In this episode, Brandi talks with David deLeon to get a first pass at the worship of the written word. We talk bible, origins, interpretation, and really, how a collective reading of scripture outside of white supremacy, can make us more free.
You can find David on social media @emmanueldl
Continuing sending your questions to reclaimingmytheology@gmail.com
If you like what you hear, please rate, review, and subscribe wherever you find your podcasts. You can also join along on pattern at patreon.com/brandinico to help sustain the work and life of the podcast.
Taking our theology back from ideas and systems that oppress.
@reclaimingmytheology
In this episode, Brandi talks with David deLeon to get a first pass at the worship of the written word. We talk bible, origins, interpretation, and really, how a collective reading of scripture outside of white supremacy, can make us more free.
You can find David on social media @emmanueldl
Continuing sending your questions to reclaimingmytheology@gmail.com
If you like what you hear, please rate, review, and subscribe wherever you find your podcasts. You can also join along on pattern at patreon.com/brandinico to help sustain the work and life of the podcast.
Taking our theology back from ideas and systems that oppress.
@reclaimingmytheology
Reclaiming My Theology, Episode 5: Worship of the Written Word
Brandi: Hello, and welcome to Reclaiming My Theology, a podcast seeking to take our theology back from ideas and systems that oppress. My name is Brandi, and I just want to say a big thank you and shout out to the people who have supported me on Patreon. As I begin to fulfill rewards for patrons, we’ll launch this weekend with a podcast exclusively for y’all.
But today, I talk with my friend David de Leon about the worship of the written word. I want to name that this is a tiny percentage of the total conversation about the written word. There is translation, church doctrine, history, church communication methods, Biblical canon, Biblical interpretation models, and so much more.
We will come back to some of these in future episodes, but just know that this topic is broad and we’re not trying to cover everything today; this is a primer. We skim the surface of what massive breadth and depth of conversation there is to be had here. I would summarize this conversation as: “The holy trinity isn’t the Father, the Son, and the Holy Bible.”
And with that, enjoy this conversation with my ever-brilliant friend, David.
***
Brandi: Hey David, thanks so much for being on the show today. Really, really grateful to have you here.
David: Yeah, I am excited to be here. This is my first time on a podcast.
Brandi: Yaay! [Brandi laughs] It’s the best. [David laughs] I love that, but I also love that most of our friendship has been built over drinking fancy scotch, which we both have now—
David: That’s true.
Brandi: —and pipe tobacco, and just sitting and talking about Jesus and spirituality and our lives and what family is and what it means to be folks of color, all over warm summer nights with friends. And so I just love that that’s our context. [Brandi laughs]
David: That is true. Nice.
Brandi: Well, now I’ve given people, like, very little to know about you except for that.
David: Yes.
Brandi: And so I would love to for you to describe, as I ask, David, what does it mean to be you?
David: What it means to be me, in this current frame of time, it is figuring out how to parent my two boys in a time of pandemic alongside a great partner, my wife Koritha. And the rub of that is actually I study a lot of theology these days, because I’m in seminary, and trying to figure out, “Hmm, in what ways does my parenting match up with the things that I claim to believe about God?”
Brandi: Whoo.
David: And so having to – having to, you know, actually reconcile that in my brain, in my body, in such a stress-filled time has exposed the cracks in my life, let me just say. So that’s what it means to be me in this season, I’d say. [David laughs]
Brandi: Yes. I have never been happier to be single and childless than in a global pandemic. That is no joke. [Brandi laughs]
David: Sometimes my wife and I are like, “How many different books would we have read by now, if – ” [Brandi and David laugh] We love our kids. Yeah. So, it’s – it’s been tricky, but we’re working it out. And they keep me honest. My – my entire family keeps me honest, and I appreciate that as I figure all this other stuff out.
Brandi: Yeah, that is a lot to be managing in what people are calling, quote, unprecedented times. I’m over the phrase, but it does make sense.
David: Right, right.
Brandi: And so you’re talking about seminary a little bit, but we’re also co-workers, in different capacities in our lives and have been over the years.
David: That’s true. Yes.
Brandi: And so would you tell us a little bit about what you do, or what your sense of vocation is?
David: Yes. So, my day job is I lead immersion programs that wrestle with global poverty and the intersection of justice, the colonial nature of the past, sort of, missions enterprises in the Christian church and how we sort of imagine that moving forward differently. So a lot of that is sort of helping college students break out of their own sense of American exceptionalism and comfort and idolatry into just sort of seeing God is bigger, and more global even, than they initially thought. That’s the exciting part of what I get to do, on top of writing papers in seminary.
Brandi: So, very casual, light-hearted, easy work is what you’re describing? [Brandi laughs]
David: Basically. It – it has made sort of this time of not being able to travel really interesting, just because we’re having to rethink what helping students to do that looks like from their own homes, as you know, Brandi.
Brandi: Yes, yes.
David: And I’ll say this: The longer, sort of, vocation of my life has been – um – so I’m a Filipino American. I’m the child of Filipino immigrants who came over in the 70s. And so a lot of my ministry career and a lot of my scholarship right now sort of centers around Filipino American constructive theology, which is nascent at best. It would be generous to say that. So that’s the dream, to be able to sort of press into that more, help my people get a little more free, as we partner with other communities to all get a little more free.
Brandi: I love that, too, because, uh, I don’t know if you know this about my background, but when I first became a Christian, it was a Filipino family that took me in—
David: Yup.
Brandi: And helped me learn about Jesus about hospitality. Like, I always eat with a fork and a spoon, and the way I do hospitality and send so much food home in foil with people.
David: Yes. Yes.
Brandi: I’m just so influenced by folks who I think were trying to get free in different ways but were still definitely under the heel of colonialism and missions endeavors and all of that, but I just – I’m indebted in many ways to Filipino folks both then and now—
David: Nice.
Brandi: —who have given their lives to me, so I’m just grateful for them in that way.
David: That’s awesome. I mean I liked you before, but I remember when you told me that, I thought, “That’s probably also why I’m fond of hanging out with you, Brandi.”
Brandi: So I was really grateful that you picked the topic for today. [David laughs] I’ll say to everybody the same thing that I said to you: I actually feel pretty nervous about this topic.
David: Yeah.
Brandi: Because I think as we were saying even before we started today, to have this conversation feels like it is breaking some of the golden calves of evangelicalism specifically, but what I would call white theology almost as a trademark in a different way, and that is the topic of the worship of the written word.
David: Yeah.
Brandi: Worship of the written word connected to white supremacy, connected to our lived experiences, connected to church—and it’s a sensitive topic, because when we talk about the written word, for Christians, that almost entirely points to the Bible for us.
David: Yeah.
Brandi: And so, I just want to name as a disclaimer, we’re having a conversation that could be really tense for a lot of folks. And tense for us. So.
David: And our process is in process. Like, we’re working this out as we’re talking about this. So, if someone wants to push back on me, and we can have a good conversation—not necessarily you, Brandi, but, like, someone after this—then I’d be more than happy to re-think my positions on things. [David laughs]
Brandi: Yes. And that’s part of the pedagogy of this podcast, right? Is that we learn as we go through conversation and challenge and hearing and doing.
