Theology in the Raw - 813: Reading the Bible While Black: Dr. Esau McCaulley

Episode Date: August 24, 2020

The Rev. Canon #EsauMcCaulley, PhD is a New Testament scholar and an Anglican Priest. He completed his doctoral studies at the University of St Andrews where he studied under the direction of N.T. Wright. His research and writing focus on Pauline theology, African American Biblical interpretation, and articulating a Christian theology of justice in the public square His doctoral dissertation, called Sharing in the Son’s Inheritance, was published by T & T Clark in 2019. Sharing in the Son’s Inheritance looks at the role Jewish messianism played in Paul’s argument in Galatians that Jesus has made believers heirs in the Messiah to the Abrahamic promises. His second book #ReadingWhileBlack: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope will be published by Intervarsity Academic press (September 1, 2020). Reading While Black looks at the tradition of African American biblical interpretation and argues that the Bible rightly understood and read from a decidedly black perspective can speak a word of hope to African Americans in the United States. Alongside these more academic works, he writes popular pieces. He is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. He has also appeared in outlets such as Christianity Today and the Washington Post. He is also the host of the Disrupters Podcast and functions as a Canon Theologian for his diocese. Dr. McCaulley, currently, serves as assistant professor of New Testament at Wheaton College in Wheaton, IL. He is married to Mandy, a pediatrician and a Navy reservist. Together, they have four wonderful children. AUTHOR: Esau McCaulley BOOK: Reading While Black WEBSITE: https://esaumccaulley.com/ Follow him on Twitter: @esaumccaulley Follow him on Facebook: @officialesaumccaulley Watch this episode of the podcast on YouTube Support Preston Support Preston by going to patreon.com Venmo: @Preston-Sprinkle-1 Connect with Preston Twitter | @PrestonSprinkle Instagram | @preston.sprinkle Youtube | Preston Sprinkle Check out his website prestonsprinkle.com If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review.

All right. I've got Dr. Esau McCauley on the show today. I've been reaching out to Esau for a while. I've been wanting to have him on the podcast for a long time. Esau is the real deal. Okay. So Esau McCauley is an assistant professor of New Testament studies at Wheaton College. He did his PhD under N.T. Wright, graduated several years ago. His doctoral dissertation is called Sharing in the Sun's Inheritance, which was published by TNT Clark. He also has a forthcoming book called Reading While Black, which was published by InterVarsity Press. He is also the editor of a forthcoming multi-ethnic commentary called New Testament in Color. Esau McCauley is also an Anglican priest. He is, he's, I could have talked to this guy for hours. Esau is engaging. He's funny. He's pastoral.

He's pastoral. He's academically wise. He's nuanced. He's so good. I'm so excited about this conversation. I mean, unfortunately, I kept him a little longer than I promised I would have him on the podcast for. I could have talked to him for so long. I'm so excited for you to engage this conversation. It's awesome. You're going to learn so much. Hey, if you want to support the show, go to the show notes. There's stuff there you can look at. I'm not going to waste any more of your time advertising my podcast. Let's get to know the one and only Dr. Esau McCauley. Hey friends, I'm here with Dr. Esau McCauley. Esau is a biblical scholar, did a PhD under N.T. Wright, and is also an Anglican priest. He's a man of the church. He's a man of the academy. And he wrote a recent, well, forthcoming book called

Reading While Black. Or is it Reading the Bible While Black or Reading While Black? Which one is it, Esau? Reading While Black, African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope. I'd like to give one piece of advice to future authors out there. If you have a long subtitle that you're really excited about, every time people ask you about there. If you have a long subtitle that you're really excited about, every time people ask you about the book, you have to say that entire long subtitle. So I have to keep saying African-American biblical interpretation as an exercise in hope, which I actually think is important, but it's a mouthful. So Reading While Black, African-American biblical interpretation as an exercise in hope.

So I want to dive into that, but actually I'm now fascinated with the title, Reading While Black, and then you say African-American. A lot of white people are saying, especially now we're all sensitive to the race conversation. Most of us are trying to get it right, I think. Is it black or is it African-American? What do we say? Or does it depend on the context? I mean, there hasn't been a black committee meeting to kind of adjudicate this issue. But I think that black can refer to, you know, a variety of people.

And so when I African-American in the subtitle actually points out that I'm talking about African-Americans, not people in Nigeria or Rwanda. So black kind of encompass, you know, people in the UK. Nigeria, Rwanda. So black kind of encompass people in the UK. So I made sure that I highlighted that this is coming particularly from African-Americans. Okay. But it's okay to say black referring, you seem to specify people who are black who have lived the American experience as a person of color. Is that? Yeah. I mean, i call myself black all of the time they're just synonyms but i just the reason is it's in the title like that reading while african-american didn't sound as good so reading my black just sounded it flowed off the tongue it was similar to it comes from the sorry the book title comes from the standard um thing called driving while

black okay and that speaks about the the disproportionate amount of times African-Americans are pulled over by the police. And so people talked about, you know, why did you get pulled over? And he said, well, I was just driving while black. And so if you're in the black community, you've heard that phrase, driving while black. And so Reading While Black was kind of a play on that idea. Okay. Okay. All right. Give us the gist of this book, man. book man i mean already sounds fascinating i'm sure it's going to ruffle some feathers and from what i've seen how you are on social media you don't mind taking up a little dust i think that's good um tell us what this book's all about man well i don't try to be provocative i

just try to do as best every christian i think is doing as best as they can to tell the truth as they understand it. And if I'm wrong, hopefully I am correctable. So the reason that I wrote the book is what I wanted to do. I can put it this way. When I first wanted to go to seminary, I wanted to get my MDiv and go back and be a pastor in my community. So the idea was I need to go to seminary, learn all of this stuff, and then take that stuff back to the community that I served. But one of the things that happened to me is that when I got to seminary, I recognized how little the seminary or even like white

