Ep. 82 / Reading The Bible On Turtle Island with Daniel Zacharias and Chris Hoklotubbe

The land beneath our feet has a longer story than most of us were taught and the Bible has far more to say about land, belonging and relationship than our usual readings admit. In this episode we’re joined by Dr. Daniel Zacharias and Dr. Chris Hoklotubbe, two Indigenous New Testament scholars and co-authors of the new book "Reading the Bible on Turtle Island," and we explore what changes when Scripture is read with an Indigenous worldview, memory and communal perspective.

We talk about Turtle Island as a name that signals deep history, then get practical about hermeneutics: the lenses we all bring to the text, whether we name them or not. Daniel explains a medicine wheel approach to biblical interpretation that holds Scripture alongside creation, cultural stories and the shared hearts and minds of a people. Chris shows how this kind of reading can illuminate familiar passages, including Jesus and the rich young ruler, where “possessions” in an agrarian world often means land, debt and dispossession and where Jubilee themes can suddenly come alive.

We also face the harder background: colonization, residential schools and the ways Christianity was used to condemn Indigenous culture, creating shame and silence even inside church communities. But we don’t stop at deficit stories. We dig into asset-based theology, the power of relationships, and why storytelling often moves hearts more than arguments ever will. If you care about faithful Bible study, Christian discipleship, reconciliation, and hearing the global church more clearly, this conversation will widen your field of view.

If you'd like to learn more from Daniel Zacharias and Chris Hoklotubbe you can purchase their book and explore NAIITS: An Indigenous Learning Community. And please don't forget to share this episode and join the conversation on YouTube! 

____________________

▶ Watch Interviews on YouTube

▶ Sign Up for FREE Dispatches From the Global Village

▶ Free Downloadable eBook "Here's Hope"

▶ More Info: evangelical360.com

#evangelical360

Transcript

Welcome And Why This Matters

Brian Stiller 0:10

Welcome to Evangelical 360. I'm Brian Stiller. And today we have a conversation that I think is genuinely important for the Canadian Church and for every follower of Jesus who wants to read the scripture with fresh eyes and an open heart. The land beneath our feet has a long history. It goes back long before European settlers arrived. Indigenous peoples were here living, worshiping, telling stories, and in their own way seeking the Creator. And the question my guests today are asking is a profound one. What happens when we read the Bible through that lens? Their book is called Reading the Bible on Turtle Island, published by InterVarsity. It's already been described as comprehensive and visionary, a work that reimagines Christian faith in view of Indigenous experiences and identity. Daniel Zacharias holds a PhD from Highland Theological College and the University of Aberdeen. He is Cree -Anishinaabe and Metis, an Austrian man originally from Winnipeg, and he serves as Associate Dean and Professor of New Testament Studies at Acadia Divinity College in Nova Scotia. Chris Hoklotubbe holds a THD from Harvard and is a proud member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. He serves as director of graduate studies at NAIITS, the first fully accredited Indigenous designed and Indigenous governed theological institute in North America. Together, they are inviting all of us to enter into a richer, deeper reading of the Word. Chris and Danny, I'm so delighted to welcome you to Evangelical 360. And for those of you who are joining me, thank you for being with us. And please share this episode with a friend. If you haven't done so already, just hit the subscribe button, and you can also join the conversation on YouTube in the comments below. Now to my special guests. Chris and Danny, wonderful to have you here. This book, Reading the Bible on Turtle Island, is a book that I just hope gets a wide, wide reading. We're going to talk about it, what it means, the ideas that are behind it. But this is a uh a mover. This is a a shifter of landscape for a lot of people, if they would come to understand what you are saying and why you're saying it. So thanks for joining us. You have the Bible on Turtle Island. Danny, I know what Turtle Island is, but I suspect most of the people that are listening have never heard of it before.

Danny Zacharias 3:04

Yeah, so uh Turtle Island is the name for the continent that we are on, North America, uh for several First Nations, especially in the plains. And so it was a wide enough distributed name that uh that's the one we chose, recognizing that not every First Nation has the same uh creation story. Often they have several creation stories, uh, but this particular creation story from Several Plains, First Nations, names this uh continent as Turtle Island. And so we deliberately chose that, Chris and I, because we want to signal to people uh recognition that the place that they live in, if they're in North America, has a longer history that goes back prior to colonization, uh, and that there was uh rich stories and people connected to this place. And so that's why we chose Turtle Island uh as part of the title.

