Field Notes: Ephraim Radner & Annette Brownlee

Theologian Ephraim Radner is Professor Emeritus of Historical Theology at Wycliffe College in Toronto. His work is deeply shaped by experiences as a missionary and minister in Burundi and the United States, and he has written extensively on the Church: on the Church’s unity, the Church’s life in time, past and present, and on the importance of Scripture for understanding Church. Ephraim is married to Rev. Annette Brownlee, Professor Emerita of Pastoral Theology at Wycliffe. Notable among her many research and teaching interests are preaching, Christian practices and formation, and theology as a way of life. John caught up with Ephraim and Annette during their recent visit to Aotearoa, New Zealand. Here they reflect together on their commitment to the Church, on the centrality of Scripture for understanding our present moment, on how to think well about the challenge facing the contemporary Church, and what it looks like to live humble, “thick” lives.

This conversation touches on—but doesn’t completely unpack—the figural reading of Scripture. This refers to the way the “figures” or shapes of life and encounter and action that we find in Holy Scripture encompass our life now personally and together as a Church. For those who’d like to read more about this, we recommend Ephraim’s book Time and the Word (Eerdmans, 2016). More generally, we recommend Annette’s book Preaching Jesus Christ Today, and Ephraim’s new book Mortal Goods.

John: Both of you have lived lives committed to the Church. You’re ordained ministers; you’ve got missionary and ministry experience, as well as having taught in seminaries and universities. So much of your life is bound up with nurturing and encouraging and strengthening the Church. How did this begin?

Annette: I don’t have a particular moment. Unlike Ephraim, I grew up in the church, in an ordinary Christian family, not “uber-Christian”, you know—the only time we said grace at dinner was Easter and Christmas. But I grew up going to church, going to Sunday school, singing in choirs. Pretty standard. Just being a family in the pew. My Mom taught Sunday school sometimes, my Dad ushered sometimes; but not a whole lot more. And so I think I learned or experienced—and this has been a theme in my teaching and my writing and leadership—the power of the ordinary practices of the Church, what we call the ordinary means of grace. And I still do. We are stewards of the mysteries, as St Paul says; and part of our role as church leaders, Ephraim and I, as clergy, is to be stewards of those. You never know who’s going to walk in the door to our church service, what they’re bringing with them, what’s happened the night before, or the year before, that has led them to that moment. And we have the privilege and responsibility of proclaiming the Word, offering the bread and the wine, leading the prayers; and then the rest is up to God.

Ephraim: Our backgrounds are quite different. My engagement with the Church as witness and life—the gospel—is far more survivalistic. I was not raised in a church. My father was Jewish. He converted shortly before I was born. My mother had a Polish immigrant Catholic background, but this Catholic background was rejected. So, with the combination of the two, we didn’t go to church. She didn’t like it, and it was difficult for him. I came to faith as a teenager, although I had been baptized as a child. And I did so in the midst of huge difficulties—my life was falling apart; my mother passed away. And so to me, the gospel was a lifeline in a fairly traditional sense. I found I was drowning, and I was allowed a place to be drawn into life, that could carry me through.

I always go back to my first ministry in Burundi, because it remains the formative place of my conscious thinking about the theology of the Church. It—the Church—was meant to be [a place of life for people] there; and it was, in the midst of civil conflict and violence and the debris of broken lives. But it was under this tremendous interior threat. Frequently, Christians were not stewards of the ministries that they had been given—that were meant indeed to be the source of their life and reconciliation, both socially and spiritually. I saw a lot of betrayal in the Church as well. That didn’t have the effect of making me turn from the Church—just the opposite. My calling is to be committed to the Church’s survival. So, there’s my personal survival; but there’s the Church’s survival. That’s the one thing we’ve been given in the midst of a lot of confusion and darkness. Yes, it’s discouraging, frequently, but that’s not the main point. The main point is to go beyond discouragement, because there is life, there is truth. It doesn’t surprise me that things are difficult, either for individuals or institutions. That’s the sort of common score we are playing to. And therefore the question is: What we do with that score? It’s not changing the score.