Christians in general understood about the community that shaped me. And because they didn't understand the community that shaped me, they often misdiagnosed the things that we needed to hear and see and do. And so it was hard to be trained by a place that didn't understand the community. And so I found myself at seminary oftentimes explaining black Christianity to white evangelicalism. But I also found myself saying, like, there are very few resources that I think are directly oriented towards the community I wanted to serve. So basically, I wrote the book to, like, young me. Like, what would I have needed when I was 22 to 25 years old going through seminary looking for a way of Bible reading that was relevant to the community that shaped me? Like, what would I have needed when I was 22 to 25 years old, going through seminary, looking for a way of Bible reading that was relevant to the community that shaped me? So oftentimes,

if you think about like these application commentaries that we have, well, most of them are applied to kind of white middle class suburban churches, because most of the past, most of the people who write these commentaries, write them to that community. So when they think about how does this apply, they're not thinking about how does this apply to a 19-year-old black kid who's transitioning from an all-black high school to a white college or a working class black guy who's just trying to take care of his family. When I was taking my preaching classes, they talked about whenever you write a sermon, you have to populate the room with certain people. So you got to think about how is this person going to hear it, how is this person going to hear it, if you want the sermon to be effective. And so what I realized is so little biblical scholarship was populated, the exegesis was oriented towards the people in

the communities that I served, that I was a part of. And so reading while black was an attempt to serve that community, but also at the same time, show to demonstrate to the academy, its own blind spots, the kinds of things that they aren't even asking or the kinds of things that they aren't considering. So in the first and foremost, it's not, it's not a book. And a lot of people kind of want black people to explain black people to white people. So it's like, here's how to understand blackness. But this is not this book. The book is not written to white Christians to explain blackness to them, a black faith. It's actually written to the black community, trying as best as I can to say, here's the way in which we can be faithful Christians in this generation through the practice of Bible reading.

Can you get that? That's helpful. That was my question, is who is the audience? Is it trying to help white people out or trying to address specifically black people? No, it is written to African American Christians. But here's the important part about that. I like to tell this story. When me and my wife first got married, we were in the military. And we got stationed abroad in Japan. And I was not working.

I was staying home with the kids. And she was off doing her military stuff. She's a Navy doc. And so I started going to the stay-at-home parents activities. But it was mostly women. And at first, they were trying to make some kind of allowances for me saying, Oh, you know, you know, they were trying to say, but after a while they kind of said, you know what, it's too much work to like make the exception for Esau. We're just going to talk about like, what it's like to be a Navy wife. So like the

eventual, like moms and tots. And I remember this one time we need to get out, but this is their description. So don't, don't yell at me. Don't like, when did you get out of bikini by this rate? I'm like, you know what? I don't have a bikini body and I don't know if this is my mood, but I, but what it did is that it gave me an insight. And even like, we would sit around at the, um, at the playground, they would no longer make exceptions to me. And so I actually got to say, how do women actually talk when they are no longer concerned with men's presence? And my one male, as one male, I was not significant to make them adjust the conversation. So what I like to say is that like sitting in on a conversation in which you're not the center of

the conversation is also informative. Because when I speak to a majority white audience, I'm always thinking to myself, how much of this can they take before this is too much emotionally for them? So there's always this filter that's going on, or at least because you're in that setting, it's like the power dynamics are off. But if you're in a black room, right, the entire conversation is different because they're not making allowances for you and you're sitting in and you will learn more. Because I will tell you this. There's a lot of crazy things that people will say in an all white room that they won't. I'm talking about like a white pastor.

You take that exact same person and you put him in a room full of 50 black pastors and see if his personality doesn't change. 50 black pastors and see if his personality doesn't change. And so the important thing that I want to say is that one of the good things about reading while black is it allows you to, as best as I can, invite you into the room to hear the kinds of conversations we're asking. And here's another analogy that I use. Some people will say, well, why would you even talk about biblical interpretation as it relates to race in these different rooms? But I will tell you this. Every single pastor does this. So when a pastor has a text in front of him and he's thinking, how does this text speak to married couples? Right. And you're thinking, OK, if I'm in a room full of married couples, I'm going to preach this text one way.

If I'm preaching to, you know, 18 to 22 year olds who are thinking about interrelationships, I'm going to bring out these aspects of the text. If I'm preaching to a youth group, I'm going to preach a little bit differently. And in each one or if you move from a city, right, to a rural area, you're going to preach differently. So all of these things, it's not that it's changing the truth of the text, right? The text has a truth, but the way that truth is applied varies by community. And when we talk about that, no one gets mad, right? No one says, like, how does Ephesians 2 speak to parenting? It's not controversial.

How does Ephesians 2 speak to how African-Americans engage in the world then becomes controversial? engaged in the world then becomes controversial. So when I'm talking about reading while Black, I'm talking about the kinds of questions that African Americans bring to the biblical text that are distinct from the kinds of questions that white Christians might bring to the text because they've had different experiences. Now, what makes this still kind of, I mean, so like we're all influenced by our circumstances and our surroundings. And these impact the kinds of questions that we ask. But it doesn't mean that God's word is allowed to speak back to us. Right.

We know our black blackness informs the question. Right. We still allow God to give us the answer. Yeah. So what we're talking about. But here's the thing, though. And so what we're talking about – but here's the thing, though. Sometimes because of the community that you are in, you will ask the wrong kinds of questions of the text. And sometimes someone from a different community can help you see a blind spot that you hadn't seen before.

So here's a paradigmatic example. Here's the paradigmatic example. Slavery. And you can talk about this. You can look at it. You can look at it. This is what happened. You had the pro-slavery faction was saying, okay, here's this Timothy passage. Here's this other text. They say, okay, therefore we can enslave people for these reasons. It's also rooted in kind of a faulty anthropology. And another thing that was happening was, well, because African Americans, Africans are deficient humans, they need kind of slavery and kind of Western pedagogy to bring them up because of their kind of inherently inferior state. So there was two exegetical flaws. One was the faulty anthropology, and the second was a myopic focus on a few Pauline texts. So why did they make these exegetical mistakes that are clear to us right now? Because their social location as their privileged class sent them to the Bible with the question of how can I support the exploitation of other people? It was greed rooted in their place in society that distorted how they read the Bible.

The initial African-American encounter with the Bible, as it relates to the same context, is saying, well, hold on. In this passage here, Genesis 1, 26-28 says that all humanity is made in God's image. Now, that was in the white master's Bible. But what the black Christian said is the implications of this text for black people is your anthropology is wrong. So the social location of African-Americans who are being oppressed caused them to use a biblical doctrine to push back on a particular form of heresy. And they asked the question, on a particular form of heresy. And they asked the question, what does Genesis 1, 26 to 28 say about blackness precisely because they were in a location in which blackness was being suspected?