As we start, I would love for you to give folks a sense of what this idea means. What is the worship of the written word and how do you see that?
David: The worship of the written word. Uh, it goes by a lot of names, I think. It goes by, um, in some ways, biblicism, sort of strict adherence to the text of what we understand to be Christian and Hebrew scripture that is sometimes conflated with God, God’s self, right. That we can sort of – we can sort of mistake what we have as written scripture, even though it’s fully authoritative, right, if you sort of buy into that. But we sort of conflate it with God, God’s self. A lot of things get staked on that that center around power, interpretation, hermeneutics, all that stuff.
Brandi: I – one of the scriptures I’ve been thinking about as I’ve been preparing for this time has been John 1, where we see this, “In the beginning is the word and the word was God and was with God in the beginning.” And Jesus himself is the word, but we’re suddenly thinking the Bible is the word? And it gets very confusing when we’re trying to have these conversations about the written word, because somehow the Bible becomes God and not Jesus, and that is a problem for a Christian thinker and follower of Jesus. [Brandi laughs]
David: Yeah. I - there’s this term – shoot, I forget who sort of pioneered this in philosophical though. But it’s like, when we say the word “word”, right, we’re dealing with, like, a synchronic and diachronic meaning. What has this word meant for all of time? What do we actually mean about it right now, when I use it in this context versus that context?
And because people don’t actually – a lot of those ideas are conflated, I think, for folks, because word, you know, logos and all that, it’s all very confusing. I mean it’s the same thing that happens when people talk about the gospel, the gospels—[Brandi laughs]—what is good news, you know. All that stuff.
Brandi: Yeah, and this topic is so big, too, in that, because so much of English language—globally, because of colonization and colonial ideologies and practices—means that things like gospel can mean gospel can mean gospel, word can mean word can mean word, and our translations then become problems, even in this entire thing.
So, even if we are to say, if you’re in the camp that the Bible is fully authoritative, you still have to question what the word “word” means. And so even to unpack this topic at all is to jump into a tangled-up mess of information, hoping that we can come out going, “Can we love the Bible and ask questions about it in a way that doesn’t make us seem like we hate our faith or God?”
David: Yeah. And – and – and then I think even sort of to – to split the hair a little bit more, it’s like, you can believe that scripture is authoritative without believing that it’s inerrant. And – and I think that some people sort of feel like, “If you start questioning any other aspects of it, well then scripture doesn’t matter to you at all,” right? In what ways are you sort of bound to what we understand to be the word of God?
So, I think, like, people sort of carving out different – obviously different camps in that, writing theological statements about this is what scripture is and isn’t. People sort of assume that there aren’t politics behind even how Bible translations have come about. But if we think about, sort of, the very translation of scripture into English, right, when it got smuggled into England, it’s like, that’s some dangerous stuff. You start democratizing it that way, you start trying to pass it off as apolitical, but it’s not. It’s entirely political. And to choose that, to see that it’s not, that’s a politicized decision in itself.
Brandi: Absolutely. Can I ask you to give a couple of definitions as we move forward? Because I think we’re going to use these two words probably a fair amount, and if not, they’ll be in the undercurrent of everything we’re talking about.
Could you give us a definition of, when you say “authoritative” and when you say “inerrant”—what do you mean by those words? Because I think a lot of us have heard those words before, but not in a substantive way; just in ways that tell us to get in line with someone’s interpretation of scripture rather than actually having a rigorous theological discourse ourselves.
David: So I’d say that, like, for scripture to be authoritative, in its broadest sense, means that “scripture matters for what Christian faithfulness looks like to me.” I just say, “Scripture matters.” Because I think one of the stones that people, and often Christians, will throw at each other is, “You have a different interpretation of Scripture X, therefore you don’t care about scripture. It’s not authoritative for your life, because clearly it says this thing.”
So I’d say, yes, “scripture matters” is what scriptural authority looks like. That said, like, that can go to differing degrees, right? Like, people – it matters in different ways.
Whereas biblical inerrancy sort of claims that there is no error—or even faults—in either, like, the manuscripts, or the ways in which scripture was written, or the traditions that have helped pass scripture down, that the content of scripture is flawless. And anyone who’s studied the book of Mark in its Greek is like, “That’s really bad Greek.” That happens in the Book of Mark. Right?
[Brandi and David laugh]
So, biblical inerrancy sort of treats scripture, in its written form especially, as flawless. Like, there is no mistakes; the people who had copied the manuscripts from generation to generation never made any changes. But, as some scripture scholars or Bible scholars will tell you, you see things that pop within the text, within the subtitles of an NIV Bible, or you’ll see it’s written by a certain person when, in reality, the oldest manuscript that we have for something just has, like, a name scribbled in the margin. There’s so much that gets masked in the task of Bible translation that people assume doesn’t exist. Biblical inerrancy – it almost acts as though the people who wrote scripture wrote it in English. Like what they see right now, today, is what it always was.
Brandi: Yes. And there’s so many issues with the ideology of inerrancy in that way. One, that it assumes that the translation that we have is untouched historically, that somehow being God-breathed means that a person was able to put together something perfectly in a way that is translatable to us in a one-to-one sense now. There’s so many issues.
This podcast is about reclaiming our theology, and it’s about reclaiming our theology, right now, from white supremacy. Can you talk about how the worship of the written word and white supremacy go hand-in-hand?
David: When people who have scripture—whatever it means to have scripture, because for most of the church’s life, only some people could read, right, and so it wasn’t until the 1500s or so that people were able to read their own scriptures on their own. You had to know Latin before that fun discourses.
Brandi: So, as we talk about reclaiming our theology from white supremacy, I think worship of the written word is at the center of what that looks like. Because what we see oftentimes is that white values get read into scriptures and then are called truth. But then we say, “It’s just the Bible, the Bible clearly says.”
And so, I want to explore a little bit how white supremacy has both been used to form the text but also is read into and out of the text. Because I think a lot of folks, especially folks of color, are under the what I would call dominion of white theology masked as biblical inerrancy. And so I’d love to hear your thoughts on that.
David: It is this notion of I can point to something outside of myself—if I’m sort of a white person or a white theologian or scriptural scholar, for all of history, whatever. So what biblical inerrancy does is it gives cover to folks who are interpreting scripture for their own need. And so it gives you the cover to say, “If scripture is written and perfect and Holy Spirit inspired, perfectly translated throughout all time up until this point, then I can say this about slavery and trust that it pretty much came from the mouth of God, straight from God’s mouth into the pen of a writer and then down to me.”
And so it sort of gives this interpretive cover as though the scripture has its own life. And I appreciate the distinction that you made earlier about what the word-capital-W—meaning sort of Jesus—who the word is, versus like the word that we talk about in terms of written scripture, because those two things aren’t always necessarily the same. And we can say, “Jesus said this,” right, or, you know, “It says in the word the early church dealt with women this way, and because that was true then, that is true today.” And you cannot question what I am saying about that without in turn sort of questioning God’s authority.
