Contextual Healing with Aaron Higashi

Aaron Higashi And then that sort of got read back into biblical interpretation.

Dan Beecher We're going to get back to it, but I have to say, you keep saying this as though you can interpret the Bible when obviously that can't be right. It's the perfect word of God- You just rub your fingers on it ... devoid of all interpretation. Am I wrong? I thought that's how it's supposed to work here.

Aaron Higashi Some people think so. Some people absolutely hold to that, and that's often one of the biggest difficulties you encounter in trying to talk to people about the Bible.

Dan McClellan Hey, everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan And this is the Data Over Dogma podcast. Welcome to today's episode. We've got a great one for you today.

Dan Beecher Indeed. We have a guest on. Here's an interesting thing, Dan. I discovered you just on TikTok when we all, during the pandemic, dove into our phones as the last place that we could find any kind of sanity in the universe. And I found your content very interesting, and there was one other guy whose biblical content I found fascinating and honest and interesting and engaging, and that is our guest today, Aaron Higashi. Aaron, welcome. Hello. Hi. Thanks for coming on the show.

Aaron Higashi I thought you were going to say somebody else after all that. And it's not this guy, but this guy's almost as good as that other guy.

Dan Beecher We

Dan McClellan couldn't get him, okay?

Dan Beecher This guy is at most fourth down on the list.

Aaron Higashi That's a great place to be in. Hi, I'm very happy to be on the show.

Dan Beecher Well, welcome. Aaron, you are, like Dan, a public-facing scholar. Excuse me. Can you tell us a little bit about your sort of biological... You could tell us about that, but your biographical history. Tell us a little bit about where you're coming from, how you know so much about the Bible, all of that sort of stuff.

Aaron Higashi Oh, man. Yeah, sure. I did most of my growing up in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Dan Beecher I took a first- No Christians there.

Aaron Higashi No, not a single one, actually. A voided wasteland of Christianity. Actually, I grew up a stone's throw away from New Life Church, all these megachurches in Colorado Springs. Non-denominational, which is like evangelical, but without any accountability to an institution or something like that. So that's the environment that I grew up in and originally attended church in, in high school and stuff. I did my first take at college at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. I wanted to be a writer, either journalism or creative writing. I failed out for lack of maturity and moved back in with my parents and- Can I just...

Dan Beecher I'm just going to butt in and say that there's something very appealing to me about the fact that I'm the only person on this podcast who's never failed out of a college or been kicked out of a college. Well- It's a great experience. You

Aaron Higashi should try it.

Dan Beecher I'm amazed.

Dan McClellan You're also the only person who's not failed out of a college in northern Colorado. That's right.

Dan Beecher The two of us are both- My university,

Dan McClellan I went to University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, which is about- Yeah ... 30 minutes away from CSU over in Fort Collins. I used to go to parties in Fort Collins at CSU.

Aaron Higashi They're the best parties or the worst, depending on what you're looking for. Less cows, more alcohol, I think,

Dan Beecher in Greeley. Yeah.

Dan McClellan It doesn't smell as bad in Fort Collins.

Aaron Higashi Differently bad. Differently bad. So after I failed out of there, I moved in with my parents and started going to community college, and I happened across a philosophy class I took at a community college, and I fell in love with philosophy. Also, it was the only thing that I was any good at because a lot of it's just arguing and writing, which I love to do. So I changed my major to philosophy. I went to the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, which has a beautiful campus seated in the mountains there in central Colorado Springs. And I took a minor in religious studies and took the only religion classes they had on offer, which was an introduction to New Testament and introduction to Old Testament, and that's where I encountered academic biblical studies for the first time. I read my first Bart Ehrman book, which I still own to this day. It's still marked up in all my notes. And it just blew my mind that you could think about this stuff from an academic perspective. I had grown up in this environment, sort of in and out of different churches, pretty unsatisfied with that experience, and it just opened every door in my mind to, you could do this. You could spend your life studying this in a different sort of way. And so I graduated from there, and I was either going to go to an applied ethics program at Oregon State, or I was going to go to a biblical studies program at Providence College in Rhode Island. Those two things probably seem very different from each other, but the underlying goal was the same. I wanted to figure out how people were interpreting the Bible and then applying it, especially in a social and political context, because this is back in... I'm old, so maybe not as old as everybody else, but older than most of my TikTok followers, probably. Right. So this is back in like... I went to college in 2004. Started when I graduated 2008, so a while ago. But this is in the middle of the Bush administration. We have a lot of Bible-believing folks using lots of Bible as a justification for this or that political policy, or this or that war on terror, or this or that funding proposal and stuff, and I wanted to know what that process was like. How do we get politics and ethics out of the Bible? So I was either going to attack that from either end, ethics or biblical studies. My then girlfriend, now wife, got into her dream program at Brown doing public health, so we went up to Providence College. Nice. I got a master's in biblical studies, and then because you can't do anything with a master's in biblical studies, I applied to PhD programs and didn't get into any. But I did get an offer to do a second master's at Chicago Theological Seminary with sort of the- ... the implication that if you take a second master's here, then maybe we will let you into our PhD program the following year. So I did a one-year master's there,

