Theology in the Raw - 752: #752 - A Southern Baptist Girl Turned Anglican Priest: A Conversation with Tish Harrison Warren

Episode Date: August 12, 2019

On episode #752 of Theology in the Raw Preston has a conversation with Tish Harrison Warren. Tish and Preston talk about poking the progressive bear, egalitarianism in the NT, Tish’s journey toward priesthood in the Anglican church, and her hot new book Liturgy of the Ordinary. Tish Harrison Warren is a priest in the Anglican Church in North America. She has worked in ministry settings for over a decade as a campus minister with InterVarsity Graduate and Faculty Ministries, as an associate rector, and with addicts and those in poverty through various churches and non-profit organizations. She is now a Writer in Residence at Church of the Ascension in Pittsburgh, PA. (If you want to hear a long explanation of why she’s for women’s ordination, you can listen here.) She is author of Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life (IVP). Her articles and essays can be found in Christianity Today, CT Women, Art House America, Comment Magazine, The Well, Christ and Pop Culture, The Point Magazine, and elsewhere. She is a founding member of The Pelican Project. Connect with Tish on Social Media: Twitter | Facebook Support Preston Support Preston by going to patreon.com Connect with Preston Twitter | @PrestonSprinkle Instagram | @preston.sprinkle Check out his website prestonsprinkle.com If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review.

🎵 Okay, I am here with my new friend and fellow writer, Tish Warren. And I have already apologized to Tish privately, and I want to do so publicly, for harassing her on Twitter. Because I sent an email to her, I don't know, a few weeks ago saying, Hey, Tish, I would love to have you on my podcast. And I got nothing but crickets, which is not a big deal, because most people that email me get nothing but crickets, sometimes forever or for a very long time. And yet I reached on Twitter to rally my followers to agree with me that I really need to have Tish on my podcast. And I, so I hope that you take that harassment in a positive way. Cause I think a lot of people were like, yes, yes, yes, please have Tish on. So anyway, all I have to say, I apologize, but, uh, I'm also excited that you're on the podcast.

Thanks for being on Theology in the Room. Yeah, I'm glad. I'm sorry. I'm terrible at email. There's an entire chapter in my book about how bad I am at email. And especially in the summer, we've been traveling and I'm pregnant and sick a lot. So yeah, I'm bad at it. But I do want anyone listening to know that some of this is that I'm on a committee. I'm now on an advisory committee with you and sort of know your work. So I'm saying that to say I will not be bullied by other people necessarily. This isn't like the way to get me on your podcast. I don't want this to be like a regular occurrence every time I get on Twitter, it's like rallying the troops. I do apparently succumb to peer pressure, but this wasn't just peer pressure.

I like, I, I, we've emailed another contact. So yeah, I came across your work through a mutual friend, Karen Swallow Pryor. And we had a little, well, I first, it was on Twitter when you released a blog and you got hammered pretty hard from, if I can, correct me with the language I'm using, but from the kind of progressive left, mainly Christian progressive left crowd, which in my experience can be, I don't know, let's the all general just say it and repent later, but can sometimes be the most hostile, not the non-Christian progressive, but the Christian progressives can sometimes be

incredibly hostile, at least in my anecdotal experience, which is, you know, it's my anecdotal experience. You can't disagree with it. One of the beauties of postmodernism. Anyway, It's my anecdotal experience. You can't disagree with it. One of the beauties of postmodernism. Anyway, can you summarize what you said in that blog and why that fired up people so much? Yeah, this was a long time ago. This was 2017, which granted is only two years ago. But in the age of the Internet, that's like ancient history. But it was a piece, gosh, it's been so long since I've talked about this. Basically, the question, it's a piece about institutional authority and embeddement and the kind of accountability that Christian leaders need. So what I was and remain concerned about is that in evangelicalism,

often authority to speak on behalf of the church or as a Christian leader comes not in really kind of formal overt ways, like credentialing and ordination and that sort of thing, but through celebrity. And so the, you see this all the way in American church history. I mean, you see this in the sacred great awakening folks that, you know,

if you can sort of rally a crowd, if you can create sort of a spectacle, then people will watch it and you'll get power that way. And sometimes folks who do that are trustworthy and sometimes they're not. And so, and I mean that doctrinally trustworthy, I also mean like morally trustworthy, right? Like we all, all of us are need accountability. And so, so I was saying that with the internet, that's particularly the case that people have gotten authority to speak because of popularity, not because of any kind of institutional embeddedness, not because they're accountable, not because they're ordained, not because they've been set apart by the church necessarily to speak for the church and the minister on behalf of the church as a quote unquote public teacher, but because they got popular through the internet and then sort of assumed the role of public teacher. The problem with that is not that everything they say is wrong or that they don't have

a helpful voice, but that I think the more public and overt your authority and teaching are, then the more public and overt your accountability needs to be, right? And so it's folks that have a lot of power and that when they say something, when they make a theological pronouncement, you know, it gets mentioned in the Atlantic, it gets a lot of attention, but they, it's, my question is, why, in some sense, and this is going to sound, this could come across as mean, but I don't mean it this way. It's a genuine question. Why? Because someone has a blogger and 100,000 followers on Twitter, and because they have popular books, why are they authorized to speak on behalf of the church and on behalf of theology, on behalf of the broader global church? Why does that get more attention than, than like a lay person on the third row of my congregation who is awesome,

you know, is a lay person, smart and thoughtful lay person, maybe. But it doesn't have any kind of more, you know, credentialing than a blogger. They just happen to not have a popular blog, right? So I guess to push it even further, like, what about somebody who is an actual expert who has been commissioned, who has, not that this means everything, but has theological training, whatever they have, they've had, um, that the church who has commissioned them to be an authoritative person, they've demonstrated moral character, theological, um, abilities, whatever, like how come the blogger who might not have any of that is seen as just as authoritative, if not more than somebody who actually has the credentials.

