She Persuades

Please note that due to software used, not everything recorded in this transcript will be entirely accurate

Studio – John Dickson

It’s the 7th of May, 1429, and a French army has taken to the field against the English forces besieging the city of Orléans. The forces of the heir to the throne of France, Charles VII, have suffered humiliating defeat after defeat. But they are advancing with confidence now, following a string of minor victories. They are being led by Joan of Arc. A simple farm girl, she has inspired the French people because she claims that God is working through her and has commanded her to take charge of the French armies. She offers them a sign and says it’ll be delivered at Orléans. The English are routed, their siege is broken and they flee, leaving the city in the hands of the woman who has dared to serve her God from horseback.

However, according to the British medievalist Beverly Boyd, the English held that a woman defeating their forces was proof positive that Joan was not God’s servant. Joan had stepped out of the role assigned to her by the church. For one thing, she claimed to speak for God. And for another, she was committing the sin of cross-dressing, wearing pants under her armour and cutting her hair, clearly in league with the devil.

When Joan was captured a year later, she was tried for heresy by an English allied court, and she was burnt at the stake.

This is not an episode about medieval history – as wonderful as that would be!

I just find the Joan of Arc story a fascinating example, almost like a parable, of the way extraordinary Christian women sometimes break into the public consciousness with an unstoppable mission. And in this episode, we’re going to meet a woman I admire as one of those great soldiers for Christ in the world today. Now, she’s gonna kill me for comparing her to Joan of Arc, and not just because she’s English, but Amy Orr Ewing is one of Christianity’s great persuaders. I’d follow her lead. Anywhere. I’m John Dickson, and this is  Underceptions. 

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Studio – John Dickson:

Flash forward 500 years from Joan of Arc, and I’m sitting in the Oxford study of one of the great Christian advocates of our day. She’s an academic, world traveller, author, social media queen, and born Christian. Persuader. Dr. Amy or Ewing is the joint director of the Oxford Center for Christian Apologetics. She did both her undergraduate degree and her doctorate philosophy degree at the University of Oxford. She leads a growing team of public Christian advocates whose influence through Britain and Europe is significant.

John Dickson:
Okay, Amy – you are basically a full-time Christian persuader. Okay. So do you ever feel like your very existence breaks the golden rules of secularism. You know, everyone should keep to themselves, religion should be private, and here you are, Bible bashing the world?

Amy Orr-Ewing:
Um, well, I think of myself as Bible bashing, that’s for sure. I think, um, that the role of Christian persuasion actually really involves asking lots of questions. Um, questions that unsettle and confront, and I guess get people to consider the claims of Jesus, people who sort of think it’s a load of rubbish. And I think the second premise of that question is that other people don’t have convictions and aren’t trying to persuade. I think, I hope, at least what I’m aiming at, is that there’s an honesty in, I guess, revealing one’s motivations and one’s core beliefs and inviting people to challenge them, yes, but owning them and saying, I do believe this to be true and I would like you to consider it. I actually think secularism does the same thing.

John Dickson:
I hate to ask this question, but I think many people might be, uh, you are not a man. And, um, and yet here you are, you know, a very vocal persuader for the Christian faith. Very widely invited. Do you ever feel like an oddity as a woman? Because the church doesn’t have an awesome reputation for putting women forward as their spokespersons.

Amy Orr-Ewing: 
That is a really deep question. I know on the surface of it, it sounds like a very sort of obvious answer, which would be, yes, sometimes one does feel like a bit of an oddity.

Studio – John Dickson:

This is not an episode about women’s ministry in the church. There are other podcasts that would look into that sort of thing. Really what I’m trying to do here is explore the fact that, that one of the most persuasive Christian persuaders in the world today isn’t, I don’t know, the Pope or an Archbishop or some clergyman somewhere.

It’s a woman academic with incredible opportunities to get up and explain and defend and commend the Christian faith.

Amy is a great undeceiver. And it turns out she’s part of a long Christian tradition.

Amy Orr-Ewing: 
But I think if you go back to the original sources, which is your great specialism, John, if you go back to who Jesus is and who actually witnessed and ultimately proclaimed the gospel initially, you find an extraordinary role for women in the Christian faith that I think is unlike any other worldview, including secularism. When you look at the Christian faith, absolutely integral to the historic claims of Jesus’s incarnation, the atonement, and the resurrection is the proclamation and witness of women. So if you think about, um, how we know that Jesus is God with us, the primary witness to that is Mary. She’s the first witness of the incarnation, a teenager, a teenage girl, who understands the virgin birth in a way that, you know, none of us really can. Similarly, if you look at the, the primary witnesses to the details of the crucifixion, the, the, the, the accounts tell us that, that yes, John was there, but the other male disciples had deserted Jesus. And it’s the women who are standing at the foot of the cross. So, we’re led to believe that the details of the accounts were primarily witnessed by women. Yes, recorded by men in the four Gospels, but first – and then obviously women were first at the empty tomb.