Dan Beecher and then

Aaron Higashi got into-

Dan McClellan So

Dan Beecher I'm going to interrupt real quick and say-

Aaron Higashi Yeah

Dan McClellan ...

Dan Beecher Dan, you're also the only one here who has not had to do a second master's because they couldn't get into a PhD program.

Aaron Higashi See? So- It's a rite of passage thing.

Dan McClellan Evidently.

Dan Beecher It's amazing. You guys are basically the same person. Well, it's nice. Dan, I'm picking you up. Aaron, you're in. I'm tagging him out.

Dan McClellan And for me, it was, I had been accepted to go to Claremont's PhD right after my bachelor's. Oh, nice. But I also got accepted to this master's program at Oxford, and I was like- Whoa ... "No offense, Claremont, but you're not making it worth my while here, so I'm going to go to Oxford. I'm going to defer," because it was a one-year master's program. Yeah, yeah. I was like, "I will defer for a year. If I don't get into a better program, I've still got Claremont." And then I didn't-

Aaron Higashi Claremont's a nice backup to have.

Dan McClellan Well, it was for a minute, but I didn't get into a better program, and then I was like, "Okay, well, I still got Claremont." And then they emailed me, and they were like, "Turns out we're going to take this year and just retool the whole program, so we're not accepting students." Oh, man. "So find something else to do and-" Find something. Yeah, so then I- Occupy your time. Basically. And so I had been accepted the previous year to Trinity Western University's master's degree in biblical studies, so I hurriedly emailed them, and I was like,

Aaron Higashi "Is your application window still open?"

Dan McClellan And it was, and so I was able to get into that master's program. So I know exactly where you're coming from.

Dan Beecher Basically, the two of you are just bumbling your way through degrees.

Aaron Higashi Yeah. That's what I'm hearing. That's kind of how it works, man. That's how you end up piling them up. Otherwise, it would've been a straight shot right through,

Dan McClellan right? Yeah.

Aaron Higashi Such is not the case. I really liked Chicago Theological Seminary's program. It was the only program, I remember googling around trying to find one, and it was the only program that had hermeneutics in the title, and that was really what I was interested, the interpretive process.

Dan Beecher I'm glad you brought that up because I don't know what that word means, so if you'll just help me out with that.

Aaron Higashi It's really just an obnoxiously fancy word for interpretation. But it also sort of came to be used to describe a field of philosophy in the continental tradition, in particular, that focuses on how we interpret texts in general. And then that sort of got read back into biblical interpretation and became a word that interpreters broadly use to talk about biblical interpretation in particular.

Dan Beecher We're going to get back to it, but I have to say, you keep saying this as though you can interpret the Bible when obviously that can't be right. It's the perfect word of God.

Aaron Higashi You just rub your fingers on it.

Dan Beecher Devoid of all interpretation. Am I wrong? I thought that's how it's supposed to work here.

Aaron Higashi Some people think so. Some people absolutely hold to that, and that's often one of the biggest difficulties you encounter in trying to talk to people about the Bible. Indeed. So I really wanted a program that focused on that, and Chicago Theological Seminary had a program called Bible, Culture, and Hermeneutics, and that's what I signed up for and got into and really fell in love with. And that's what my PhD is in today. So that's how I know at least a couple of things about the Bible. I specialize in Hebrew Bible. You've got to pick something, and only really nerds and saints do New Testament, so I wanted to do the fun stuff in Hebrew Bible. Yeah,

Dan Beecher nothing nerdy at all about Hebrew Bible. There's nothing- No, it's much cooler.

Aaron Higashi It's much cooler.