Yeah, that's exactly, that's a great, that is a great question. And there's a book called the death of expertise, which is really, really interesting about the basically with the quote unquote democratization of voices that the internet sort of promises us, what ends up being drowned out is like actual expertise, like people who actually have studied something. So I was making this intricate point, I think, that this has particularly affected women because institutions have historically not opened up space for women.

Because when you ask people, give me some Christian leaders, there are people like Russell Moore and Tim Keller and, I don't know, like N.T. Wright and John Piper, who all of these are like, they're like theologically educated, they're rooted, they have overt authority. If Tim Keller, they have overt accountability, I mean. Well, yeah, they have overt authority and overt accountability. They go together. If Tim Keller tomorrow denied the resurrection, I would know who to call, right? Like, he has a presbytery that holds him accountable for what he believes. Same way, hopefully, if Tim Keller tomorrow, I mean, God forbid, like, had an affair,

that, there would be a moral accountability to that, right? But because women have been sort of pushed out of leadership in the institutional church, then women have found ways around that to be leaders in other ways, which I think makes sense because women want women leaders. We want to hear from other women. But because of that, it's created this almost vacuum of women's voices that are embedded within actual institutions. So you get lots and lots of quote unquote female leaders and speakers and writers, but they're not embedded in any kind of overt accountability for either doctrinal or moral, and they're not embedded in an institutional church.

So I think this creates a situation where what you get is lots of branding, personal branding, and lots of sort of Christian celebrities, mega celebrities. But two things. sort of Christian celebrities, mega celebrities. But two things. First of all, I worry about what this does to doctrine, what this does to teaching, and also just moral accountability. But also I worry about is it actually going to help the church? Like will my daughters have more female leaders in pulpits in actual congregations when they are my age than I do?

Or will we just have a few kind of female Christian celebrities, but it doesn't actually affect the institution of the church? And I was worried about that on both progressive and conservative sides because I think progressives tend to be sort of – what's interesting to me is what I found through this piece is that conservative evangelicals and progressive evangelicals are equally committed to anti-institutionalism. Like they're equally skeptical of the church. And they're equally kind of individualistic in that.

And so that's something like they both hold in common with evangelicalism is this sort of skepticism towards the broader actual institutional church. Yeah. But the other thing is, you know, I have friends who are women who are leading, who are teaching, who in all respects are public teachers and have a public ministry of the church that are women in complementarian spaces that honestly are doing the work of ministry. And I think that their complementarian spaces should recognize that.

These are nationally known women. And so it's not even like they're always against having institutional authority. It's like I got attacked on the progressive side for not being, I mean, I don't know, but I was called like anti-woman. And, but the majority of the piece, it's something like 600 words of the piece is actually to institutions asking women institutions to make space for women, even if it's not ordination. If someone's job is teaching the Bible, it seems like there should be some kind of commissioning or formal relationship with the institution they're in, instead of, you know, something like the Southern Baptist Convention or the PCA,

having women do great work in them, and just sort of ignoring it. Yeah, right. In a sense, you were originally critiquing some of the, for lack of better terms, the conservative structures that have created, that have, that have not allowed spaces for women, but also critiquing the new spaces, blogs and writing and stuff that don't have accountability. But it's, I mean, it's not shocking that of course they would respond with horror and outrage, you know? I've never been attacked either, even since. That still has been the worst attack I've ever gotten on the internet.

And it was days long. It was exhausting. It was terrible. People were mean, like straight up mean. And I got it from both sides. I did get it from conservatives as well. I just got it stronger from progressive voices. And more publicly.

I mean, Jonathan Merritt, who i now count as a friend but we've talked about this but he wrote a piece i think in rns where he called me a coward so um that's a national news source so i got it was it was intense and um and but i was at the same time getting heat from conservative men who were, who were basically saying I was trying to sneak women's ordination in the back door. Um, it was an argument, I think for some kind of formal recognition of the ministry of women, even if it's not ordination for something, some kind of formal partnership or commissioning or guild of women writers, or I don't know, but I mean,

that could be institutionally hammered out in various ways from denomination to denomination. But anyway, I did get attacked by both sides. I just got more attacked by, and some of that's the nature of Twitter. Twitter leans left a little bit. And so, you know, I know if I go on Twitter and I'm like, Donald Trump's a racist, I'll get 50,000 likes. But if I'm like, let's critique anything progressive, it's like, you hate people. Why do you have to even call yourself a Christian? So some of it is just the nature of on twitter lends itself to being attacked by the left one and right i'm sure if it was a different

kind of space yeah i mean at least on my twitter feed lean no that's it's it's uh the atlantic recently ran a piece on this that did say like your average twitter user is a left-leaning progressive white female that's like no no seriously like when they call the information yeah that's so funny somebody once said uh you know my twitter feed says trump is the antichrist my facebook page says trump is the Messiah. And my Instagram feed says everybody else's life is better than mine. That's funny. Which I, you know, I like, yep, I think that's pretty true. But yeah, I mean, my Twitter experience changed dramatically when I discovered the mute button and use it aggressively. That was several years ago.

So now I don't have any enemies on Twitter that I can see because they've all been muted. And sometimes I'll say something obnoxious just to just to draw out people that I need to mute. You know, I'm like, yeah, I haven't muted anybody in a while. So I'll say something that I know is going to rile them up and boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. But then the advice of, again, Karen Swallow Pryor, I took her advice that she keeps a few trolls as pets because their statements are so obnoxious that they're almost in a roundabout way,

they become almost entertaining. So she actually doesn't mute a few people just because their statements can be, you know, humorously, yeah, annoying. Yeah, this was actually our first conversation was about this piece someone asked you what you thought of this piece and you liked it particularly because the what you keyed in on was the harawas quote at the end where i talk about um harawas basically said you know the if if there was a seminary student no no he said if there was a doctor, a medical student who said, I don't really feel like taking anatomy this year.

I want to connect emotionally with my patients. I'm going to focus on psychology. They would say, well, this is very Havawass. The exact quote is, who the hell do you think you are you're taking anatomy or ship out right yeah right and he said but with seminary students we say oh whatever you know if you don't if you don't want to take systematics if that's not your thing you don't want to learn whatever you kind of need and he says and this is the money line. He says, we do this because we think doctors can actually hurt people, but we don't believe pastors can actually hurt people.

