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Joy Marie Clarkson: Welcome to Another Life, a podcast of Plough Quarterly. This episode is a part of our series on Friendship. Friendship is not something you will often see making headlines, but we at Plough believe it’s the hidden ingredient that makes the burdens of life more bearable, communities strong, and what gives our life depth and meaning that cannot be found alone. On today’s episode, I speak with Professor Cambria Kaltwasser about that most mysterious and fundamental friendship: friendship with God.

Professor Kaltwasser is an associate professor of biblical and theological studies at Northwestern College. She serves as the co-president of the Karl Barth Society of North America and is the project editor for the Barth Translators Seminar, which is funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is an ordained minister for the Presbyterian Church (USA). On today’s episode, we talk about what friendship with God has meant throughout Christian history.

Looking to the pages of Scripture, to the ideas of Thomas Aquinas, and to the radical suggestions of Karl Barth. We talk about friendship as the sharing of secrets, the bearing of souls, and the willingness to ask things of each other. I hope that you’ll listen to the episode and then head over to read Cambria’s charming and profound essay in this quarterly, featuring that dynamic friendship duo, Frog and Toad.

I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Thank you for listening to another episode of Another Life.

Joy Marie Clarkson : Welcome back to Another Life. This week we are diving back into our series on friendship. And today we’ll be discussing one of the most perhaps fundamental but also unwieldy questions of friendship, which is our friendship with God. And to chat with me on the show about this, I have the pastoral and kind and profound Cambria Kaltwasser. It’s wonderful to have you with us on the show. And I’ll start by asking and then answering my own question, then I’ll pass it over to you. A question that I ask everyone, which is where you find yourself physically. I am, as usual, in my little East London flat. Where does this conversation find you?

Cambria Kaltwasser: I am speaking to you from my office on the campus of Northwestern College in Little Orange City, Iowa, in between many corn and soybean fields.

Joy Marie Clarkson: So before we dive into our conversation, tell us a little bit about how you spend your days and what you do.

Cambria Kaltwasser: Yeah, well I teach theology at this college that I mentioned in Northwest Iowa. It’s an undergraduate Christian liberal arts college. So my classes are filled with eighteen, nineteen, twenty-year-olds. And for many of them they’re just new to theology and I really have to make it concrete for their lives. I don’t have any master’s level or postgraduate teaching in my vocation. I also am an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA), but I fulfill that calling through doing pulpit supply. I’m usually preaching somewhere once a month. A lot of little country churches and small town churches. And, you know, I do things for the Presbytery, do committee work, et cetera. But I do participate in a number of networks, most of them related to the study of the Swiss theologian Karl Barth. And so I get to travel from time to time to do things with the Barth Translators Seminar and the Karl Barth Society of North America, for instance. So it’s a good life.

Joy Marie Clarkson: I had the pleasure of seeing Professor Kaltwasser speak a couple of weeks ago at the Scottish Dogmatics Conference, in which you were very much in your academic mode, but I felt like there was an expository preacher’s heart in some of the way that you spoke, which I really enjoyed and it’s part of why I’m looking so forward to this conversation. I wanted to ask you something quickly, if you don’t mind, about teaching undergrads. Are most of the undergrads that you teach – are they people who are going to major in theology or are they people who you’re picking up in a mandatory class they teach or that kind of thing?

Cambria Kaltwasser: Well, it’s a mix. My bread and butter is teaching a course that all students have to take at Northwestern College, no matter what their major is. They actually take two courses from our department, and one’s sort of an intro to the Bible, and the other is an intro to theology. And I teach the latter. So I, yeah, I teach a lot of students who haven’t necessarily had any training in theology and aren’t necessarily willing to accept the terminology. So I have to kind of woo them and try to convince them that this might matter for their life, especially their life of faith. Most of our students are Christians. But then also we do have majors. So I get to teach some upper-level classes for students who might be considering going on to ministry or other parachurch ministries. Yeah.

Joy Marie Clarkson: I just always think that’s such an interesting dynamic. The different kinds of students you might end up teaching. I work at King’s College London, and I actually don’t do very much undergrad teaching, so I shouldn’t be talking about this. But it’s interesting because, you know, our departments are theology and religious studies programs, so you have students coming, some people who come and they want to just do Christian theology and they can. But you also have people who are doing religion and politics or, you know, there’s other things. And so maybe they dip into Christian theology for one class. And it just is a totally different mindset if you’re teaching for someone who may not particularly want to encounter this or may never encounter it again. But as you said, it just creates a different dynamic and it makes you a little bit more creative and makes you put on your rhetorical glasses to say, how can I make this intriguing and engaging? And if this is the one time they, in their whole lives they ever really engage with theology, what will they take away from it?