Dan Beecher Let me ask you this. You mentioned earlier that when you first realized that this was an academic study, you compared the academic perspective to what you had been raised with. Mm-hmm. Can you talk a little bit about the difference between a layperson's, a lay believer's study of the Bible and what you experienced in academia?

Aaron Higashi Yeah. Laypeople, through no fault of their own, tend to read the Bible as a repository of dogma and sort of crystallized in a more pure form. And their job is just to go to the text and then to derive, sort of rederive over and over again, dogmatic beliefs that they're already committed to. So they believe that God is good, so they find passages in the Bible that seem to correspond to the idea that God is good. They think that Jesus has risen from the dead, so they find passages in the Bible, Jesus rises from the dead. And so the Bible is just a resource to sort of affirm things that they've already come to believe as a result of tradition and church practice. And that's not inherently bad, but there's a lot more ways that you can interpret the Bible, and so academics just bring a lot more tools to the table to be able to engage with the Bible. So there's historical tools to be able to set the text in its original context. There are linguistic tools to be able to get a better grasp of the original languages. There's literary tools to be able to parse apart the different sections of the text and to speculate about its origins and its different kinds of theories of composition. There are more fancy philosophical and ideological tools to be able to analyze the rhetoric of different authors and expectations of different audiences. So it's an entire bag of lenses or tools to bring to the text that allow you to ask more sophisticated questions. What is this author's... Who is the author? At what point in history might they be situated? To whom are they speaking? What are their immediate spiritual, ideological, communal needs? How does this text help serve those spiritual, ideological, communal needs? And then asking those sorts of questions in a variety of different ways. over time. And that's a lot of what biblical scholarship is, is trying to probe the text with these tools. And it felt very empowering to me because before you're not really doing anything, right? The work has already been done. The dogma's already been laid out. It's a very circular and sort of insular process. You go to the book for the dogma that you already had to begin with, and vice, and over and over again. But now you can discover things or at least put forward new hypotheses about why the stuff in the text is working in the way it is using these tools. And it puts you in charge of the process of biblical interpretation. And so for people, I think in particular, who felt like they had been hurt by the Bible in some way, or by Christian faith or dogma in some way, the ability to go back and undo some of that with these tools and to think differently about the text is an enormous relief. And I think can be very healing as well.

Dan Beecher I think that's fascinating. One of the things that I wonder about, I love that you're coming at it from that angle, from the angle of this being a healing process or this being an empowering process. I do wonder, however, one of the things that our show has done for me and that both of your content on TikTok, you and Dan, your content on TikTok has done, is to expose me to viewpoints about the Bible that are true, but were I a believer, would be very challenging to a lot of those dogmas that you were talking about before. Mm-hmm. Did you encounter challenge in your academic career that either made your beliefs, I don't know, difficult or that rocked you in some sort of way that you weren't prepared for?

Aaron Higashi It's been like a slow, it's a gradual process over time, but, yeah. What I sort of end up doing is you go to the biblical text from a different perspective rather than a dogmatic perspective, and you encounter there morally problematic stories. You encounter there a God that defies many of your expectations about what you think God is supposed to be like, and then you have to do something with that. And that process can be challenging on a number of personal, professional, psychological. It can be challenging on a number of levels. I think for me it was still exciting though, because I got to be the one who decided how to reconcile those things. It wasn't somebody telling me, "Maybe God seems evil here, but it actually all works out for the good," or, "It's actually justified that these babies are dying," or, "That these people are being enslaved," or, "This genocide is being done," or something like that. I got to be the one who decides maybe this just isn't God. Maybe this is just rhetoric. Maybe this is just ideology. Maybe this is just something that felt right for them there at that time, or was rhetorically useful for them there at the time, but no longer has any use for me. Maybe it did genuinely facilitate some personal religious conviction at the time, but now it doesn't. And so you sort of feel like a monkey swinging through trees. You're letting go of one branch as you are grasping onto another. But now at least you get to be the one who decides which branches you are grasping onto and which you're letting go of.