Brandi: And it just seems like, with that, it makes white interpretation most proximate to godliness. And then, as I’ve said before on this podcast, we can’t have that conversation without talking about how the Bible is interpreted and how academic privilege, mostly held by white men throughout the centuries, has created the major interpretive frameworks we use to interpret the scriptures.
So that when Indigenous folks or folks from different communities who have oral traditions are interpreting scripture, are interpreting God, are interpreting the word of God to them, a word that they have received from God, it became heresy because it’s not the white western academic historical critical models of white interpretation. And so to step from those things is to step away from the Bible, which is to rob the Bible of authority, and is to then leave the faith with no foundation, because we say that the Bible is the foundation of our faith, not Jesus himself.
David: So I think where folks of color sort of feel squeezed when it comes to scriptural interpretation is, on one hand, we have biblical inerrance, sort of, fundamentalist approach to the Bible, where, “If God’s word is written, it is what it says it is; it’s nothing more than that, it’s nothing less than that, it’s perfect. You can’t argue with that.” And then, on the other side, you sort of have historical critical scholars of the Bible, which is also dominated by white folks and sort of overly reliant on enlightenment principles, sort of trusting that it’s like, “Oh humans can totally read scripture and we can read it so much that we know that it has no bearing, sort of, on life anymore.” Scripture is caveated, dissected, put in a corner to where it no longer has to mean anything.
And I think with both ends of that spectrum, with people of color sort of caught in between, what both ends of that spectrum do is they ultimately sort of flatten who God is—the God that is actually revealed through scripture—by either saying scripture doesn’t mean anything or that the written word of scripture, as is, is everything.
It’s a – I think that’s a really tricky place where people of color sort of live in, because scripture, I think, matters for the ways in which stories matter to our communities. But also, we’re skeptical of the ways in which power is infused into how scripture is read. We can sort of identify how scripture’s been abused and weaponized against marginalized communities, like our own.
As a person of color, you feel the marginality of scripture and the sort of liberative readings about what freedom looks like, the kind of freedom that Jesus brings, the kind of freedom that the Israelites experience coming out of Egypt. And it’s like that doesn’t quite work for you either, because on the super-hyper-fundamentalist side, scripture is being weaponized for further oppression.
There’s a situation that I was in – a church that my wife and I were at for a long time, which we really appreciated, had some really great friends and a community there, it was really important for that time, but it got really hard all of a sudden when I started realizing just how differently we interpreted the scripture. It’s sort of on the more conservative side of evangelical churches, and they were trying to change their bylaws to explicitly name that women could not be elders in the church. And by extension of that logic, right, women could not be pastors, could not teach or preach, without men around to give cover for their teaching or whatever.
I remember showing up at one of these sort of open forum town halls—or so I thought it was—to sort of discuss, like, why the board of the church was sort of moving in this direction. And I remember being in that room and one of the more prominent members of the church, when I sort of brought up my concerns about how biblical gender roles, complementarianism and stuff, like, how that was being discussed—when I brought my concerns up, I remember one of the prominent members of the church going, “Well, it says here that, like, you know, he must have a wife”—like, the elder, that’s – I think this is in, like, Timothy—“he – he must have a wife and must be in good standing of the church or whatever.”
And I was turned to and he was like, “It’s pretty clear that it’s a man.” Like, the assumption here is that there’s a man here and – and I realized just how different, sort of, our hermeneutic was towards scripture, and in many ways that was sort of the beginning of the end for my wife and me at that church. Because it was, like, you’re not going to read scripture more robustly than sort of like, “This is what I’m saying here, I can’t argue with what it explicitly says here, therefore you’re wrong, case closed, because you literally can’t change what’s written there.”
And so I remember thinking, like, “Whoa. People read the Bible really differently than me.” And – and I – I couldn’t shake sort of the – the subsequent Sundays in which it became really clear to me, sort of, the unevenness, or I’d say the dishonesty—oh, that’s a strong word—but some of the dishonesty around, like, what the hermeneutic is. And the fact that there was, like, no nuance about that at all, it was really troubling. And it felt like, “I think that the God that you’re sort of reading about in the way that you’re reading scripture feels really small to me.”
The connection between white supremacy and scriptural interpretation is to assume that, like you said earlier, that authoritative perspective, right, like a universalized perspective that doesn’t exist within, sort of, the interpretive self, but it exists in this untouchable, written scripture that no one can lay hands on. And that’s dangerous.
Brandi: It’s so dangerous. And it totally makes sense in a society that’s embedded with white supremacy and that a church that’s embedded with white supremacy. Because I hear in your story that you’re naming all these values that are playing out that are just being called “the Bible” or called “scripture.” And it makes sense to me.
You know, I grew up in church cultures where I had only seen white men as leaders and only white men with Bibles in their hands teaching from the pulpit. And so that was my image of what was authoritative. And so, sure, the Bible is authoritative, and the written word is authoritative; but it was the written word from the mouth of white men who could defend their patriarchy with proof texting or who could defend their homophobia with the same strategy. And so I learned that the written word and God were hand-in-hand that always had to come out of the mouthpiece of whiteness.
And there were scriptures that we used to defend that—I think there are some classic ones, right. You already talked about, even in your stuff about leadership and Titus – and that, I think there’s that fascinating contrast between Titus and Philemon and the very opposing ways that we interpret those texts, Philemon with a ton of generosity and Titus with a ton of stringency, and that both of those things can use different methodologies, but both of them reinforce white supremacy or dispose of the ugly parts of white Christianity in the name of bad interpretation by those people then, even though slavery wasn’t that long ago. So I think there’s just so much in there…
David: Right. Yeah. Yeah. I – I – I mean and then you sort of – you talk about sort of the multi-faceted nature of, like, the power of whiteness being patriarchal, wealthy. All those intersections I think come to play whenever scripture is sort of used to justify the oppression of a marginalized person. It’s like all of those things sort of collapse on each other.
Brandi: I think that it’s important to note that worship of the written word isn’t an inherently Christian or white value; but that because of specific intersection of Christianity and white supremacy make for what I would call social double certainty, where it’s you have whiteness that we see as right and socially appropriate, and you have the Bible, that we see as authoritative and inerrant.
When you dovetail those things, and then you combine that with white culture in general, which elevates the written word through the academy, through an obsession with literacy, through a lack of care or critical work with oral tradition or story—all of that plays out in making our ability to read scripture, honestly, with suspicion and with good doubt and with moral questions almost impossible, because it is to rip down the entire enterprise we believe our faith to be rooted in.
And so it’s – I think there’s just so much – again, this whole conversation is super messy because the whole concept is super messy.
David: I sort of think about how, sort of, reading scripture from a position of power and whiteness totally obscures, like, the original communities for whom scripture was written.
And I think a lot of folks like to say that, like even my really progressive friends like to say that, “Scripture was written for folks on the margins” without actually spelling out, like, what that means, right. And so I think about how, whether it’s toward whiteness or sort of finding strength in your marginalized state, communities are formed around how, like, scripture is read and interpreted.
But, like, when you take the perspectives and you read out the – the, sort of, marginal perspective from scripture, then you can just justify anything. Anything that you want to justify, you can do that, because you ripped the pressure from which the community scripture was written for – it’s like, you sort of ripped it out of context, and it doesn’t matter anymore.