But he said the entire historic church has always said that, I mean, that's cure of souls is what pastors and, and public teachers of the gospel were called because there was this, there's this curative effect, this, the doctor of souls is basically what that means. And so that just like if you give the patient the wrong prescription, you can kill them. If you give them false teaching, you can kill them. Like this is, this is not conservative Christianity.

This is just Christianity for the last two, like, so basically for 1900 years. So, um, so I was saying, just like we have doctors boards, like we need these, the accountability is not in place to oppress people. It's to protect people. And we need, we need to believe that public teachers can kill people. Like, And we need to believe that public teachers can kill people. Like, I wanted to call the piece, could your favorite blogger kill you? Like, or something like that. And so, which they thought I think it was, like, too over the top.

So they called it, who's in charge of the Christian internet? Which I think is more over the top, because, I mean, no one's in charge of the top. So they called it, uh, who's in charge of the Christian internet, which I think is more over the top. Cause I mean, no one's in charge of the internet, but, um, anyway, so you cued in on that. And then we got into conversation and you, I think DMs me and you were like, let me tell you about this thing, the mute button. It's going to change your life. Yeah. Oh, it's fun. I'll just mute people because, yeah, it's – and here's what's funny. You made reference to it earlier, and I've told my listeners this several times in the podcast. But my – I probably mute people – I would say 50% of the people I mute are to the progressive left and 50% to the progressive right. to the progressive right, the tone, the rhetoric, the failure to try to understand what I'm saying, lack of just human, humanness in their language. I mean, it's all identical.

It's like the horseshoe analogy where when you keep going farther down the left spectrum and farther down the right spectrum, you end up meeting right in the middle. Well, and the thing is, is what you learn is over time in this space as an author if you don't fit into any of those camps which i don't and it sounds like you don't then what you learn is they need each other they feed off they build their careers off of each other that um you wouldn't have i i probably shouldn't, I won't name names, but like you wouldn't have, take your like female progressive blogger. You would not have her if you didn't have your, you know,

really curmudgeon reformed fundamentalist guy. Like they're absolutely pinging off each other. They're feeding off each other. Like they're they're absolutely pinging off each other. They're feeding off each other. And and they're both providing the other with completely unnuanced caricatures that they can skewer. And so it actually creates a lot of heat and very little light. Like it doesn't move us forward, but it does. It's somewhat of a that it creates a cauldron where people can rile people up. Yeah. It's almost like, you know, the American and well, we don't need to get into the whole violence conversation. But the American the military industrial complex needs a war.

And there's been, you know, studies done on what would happen to our economy if we didn't have a war. what happened to our economy if we didn't have a war. We need an enemy. America needs enemies to unify our country, to keep our military going strong, to keep the trillions of dollars flowing in. And if that whole thing, if all of a sudden there was actual peace or no enemy, we would collapse. And if we don't have an enemy, we will create one. But I mean, in the same way, the progressive left needs Donald Trump.

Like when Donald Trump is gone, what are they going to talk about? I mean, my Twitter news feed, you know, my Twitter news feed that doesn't lean left. It simply is left. You know, it's like, what are they? Is it even going to exist when Donald Trump is not in office anymore? You know, so, yeah, no, I think that's exactly right. Let's let's shift gears a little bit. You are a priest and a female, in case my audience didn't know, in the North American Anglican Church. I think I said I was pregnant.

Maybe earlier. Well, technically, you're a pregnant person, whether you identify as female or not. Yes. I identify as female. Okay. Interesting. And I, and I, and I really don't want to get into the sexuality conversation cause I do that a lot on this podcast. So let's talk about something else. Um, uh, so can you give us your journey there? Uh, because that, that, that sounds in

American evangelicalism, that's, I'm going to assume that might've been an uphill, uh, swim for you. Can you give us your journey both in the whole conversation about just women in ordination in general and you in the Anglican church? Did you grow up in Anglican church and, um, and how has it been as a female in, uh, ministry in America? Yeah, this is a really hard thing for me to talk about without it going like an hour and a half um so i do have my husband and i did a podcast together for um um uh i'm sorry i know the guy's name but i'm trying to remember the podcast name um seminary dropout podcast yeah um with shane blackshear and we tell our whole story of kind of how this, this change occurred,

because it is an hour and a half long. Because I wasn't for women's ordination for, you know, a large portion of my adult life. I grew up in the Southern Baptist Church, left the Southern Baptist Church, ended up sort of asking a lot of theological questions in college, and ended up kind of part of this sort of young, restless, reformed kind of movement, which that may mean something to people or it may not. may mean something to people or it may not. But it was, you know, this was kind of, this was in the late 90s, early 2000s. So there was sort of a, I was in a PCA church and reformed. There was also like emergency stuff happening at the time. And I kind of was part of some of that.

I went to an emergent church for a while that I don't think exists anymore. But anyway, so I ended up going to seminary, really having no idea. I felt this strong sense of call to ministry when I was young, like 14, and had no idea what that would look like as a woman. And sorry, if other people have heard podcasts from me, I tell the story a lot, but it was a pretty formative story. But when I was 18, I walked the aisle in my Southern Baptist Church and committed my life to quote-unquote full-time vocational service

because that's what you do in the Baptist church when you're called the ministry. And, and people were so receptive and kind and, and came and hugged me and the church affirms in front, in front of everyone. They affirmed, we affirm this call.

We think you're called to this. We've observed this in you, but people that I really respected, including my Bible teacher at the Christian school I was at, they said, we're so glad you're called to ministry. You'll make such a great pastor's wife. And I was not even offended. I didn't even know to be offended. I just was like, how does one become a pastor's wife? Like, how do I find a pastor to marry me? Like, how is that a viable vocational path? This was before the internet.