Dan McClellan And I think that's a big part of a lot of the public discourse about how we approach the Bible is who gets to decide. It seems like a lot of the reasons that the Bible is not very dynamic, that we already know everything that it is allowed to say, everything that it says is because it's being used primarily to structure values and power. It's serving the interests of people largely in positions of power, whether it is on a national level, a state level, a- Mm-hmm ... congregational level, even within a family. The Bible can be used to structure powers and value and to say, "Well, I'm going to look at it this way," and suddenly that power structure just collapses is a threat to a lot of that tradition that has spent- Mm-hmm ... so long constructing this approach to the Bible, this hermeneutic, to protect itself. And I appreciate a video that you published a little bit ago where you addressed some of the different theologies that people bring to the text and how a lot of these different theologies, the one that I'm most familiar with is probably liberation theology, is an approach to the Bible that developed a bit ago, particularly outside of the United States as- Mm-hmm ... a way to kind of arrogate some power to the readers and reread the text in a way that served the interest of the underdog, which historically has not been the group in charge of interpretation. And you said that all these other approaches to theology, womanist theology, feminist theology, Black theology, queer theology, they all get qualified. They have these adjectives that are attached to them. And then you say we presume that white male theology is the default. Mm-hmm. And one of your points there was that all theology is contextual. It's not like we have decontextualized theology and then all these other junior theologies- Exactly. ... that are developing. Do you think you could talk a bit about how important it is? Well, basically, what you're saying there, and then how important that is to you that people understand that there is no objective, nobody can stand outside of all these power structures and all of these lenses and say, "Well, no, I'm doing it purely objectively."

Aaron Higashi Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher And also in the process, if you wouldn't mind defining some of these different theologies, that would be awesome.

Aaron Higashi Sure. Yeah. No, there are so many different kinds of theology and so many different ways to parse out the different kinds of theology. So most people are familiar with just theology, at least in principle, and theology is just God talk, or in academics, it's usually the study of the nature of God. But that's still very, very broad and can be broken down in a number of ways. Some people might be familiar with systematic theology, which is an attempt to be very comprehensive and internally consistent, saying as many things as we can possibly say about the nature of God and our relationship to God using as much data as possible. So that's systematic theology. But alternatively to systematic theology is contextual theology, and contextual theology does not aspire to be either comprehensive or coherent with other kinds of contextual theology. It just attempts to speak to the theological imagination of individual communities, often with their experience, their historical experience, as sort of the catalyst for doing that theology. So Black theology is going to reflect the community and experience and spiritual needs of Black communities, and feminist theology is going to reflect the unique experience and spiritual needs of women, et cetera, et cetera, through these different kinds of contextual theology. So there's no aspiration there that they're going to say everything that can or ought to be said about God, and there's no aspiration there that whatever they have to say is going to match with what other kinds of contextual. So Black theologians aren't concerned that what they're saying is going to match up with feminist theology, and feminist theologians aren't concerned that what they're going to say is going to match up with Asian American theologians or something like that. So that's a big division between systematic theology and contextual theology that you can make. If you pick up a textbook on contextual theology, the categories are often given as Black, Asian, Asian American, Native American. They are related to ethnic groups and then to gender and issues of gender and sexuality. So sometimes you'll see gay and lesbian theology or queer theology, feminist theology. And then some that are combinations of these things, like womanist theology, which is both Black and feminist for Black women's experience in particular. But what you will never find in those categories of contextual theology is white theology or male theology. And part of that is- I think

Dan McClellan that's what Twitter is, isn't it?

Aaron Higashi That's what a lot of things are.

Dan Beecher I think that's what church is, isn't it,

Aaron Higashi for most people? In the United States, in a context where a lot of theology is white evangelical theology, yeah, that is. And so that's part of the way that you can claim the center of discourse is by not disclosing the context in which you are doing theology. So it is an attempt to depersonalize or decontextualize. You're saying, "My theology is not coming from my experience. It's not particular to me or the needs of my community. I am just doing theology." Right? "Everybody else is particular. Everybody else is dependent on the real kind that I'm doing." And it is that failure of disclosure that I was trying to call out in that video. There's nothing wrong with being a white male theologian or doing theology from that perspective. It would be nice if such theologians disclosed, "This is the perspective that I am doing it from. These are the kinds of personal experience that I am drawing upon. These are the communities that I am trying to serve and whose rhetorical and ideological interests I have most in mind." And that's all you have to do. You don't have to be like, every time you speak, "I am a white male speaking and doing theology." Just somewhere in your project at some point, "This is where I'm coming from." And that's all that really that Black theology and feminist theology and all these other kinds of contextual theology are doing. They're just saying, "This is who I am and this is where I'm coming from, and this is the community that I'm speaking to."

