ON THE PODCAST:

• NYT essays by Esau McCaulley
• The Esau McCaulley Podcast
• Reading While Black: book; podcast episode
• How Far to the Promised Land: book; podcast episode

CONNECT with Dr. McCaulley on his website (esaumccaulley.com) and on social media (@esaumccaulley)

Watch this conversation on YouTube by clicking here. 

ABOUT:

Esau McCaulley, PhD, is an author and The Jonathan Blanchard Associate Professor of New Testament and Public Theology at Wheaton College. His writing and speaking focus on New Testament Exegesis, African American Biblical Interpretation, and Public Theology. He has authored numerous books including, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope, which won numerous awards including Christianity Today’s Book of the Year. Esau also served as the editor of New Testament in Color: A Multi-Ethnic Commentary on the New Testament.

On the popular level, Esau’s recent memoir, How Far to the Promised Land, was named by Amazon as a top five non-fiction book of 2023. He has also penned works for children, including Josey Johnson’s Hair and the Holy Spirit and Andy Johnson and the March for Justice. Esau is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, and senior editor for Holy Post Media as well as the host of a new podcast with the Holy Post. His writings have appeared in places such as The Atlantic, Washington Post, and Christianity Today.

Note: This transcript is autogenerated using speech recognition software and does contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

Amy Julia (01:30)
Reverend Dr. Esau McCaulley, welcome back to the show.

Esau (01:35)
Thank you. How many times have I been on this show? This is my third time. I think this is one of the few podcasts that I keep coming back to. Maybe I just can’t, I can’t quit the Amy Julia, Julia? Julia, yeah, I was making sure. Amy Julia Becker podcast. I can’t quit it. Just like I come back every time.

Amy Julia (01:37)
And that’s what I think. Yep, number three.

Julia.

Well, I appreciate that because you are definitely one of our favorites as well. So this is a mutual, you exactly. Here we go.

Esau (01:55)
There we go, the love fest is already happening. And I’m a podcast announcer, I’m gonna learn from you how to do this properly.

Amy Julia (02:02)
I saw that. In fact, I wanted to start by asking you about that because I was thinking, okay, you are an academic, a professor, you put out scholarly works. We’re going to talk about one of those today, but you also write regularly for the New York Times and you just started a podcast and I’m noticing that some of the topics you’re covering are things like basketball and lecrae and pop culture. And you might think of those as just these kind of like two different, entirely different things. I’m guessing

Esau (02:08)
Yes, that’s, supposedly.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yes.

Yeah.

Amy Julia (02:31)
that you connect vocationally to both the scholarly and popular aspects of the work you do, but I wanted to get you talking about that.

Esau (02:39)
Yeah, so I can say that I came up as a normal human being who was trying to make sense of God in the midst of the world that we actually inhabited. so I just never felt like… So I used to this story that I would go to church on Sundays and I would listen to the sermon. I had this idea in my head that the sermon is really good, that I wasn’t going to sin that week. If the sermon was bad, then I could go and be a knucklehead for a week.

And so I always felt like I lived at the intersection of church and culture. And so I have never felt like pretending. I mean, when I was a kid, at one point I this sermon, I got rid of all of my like secular music. Then I went and bothered again back when we used to actually have CDs. And so I’ve always been back and forth. And I realized that the most important, the culture reveals something about what it means to be human. Sometimes it reveals our deepest longings.

Amy Julia (03:28)
Hmm.

Esau (03:31)
Sometimes it reveals our creativity, sometimes it reveals our brokenness. But culture’s always teaching us about humanity’s search for God. And I thought that taking those things seriously as a writer or as a podcaster would help other people who are in the midst of culture trying to figure out what it means to be a follower of Jesus. And so for me, having stuff in the New York Times or having a podcast,

Amy Julia (03:38)
Hmm.

Esau (03:57)
It’s just like being a Christian in the actual world that we inhabit. Now, the technical stuff is important because some questions defy easy kind of, know, click bait type of answers. And certain things need reasoned arguments. And so some people are called to only do one, only do the other. But I feel like in each area that I am working or writing,

Amy Julia (04:10)
Mm-hmm.

Esau (04:23)
are trying to make sense of life with God just in different mediums.

Amy Julia (04:26)
I love that and I also, I mean, I’m not an academic, but I tend to read a lot of academic stuff just because I’m nerdy. Yeah, I do write books.

Esau (04:34)
Really? I have question. You write books, right? How many books do you have?

Amy Julia (04:40)
you know, it depends on how you count them, but at least four. At least four.

Esau (04:42)
No, I count every single, but how many? What is the least? What do you mean the least four? You don’t have.

Amy Julia (04:47)
Well, I have some that are more in the self-published category.