So, yes, I do feel like an oddity. Obviously in history, in the history of the church, there’s sort of, I guess, um, a patchy record, so you might look like, look at a woman like Catherine Booth here in the UK, one of the greatest proclaimers of the gospel we’ve had or produced. Or you might look at the sort of, I guess, missions, global missions movement of the 1800s, and you see extraordinary women like Gladys Aylward and Amy Carmichael and others like that who have had this role in proclaiming, but I guess they were sort of far away. So yes, sometimes I feel like an oddity, but I feel like this is actually a core distinctive of the Christian faith, that women have a voice.

John Dickson:
Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of your heroes. Uh, is Dorothy Sayers, who was one of the first women to receive a degree. Yeah. From Oxford University. What did you discover in your doctoral research into her?

Amy Orr-Ewing:
Yeah. So we’re sitting in Oxford now, in case that’s not obvious. But just over the road there, she went to Somerville College. I guess the initial attraction about, uh, around her was that, you know, as a contemporary of C. S. Lewis, um, Sayers in Britain was regarded, the two of them were regarded as the foremost, I guess, public Christians in the UK. She was a novelist, um, uh, also a sort of literary scholar, um, she was also a, a great linguist and translated Dante, she wrote plays and things. So she wasn’t a church woman, you know, she was a layperson. But she used her voice to have this extraordinary impact. She ended up doing these, creating these radio plays around the life of Jesus that millions of people listen to. And you can look at church attendance in the UK, and, you know, some people would say what she did on the radio actually had an impact on church attendance. I mean, it’s extraordinary, a massive impact generationally. But she’s been largely, I guess, forgotten whilst we’ve all got loads of C. S. Lewis’s books and, you know, hundreds of biographies have been written about him. I think when I started doing my research, there were only, you know, sort of four or five full-length biographies of her. So I was drawn to her as somebody who I guess used her intellect and used the opportunities that were at her disposal to tell lots of people about Christ, and she did it excellently.

Media – ‘Good Morning Britain’ clip

Studio – John Dickson:

Across the world, men and women are debating healthy masculinity and toxic masculinity. And commentators like Good Morning Britain’s Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid aren’t going to run out of steam any time soon. Maybe there’s a future Undeceptions episode in there for us too. But there’s no doubt men are being placed under a microscope for their bad behaviour towards women. And you know, the church isn’t exempt from all this.

The #MeToo movement that swept the world in 2019 also led to the downfall of several prominent Christian male pastors. The faith itself has come under renewed criticism for its apparent patriarchy and misogyny. In my view, there’s no better time than this to rediscover and uncover the contribution of women to the progress of the Christian faith.

John Dickson:
Do you think in the current climate, women actually have a special contribution to Christian persuasion? I do. There’s such a strong sense of men behaving badly.

Amy Orr-Ewing: I think that is, that there’s definitely something in that because I actually think that the Christian faith has something truly awesome and significant to offer into the current conversation around whether womanhood actually exists at all. The humanity of women is, is at stake today with the whole load of other, ethical conversations that are happening. And so, you know, the sort of ultra-left, I guess, feminists in culture are the people who are beating the drum for the existence of women as a category. But I think the Christian faith uniquely has an intellectually coherent foundation for that, as well as, obviously, Jesus extraordinary affirmation of women. And so I think, although the church has done all this wrong and all of that, I think we have something really breathtaking and wonderful, to say today in culture. And so, I guess I’m finding my voice in that conversation, and I hope that there are going to be other women apologists and women persuaders and speakers and preachers and, you know, one-to-one evangelists who, who, who do the same.

Studio – John Dickson:

The word apologist. And evangelist, uh, kind of boo words to many people today. To some, this means people who’ll use any argument, even bad ones, or perhaps especially bad ones to Bible bash a few more people into church. But what Amy means is more serious. An apologist isn’t someone who goes around apologizing for Christianity, though I suppose there’s a place for that. It’s someone who’s able to give an intellectual defence of the faith. The Greek word apologia means defence. And evangelist is just someone who can make the guts of Christianity, the heart of Christianity, clear to those who don’t yet believe it, which invites the  question –

John Dickson: 
What are the main blockers to the Christian faith? What are the things that keep people from investigating Christianity?