Cambria Kaltwasser: Yes, so beautifully put. That’s been the real challenge of my career. It’s been a very worthy challenge, but since coming from graduate school, in graduate school, I feel like you are in increasingly narrow circles of people interested in very specific discourses and sharing this common language. And coming from that to a world of non-major undergraduates, you can’t speak the jargon to them and expect them to care or to listen up. I had this sense when I was teaching in the first year that, you know, I might spout off terms even like soteriology, something like that. And I just had a sense looking in their eyes that they didn’t accept that that was a thing. And then I had to ask myself, is it a thing? And why would it matter? You know, how can I put this differently, if it really matters?

Joy Marie Clarkson: Yeah. Yeah. But that’s an exciting thing. And I guess it is a good challenge too, to be like, why do I love these things? Why do I think they’re worth talking about? And you still clearly do think they’re worth talking about.

Cambria Kaltwasser: Very much so.

Joy Marie Clarkson: So you’re going to help us think about this theme of friendship with God. And I will say that I’m very excited to get my hands on – probably actually around the time this podcast released, so after people listen to this, they can go and look it up – your book, which is coming out in October, I think, right?

Cambria Kaltwasser: Yes.

Joy Marie Clarkson: And that’s called Karl Barth on Friendship with God: Prayer, Partnership, and Transformation. And that’s with Baylor University Press, if my memory serves.

Cambria Kaltwasser: That’s correct.

Joy Maria Clarkson: So people should go and look that up. But before we get into maybe some of the specifics of what you examine in there and perhaps some of the infamous Karl Barth’s thoughts in the matter, let’s begin with a broad but a basic question. What does it mean to be friends with God, or friends of God?

Cambria Kaltwasser: Yes. I think that this is a theme that you can find stretching back to the earliest days of Christian theology. But I think that there are different aspects of friendship with God that various Christians have found compelling. I think at its basic level it means to be befriended by God in Jesus Christ and to be drawn into a relationship of intimacy with God. And so, for some, for some spiritual writers, they’ve really emphasized the intimacy, the nearness to God, the exchanging of all of our deepest thoughts and desires. Praying to God in that way where we can just let everything out, let God into who we are, and also receive back from God. Many have emphasized friendship is a relationship in which you enjoy the other person for who they are and not just their utility in your life.

So you care about them for who they are and not what they can give you as some kind of external good or service. And so many spiritual thinkers have emphasized the goodness of our relationship with God in which we enjoy God in which God enjoys us and just loves us for who we are. Gracious, just abundant life, being in that kind of relationship in which you’re loved for who you are.

There’s the emphasis on friends as those whom you share your secrets with. That’s something that was lifted up by Thomas Aquinas. And I think it has its basis in John 15:15, where you know, Jesus says that the servant doesn’t know what the master is doing, but I have let you know all that I am about.

So God shares God’s secrets with those who are drawn into this friendship with God through Jesus Christ. And I think we have a sense that we know we know some of the heart of God in that relationship. And we are growing closer and closer into the heart of God, having some provisional knowledge of what God is about in the world and the kind of world that God is bringing about. And of course we share our secrets with God, as I mentioned before.

But the aspect of friendship that I actually focus on the most in my book is the asking of things from one’s friends. So friends are those that we ask things of. We kind of have a right to ask things of our friend who is there for us in our time of need. So I think of like one time when I was in seminary, there was a medical emergency in my family and I needed someone to be there for my son who was asleep. I didn’t want to drag my son to the ER with me. So I asked my friend who lived nearby if he would stay in our apartment until my son woke up. And that was an example of me imposing on my friend, but it wasn’t imposing because he was my friend and I knew he would say yes.

And I think friends are really the ones that we turn to, the ones that we ask something of when we need something, we need a ride, we need to borrow someone’s car, we need this or that. The people we turn to most readily, they are our friends. And in many situations, if that person were to say no, like it’s one thing if they can’t, but if they were just to say no, then it would indicate they’re not really our friends, or they’re not as good of friends as we as we took them to be. So friends really ask things of each other, and that’s part of the reciprocity that makes friendship what it is, and that’s part of the goodness of the relationship.

