Beeson Podcast, Episode #539 Dr. Stefana Dan Laing March 9, 2021 >>Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University. Now your hosts, Doug Sweeney and Kristen Padilla. >>Doug Sweeney: Welcome to the Beeson Podcast. I’m your host, Doug Sweeney, here with my co-host, Kristen Padilla. Did you know that the month of March is women’s history month? When we remember and celebrate the contributions women have made to history and society? Here at Beeson we give thanks to God for the ways in which he has called and used women through church history to take the gospel of Jesus Christ to the ends of the earth. Our guest on the show today is an expert in church history who spends some of her time studying women in church history. She’s also a cherished faculty colleague here at Beeson, who disciples and mentors some of our female students and coordinates our women’s theological colloquium. Kristen, would you please introduce her to our audience? >>Kristen Padilla: Hello, everyone. We are so glad to have on the show today, Dr. Stefana Dan Laing. She is Assistant Professor of Divinity and Theological Librarian at Beeson. In her roles Dr. Laing teaches in the area of spiritual formation and coordinates, as Doug has already said, the Beeson Women’s Theological Colloquium. She is married to John and they have three children. Just a little personal word here, but I’m so grateful for Dr. Laing and her friendship and our work together in discipling and providing resources to our female students. So, welcome Stefana to the Beeson Podcast. >>Stefana Laing: Thank you. Thanks for inviting me. It’s great to be here. >>Kristen Padilla: We always like to begin by allowing our guests to share a little bit about your background, your story. Tell us where you’re from and how you got all the way to Beeson? >>Stefana Laing: I’m originally from Cleveland, Ohio. I’m the daughter of Romanian Baptist immigrants who came to America separately. My mom came when she was just a child, just before the outbreak of World War II. And my father came as an adult in 1970, specifically he came to marry my mom. They started their life together in Cleveland. There’s a long story behind their meeting and their marrying, but suffice it to say my parents ministered in Cleveland at the Romanian Baptist Church that was pastored by my grandfather. My mom’s dad. And later my parents became involved in cross-cultural church planting in the Cleveland area and in northeastern Ohio. Part of their work was subsidized by the NAMB, which at that time was called the home mission board. During their ministry years they were bi-vocational. Since my mom had taught for a long time in the Cleveland public schools and later my dad worked in the public school system as well as an ESL teacher. So, all that to say that my two younger brothers and I lived in Cleveland during our childhood. We were PK’s, preacher’s kids, and we were MK’s, missionary kids. So, we were doubly bad. You know? (laughs) After about 1986 we became international MK’s as well, as my parents became involved in church planting – again, among Romanians. This time through the International Mission Board in Australia. So, my high school and college years were spent in Sydney, Australia until I left home for seminary. That’s it in a nutshell. >>Doug Sweeney: Dr. Laing, some of our listeners will know that you are an expert in patristics, but not all of our listeners will know what the word “Patristics” means. Would you let us know what it means to be a specialist in patristics? >>Stefana Laing: Yeah. I’m not the greatest expert, but I do love this area. Patristics conventionally refers to the era of the church fathers, which is a recognized group of theologians who taught authoritatively and who really defined the contours of church doctrines like the Trinity, Christology, Ecclesiology, and lots of other ologies. They weren’t just theologians or teachers, they also served as pastors and bishops. They were preaching and teaching and defending the faith. This period, the patristic period, spans about the years 100 to 600 AD. Now it’s also acceptable to use another label – late antiquity – to refer to this period. So, when you use the term “late antiquity” then it’s a much more inclusive term, including both men and women and their great deeds, their impact in the church, et cetera. But strictly speaking the term refers to the church fathers and their contribution to doctrinal development. >>Kristen Padilla: Since we have you on the show, I would love for you to tell our listeners about your book entitled, “Retrieving History: Memory and Identity Formation in the Early Church,” which comes out of your study of patristics. What are you seeking to argue in your book? What are some of your conclusions? I just wonder if you could give our listeners a teaser so that they’ll go out and buy your book after listening to the podcast. >>Stefana Laing: Thanks for that question, Kristen. Let me back up just a step and just kind of talk a bit about how I got interested in patristics. My great interest in high school and college was always ancient history. Mainly from about the 5th century BC through the late Roman empire at like 3rd century AD. So, I think it was various aspects of that time period that interested me. Like the art, architecture, literature, religion, et cetera. And also the people whose ideas fueled all the events that I was reading about. So, in high school I studied the history of the