Then they said, well, hold on. You have passages like 1 Timothy and here and there, but there's this huge chunk of the Bible called the Exodus, where God seems to take pleasure in liberating people. And this idea about God as liberator appears over and over and over in the Bible. And so this is what the black Christian said. God's character is most clearly revealed in these acts of liberation. So Exodus becomes a metaphor for Christian salvation, right? Freedom from sin. And so there's something about God's desire to free things that you see throughout the entirety of the Bible. And so their social location, once again, caused them to say, canonically, the picture of God that emerges from reading the Bible as a whole shows you that as a Christian, you should be against slavery. you that as a Christian, you should be against slavery. Both of those were ideas that were articulated in the way that they were because they were African-Americans whose first question was, the first question, does the Bible support what happened to us? And so socially located reading

doesn't eclipse the biblical text. It is simply an honest assessment of the fact that we bring our questions to the Bible. And so what I'm saying is like, what African-American biblical interpretation refers to are the ways in which the collective experiences of being black in America have shaped the kinds of questions that we bring to the text. And it talks about the particular ways in which the text challenges us. Because every single culture has ways in which the Bible is a particular challenge. And so let me, and this is once again, a pretty basic example. I'll talk about forgiveness. Forgiveness is like a basic biblical idea.

You know, someone sins against you, you forgive them. It's part of what it means to be a Christian. But you look at, like, forgiveness from, like, the two sides of the black-white divide. The white Christians are effectively, like, receiving their forgiveness. And the black Christian is the one who's having to process all that's happened to us in America and what continues to happen and what continues to be denied. And so the African-American in this context is having to deal with forgiveness, is doing different kinds of emotional work. It's the same kind of emotional work that a survivor is trying to, like, deal with, right? A survivor of abuse.

And so when we talk about forgiveness, we work, we do a different kinds of theological work. Yeah. Not that no one has to forgive. You see, you see what I mean? So like Christians say you should like forgive in this particular dynamic. Is it the same now? So the ways in which the gospel in particular challenges different communities means there's certain kinds of questions that we're going to have to answer in a different way if we're going to be faithful. And so I can't speak to all of the ways in which the truths of Christianity particularly press on the culture. But we can even talk about the ways in which individualism, like American individualism,

functions to keep, to kind of push back on any kind of corporate responsibility in white Christian settings. And so what I want to say is this, there is an exegetical motivation against corporate responsibility because corporate responsibility in a white Christian context requires certain kinds of like added burden, right? So there's this idea of like, I'm at all complicit in anything that happened before I was born. Then that puts a lot of, so like there's an exegetical motivation

not to see those kinds of things. And so what I'm saying is that like, it's the Bible as God's word comes to a different communities, but the ways in which it challenges and pushes back and transforms each culture is as varied as the culture. And when you get all of these cultures together, reading the Bible, right, that's how you get to the truth.

Because I need a Ugandan or a Nigerian to come and say, here's some American blind spots. I might need my Asian-American brothers and sisters to say, here's some things that you might not see because you're so caught up in the black-white binary. and say, here's some things that you might not see because you're so caught up in the black-white binary. And so what I'm talking about is literally the entire body of Christ reading the Bible together so that we might properly understand it. It says I can't speak all of the ways which other cultures read the Bible and the questions that they ask. I could talk about the ways in which my culture reads the Bible and the kinds of questions that we ask. And so this is what I'm trying to like contribute to the conversation around the truth of God's word.

Oh man, I've got about 18 different questions that run it through my, first of all, it just makes me want to read your book more. And if, if it means anything, I just want a hundred, 100% affirm that the Bible can be absolute truth.

And yet our access, our interpretive process by which we access that absolute truth is colored by gender, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, power dynamics, geographical location, even temporal. Like we are living in a, we read it as post-enlightenment readers. And that, that plays a role too. Denomination. I mean, there's so many intricate layers.

That color doesn't mean our interpretation is wrong or right. It just means we have lenses on. We all have lenses on, right? And the only thing I'm doing is I'm being honest about my lens. And actually, to be funny, to be honest, that's only one of the lenses. So one of the things I do when I teach New Testament and the students laugh because when we go through the Bible, I tell the I kind of point out Christians when this is their moment. So we get to Ephesians like one and two. I say, OK, Calvinist, here you go.

And like they all perk up. God's sovereignty over human affairs. Right. Or when we get to Acts, I was like, OK, Pentecostals, you know, here you go. The Holy Spirit. When we get to the Gospels, you know, here's my personal relationship with people, with Jesus' people. We get to the Sermon on the Mount, our ethicist. Every tradition, right? Anglicans feel like we really believe, we really believe, we really believe that we, like, invented Advent and Christmas. I know we think that we do.

Like, nobody does it like we do, right? do we like invent an Advent and Christmas? I know we think that we do. Like nobody does it like we do, right? So we know when it's baby Jesus time, John 1, the Anglicans kind of rise up. When it's time for like atonement theory, here comes the Presbyterians. Because every text, every tradition has these set of texts that becomes the lens through which we read the Bible. Yeah.

Right? Okay, like Ephesians 1 and 2 is, like, my hermeneutical center, and everything else, like, I'm going to explain Hebrews in light of Ephesians and Romans. Yeah. And so what I want to say is that, like, that tradition, the tradition is, like, good, because it keeps us from, like,

changing week in and week out. But also, people who are committed to returning to God's Word over and over again in the search of truth, sometimes those traditions can be limiting in certain ways. And so just because I'm doing African-American biblical interpretation, it doesn't mean that I'm right. It doesn't mean that everything that we say is right. I'm just being honest about my influences.

So the whole idea of personal devotions know personal devotions interpreting the bible on your own you know you and god you and god you and your bible which i am not i would never have discounted individual bible reading but you're saying i think you're saying and i would 100% agree that we absolutely need to interact with the text interpret the text in a diverse community. Because if all we do is read it through our lens, we're going to be blind. Everybody's going to have blind spots until they are challenged. And even if they're challenged, they have to be open to being challenged too.

Just sitting in a room with a bunch of diverse people, interpreting the Bible isn't going to do anything but frustrate people if we're not willing to admit that we all are bringing lenses and biases to the text. Would that be? So let me give a couple more examples. Anyone who studied the Reformation knows that part of explaining what happened with Luther's formation of his theology is by the particular excesses that were going on in Germany. particular, um, excesses that were going on in Germany. And so Luther is not just responding to Catholicism, like as a, as a kind of global entity. He's in particular dealing with the particular extremes of the nuances that were happening in Germany. And so what was happening in Germany influences kind of the, the trajectory of the reformation. And most people talk about how Calvin's Geneva influences him. And so all of us recognize that we are influenced by our context. It doesn't mean that Calvin and

Luther were wrong, simply because they were in those places, but those places help you understand the things that Calvin and Luther said. Now, the problem is, and if you've ever you've ever been you've done academic formal research. The problem is, once you have one idea that is kind of established, sometimes people will just uncritically follow that same idea. And part of getting a dissertation is here's how you get a Ph.D. You just find something that everybody said because somebody said it a long time ago and no one went back and read the data. And you go back and say, hold on, when I go back to this data, this idea is wrong. And so someone stands up and goes, hey, this idea that we've all been building upon, this foundation is flawed. And because we're all kind of thinking in the same way, sometimes they need someone who's from the outside to go, hey, look at

it this way. And so when we talk about why you need diverse interpreters, it is because sometimes we get in the habit of doing things. As an Anglican, we have our kind of liturgical calendar and we have our sacraments. We have this entire structure in which we're saying, this is how you follow Jesus. And Anglicans can sometimes be a little bit removed, right? We can kind of be a little bit stayed and not as, you know, evangelistic. Right. We can kind of be a little bit staid and not as evangelistic. So we need every now and then our non-denominational brother and sister to come in with their head on fire. Talk about we need to do what we can to help people introduce people to God.