So I got a little bit far away, but the focus of my book is on petitionary prayer because that’s where Barth draws out this language of friendship with God. Because he so wants to emphasize that yes, God answers prayers. Prayers aren’t just prayed to change my attitude towards things that happen in the world. It’s not solely about aligning my will with God’s will. It’s really about asking for something that I expect to receive from my divine friend. And in Scripture, we learn of a God who answers prayer. We learn of a God who hears the groans of those he loves, those he’s befriended, and who answers them. So it’s in developing this realistic account of God truly answering our prayers that Barth starts talking in terms of friends. So he uses that to say, you know, it’s not because from the outset we have a claim to God’s help. It’s not because we deserve God’s special favor or that we’ve earned it. But because God sees us as friends, God has deigned to be held accountable to the claims of God’s friends.

So that’s where he starts talking about friendship, but then there’s a reciprocal account of how God behaves as our friend by responding to our petitions and also empowering us to call upon God as friends. So that’s the basis of Barth’s friendship talk. So there are many different facets of friendship, and that’s just the one that I focus on the most in my book.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Hmm. I love that. I want to linger momentarily around the – I love the idea of a friend as someone who with whom we can share our secrets and who shares their secrets with us. I don’t know how I missed that one, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of that. But that that kind of picture of, in John 15:15, as though Jesus is saying, “I’m letting you in on the secret of what I’m up to in the world. And that is a part of what makes us friends.” And that really goes back to that very you know, I think when I think of my life of like when I was sorting out what friendship was most, or at least like the most intensive early experience that, it’s when you have those kind of like early adolescent friendships and being in on each other’s secrets is such a big part of that. And so I love the idea of being in on God’s secrets, God revealing God’s self to us, and that being a part of what makes us friends.

But I also love the question of petition and that being a fundamental aspect of friendship and that being something that Barth pulls out. Because I also think that in human friendships, that’s something that is increasingly, almost undervalued, I think. There’s this sense that you, you know, we talk a lot about boundaries, and I’m not saying boundaries aren’t good, but I think there is less of a sense that we can ask things of people and trust that they will be there for us. But that reciprocity is fundamental in many accounts of friendship. And it’s really interesting to hear that brought out specifically when it comes to friendship with God, that we can ask things of God. Does Barth also put it the opposite direction? Does God ask things of us?

Cambria Kaltwasser: Mm-hmm.. I mean that infuses his whole theology. I don’t know that he draws upon the motif of friendship as he’s thinking about God’s specific asking things of us. However, it’s implicitly there, because he calls friendship a commission. He says, yeah, I’m trying to think this through ‘cause when he talks about our role in prayer, he says some of the most radical things ever about our relationship to God. He says that we participate in God’s rule. Like we are next to God, next to God’s throne, and we are reigning with God as God’s friends, which is pretty radical. He also says that God sort of allows our prayers to co-determine God’s action. Now, all of this you’d have to nuance within his understanding of God’s sovereignty, within his understanding of providence. But the basic point is that there’s a union of wills and a shared agency. So clearly, we can only participate in God’s will through prayer because God has already let us in on what God is about in the world, which is also God’s claim on us to be drawn in, to respond to God’s befriending of us. So there’s a claim on us that I think precedes our claims on God.

Joy Marie Clarkson: That’s where that reciprocity begins. So how do we cultivate friendship with God? Is it through prayer?

Cambria Kaltwasser: Yeah, in Barth’s terms it’s definitely through prayer. Just like as with any friendship, you want to take time to get to know the other person, who they are, what they love, what their purpose is. We get to know God through reading Scripture. But also through being drawn into the community of those also befriended by God, so the church, and we get to know God better through these other friends of God who can reflect different aspects of God to us and share in this love for God with us.

But prayer – I mean prayer, we have that command in Scripture to pray without ceasing.

And Barth himself notes that prayer can’t be thought of as only discrete prayers, when I like consciously sit down or fold my hands and form a prayer, but it has to be thought of as a way of life, a way of thinking of your whole life as lived in communion with God. Or as lived before God. And received by God. I think there’s something really profound to me, I don’t know if I’ve fully gotten to the bottom of it, but I think there’s something really profound to me about thinking of my life as received by God.

Because I think there’s so many aspects of life that can feel meaningless or thankless or confusing. There are times when we feel alone and we feel confusion, doubt, sorrow that no one else sees. And we’re trying to put one foot in front of the other and we’re trying to do our best to think about our life as the enactment of a friendship with God, then would not only be to say, I’m going to try to have this consciousness of my divine friend in my mind and the way that I act in the world, I’m willing God’s best, which is a weird thing to say, but I’m willing like this world that God wants to bring about, like in all my little steps and all my imperfection and all my stumbling. But then it’s another aspect to say, despite how much I fall short of living that life, God is generous towards me. God sees me in the moments nobody else sees me. God accepts yeah, my life as sort of a gift friendship.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Hm. That’s a beautiful thought. And a kind of encouraging thought, literally, as in it gives one courage, I think.