Brian Stiller 4:01

Chris, obviously you and Danny have deep Indigenous identity and Christian faith. I'm intrigued as to how two of you, one from the U.S., from Canada, would land together. What brought you together and what what what are the what are the kinds of things that are holding you in this bonding of of co-authoring this major book?

Chris Hoklotubbe 4:22

You know, the center of our friendship really began around our mutual participation in NAIITS and Indigenous learning community. Uh NAIITS stands for the North American Institute of Indigenous Theological Studies. And frankly, I needed a friend. I thought I was the only person uh who was a member of an Indigenous tribe who was a biblical scholar. And through NAIITS's, I realized oh, there's one other person in North America that is Indigenous and also holds a degree in New Testament. I came to discover there's one more at Louisville Seminary, so that makes three of us, but it's a pretty exclusive club here. And one of the things that Danny and I are both committed to is walking alongside of doctoral students and graduate students who uh are Indigenous and are exploring biblical studies so that we're not the only one. And I think both Danny and I had a vision of a project like this. And we uh discerned that it would be better to do this together than apart, not just to embody the Indigenous principle of doing things together in community. Uh, but there were ways in which I knew the story was larger than the United States, and uh to have someone from Canada to tell the Canadians part of the story and from the United States to tell the United States part of the story, and to bring our sources together. And I'll tell you that the writing and the ideas were all the more richer uh because we worked together and we what we like to call did theological jazz. I would say something, he would say something, and we would arrive at an interpretation or a way of organizing the text that neither of us individually

Turtle Island Hermeneutics Explained

Chris Hoklotubbe 6:10

would have come out at by ourselves.

Brian Stiller 6:12

Danny, let's let's get into the into the heart of this. Uh, you talk about Turtle Island hermeneutics. Now, if you're sitting down with a person at Tim Hortons and explaining Turtle Island hermeneutics, explain what that means. Okay.

Danny Zacharias 6:30

Yeah. So I mean that I would have to tackle hermeneutics for sure first. I mean, it's just a common word, right? You know, hermeneutics basically is uh a description of the method or process for interpretation. And so when we talk about hermeneutics in the in the context of Christianity, we're talking about the interpretation of the biblical text and what that process is, what lenses we bring, what methods we might use. That's hermeneutics. That's kind of the overarching. And so for Turtle Island hermeneutics, what our project was, uh, Chris and myself, was to say, how do people rooted to this land, Indigenous peoples who honor their traditions, you know, they they they haven't uh they haven't walked away from their culture, but they've sought to engage. They're proud Indigenous people, and they are Jesus followers. Uh, in what ways do they approach the text and engage with the scripture in light of their worldviews and their life ways as Indigenous people? And so that's what Turtle Island hermeneutics is. We put a, you know, an S as uh a plural, uh plural, recognizing there's a plurality, but we tried as best we could, uh, and I think we did fairly well. We've heard uh good things across different uh First Nations across Canada that uh that we've provided a helpful framework. And so Turtle Island hermeneutics, as you'll encounter in the first uh main chapter of the book, uh takes what we call a medicine wheel approach, where you kind of dance through uh this process of interpretation in which we see uh medicine wheel, again, if you most people have seen it one time or another, uh, four quadrants of a circle where scripture uh is one of those quadrants. Uh, another quadrant is creation, another quadrant is our cultural traditions and stories, and another quadrant is our hearts and minds, collective in the plural, our hearts and minds. And we observed uh with Indigenous followers of Jesus as they read the text that uh they look for wisdom in all of these places. And as they do so, these these quadrants of the circle engage with one another in kind of like what we call a round dance. We invite people to this round dance of recognizing that these things uh exist together and intermingle together and mutually inform one another. And so that's the Turtle Island hermeneutical approach.

Brian Stiller 9:08

Okay, let's come back to this word hermeneutics again. Um I come out of a Swedish-Canadian background, or Euro-American, as you would say. So I come to a scripture and I look at something through the lens of being raised as the son of a Pentecostal minister in Saskatchewan, and I read a biblical text in a particular way through the lens of that culture, that language, and that heritage. I see it that way. Whereas if I go to if I go to Zimbabwe, that will, or Ethiopia or some other country, they will look at that same text and see it differently. Is that what you mean, uh, Chris, by hermeneutic?