And but here's the thing, though, the they can sometimes like in the global body, they can kind of inject Anglicanism with kind of the the free church chaos. Right. And I mean, chaos in a good sense, like innovative chaos. But here's the other thing that you're also seeing happen. You're also seeing more non-denominational churches begin to adopt some of the liturgical practices. When I was in high school, nobody was talking about, no Baptist was talking about Advent and Lent. But it's much more common in non-denominational spaces, because they said that there's something in the Anglican tradition that is actually good for the wider body of Christ. So we need each other. We need each other to kind of get towards the truth. community, then unless that singular community is like uniquely insightful, then that community

is going to have blind spots. And you need to sometimes have someone from outside the community to help you kind of form it. All Christianity is this large conversation across time and culture about the nature of the Christian witness. So even if you go back, sometimes reading the fathers and church fathers and mothers, except for understanding the modern day, because they're not caught up in our kind of particular sets of circumstances. One of the things that, for example, as much as Paul talks about salvation by grace and salvation by faith, all of the things he talks about how God's salvation is a gracious gift. Paul is not at all uncomfortable telling you need need to do stuff to be saved, right?

Work out your salvation with fear and trembling. You know, like he tells you to like do these good works that God has prepared for you in advance to walk in. Now, when we preach those, we have to say the following. Yes, Paul says that like you need to do these good works that God has prepared in advance for you to walk in. But don't think that that means you have to earn your salvation, because we're always afraid that someone's going to misunderstand it and turn into Pelagians.

But Paul was super comfortable both saying, you're saved apart from anything that you do in one chapter and three chapters later, without any qualification, saying, do A, B, and C if you love Jesus. Because he's not afraid. Because we're so we're so influenced by the reformation binary we're always protecting people from becoming pelagians that's our biggest fear and that wasn't isn't there something to the fact that we have a four-fold diverse gospel witness to christ and not just one gospel, doesn't that show that God's

not afraid of different angles and slants and perspectives? And I mean, or even like, um, when I was studying in Aberdeen, one of my fellow students, um, he was doing his doctoral work on the general epistles on it from a canonical canonical perspective. And he said the very canonical placement of the general epistles, Hebrews through what, Jude or whatever, or Revelation, I guess, it was almost designed to be an added corrective. Maybe that's too strong of a term, an added complement to Paul. And this is why the very tension we see between Romans 3, James 2 2 between some statements in hebrews and paul's letters like that's actually intentional we didn't want it's not it's not like paul's the primary voice and his emphasis on divine agency and or even like i mean even acknowledge that even within

paul there's diversity but let's just say let's just understand paul through a lutheran lens even if we do that um we shouldn't go the Lutheran route and say, therefore, James is kind of a right straw epistle, or there's these problems over there in the general letters. You know, like those aren't problems. Those are absolutely necessary compliments to Paul's emphasis on salvation by faith. Yeah, I think my Lutheran scholars are going to say that, you know, that was one offhanded statement by Luther, but I don't think he, I don't think Luther actually wanting to kick James out. I've read something about that. What I would say is that like the Bible, when I talk about, so when you think about the gospels,

let's just kind of stick with the gospels. We think about like the, the, the Jesus who emerges in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and not in contradiction with one another. That is the same Jesus. But they bring out facets of his personality or facets of who Jesus is that are relevant both for the culture of the time in that community they're writing to, but also in the providence of God to the body of Christ.

So that God intended to use a variety of writers who had a variety of interest to give the, not even the fullness of who Jesus is, because even with the fourfold gospel, there's something about Jesus that like still eludes us, right? He's still like, we don't, we don't have, he's not bound by those four stories or those four narratives. He's even more than that, right? That Jesus is,even with those four different portraits, there's something about God that can't be fully articulated. There's this—the passage in—forgive me, this is my—working on Ephesians. Paul talks about having the strength to know the love of Christ that surpasses all understanding. So Paul's like idea is I want to pray that you have the strength to know the ultimately unknowable because God is beyond anything we can define. And so, yes, I don't think that any community, any community has a. A what do you call a corner on the truth, such that they can say, we have no need of you. And that the body of Christ is supposed to be one people under the Lordship of Christ across different cultures. Then we need

those cultures to fully understand and apply what God would have His people do and be. Yeah, that's good. Hey, I want to go back to, there's a question I had about blind spots. You've spent a lot of time, right, evangelical well just a white evangelicalism as a whole um you know that world what are some other blind spots you've seen i mean because you you know the slavery one i guess most people are like oh yeah i totally get that what are some that maybe um stereotypically white evangelicals might be more blind to the, you know. Yeah. I always say some because people will say this doesn't describe me. So I can't speak to every single like white Christian. I would say that in general, there is, and this is what I

see a lot of students struggle with. There is, and this actually influences like our biblical interpretation, and I always get the quadrilateral wrong. So if evangelicalism is emphasis on the cross, cruciformism, the need for evangelism, personal salvation, I forget all four of them, whatever the four Bevanthine quadrilaterals are. I would say there's kind of two unspoken ones that don't often get articulated. One is kind of like a gentleman's agreement not to be too critical of the United States. So there's this idea that there's a strong link between their faith and kind of American exceptionalism. between their faith and kind of American exceptionalism.

And this idea that we're, and so there's such the criticisms of America sometimes feel almost like criticisms of Christianity, especially if it's criticisms of an early era of American history. So right now people will say, okay, you know, because of abortion or whatever that America is in a rough state now, but they hearken back to the golden ages of like the 50s and the 60s what i want to say is that like america never had like the gold what people call the golden age before the moral the supposed moral decline of america is during the era of segregation and so when black people were less free people say well this is the golden era. Now that black people have more freedoms, there's like there's a moral decline.