Roman empire from Augustus to Nero. So, the beginning of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. And naturally I thought a lot about the overlap of that material with what I was learning in church – both from the New Testament, which directly overlaps that period, as well as from the Old Testament. In fact, in high school I had kind of this a-ha moment where I realized that what I was studying in the Greco Persian Wars overlapped significantly with the Book of Esther. In fact, it overlapped directly with the Book of Esther and the story there. It just kind of blew my mind a little bit in the 11th grade. But the ongoing history of the church fit naturally within the period of the Greco Roman empire. So, the patristic period was kind of a natural fit to capture my interest. So, the patristic period told the story of the church after the apostles passed off the scene. And it included the church’s perseverance to persecution and its eventual triumph through the Emperor Constantine. And so while I enjoy studying doctrinal development, I also am very interested in Christian history writing and in Christian spirituality, artistic expression, and iconography. Specifically, this is now coming to my book, how Christians told their own story in various formats. And in this way they shaped the identities of generations of believers throughout those tumultuous first five centuries or so. So, you asked about my book called, “Retrieving History” and the subtitle is, “Memory and Identity Formation in the Early Church.” So, you can see how that reflects the interests that I’ve had all along. So, my book is part of a series called “Evangelical Ressourcement” and it’s edited by Dan Williams at Baylor, published by Baker. The overarching point of ressourcement, which means “going back to the sources,” is to draw on the ancient sources of our faith for the benefit of the churches present and future. In my book, I’m really interested in laying out the value of history, how history was written in the patristic world, and what forms history took between the first historian, who’s not Eusebius but Luke, in the first century, and then Eusebius in the fourth century and, after, those who followed his model of history writing. So, when you ask yourself, “Well, what came between Luke and Eusebius? Did the church really not care about its history?” This is a question that Dan Williams and I discussed. The answer is, “Yes, they did, but there are different forms of history.” So, I kind of trace these in my book. So, I talk about apologetic uses of history, martyrology, the stories of the martyrs, hagiography, which are the stories of the saint’s lives, I guess, holy biographies, and then I also write about church history proper in the form of Eusebius and then those who kind of continued his model. So, what I’m doing in my book is probably not arguing so much as reminding and inviting and kind of pleading with folks to value the past, because the past really does powerfully impact the future. And so in my book I really stress remembrance, because the Bible stresses remembrance. I’m going to share a bit from the very last paragraph of my book, that remembrance is a command from God to his people in the Old Testament, a mandate from Jesus to his disciples in the gospels, it’s an urgent exhortation from apologists and martyrs and remembrance is also a task carried out by biographers and historians. It’s still an ongoing work that we do in the service of the church that we, as Jesus’ disciples, ought to fulfill. So, we need to remember noble people, notable events, great examples of virtuous character and steadfastness of sound doctrine, these should be praised, emulated, and passed to the next generation as we read in Deuteronomy, so that the next generation will also set their hope in God and not forget the works of God. And that’s a quote from Psalm 78, a historical Psalm. So, as we remember our forebears we also ought to look to their God, who is the God of history, the God that they bore witness to, and that we also bear witness to. So, in a sense, we enter into that story and are sort of born along by it and our identity is formed by it as well. Both now and into the future. And it’s not just a personal, individual identity, it’s a collective identity, because we are a collection of sinners saved by grace, called the Church. That is how God has chosen to do his work in the world in history is through the Church. >>Doug Sweeney: Another one of the roles you play here at Beeson, Dr. Laing, is to teach our students spiritual formation. Probably most of us have an inkling as to what spiritual formation means in a seminary like ours, but how do you teach it to our students? What role would you say spiritual formation should play in the lives of ordinary believers? >>Stefana Laing: Yeah. Well, the first thing I tell my students is that formation is always happening, both in positive ways and negative ways. In ways that we realize and ways that we don’t realize. So, when we say, “What is spiritual formation and how can we do it?” Well, the thing is that it’s always happening. It’s constantly happening. If I were to just state it concisely, spiritual formation is a lifelong process of sanctification for all believers, for congregants, for pastors, for all believers. Spiritual formation, to me, involves knowing and loving God, first of all – knowing and understanding and valuing ourselves. And also understanding and