When you’re in a situation where you sort of have scripture and a liberative, sort of, reading of scripture up and against people who have an interpretation, say, like my example earlier, where folks were wanting to justify women not having pastoral authority in the church. When you’re in a culture that sort of accepts that reality about whiteness and scripture, everything for the marginalized person is an uphill battle.
Because you have the interpretation that you’re trying to get across because it affects your life, right, it affects what matters to you. But you’re in a culture, in a community, that’s formed around how scripture is read, and so someone is going to have to sort of undo the entirety of how they’ve learned to read scripture and – and you’re not able to do that because you’re working from behind the whole time. Because you’re having to prove, like you said, what you’re saying matters. Your interpretation is just as valid as so-and-so’s even if the literature doesn’t exist to back it up, even if the scholarship isn’t there or there aren’t numbers, right.
So, one of the initial sort of broken reasons I wanted to go to seminary was because I felt like a white person wasn’t going to talk to me – like a white pastor wasn’t going to talk to me unless I actually had like a seminary degree, right?
Brandi: Mmhmm. Yes.
David: And I remember having to – I remember when I initially wanted to go to seminary and the initial thing that I wanted was I wanted to be able to figure out how to, like, use scripture for my purposes to sort of deconstruct everything that feels oppressive to me. And as I sort of engaged with God about that, what I felt like God was telling me was, “Hey David, it feels like you’re looking for a weapon.” And I was like, “Oh that’s just kinda like the same thing that, like, folks are doing to me.” And I felt like I needed a seminary education so that I could quote the right passages and show like, “Hey your stuff is flawed; now maybe you can have a conversation with me about why we read this scripture differently.”
I feel like when it comes to the interpretations of marginalized folks, everything is an uphill battle. You don’t have money at your back; you don’t have tomes of literature at your back to sort of be like, “See other people read scripture this way.” And there’s a way that this erases realities of the original communities that can actually, I think, give us, really, insight into how rich scripture can be when we put it into everyone’s hands in that regard.
Brandi: I think there’s just so much good stuff in there, because – I think because whiteness is tied so deeply to power and scholarship and literature that the worship of the written word, the Bible, becomes buttressed by the worship of the written word scholarship, which becomes worship of the written word, which is theological statements, becomes buttressed by books written by mediocre white pastors, which is buttressed by Instagram posts about that pastor.
And so everything creates a paper trail, and without a paper trail, things aren’t legitimate. And it assumes this very problematic thing, which is that when we say the word of God that we mean the same thing that the scriptures mean, and that the authors of the scriptures mean, when they say the word of God, which is so untrue.
David: Yeah.
Brandi: Because we can’t – we can’t superimpose the Bible backwards onto the Hebrew text, and Christians love to do that. We love to be like, “This was the word”—all while disregarding the law and all of the covenants and so – But I’m struck by the reality that if we were to resurrect someone from the dead who wrote some of the Hebrew scriptures and tell them what we’re doing with it, they would be like, “Are you out of your mind?” There’s just so many assumptions.
So I would love if we could unpack some of the assumptions that we glean from scripture about the written word and its value. And I can give a couple of examples to start us off, but I think there’s – we have to break the assumption that the authors of the Biblical text believed themselves to be writing the Bible, believed themselves to be writing something that was God-breathed.
David: Yes. Yes. One of my favorite things that one of my professors says—she’s a white woman. [Brandi laughs] She’s sort of like, “Reading the Pauline letters is an exercise in reading someone else’s mail. And you’re only seeing pieces of the story unfold. People are responding to things that you have no idea what they’re responding to. And in all honesty, something like the gospels, for example, were an attempt to just sort of preserve the story of Jesus for the next generation of folks who didn’t have it in their memory because they never met Jesus the way that other folks did.”
One of the things that I appreciate about even the formation of the biblical canon is that it wasn’t this council. I mean, it was formalized later on, like, “Yeah, these are the things that we understand to be authoritative.” It was the letters of Paul, and these other manuscripts written about Jesus, that were helpful for communities in remembering who Jesus was and what Jesus taught. And that survived over, you know, the first couple hundred years of the church’s existence, right?
I mean, it wasn’t like, “Oh this is nice.” The folks who really tried to, sort of, weaponize scripture to either read, like, anti-Semitism into it were totally rejected because it was like, “No, there’s this breadth of letters that we have from Paul” or “It’s this breadth of stories that we have that were written by someone maybe named Luke”—like that had been so helpful for the life of worship for the church, right? And so it – and that was a church under duress who has being persecuted. No one intentionally was like, “I am writing the word of God right now, and y’all can’t do anything to this forever.” I mean they – they still want that, obviously, because you don’t want people messing with your, you know.
Brandi: Well, and I think for me, it becomes hilarious, because we get into these interesting clusters that we put ourselves in with this worship of the written word, because we read that text where Paul is saying like, “Hey this is only my opinion,” and then here’s this other thing. And we’re like, “But his opinion is written in the Bible, so it’s the word of God and it’s inerrant, so Paul’s opinion is truth because it’s in the Bible even though Paul says that it’s not”—so which part’s true? That it’s his opinion, or that it’s the Bible, and that it’s truth?
And I think that because we take a tradition that is inherently based in an oral culture, and then we superimpose academic structures and hermeneutics and practices onto it, we lose and miss so much.
And especially for folks of color, as we reclaim our theology from white supremacy, it’s really hard to reclaim our theology, because our communities are based around stories.
David: Yeah.
Brandi: Our communities are based around stories and practices, not just texts. And so, to honor our own stories and the word of God that is found in our stories, the spirit of God that is found in our stories, is to come up against whiteness and the Bible, even though there are these different ways that scripture – that people in scripture would have interpreted that.
I think about how God speaks in scripture, how the word of God, in quotes, comes to people. Sometimes it’s in a vision or a dream, and it’s never written down. So it just seems like we have been taught and indoctrinated into a way of reading scripture that gives us no interpretive tools to read our experiences or our stories that I think can be equally helpful in helping us to know God and to know ourselves.
David: Yes. Where it’s just sort of, like, every interpretation that comes in scripture that you come up with has to be owned in its fullness. That we can’t sort of foist the responsibility or the power of – of an interpretation back onto sort of the written word.
Because the text doesn’t speak for itself. It speaks when people say something or make something of it, when communities form around it, as I’ve said. And I think if people actually gave thought to the fact that you are always interpreting scripture, you’re not just reading it, it’s always being interpreted, then I think we would all be more careful with whatever hot takes or ambitions that we have about scripture, because we’re not blaming things on God; we’re actually taking ownership for that.
And that might get a lot of my evangelical fans sort of mad, but – but it’s like, you know, we can own scripture. Because I think people who disagree with us and how they read scripture, it’s like, “Well, that’s their fault. They’re just reading scripture wrong.” But when – when we take our stands on what we think is important and what we read out of scripture, it’s like, “Nah, that’s just – that’s just in the Bible.” So, owning an interpretation, that it doesn’t just sort of come out of anywhere. Things aren’t always necessarily just self-evident when it comes to scripture. But you’re reading it in partnership with the Holy Spirit, you’re reading it in partnership with the community around you, who’s interpreting scripture together.