Dan McClellan And it seems to me a lot of the white male folks who are engaged in theology, obviously I'm one of them as well, to the degree that I engage in theology, which I don't really call myself a theologian, but a lot of is that in our training, we've never been told that we're engaging it through these lenses and we're aimed at serving these communities and these goals because we've always been kind of the dominant identity within the field, and so we just kind of plod along as if the whole world is our playground. And we see others saying, "Well, I'm doing this from this perspective, and I am engaging my community in doing that." And we think, "Oh, well, you're limiting yourself. We, on the other hand, are addressing this more broadly." Because it's usually we don't get training where we are shown that we are trying to serve certain structures of power or certain communities, and I think that's a big shortcoming. But to do so is then to acknowledge our positionality and to some degree limit the applicability and limit our ability to structure power over and against others who may be operating in a different field. So unfortunately, that needs to be called out a lot more frequently, or the field is just going to continue to train its new scholars to do the exact same thing.

Aaron Higashi Yeah. There's a great book by Angela Parker, who also graduated from Chicago Theological Seminary, called "If God Still Breathes, Why Can't I?" And it's about how So many theological schools and schools of religious study effectively train their students, regardless of their race or gender, how to do white male theology. So even people of color who come from other backgrounds are still trained to perpetuate and to speak as like they are doing white male theology. So yeah, it's very infrequently that people get access to these kinds of resources or get taught to think or speak differently about the kind of work that they're doing.

Dan Beecher Is there a sense that, I read in sort of greater feminism or in other circles, people talk about intersectionality and the need for that. When you spoke about Black theology not necessarily concerning itself with what's going on in feminist or womanist theology, that sort of thing- Mm-hmm ... where does intersectionality come into it?

Aaron Higashi Yeah, well, that's a fun way to ask that question. Womanist theology emerges out of Black theology specifically because of Black theology's lack of attentiveness to intersectional issues.

Dan Beecher So- Interesting.

Aaron Higashi Yeah, of course ... intersectionality is a way of thinking about various elements of social identity, gender, race, class, as though they mutually construct each other. So you can't look at gender alone, but the way we think about gender is affected by class, and you can't just think about race alone. The way we think about race is affected by class. And so people sort of lie at the intersections of their different elements of social identity. And it was really a number of Black women's dissatisfaction with what was happening in Black liberation theology that led them to then create womanist theology, which is a much more straightforward attempt to be intersectional, bringing together gender, race, and class in the doing of their theological work.

Dan Beecher So when someone who is afflicted with straight whiteness and maleness, the way Dan is, for example, or myself, and they're out there trying to study theology- Mm-hmm ... how do you recommend that person approach it when, as you say, the structures, even in current academia, are still pretty geared toward that straight white male perspective?

Aaron Higashi Yeah. Fortunately today, and we've only been able to say this recently, but fortunately today, we do have a fair number of women and people of color and people from the Third World who are actively involved in the academy. Now, they're still minority voices, but they are present. And so you can go to them directly and purchase their books and read their material. And I don't think it takes much. It's more the willingness to do a little bit of that reading that's the difficult part. But then once you get over that and you can engage with some of this material, I think you'll very quickly be able to do the adjustments, or at least the bulk of the... It'll probably take the rest of your life to do all the adjustments. It's an ongoing, existential process, as it is for so many other things. But the bulk of the adjustments that need to be made in a pretty short span of time. You can pick up a couple books, learn from a couple Black theologians, feminist theologians, queer theologians, in a relatively short span of time, and I think greatly benefit for that. A book I frequently recommend is called "Liberation Theologies in the United States," edited by Stacy Floyd-Thomas and Anthony Pinn. And it has 20-page chapter-length introductions to most of the kinds of contextual theology at play today. You make it through that one book, right, just a couple hundred pages, and that's already, you are multiplying your knowledge of the diversity of theology a hundredfold in a pretty short span of time.

Dan Beecher I wonder if you could give us some examples of different contextual theologies and how they differ from each other. It's something that we've been talking in the abstract about this thing, and I wonder if we could concretize it in some way.