Esau (04:51)
Wait, I have question. Did you write them? Okay, how many books have you written? See, I’m stealing the podcast. I’m taking over. How many books have you written, Amy Julia Becker? How many books that have your name, I pay for the book? If I can pay for it, you wrote it. Okay then, how many books?

Amy Julia (04:53)
I did write them.

Okay. Does it do devotion? Do devotionals count? That’s my question. You can pay. Okay, fine. No one has ever pushed me on this before. Seven. If you can pay for the book, there are seven.

Esau (05:12)
Okay, you’ve written seven books. So I don’t think that academic is simply someone who’s achieved a certain degree. It’s people who think seriously about God and culture and try to communicate it. So I’m consider your seven books and your thoughtful podcast. Maybe if you need an official institution to give you this status, I decree that Amy Julia Becker is an academic.

Amy Julia (05:26)
Hmm.

Wow, I’ve never had someone say that before.

Esau (05:41)
Or I’ll make it easier rather than say an academic, because then you can feel like I don’t teach you in school. She is academic. There we go. See how that works? There we go. Yeah, you’re academic. Done.

Amy Julia (05:50)
Hmm, I do, I do. And I appreciate it so much. Okay, but I share with you the desire and I always have. In fact, one of the reasons I did not try to get my PhD is because what I’m the most interested in is how does all this stuff that I read about that seems kind of abstract and like technical and esoteric actually relate to not just my life, but like the real lives of the people in my family, my friends, the…

people who may or may not have the same faith commitments that I do, like, why does it matter? And how can I communicate that? Not simply to people who already know what I know or already agree with me, but in a way that like builds conversation around these things.

Esau (06:33)
And I think that’s the tricky part. That’s actually a skill. know, some of us can write really technical stuff, but we can’t communicate it. And some people could communicate well, but they don’t always have a grasp of kind of the current conversation. So someone who can take all of the boring stuff that some of us academics write and then give it to the wider culture, that’s actually an important gift. But I’ll stop just praising Amy Julia Becker and let her have her podcast back.

Amy Julia (06:40)
Mm-hmm.

Alright, alright.

Esau (07:02)
So I’m so used to being in charge now, I gotta get used to being interviewed.

Amy Julia (07:05)
Well, here you are in the hot seat. well, this is one rule that I typically have for myself as a podcaster that I’ve broken today. typically, if I’m interviewing an author, I have a rule that I read the book cover to cover, which I did do with Reading While Black and with your memoir. How far? was like, stories of the promised land. I should remember this. How far to the promised land? Such a beautiful memoir.

Esau (07:23)
Have fun to the promised land.

Yeah.

Yes. Yes.

Amy Julia (07:30)
people who are on this podcast, go back and listen to that conversation, read the book, so good. But I’ve broken that rule today because I am having you here to talk about a different kind of book. It’s 800 pages. It is not, it’s not really a cover to cover read, right?

Esau (07:39)
Yes, that’s fair. Have I read all 800 pages? Yeah, I have. Mostly, yeah. I mean, like it’s fine, it’s fine.

Amy Julia (07:46)
You might be the only one. All right. So the name of this book is The New Testament in Color, a multi-ethnic commentary. And I guess we just tell us about it to begin with. Like, what is it?

Esau (07:56)
Yes.

Yeah, so the truth is, know, books are always complicated. So when I initially came up with the idea for New Testament in color, it was meant to come out the year after Reading While Black came out. And so Reading While Black was looking in particular about the contributions that African-American, the African-American church has made and can make to Christianity and Bible reading more broadly.

Amy Julia (08:12)
Hmm.

Esau (08:24)
But I never thought that the black church was omnicopotent, that we didn’t need each other. And so I had this idea that we could have this book called the New Testament in Color that would come out a year later. They were bringing together black, white, Asian, and Latino, and white scholars to create a commentary on the New Testament, such that the scholars in the commentary look like the church envisioned in the New Testament. And the idea was we bring in people from different cultural contexts.

to each one of them has a section of the Bible or a portion of the Bible. So it’s like, you might have an Asian person doing a gospel or a Latino person doing an epistle. And so we wanted to have a diverse group of commentators who would speak from their cultural location to the wider body of Christ. And so the whole point is if you read those two books together, or if you see those two projects as being companion projects, it’s the idea that,

Amy Julia (09:18)
Hmm.

Esau (09:20)
we need each other across different cultural contexts to discern the mind of Christ’s best, right? That every culture has its own blind spots and weaknesses. And that through reading the Bible, we can make up for our weaknesses and then discern what God would have us do. So the people in the commentary had basically, I think we asked them to do two or three things. We asked them, they didn’t have to speak for their culture, because who could do that? But they could be unapologetic about speaking from their culture.

Amy Julia (09:48)
Hmm.