Chris Hoklotubbe 9:59

Yeah, and you don't even need to go to Zimbabwe. You can go to the Presbyterian church down the street. You could probably go to a different Bible study in your own church, and they are asking different questions that arise from the particular experiences that the community uh that gathered around the text has had. Everybody has a lens and everybody reads the Bible with the questions that they bring to the text. And the questions that we bring to the text usually come from our own experiences. If you are really curious about where women in the Bible, if you're if you're a woman yourself, you might have a more vested interest in that question. So you are looking for and seeing things. Like I like to tell my students in uh my biblical interpretation classes is that the Bible gives us the answers to the questions that we seek. And we think that, oh, well, we're just reading the narrative, but you're always reading the narrative with particular personal questions in mind or certain expectations of what you think you're going to find there. So if you are Presbyterian, you have a whole range of traditions and um ways that you've heard how theology should look like, whether it's predestination or emphasis on grace in certain ways, that then you when you see that in the text, it stands out to you, or you look for it. If you're Pentecostal, um, you might be looking for stories that emphasize the different gifts that charisamas or uh speaking in tongues in ways that other traditions might be much more skeptical about, or they might see it and say, well, because of our larger theology of dispensation, we know that was something for then and not really that relevant for thinking about today, because that all ended with the apostles. But from a Pentecostal tradition, that framing of your theological imagination isn't there. And so when you see these things, you not only are more excited by them, but you're also making more connections to the present and to the text. So all of us come with, again, just expectation. It doesn't matter if you're even in the same church or different traditions. And so what Danny and I is trying to do is just make something more explicit, what every single person does. Uh, I think sometimes, though, the way in which the Bible is talked about and reading practices are talked about, we just read the text, you know, someone might say, Well, we just I just read the text in English. I just read it as it is, I don't have any kind of hermeneutical lens. This is stuff that people say that actually, when you further investigate it and ask questions, doesn't actually match up to reality. Uh and so this, or I think what we do in biblical scholarship is we say, we've seen a bunch of different people read the text. And from our exploration and our listening to different people's in African American tradition, Latinx tradition, even different uh Euro-American traditions, um, we have discovered these kinds of patterns and these kinds of um cultural lenses that people bring to the text that are all beautiful. And ultimately, I will last end is that what we come away from, not just Turtle Island hermeneutics, but what we've learned from African-American hermeneutics, Asian American hermeneutics, Canadian hermeneutics, is that the more people around the table, the more experiences that we get. And people help us to see different things. And so, really, to read the Bible for all it's worth, we need as many people

Colonization And Reclaiming A Voice

Chris Hoklotubbe 13:40

as possible.

Brian Stiller 13:40

Danny, why has the Aboriginal Indigenous hermeneutic not been given full license?

Danny Zacharias 13:49

That's a big question. I mean, that so much of um what Chris and I wrestled with as we, you know, part of this project is we did a lot of time sitting down, building relationships with people, hearing their stories, um, hearing how they do ministry, the struggles that they've had. You know, the reality is that colonization in Canada and the US um was wetted with their spread of Christianity. And Christianity so often, uh, as Richard Twiss uh said in his books, the good news was heard as bad news, right? It came with this condemnation of culture and practice. And that sunk in deep into many uh Indigenous people, especially Indigenous Christian people quite often. And so the uh work for us in part is helping to legitimize and saying you have a legitimate and good way of approaching the scripture, even if it looks different than wider Christianity that you've been engaged with uh or heard from for so long. So, you know, so the reason for it's uh you know not being out there a lot is Indigenous peoples have had to uh deal with and uh work against assimilation that comes at the government level, um, but also especially coming comes at the theological level. You know, my my family, my Indigenous family, uh the the church, you know, expressly said to them, you know, your culture was pagan and demonic, right? You you you move away from that to be a Christian, you're just a Christian now. All of that is, and and so that's to hear that message, and that was common uh for Indigenous people. Um, that's it, there's a lot of reclamation to do, there's a lot of unlearning to do to actually say you bring good things, there's beautiful things that are part of your culture, you have a unique worldview that can um that can shed light on the Christian scriptures and help you to live as a as an Indigenous follower of Jesus. So it hasn't been prominent um in some ways because Indigenous people, you know, have been tampered down. The residential schools try to erase Indigenous peoples from society. Well, when you try to erase their culture, the it's hard to have that cultural with theology engagement because one is seen as illegitimate. There's that deficit-based approach to how Indigenous peoples kind of lived and moved. And so that that's why you have uh for so long it either kind of sitting dormant or not being allowed uh, you know, to be voiced. And and Chris and I are, like Chris has said, we've sought to find our own voice, him as a Choctaw man, me as you know, Cree-Anishinaabe and Metis, I got a good mix. Um, but also trying to help others uh find language and legitimacy and uh helping them strengthen their voice as Indigenous followers of Jesus as well.