Aaron Higashi Sure. So you can think about, a big part of Black theology, for example, is trying to think through again some elements of Christology that white folks sort of just took for granted but are actually quite problematic for a Black community and for Black experience. So thinking of Jesus as an entirely passive servant figure for people who have in their historical background slavery and household servitude can be a bit problematic. That's not something worth valorizing, right? If your primary problem is pride and privilege, then sort of humbling yourself in the image of this humble Jesus might be some moral progress for you. But if you've already been consigned to this place in society, that's not uplifting, right? That's not something to aspire to. That's not something as valuable about Jesus. And so you see a lot of Black theologians sort of reconfiguring the significance of the incarnation, thinking about it in terms of Jesus' power to confront authorities in the day, or Jesus' power to heal the poor, or Jesus' simple ability to feed large numbers of people, and they find more value in these stories as opposed to Jesus' humility or his suffering. There are a number of feminist theologians who find Jesus' substitutional sacrifice to be unjust. They find the idea of God sacrificing a son to be abhorrent because they cannot conceptualize thinking that it's a good idea- for a child to be ordered to their death by a parent, drawing upon a more immediate and visceral relationship that women have through pregnancy with their children. It clashes too much with their experience. And so now we got to rethink some of the significance of whatever work Jesus is doing in his death on the cross. So it's often something about the theology they've been fed does not jive with their experience. So back to the drawing board to find a way of thinking about Jesus or God or other stories in the Bible that are going to work better for their community's aspirations.

Dan McClellan And I think that raises an interesting point. A lot of communities that someone who is used to being in a position of power might neglect a lot of their experiences, might not see what they see in the text, but it's going to be there. There are a number of different ways that the Bible speaks to the oppressed, the downtrodden, the marginalized, and that's obviously one of the blind spots in the majority theology is that it's not seeing things from that perspective, which means it is woefully incomplete. It is not able to reach everyone. Mm-hmm. And I think your dissertation, which you wrote as part of your doctoral degree, was on Ezra, and we have where Ezra is reading out the law to everybody, basically letting them know from here on out, here's how things are going to be. Oh, and by the way, if you married women from these people groups or these identities, you have to divorce them and send them away. Which is a remarkably ethnocentric- Mm-hmm ... kind of act that we generally like to gloss over when we talk about that in Sunday school. But- Yes ... I wonder if you wouldn't mind-

Aaron Higashi Well,

Dan Beecher one could say that there are those out there who would love to not gloss over that-

Aaron Higashi Yeah ...

Dan Beecher and hold solidly to it, even in today's, in now.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Again, there's me defaulting to my own experience with- ... a specific religious community. But I wonder if you wouldn't mind talking about how you approached the question of interethnic marriage and what Ezra was doing in structuring power. I think you were looking at Ezra 10, is that correct?

Aaron Higashi Yeah. Ezra 10 is where it's called the intermarriage crisis is discussed. Ezra is in a very transformational and volatile time in ancient, now Judea, not really Israelite anymore, history. We're talking about post-exile now, the middle of the 5th century BCE. He has the unenviable task of having to reconstitute the identity of his people in terms that make more sense to them, and that is primarily to rethink of themselves as a people whose primary touchstone experience is coming back from exile and resettling in Jerusalem. Prior to this, it had been the Exodus. The Exodus was the defining experience of ancient Israelite collective conscience and ethnicity, and now it's this other thing. It's coming back from another place. And part of the way he does that is to draw these very firm, but at the same time indeterminate lines on the ground about who gets to marry who, what ethnicity is really going to count as this emerging Jewish ethnicity. At this point, we can finally start to sort of use this word Jewish as opposed to Israelite. What's going to be this Judean ethnicity in this time period? In order to accomplish that, he draws on, what at that point, several centuries old laws from various legal material in the Pentateuch to say that the people groups that surround you today are similar enough to, although we know in literal fact cannot be identical to, the groups that existed back then a long time ago. And God said a long time ago, "You cannot intermarry with them." So God is saying now, obviously, it must be the case that you cannot intermarry with these people as well. You have to get divorced. This is the only narrative description of divorce anywhere in the Hebrew Bible. Divorce is very rarely spoken about. Even in legal material, there are only a couple references to it here and there, and I don't think there are any other narrative examples of it. So it's here, and it's a mass divorce, and it's a mass divorce that's coerced. Right? Ezra has all the people in the entire region gather in the temple courtyard under pain of confiscation and exile from the community. They are forced to go through this proceeding in order to determine which marriages are legitimate and which are not, and everyone who's found illegitimate is compelled to get divorced. And in the end, about 100 families are broken up as a result of Ezra's decree. So it's a very dramatic moment in the Hebrew Bible. Again, like Dan said, we gloss over this a lot. It's not read hardly at all. I have the "Ancient Christian Commentary" series that has a bunch of commentary from the first seven centuries of the church. Nobody except for Bede, the Venerable Bede, or however you say his name, he was the only person for the first seven centuries of the church to comment on this, and even today, we don't continue to read this text. So it's under-read and not reflected on often. For the past 70 years or so, biblical scholars and theologians have been trying to justify what Ezra did. As we sort of become increasingly conscious of how bad this kind of ethnocentrism is, scholars have put in a lot of work to try to vindicate Ezra's decision to force these people to get divorced because it's terrible, especially for the children involved who go off to fates unknown. We have no idea what happens to the children of these marriages or to the wives involved. They could be in immediate threat of death depending on the circumstances. So scholars have put a lot of time and energy into trying to say, "No, Ezra did the right thing," and they give various justifications for that.