Esau (09:48)
we asked them to keep in mind that historically, especially ethnic minority communities, it ran from a hermeneutics of trust rather than suspicion. They wanted to be respectful to the text, ask God’s word to us for our good. They wanted to be respectful of the church’s historic creeds. And even when we talk about something like respectful to the church’s historical creeds, people might say, is the Nicene Creed, is that privileging Western theology? I was like, no, it’s not.

It’s just saying that a good idea can come from anywhere and that the church has historically seen the Nicene Creed as a good summary of what it means to be a Christian. And so we said, you know, we are unapologetic in the affirmation of the Creeds. We’re unapologetic in our affirmation of the scripture as God’s Word. But we want people to be comfortable being themselves. And within that broad parameters, we gave the writers as much freedom as we could.

Amy Julia (10:44)
Well, so I did not read the whole book, but I did read the introduction and I did read multiple passages from it. And there was one thing you wrote in the introduction that I wanted to ask about. So you wrote, and this I think follows up on what you were just saying. I wanted people to attend to the contributions of my community without being similarly invested in others. I needed to spend less time complaining and more time listening. So you’re kind of critiquing yourself.

Esau (10:46)
It’s okay. Yes. Yes.

yeah. Yeah.

Amy Julia (11:06)
And I thought you might be able to speak to that. Like who did you need to listen to and what happened as you did that listening?

Esau (11:12)
Yeah, so I think that a lot of times, especially minorities who feel like they’re not heard in the academy and the culture, you can become really invested in contending for our group. So I remember having this idea, and this is where the genesis of the book comes from. I was sitting in this coffee shop. I remember the coffee shop I was sitting in. They had these red velvet cupcakes.

Amy Julia (11:18)
Hmm.

Esau (11:38)
I don’t know if I had one on that day, but they had red velvet cupcakes were delicious. And they had some really good coffee on Park Avenue in Rochester, New York. I’m working on some academic assignment. And I’m thinking to myself, I’m so mad that no one ever pays attention to what’s going on in the black church. And then hopefully, maybe it was the Holy Spirit, maybe it was the red velvet cupcake.

Amy Julia (11:59)
cupcake.

Esau (12:01)
But I had this idea, Esau, you’re a hypocrite because you know nothing about the Asian American experience in the United States. You’ve read nothing, you’ve studied nothing. You know a little bit of, you know almost nothing about what’s happening with Latino culture. In the South, in Alabama at the time when I was growing up, it was the black white binary. And then, and I hadn’t even thought when I had that idea, I hadn’t even yet considered the fact that I knew nothing about what’s going on with the First Nations or our indigenous peoples.

And so I realized that I spent so much time trying to get people to listen to me, I hadn’t begun to listen to other people. And insofar as I knew, I knew that a lot of ethnic minorities, when they say, to us, they often implicitly, and we often implicitly are saying to the majority culture church, the white church, listen to us. But I’m wondering like, what would happen if we had a conversation amongst each other? In other words, that like as an African American, I committed myself to learning a little bit more about

how the Asian experiences of Christianity in the States and their reflection that those communities have had on the faith tradition, on what it means to follow Jesus. And the same thing about my Latino and Latino brothers and sisters. And so that was the genesis of the project is to say, would happen if we listened to one another? The other thing I thought is that a lot of times when we say like multiculturalism, it’s actually a code for everybody except for white people. And I said, well, like,

People like to be truly multicultural in the United States actually means to include everybody. So what if we did something like super subversive, like have a multi-ethnic commentary that included black, white, Asian, Latino and First Nations people in the United States. The other thing that was working as an assumption, there are elements of this that I kind of got wrong, but as a working assumption, I had this idea that especially in evangelical spaces, there is

more comfort with majority world theology. So the idea that I can read about African theology or I can read about Asian theology out there, that was more comfortable. But the idea that ethnic minorities in the United States might have something unique to say was unique. And so I knew about like the African Bible commentary. I knew about like the Asian Bible commentary. But I said there wasn’t a commentary that I knew about that brought together ethnic minorities in the United States.

Amy Julia (13:56)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Esau (14:18)
And so the idea was that there’s this assumption that in America, there’s a mono American culture and that we know what that is. And that abroad they do their other stuff. And I said, well, no, there are the minorities here in the United States that have also done important work. Now in retrospect, there’s all kinds of reasons why there’s the limits in how I was thinking was also influenced by my own background that we can get into it later if you have some questions.

Amy Julia (14:23)
Hmm.

Well, yeah, am curious about, I mean, I’m curious about a lot of things like one, the process of just working together. And then two, maybe this is within that, whether what assumptions you might’ve had that were challenged or whether there were, yeah, like, yeah, how did you choose who worked on this? Are there voices that are still missing?