loving others – our neighbor. And so through God’s work of sanctification we’re able to grow continually in these ways, increasingly formed into the image of Christ so we know clearly what our goal is. So, formation of any type is a kind of training or conditioning to develop any particular skill and it requires mentoring, modeling, practice, repetition, reinforcement, perseverance – all of these things apply to spiritual formation. So, spiritual formation, even pastoral, ministerial formation, they don’t stop at seminary graduation. But they need to continue in the lives of our graduates and in the lives of believers so that we can remain spiritually fit and not be spiritually stagnant. I would say the biggest way, the clearest way that spiritual formation can be engaged in is through the spiritual disciplines. Ways that ordinary believers can engage in disciplines that will help them, let’s say, through bible study, through knowing and understanding the text better. I really like, in addition to prayer and meditation, solitude, carving out some silent time, some time alone to look at the scripture, to sit with it, to listen to the Lord, maybe to journal with it. One that I really like is called, Lectio Divina, “holy reading.” In this practice we really slow down, we allow ourselves to internalize the text, allow it to saturate us. We can give close attention to details and allow the Holy Spirit to permeate and influence our thoughts about the text and to basically open ourselves up for the Holy Spirit to do his transforming work through the Word. So, I find myself constantly telling people, as they read the scripture, slow down. I like to read scripture in a group. I like to read scripture out loud. I like to walk through it at kind of a relaxed, leisurely pace so that I can think through it and listen through it, kind of put it together and integrate it into the thoughts that I’m thinking and just to see what is the Lord saying to me? How can I engage the text? What is he saying to me in my life as I walk along? >>Kristen Padilla: That is so helpful, Dr. Laing. As Doug has already mentioned, we have you on the show during Women’s History Month. This episode comes out the day after our Women’s International Day. Given your work at Beeson among women and your work in church history, I wonder if you could talk for a few moments about the contributions women have made in church history. That would take a whole long podcast. So, generally speaking, I wonder if you can touch on that topic and perhaps drawing from your research in patristics, perhaps you can share about a couple of women we should know about from that time period? So, we would love to hear about women’s roles in church history. >>Stefana Laing: Yeah, that would take significantly more time. I’m going to answer by using a broad brush. So, I’d say that women have been influential in certain ways in the public sphere and in more ways in the domestic and family sphere in the period that I study. There are some exceptional standouts that, on the whole, women functioned, I’d say, more impactfully in the church in that time in the domestic sphere. So, if we were going to talk about the public sphere it’s not like all women stayed home. Some women did have some opportunity to travel. They had opportunity to learn. Most of these were wealthy women who wanted to consult with bible scholars, maybe, like Jerome or they wrote letters to bishops like Augustine. One of the women that I write about in my book is named Melania and she and her husband Pinion were exorbitantly wealthy, I would say. But they renounced their wealth and wanted to live a simpler life, an acetic life, a life where they could think more, let’s say, in a Kingdom direction, and use their money, use their wealth to invest it in God’s work. Because they started traveling a lot as pilgrims they were able to visit with a lot of Christian communities throughout the Mediterranean and into North Africa. As they say needs in communities that they passed they started to use their money to endow, to endow monastic communities or just to help impoverished communities that they passed through. There were a number of other wealthy women like Melania who helped to establish some shrines in the Holy Land. Churches in the Holy Land. Monastic communities there. They were very, very important and their legacy still stands, even today, for people who visit the Holy Land. One very famous person who had a very public testimony is Perpetua. Also her servant girl, Felicity. We have them pictured in our dome here at Beeson. In fact, they are the earliest ones, chronologically speaking, there in our dome. The story of Perpetua is written mainly by her own hand. She kept kind of a diary. The kind of witness, the kind of bravery that we see from Perpetua and from Felicitas together is really convicting. It’s absolutely astounding. So, I would highlight that story. Let’s say, historically speaking, what we find with some of these stories, like Perpetua’s and also like the biography of Melania, is that these stories were inspiring to future generations who looked back, not just for examples, but let’s say in the time that the church was persecuted, later generations would look back to previous generations and how they endured persecution and they were kind of getting trained in the church, in case persecution should come across their community. So, I would say that women were also doing some very amazing