Amy Orr-Ewing:
I mean, I think one of them is, is around what you said, the church’s record. And obviously you did that amazing documentary exploring that question, um, the bad that’s being done in, in, in the name of religion. Um, honestly, though, I think we’re now at a point in the West where one of the biggest issues is a sort of, is a kind of apathy. There’s this, we’re not even going to ask questions of Christianity because we just know it to be totally irrelevant. And it’s just so far out of anything even worthy of being at the table of conversation that we’re not even going to dignify it with a question. And that might take root, I guess, along more kind of philosophical, intellectual paths, or it might be around conversations that are more kind of ethical. Why should the church or Christianity have anything to say about this today? It’s so clearly so ridiculous and irrelevant. So, at least a part of the task of Christian proclamation and persuasion is to get the ideas on the table at all, you know?

John Dickson:
Yeah. So how?

Amy Orr-Ewing: 
Well, I think there are ways of doing that. I think, um, I guess around this conversation about the humanity of women is one that I’m finding at the moment. I still think that there are touch points in culture around, um, you know, Christmas and probably also around the search for meaning. So I was in Switzerland in September talking to loads of Swiss bankers and looking at some of the research that had come out of Harvard around how pursuing increasing affluence has not led to increasing well-being or a sense of happiness in, in culture. I personally think that all the conversations around the climate and, um, our use of, of the earth, I think we have something really profound to say into that conversation, that this world was created and that, you know, there’s extraordinary value in that creation, even if you look at how John’s gospel begins, it begins with that, um, that asserting that everything that was made was made by and through the word, through Jesus. And so there’s this extraordinary value on creation that ought to be. So I think a lot of our task today is to, I guess, make those creative connections between the faith and what’s happening in culture because people aren’t going to do that for themselves. They think we’re irrelevant.

Studio – John Dickson:

But Amy says there’s one question that people keep on asking, and it’s one that Christianity answers profoundly. That’s where we go after the break

Media – News clip sting

Studio – John Dickson:

Amy finds that suffering often provides an occasion for people to ask the big questions, and her thoughts are timely as it seems like right now the whole world is pondering its mortality. Amy doesn’t attempt a philosophical account of pandemics or anything like that, but she has pondered this theme deeply, and it’s actually the topic of her next book, so I wanted to grab a few of her best reflections.

Amy Orr-Ewing:
I think as you get older, this becomes a more real and profound question, even than when you’re younger. And I’m not saying it’s not there when you’re younger. And so for me also, professionally, it’s something that I’ve thought about and reflected on. My husband and I were really thinking about, um, I guess pastoring this couple through the death of their baby son. And he had to speak at the funeral. And one of the things that he said was, that this boy had never known a day without love. And it, it really sat with me and, and, um, it began to, I guess, shape how I was thinking about and processing the question of, of suffering and evil and God’s existence, but to look at it through that lens of love, how and why love is even possible, how and why suffering hurts because of our experience of love, that the two are so indivisible. And do we actually believe that love is, is a real category? And does our, uh, understanding of love as a real category in this conversation about suffering, does that have any foundation? And if we take a purely materialistic view of the world, then, you know, our feelings and our interactions with other human beings are predominantly biological or chemical, is there a metaphysical category beyond materialism that drives us as human beings, that is in us, that’s around us, that give some explanation as to why suffering hurts so much, including the suffering of people we’ve never met. Um, so looking at love from that sort of perspective, and then I guess unwrapping it through different kinds of experiences of suffering, including, you know, seriously violent, horrible, evil. Um, you know, how does love as an explanation fit with that as well as kind of natural disasters and stuff. So I’m looking, I’m trying to look at what I believe is a sort of uniquely Christian perspective A on what love is and B that we’ve been created as human beings with the capacity to, [00:23:00] to love, but also to, to withhold love and what that has to say into the conversation.

John Dickson:
The day before I flew here, um, I visited a friend in hospital, her cancer’s returned, aggressively, um, she has four kids at home. She’s not a Christian. And of course her question is, why shouldn’t I take this cancer as evidence that randomness is more basic to the universe than order and love?