And so what I want to say is that, like, so when you start talking about, like, the history of oppression, if you go back from the founding of the country. So if you tell the story this way, America was, you know, founded by the exploitation of the Native Americans, the enslavement of black people through the exploitation of Asian Americans on the western part of the country, as relates to kind of the theft, the parts of the Southwest through the war with Mexico, up through what happened with African Americans during post-Reconstruction, Jim Crow. And you say all of those things, people say, well, are you grateful to be here? And how can you, like, so like that narrative makes people think that you must be a theological liberal

for having what they consider a heretical reading of American history. And so what separates African-American churches and white evangelical churches is oftentimes not theological in the sense of it's different readings of American history. But the other part that's related to that is that there's an evolutionary way of telling

this story. When I say evolutionary, the idea was that, yes, America did these bad things. Now we're evolved to this new place where now these freedoms are here. And so if you just give us more time, we will continue to give you freedom. So you should be patient. And so this idea that African-Americans, the people struggling for justice should always be patient. And so when you appear to be impatient and critical, regardless of your other theological beliefs, you're sometimes pushed to the side in evangelicalism. And now I don't want to make it

seem, and this one I'm talking about complex ideas. Two things can be true at the same time. It can be true that America has made tremendous progress over its history, but it is also true to say that existing problems still remain, and the progress that have been made is no excuse for patience, because in every single generation, African-American Christians have been told to be patient. The what to the slave is the Fourth of July, the sermon that Frederick Douglass gives or the message that he gives is a criticism. He's like, look, you guys are having all of these celebrations, but how can you have these celebrations with black people still experiencing these oppressions? But how can you have these celebrations with black people still experiencing these oppressions? And people said at the time, how can he possibly be so critical? Because he should be happy that he's free and that America is moving towards this place.

The other one that you can see is if you read Frederick Douglass' speech when they dedicated the monument to Lincoln after his assassination. And rather than just being laudatory for Lincoln, he criticizes Lincoln for being so halting in the freeing of black people. People said, how can you possibly stand here, Frederick, when we're literally putting up a monument to Lincoln and criticize him? You should be grateful. So the assumption of the requirement for black gratitude at every single step. of the requirement for black gratitude at every single step is one of these kinds of things that then influences how we see black claims on justice, right? So when black Christians say, hear all of these passages in the Bible about how we should care about the poor and the foreigner, hear all of these things that Jesus says, well, you're distracting us from the main message. You should just talk about Jesus and then kind of let America's

evolutionary ethic take its place. This is how these two things work together, right? So you don't got to talk about it. You just convert me and converting me would solve the problem. But then the African-Americans said, well, hold on. We've had white Christians for centuries. And what has to happen is that, and I don't want to make this to be misunderstood. Yes, the gospel addresses all of these issues. The gospel addresses ethnic enmity. But what the gospel—what you have to do as a pastor is disciple people through the preaching of the entirety of the Bible. So, yes, the implications of Christ's

death for all means there should be no racial hierarchy, but people aren't going to intuit that. So you have to explain to them, here's how the Christian message and all of the other passages in the Bible speaks to how people should be treated. So the gospel has to be discipled into a praxis. And we do that, discipling the gospel into a praxis in all kinds of other areas. Yes, because we're all saved, you know, this is how we should be married. But this is exactly how you parent. This is how you treat your wife. We give detailed examples. So what I'm saying is that as it relates to justice, the emphasis on salvation and piety and the blocking off of all of these passages is an exegetical blind spot of evangelicals rooted in their,

some evangelicals rooted in their understanding of American history. Don't talk about these things, just preach the gospel and trust in America's evolutionary goodness, when in every case, America has never just randomly come to the conclusion that this is what they should do. It's been by being publicly challenged and pushed back on and saying what you're doing is not keeping in keeping with your stated beliefs. So that conflict has to become explicit, not implicit. Individuals association with the corporate white experience in America is a blind spot for how we maybe deemphasize or even just flat out blind to maybe the gospel or the biblical, I would say, emphasis on issues of social justice. And so on, where somebody reading the Bible from a corporate black experience is going to be much, much more in tune to the many passages that are kind of this dichotomy between I'm just going to preach Jesus, not do that. It's just such a false. If you're going to preach the biblical Jesus, you are preaching somebody who in part was addressing loads of social, even racial issues and tensions of his day. Yeah, the question that I would ask, and I don't speak about, like, I'm not a white evangelical, because I can't speak to what white evangelicals do corporately.

I can talk about what I see as patterns of behavior. And I would say that, like, for example, we don't, like, there are certain issues that evangelicals, this is the example, and I hate to give, like, really provocative examples, but this is the best one that I've been able to think of. So we talk about, no, I'm saying, like, I just don't like to trigger people. So we talk about something like pornography and we say that, you know, pornography is dangerous to society. It wrecks marriage and it's harmful to children. And sure, one way to solve the problem of pornography is to change the heart of the individual people making the exploitative films, right? So you can preach the gospel to the individual director, writer, and producer and and hope that that person becomes a Christian, changes their behavior, and stops making the

films. But until we have the opportunity to change that person's heart, we try to put in place laws that protect society from the damaging effects of these things, right? So we say, you know what, we don't want this easily accessible, so we're going to put these boundaries around it. effects of these things, right? So we say, you know what? We don't want this easily accessible, so we're going to put these boundaries around it. So we understand, as it relates to pornography, that there is both an individual ministry to people and laws and structures in society that we need to change to protect people while we go about our business. And in one way, we care, but we don't care about the person's heart while we do that, right? We don't say, you know, we just need to focus on the pornographer's heart. No,

no. We say we need to protect people. And then hopefully we change their heart too. So as it relates to racism, we can't simply say that's when we go into heart theology. Well, what we have is a skin problem, not a, you know, whatever the phrase is, a skin problem, not a sin problem, not a skin problem. So we're saying what we need to do is change individual centers. Yes, change individual centers. But while we're changing individual centers, let's look at the structures in society that allow these centers to exploit black and brown people. And so it's only in this context.

It's really only in this context. Because you talk about like all of the times times which people say, you know what? I see this thing, this Super Bowl commercial that I don't like, and I'm going to get Christians everywhere to boycott it because I don't like this image that I'm having to see. So we're going to organize to change this thing. So what I'm saying is we do this. Christians do this in other areas. But when it comes to racism and injustice, they go, you know what? Let's just focus on the heart. And that's what I want to call is exegetically inconsistent. Because if Christians can argue their issues in the public square, they can argue about issues related to racism. And when we talk about how materialism and greed and covetousness exists in every structure of society and we try to fight against it, not controversial.

We talked about sexual exploitation. We don't say let's just change the hearts. We say let's change the hearts and change the laws to make it more difficult. We think about all the ways in which we protect people in our society arise from our Christian faith. The question is why is injustice the category that is limited to the human heart and not structures in society? And why is it that the people who push back on it are the exact same, shouldn't say the exact same people, some of them are still alive, who push back on the civil rights laws? Wow.