John: It seems to me that’s one of the temptations in a time of crisis. You’ve written and spoken in frank ways about the present moment and the challenge to the Church. It seems to me that there are a number of ways we’re seeing churches respond to that, and not all of them are rooted in a confidence in God. So, why do you have hope for the Church?

Ephraim: Well, Jesus Christ has been given to us—he has walked this earth, he has taught, he has spoken, he has died, he has risen, and he reigns. This is the proclamation of the gospel. I believe it. Are there signs of it? Of course: there are signs all over the place. What’s difficult I think for any of us is to believe that and to say, Well if that is true, why isn’t the rest of this—which is the bulk of the world we walk through—why isn’t it transformed in a way that is completely transparent to this reality? My whole theological commitment is to try to think through and articulate the fact that this world, as it is, is transparent to God. It’s not transparent to his truth only if it changes. Our lives are transparent to the truth, love, victory, and joy of God, our God. The question is to look at our lives in such a way that we are looking through the glass, not at reflections of ourselves. I think we haven’t been taught how to see through the glass.

And how one is taught: there are lots of different ways. We have witnesses, we have martyrs, we have teachers, we have our own experience, we have the Church. “In the world, you will have tribulation. Be of good cheer, I have overcome” [John 16:33]. It’s not: “In the world, you will have tribulation, and now that’s over, you can now live somewhere else.” It’s the two together. This world of tribulation is the place Christ has overcome. It’s that congruence, the synchronicity of reality, that is the Christian life. Not one or the other. Obviously, if it’s just tribulation, it’s despair. If it’s just victory, there’s no more world anymore—and of course, that’s unrealistic. That’s a lie. You can’t paper over the tribulations of the world in which we live.

Annette: This is the world we live in. And we can say, Oh, I wish I was involved in the Church in an era when things were easier, or where things were better. But we can only live in the times we live in. And this is the nature of the Church and the times we live in, for better or worse. I remember when I first started in ministry, 35 plus years ago: I was just out of seminary and I’d been trained to do ministry, but I didn’t realize I had to do mission. And I looked at some of my older colleagues, and they would tell stories about the 1950s and 1960s when their churches were just full! And I’m thinking: wow! I kind of wish I could have been a pastor then. But: here we are.

Ephraim: It goes to a question you said you wanted to discuss about figural readings of Scripture, which I’ve written a lot about. Figural understandings of Scripture: the term is a little unhelpful, because it brings up a sense of a literary approach to Scripture. But I, and others, simply mean “a form.” That’s the scriptural term—a form, a morphe. God has made the world—we’ll accept that that’s a fundamental Christian belief. And secondly, we’ll accept that God has made the world filled with things. In Genesis 1 and 2—with birds, and rocks, and stars, and plants, animals, human beings, and so on. These too are forms, are morphe. The world is a set of God’s created forms. To speak of the figural reading of Scripture is simply to say that all the forms of the world that God has made are given in Scripture. All of Scripture is the book of the world. That’s why we can bring them into some kind of relationship: the book of nature and the book of Scripture are the same, although articulated differently. And this brings up what we were just talking about: this is the world we live in. But it’s not simply that time moves on, and we’re stuck in one time of history. It’s that this place we have been put in to minister is a form that Scripture has, in a sense, already laid out for us. We can find this form. And so it’s not a weird place to be. It is God’s place that he has created for us to be. And it’s filled with the promise of his Word.