things in the domestic sphere. For example, one stand-out, of course, is Augustine’s mother, Monica, who just by her very faithful Christian witness and personal investment in the spiritual life of her son was, I think, enormously successful. Even though she probably didn’t consider herself to be a success as a mother. Another woman is named Amelia, who is the mother of what we would call the Cappadocian family that consisted of three, no less than three, bishops coming out of that family. So, Basil of Caesarea, and Gregory of Nyssa, and Peter of Sabaste. All came from that family. I also would have to mention their big sister, Macrina, who was the eldest child. Macrina just was also a very faithful sister and a Christian role model of just spiritual strength. I mean, she was just a rock. Even more so probably than her siblings. But Macrina also was very loving, very kind, very compassionate, and basically turned their home into a bit of a domestic monastery and ministered to just people who needed a place to live, especially women who had nowhere to go. There were frequently natural disasters, famines, at that time, and Macrina actually took in a whole group of girls that were just wandering along the road with nowhere to go because they had been driven out of their home, due to poverty and famine. So, these are some examples. I could point to others and we’d need a whole show on that. But a book that I can recommend about women from this period is a book by my friend, Lynn Cohick, who recently moved from Denver Seminary, I believe, to Northern Seminary, as their Provost. She wrote a book called, “Christian Woman in the Patristic World.” I would highly recommend that. >>Doug Sweeney: Stefana, your friends and colleagues here know that you’re also hard at work co-editing a new women’s study bible for Lifeway. Could you give our listeners just a little hint about what’s coming there? Why are you doing a new women’s study bible? What are you doing in there? What’s special about it? >>Stefana Laing: Yeah, I mean, it’s a valid question. Why do we need another study bible? Why a women’s study bible? And it’s a legitimate question that the editorial team wrestled with as well. We believe that a new women’s study bible is warranted because of the massive shift in women’s discipleship over the last decade. Especially as a result of the digital age, which in the words of my friend and co-editor, Hannah Anderson, “the digital age has flattened traditional social hierarchies and raised up new voices and,” importantly here, “put pressure on our interpretations of difficult bible passages, especially those related to gender, race, power, and cross-cultural ministry.” So, what we believe is that the best thing we can do for women in this moment is to equip Christian women to draw them back to basics and particularly to the timelessness of the scripture. So, what we want to do is to equip them with a study bible that will illuminate the text in its historical and cultural context, situate it within a large history of the church, and also model some careful hermeneutics. So, are there lots of specialty bibles on the market? Yes, absolutely. Most of the bibles for women, the way that we have found it to be the case, are devotional bibles, gift bibles, journaling bibles, coloring bibles, doodling or whatever. But this product is a bonifide reference work. It is a study tool, a study resource. What we want to do is to create a study bible that is led and driven by the text. To let the text determine what questions there are to answer, let the text tell us what it wants to tell us and not just bombard the text with all of our questions just from our cultural moment. But at the same time we don’t want to ignore the cultural moment that we are in with all of its issues. Another thing that we want to do, that we think this bible would make a really wonderful contribution, is that we hope this project can tap the virgining field of female scholars and church leaders creating a study bible that is written by women, for women. So, I am actually amazed at how many women are currently, not just doing a PhD or teaching classes but how many are currently engaged in writing biblical commentaries right now. I can tell you that within about two or three years we will have a flood of wonderful, exegetical commentary works written by evangelical woman, drawn from all evangelical denominations. It’s very exciting. It was a real eye opener to me as I contacted women to be our study note writers and I’m very, very pleased that that is going to be the case. And so what we hope for this project is that it will uncover new insights and perspectives on the bible, the text that we all love. We hope that it will model thoughtful and robust engagement with scripture by women. We hope to resource and equip lay women who love the scripture but maybe have a limited biblical knowledge that has been limited by years of maybe very thin discipleship. And so in this sense we hope that this study bible will be a bridge between the excellent work that’s being done by women in the academy and also the work that lay women are doing in their own ministries. And I can’t tell you how many women who are going to write study notes for this bible are not just academic, but they have a real heart for giving women a rich resource, a rich experience of the biblical text and answering the questions that are close to women’s hearts. >>Kristen Padilla: Well, I can