Esau (14:51)
Yeah.

yeah, I mean, no book can accomplish everything. So the answer to the question is there’s tons of people who are missing. it’s more of an invitation than the full conversation. And I will say one of the initial limitations of the project is I grew up obviously in the black church in the United States. And there’s a particular history of black Christianity in America because it’s largely cut off from its African roots.

Amy Julia (15:06)
Hmm.

Hmm.

Esau (15:24)
In other words, because of the transatlantic slave trade, the black narrative, as far as we know, kind of begins in slavery going into liberation, in the formation of black churches post-slavery and towards the end of the slave period. And so for us, our narrative is mostly connected to the United States. And as much as we reach back to Africa for some understanding of who we are, it can be a notional. In other words, I don’t know who my African cousin is.

Amy Julia (15:27)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Right.

Mm-hmm.

Esau (15:52)
I can do a genetic test and find out what part of Africa I’m from, but there’s kind of a strong disjunction in the narrative because of the slave trade. And so the black church kind of begins in the United States, even if there’s African roots about Christianity, that the Christians were before they were enslaved, that’s true. But the narrative is mostly focused on what happened post slavery. And so when I first began to think about this,

Amy Julia (16:00)
Yep. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Esau (16:18)
I thought, there’s seven historic black churches in America, denominations that then kind of grow. And when I first started studying, said, okay, what are the seven historic Asian American denominations? What are the seven historic Latino denominations? And then I realized, their story doesn’t actually work that way. In the sense that like, there are people who want both sides of these borders who could trace their family back much further. I’m from Mexico, my family’s from here. And so the narrative of

Amy Julia (16:28)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Esau (16:46)
this strong disjunction that marks the black church, black Christian experience isn’t actually true. And there’s ongoing connections and the same thing. friends from Korea or China or parts of India who have a much more robust connection to their countries of origin. And so that influences, like so in my brain, I had a mostly kind of an American focus, but some of my,

Amy Julia (17:04)
Great.

Esau (17:15)
brothers and sisters, even if their parents immigrated or their grandparents immigrated, there’s still some kind of more organic connection that they can make back to their families. And those records aren’t kind of gone like they are in our context. if you know anything about American politics, so what happened in the South is not the exact same thing that happened in the Southwest, which is not the exact same thing that happens on the West Coast.

Amy Julia (17:29)
Right.

Esau (17:41)
And so a lot of the anti-Asian racism that happens around immigration on the West Coast was kind of foreign to me in the South. so there, and even the idea that like, Texas just became a part of America. We kind of like took Texas and there were Latino people who were like Mexican and now they’re Texas and now they’re American. And that just didn’t like that kind of three-stage history and how that might affect.

Amy Julia (18:01)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Esau (18:08)
understandings of identity in America and all of those things, were just things that as a black man in Alabama, that was not something that I would have had to encounter. So there’s tons of stuff that I learned. I even learned about like, we collapsed Asian American, within itself, that group is very diverse. And so how,

Do we not just make Asian-American as relates to Christian theology, a code for Korean? Because the significant influence of Korean Christianity in the United States, but how do you actually begin to include other Asian minorities? And so there’s tons of stuff that I didn’t know about that I myself learned in the course of writing this.

Amy Julia (18:34)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

And what about the scripture itself? I’m curious if there are any examples of a particular passage of scripture that changed for you or just got expanded or enhanced for you as a result of working on this project.

Esau (19:01)
Yeah. So it’s funny because when you have like 20 contributors, every minute we are, they can become your kids. you know, like not in a non-paternalistic way, but you don’t want to highlight like one kid for the expense of the other kid. Because like, why did you talk about me? So I would say read all of them. They’re all really good. But I can talk about an experience that I had as I was working on my commentary, which is the features.

Amy Julia (19:17)
you

Esau (19:28)
There’s this verse, and I’ve read Ephesus a thousand times. And I think Paul says something like, I bow my knee to the father from whom every tribe on earth derives his name. And I’d never really thought about that, like passage, until I’m working on this commentary. I say, what does this actually mean? And so I do some digging. And know, name, obviously in the Bible, biblical terms, is when you name something, you give it an identity. It’s a part of.

of giving it, it’s not just a name so I can know what it did know, it’s what it connotes. And so the idea that Paul says that the tribes, the cultures, the different peoples, derived their name from God. His point isn’t that God called a Kenyan, a Kenyan. That’s not the point, right? It’s the point that that tribe’s identity comes from God.

Amy Julia (20:15)
Right.

Esau (20:20)
which means that our ethnic identities ultimately have their origins in God. And that they find the fullness of themselves when they reconnect with God, their creator. Such that both, and this kind of comes into the introduction, that every culture bears within it both the image of God, because the people who create the culture are image bearers, and marks of the fall. And that redemption is not the erasure of culture, but the transformation of culture to be that which God made it to be.