John: Explain further how that speaks to this cultural moment. People might say “This is unprecedented. We’ve never seen such challenge for the Church before.” You’re saying not the case. You’re not just saying though, that things have been bad in the past; you’re saying that the form of reality that we’re encountering…

Ephraim: …is uttered in the Word of God. It’s God’s Word being uttered. God’s Word creates. So, if we’re created, the shape of our lives reflects, or is the result of, God’s Word uttered, which is Scripture as well, primarily. If you want to get theological, I subscribe to the view—and it’s a traditional Jewish view—that Torah precedes creation. The world comes out, tumbles out, of the Law; or in this case, it tumbles out of Scripture. So, yes, repeated in a way; but it’s not repeated in a kind of dead way. Our lives are the form of the uttered Word of God, which is living, it’s always living. So it’s not repeated in a kind of circular fashion. Our life in a way is the living word being uttered in God, which we can try to understand in Scripture.

John: So, when I come to Scripture (and you’ve said, by the way, you’re not discovering something new here; you’re saying this is the way the church has read Scripture for most of its history), how does the figural reading of Scripture change how I interpret this moment for the Church, or for my life?

Ephraim: Well, one thing is hope. If every moment is God’s creative word uttered in a way that conforms to Scripture, that means that every moment is filled with his purpose, his life. What could be more hopeful? And if this is a moment of tribulation, it means my tribulation is hopeful.

Annette: I think one of the things that it does—Ephraim and I talked about this a couple of days ago—is help us with the question: How do we help people find God in the midst of terrible situations, situations that they want to get better? We so often pray that God will help things get better. That’s not bad. But if all of the world is God’s world, the life we have received now—the anxiety level of young people, struggles in our families, loved ones who are sick, or the tensions that you’re talking about in New Zealand (and every country’s got their own)—how do we find God in that moment? One of the things I teach in pastoral theology is to get out of a problem-solving mode. The problem is the context for God’s care of us, not the thing that we as clergy or church leaders have to fix. Right? That’s because of this utter confidence that the world is made by God, therefore it is brimming with the living God.

John: And Scripture is not “surprised” by what I’m experiencing now?

Ephraim: No. One of the difficulties in all this of course is the role of sin. People could say, Well, what you’re talking about is just saying “Whatever is, is right”, to use Alexander Pope’s famous line.

John: But this is not just a biblical fatalism you’re talking about.

Ephraim: Right. Sin is also wrapped up in the story of Scripture, but not in an easily un-threaded fashion. David is the great example of that: the great figure of the Messiah who’s also the worst sinner. It’s not that it’s not real that he’s a sinner. And it’s not that it’s not real that he’s a righteous king, who is the figure of the Messiah. But it’s hard for us to discern and unravel the threads that are the good and the bad, the sin and the grace. Part of our job, part of our vocation—which is a wonderful vocation, a joyful vocation—in reading Scripture in our own lives, is to try to do that discernment. And it’s never finished. Life is this constant discernment. We’ve got 150 songs in the Psalter for our lives (which, by the way, is a traditional Christian claim: the Psalms is the book of human life). It means that we are constantly going back and forth in the discernment of what is my responsibility and my call to repent, as well as God’s grace. You can’t really pull apart human sin from God’s grace.

So, I think we can affirm the hopefulness of my hour, this situation, at any moment, without giving in to saying “It’s all good, there’s nothing to be engaged.” But part of this situation is a situation of constant repentance. That’s a good thing. It’s a joyful thing to be able to repent. Annette and I were just reading [John Henry] Newman and he has the distinction between remorse and repentance. Remorse is just feeling bad for what you’ve done. That’s not repentance. Repentance is an openness to the power of God to encounter your having done that. So repentance is always a wonderful thing. It’s not a dead-end of feeling bad.

Annette: What if we tried to teach young people that their lives are found in the Psalter? That they don’t have to make it up. That their families are found in the Psalter, their nation. John, you said you’ve had these very hopeful experiences with young people.

John: I teach on the Psalms in our Summer Conference. We say: this is a school for prayer; it’s a gymnasium for prayer. Unlike socials, you’re not having to make yourself up all the time: God has given you a way to pray.