Brian Stiller 16:53

Danny, let's stay with your case for a moment. You say that that the missions, the churches that came to your your commun community, said that this was of the devil, that they needed to get rid of it because it was it was contrary to the gospel. How has that turned around? Or are your people still struggling under the sense of of being inferior, of of feeling inadequate in dealing with the biblical text themselves? Or is there been is there a change coming?

Danny Zacharias 17:26

Um I would say from individual to individual and community to community, it's definitely going to vary. Um I'm Chris and I have both met some people uh along this journey, both in, you know, face-to-face, but also in writing, for which they never had that sense of having to overcome, you know, a sense of uh assimilation or inferiority of the way, uh, you know, the way they lived, what they believed. Um, but I wouldn't say that that's the majority. Um most have had that uh that's what's what's sometimes called the white gaze uh or the white Christian gauge, you know, that that assumption that what is what is that? Well, that that idea that there's always the the the non-Indigenous uh majority culture around you watching you and judging you for how you live and think. Um and in the case of Christian spaces in which you know you you have you have uh camaraderie with them because you are fellow Christians, it's also the sense of uh sometimes trying to you you minimize yourself in order to make the majority happy. Uh by the way, people still experience this in non-Indigenous aside, like in churches today, if you have strong minority groups within your church, the same thing is happening. They are mitigating themselves to accommodate the larger group. Uh the same thing, you know. So that happens today, and and that has happened across history. And so um a lot of so just going back to some of my uh research as I've again as I came into reclaiming my culture, um some work uh by Leslie Newbigin, he's a famous missiologist and uh really good writer, but he talked about out on the mission field how he observed the same type of thing where it wasn't until the second or third generation often of the gospel coming, especially if it came with that kind of uh you know, couched also in European culture, that it was the second or third generation that that still, you know, were following Christ, but would ask that question of like, well, what did we lose from our cultural heritage that was good and strong and beautiful, that um that our great-grandparents or grandparents kind of just said that doesn't matter anymore, because for them, like my generation, it matters that we had that sense of loss and we're trying to reclaim. So it really does vary, Brian, uh, from individual to individual and community to community. Of course, Chris and me uh certainly hope that a book like this um can help help uh Indigenous followers of Jesus uh to see themselves um as uh as feeling free, you know, to bring themselves to the text and wrestle with it as Indigenous followers.

A Land Back Reading Of Jesus

Brian Stiller 20:27

Chris, let's go to a text, a biblical text. Can you take take out a Bible verse and show how that is different seeing through the lens, through the hermeneutical lens of the Indigenous eye?