Amy Julia (20:23)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Esau (20:49)
And so as I’m reflecting on from which every tribe derives its name, I was like, wait a minute, God made these groups to reflect him in the world. Our identities, our cultures and our subcultures have elements of a divine stamp of approval upon them. And I had read that passage, but I never really reflected upon it theologically until the context of trying to ask what might Ephesians say?

to the people from diverse backgrounds. And obviously people know about the Ephesians too, the dividing of all of hostility. That’s kind of like the low hanging fruit. But I was really struck by how that passage really, really like moved me as a writer.

Amy Julia (21:31)
Yeah, I think for me, one of the biggest challenges in approaching the Bible, New Testament, the whole of it, but is the individualism that I have and seeing the places where, I mean, first of all, I really wish most Bibles translated you with y’all when appropriate. It would be really helpful to me to be constantly reminded that what we’re talking about is a community.

Esau (21:50)
Yo!

Amy Julia (21:56)
and not just about me in my little chair in the morning reading the Bible, right? So I think that there are these kind of subtle shifts that we can make and these passages that seem so familiar. I’ve read it all the time and yet when I have a little bit of a different lens, it might open up a whole new world of meaning.

Esau (22:01)
Yeah.

Yeah.

The other thing I probably, you asked me what else I learned from working on the project. It is like how to, in some sense, let go of control. you have your opinion, like I have my opinion, but everybody in the commentary wasn’t writing the version of Esau’s opinion. You know what I mean? Or Dr. Peeler’s or Dr. Oak or Dr. Padilla’s.

Amy Julia (22:23)
Hmm.

Hahaha

Yeah.

Esau (22:42)
it was their own work. And so you have to understand that even if you agree on a basic methodological approach, it doesn’t mean that you’re gonna agree with everyone’s conclusion. And to say, there something, like what do you learn about saying, and maybe this is probably good, I’ll put it this way. Sometimes you can say, listened, I listened with empathy, but I still disagree. And I think that’s kind of an important,

I guess corrective because sometimes we’re going to say, you know, we want to decolonize our bookshelves. We want to make sure we read diverse voices and want to learn from them. We want to listen to them. But you can also say I’ve listened with empathy. I’ve listened without kind of a paternalist and that’s afraid to be critical, but there’s still some places where I might understand things a little bit differently and how to engage the people I disagree with in charity and to give them the freedom to like make their own arguments.

Amy Julia (23:34)
Mm-hmm.

Esau (23:35)
And so that also is to say that like, everyone who agrees with the Bible as an authority doesn’t always come to the same conclusions. We wouldn’t have denominations, right? We wouldn’t have Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, know, Catholics, Lutherans who all agree the Bible is authoritative, but we didn’t disagree on particular passages. And so obviously this sounds weird, but if you’ve read the entire New Testament,

Amy Julia (23:45)
Right.

Esau (23:57)
you personally probably have an interpretation of like every section, at least a working interpretation, right? So then you have 22 people who are then gonna give you their interpretation. And the idea that like you could read through an entire book where you have 22 other or having me, I forget how many editors and writers we have, where every single person in every single place, they’re gonna say things like you would say it, that would be robots, right? And so that’s just not what occurred. And so…

Amy Julia (24:03)
Thank

Esau (24:22)
It’s really interesting to kind of go, yeah, like here it goes. I’m the editor. I’m not the boss. And so it was fun and I learned a lot. And I was like, I never would have thought about that. So it’s not just, I learned to disagree. I was like, man, I never really thought about that. They might actually be right. And so there were times where I was like, they convinced me of this. I never thought about that this way. And that’s true. And I’m gonna have to incorporate that into my use of

Amy Julia (24:28)
Right.

Esau (24:51)
like our interpretation of the Bible. this is interesting. It’s helped me nuance my view a little bit, but I still hold my traditional view or my view, not the traditional view, my view. And so I learned a lot from reading a bunch of different scholars who know a lot more than I do about their context. And because there’s like a lot of socially located stuff, there’s history that you need to be aware of in order to properly understand why they’re saying what they’re saying.

Amy Julia (25:03)
Yeah.

Esau (25:19)
And so there are moments where I’m like, wow, this is giving me a good window into different aspects of American history that I hadn’t known about. So I actually learned a lot of history, I would say, in the context of this commentary as well.

Amy Julia (25:29)
Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

Well, and so there’s a kind of a flip side or something to all of this. And you’ve mentioned decolonizing our bookshelves. And so there’s this one aspect of this project that is basically filling in gaps when it comes to our cultural understandings of scripture and it’s making it more beautiful and making a deep reading more accessible to more people. But then there’s also this like something you write about, which is the danger of attending only to a white and Western reading of the Bible. Right. And this is another quotation from the introduction.