So I couldn't like, just, you know, there was no like hotpastorwives.com or whatever that I could like try to get my name in. So I knew I was called to ministry. i had no idea what that would look like um and then ended up in a pca church that also um didn't ordain women and and i was fine with that i wasn't for women's ordination so i wasn't like trying i wasn't like smash the patriarchy i just wanted to serve jesus and i was working with the poor, which was my, is a passion, but especially in my 20s was that that was that was what I did as I worked with drug addicts and with the poor and was very, very passionate, still am, about Christians being involved in poverty and social justice. And so, um, so I was doing that in a lay capacity. Eventually I became Anglican, which is a long story. Um, and some of that, if you, you know, if you read

Liturgy of the Ordinary, I get into some of that, although that it's, it's not a memoir. It's not like telling my story, but then the church ordained women. Before then, we did not become Anglican because the church ordained women. That wasn't really exactly part of it. We became Anglican because we became more little c Catholic in our views of the church, of ecclesiology, of the sacraments um and we we it was an accident we didn't mean to become anglican we were just going it was like a fling we had this nine month period of our life where we were living in a place that we knew we weren't going to stay so we just went to this Anglican church for nine months because we couldn't find a Presbyterian church. Fell totally in love with the liturgy. But meanwhile, when we were in seminary, my husband and I, who, by the way, didn't want to be a pastor when I married

him. He was in law school. Real quick, what seminary were you at? Just so we know. Gordon Conwell. Oh, Gordon Conwell. Okay, yeah. Yeah. But we got married. He didn't want to be a pastor. I didn't know what it would look like to be in ministry not married to a pastor, but he loved Jesus, you know. So we got married, and he ended up coming to seminary with me, and I still thought he didn't want to do the, he wanted to be an academic. He wanted to teach.

So he was there, he got a master's in church history. And then he went on and got a PhD in religious history. But through the process of him doing exegetical work on second Timothy um he ended up becoming he switched he became poor women's ordination so we fought about it for a long time for like a year because he was poor women's ordination I wasn't and I I was like questioning his theology. We were having long conversations about it. And yeah, and eventually like he, I read, I read, I studied, I argued, I prayed, I talked to people and I changed my mind. I mean, I came to the conclusion that the scriptures are really not as clear on this as I thought just reading. Can we linger here for a second? And I don't even know if you know, but I'm,

I'm, I'm basically in the middle of both camps. I grew up strongly complementarian, like women shouldn't drive cars kind of thing. And then more and more seeing some of the arguments for that side to be a little overplayed, if not just wrong, seeing more evidence for egalitarian, but then also seeing some arguments for egalitarianism that I found were actually not good. And then still seeing some conservative arguments for complementarian. I'm like, I don't know if I've seen this really well refuted, but I haven't done a lot of study on it. I've just kind of tabled it, said, you know what? I mean, I'm right in the middle. I'm, this is not, I don't have time right now to fight yet another battle or whatever. So, but I'm very intrigued by the conversation. And most of the biblical, most of the evangelical biblical scholars that I respect, like N.T. Wright,

Scott McKnight, Michael Byrd, I mean, just on and on it goes, would all be egalitarian, and yet very strongly in biblical authority and so on. So all that to say, anyway, could you unpack maybe what were some of the huge, like, complementarian biblical arguments that for you is like, this is why I'm complementarian, but then having studied them further, you're like, whoa, it's not as clear as I thought it would be. Yeah. I'm happy to do that. Yeah. So a few resources do I do listen to this podcast seminary dropout because we go through each argument real quick. That's on your website, on your website.

It says if you want to hear a long exclamation of why she's for women's ordination, you can listen here. Is that the one? That's the one. Yeah. Also in this new book that Karen Swallow Pryor just edited called cultural engagement. I have an, I have an essay on egalitarianism that is only about three or four pages long. So it's not going to get, but if you want like a quick and dirty this here's some um you know some responses to biblical text it's in there yeah um but i'll say um okay so this evolved over time i will say that the very first argument that kind of made my husband question this was, oh, gosh, I'm blanking on his name.

He's a seminary professor at Gordon-Conwell. He's a brilliant, brilliant guy. And he's the pastor of Park Street Church in Boston, but I can't remember his name. I could Google it. Hugenberger, no. Yeah, I think it is Hugenberger. No. No.

No. I don't think so. I know who you're talking – yeah, it's not – I don't know. Yeah. Anyway, I can – this is – I'll just say I'm terrible at remembering names. Um, but also I'm pregnant, so I'm just going to blame it on that. Um, this is a real thing. Like my doctor told me this, that there's like, um, all this energy and blood going to the baby. So you like actually can't remember things as well. There's like pregnancy amnesia yeah for real anyway um i have i i'll

send it to you yeah but um keep going keep going anyway his their view his view is basically he Because wife and women are the same word. It's gune, gyne, in Greek. And so the only way you can determine the difference is context. And so he makes the argument that women should submit to men, or women should learn in silence and submission to men, actually should be wives should submit to their husbands learn in silence and submission to their husbands and he takes that by making it parallel to a first peter passage which really really clear it means husbands and wives the context wouldn't make sense except husbands and wives okay same

with ephesians 5 right right and he makes the, but he takes these two, this Peter passage and Timothy, and they, he says they're, they are absolutely parallel lexically, like in terms of the Greek structure, they're absolutely the same. So there's no contextual reason to translate one wife and husband and one male and female. So where he ends up and where his church ends up is essentially women are to submit to men always in the context of loving relationship. And so husband and wife, there is some kind of hierarchy.