Ephraim: One of the greatest unintentional blasphemies of the church in the last century has been to excise parts of the Psalms. Are you aware that we’ve actually done that? One of the Canadian prayer books has left out whole Psalms because they’re viewed as offensive and filled with attitudes that are unworthy of a righteous person—something like that. I understand the reasons. But it’s the wholeness of this book that exposes who we are, inside and outside, which is why it’s so essential to have the whole book. The whole thing. And if young people could understand and be drawn into the wholeness of the Psalter…. Well, I think we can have faith that something would happen that was good.

John: You’ve said the Church finds her identity in Scripture—say more?

Well, again, to speak negatively, the fact that the Old Testament has disappeared, practically speaking, in many Christian contexts, has robbed the Church of its ability to find itself properly in the Scriptures. The thought experiment is (because we can look at the history of the Church and its attempts to do this): What if we created an ecclesiology based solely on the Israel of the Old Testament? (And of course, that’s precisely what Jesus is providing: an ecclesiology based solely on Israel of the Old Testament). But what if we worked our way to doing that? Again, there would be a lot of reaction negatively to doing that. Some people, in their worries about colonisation and decolonisation, have seen biblical Israel as the epitome of the coloniser. And there’s some truth to that. I mean, we’re right to see Israel’s oppressive actions as sinful. Scripture itself does that. But it also does other things. What do we do with the call into Canaan by God? I’m not saying I have an answer to that. But I have no doubt that looking squarely in the eye of that—if you will—ecclesiology of the conquest of the land is going to trouble and reframe Christian self-understanding. It’s not obvious how it will do so, by the way. I’m not saying it will just turn us back into a triumphalistic church militant. Not at all. The story of the conquest of the land is a complicated one, scripturally—very complicated. But we have to be willing to have the patience to do so, and the courage to spend our time there.

And the Early Church tried, with difficulty. The issue of the Canaanites and the Amalekites and so on, was a favourite place. Origen, Augustine,… a lot of them struggled with: What do we do with this? Because here it is, this is who we are. They certainly didn’t shy away from that. No lectionary excisions. If you take Origen or Augustine, what became a traditional move to deal with these texts was to say: The Amalekites are our sin; this is the struggle against sin. Which is a very allegorical or tropological reading. It means I can look at Israel struggling against Canaan, not to say how bad Israel is, but to see my own sin. This is, maybe, too neat. It became too neat: it became a wooden way of dealing with difficult texts of Scripture, with violence in Scripture, and so on. But [it is] nonetheless, I think, a valid one. The other thing about figural reading is it’s constantly being done, because if this is God’s vital Word that’s in these forms, it means that these forms have an infinite depth of meaning. It’s both singular and polyphonic. We never end our engagement with it. And one thing you can’t do is the sort of equivalent of a cancel culture on Scripture. No; we have a call just to go there to find who we are, find who God is, find what Christ is doing.

John: This dovetails with your lifelong concern, both of you, with formation. And you’ve come to a point of saying: We need to do the basics in a sustained and coherent way. What’s the conviction at work there for you?

Ephraim: So—and Annette will have her take on this—I’ve gotten very interested in my writing in the last 10 plus years on this question of the shape of a Christian life, of a mortal life. Our lives are actually pretty straightforward: we get born, we grow for a few years—at best, as the psalmist says, if we’re lucky, 80. We die. And in that period, there’s this arc of life. It’s actually pretty similar for everybody. Our lives are small things. And that’s said over and over again in Scripture: our lives are very small. And therefore, what we’re called to do is to try to live them well. And to live them in a way that’s faithful to God having made us who we are. But no more. We’re not here to remake the universe.

So, the Christian basics are framed by this modest structure of our life. They can’t and shouldn’t be more than that. They should respond to the fact of birth, of growth, of living with others and trying to nurture them, of getting weak—Christian basics should be ordered to that frame. And to that degree, I don’t think they’re that complicated. They’re profound, but not that complicated. And they haven’t been, in the teaching. The Middle Ages ended up not having big catechisms: what they had was small things—the seven works of mercy, the seven deadly sins, the four cardinal virtues, whatever. And if you think about all these things, they were very practical. They had to do with life and death, and with the suffering of those who, in their brief span of life, needed help. Burying the dead: can you imagine this? One of the seven works of mercy that every Christian was taught, illiterate or not, as being fundamental to their life, was to bury the dead. Nobody would say that today.