And that’s why I think – you know, you sort of talked about individualism, right, as a value of white supremacist culture. And I think this is sort of rooted even in the very heart of when folks started trying to just translate the Bible. To sort of assume like, “Everyone interprets scripture, on their own, no matter what, and everyone has equal access to do that. So I think that’s a great idea, right? It should be democratized; people should have access to the word of God.”
But what’s sort of hidden in that, and even sort of, like, Martin Luther’s, like, ambition about some of how scripture’s interpreted, was like, “Well, as long as you interpret it, sort of, the way that I interpret scripture.” When you think about the authority of the church, right, it’s like, “As long as you sort of match up with me on that, those are the folks who can read scriptures for themselves,” you know. The rugged individualism of, “Yeah, I can take on scripture. I can interpret it on my own.”
It’s, like, what I think sometimes gets lost when we talk about folks like the reformers, like Martin Luther, is he had state backing behind him. Like, the reason that he was protected from the Vatican was because one of the princes in Germany at the time was like, “I will protect you and take care of you.” But he sort of acts as though, “I’m doing this on my own, we got this, all I got is my scripture, we can interpret it,” right?
And, so, it’s complex, because it’s beautiful in that everyone gets to have it. Cool, awesome. But there are some hidden caveats there that I think people aren’t always engaging with, which is like, “How you interpret it is fine until it disagrees with how I interpret it.”
Brandi: Yes. I think of it in a very silly metaphor, but the metaphor I think about is of a bowling alley. And what white theological interpretation does is it sets up bumpers and says you can throw the ball however you want to, as long as you stay within these bumpers, because it’s going to bump you back to hit the pins that we want you to hit.
And so feel free, throw the ball, have theological freedom, explore things in seminary, and do what you want, as long as you do it within these confines. And the moment you ask questions that fall outside of the bumpers and that rely on story and experience in particular, or revelation even, you enter into the land of heresy, because you create, in this metaphor, a dangerous situation for people by going outside of the bumpers. You teach people how to play the game wrong, you mislead your flock, you are a bad shepherd.
And so, I would love for us to talk about how this worship of the written word practically plays out. We’ve done a little bit of that, but I think it’s complicated for you and I especially, because we’re both people with hundreds of thousands of dollars of academic – yeah, hundreds of thousands of dollars of academic knowledge that we’ve acquired in very white spaces that have taught us white ways of knowing. And I know for me, I’m constantly battling, “Where does my white education end and my Blackness begin and my theology?” And all of that gets kind of crumpled up.
I’d love for us to talk about how this worship of the written word plays out in churches and organizational culture, because it doesn’t just end in how we read scripture. I – I don’t know, the things that come to mind specifically are those scriptures that are used to keep people in line, or the practices that are used.
So, I think about even the notion of a daily quiet time. And I love scripture. If anyone knows me, I love scripture. I probably – while I hold very liberal ideologies about scripture, I grew up in a conservative evangelical community that fenced me in pretty significantly in a way that was quite effective. And so while I’m like reclaiming my theology from that, my practices still probably look relatively conservative. Like, that’s just a reality.
But I think about how when I was learning scripture, people would try to get me to do quiet times—and I loved it, because I love scripture—but it required so many things. It required me to be literate to be close to God, because it meant to read my Bible every day; it assumed that the people who were guiding me in a way where I could read scripture in an appropriate way, and if I didn’t read it in what was, quote unquote, the appropriate way, I was reprimanded for that later. It meant that words from God always had to be rooted in a proof text somewhere, and not just be a word that made sense because God spoke it. And there are so many liberties that people took with that, kind of, even just having a quiet time model, because it was based in this written word and rugged individualism, like you said earlier, that assumed I could interpret it.
And so I’d love if we could just kind of go through some of those things and how we see worship of the written word really creating marginalization for folks who don’t fit dominant white identities.
David: Yeah. It reminds me of a story. Whenever I take students overseas to live in different marginalized communities, straight up slum communities in – in metro Manila, and you have these assumptions of sort of what personal faithfulness and devotion to God and God’s word looks like by, what you said, these quiet times. There are no quiet times in the slums of metro Manila. And it is crowded and you cannot get by yourself.
And so we always tell students that the way you experience God and scripture, if you’re used to sort of your coffee next to your Bible, open journal with your phone, to sort of ’gram that moment with you and God, if you’re looking for that, and that’s sort of what your life thrived on up to this point, you’re not going to get it, like that’s not going to work.
We’re going to have to sort of figure out what ways are we engaging in scripture communally. How are we collectively paying attention to what God is doing to a community as a whole? Because you’re not always going to sort of, like, in the context of my students, you’re not going to find those quiet moments of God’s still, small voice. You might hear it like in a Bible study with other folks, like in another language, who are engaging with scripture so totally different than you, right. You might hear it from the word of a pastor instead of a loud church that’s really hot with fans.
So I think, like, not sort of personalizing the word of God as a – as a means of individual consumption. For most of the church’s life, scripture was, like, read out loud. And it was communicated to communities at a time, and it was a community that read scripture together. You know, that’s how interpretations came to the early church.
That’s how – in many ways, what whiteness tries to do is it tries to, I think, veil a communal sort of agreement as to how to read scripture in an individual frame. You – you can feel like, “Oh, I’m doing this with other people,” but actually at the end of the day, it’s all about, “Are you reading your Bible every day? Are you spending time with God?” I feel like I went through a whole year where, like, literally the application question after every sermon was, “Are you reading the Bible?” As though there is nothing outside of that that sort of sustains what a robust vibrant life with God looks like.
Brandi: Yes. And I think in that is this reality that so much of biblical – or well we can’t even call it biblical interpretation – scriptural interpretation, story interpretation, was done in community. What I think whiteness has done, because it’s so obsessed with the academy, has made it so that truth is found by an individual conversing with a dead white guy and then coming to a series of theological statements or documents that reflect that conversation that they had—when most of scripture has been interpreted historically in communities of people who are dialoguing, fighting, murdering each other as they go into like this messy thing.
And so, I think white supremacy tries to make theology much more clean by creating fences, by creating limited dialogue partners that you can have. And this has manifest to me in really obvious ways, like the fact that we use study bibles. Study bibles, right, use them if you want to, but they’re interpretations of the word that are then used to back up ideas about it, and they are used to keep you from thinking about the Bible by yourself. Study bibles imply that what you read in scripture cannot possibly be relevant in conversation with others if it’s not first interpreted by the guidelines, or bumpers as I said before, of a study bible or of a study guide.
And what those tell me is the same thing around paternalism that we talked about with Carlos, is that we actually don’t trust that people can read scripture for themselves in a way that is – what we’re saying is that people will – if we do not give people guides, people will not read scripture like us, and if they do not read scripture like the dominant culture, that it’s dangerous and that it’s heretical.
David: Yeah! And I think along with that, there is a community, like you said, of scholarship that exists and that is perpetuated in things like the study bible or how people are supposed to engage with their daily devotionals, or even like how a pastor preps for a sermon. It’s this, like, “I’m staying up late at night, poring over the text, so that I hit this revelation from God.”