Right? That if you look back on, you can look back and see it at the time. There's never been a time when an African-American Christian who's pushing for justice had been a popular amongst white Christians. Martin Luther King, they say, was doing more damage to black people than helping. Look at the opinion polls. He was never loved during his lifetime. Neither was Frederick Douglass. Neither was John Lewis. They always criticize being too provocative. They die. Their story is edited down to manageable points and then decontextualized quotes are then put to the fore. Here's an example. Martin Luther King, people say all of the time, like, you know, I don't want to be judged by the color of my skin or the content of my character.

And that Martin Luther King is advocated as this kind of colorblind theologian. But he also says black people need to be able to say, I am black and I am proud. But I don't see people quoting that part of Martin Luther King's talk. Martin Luther King talks about how every black man needs to write in his own heart his own emancipation proclamation in his soul. He says, I am black and I am somebody and God created

my blackness and God made my blackness beautiful. And that king isn't quoted. Because that's the king that no one liked. And so what I'm saying is that there has to be this place in which I've said this. I don't think there's been a group of Christians more consistently disbelieved about their experiences than black Christians telling white Christians. These are the things we're experiencing and we're being told repeatedly, no, you're not. And it's not that bad. What you're doing isn't helping. And we're being told that if we do it a different way, then maybe we will receive the help. But the problem is there's never been never looked search in history.

black Christian movement for justice, they received the approval of the majority of white Christians. And as a matter of fact, since post-Colomar, every single time it's been done, they've been accused of communism, every single time. So when you come to 2020, and you hear black Christians saying, hey, here are the ways which we think the Bible speaks to the movement for justice in America. And we're called being excessively divisive, setting black people back, using the wrong kinds of language, and effectively being influenced by communism. It's the exact same thing that's been leveled against African-American Christians for a century whenever they've done it. And so you talk about a blind spot. There's a gaping blind spot. Like, really, the question should be asking yourself is like, who is the black Christian who I disagree with on issues of justice, who is not a communist? Right. So I feel like there's two categories. The black people who get it and communists. Like there's not a category for

here's a black person talking about injustice in a way that I don't like but I just disagree on their interpretation of the Bible. It always has to be created, they have to construct an entire worldview

that black Christians have to justify not engaging. Because it's not even an exegetical argument, right? If you look what's going on right now, if the internet is any judge, there's not an exegetical engagement in, here are the passages that African-Americans are talking about, and with these caveats saying that these are how they should inform the Christian vision. And people are saying, here's how this exegesis is incorrect. What's actually happening is here's an entire worldview that explains why black Christians are saying what they're saying and why you don't have to listen to them. The lack of exegesis, the lack of serious engagement with biblical text is startling.

So, yeah, I got a bunch of questions. We're running out of time, man. So, and maybe it's because I run in maybe different circles, but in my circles, and that would maybe include the limited time I spend on social media, whatever, just paying attention to the broader Christian world, it seems like white evangelicals are just tripping over themselves to be anti-racist. And I mean, you have so many, I mean, literally millions of white Christians clamoring over Robin DiAngelo's just horrendously written book, White Fragility and Others. And it's like, so maybe it's because i swim in broader evangelical circle maybe there is a far-right evangelical that is really pushing i just that's not my world so am i living in a small world or are white christians no i think i think i think i think that like this is this is another interesting question i think that there's a

portion of evangelicalism that's changing okay and i think that it's a portion of evangelicalism that's changing. And I think that it's a portion of younger evangelicals. But what I want to say is... Maybe that's more my audience. Yeah. But I would also say, and I'm going to get in trouble for this one, but this is what do I care. We have to be discerning. And what I want to talk about this is there's a lot of people who are talking about social justice, who have a variety of different theological frames. And you can say this way of

talking about the movement for justice is helpful, and this part of the movement isn't helpful, or this part of what they say is helpful, and this part isn't helpful. The best analogy I've come up with to describe this is the Reformation. Out of the Reformation comes Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans, Anabaptists, Quakers, Shakers, all of these things. All of them were rooted in this singular idea about, you know, justification by faith. But it spread out into a variety of different practices, some of which were helpful and some of which weren't helpful. And as we step back from the Reformation, we can start to begin to trace these different

lines. And we were able to say, you know what, this part of what they were doing, I'm not going to go with. So like Luther might have been good here, but he had this huge problem with anti-Semitism. Or we might say that like, you know, Calvin did this, but he did this part wrong with anti-Semitism. Or we might say that, like, you know, Calvin did this, but he did this part wrong. The Anglicans did everything right. No, I'm just kidding. And so what I'm saying is that as it relates to issues of the current move for justice, one of the things that I see some people doing is the exact same thing that, like,

the Catholics do to Protestants. They sit back and they look at the extremes and say, look, there's a thousand different denominations, and look at this crazy thing that the Protest do to Protestants. They sit back and they look at the extremes and say, look, there's a thousand different denominations and look at this crazy thing that the Protestants did. Therefore, Protestantism is wrong. Full stop, come and be a Catholic. And so what I see some people doing is looking over the entire discussion of justice in America and say, look, here, here, and here are extremes and here are ways in which these things are destructive for Christian practices.

Therefore, let's pull back from the entire conversation about justice. And so what I want to say is, no, no, no. What you have to be able to do is to say this, this, and this are bad appropriations, and here's a helpful one. And so what I would think that if I see one danger amongst some portions of white evangelicalism is a lack of theological discrimination arising from excessive guilt. Yeah. And so one way to kind of, one way to not be like your parents is to say, well, I'm going to be like super pro everything, like anti-racist. I'm going to take it all in.

But what I want to say is that like, you can't trade one extreme for the other. And there's a variety of African-American Christian voices and African-American voices more broadly. You should read all of them, but you should also discern the streams of the tradition, right? Just like there are streams for the African of the, of kind of white Christianity, there's streams of black Christianity. And I don't know how discerning, kind of white Christianity. There's streams of black Christianity. And I don't

know how discerning some white evangelicals are of these different streams and how and the nature of those conversations. And so it's going to take a while for them to understand kind of the clusters of ideas. In the same way that it takes a while to kind of get

the reform. It takes a while to kind of get okay, when this scholar in the Reformation is dealing with this and following up on this idea, and he's pushing back on this person. And so what I want to say is that in the same way that you need to populate the room, even with Pauline scholarship, here's an apocalyptic reading of Paul. Here's a new perspective reading of Paul. Here's an open perspective reading of Paul. Here's a radical new perspective on Paul. Here's Paul within Judaism.