Unfortunately, too often the sanctification of culture has been confused with the westernization of culture. That lie has done tremendous damage to the church. So I wanted to get you to just speak to this book is not only contributing something beautiful, but also I think trying to do some work of repair when it comes to some of the damage. So can you speak to the damage and also the work of repair?

Esau (26:13)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, so I think that when we ask ourselves, what is the standard of society?

we can sometimes have this idea that culturally approximating Europe is somehow achieving sanctity. One very simple non-exegetical understanding, this is like hair. And some of the rules around the policing of African-American women and men’s hair are often rooted in a standard of professionalism that is rooted in Western modes of dress and hair. And so,

And there’s this implicit idea that like what we do, I can’t grow hair, so it’s not an issue. Like this bald is all I got. But there’s this idea that that can be, that’s the norm. Or even, and I’ll put it this way. Maybe I’ll give you an exegetical one. And this might seem 20 % nerdy, but I think people can follow it. Oftentimes when people talk about diversity and they look at something like Ephesians 2.

Amy Julia (27:04)
What you got?

Esau (27:25)
And they say the dividing wall of hostility has been torn down, so we should be one. We should be a more inclusive or multicultural community. Well, implicitly in that narrative, if people don’t pay attention, they actually put the white Christian in the place of the Jew as the chosen people. They say we need to include other people, like let’s go get more diverse. So we the chosen people need to go get some black and brown people to join our community. Well, no, no, no, no. Actually, all of us,

Amy Julia (27:31)
Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Esau (27:52)
all of us Gentiles are actually in the same bucket and the Jewish people are the people who are including people. And so there’s a subtle shift, even when we talk about diversity, we say we need to bring more people into our thing. Well, it’s actually not your thing. It’s God’s and the people who are engrafted are all the Gentiles. And so we understand that like whether you’re from Europe, parts of Europe, unless you are a Jewish believer, you have been like engrafted in.

Amy Julia (28:02)
Yeah.

Esau (28:22)
And so there are ways in which, so when we think about, okay, we have this in a chapel, let’s include these other elements. Let’s include like a cultural Sunday or whatever. And the idea is it’s like, this is normative and then we’re adding people in. Well, what if like the norm is actually all of us together trying to discern the mind of Christ. Did you not actually including

ethnic minorities into a largely European faith. But from beginning, the church has been multi-vocal, like people from every tribe and and nation. That’s the vision, right? at the beginning, the church has gone out from Jerusalem into the world, and it has made root amongst every family that the gospel has reached. So even something as simple as the vocation of the church was always multicultural, was always multicultural. From the call of Abraham.

all the way through. And so understanding that and saying, how do we conceive of the church in that respect? And how does that reorient who we listen to and who doesn’t get a seat at the table?

Amy Julia (29:32)
And I think also just our kind of our position in terms of being the center, being, you know, not to say that, you know, from what you just said, I conclude that white people are on the margins. just think about like, again, as you said, not having the white church thinking of itself as the, yeah.

Esau (29:47)
There is a center of faith, not a center of culture. I think there’s a thing called Christianity. I don’t think we can make this up. I think there’s a thing called the faith once delivered to the saints that have been passed along, that is recorded in the scriptures and in the church’s creeds. I believe there’s a center of the faith. I don’t believe there’s a particular culture that epitomizes that faith.

Amy Julia (30:01)
Yeah.

Right,

Esau (30:10)
So I’ll give you one example. I’m working on a book on slavery right now, the Bible on Slavery. And across the board, you hear people saying, well, the church never like was convinced as to whether or not there should or shouldn’t be like slavery. Like there’s an indeterminacy to the argument during the abolitionist movement. And I said, yeah, if you sent to the white church, that’s the answer. But the black church wasn’t confused.

Amy Julia (30:35)
Mm-hmm. Right. Yeah.

Esau (30:37)
Like if you had polled black Christians in the United States at any point and say, what do y’all think? It’d be like a hundred percent one way. And so what we begin to talk about even like, what does it mean to convince the church? The idea that like, I, who the church is, is sometimes very myopic. Even when we talk about the corruption of the church. Now you might say there’s these corruptions in this, like even America, right? We’re not the only.

Amy Julia (30:46)
Right.

Mm-hmm.

Esau (31:04)
part of the body of Christ. The church is probably one of the most diverse institutions on the planet. And so we think of the church as a particular portion of the American Republic, then we’re just not being honest. And so what does it actually reorient your understanding of the church to say? For example, if you say something like, I’m disappointed with the church because it doesn’t stand for justice. And I ask, well, who’s the church?

Amy Julia (31:09)
Mm-hmm.

Esau (31:28)
And actually sometimes de-centering yourself can give you a broader appreciation of what God is up to in the world. But that also doesn’t mean that you have to be quiet. In other words, the New Testament in color includes black, white, Asians, and Latinos together. So we’re not saying everyone, if you’re not, if you are from the majority, you have nothing to offer, we’re saying let’s have this conversation together about what it means to follow Jesus.