Chris Hoklotubbe 20:42

I had a family member ask me about a very similar question and asked what difference does it make to read the Bible from an Indigenous lens? And I shared with him the story of Jesus' interaction with the rich young ruler. And when we get to the point where the rich young ruler is asked by Jesus to give up his possessions and to come and follow him. And to just just, you know, for your listeners, right? This is the story where yet rich young man comes to Jesus, asks what else he needs to do in order to uh follow him and go to heaven. And Jesus is said, Well, have you done all the Ten Commandments? And he says, Yes. And Jesus says, All right, give your possessions away and follow me. What we oftentimes assume is that this person has like a pirate's chest of a bunch of gold de blooms or something that he's going to redistribute to the poor and then come and follow Jesus. But when you look at uh Galilean agrarian society and where the wealthy got their wealth and stored their wealth, it was all in land. This person historically likely didn't have a treasure trove of gold to bloom. Rather, he owned a lot of land that other people worked with. Land that over generations his family had accumulated because their family had given out loans to other farmers who defaulted. And when they defaulted on those loans, they uh gave the land to the creditor, right? And effectively in agrarian society, this is how the majority of rich people became rich. And so you had this tiered society. So from an Indigenous lens, one of the things that we're very much interested in is uh the way in which some churches and some communities and cities are giving back land to Indigenous people uh for whom their ancestors uh uh were either cheated or didn't fully uh uh uh you know, the the trees weren't fully uh followed and yet they had lost land. And this is a big thing throughout the Hebrew Bible that resonates with Indigenous uh political concerns is the the year of Jubilee, that that in the year of Jubilee, after the 50th year, that uh people were given back their land, that whatever land they had sold off and had gone into debt went back to those people. So flash forward to Jesus, when Jesus is telling this rich young ruler to give back his possessions, an Indigenous interpretation of this emphasizes there's actually a landback quality to this. We can even talk about Jesus being a landback jubilee prophet. And that challenge is the rich man to give back the land to the Jewish uh uh ancestral stewards of it so that they can be uh more stable and self-sustaining on that land, and then come follow Jesus because then he's restored to harmony, not just economic harmony, but harmony and relationships between those people who are getting their land back and to their ancestral land. So I told this story to my family member, and he said, huh, but that's not what the story's about. I was like, oh, okay. You know, I'm just like setting aside my Harvard PhD in biblical studies to someone who's uh, you know, in the STEM. I'm like, what tell me what it is about? And he's like, Well, it's about idolatry, and that it's about the love of money that's keeping this person uh from following Jesus. Like, oh, okay. So tell me where in this story the word idolatry shows up in. And I'll even give you, you know, we'll extend this further. You know, because sometimes the gospel authors do this, they'll tell a story with one theme, and then they'll move to the next story. And that theme's not present in that next story, but because they're juxpositioned together, that theme we know is carrying on from a narrative style. Show me where in the the, you know, the neighborhood of stories that idolatry is the central issue here. And you don't find it at all. And I said, that is your reading of the text that's coming from your church tradition. That's not at all explicit or obvious in this text. So even though you say that you don't have a hermeneutic or you you're not reading with a particular gender or lens, you still nonetheless read things into the text that all of a sudden seem obvious to you. And then that leads you to kind of dismiss other things because, you know, it's Indigenous or whatever adjective comes with it, even though largely the Indigenous part of it is kind of secondary. This is actually good Gallian economic cultural interpretation of the text that happens to resonate with an Indigenous political theme of today. So uh for me, when I see stories like this of where biblical scholarship aligns with Indigenous concerns, it gets really exciting. And one of the things that we tell people in this book, and we love to tell other Indigenous people, is that Indigenous people are much more similar to ancient Galileans and ancient Hebrew people than 21st century United States people are Canadians. And so there's actually a lot to learn, and you actually help us to read the Bible better by spending time in and with these cultural stories.

Brian Stiller 26:11

Daniel, how can I, as a non-Indigenous Euro-American, um can I better understand the text by being aware that my hermeneutic is pretty narrow, it's pretty defined. I'm not gonna change that, but is there a way? Well, maybe there is a way of changing that. Is there a way of, if if we if we're using the metaphor of a lens, so a hermeneutic is the way we look, we look through a lens at a at a text, at a story. Is there a way of me broadening that lens in a way that that is informed by the Indigenous mind that gives me a deeper and a richer understanding of the biblical text, the story of Jesus, the broader creation story? Is there is can you can you give me kind of 101 of being an old white-haired North American Swede on how I can indigenize my hermeneutic? How's there for a combination of words?

Danny Zacharias 27:19

Oh, that's right. I need a dictionary to understand that sentence. Yeah, no, Brian, uh uh that's a great question. Um so you know, Chris and I, our hope obviously is that as as people read the text, whether they're Indigenous or non-Indigenous, that um we can show how that lens, you know, from a particular community can bring insight, not to replace, but to enrich someone's reading. Um and it's the same way that you know, Chris and I have been enriched by reading African or African American um exegetical books, hermeneutics books, or Asian or Asian American. I've learned richly from other uh Indigenous communities across the globe, you know, that are different uh than the First Nations and on Turtle Island, you know, readings from the Maori or the the many Austrian uh Australian nations. So so it's about enriching and and widening and being able to appreciate it. And that's the value of I think uh a reading like this that is it's not a short sound bite, it's a longer uh introduction to the worldviews, the histories, the lifeways of communities. And that that enriches and and widens our view such that we can then appreciate, you know, not only what they say and understand why, but also then to have that same kind of uh lens, being able potentially to pick up that lens and say, you know, what if I what if next time I read this paragraph, I I don't think about land as a commodity, but I think about land as a uh as having some sort of agency, uh, because the Bible says that, Indigenous traditions affirm that we don't tend to default read like that. So what if I do next time, if I put on that lens, uh that framing, and then read? And and that's available to anyone. And I think that's part of the richness of our global multi-ethnic body of Christ across the world, is being able to receive those types of gifts from the wider community, um, not to replace, but to come alongside

What The Book Changes In Us

Danny Zacharias 29:35

uh and enrich all of our readings together.