and wife there is some kind of hierarchy but not um but that passage then is is that wives shouldn't be um over have spirit pastoral authority over their husbands um which creates some like um questions about how you do church government like for for instance, if we were actually going to put this into place, like would spouses of pastors be under like a bishop or under a presbytery instead of under the spiritual, like under the spiritual authority of their spouse, which actually somewhat is fairly, I think, good practice and pretty practical because it would be inappropriate for a spouse to spiritually discipline their own spouse, right? Like that would be, there's all kinds of messiness there if your husband is able to spiritually discipline you as a pastor, excommunicate you. But so he thinks that passage is about wives and husbands, not, um, women,

men. I actually am not there anymore. Partly because we're pretty egalitarian in our marriage as well. Like, um, because mostly, I mean, we really, everything about husbands and wives submitting to one another is, or submitting wives, submitting to husbands under this larger thing of submitting to one another is, or submitting wives, submitting to husbands under this larger thing of submit to one another out of reverence of Christ. So I, I don't, I mean, honestly, the best marriages that I have seen,

the most beautiful marriages I've seen have been complementarian marriages where men and women deeply love each other and are submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ and egalitarian marriages where people deeply love each other and are submitting to each other out of reverence for Christ. Like any time it becomes a power play, it gets ugly, whether that's the husband saying, submit to me, woman, or the wife being like, you know, you sexist asshole. I feel like neither of those are the picture of godly marriage, like mutual submission is the picture of marriage. So it's not that I don't have a dog in the fight of the complementarian, egalitarian stuff when it comes to marriage, because I've seen it so misused to really be awful for women. I mean, I know stories of women that I would say underwent even abuse in the name of complementarianism in marriage.

But to be fair to complementarians, no healthy, biblically rooted complementarian would look at that and say that's the example of complementarian marriage. I mean, loving your wives as Christ loved the church, even if you maintain male headship within the marriage and take it holistically and what the whole passage is saying, who, what Christian would deny that done rightly? That can't be a beautiful thing. Even if you end up disagreeing that that's the best way to read that passage. I think that's what you're saying. Like you've seen both. I mean, both can be beautiful. Both can be really bad, depending on. Yes, that's right. That's right. Yeah. Because I think the whole point is that Christian marriages aren't defined by power. They're defined by love and kenosis, right? This picture of Jesus pouring himself out for the other. So that's when I would now say I'm pretty persuaded by N.T. Wright's argument.

So I really think this comes, I think the big thing comes down to 2 Timothy. I don't feel... 1 Timothy, right? 1 Timothy. Yeah, I'm sorry. 1 Timothy 2. Sorry. And because it gets otherwise it gets. Yeah, I think everything else is pretty squishy in terms of what the argument. But Wright argues that essentially Paul is saying he's speaking into this.

And Paul is saying, he's speaking into this Ephesus cult, where in the context of Ephesus, only women could be priests, because it was for a goddess cult. So women, it was a matriarchal kind of fertility cold. And so all of these women are finding new found freedom in the gospel. All these men and women together in this Jewish context are finding this sort of new kind of liberation in the gospel. And I do think complementarians and egalitarians both have to be honest that like Jesus, the New Testament community really gave a position of power and liberation to women that was not seen before. Right. This is just historically fact.

That we also need to be honest, that doesn't look like secular egalitarianism today. egalitarianism today. Jesus wasn't like, burn your bra, but there is a sense that women were just massively liberated. And so with this liberation, they're negotiating their new place in this community. And Paul is saying, do not, instead of this word, hold authentane, authority over men. Authentane is a apex legomena. It's only used one time in all of scripture. And we have so little evidence of what it means. People like Grudem will say we have tons of evidence of what it means. like Grudem will say we have tons of evidence of what it means, but he's pulling from other Greek texts that are hundreds of years after this.

Like, they could be many centuries after this. So we have very few extant Greek texts from the same time period with this word in it. So, authentane can mean being domineering or usurping. And so, Wright would say that, and I'm appealing to Wright because he's a New Testament scholar, and I am not. I'm not a New Testament scholar. I can't even remember this dude's name at Park Street. But anyway, so Wright would say that Paul's message there is basically like, you have this newfound liberation, but we're not going to be like the Ephesus cult.

You are not to dominate men. So do not dominate men as you have seen men dominate you. In other words, don't let the oppressed become the oppressor. We are going to have a different kind of community. So is that a slam dunk that that's what that means? It is not a slam dunk that that's what that means. It is not a slam dunk that that's what that means. But one of the things I say in this podcast, and one of the things I believe deeply is that about women's ordination, you can only be about 80% sure. So I could be wrong about this. And I have to deal with that before God. But I don't think the scriptures are very clear on this particular issue.

I totally believe in the perspicuity of scripture. Scripture is clear about things with salvation. Um, I think scripture is clear about a lot of things, a lot of kind of ethical things, even sexual ethics and that kind of thing. Yeah. But I don't think it means it is equally clear on every single issue. And it's, I don't think it means it is equally clear on every single issue. And I don't think it's as clear on this.

There's just passages that seem to really push towards an egalitarian, liberative kind of view. And there's other passages that don't and that seem to push towards a complementarian view. And so I think we need to be honest about that, both sides. But at the end of the day, we all have to make a decision. We have to make theological choices. And I think denying women, let's say God has really called women to pastoral ministry, which I believe he has, denying women that role is just as wrong as

giving women that role if they are not called. And so we're all, no one's off the hook. We're all on a tightrope here. None of us are totally sure. And so we do the best we can to exegete, and then we fall on the grace of God. Like, I really believe that. I love that perspective. And I can predict that wherever I end up on the other side of this, if I ever find space to read the piles of literature on each side of it, I remember wading through, Bill Mounce has a commentary on First Timothy, I think in the Word Biblical commentary series. And Bill Mounce is, you know, he wrote the textbook for all of our, you know, first and second year. Great. And the guy's a great scholar, great pastor.

And that was my textbook. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And I remember wading through his section on first Timothy two. I think he ends up complementarian actually, but just seeing the piles and piles and piles of literature that he's citing. I'm like, I don't, I would have to go on a sabbatical, like a three-year sabbatical just to comb through all this. And I'm the type of, I don't know, maybe to a fall. I don't like to, on controversial issues, I like to read everything and think through everything before I kind of land on a position.

Even if my position is still like, I lean 60, 40 or whatever. I still like to say, at least I covered everything. So I'm looking at this pile of literature saying, I don't have space right now and for this foreseeable future to come through this. So I don't want to say definitively one way or the other.