So something that some people might worry about, and this is, I’m gonna combine two questions here. But some people might worry about thinking of God as friend because it could seem sort of irreverent or could kind of lighten the sense of lordship, right? The sense that God is God and we are not.

So I guess my twofold question is how do we respond to that concern? The concern of thinking of God as being something that might be almost sacrilegious, even though I guess one simple response is that it’s in Scripture, so we might as well use the language that’s given to us. But then more fundamentally, how do we think about that question of how can God be both Lord and friend?

Cambria Kaltwasser: That’s a great question, a very important question. And I do think that the idea of friendship with God often elicits an eye roll like from people I really respect, you know. It seems like one worry is the casualness of the idea of friendship with God could lead to a laxness of the Christian life and assuming that God just has this easy approval of us and, I don’t know if you’ve seen there’s the statue of Buddy Christ who’s like winking and doing finger guns. It just seems this like really like low-key whatever kind of chill Christ. I think I would say that the fear, the fear that friendship with God might degrade the seriousness of this relationship, I think it’s the worry that friendship would cheapen our relationship with God. But I think the basis of it is that our idea of friendship is too cheap. That we underestimate the high calling of friendship. So think about it. If friendship is to love someone for who they are and to love them well, even at cost to ourself, to really increasingly see them for who they are and to see past the illusions of who we would want them to be. If it’s also we take on what our friends love and the people that our friends love. We treat them as our friends. So it’s also to take on this friend’s loves to … then it’s really a high calling. Like what calling could be higher?

I think that when I think about different callings that you might have as a Christian, you know, if you think of yourself as a witness, as a neighbor, as a citizen. A lot of these callings, you can think of them as roles you kind of put on at various times, but then you can like set them aside. Even being a minister, even being a shepherd of God’s people, you can set it aside. But the calling to be God’s friend you can’t set that aside. It’s not so much something to do, but it is someone to be.

And so I think that it’s a calling that’s more demanding than any other calling because it can affect almost, it can affect absolutely anything. That you find yourself in a moment where you ask, how does taking this step or that step reflect upon my divine friend? How does it love God for who God is? How does it further this common cause that I have with my friend bringing about this kingdom, or at least reflecting this kingdom in all that I do and say, out of love of who God is? I think that’s the way to mitigate the worry about the cheapness of friendship is to say it’s actually a much higher calling than we tend to think of it as. Because our understanding of friendship has deteriorated, I think, a little bit, especially through social media and the easy way we use that term friend.

So I think then that that kind of helps with the second half of your question, which is how can God be Lord and friend at the same time. When you think of a Lord, you think of someone who commands you.

And one of my mentors has helped me with this a lot because he’s written on the way that friends command each other. This brings us back to what I said earlier about friends making requests of each other, but friends also command each other.

If you think about, I think for many people, the closest friendship you have is your spouse. And your spouse is the person who can just tell you what to do. You’re gonna pick up the kids today, pick this up from the grocery store. They don’t have to say, would you consider doing this? Sometimes it’s a command, but we don’t think of it as a command because our lives are so closely intertwined, and we’re so ready and willing to obey.

So I’m gonna pair that. So if you can accept that, OK, a Lord is someone who commands, but a friend commands us. Then I think combine that with, Barth also has a lot to say about obedience, not just being like an external, sort of you know going through the motions of what is being asked, but true obedience is a conformity of the heart, which means if you if you really had true obedience, you’d be completely free because your will would be so aligned with the person who has commanded you.

So who can command you with more complete authority than a friend can command you? You not only accept what they’re commanding of you but their authority. Who can who can compel more of you than a friend compels you, but through the power of love? So that you’re complying, maybe that’s a better word for some than obeying, but then you’re complying from the heart, because you want to, you want to do what they’ve asked of you. So I think that actually lordship, in our imagination, there’s always a distance between our will and the one who commands us. We think of that as a relationship at a distance.

And it is true, because we don’t have inside knowledge to everything that God is asking us to do, and so maybe, often, we have to think of it as a Lord-servant relationship. But I think friendship maybe is the eschatological way of thinking of that relationship because to be a friend would be to obey with no distance, but completely from the heart, with a completely united will, and to obey from love and not merely from some sort of like external notion of obligation. I don’t know if that’s been helpful or not.