You begin to populate all of those people to understand the conversation. What I want to say that in black Christianity and the movement for justice, you have to learn that the conversation is just as complex. And it can't just be as simple as let's just read all the black people and put it all into a bowl and mix it out and come up with this kind of conflicting series of ideas. and mix it out and come up with this kind of conflicting series of ideas. And so what I want to say is that sometimes you need to like read all the different things and keep your theological wits about you as you do that. There is this thing that I think is called historic Christianity that is not rooted in like whiteness and white supremacy. And I think there's like, you can believe the creeds and the scriptures and the, you

know, Trinitarian theology and the dual nature of Christ. I don't think that's just like Western imperialism enforcing a distorted picture of Jesus on the world. So what I want to say is care about justice, but don't lose your head in that context. That's good, man. Can I ask you for some pastoral advice? I mean, this is going to go on the record. I don't know how many people are going to listen to this I just this is really just I would almost ask this off offline. But it has to do exactly with what you're saying. So, yeah. So what I've been trying to do and I've been I've been trying to engage the race conversation off and on for maybe 15 years so um yeah it was back in 2000 i think five a good friend of mine said have you

read the autobiography of malcolm x yet and i was like and it was a yet and i said no i'm i grew up thinking he was just like the devil you know read that book absolutely reconfigured how i even go about the race conversation realized there's so much all the lenses stuff all the stuff we talked about and so it's been an interest of mine for a while um and more recently obviously i'm trying to get up to speed on some newer works and so i've been trying to see it might be a longer question but i i've been trying to do exactly what you're saying i think of reading a range of reading a range of voices i do when it comes to the race conversation i do tend to prioritize um black intellectual voices um i i'm reading white people too i mean i again i read so this

is an interesting exercise uh reading these two books chapter by chapter back to back i can see i can only see one of them white fragility i don't see the other one so shelby steel white guilt and then uh beverly d'angelo oh wait i think it's coming out my camera's flipped anyway one's yeah you know white woke liberal woman the other one's black intellectual scholar they fundamentally disagree um so i i do i do i am reading some white scholarly voices i do tend to prioritize black voices but'm seeing, especially in this kind of third wave of anti-racism, my responses, whatever, a bit slower. I think in the social media era, everybody's just jumping on every little thing. And I'm like, exactly.

Just like Pauline scholarship. If all of a sudden I read an N.T. Wright book, I was like, oh, my gosh. And you're like, well, hold on. You got to read Francis Watson and John Barkley. You have to read. There we go. You know, like just hit pause. And I do understand there is an urgency to having a correct perspective on

what's going on america now but there's you don't also i mean it is way more complex than some of my white woke liberal younger typically christian often christian friends make it out to be um and i'm like i just just i i want to do a lot of listening, a lot of reading, a lot of thinking right now, prioritizing the diverse range of black, typically intellectual voices. That's what I've been doing. So you as a pastor, tell me yes, no, yeah, but do this or maybe don't do that. I would say a couple of things. First of all, like woke as an insult is like rooted in kind of a certain segment of evangelicalism to things like the ties, those two things together. I'm using it mutually just so you know,

I'm not trying to use it. Okay. So I guess, I guess what I would say is I tell people to stay in their lane and this is what I mean. I'm a new Testament scholar. Yeah. I'm not a sociologist. I'm not an economist. So I try to say, I try to use things that are within my competence. And I try to limit myself to things that are like beyond my competence, as far as speaking as an expert. And so when I talk about, um, like racism and injustice as best as I can I'm speaking from like exegesis of the biblical text and my understanding of African American Christian culture

and because of my long sojourn in evangelicalism kind of an anecdotal understanding of evangelicalism some people actually have like a deep kind of Mark Noll understanding of evangelicalism so what I want to say to people is, if you're not a sociologist, don't pretend to be one on the internet. And so I think that the Bible gives,

so this is not a Bible only, like, if I was a theologian, I would say, like, engage this from your discipline. So if you're a pastor, you might want to say, giving what I have what can I say to my congregation that I know to be true and then as you begin to expand your understanding then

you can begin to kind of expand the nomenclature that you're able to understand like to engage with so like first thing I would say like stay in your lane and the second so like there's like I would say, like, stay in your lane. And the second, so like, I've never read Right Fragility, and it's not on my reading list.

You don't need to. And so, like, it's just like, I just don't, I have not read a lot of critical race theory, because that's like not necessarily directly tied to what I want to do as a biblical scholar. Now I'm learning about it because it's a part of the conversation and understanding.

And I'm starting to kind of develop some kind of competencies in that. But that doesn't mean I, for the most part, don't use a lot of critical race theory that I can consciously in my scholarship because I'm just not an expert on it. And so in the same way that people just can't people can use the Bible. on it. And so in the same way that people just can't, people can use the Bible, but to like jump in and go into appalling arguments, you need to really done your work where you're going to embarrass yourself. And in certain ways, it's similar that I can't like read, like, and you can tell people who are like non-scholars who then just kind of sprinkle into biblical scholarship, which is fine. But I expect for them a certain level of competence rooted in this is what their discipline is. They're talking about this area outside of their competence.

So they should be appropriately chastened and humbled. One of the things that I find really interesting is how many people master a whole like section of thought in like two months and speak about it definitively on the internet it's like dude that didn't even exist like you just you literally googled it read three or four other blogs read like a couple of books and put your spin on it and so what i want to say is like a little like theological and and a little humility wouldn't hurt theological and a little humility wouldn't hurt. Yep.

That's a great word. I love it. Yeah. I'm not an expert on race. Yeah. I'm not. I can talk about African-American biblical interpretation, and I can talk about how the New Testament,

as best as I can understand it, addresses issues of the day. But when it talks about about like, you know, there's certain elements of kind of the secular race conversation that I'm still coming up to speed on. For me, and for me, I love what you said, Standard Lane. It's taken me a long time to discover that. And I have no interest, like you said, in being kind of some kind of voice on these issues, which I never, it's not – I would need to go away and study it for 10 years.