But if I did, I know enough of the arguments to know, I think I would land where you're at. Well, let me say this. I think I would, what you said about being 80% sure, you know, I think I would land where you're at. Well, let me say this. I think I would, what you said about being 80% sure, you know, maybe 70% and I could be wrong and having that kind of like, it's a lot less clear than I think people want to make it out to be. Whether I land complementarian or egalitarian, I think I would have that posture because like you said, there's just, I mean, 1 Timothy 2 clearly has some cultural, contextual things going on.

Now, does that demand an egalitarian reading? I don't, I'm not sure, actually. But we have to acknowledge it. It's not as straightforward as people make it out to be. 1 Corinthians 14 is a mess. It can't be, because they talk about, oh, sorry. Well, I was going to say, 1 Corinthians 14 is a mess, Oh, I was going to say, First Corinthians 14 is a mess no matter what view you're on.

Women be silent in church, like literally. I mean, and some churches follow that consistently where they can't pray, they can't speak, they can't give announcements. I don't know any

commentarian church that, and you know, and there's enough exegetical work to show that there's a lot of strange stuff going on in that passage and even debates about whether it's in the original manuscript.

And then you have, you know, as you said, clear countercultural, what would be considered very progressive statements about women in its first century context. And to me, the most persuasive argument is some kind of trajectory argument where you say the New Testament doesn't tie the bow on this, but it does give us the kind of movement toward full equality and leadership positions. And we have enough evidence to see that trajectory heading that way.

And who's that dude? Is it Barry Webb? William Webb. William Webb. William Webb. Slaves, women, and homosexuals. Yeah. So I think that kind of argument to me is the most attractive.

Yeah. That was an important argument for me in this process. I mean, it was really like two years, like I said, like, yeah, it was a long time. And I could tell a long story like I kind of I strongly disagreed with where my husband Jonathan was. And he didn't even come out like I read I think it is Hugenberger I read this Hugenberger argument and I have changed my mind he was just sort of like whoa this is a good argument and some of it is we met for the first time people who were egalitarians that actually had a strong like a high view of scripture um and had good orthodox arguments that were beyond like you know just the stupid stuff that you see on twitter like yeah you know about you know what you know why does genitalia

matter in ordination and stuff it's just like that's way too simplistic right um and so um so we so he was more kind of maybe where you are of just questioning and reading studying as i said he has a phd in religion he reads more than anyone i know so he's just massive you know yeah he reads like three books a week i'm not exaggerating it's it will give anyone uh inferiority complex about your reading. And so he's reading all this stuff. And I'm really hesitant in part because I just knew I can't honestly approach this unless I'm, like, willing to cover my head at the end of it. Like as a woman, like I can't go into this conversation saying for God to be good, I have to be an egalitarian at the end of this, right? Like I felt like I couldn't sort of take, I was just so wary of taking my own cultural assumptions and saying that if God, if you don't meet my cultural assumptions, then you aren't good or you aren't trustworthy or you aren't worthy of worship. And so I knew I had honestly avoided this conversation so long because

I was scared. Um, knowing that I, if, if where the exegesis took me was really, you can't give announcements ever again in church was like silence that that's, I had to be open to that, or I couldn't do, I couldn't actually be honest about my study, right? That's so good. Yeah, that's great. So, but that's hard as a woman. I mean, it's hard as a man too, but I think it's particularly hard as a woman because it was, there was just no way that I could not have skin in this game. I mean, it wasn't theoretical for me. skin in this game. I mean, it wasn't theoretical for me. And so I, yeah, so it was a long time before I kind of came to it theologically. And then it was even, it was a good year after that, before I could sort of see myself as getting ordained and taking that step. And that was a long

kind of spiritual practices and dealing with my own imagination taking that step. And that was a long kind of spiritual practices and dealing with my own imagination around ordination. And so that was a long, slow process. But my big joke is like, I finally submitted to my husband and got ordained. He was like for it way before me, like way, way. He wanted me to get ordained like way before I was okay. So it's this little loophole, right? That is so awesome. Oh, my gosh. What's it been on a practical level?

What's it been like now being a female priest? I mean, obviously, you're in the Anglican Church and you're a priest in the Anglican Church. That obviously is okay with you being a female priest in their church. Otherwise, you wouldn't be a female priest in the English church, but you're still a voice in the broader evangelical world. What's it been like being a woman in Christian leadership in American evangelicalism has been good, mixed, bad, good, bad, ugly? It's been nothing but a piece of cake. No, I, I, well, so first I should clarify, I'm part of the Anglican Church of North America, which is different than the Episcopal Church. And so my denomination is actually split on this. So we allow, it's what's called dual integrity. So some bishops ordain women and some don't. Some churches

hire women or for women and some aren't. So it's a highly contested issue in the space that I'm in. So I actually am, I get a fair amount of criticism and sometimes really harsh criticism from people in my own denomination. So it isn't just broader evangelicalism. I'll say in general, you know, there's good and bad. In some sense, I really am grateful. I do think God has called me to this. I think there are, and I don't say this in an arrogant way, but women in the church are so hungry for spiritual mothers and spiritual older sisters right now that I frequently have women who deeply resonate with my work that are also just saying, like, thank you. Thank you for what you're doing.

but are also just saying like, thank you. Thank you for what you're doing. Thank you for a voice that is, I hope, at least seeking orthodoxy that is also female. So I think I just want, I want more of that. Like, I just want more. I want this to be really common. I want this to be like, oh, yeah, yeah. Like another, another other Orthodox female voice, like it's just everywhere. They're in all the churches, just sort of like you have with men. And so it's a privilege. That said, especially, I will say it's been harder the last two years. And I'm not entirely sure why that is. At first, it was just this like fun, novel, exciting new adventure. But the last two years have been hard around being a female leader.