Amy Julia (31:44)
Right, right.

for someone who you mentioned earlier might be critical of kind of the idea of like creedal Christianity because that’s a product of the West or who might even see the Bible as a Western cultural product in general.

Esau (32:01)
Yeah. Yeah.

Amy Julia (32:09)
I just wanted to think a little bit together about, and I think your work has helped me with this in terms of, you’ve already mentioned just the multicultural nature of Christianity from the get-go. that’s true not only in terms of who wrote the Bible, who received it, who discussed it, who preserved it, and then who, the creeds that came out of it, but just for someone who…

Esau (32:19)
Yeah.

Amy Julia (32:34)
has maybe not read it much before or has only read it through that white Western lens, what would you say?

Esau (32:40)
Well, I would say this thing about, there’s a reason why I like to the creeds. One, because I think the creeds are true. The second one is, think there’s a sentence there where I said there are no pristine histories. In other words, we can look back on what’s going on in Europe during the fourth and fifth centuries and say, this is colonial, this is this, that, the other. But also someone could take a look at what’s going on in the United States and say, or even within the subculture United States.

Amy Julia (32:51)
Hmm.

Esau (33:07)
There are ways in which our cultures, whatever context we come from, fail to fully embody God’s purposes and will for the world and for his kingdom. And the idea that a broken culture can say something true and good and beautiful is a necessity if we’re gonna have anything from the past. And so we can both be critical of the past, but also understand that even within the context of a complicated past, they’re able to tell us something true.

Amy Julia (33:24)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Esau (33:35)
In the same way, people are gonna look back on what was happening in America in our context and say, you know, there are all kinds of ways which the church in America was compromised, but hopefully, nonetheless, we say it’s something that was true and good and beautiful. And so the grace that I try to show towards the fourth century or the fifth century is I hope that even in my own context, that in the midst of our brokenness, we can also do the things that are true.

In other words, I think that there are no pristine histories. here’s the thing, God either won’t deal with humanity or he engages the broken humanity. And because I believe that God engages humanity, then I have to learn how to make sense of complicated characters in history. And so for me, affirming the creeds is saying I don’t have to throw away the entirety of Western history.

Amy Julia (34:05)
Yeah.

Totally.

Esau (34:29)
And in order to say that, that doesn’t mean that I’m like trying to colonize anything, you know, or just internalizing my own colonialization. It’s saying that complicated cultures can say things that are true and beautiful and good.

Amy Julia (34:33)
Mm-hmm.

I really love that because it does seem to be a deeply Christian notion, right? That as you said, either God says you’re untouchable because of how broken you are, or yeah, I can get right down in the midst of that and continue to work among you. it is actually, seems to me much harder for us to give that grace to each other than it is for God to give it to us.

Esau (34:50)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, one of the things, and maybe I’m gonna, you got me catching me too nerdy in this moment. One of the things that really frustrates me about some of these conversations is people say, the Bible was written by human beings over a long period of time, as if that’s a new piece of information. Like in other words, the only way for, God either comes through culture or in the midst of culture or completely avoids culture. And if God comes into culture, then he comes to culturally bound people.

Amy Julia (35:04)
Sorry.

Esau (35:28)
But the idea that God is bound by the cultures of the people into which he enters and engages is ultimately saying that God is limited by humanity. In other words, there’s the possibility that God can use limited people to say transcendent things. And if God can’t use limited people to say transcendent things, then we’re saying that God can’t speak. And so I believe that God can speak. I believe that God has spoken to flawed, broken human beings.

Amy Julia (35:44)
Right.

Esau (35:56)
who nonetheless use to give us scriptures that although culturally located, also speak a transcendent word. Now, obviously in our context, we’re not creating Bible. We’re not creating new scriptures. But the idea is the same, that God can come or God can use limited human people who have flaws to nonetheless do His purposes in the world. And so for me, it’s multicultural

Amy Julia (36:19)
Mm-hmm.

Esau (36:23)
interpretation where we say God is at work in different cultures to say things that are true or that help us understand God’s words better, is nothing less than saying the Spirit is active in the entire body of Christ at all times, in all places. And that sometimes those people, we listen to the Spirit well and we interpret well, instead of listening to the Spirit poorly. But that’s why we need each other.

Amy Julia (36:50)
Yeah, and I know this is, well, there two things I want to say. One is just actually thinking of, I know a professor of yours, NT Wright, who has spoken about various things that like 300 years from now, we’re going to know if we were right or not. Like just that sense of like it takes a long time to be able to sometimes sift through what God is doing in that transcendent way, which doesn’t mean that it’s like a hopeless task to try to understand what the Spirit is doing in this moment, but also that that sense of humility

Esau (37:02)
Yes. Yeah.