Amy Orr-Ewing:
Okay, so the first thing I guess I would want to say in, in this conversation would be you need to draw a distinction between how as a Christian we understand that and what we actually say to a dying person in the moment. So we do not need to blurt out everything we think about and know and, or have come to believe about that situation to a person who’s actually suffering in that situation. So. I think that would be the first thing I would say. Um, In terms of, of how I would be responding as I’m thinking about this question through the lens of love, I would be thinking about the fact that this woman is, is suffering is more than the sum of the parts of a physical clump of cells eating away at her physical body and her physical body one day ceasing to exist. And if we believe the dilemma for a woman who has four children and is in that situation is more than material, if there’s a greater dimension to it than that her And all she is, is her body. And so her children are losing the material body that interacts with them materially. If we believe it to be more than that, I want to ask why, why does suffering hurt so much? And for us as Christians, ultimately, the answer to that is that. You as a person exist. There is a metaphysical reality to you. There is a sacredness to your life. And so cancer feels like. the horrible, painful, dreadful, awful thing which we dread and hate and all of that precisely because life is so precious and sacred. And so then we might go on to look at a Christian account. the world as to why there is the suffering, how within a Christian account of the world there is not a law of karma, there is not a connection between this woman has done something to deserve what has happened, or maybe her ancestors have, or she did in a previous life, none of that is there. And then I would also want to look at, um, the sort of, The radical promise of, um, of life, you know, the John’s Gospel talks of Jesus in him was life and that life was the light of people that Jesus is ultimately that source of life, which transcends our material bodies and how there might be hope, because ultimately the pain of that question is a loss of connection, isn’t it? It’s a loss of connection with it. one’s children and, um, experience of life and all of that. So, so the, you know, the possibility of, of life. Yeah. And that that’s not just clutching at straws, that is actually incarnated in history, in Jesus resurrection.

Studio – John Dickson:

Christianity can make its intellectual case. And I think many of my Underceptions guests have made that clear. But obviously we are more than rational creatures. And increasingly, people aren’t just asking, is there a good argument? They want to know, does it work? Is it good? Does Christianity make sense in the head and the heart of our concrete daily lives? Amy says that it’s here the persuasional power of Christianity really comes to the fore.

Amy Orr-Ewing:
When we talk about the Christian faith, when we present the Christian faith, we’re not just talking about, you know, a book of rules that might help you navigate moral dilemmas. And so there’s an attraction to, I guess, uh, uh, uh, An actual worldview that encompasses everything from creation care to what it means to be a woman or to be human. Um, you know, how we conduct our finances and the origins of the universe. It’s, it’s sort of massive. And that, that I think is attractive as we feel we’re in sinking sands. There’s a lot of confusion and, um, politically and all of that. I think secondly, honestly, certainly here, the reality is that where there is poverty and where there is distress or garrings or, you know, collapse of the prison system, there is Jesus in his church. And I think You know, we, we kind of rightly look at the record of the church on lots of things and say it’s terrible. But we also sometimes can be encouraged by that truth. So, you know, I was just driving here today, for example, and listening to the radio and, you know, someone was talking about food banks, food banks coming up all the time. You know, that was dreamed up by a friend of mine’s dad, who’s a Christian, who wanted to actually do something really practical in the name of Jesus. Two weeks ago, um, I was talking to someone who is massively involved in, in prisons in the UK and in helping people who’ve, who’ve been in prison get sort of basic skills and, you know, then ultimately be employable and all of that done in the name of Jesus. So where you see the biggest, most intractable social problems. of poverty, there you meet Christ in his people. And I think that really is resonant of the early church and who Jesus is. And if we have eyes to see it, you know, that, that really is there. And that, that I think does draw some people too.

Studio – John Dickson:

Let’s press pause. I’ve got a five-minute Jesus for you. I owe my own Christian faith to the persuasive power of women. I mean, firstly, my babysitter when I was nine was Mrs. Faithorn, and she did something I never realized until years later. You know, it always used to puzzle me, um, that I could say the Lord’s Prayer.

And did, when I was a little kid. You know, Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, and all that. Um, even though I’d never been inside a church. Ours was not a religious household. And when I eventually became a Christian as a 16 year old, I honestly, for a moment, thought that I had miraculously imbibed the Lord’s Prayer.

This was some miracle of God. Uh, but then years later, I was speaking in a church and told the story of how I somehow magically knew the Lord’s Prayer. And this gorgeous elderly woman, Elsie Faithhorn, came up and said, don’t be silly, John. I was your babysitter when you were nine and I taught you the Lord’s Prayer.

You know, I felt so embarrassed, but also delighted at the influence of this woman. I mean, I remember she was my babysitter, but I had no recollection of her teaching me anything about God. And it was years later that another woman, Glenda Weldon, was my scripture teacher at high school. She wasn’t pushy.