Brian Stiller 29:38

Let me be right up front with those of you that are are are watching this. Uh I think this is a marvelous book. I think this is a a head turner. It may be a heart change or two. So I'd like you to buy it. I want you to order it. But now I need you two guys. And I'm gonna start with you, Chris. Tell me what this book will do for me, what it will lead me from, through and to. So I come with my bias, my my history of of living in Saskatchewan in the middle of an Indigenous world where we had no idea what we were taking from those whose land it was before us, or taking from them their culture which had been so embedded in their lives. I I lived in the middle of it, I didn't know I was living in the middle of it. So here I am at my age, wanting to understand the gospel in new ways, but through the lens of you who are describing Turtle Island. So let me that's that's that's a long introduction. Let me start with you, Chris. Tell me what I'm gonna learn and how this will change my life.

Chris Hoklotubbe 31:01

At the foundation of this book is about relationships. This book was born out of two and a half years of Danny and I uh traveling across Canada and the United States, building and strengthening relationships with Indigenous ministers and practitioners and medicine men and women, and building TBs, sweating sweat lodges, meeting with grandmas over coffee, and listening to stories. And in that spirit, this book really is a celebration, a joyful uh celebration of the many voices who are reading the Bible and finding life from it. So, what I hope that readers will take away from this is inspiration and an invitation to not only be more connected relationally with God, Creator, uh, but also with their neighbors, uh, potentially their Indigenous neighbors, but even their own family members. This book is also modeled alongside a uh a relational arc that um talks about uh uh the joys and the gifts that Indigenous interpretations bring to the church to help us become better readers of the Bible, whether it's a better reading of Genesis and how um how Genesis and so many themes of the Bible are actually about our relationship to the land, that land is a person, a character within scripture that we oftentimes miss because of our Western readings, to the ways in which Indigenous, the ways in which how Indigenous people are thinking about salvation actually helps remind us about these old metaphors of what salvation is and how Jesus makes us right that expand and enrich the kinds of stories we tell about our relationship with Jesus, to uh celebrating the place of dreams and visions in Christians' lives. Uh, and and the way that was really active for the early church. In fact, I mean, the number one way in which God communicated to people in the Bible was through dreams and visions, uh, something that would is a wonderful thing to Pentecostal ears, but something that is largely suspicious to a number of other uh evangelical ears, at least to those I've experienced. And then we do tell hard stories. We talk about the boarding schools, we talk about the histories, because at the end of the day, if this text is about relationships, the way that we heal relationships and bring reconciliation is by having a shared account of what happens. So when my daughters fight each other, I just don't say get over it, or that's the past. They've got to actually come to a shared story of what happened and how do they make things right and then how they move forward. Otherwise, that's just a festering wound. Um, and at the end, we talk about the um the joy of Indigenous ceremonies and how we're all invited to uh reinvestigate the riches of all our heritages. We all come from someplace. We are all Indigenous to a place. And we're also invited to, um, in a different sense of the word, indigenize, um, form relationships with the land that we're in now. Make, you know, be connected to your garden, be connected to your community, your waterways that are feeding you. That the uh one of the latent invitations throughout the Bible is that God is not just calling us to relationship with uh Jesus Christ and to go to heaven, but for us to be in really good relationships with everyone around us, as well as this earth that God had also created as good, and that God has his own relationship with the animals and creatures. We see in the note, the covenant that he makes with Noah and the animals. Um, you can go to our book for all the references to uh God's relationships to animals and this land, but uh we hope this book invites people to a greater discipleship uh and spiritual uh formation in their lives to walk a good route, to walk a good path.

Brian Stiller 35:07

Danny, how do you think my life will be changed by reading this book?

Danny Zacharias 35:11

It's already been changed, Brian. Um yeah, again, just to reiterate, so much of what Chris said is is great. I don't have a ton to add. It would be again thinking about it not in terms of replacing what you know, but expanding and enriching by hearing voices of other Christians who also love the scripture, uh, take their discipleship seriously, um, but also are um committed, rooted in, and uh and celebrate their Indigenous heritage. And in the same way that I would also recommend people go read you know other books like you know, Reading While Black by Esau Macaulay, to hear an African-American perspective, because that will also enrich and educate and and uh and help to hear the voices of the wider global church. And so, you know, our hope is not only that we wrote something engaging uh that's educative, but that it's also uh invites them into um into engaging the text from who they are and where they are, their social locations. And uh and I hope that it that it causes conversations as well as uh you know the Indigenous, uh the in Indigenous readers, you know, in the first instance, Chris and I were thinking, what kind of book would have been really helpful for us 10 years ago? You know, so so Indigenous Christians, uh followers of Jesus, uh we hope that it again helps them to rediscover the beauty of their uh culture if they haven't already, uh, to ask those questions uh and to appreciate that and then bring that uh into their engagement with the scripture. And and we hope it does the same regardless of whether you're Indigenous or non-Indigenous, that you would that you'd come to uh see the the beautiful kind of dynamic and dance that there is uh as we engage the scriptural text from where we are.