And I mean, going back a little bit to what we were talking about earlier, but I just don't, I don't, and I'm not, I hope that there's not a whiff of pity in this. It's more just factual that I don't exactly have a camp. That's, I found that not true. I do have a camp, but they're just small. It's a small camp and I, and a beloved camp, but a writer who I will not name, because I don't know if he would want me to share this, but early, he's a complementarian guy. He's my friend and very thoughtful, but strongly complementarian. I said early on when I was working on the book and also writing for Christianity Today and other places, he said, your problem is that you, you're not going to have a camp. You're not going to have a squad because you're not going to fit

in with the gospel coalition crowd because you're a female priest, but you're not just like a straight up progressive in your view of the church and in your view of the scriptures. So you just aren't going to have a space. Now there's a lot of us out there. There are. And I have dear, dear friends who are other writers that don't fit. And so I think there's more and more of us that don't fit exactly in either of their spaces. What's interesting, well, I don't know, this might get me in trouble to say I feel often more tolerated by folks like it like there are conservative complementarian male leaders who disagree with me strongly about women's ordination but will still promote my work or will still interact with me about other things that I write that where there's

common cause. And it's interesting because I politically I'm not particularly conservative. I mean, I've never voted Republican. And I am. And I'm a pacifist and I'm strongly for issues of poverty and this everything happening on the border right now, I think is just the, it's the worst moral atrocity that we've seen in the last decade. But in spite of that, I feel often, and being a female priest, I feel often more skepticism from progressives because of my views of scripture and sexuality and the church and having a really high view of the church. So sometimes when I don't fit in evangelicalism, it's because I'm too quote unquote liberal. And sometimes it's because I'm too quote unquote

Catholic often, which is interesting. So going back to the question of how's that been, so not fitting in a place is okay with me. I think that the scripture doesn't fit any of the right or left, and so I'm okay with that. And I have enough people that love me and know me, like in my actual life, that care about me, that I'm okay with that. wearying, I think, to feel like there's not a kind of ready-made market for my work. And that's okay, but it's exhausting. And it just means every time I go on Twitter, like literally, there is someone who's like, you're the greatest. You changed my life. I love you so much. You're the person I know most like Jesus. And then there's people that are like, you're a bigot and I hate you.

You're what's wrong with the church or you're liberal. And you're the, what do they call me? The, the Bane. I'm going to be the Bane of the Anglican church. Like, and I get these from, and so a lot of it is having to regulate social media yeah the intake of social media but also um just not believing either side right like I'm a lot worse than my enemies think I am I'm a lot more selfish than they think I am. But I'm also like way more beloved and used by God than people know. And most of that is offspring. Right. And so, um, it's just kind of like not believing

the hype and believing the gospel, um, instead over and over and over and over, which is honestly true of every single one of us, whether you're a female priest or not. Right. That's so funny. I was going to ask how much of that, for lack of better terms, tribal disorientation is due to social media or just the internet broadly. Like pre-internet, it's hard to conceive of that world. But I mean, I imagine your local church context is probably for the most part, pretty good. I doubt it's 50, 50. We love her. We hate her. It's probably, I mean, you were there, right? So, I mean,

Yeah. Yeah. So my local church context is incredibly supportive of my ministry. My past, I'm, I have a, I have a boss, like the rector of our church, and he's unbelievably supportive. And my bishop is unbelievably supportive. And we love our people. Like our church, you know, it's a large church, but we also, it's small enough where we can know people and love them. So, yeah, I think a lot of it is abstraction in the internet.

I mean, with all of us, right? Like, I have some dear, dear friends who are very, very progressive. And they don't give, they're so kind to me. But it's because they know me and they know the nuances of who I am. They know what I believe, but they also know what my favorite kind of food is and the way I take my coffee. And the same, I have conservative friends and family, especially, that that love me, you know, in spite of our differences, but because it's in this broader context, it's so easy on social media to abstract someone from all of that and not see a person that just see like a list of positions and react to that. And so, I mean, that said, I have experienced actual embodied sexism in the church.

Like I have, that said, I have experienced actual embodied sexism in the church. Like, I have experienced that. I've experienced that from other priests in the church that know me and other pastors in my PCA context. So that happens in real life. It just happens less often in real life than it happens on the screen. So it's not like there's no connection. Like these people are people in real life, but it's just every, every flaw of, of our human nature is just sort of amplified. I think by this.

Where I've kept you an hour. I just noticed the time. I don't want to, uh, keep you longer than, than, uh, I should here, but I haven't even met. Oh, I forgot to mention to you, I will do a pre-recorded intro. Well, people that are listening to this already heard my pre-recorded intro that I haven't actually recorded yet. way. So I will mention your book, The Liturgy or Liturgy of the Ordinary Sacred Practices in Everyday Life by IVP. So people listening to this now have already heard me mention it. But for the sake of you explaining what this book is all about, give us the 30 second summary overview of what this book is all about and what kind of person would be interested in reading it. Okay, so the book takes a day of my life.

It's about one day from waking to sleeping. And it goes through really mundane activities of that day, like waking up, brushing your teeth. I forget all of my chapters now. Losing my keys, fighting with my spouse, eating leftovers. These are actually like chapter titles with subheadings. But it takes that, so these moments of the day, and then it takes moments of liturgy, particularly Anglican liturgy, but it's not just I draw from Reformed liturgies and Lutheran liturgies

and Catholic liturgies and even a little bit from Eastern Orthodox liturgies. And it sort of pairs them together and uses one to talk about the other. So it's about what it looks like to meet Jesus in our ordinary life, but also how our ordinary life forms and shapes us, that what we actually do in a day is formative. And that's not just our prayer time is formative. It's that also sitting in traffic is formative. So, and the way we interact with our neighbors and our husband and our kids and our friends.

And so it kind of walks through liturgical practice and walks through a day together and stops and says, how are we being formed by this? How are we being malformed by this? What kinds of things, practices in our culture disciple us in ways that are not good and true and right? And what kind of practices form us to be more people who can walk in the belovedness of God? So that's... people who can walk in the belovedness of God. So that's... Is it similar to Jamie Smith's stuff with You Are What You Love and his whole stick?