Amy Julia (37:17)
in our interpretive work, that sense of listening to one another because we may really have our position wrong. I think back to talking with Natasha Robinson at one point and she was talking about Exodus and said to me, know, if as a white person you’re reading the story and thinking that you are identifying with Moses and the people and not with Pharaoh, you need to consider

whether you are paying attention to the wrong character. Things like that, I think can just kind of flip us around in a positive way, like in a good, engaging, trying to understand, yeah, what the spirit is doing type of way.

Esau (37:42)
Yeah.

Yeah, I agree. And I think that the interesting thing is all of us can be, depending on the context, Pharaoh or Moses. We can be the people who are standing in the way of God’s will, or we can be the people advocating for God’s will. And so finding ourselves in that narrative is, and all of these narratives are important.

Amy Julia (38:02)
Yes.

Mmm.

Yeah, I love that.

Esau (38:18)
So I won’t say more about Exodus, because this is supposed to be a New Testament commentary. But yes, I agree. agree. No, I was about to go knee deep into the Exodus, but I said, you know, I’ll hold back.

Amy Julia (38:21)
Yes, yes, okay. I got us off track there. I have one.

All right, I have one more question for you, which is just in relation to the religious landscape of the United States right now has seen like a dramatic decline in church membership and affiliation, particularly when we look at the younger generation. And I’m curious whether you think, and I don’t mean are like all the 18 year olds gonna be picking up this 800 page commentary and like reading it cover to cover, but like, does this type of work? Do you think?

Esau (38:33)
Yeah.

Yeah.

I doubt that.

Amy Julia (38:55)
like speak directly or indirectly to whatever the needs are of a generation that is like walking away from the church.

Esau (39:03)
So I always feel like a lot of the narratives of decline are a little bit complicated. What I mean by that is we sometimes think of this high water mark of Christian, you can do it demographically, like people used to go to church more at a certain period of time in American history. But I always wonder like what kind of church were they going to and what kind of Christianity were they practicing? In other words, like,

I think the high point of church attendance was like the post-World War II boom. There was also Jim Crow. And so I don’t look at like, we should go back to those days. And so, and the question is, or even like one of the things sometimes like when Jesus, Jesus preaches the sermon on his body being like a true food and eating his flesh and drinking his blood in John, Gospel John, and people leave him.

Amy Julia (39:32)
Mm-hmm.

Right, we were so moral.

Esau (39:53)
because that’s a hard word. I wonder if some of the people who were attending church during that time period would have abandoned the church sooner had they been confronted with all of the gospel’s demands. And a gospel’s demands is the wrong word to put about. That’s the wrong word, because the gospel is a message of grace. That they fully embrace the implications of what the gospel’s taught about human persons. And so it looks like

Amy Julia (39:54)
Yep.

Yeah.

Esau (40:19)
now that people who are getting some kind of intuitive understanding of what the gospel actually implies about persons and the dignity that you treat everybody with, and they’re seeing that the church isn’t doing that. And that’s causing us, that’s one of the reasons for disillusionment. Well, that means that the people who were attending church during all of this time hadn’t fully bought into the gospel, hence created the contradiction, hence leading to the young disillusionment.

Amy Julia (40:34)
Yeah.

Esau (40:48)
And so I don’t think it’s as simple as how do we win back young people? It’s like, how do we live in such a way that people see the beauty of the gospel for what it is? And in so much as anything that I write could participate in that, then I think hopefully it does good in the world. In other words, think that we need to be, strategy is important, but integrity might be equally important.

Amy Julia (41:13)
Mm-hmm.

Esau (41:13)
and that we need to figure out how can I live a life that brings glory to God and draws people not to me, but to the beauty of the God that I serve. And if this book helps them read the text better, so as to live for God more faithfully, then I succeeded.

Amy Julia (41:26)
Hmm.

Amen to that. I really trust that it does and it will. And I’m really grateful for that contribution personally. I mean, this will be very much within arm’s reach for any time I’m trying to understand a New Testament passage better, because I know how culturally located my reading is going to be. And you’ve helped me certainly over the years, starting with Reading While Black, but including this for sure, helped me to understand that.

Esau (41:46)
Yeah.

thank you.

Yeah. Thank you. That’s very kind. Hopefully, it’s always good to, I just want to be useful to people. I want to help the church be that which God called it to be. And anything that I can write or say or do to make that possible, that’s the only blessing. You might imagine, like people don’t, you don’t get paid millions of dollars writing Bible commentaries, but I think it’s important work nonetheless.

Amy Julia (42:18)
It’s absolutely important work and I’m glad you’re doing it along with your podcast and your columns. So thank you for all of that.

Esau (42:24)
Yes. All right. Thank you so