attest that Dr. Laing is spending a lot of time on this project and has provided such vision and wisdom and leadership to this new study bible and I’m excited that it will finally be coming out in a couple of years. When is the expected release date on it, Dr. Laing? >>Stefana Laing: As far as I know, it’s 2023. >>Kristen Padilla: 2023. Well, we’ll have to have you back on the show at that time to share more about the study bible and celebrate. >>Stefana Laing: [crosstalk 00:27:21] Kristen Padilla are also a contributing note writer to the bible, and I wanted to make sure our listeners know that. >>Kristen Padilla: Thank you. I’m very honored to be asked to be part of this project. We can’t let you get away from the show without asking you a question about Beeson. You came on faculty in 2018, but prior to that you were no stranger to these halls. You had taught classes as an adjunct several times. You had come in for lectures and sermons at various points in your career. I would love to know as a committed Southern Baptist, why did you accept the invitation to come on faculty at Beeson in 2018? And why should Baptists in particular consider preparing for ministry at an ecumenical interdenominational evangelical seminary like Beeson? >>Stefana Laing: I’ll answer the second question first. It’s because this kind of school that is interdenominational reflects the landscape of the evangelical church outside of these classrooms. I think it’s important for people to be acquainted with various Christian evangelical traditions, because chances are that in the community where they pastor, where they minister, there will be these other churches, ministers, who will be their peers. It’s important to understand one another, to know how to talk to one another, how to form friendships and relationships and how to form partnerships in ministry in order to benefit the community has a whole. And in order to be faithful witnesses to the gospel in whatever community the Lord sets you in. I’ll go back to your first question. Why come to Beeson? Gosh, the first time I came to Beeson was in 1999. At that time I was wandering around the halls here. It was January and not many people were here but Fisher Humphries was here. Actually, he was officing in your husband’s office, Kristen. He was in Oswaldo Padilla’s office. He gave me a tour of the facility, which wasn’t very exciting until we walked into the chapel. When we walked into the chapel that dome is just the historian’s dream, the church historian’s dream. When I looked at that I told Dr. Humphries, “It’s so traditional.” It’s a traditional form, the kind of thing that you’d find at a Catholic church or an Orthodox church in their dome. But instead of the disciples, Jesus’ disciples, it has figures from church history. When I saw that I thought, “Beeson reflects my love and appreciation for the church, for its people, for its deeds, its history, its Lord that is over all, the great cloud of witnesses, and all of these values are embodied in the iconography of the chapel.” The dome, I would say, is kind of a Hebrews 11 style. A gallery of faithful disciples who have carried the church’s mission forward. A gallery of saints from every denomination. So, I think because it was very clear to me that Beeson embodied the values that I also hold dear as a disciple of Jesus. Not just as a Baptist, but as a disciple of Jesus, and as a church historian. I think I connected with that, it resonated with me. I wanted to come back again as soon as I first saw it. So, I’m so happy that basically 20 years later we were able to make our sort of on again, off again relationship to be permanent. >>Doug Sweeney: Well, we’re happy too, Dr. Laing. As you know, we like to end these interviews by asking our guests what the Lord has been teaching them recently. It’s kind of a crazy time to ask people this question, because this has been such a difficult year for so many people. But in the midst of it all, is there anything that God’s been doing in your life or teaching you that you might share with the listeners as a way of edifying and encouraging them in their walk with the Lord? >>Stefana Laing: Well, it’s very simple for me these days because there are the kinds of challenges and also distractions or discouragements of the sort that you described. What I have found the Lord is teaching me through scripture and bible study, group study, is just to focus. To focus on the work that God has given me to do and not to worry about what anybody else is doing. So, just have to develop and maintain a single-minded focus and not to be distracted. >>Doug Sweeney: A great concluding word. You have been listening to Dr. Stefana Dan Laing, an Assistant Professor of Divinity and Theological Librarian here at Beeson. She and her husband, John, have already become dear friends of Wilma and me. We’re so grateful to you, Stefana, for giving us some time this afternoon. We’re grateful to you, our listeners, for tuning in. We continue to pray for you. We ask you to pray for us. And we say goodbye for now. >>Kristen Padilla: You’ve been listening to the Beeson podcast. Our theme music is written and performed by Advent Birmingham of the Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham, Alabama. Our engineer is Rob Willis. Our announcer is Mike Pasquarello. Our co-hosts are Doug Sweeney and, myself, Kristen Padilla. Please subscribe to the Beeson podcast at www.BeesonDivinity.com/podcast or on iTunes.