Dan McClellan Is it generally agreed that this is historical?

Aaron Higashi Yeah, I think so. Or at least that it reflects something that happened in sort of smaller measures periodically over the course of a long period of time. Okay. But I haven't seen a lot of attempts to challenge outright the historicity of the event. It's sort of an embarrassing thing to admit to and it keeps coming up. Some of these issues return again in Nehemiah which many scholars take to be a bit later. So it seems to be a recurring problem. It's not just a one-off sort of event. So what my dissertation did is try to find a different way to read it without valorizing Ezra, without finding the meaning of the passage in Ezra, and instead try to find some moral significance in what the gathered people do. And there's this cultural anthropologist named James Scott who spent some time in Malaysia studying how peasant communities resist oppression in these very subtle sorts of ways. And so I took his work and I applied it to this passage and I said, "Look, the people in this scenario resist Ezra and his demand for divorce in some of those same ways." They foot drag. That is to say they take a long time to do it. They sort of appropriate some aspects of the process. They demand to have their own native judges involved in the divorce proceedings. They do all these very subtle little things that are easy to gloss over, but the end result is that only 100 families get divorced, which is like less than 1% of the population of the community, and they're almost all priestly families. So it sort of backfired. The Second Temple community is like, "You guys out there, you are an existential threat to our community. You're going to ruin the whole thing. God's going to destroy us all if you out there in these rural villages don't shape up." And at the end of it all, almost all the marriages of the rural villages are held intact and it's just really the priests who are most on board with this ideology who end up sort of breaking apart their own families. And I attribute that to sort of the cleverness of the assembly.

Dan McClellan Wow. I know that there's a long history of re-- well, I don't know how long the history is, but this resistance, I think, has been discussed in a lot of scholarship. I know I've worked in Bible translation for a while and there's an example from a while ago about, and now I'm going to forget the language that it was, but it's in Southern Africa, one of the Bantu languages. I think there's the translation of the New Testament. It was initially, for demons, the translators decided to use this word that referred to ancestral deities from the local community as a way to try to kind of influence the locals into thinking of these ancestral deities as wrong, as demonic, and so to try to kind of push them away from continuing to appeal to these ancestral deities for guidance and for blessings and things like that. And it kind of had the opposite effect, where they appropriated that translation choice and began to appeal even more to these ancestral deities and use the Bible as kind of an icon, as a piece of cultic media in the petitions, in the interactions with these deities. And so the folks from Europe who were colonizing this area had to come in and retranslate the Bible so that they kind of cut out that resistance from underneath the locals who had basically taken what they had done as an act of kind of oppression and subverted that. And I find it so fascinating when we see examples of that kind of thing, and I've never noticed that in Ezra, but they kind of shot themselves in the foot there and forced themselves to abandon some families just because they were- Yeah ... they were the ones pushing it, and I guess they had to go through with it if they- That's right ... were making a big deal about it.

Aaron Higashi Yeah, that's exactly right. And that's one of the reasons why I think contextual theology is so valuable. There's an entire energy for theology that can only be found amongst oppressed peoples. That is such an inspiration for the doing of theology. Mm. Privileged, relaxed, comfortable people can do theology, certainly, but there's less of an impetus to, there's less of a need to do it, I think. And so when you put people in these really desperate situations, they become very theologically creative very quickly, and you get to see the product of that creativity in these contextual theologies. So yeah, they will take translations, they will play with words, they will subvert expectations left and right, and they will do everything they can in order to ensure the survival of their community. And you get in touch with a little bit of that through this contextual theology.