And there are some truly Holy Spirit magical moments in how that happens, but I think what that tricks us into believing is that we’re not bringing the communities that have formed us into that moment where we’re actually even engaging with scripture, maybe physically by ourselves. We’re acting as though this word came from me, straight from God, and I’m bringing it to y’all this Sunday morning; when, in reality, like, whether or not I know it, how my grandma talked about scripture to me, how my grandma told me stories, how my dad and moms told me stories or embodied this reality about God, how they did that is informing how I’m engaging with scripture.
But there’s this illusion that it’s just me that’s engaging, and I think that’s really toxic, because it cheapens, I think, the experience of what it – a community, how it reads scripture, how it forms people, how it teaches, how it perpetuates knowledge generationally, like how that actually happens. And then it veils the fact that if white supremacy, that’s a generational, communal reality that gets passed down through individuals that maybe sort of mask just how well-networked and systemic the entire project is. I don’t know.
Brandi: Ohh, yeah. The entire enterprise that you’re talking about, this Biblical criticism enterprise, this structure of white supremacy that centers how we look at scripture, doesn’t actually line up with the way of Jesus that we read out of scripture. Because I think – when I read scripture and I look at how Jesus uses scripture, I’m like, “That is not what we would call a good methodology for using scripture.” The way that Jesus pulls scripture ahistorically in some ways that seem kind of uncritical, the way that Jesus interprets the law around himself, and there’s a lot of ways to think about this.
But, again, I’ve talked about this several times, but even the way that Jazzy and I were talking about how Jesus often says, “You’ve heard it said, but I say to you.” That scripture is not some static object that we worship; it is a—I’m careful to use this word—but a tool that we use in a many-faceted toolbelt to get to know God. And it’s one tool for the many ways that we hear the word of God.
And so when we talk about the worship of the written word, I feel concerned that a sole focus on the Bible as the only authoritative way to hear from God makes it so that we can’t actually read that word without just hyper-imposing two – like so many lenses on it that, as you said before, it becomes obsolete.
David: Yeah. Yeah. There’s something – ahh – when you said the like, you know, like, when Jesus was like, “You’ve heard it said but I say unto you”—what Jesus is modeling in that moment is a full ownership of his re-interpretation of scripture, which is not what a lot of people do. Because people can throw it back on scripture. And I’m sure if we think hard enough, we can think about a moment where Jesus sort of lets – Jesus quotes scripture and sort of lets that stand.
But what he’s doing is engaging the communal imagination of the hearers who know exactly where he’s going to go with this thought, right. Where – where after he reads from Isaiah in Luke right, at the beginning of his ministry, and then he tells the story of Naaman and then the widow from the Old Testament. Like, he doesn’t have to connect the dots for the folks, but he’s engaging sort of the collective understanding of scripture of a community, and he’s letting them sort of read it together. And it gets him – like he’s owning his reinterpretation to the point that he almost gets thrown off a cliff.
What individualism does, and sort of even the power of white supremacy over how we interpret scripture, is it protects people from getting thrown off cliffs, and having to own scriptural readings that are maybe costly. And – and we don’t like that, right? And what we can do then is we can put that on God, or put that on the written word, and be like, “Nah, that’s just what God says. You can get mad at me, but you’re really getting mad at God.”
Brandi: So with that let’s talk for a minute about how that happens. I think the ways that white supremacy in theology and in church plays out happens in really specific, very white, very culturally embedded ways.
And the first thing that I see is the obsession with theological statements and theological papers that one has to, quote unquote, align to be part of the, quote unquote, family. I – it feels sensitive to me to talk about this, and I feel sensitive to you in the same way, but we’ve worked for probably multiple evangelical institutions that have used – have weaponized scripture in ways to create statements about some things to exclude but have not made statements about other things.
So we’re really comfortable making a statement about how we want to include or exclude queer folks, or how – or how people do not have value in the church, but we’re really – we don’t feel that way about women in the same way, or we don’t feel that way about how people use their money, even though Jesus talks about it way more.
David: Right.
Brandi: And so I’m just aware that there’s this statement culture, even the Nashville statement around queer folks in the church in 2017, was one of many, many statements that people used to say, “This is where we stand, and if you don’t stand here, it means something about your relationship with Jesus or your relationship with the text that has been perverted in some way.”
David: Yeah. I was going to say, and the way that scripture – communities are formed implicitly or explicitly around the ways that scripture is read. What – what what statements like this does is it – it sort of draws clearer beacons of like, “Hey this is the community that we’re trying to be. We’re thrusting this sort of on the authority of scripture but we are forming a community around this idea or this exclusive idea.”
I think communities rallying around interpretations of scripture or, um – like, I don’t think that’s inherently a bad thing. But when we don’t, sort of, own the fact that we are explicitly drawing this boundary into which people must either be in or out, I think that that’s where we’re sort of disingenuous, how we treat things like theological statements or even how scripture is read.
And I’m thinking a lot about like – I’m thinking about the Constitution or founding documents, right. We love having communities coalesce around shared values, and that’s understandable. But when we’re not honest about like, “This is how we’re seeing it, this is how we’re reading it, we realize that, you know, this is probably imperfect,” or “We could be wrong. Like we could be really wrong about this, this is the decision that we’re making; it could be bad.” But I don’t know.
Brandi: Yeah. And I just wish people would say that. I wish people would say, “We’re drawing this line in the sand, and we could be wrong about it.” But instead we do what you’ve talked about or alluded to several times, where we just blame the Bible, like, “Well, the Bible says, and therefore, like, it can’t be helped that we have this interpretation of scripture.”
David: Exactly.
Brandi: When there is a robust way to read the text—and – and I think one thing that we haven’t talked about it that the written word is not objective in so many ways, but also, like, that history tells the story of the winners, and, in the case of the US, literally burns the documents of the defeated or conquered.
And so the written word that survives is always the written word that is proximate to power. And so when we take a bible, like the Bible, which is not written from that perspective, and then we interpret it through the lens of folks who always tell the story through the lens of the winner, means that we always see ourselves as – as I think people have said before on the podcast, through the eyes of the – the, quote unquote, winners.
One of the things that also comes to mind is the ways that white supremacy is built on either/or thinking or “us and them” ideologies. There is this “white is right” ideology and anything that is away from that is wrong, and that what theological documents and theological camps do, or theological statements and theological papers, is that it creates “us and them”—and what “us and them” creates all the time, historically, is violence.
And so our worship of the written word, when you take it to the farthest end, isn’t truth; it’s violence. It’s violence against anyone who falls outside of the lines of whiteness or white supremacy. And that doesn’t come out when you just say something like, “Oh, scripture is God-breathed and profitable for teaching and reproof from correction.” You just say, “Oh, Timothy gave me permission to weaponize the Bible in the name of truth.”
And we leave a trail of literal bodies and of harmed people and of traumatized emotional worlds and all sorts of things, because we are so comfortable weaponizing a written word, because at least it gives us something to go back to and to blame. And I think that’s the word – we’ve used that word a lot, like, blame or fall back on, and that’s fascinating to me.
