're being told that you have everything that you need in order to lead a different life so that there's a sense of fulsomeness, amplitude, expansiveness that--and I'm talking about this in terms of God's grace--you have a sufficient supply to do what needs to be done. So it's not so much that you're in circumstances of poverty. To the contrary, you're in a situation of resource abundance, if you want. I'm talking about grace here, not actually living in circumstances of resource abundance because that's clearly false. So that's the kind of thing that I'm suggesting.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: I find myself asking the question: would you imagine those two worlds bleeding into each other at all, or affecting each other?
Kathryn Tanner: Part of what I'm trying to suggest is that the contemporary economic circumstance is turning you towards the present. It's telling you to look, look, look, look at the present moment. So rather than saying from a Christian point of view, "you shouldn't pay attention to any of that," instead saying, "yeah, let's look at the present; let's focus on the presence; let's make the present everything, but let's just do that in a different way."
This is something that I do in my theological work generally is let's take something that already has cultural currency, and let's just do something unusual with that rather than rejecting it all together and saying, "oh no, we can't be" as if we're not really a part of this world or we're not really shaped by current economic trends or whatever. Let's work with them, those trends, but do something unusual with them. I push them in different directions. I think about them differently.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: How would that different stance towards focusing on your present, how would that change things for somebody who focuses on the present very intensely? The sense that in grace, you have everything that you need for this moment, from a Christian perspective, what difference does that make?
Kathryn Tanner: That's a really good point. I'd be suggesting that you should try to enact that same way of looking at the present that you find from a Christian point of view in the present economic circumstance, and that means changing the economic structures of things. So if the problem here is that you don't have any slack, this is something that these poverty theorists talk about, give people some slack. There's plenty of evidence that suggest that one of the things that economically disadvantages African-Americans is that they don't have any savings. And there's a reason why they don't have any saving. They've been systematically expropriated for centuries. So if that's the case, then something needs to be done so that they can actually have money in the bank to trade on, so to speak, when there's an emergency so that they won't be forced into these dire circumstances when they get a flat tire on their car, or whatever. They'll be able to deal with that in ways that won't be seriously life altering.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: So do you have any thoughts on how all of these dynamics and the ways that they impinge on our lives might affect the practical possibility of something like patience in our world today?
Kathryn Tanner: Patience is a form relate you to the present in this kind of ample way, a way of elongating the present in some ways that doesn't require immediate action. So yeah, I think that might be an interesting case, if you want, of what I was saying about the possibility of Christian commitments being an antidote to what you're being pushed into by present economic circumstance. a lot of what I was describing is a form of impatience. I need to profit now.
Sociologists and political theorists talk about that something has to hold firm in order for you to take risks, and that means risks with unreliable people and you direct all your attention to something that is risk-free or that is completely stable or eternal or whatever, but they're connected to one another that in virtue of being committed to a God who doesn't change and who's stable, that enables you to throw yourself into an unpredictable, volatile, and fallen world and not feel that you're going to be destroyed by that.
Luke Stringer: This final highlight segment features theologian David Kelsey. Who is the Luther a five? Gold professor emeritus of theology, a Yale Divinity Already taught for 40 years. Ryan McInerney lens. Himself and alum of Yale Divinity School. Brings Kelsey onto the show to talk about the wild and inexplicably grip of Unearthly creatures. And the analogously wild and an explicable nature of cods grace. And God's immediate if silent. Witness and presence to human English.
David Kelsey: God so exceeds our capacity to get our minds around what it is to be God that everything we say about God in the tradition--my tradition labels that "analogically said" that "God is kind of like someone who loves," "God is kind of like someone who is focused on justice." But it's that somehow alike that is the slippery part. There's a medieval Roman Catholic formula that says that in an analogy, the two things are said to be similar, but the dissimilarities outweigh the similarities by far. And that's what we always have to keep in mind, which means that when we believe we are speaking correctly to characterize God as, say, just, we have to very careful before we draw inferences from that, because we have to acknowledge immediately we don't really quite know what justice in God's case means.
So one implication of this idea of God is that, I want to say, when we talk about God, we've got the start and then correct ourselves, and then start over almost endlessly. I call that stammering. When people talk very fluently about God, I get very uneasy. It's too slick. That's one thing it means. But that has an application about suffering in particular. God almighty. God is powerful. Yes. But don't just assume that you can infer from that that therefore God sends everything that happens. Just don't take that for granted.
And that leads me to a second kind of implication about this. The way our tradition says God relates to other realities than God--the generic name for all that is creatures. The way God relates is told in scriptural stories and those stories have certain particularities to them. They're stories about how not just that God relates to creation to hold it in being, sustain its reality, and nurture its fruition, but how God goes about doing that. So too, the tradition says God relates to draw us back to God when we have separated ourselves from God. Yeah, that's true. But that's awfully abstract. At least for Christians, the story about that is a story about what God is doing in the life of Jesus, and that's the very concrete way God goes about doing it.