She wasn’t proselytizing, but boy, she had a great case, uh, for the person of God. Jesus Christ, and really it was through her that I came to take the Christian faith really seriously as a 16 year old. Women persuaders have been a big deal in my life. And you know, there’s lots of nutty stuff out there about Jesus and women.

Um, and it’s kind of depressing. There’s that famous Dan Brown novel where Jesus is meant to have, uh, fallen in love with Mary Magdalene and kissed her and got married and so on. But frankly, we don’t need romance to see the prominence of women. In Jesus life. The data we have is really clear. Women are there from the very beginning.

In fact, in Matthew chapter one, in that long genealogy, uh, Matthew deliberately, uh, takes little sidesteps as he’s listing all the men in Jesus life to mention. some of his grandmothers like Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba. It sort of breaks the rules of an ancient sort of patriarchal genealogy by saying women were part of this.

Just, just a reminder that women are going to have a prominent role in the life of Jesus itself. We know also in Jesus adult ministry that the people who bankrolled Uh, his whole project were women. It wasn’t male benefactors. We’re actually told in Luke’s gospel that there were a bunch of women, uh, Joanna, Mary Magdalene and others who provided for Jesus and the 12 apostles for their full time traveling around Galilee and Judea.

Without them, uh, the history of Christianity would have been very different. different. We also know women traveled with Jesus. There are several mentions across the Gospels that women were in his entourage. And the great New Testament scholar, James Dunn, makes the point that this will have raised eyebrows in the ancient world to have women part of his entourage of disciples.

Women also feature in Jesus key teachings. He sort of brings them to the fore by mentioning them. So for example, in Mark 12, A woman is the exemplar, the ideal of a generous follower of God. Um, in John eight, you’ve got this marvelous story of forgiveness. The woman, uh, caught in adultery whom Jesus defends and loves.

But then on the other side of the equation in Luke 15, uh, Jesus uses a woman in his parable as a picture of God. Offering mercy to others. So this woman, you know, sweeps up her house looking for a lost silver coin. And, and that’s a picture of God searching out for others. We also know that women are there at the very end.

They’re at the cross, watching Jesus die. When most of the disciples, male disciples, have fled. And they are at the tomb. They are the first to visit the empty tomb. And, uh, give their testimony about the risen Jesus. I owe my faith to Elsie Faithorn, to Glenda Weldon, but you know, also to my wife, my darling wife, whom I’ve nearly lost twice to dangerous medical emergencies.

And in fact, as I record this, her own father is days away from dying, but I watch her, her faith in Christ. And honestly, it’s one of the guiding lights of my life. Women are everywhere in the Jesus story, and I just have to confess, women have persuaded me to remain trusting in Christ through it all. You can press play now.

Studio – John Dickson:

Amy is an unapologetic apologist for the Christian faith, but is the role of Christian persuader a growth industry or a thing of the past? I mean, nearly a third of the people on the planet at the moment still claim to hold some kind of Christian faith. But in the West, everyone knows that seems to be dwindling.

The great sandstone bodies of these once influential Christian institutions, like the Cathedrals of Europe or Oxford University itself, might still be standing, but the heartbeat of the faith has slowed. How can a persuader pull on her boots each day and head out to work without feeling a bit like a relic of a bygone era?

John Dickson:
All the demographics. Uh, and sociology suggests that Christianity is waning, uh, in Australia, here in Britain, in Europe. Uh, so, are you nonetheless hopeful? You always seem like a very chipper person. So, are you hopeful? And, and why are you hopeful?

Amy Orr-Ewing:
So, I think it’s partly my understanding of what those things are measuring is, I guess. So, in this country we have, uh, certainly a legacy of Christianity since Celtic times. You know, the church has been here, and that’s both a blessing and a curse. So when you look at kind of numerical church attendance and, and, and you see sort of graphs going downwards, um, you have to ask what you’re actually measuring. And I think what, what has gone in massive part is nominalism. It’s a sort of, I guess, a, a kind of cultural adherence to loosely. You know, Christendom kind of things. But if you’re a follower of Jesus, you don’t necessarily recognize that as true living Christian faith. And what the statistics actually say now in the UK, in the big cities, is that the church is growing. Not yet in the countryside, um, but in, in the major cities. It’s, it’s growing and that is amongst young people, that is amongst minorities as well, but not exclusively. It’s not only everyone, you know, five years ago was saying it’s only the black majority churches. It’s not. And so I feel hope because what that statistic is speaking to is, is real people actually encountering Christ, not a sort of drop off of, I guess of a sort of cultural badge of Christianity which isn’t what the Christian faith is ultimately about.

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