David: Yeah. Oneness gives you the illusion that you have this all-encompassing, like, omnipotence and even omniscience, right, such that you could read scripture and feel like, “I know exactly what was going on here in the early church, and because of that, I am reading this perfectly and clearly in this moment.” When, again, you’re sort of shrugging the communal, sort of generational passing down of what teachings have looked like with a particular blind spot of, “What is the power that I’m assuming as I read this scripture?” Even just assuming, “I know perfectly what’s going on.” Which I think, you know, you could spiritualize that, but you could also invite the Holy Spirit and be like, “I could be reading this wrong.” But you’re never going to know that unless you’re reading in community. And the community that you’re reading is never going to be, sort of, like, reading it well unless they’re engaging with the scriptural interpretation of another community, outside of itself. Especially if our communities are super homogenous, right?
So it’s kind of the rubbing up of different scriptural interpretations upon each other that can cause conflict, that can often cause violence, especially, as you said, when there’s disparate power, like, that’s being engaged with. But when we’re in the right sort of humble spot, right, when we assume that we are not all-powerful and all-knowing, then I think that that’s sort of the place into which the Holy Spirit sort of breathes the most life-giving in understanding of like what is the truth that God desires to communicate through scripture.
Brandi: In that way, the word of God isn’t just the words that we see on paper. It’s the conversation between me and my friend and their cousin and the words I see on paper and history and – and my experience and what I feel and what I sense and what my body tells me. If all of that gets to be in deep conversation instead of this unilateral thing that we just –
Really, it’s a banking model of education, where we take the Bible, and we ask people to ingest it, and to – we just deposit enough information in people and then if they pull – when we need to withdraw, we just withdraw the right theology, and then we know that people are saved. And I just think that’s such a flattening, and it doesn’t make sense for most communities of color.
I have a friend who – um – one of my Native friends, he often says that he wishes that people would have never translated the Bible into his language. Because it rips away the conversation and replaces it with an abstract idea of truth that’s only given through indoctrinating principles or ideas.
And so it sounds like what we’re doing right now is asking, “If worship of the written word is causing all this damage and is pulling people from themselves and from knowing that they can read the scriptures and have a conversation with it themselves, then what is the other way?”
Because for me, I even – I even think about this concept of – I believe it’s an ancient Jewish concept of turning the gem, like, scripture is like a gem that you – that you hold and that has all these different sides to it, and the light hits it as you turn it. And stories and scripture get to be the turned gem, where you read it once, and it has one meaning, and you read it a different time and in a different time in your life, it has a different meaning. And that doesn’t rob the thing of its value, but rather it makes it more robust and more deep and more beautiful and more good. And I just don’t think – actually, I don’t think whiteness gives us the liberty to do that, to see scripture as more good and beautiful, because it tells us that there’s one right way because we are so indoctrinated into – we’re so indoctrinated into indoctrination! [Brandi laughs]. It’s a mindfuck.
David: Yeah. I mean, even how like rabbinic literature is written, like of scriptural interpretation from the Hebrew Bible, they just – they copy and paste every single, like, “Rabbi so-and-so from this year said this. Rabbi so-and-so from this time said this.” And it doesn’t actually tell you, like which one is there; they sort of let it stand, right? And the same can be said about why there are two accounts of creation in Genesis, because it’s like, “We’re not just going to give you one; these have arisen from different communities throughout, sort of, our tradition, and we’re going to actually read them side by side.”
When there – when we don’t interrogate the power—in – in this case, it’s sort of the power that whiteness brings into scriptural interpretation—what it does is it crowds out the translation of marginalized communities.
So, I think, what does it look like to intentionally sort of seek out scriptural interpretation from communities that are marginalized? And to not count the marginalization against those folks, like, “Oh hurt people hurt people; hurt people read scripture bad.” But actually like, “Oh, what is the way in which God is speaking particularly to this people?”—whether it’s this racial or sexual minority or, um, you know, uh, class minority, right, like this oppressed person. Like, in what particular way is God speaking to this community, and how does this come up against the way that maybe I, in my privilege, right, or I in the ways, as a Filipino man who has learned to read scripture as a white person, how does that challenge how I read scripture? And ultimately, how does that challenge how I see God?
Figuring out in what ways do we sort of elevate scriptural interpretation from marginalized communities and not treat dominant narratives of scripture, dominant scholarship from, like, white folks as – as gospel, multi-faceted – how to not treat interpretation from white folks as the only interpretation out there.
Brandi: Yes. The gospel is not The Gospel as Told by White People. The gospel is a story about Jesus, a message from Jesus. [Brandi laughs]
David: Yeah. I love that you brought us down that route of, like, the gem that turns. Because – because we don’t – we don’t have that tradition within Christianity.
Brandi: [Brandi laughs] Yeah. Yeah. It feels ironic to me that we don’t like to have a multi-faceted—what I would call a fair—interpretive process around scripture. Because white people be loving murder mystery and CSI and all of that stuff, of hearing a story from multiple perspectives and then engaging with the suspense of it all. And I wonder if – if white people took the deep love of all things, like, mystery novel and CSI and allowed that kind of curiosity to shape their view of scripture and to shape how we create communities around scripture, I wonder if we’d actually love scripture more. Because I think that what we actually do with worship of the written word is we teach people to dislike scripture because we make it A) boring, B) super oppressive, 3) totally irrelevant. And so I wonder if we actually injected, you know, maybe like a redeemed version of a white value into it and—[Brandi laughs]—allow people to have that as a pathway to more liberation, if that could do something.
David: And I – I’d say that the closest that we have that’s kind of not questioned about that, at least in the Christian tradition, is the gospels, right, like the four written gospels, in that we have these multiple accounts of what went down in Jesus’s life and ministry. And for some reason, we see that as a strength, I’d say. I’d say that, like, white folks who interpret scripture, along with all the folks that have learned to interpret scripture that way, like, see the multi-faceted gospel narrative as a strength of our – we’re just like, “See, we have different angles; like, we have multiple witnesses that can attest to this one thing.”
There’s a way that, like, if the early church was like, “We need as many of these perspectives as we can to get a real read on what it was that God is up to,” then I think we can afford to do that with how we approach other parts of scripture, maybe that are used a little more oppressively. Because God knows, people – people like using Paul. Because Paul set up some real quandaries for the church. And – and yet the community of the church, generations all over have sort of had to wrestle and contend with what Paul actually means and how to read Paul today.
And so maybe – maybe we read that lesson from a different gospels as a lesson of humility, like, hey, we don’t have all the angles, so we could be wrong; even though the gospels give us that.
Brandi: And maybe in that scripture, and the Bible itself, isn’t just about reading truth; it’s about finding it, again, in conversation with other parts of our lives.
And I think for me, it – it feels important to recognize that worship of the written word doesn’t just complicate things, like you were saying in all of that, or make Paul totally unreadable, because Paul becomes our lens to read Jesus, when, if Jesus is the center and foundation of our faith, that should never be the case. It just sets up, like, bad scholarly tools to read about Jesus. [Brandi laughs] But that’s, um, an aside.