It also tells us a story about God working to draw creation to ultimate fulfillment and endtime glorification of some sort--beatitude at the end. But again, the images and the narratives in the scriptures are about how God seems to go about doing that. And it's that particularity that I want to focus on because there's different sets of images that scripture uses in each of those ways God relates to us, and they tell us something about God and what you can say about God and what you cannot say about.
When we talk about how God relates to suffering, how God's involved in it, we have to ask ourselves who is this God we're talking about? What are God's qualities? Would God do a thing like send suffering for a purpose? Is that something God would do? I say in light of the kinds of stories that we take to be scripture's accounts of our God goes about relating to us, the answer is "no, God would not do a thing like that," although you can find passages of scripture that seem to assert that very thing. So this is a matter of reading scripture in the light of scripture.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: It strikes me this is a very different approach to take to the question of suffering and how God's power relates to it than one that would find an explanation either in terms of purposes and plans and sending and things like that, or in terms of incapacities, a kind of principle--it's not within God's power in some sort of strict sense, which would pull God into the same plane as creatures and just quarden off some things as doable versus not doable. And it leaves me with the feeling that part of what you're driving at is explanation--an explanation may not be on offer here. I don't know if in the experience of anguish over a loved one suffering, explanation comes to the fore. But it does seem to me that at least at a step remove, there's a powerful drive to want an explanation.
David Kelsey: Yeah, there is. There is. And I guess I'm urging that two things at the same time. On the one hand, to acknowledge that human creatures want explanations. Yeah. We all do. It's very important to us to make sense of our lives by being able to see why things are happening, see patterns in them. What I want to stress is two things here. In the actual pastoral situation, or you're consoling somebody who is in deep anguish, let them raise the why questions. Acknowledge those are real questions. And then acknowledge that as people of faith, we don't know the answers. What we do affirm is that God Godself is present in the situation of the people who are anguishing and the people who are suffering. God is there affirming the value of that life even as it suffers, while God is as offended by the suffering as you are, God is as angry at the suffering as you are.
To trust God on the part of the one who is offering pastoral care, for that person to trust God in that situation involves a witness to the fact that they trust God's presence and want to affirm that it's the case to the person who is suffering, whether the person who is suffering at the moment is able to affirm it is another matter, and that doesn't matter finally at that point. But also to do that instead of being sucked into the game of giving explanation, because that just plays into the urge to have explanation. And in those situations, part of faith, part of living a faith as trust in God is a matter of acknowledging that one doesn't know, and yet affirms that God is present in the midst of a situation that is simply unintelligible.
there's no quid pro quo that makes any sense out of all of this. And that kind of means that the world was a bit inexplicably. That's the point. Evil is inexplicable. I think people of faith don't take that into consideration. God created a good world. The world is good is explicable in terms of the character of the creator of it.
But that means God did not create evil. And yet unmistakably the evil is there now. That's anomalous. There's no norm to that. It's absurd. And it's real. How it came to be that way, we don't know. Presumably God does, but hey, I'm not God. And I think that part of the life of faith has got to include the acknowledgement not only that we don't fully grasp God, but that the world also is experienced many times as anomalous. And that God is in the midst of the anomalies, present to us in the anomalies, not only in the occasions when it all makes beautiful sense, which also do happen.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: So there's a kind of spirituality attached to this of not short-circuiting the mysteriousness of evil and yet affirming somehow the priority of what you call the positive mystery that is God.
David Kelsey: Emphatically yes.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: That feels hard.
David Kelsey: It is hard. Yes. It is hard. Christian people all too easily slide into one of the "making it easy." And the way we make it easy is the claim that in principle, we have all the answers. And on the one hand, like God's grace--what I do call the positive mystery--and on the other hand, the reality of evil are somehow reconcilable if you just think hard enough about it. And that was a way of obscuring the sheer wildness of evil on the one hand--wild in the sense that it's unpredictable. Inexplicable as I keep insisting is the "why it's there." And on the other hand, the wildness of God's grace, which is also "why in the world would God love us this way." In the Christian story, God loves us to the extent that God Godself enters into the suffering in the life of a particular human being.
Why would God do that? We say because God loves us. Fine. But why does God love us considering what we've made of the world? It's wild. And we try to domesticate all that by making it manageable. And one sign of our drive to manage it that people who engage in pastoral caring, people who care about people who are anguished by someone's suffering--one sign that we're tempted always to manage it is that we talk, and we talk in an explanatory way as though that's going to get it all together and make it feel better. Better not to talk. Better to acknowledge what's there. Witness to the presence of God's grace in the midst of it, and be silent.
Evan Rosa: This episode featured Krista Tippett. Willie Jennings Carrie day. Catherine Tanner and David Kelsey. Special. Thanks to Harry average, Tom Craton maker and Luke stringer. Interviews were performed by Miroslava Wolf and Ryan McAnally lens. And I produce and edit the show.