But I mean, lots of things come out of that, right? You could spend a course in a theological school unpacking the virtue of burying the dead, and what it means. And that’s sort of what I’m talking about. It’s simple, but profound.

The traditional three pillars of catechesis [are] the Apostles Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments, from the Early Church on—Jesus himself—saw those as frameworks for righteousness. Maybe it seems dumb—old fashioned or something. But again, just to think through the Ten Commandments, as sort of the basic ordering of a human life: you could do a lot worse. And one has done a lot worse!

Annette: When our son graduated from university, a small private liberal arts school in the United States, there was a baccalaureate service in the chapel the evening before the graduation service. It was completely secular. Seating was limited, so every graduate got two or three tickets. So, who was at the service? Parents, grandparents, siblings. The graduates picked a faculty member to talk—this was someone the students thought very highly of—and she gave her talk. And it was all about what you might expect: Be all you can be. Go out there and change the world and live these very large lives. And there was not one aspect of what she said that was connected to the people who were sitting in the chapel. There was nothing about generations, taking care of families, starting families, loving sisters and brothers, taking care of ageing parents, respecting grandparents. And I was just struck by the contrast between the reality of their lives, as bound to the people sitting in the service and the shape their lives were now supposed to take. I think we have done our young people such a disservice when we tell them (and I’m speaking as a woman here, so I’ve benefited from this): “You can go out there and be anything you want. But we expect you to figure it out by yourself”, untethered from families and generations and all that entails.

But what would I have said to them if I had given the baccalaureate address, when they’re surrounded by their parents and grandparents and siblings? Something about the world that these people had given them, their families….

Ephraim: To me, these pillars of the traditional catechism—the Apostles Creed, the Lord’s prayer, the Decalogue [the Ten Commandments]—the Decalogue is a little more obvious in its relationship to what Annette just talked about, this generational, mortal existence. The front end of the Decalogue is about who God is; and then following that, How do we live with one another? And if you do that, then the more “religious” things, the Creeds for example, they actually take on a different register, right? They’re not just about big ideas intellectually, theologically. They’re about how God relates to us. I would do the Decalogue first because it tells us who we are. And then the Creed, because it shows us how this God who has come to us as Creator—in the Incarnation, in [Jesus’s] death, and in the Spirit—it shows that this God is for our life. For this life. And then the Lord’s Prayer tells you in a sense how to pray—what is our relationship to this God? We hallow his name…. Anyway, I won’t go through all these. I don’t think that’s complicated. It’s just profound.

Annette: A question might be, How do we help young people live thick lives? I’m not young, but it does seem that a lot of us are not living thick lives. And we’ve struggled with this in the question of formation at Wycliffe [College, Toronto]. There are students who come to us who really want a degree it seems for information, not formation—and certification, they want the credential. Either they don’t feel they need the formation, or they don’t think that what we offer is what they want. Or they’re just trying to do too many things. They’re spinning too many plates to be able to try for any intentional formation. And we can also just talk about this in life; you know: “My life is so crammed that I haven’t left time to go take my children and watch cricket.” So how do we do thick lives? How do we do that?

Ephraim: I am sorry to say this, but I’m not sure there’s a strategic pathway to doing this. Given the breadth of dissolution of this vision in our world (not just in one place—it’s all over), I wonder whether (and this doesn’t mean we don’t have responsibilities here now) it will only happen in a significant way when there’s some complete upheaval, some catastrophe, that just breaks up all this stuff, and we’re suddenly thrust back on how to live, how to get through the day, and how to help the person I love survive. It’s not a counsel of despair, but it’s a historical question of how things have changed, and where the faith has blossomed. There’s this whole sociological theory that Christianity has thrived in our modern world mostly in places of so-called existential insecurity. And everybody always said the great outlier is the United States, which is a developed nation; but the theory there is that actually the United States is pretty existentially insecure. It doesn’t have a medical system that other places have; it has huge disparities of wealth. Anyway, if that’s true in some fashion, it means that that’s where the Church is AA [i.e., like Alcoholics Anonymous]—when you hit the bottom. And when you hit the bottom, you’re open to God.