Joy Marie Clarkson: I think so. And it goes back to the knowing God’s secrets, right? Because there’s a sense of, you know, when Jesus says that. And it is, the language he’s using, I think, in some translations is, I no longer call you servants or even slaves, but friends. Because there’s this sense of you know what I’m in on and you’re close to the Father’s heart and the Holy Spirit is a part of that as well and revealing that to us so that we can be close.

I was also thinking about, I was glad you gave the example of a spouse as a friend on whom you have demands. Which some people don’t like that, but I’m not sure why. But I was thinking about how when marriage is going really well and when there’s a sense of friendship, there’s a sense of demands on each other that you don’t have to articulate because you’re so attuned to each other. Right? So there’s a sense that I, in my current experience of life, I need things from my husband that I don’t usually need because I’m more vulnerable and more tired than I usually am. But a part of what makes that a gift is that I often – and I can, on some level it is just right, if you want to use some of that language about that you might find somewhere like Aquinas or something about the just demands for it’s just that my husband provides me those things. But in really beautiful moments, a part of the gift is that I could command those of him, but I don’t have to, because there’s this attunement and this harmony between us in these stronger moments of marriage.

And so it’s something like that. It’s this sense that God is the Lord to whom we do owe things, to whom we are commissioned and called to ask things. But that aspect of friendship is that that almost doesn’t have to be asserted because as we grow in friendship with God, there’s an attunement to God’s secrets, to what God is up to. And is that always the case? No, but there’s some kind of – I’m just verbally processing what you said – but that makes a lot of sense to me. The sense of things that we can ask of one another, but that we almost don’t have to within friendship because – or that we do ask it but it disturbs that kind of power dynamic, I think.

Cambria Kaltwasser: Yes. I think you said that beautifully. Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m trying to get at. Sometimes we don’t have to state our needs to our friends. Oftentimes we still will, but it won’t meet us like a burden to want to meet the needs of our friends when we have in mind how much we love them and want them to be well.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Yeah, and I think a point of pain in friendship or in a marriage is when you ask something of a friend and they say no and you have to explain why you actually need this from them.

So, I suppose we’ve already gotten into this and touched on it. But if you were to articulate what does friendship with God add to our understanding of the Christian life? How would you try to bottle that up?

Cambria Kaltwasser: Trying to think of how to put this with in a way that won’t be repeating exactly something I’ve said before.

Joy Marie Clarkson: But it’s probably OK if you repeat a little bit, ‘cause we’ve talked about a lot of things.

Cambria Kaltwasser: Yeah. I think friendship with God inclines us to see our relationship with God as a good relationship whose goodness is in part the sharing of a life together through the mutual give and take of prayer. Just the idea that God wants us to voice our needs and our desires to God, that God wants to bring us into God’s desire for this world, to let us in on what God is doing, so that we can participate in it too. But also, yeah, to be claimed by us, as we articulate where things are out of alignment with God’s unfolding will. That’s a relationship of … Yeah, just a shared life I think is the best way that I can put it. And as you think that way you start to see your life as a offering or a gift to your friend, because all of our life is lived before God, Coram Deo. God sees us in all of the moments of our life. So there’s a friend that’s always there with us. That is God. So all of one’s life can be a kind of offering to God.

And I think that changes the way that we experience it. I think it changes the moments of loneliness or frustration or despair. I think it also elevates our efforts at living faithfully, even despite their imperfections, to think of them as a gift to our divine friend, who receives them generously despite, you know, our confusion and our imperfection and lack of ability.

Joy Marie Clarkson: As a good friend would.

Cambria Kaltwasser: Yes, exactly.

Joy Marie Clarkson: So, I have a question that I didn’t write down but I am going to ask you, and I think you’ll have, I think it’ll be an easy answer. Who are a few writers or where are a few passages you would look to if someone wanted to meditate more on the theme of friendship? So obviously they should buy your book and think about Karl Barth’s engagement with friendship. But are there any other passages of scriptures or spiritual writers you would encourage people to look to if they wanted to think about friendship with God?

Cambria Kaltwasser: I don’t know, this actually isn’t so easy because I have very much been in this, I’ve had my head down in this world of Barth studies. And the part that maybe you might not want to bring this into the show, but the part, in Barth I’ve actually been making a critique against Barth using this theme of friendship. So I haven’t been as wide ranging. OK, let me think. Actually, there’s a book by Gilbert Meilaender that touches upon, it’s a short book and it touches upon many of the same themes that I’ve been discussing, but in a really accessible and helpful way. Only I don’t know if I have the name of it. I know friendship is prominent in the title. Gilbert Meilaender.