Brian Stiller 37:15

You know, as I as I read your material, and I I'm very much aware of where we are in North America on Aboriginal Indigenous issues. Uh we have a we have a sad story, we have we have current history uh activies that are going on that shows the abuse and the victimization of the Aboriginal Indigenous community over the years. And that's been the basic story that we have heard about the Indigenous world. That they were robbed, they were taken, they were made, uh, they were abused, they were victimized. But you're bringing a different word, a different message, a different tone. It's as if you're saying, yes, all of those factors can be true, but there's something else that we need to go to, something else we need to think about and see as a way of bringing newness and joy and good information into the world, the larger world, through this community, yes, which was victimized, but still we have something much to share with you all. And so I have that feeling that's what you're doing. Is this in your mind at all?

Chris Hoklotubbe 38:33

Absolutely. You know, when you think about any time you've changed your mind or you've grown as a person, um, it's been because of a relationship. It's not because somebody who you didn't trust or you were scared or mad at told you something and all of a sudden you changed. I I have taught at a Liberal Arts College, and you know, we just tell all these stories of deficits and problems to our students, thinking, well, this is how we get to justice, and this is how we get to changing hearts and minds. Um, but all that really triggers are people's defense mechanisms when they hear such stories of deficits, whether it's fight or flight or fun or um freeze, right? They just they give this information and they don't do things with it. Uh, but yet the way forward, the way to transformation is through relationships and through some stories of communities working well. And then this is at the ground of what we introduced at the beginning of chapter one and introduced at the end of chapter seven, something we've learned from our elder Terry LeBlanc about asset-based, not just asset-based community development, but asset-based theology. Oh, that word again, which asset-based, not asset, not at like chemistry, asset A S S E T.

Brian Stiller 39:52

So, like something land is a value, asset-based.

Chris Hoklotubbe 39:56

Like a value.

Brian Stiller 39:57

Okay. Yes. What does that mean?

Chris Hoklotubbe 40:00

We if we start. So I think we can move to a place of transformation and a place of change when we tell stories of life at its best, when we tell stories of the joy and goodness and our vision for what we want to get forward. If I can tell you about how we dream about reconciliation and uh uh the gifts and the joys of Indigenous people, well, that's more inviting. That's not triggering your fight or fight. And that is uh uh moving us to a vision that fills our chests, that we be we enter this imaginative state where we can kind of dream together. And indirectly, we'll address the deficits and we'll address the problems. And even to go further in this relationship, uh, we'll talk about the hard things. And this is why in our book, we don't start off with the the boarding schools. We don't talk about the dispossession of the chata from their lands or the trail of tears. That's later on, after we've built a relationship with a reader, after four chapters of talking about here are some gifts from the Indigenous community, here are some uh uh joys, and here's what we're excited about, how this brings life. Um I think that's not that that's a model for even how we do church together and how we can really tell some of these hard stories about our church's uh uh implications in the harms, the social harms that have gone on in Canada, the United States. Um, to go back to the liberal art education, we don't spend enough time talking about the goodness and the joy and uh stories where people are actually predictively coming together to address these issues. Um and I I we need a little bit more of that. So it's a yes and, but I think in our public discourse, even in our college classes, we tend to emphasize

Asset Based Theology And Storytelling

Chris Hoklotubbe 41:45

the deficits, and that's just it hasn't done us good.

Brian Stiller 41:49

Daniel, as I was reading this book, it it it my mind flipped back to the mid-1980s and I was in Youth for Christ, we were in evangelism, and I came across a book called Foolishness to the Greeks by Leslie Newbigin. And he changed my life. He changed my understanding of what mission was, what the gospel was. And as I read this, I thought this this was a book like Foolishness to the Greeks. It comes at an issue that is complex that has so many diversions to it. The stuff that goes on, that has gone on, the the the accurate reporting, the inaccurate reporting, uh a story oversold, uh all of that stuff goes on, and it creates a bit of ambivalence as to the legitimacy of the concern that we hear from the Indigenous community at times. But I found this book cut through all that, and it brought me into a the hermeneutical question, which for me is so important, the way I see something. So I don't know when you, Daniel, as you and Chris were working at this and working at the at the Turtle Island hermeneutic. Wonderful did you did you have someone like me in mind that you wanted to me to to change the lens and how I saw things?