John: Pope Francis talked about the church as a field hospital.

Ephraim: But to do that it has to be in a place where the wounded are recognized as such, and recognize themselves as such. I think that’s part of the problem, recognising themselves as such.

Annette: The physician is there for the sick.

Ephraim: They come to him, or they’re brought to him—the sick aren’t always able to come to Jesus, but their friends bring them. I do think our responsibility as Christians for our unbelieving friends and family members, and so on, is pretty great. We have failed, that is certainly true. I’m no dyed in the wool, conversionary evangelical, but we have failed to share our faith, big time. Or we share it with the wrong people. They say we share with people who actually already have it in some fashion. God bless the Salvation Army; God bless those places and people.

We spent our first years of married life in ministry together. I’d been single and worked in Africa and came back and met Annette when she was in seminary: we got married, and she got ordained. Then we went spent two years in the inner city in Cleveland, Ohio, which is one of those sort of broken cities of the American Rust Belt: you know, big factories, highly segregated housing-wise. We worked in African American parts of the city. Very poor. And I was always impressed with these little storefront churches that had existed on and off over the decades. These places worked. They didn’t work forever. They worked because they were the places where people could come who understood that their lives depended purely on God’s grace just to get through the day. I’m not saying we should all hope to be living in such a situation. But they were real, they were genuine. And in some sense, this is a problem with the institutional church: this is not who it is; it can’t be. Someone yesterday was talking about the need for holy places, allowing young people to be exposed to the beauty of holiness. I agree, and therefore I’m all for beautiful churches, or at least spaces; but I think we’ve overdone it. We’re past that. We have to figure out a way to have a beautiful holy place that’s a storefront, figuratively speaking.

John: It reminds me of the village church in Taizé—not the main church of Taizé, but the local village church which they’ve renovated simply and beautifully. I think it restores us to ourselves in certain ways—we go: “Oh, yeah, that’s right, I’m small, here; God you are big… I have nothing to say…

Ephraim: …You have everything to give.” 

Annette: Everything beautiful in the world is based on accepting limits. We were talking earlier about sports: I mean, who figured out a game with a ball where you can’t use your hands—and football is beautiful! Art is based on the limitations of the medium, whether it’s wood, or stone, or music or whatnot; and so too our lives are meant to be beautiful before God and each other. That, I think, deeply has to do with accepting limits: our mortality, but also the rhythm, whether it’s the Sabbath, or daily prayer or whatever. And you mentioned getting down to the bottom—well, AA [Alcoholics Anonymous] are based on accepting existential limits: I cannot drink. I can’t miss this meeting…. So, I think this has to do with thick lives and with formation: How do we live small lives that God can open up to the world? There was a phrase that was on the news right after October 7^th; they were talking about the value of the lives of the hostages taken by Hamas: that every person contains a world. And there’s some truth to that.

Ephraim: The people I’ve seen who are happiest are precisely that: I think it’s humility.

Annette: Paul says, I’ve learned to be content with all things.

Ephraim: The people who have accepted their limits, as they’ve understood them, with joy.

Annette: It’s not a defeatism, or, Oh, woe is me, I can’t do anything.

Ephraim: Unfortunately, that’s not me. I’m constantly rebelling against my limits. I’m just speaking personally. So, I feel that, and I see other people doing that. I also see my wrong attitudes towards my children, wanting them to do more, instead of helping them accept who they are. I do believe that the most beautiful lives are the most humble lives, in a joyful, thankful acceptance of one’s limitations. So, “Be all you can be!” It’s not wrong. The problem is, who you can be is actually given. Discern who you are, and receive who you are.