You Are What You Love came out after my book was already in, it was in the can, so to speak, it was into the editor. And there was a lot, there are, there's enough um overlap where i i wrote jamie and said i promise i didn't read this before yeah because my book hadn't come out yet but it was coming out just a few months later um but uh so i hadn't read you are what you love but i had read um uh desiring Desiring the Kingdom, which was huge for me. So the book is really deeply interacts with Desiring the Kingdom. And I quote Jamie at length in the book and interact with his ideas a lot, especially in my second chapter, which kind of lays the foundation for the book. lays the foundation for the book. So he, when I got my manuscript back, I had, there were my, actually the editor didn't make many changes, but she said, there's too many quotes. There's too many Jamie Smith quotes and too many C.S. Lewis quotes, which I was like, that's good.

You can't have too many C.S. Lewis quotes. Come on. That would be a good thing, right? So it is like Jamie's book, but it's taking Jamie's book on a much more mundane, pragmatic, ordinary kind of place. It's saying like, it's taking these ideas really, really into the kitchen and the bedroom and life. And Jamie himself has been really super supportive of the book. He wrote an endorsement of it, which I really appreciated. And he said in a tweet,

he said something like, he lives in the heady world of philosophy. So desiring the kingdom was like 30, 40,000 feet. And he said, you are what you love. It was his attempt to bring it down to 10,000 feet and literature. The ordinary brings it down to the ground where people, it's like the poor man's version,

like the, which I do feel like if I don't, I'm not a philosopher. I'm not, I don't have a PhD in theology. The thing that I do is try to read these guys like Jamie and like N.T. Wright and translate that to the people in my pews as a pastor that's my calling is a i'm far more of a translator than a writer um and uh and i i hope i'm a writer too i mean i also want to sort of i love language so i try to wrap um jamie's work and other theologians' work around with sort of poetic metaphor.

So a lot of my book is dealing with metaphor and symbolism of the stuff of our everyday life, the metaphor of leftovers, the metaphor of traffic. I love your writing style. It blends that kind of that earthiness, as you said, the kind of on the ground, normal person, but it's also very beautiful and also very thoughtful too. Like some people can write very earthy, but then I'm like, yeah, you're, you need to go back to school, you know? And then often people that have been in school too long, don't know how to address the earth, your person. And, and I think you blend both very well from the limited samples I've read of your stuff. So yeah, you keep it up. I was like, yeah, I just was like, put that on my website. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, I, my desire is to kind of do the same thing. I, I didn't, um, I wasn't an, I didn't grow up in academic. I didn't read a book until I was like 17 years old. Like I hated academia and everything. And I

just, uh, when I became a Christian at 19, I fell in love with learning, but I was still kind of the village idiot, my seminary days and the PhD program. Like, I don't know how I got into a PhD program. Uh, but I just constantly loved learning. But my, but my natural way of thinking is still very much like the baseball player in high school that I was and still am in many ways, you know? So yeah, sometimes, sometimes being the village idiot can, can help you communicate to other village idiots, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Well, well yeah i think there's a pastoral task yeah of um there are really i actually think jamie's work i think you are what you love is really accessible so i would highly recommend that like i mean if you're only going to read one probably read you

are what you love but if you're going to read two books read you are what You Love and Liturgy of the Ordinary. They go well together. It's a good pairing. But I do think, so not Jamie, he's a great writer and really accessible, and he and I have actually had this discussion because there are, okay, here's what I think. Some theological writing actively makes me angry now. And it's not because of the, it's not because the ideas are bad. It's because they're speaking about such like indelibly gorgeous things about God. And it's not beautiful. Like the, it's what the ideas are so beautiful and the words are not, and the words are actually making it harder for people to understand what they're saying.

And that makes me mad actually, because I think theology deserves people who care about language. And theology is ultimately for the church, right? It's not to convince people that we're smart. It's not to, like, look cool or intellectual. It's really to help people worship. The end of theology is always doxology. people worship. The end of theology is always doxology. So, um, so I do think part of the pastoral task, this is why we learn Greek, right? You don't learn Greek in seminary so that you can

show off your Greek. You learn Greek so you can never show off your Greek. So you can, so you can know it and be able to look at commentaries and then go and tell people about like how they can continue to love Jesus when their spouse just left them or their mom is dying or like that's the whole pastoral task. So I'm super into trying to make theology both accessible and beautiful. make theology both accessible and beautiful. That's good. There you have it, folks. Tish Harrison Warren, an angry female Anglican priest. I have so enjoyed this conversation. I would love to keep going.

But I've got another guest on the phone right now that I got to interview. So I got to take off. Your website, tishharrisonwarren.com has all kinds of stuff here. Is this kind of the one-stop shop for people to learn out, learn more about you? Yeah, I am terrible at it. I am not a good self-promoter. I need an assistant like we talked about. So I only update it like once every six months, but, but it's a good place to start. Wow. You had Michael Horton, who's really conservative. Then a whole range, then Jamie Smith. And you have a whole range of people endorse his book. I love that. And like Micah Boyette, who is like leans, you know, progressive, I think.

I think it's okay. I hope that's okay for me to say if Mike is listening. But yeah, I have a, it's a panoply of, it's the gamut that endorsed my book, which I'm really grateful for. And also, yeah, like people on Twitter have, Russ Moore said he liked my book and Sarah Bessie said she liked my book on Twitter. So, um, uh, yeah, I hope that doesn't mean it says nothing. I hope that that means it says something to a bunch of different people. And part of it is that's why when you said,

what kind of person likes it? Like all of us brush our teeth or should i hope that that's all of us um have bodies all of us um have to deal with waiting all of us have to deal with sleep all of us sleep all of us um so it in that sense it's been it's been a book that's brought brought a lot of different types of people around the book because we all share these really common human experiences. The book is really about this commonality of the human life that we all share. Tish, thanks so much for being on the show. And again, yeah, if people want to check out your website, you have a ton of articles on here. The book is out there. Obviously, the book's on Amazon.

And you pastor in Pennsylvania, is that correct? That's where your church is? In Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. So if you're looking for a solid Anglican church, or just a solid church, check out what's the name of the church? Church of the Ascension.

Church of the Ascension. Tish, thanks so much for being on Theology in a Raw. Thanks. This was fun. Thank the Ascension. Church of the Ascension. Tish, thanks so much for being on Theology in Her Own. Thanks. This was fun. Thank you. Take care. you