Joy Marie Clarkson: I’ll look up the book and I’ll put it in the show notes.

Cambria Kaltwasser: There’s also friend of mine who is writing a book on friendship, whether it will be primarily friendship with God or other friendships, but he’s a theologian. His name’s David Henreckson at Whitworth that I’m very much looking forward to read. That will probably be a year out. Part of my book is also a critique of a different strand in Barth’s theology that doesn’t lend itself to friendship with God, but is more aptly described as paternalism.

And when you think about alternatives to friendship, one of the main ones would be domination, thinking about God solely in terms of a master to a slave. And I think Barth rules that out. That’s just the idea that we can’t know what God is up to and God only comes as judge and we are in the role of like just obedient servants who aren’t up to the task of understanding and endorsing God’s will.

I think Barth rules that out very well, throughout the church dogmatics, especially in the way that he elevates Jesus as the one in whom we know God’s heart, and so that we never have to accept this relationship with God as just one of abject sovereignty over us.

However, I think there’s a more subtle strand in Barth that would also cut against friendship. And it’s not domination, but it’s something more like paternalism, which is the idea that God, yes, God loves us, God is devoted to us, but we again aren’t up to the task of understanding and endorsing what God is doing. So mostly the Christian life is just about God doing it for us.

And I think this comes out in certain passages in his doctrine of sanctification, which I have a critique of in my book, where he is particularly very skittish of us identifying exemplars in the Christian faith or instances of faithful response to God or instances of sanctification. So he has an account where we can’t really say or know like where and when God has sanctified and lifted up human action to make a genuine response to God. But rather we just have to take it on faith and look only to Jesus, that somehow we are being sanctified, but it’s invisible to us. And I think that this really would be a form of estrangement within friendship, or we could call it a kind of alienation, to not be able to share in the knowledge of where and when we can see glimpses or glimmers of God’s world coming into being, or how or where or when we can participate and become part in of this inbreaking new …

So yeah, there’s a paternalistic strand in Barth. And I think it’s relevant, even for those who aren’t interested in Barth studies, there are paternalistic accounts of the Christian life, and accounts of the Christian life where we are not empowered to view our life as an offering, given back to God, but rather to only see it in terms of poverty and sort of abject depravity and sinfulness and just our incapacity and our inability. Not to mention accounts that really emphasize God as a dominating master. Yeah, which I don’t think helps those either inside or outside of the church to see how this relationship is good, and one that they want to participate in.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Absolutely. I’m very glad you shared that. That was great. I think the conversation would have been incomplete without that. Well, Cambria, thank you so much for sharing with us today. And you’ve given us so much food for thought and a beautiful vision of the Christian life as a growing and witnessed by God friendship with our divine friend.

I want to end today by asking something I ask all my guests, which is what is one thing that reminds you that another life is possible?

Cambria Kaltwasser: That’s a beautiful question. So to stick with the theme of friendship, I would say that for me it’s hearing my friends tell the good news.

So usually in a worship context. If I ever hear a good friend preach, or a friend speak the liturgy or pray, and this can also be outside of the context of worship, just to articulate what is it, this good news that we have in Jesus Christ. There is something so moving about that to me, that sometimes it’s even brought me to tears. And so I’ve been thinking about that in in relation to your question, and in relation to all that I’ve been thinking about in terms of friendship. I think that we really need other people to make the gospel credible to us.

I was thinking about this in terms of something that Rowan Williams has written. Maybe your audience is familiar with Rowan Williams, the Anglican bishop and theologian. He has this lovely little book, Tokens of Trust, in which he says that faith is often not established or grown through arguments, through theological proofs, but rather through people whose lives we consider trustworthy to us, people we trust, people who whose life we see and we admire and we think that we could live inside their faith.

So they make the Gospel credible to us, I think concretely in our life, these are the people that laugh with us, that cry with us, that love us for who we are. And when they articulate the good news, it has a different level of authority, and is so compelling that even back when I was in seminary, to hear a friend preach in the seminary chapel was so compelling and moving to me. So I think that’s just a theme in my life.

Joy Marie Clarkson: I love that. To hear a friend preach the good news. Well thank you so much for joining us. I’ve loved this conversation.

Cambria Kaltwasser: Thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

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