I think what it does is it drowns out that the word of God comes to people. It’s this scripture – it’s this word that’s used in the Bible all the time: “The word of God came to so-and-so; the word of God came to so-and-so.” And I think because of the ways that we’ve taught people to read scripture—and not even read scripture, but read scripture through the lens of their pastor. Like, even the idea that churches have bible studies—bible studies, quote unquote, they call them bible studies but they’re just talking about what the pastor preached about on Sunday. All that tells me far more about your interpretation of scripture than scripture itself.
And I’m struck by that and I’m struck by the reality that it keeps us from hearing each other’s words. And hearing the word of God in nature or hearing the word of God in stories or in our family traditions. And I think if I – if I’ve learned anything from Indigenous people over the years, it’s that stories matter because they allow everyone to decide for themselves what the story means, and they do that in communication or they do that in community and over time, and the story might hit someone differently at a different time, and that doesn’t make it less legitimate; it just means that we trust that we can hear the word and interpret it in a way that isn’t going to cause harm if we’re doing so, as you’ve said, in community.
David: Yeah. Let me quote a white guy. [Brandi and David laugh.] Let me quote a white guy.
Brandi: Perfect.
David: Karl Barth is a lot of what is tricky about this conversation, for the way that – for the way that Karl Barth, you know, holds scripture up. Some of what I feel like you’re getting at is something that – that he said that struck me, which is like, “We’ve all been in a sermon where someone was preaching out of scripture, but the word of God was not there that day.”
Brandi: Yes.
David: Right? The word of God isn’t just sitting in the Bible, like, that’s sitting on my desk when no one’s reading it, right? But the word of God comes and is spoken when people are listening and the Holy Spirit comes and something clicks for a person. And that’s sort of when the word of God is spoken, right? And so to – I – I feel like, a white dude said that. Uh, I feel like that – that understanding is actually super helpful, because it – it engages our anthropology, it engages our humanness in a particular way that I think squares well with what we understand as – as cocreators, which we read from scripture, right, in the beginning of Genesis, for how God desires just to engage with humanity.
And so to not sort of be, like, “Oh the word of God is just floating around in these different things and we just kind of, like, we stumble upon it or whatever.” Which, you know, maybe it happens. But that it’s – it’s this paying attention, hearing, and then the Holy Spirit making it click for you. And – and that happening in the context of – of a community that reads together, that happening in the context of – like you – you may very well be by yourself reading scripture, but if we’re honest about that moment, we’re reading scripture with the folks who have read it before us, right. And maybe that’s what’s hitting in those moments where we’re physically by ourselves.
And if we could be more honest about the fact that I’m never interpreting scripture on my own. I’m always interpreting it with my pastor who spoke to me as a kid, with my parents who read me Bible stories, with even the trash that I’ll read and have to maybe, like, you know, filter out, as I’m trying to engage with scripture. I’m always reading with a community whether or not I know it, and to be able to acknowledge that, even when it’s physically individual, is super crucial, I think, to – to – to being more honest about what it means to interpret scripture and hear and understand and receive the spoken, sort of, word of God.
Brandi: And I think that that protects us so clearly from fundamentalism, because it requires so much humility, and it requires so much conversation, and in many ways what we’re talking about here is education, is how we learn.
And you have the Helen Keller quote, where she says that the highest result of education is tolerance, and what I see in a lot of Christianity is that our increased education, because of the worship of the written word, has created so much fundamentalism and intolerance. Because our metric for the scriptures is not about what you’re talking about, about conversation and historical groundedness and our feelings and all of that; that it’s just about belief and indoctrination.
And so I do wonder if, as we close here, there is an invitation for people for lean into their own minds and oral traditions and stories of communities outside of themselves, and scripture outside of themselves and poetry and gardening and going on walks and seeing things with their eyes and asking, “When what I see and what I experience doesn’t align with what I’ve been told about scripture, can I not just discard one or the other? Can I put those things in conversation with each other and practice the word of God as conversation and not as some abstract truth?”
David: Yeah, I think at the end of the day, God wants to engage in conversation and not so much banking method of education of just passive reception. And there’s a reason that God, sort of, I think, invites people in the fullness of their humanity to – you know, if we take – if we take Jacob, to sort of wrestle with God.
One of the interpretations that I love for the beginning of scripture, when the patriarchs—blech—of, um, like, you know, the nation of Israel is, sort of, like, you read the different stories and God, through scripture, is sort of calibrating what human engagement looks like with what God desires. And it sort of culminates in the person of Jacob, the Israel one who struggles with God, where it’s like, “Nah, God doesn’t want someone like Adam and Eve, who sort of just disregard, or they don’t want someone like Abraham who’s like, ‘I’m going to listen, whatever, cool,’ or someone who’s just straight up evil and kills, someone like Cain.” But God wants someone that’ll sort of wrestle.
And so you find that in the person of Jacob who embodies the story of Israel: You wrestle with God; you engage with God; you converse with God; and you know that that happens as a community.
Brandi: I love that. And I love that in this series on reclaiming our theology from white supremacy that that is what we’re doing. We’re wrestling, we’re struggling, and what we receive on the other side, if we follow that story, is a blessing, is a new way of being.
David: It’s a promise!
Brandi: Yeah, it’s a new trajectory, it’s – it’s reconciliation with others who have harmed us or who we have harmed, in his case; that the word of God actually becomes a beautiful healing agent, not a series of fences to keep people from sinning or to keep people out; it is a conversation that leads to life.
And so I also love in that story, as we close, is that marginalized communities know what it is like to struggle. So why would we turn to anyone but marginalized communities if we are to get to know a God who values struggle so much so that God, God’s self, centers Jacob and what happens for him as the way to know God and the way to be blessed by God—why would we turn anywhere else?
And, so, David, thank you so much for being on. You want to plug anything? Where can people find you?
David: Shoot. I don’t really do that social media stuff, but maybe I should a little bit more. I mean, I tweet sparsely at emmanueldl; that’s my Instagram account, too. Maybe if folks actually come looking, I’ll actually write more things in this season of life. But you know, I’m currently sort of working for Evangelicals for Social Action, so check that work out. It’s pretty fun. We do, like, anti-racism stuff right now, all the fun stuff. Do you watch Hot Ones?
Brandi: No I don’t.
David: Oh, that’s ok. It’s just the funny part because people are like delirious and spiced out at the end, and so Sean Evans, the host, is like, “There’s a camera there! There’s a camera there! Tell those people what you’re up to!” And they’re just like, “Uh, you can watch – my – new – movie… But…” Anyway…
Brandi: [Brandi laughs] That’s awesome.
David: Thank you for having me, Brandi. It was fun.
Brandi: Yeah, of course.
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Brandi: Thanks for joining for another episode of Reclaiming My Theology. It’s been such a gift to get to put this out every week, thanks to your support. So if you like what you hear, as usual, please subscribe, rate, and review. It goes a long way to help others find the show. And join us on Patreon; just $5 a month will get you more content, and, like I said before, we’re launching that on Saturday with an exclusive podcast for Patrons.
Have a good one, y’all. And as always, let’s just do a little bit better.