Dan Beecher One of the things that I wonder about because I loved the examples that you gave of how to use contextual theology and how people use their context to sort of reimagine the stories of the Bible. I wonder, are there points at which it's not a useful exercise to look at it theologically, and there are certain stories or certain ideas from the Bible that you just jettison altogether as opposed to looking for ways to recontextualize to make it okay, or to find something good in it? At what point are you stretching beyond the bounds of where that book can actually take you?

Aaron Higashi That's an interesting question. I think there's at least two questions there. One is, at what point do you stop trying to make it okay? And the second question is, at what point do you stop working with it theologically? And I think the answer to that first part comes way before the second part. So I think when we stop making it okay is a point that we're going to reach first. But just because it's no longer okay doesn't mean that you still can't work with it theologically. It can be used for other things, as an indictment on the original author and audience. So yeah, I think there are plenty of stories in the Bible that have no moral value or that I just outright don't think personally God had anything to do with. I'm a religious person. I think there's no God here at all. So you think of the genocide of the Midianites in Numbers. This is presented as a direct command from God. I don't think you can fix that. I don't think you can fancy theology your way out of that. That doesn't mean that you don't say anything theologically about it, but it would instead be an example of religious extremism. Look how bad things can get. Look how twisted our imagination can get. Look at how malicious we can become when we are trying to demonize these other communities, when we are trying to polemicize against other people. Look at how God can be employed in that harmful work. So it's not that we stop thinking about it, but yeah, there are plenty of places where you just go, "That has nothing to do with any God that I'm worshiping or thinking about or that's involved in any way in my life."

Dan McClellan And the project of trying to accommodate those things theologically is going to continue among those groups of folks who can't accept that God is not in those passages. Yeah. And so I think we need to stay informed about them as well in order to be able to push back against attempts to rehabilitate things like the Midianite genocide. I did want-

Aaron Higashi Who was that guy that wrote that book-length review of Paul Copan's...

Dan McClellan Oh, Tom Stark.

Aaron Higashi Yeah, it was like a 250-page review of it.

Dan McClellan Yeah. That's exactly what that was. So Copan's book was "Is God a Moral Monster?" And Stark's response, which is freely available online, you can go find in a revised and updated edition. It's called "Is God a Moral Compromiser?" And I think it's a wonderful discussion of the problems with Copan's attempt to rehabilitate this perspective about God, where these are oppressed peoples who they're under the boot of this empire, and the only way they can make themselves feel better is fantasizing about being on the other side. Mm-hmm. And once you get out from under that boot, those fantasies should not be operationalized any further. Exactly. And this is something we talked about with Bart Ehrman is with Revelation, people need to find themselves in Revelation to make it relevant, which means finding oppressors around us. Mm-hmm. And for a lot of the folks who are most concerned about this, they are the ones in the position of the oppressor, and so they've got to look for others who can be vilified. But I did want to share, I looked up real quick the language. It was the Setswana Bible translation, the Wuki Bible, which is an old, very classic translation. But the word for daimoniós, they rendered as badimo, which is a word that refers to these ancestral spirits. And there's a paper by Musa W. Dube. It's called-

Aaron Higashi Oh, yeah. Musa Dube. Okay,

Dan McClellan Dube. Excuse me. I know a Dube, but it's Dube there. Okay. And the paper is entitled "Consuming a Colonial Cultural Bomb: Translating Badimo into Demons in the Setswana Bible" from Journal for the Study of the New Testament back in '99. But that was a great discussion of that. Yeah. Sorry, I just wanted to make sure I-

Aaron Higashi No, that's good context. Yeah

Dan McClellan ... resolved that.

Aaron Higashi Musa Dube is a great post-colonial theologian. She does a lot of great stuff, especially in that African context.

Dan McClellan And you bring up post-colonialism, which is another framework that can be another-

Aaron Higashi Yeah, post-colonial theology too ... theology.

Dan McClellan Yeah. I wanted to ask a bit about your experience on TikTok and engaging in public scholarship. I know you framed this as forced upon us by the pandemic and being trapped inside. Yes. Now that you have become an advocate for public scholarship, have you learned anything about engaging the public and trying to help them grapple with the Bible in a more productive, more informed way? Or have you just decided none of this is going to work out in the end?