Danny Zacharias 43:14

Well, first off, thank you for comparing us to Leslie Newbigin. That's uh that's a high praise. Uh he's one of my favorite uh voices too in Christian uh history. Um, for sure. I mean, there the reality is, Brian, as you you know, you I think you know from from the Canadian context speaking, because I'm the you know, I'm also Canadian here, but part of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission calls to action for churches, uh, for Christian peoples is education. Um it's a it's about understanding the stories that brought us to where we are as as Canadians, but also in the context of Indigenous peoples. Um and Chris and I know tried to take that seriously even in the context of a book that's engaging in biblical uh the question of hermeneutics of biblical studies. Um so you know in one sense uh or or sorry in that you know that historical um education that component that we took very seriously um when you you know say someone like you uh I still meet people in my own church in my wider denomination who uh I I'll talk about the TRC or I'll talk about this book and and for some of this this is the still the first time that they've heard it um about residential schools and about assimilationist policies, you know, about in the loss of treaty rights and lands and all of these things. Like it's just this huge load that they've never really heard before. So in that sense, yes, you know for that particular conversation um Chris and I hope that our book brings to light um as a response to the TRC as a response to the history uh and stories that we've been given and read about that we pass that on. And then like you said that hermeneutical question is so important. Again, that's you know Chris and me uh this is our tribe too people who take the Bible seriously who want to read it well uh who want to feel like the decisions that they make the way that they read um is pleasing to God is in step with the spirit um we we we feel the exact same way and so and so we want to we also want to meet people um who feel that same way in this book uh we hope that we can engage them at that level as well for sure Chris as we land this conversation uh any advice you would have to a pastor a teacher a parent to somebody who has influence over others what they might do to further this conversation in ways that don't induce hostility or anger but understanding one of the things that Terry LeBlanc has shared with us too that I keep coming back to is that people if you give them proposition they will argue with a proposition.

Chris Hoklotubbe 46:22

They will argue against a claim or try to one up a claim but if you tell a story people usually don't argue with stories but they listen to stories and they might give you another story that produces uh a greater learning or nuance or might explain um uh why they feel the way they do and so I think not just as the leaders as teachers but as Christian disciples we need to become better storytellers and listeners of stories and to be able to know the stories of others so that we can share them so that we uh can in productive ways help shape the uh the emotional reactions and then the the propositions that people actually believe. I, you know, I used to believe that I could out argue anyone that's why I became a biblical scholar because I wanted to move people to the right way of viewing the Bible and Jesus. But over time I realized that actually people's interpretations of text largely come from you know core experiences or stories that they've heard or fears that they have. And that leads them to ask the questions they do or hold the theological positions that they do. And ultimately what unsettles or spans or enriches any person's theology or reading are if not direct experiences themselves, then well told stories by people they trust. And uh so in this book we've tried to tell a number of stories.

Brian Stiller 47:54

People may or may not agree with those stories or where they go to but these are true stories that should shape the uh uh should should invite curiosity if not help direct and shape somebody uh Chris and Daniel what a what a pleasure to have you on Evangelical 360 this is the book that I'd like each of you to get a hold of I don't know where you buy your book your your books but there it is take a look it'll be in the the the uh the the the notes as well on the uh on the bottom of the screen and you can pick that up uh guys wonderful work that you're doing uh full speed ahead God's anointing and empowerment in your lives and you have other ideas that you want to press out to the world please join me on Evangelical 360 again thanks again for being with me today

Danny Zacharias 48:52

thank you Brian for excitement we really appreciate this

Chris Hoklotubbe 48:55

thank you thank you

Brian Stiller 48:57

thanks thanks Chris and Daniel for joining me today your insights are simply remarkable

Closing And Next Steps

Brian Stiller 49:05

and to my listeners thanks for being a part of the podcast please share this episode and then join the conversation on YouTube. If you want to learn more about our guests today just check the show notes for links and info and if you haven't already received my free ebook and newsletter just go to Brianstiller.com Thanks again until next time don't miss the next interview be sure to subscribe to Evangelical 360 on YouTube