It's more for my own as I'm processing, thinking, even helping my kids. I've got three teenagers. They're asking questions, working through this. So it is more of a admittedly – I like to give – What's that? I like to give a taxonomy and this would actually help this might help you and it's i put this in the book but maybe it's probably even developed

beyond the book so i don't know if it's actually in this there's kind of like four streams of what i kind of consider african-american kind of hermeneutical models and the first one i want to say it just kind of help people to kind of put people in buckets, at least in the race from the Christian tradition, kind of like the black kind of radical black slash black nationalist tradition. You think of someone who who. So that's kind of like you think of James Cone or someone like that who's kind of very critical of the United States, very critical about injustice and racism, has a certain way of articulating kind of the response to these things. And on the other spectrum, on the other side of the spectrum is kind of what I'd like to call black accommodation list. And these are the people who kind of repeat the talking points of majority culture. These are the people who are often cited against James Cone, said, okay, James Cone says this, here's a black Christian who says

all of these things are false. You kind of move in from that and you would say, well, there's kind of this black, and they may seem similar. This is the hardest one for like white Christians to understand, the difference between like the black radical tradition and the black revolutionary tradition. I talk about the revolutionary tradition, I would say something like Frederick Douglass or maybe even Martin Luther King, who are equally critical of the United States, who are equally strong about racism, but who propose a different set of solutions and have a slightly different theological framework. On the other end, there's kind of like black, what I call black pietist. A black pietist isn't going to be super like vocal about injustice, but they will kind of acknowledge racism.

But they're more focused on kind of personal relationship with Jesus, going to heaven when you die. And it takes a lot to kind of get a black pietist to join with revolutionary tradition. And if you think about like these kind of systems, they don't actually follow like theologically from left to right, like evangelicalism, but it's like different modes of being. Black accommodationists, black pietists, black revolutionaries, and then black radicals. And so this spectrum is kind of like the realm within which you see Christians operate. And what tends to happen in evangelicalism is they read accommodationists, maybe even pietists, in evangelicalism is they read they read accommodation lists maybe even pietist because they're not very challenging and they lump all of black kind of radicalism and black revolutionary theology into the same category when sometimes there's different theological frames and emphases that are more than just different between one and two what i'm saying

is that like people tend to think that there's it's a pole, but it's actually a spectrum. And so understanding like as I read, what tradition is this person coming from and who are their conversation partners? And why am I either put off or push back on those? Like, how am I responding to these because of my social location? And so understanding those traditions allows you not to embarrass yourself. Because what tends to happen is evangelicals, for the most part, don't really know black radicals. They don't, because black radicals are so separate from their conversations that they're not even listening to them. They're not even engaged

in white evangelicalism. They think white evangelicalism is all white supremacists and just not worth their time. So what they do is they find the closest kind of black revolutionary tradition to them. And they yell at this black person over and over again, over again. They just basically harass this person and say, well, you're actually a black radical. And they go, well, no, I'm not. I mean, I know the black radicals. I talk to them. We engage in the conversation, but I'm not them.

I'm here. And then white evangelicals are like, no, no, no, you're not. You're there. And so like, and then, and what tends to happen is that more and more black Christians go, you know what? It's not worth me even talking to you because you don't hear me. And so, and the other thing that happens is like, sorry, this is like when white evangelicals start reading, because there's not a lot of like the spectrum of black writing isn't in print. They kind of jump over that tradition and go to black radicalism, too. Now, radicalism, progressivism, whatever you want to whatever term you want to use to describe it. I'm not saying there's not a part of the black church tradition.

There's not part of black Christian tradition. black christian tradition what i'm saying is it's one particular stream and that what we need in the same way that we have a spectrum of voices that are engaged in the exegetical process in white christianity and white christian spaces we need a diversity of voices going through the exegetical process in black christian spaces yeah that's good and helping your kids understand that is to help them because the like kids don't really understand they just kind of put people in in buckets and it's like it's like some people go like oh like well N.T. Wright and John Piper don't go in the same bucket right you know N.T. Wright has this genealogy and he's actually different than Richard Hayes yeah sorry this might be too much for the Bible scholar but not

Bible scholar you see how you see what You see how understanding is for this? You see what I mean? So you can say there's Barclay, there's Wright, there's Hayes, there's J. Louis Martin, may he rest in peace, all of these people who give birth to schools that are in dialogue with one another. And understanding this is pivotal to understanding the exegetical process. In the same way, black Christianity is a multifaceted, complex thing that you can't understand by reading one book from each camp. Or three books from one camp, and then one group

from the other pole. That's usually what happens, it's the two poles that get read, and none of the stuff in the middle. I've been enjoying several good YouTube conversations where you have a diversity of perspectives, dialog there you just get the raw kind of unfiltered uncut get you know um yes yeah yeah that's been helpful one more you gotta go eat lunch man i but uh just one quick question i've been wanting to ask you in the last 10 minutes as you're talking is it um okay is it insulting maybe not insulting but maybe naive or maybe it is insulting when white people assume like you're an expert on race relations or like, hey, you're black.

Tell us what's going on in the world today, you know, or is that actually like how do you feel when people kind of assume that you're an expert on race relations? on race relations. Well, I think, I think that what black Christians, or at least I am called to do is to be both a scholar and a practitioner. So, you know,

as a writer, we're writing about these problems. We're trying to think about these problems. We're trying to give it a theological account. So when people then say, okay, if you've raised the problem, now fix it in an hour conversation. Well,

hold on. Like, that's not my, like, you know, there's, there's doctors who do research and doctors who do surgery. You don't tell the doctor at the end of the surgery, at the end of research, now come cut my heart open and fix my heart. No, no, no. Here's the data. Now that data has to go to the practitioners. And so, or people, so it's like people think that the only way that your criticism is significant is if you have the solution. And you can say, explain to me how I can fix this problem. So what I want to say is that there's an assumption of omnicompetence and there's an assumption of limited competence. That sounds like they're in contradiction, but this is what I mean. Omnicompetence is we can go from diagnosis to cure to praxis in an hour.

And that's what we can do. Yeah. But we're also limited to that expertise. So I have a Ph.D. in New Testament, so I know New Testament scholarship. I've written stuff about Paul. I have a dissertation and nobody reads about Paul. And people assume that the only thing that I could talk about are issues related to race and ethnicity. So you're both omni-competent on issues of race and of no competence on issues not related specifically to race. And so the freedom to move freely in and out of those conversations are difficult. So some African-Americans avoid it because they think, well, if I speak about it, this is the only thing that people ask me to speak about. So they kind of, in order to have the freedom to do other things, they kind of limit it.

I tend to say, well, I'm going to talk about it as much as I want to talk about it. When I'm done, I'm done. I tell people on the internet, you get two replies in a tweet. After that, you need to take my class. I don't give theological education for free on the internet. Esau, thanks so much for being on Theology in the Raw. I really appreciate you, your work,

your voice. Keep up the good work, man. I'm really thankful for you. And yeah, maybe we'll have you on again sometime. We can just talk about Pauline's scholarship. How's that? Yes, hopefully I can get back to reading some good Pauline's scholarship. This has been a hectic summer. Thank you for having me. God bless you all. Don't email me. Goodbye. Thank you.