Episode 50: Esau McCaulley - The Search for God and Self
How do experiences of pain, identity, and reconciliation shape one’s understanding of God and faith? In this episode of Faith for Normal People, Pete and Jared are joined by Esau McCaulley to talk about how his faith has been formed in the midst of family trauma, anti-Black racism, and the search for identity in America. Together they ponder forgiveness as a transformative process, the hard parts of cultivating a desire for others' flourishing, and the ways suffering can deepen faith. Join them as they explore the following questions:
How did Esau McCaulley’s relationship with his father shape his faith?
What role did forgiveness play in Esau’s spiritual journey?
How can one reconcile the presence of suffering with their faith in God?
What does it mean to interpret one’s own suffering?
How can someone experience God as a presence rather than an explanation in their life?
What did forgiveness mean in Esau’s story?
How can forgiveness lead to transformation rather than maintaining the status quo?
How do boundaries fit into the process of forgiveness?
What does it mean to become who God created you to be? What did it mean to Esau specifically as a Black man in America?
How can a person navigate cultural expectations to find their true self?
How does Esau’s racial identity inform his faith and perspective on God?
What does it mean to feel like rebellion is “scripted”? How can finding your true self be an act of rebellion?
What can we learn from the Black church about trusting God amid disappointment with other Christians?
How has racism shaped Esau’s faith journey and his perspective on God?
How do suffering and faith interact to shape one’s understanding of God?
How has Esau’s journey helped him understand the importance of vulnerability and authenticity in faith?
What does it mean to depend on God when cultural, political, and social power are absent?
How does the Black experience inform a unique perspective on faith and identity?
Quotables
Pithy, shareable, sometimes-less-than-280-character statements from the episode you can share.
“What does it mean to make sense of forgiving and wishing the best for people who harmed you? In some sense, my father's presence and absence has been a defining characteristic of my life with God.” — Esau McCaulley
“My great grandmother, who was a tenant farmer, never read Bertrand Russell, never read the philosophers, never read humanistic thinkers. She'd never read those things. But she actually suffered. And she might not have had the vocabulary that I had or that my fellow classmates had, but she had to make sense of God in the cotton fields. And that hard-won reflection on God's existence in suffering is not any less significant because she lacked the vocabulary that we have to talk about it.” — Esau McCaulley
“[I try to] push back on a certain kind of spiritual paternalism that treats those who suffer and remain in faith as less intellectually robust as those who don't, while taking seriously the fact that not everyone comes to the same conclusions that I do. But I would just say: give me the right to follow God as best as I can discern it.” — Esau McCaulley
“As I began to think about what it actually meant to forgive my father, what I learned was [that] there was a part of me that didn't want him to change, because as long as he stayed the way that he was, it justified my disdain for him. But the longer he stayed cruel, then I could be angry with him. And I realized that if he changed, then that would actually force me to change my relationship toward him as well. So forgiveness actually wasn't, for me, the process of forgiving him for the things that he did. Forgiveness was for me to say, ‘I want you to become a better person for your own flourishing. Even if that makes it hard for me.’” — Esau McCaulley
“Forgiveness is rarely, in the Bible, used as a weapon against the oppressed. In other words, forgiveness is usually offered rather than demanded. Oftentimes the people who are demanding forgiveness are also demanding an erasure of everything that came before. That idea—that forgiveness is a weapon, that God designed forgiveness to function in the church to allow people with power to abuse those without power without any recompense—is in significant tension with the biblical narrative.” — Esau McCaulley
“If grace is functioning as a means of normalizing ongoing mistreatment or failing to recompense for previous action, then that's not biblical grace or biblical forgiveness.” — Esau McCaulley
“The world is really messed up, and we really, really harm one another. It was sufficiently serious for Jesus to come amongst us. But also, that brokenness that we see in ourselves and in the world doesn't have to be the end of the story that God is telling.” — Esau McCaulley
“These two dual experiences—Black is normal, Black is ordinary, and Black is danger—are the things that kind of marked my experience. And it's not just mine. That's the same thing as my parents. The space that we can inhabit as Black people and not be dangerous may have expanded since segregation, but there's still that duality of existence of being black in America.” — Esau McCaulley
“When we think about the journey toward God in kind of traditional Christian narratives, if you think of white narratives, they don't actually deal with racial identity and being yourself.” — Esau McCaulley
“When you are a Black person in America, and who we are and who we're allowed to be is suppressed by society, the question of ‘Who am I?’ is a religious question. And so part of my finding God involves, does God have something to say about this Black existence?” — Esau McCaulley
“For me, when I wanted to write about finding God, I had to struggle through the things that were between me and God in my childhood: family, racism, poverty. And I wanted to say that story is equally important, and the universal stories aren't just the white stories.” — Esau McCaulley
“Sometimes we're in this culture where, especially as it relates to voting and elections, there's this fear that if we lose political or cultural or social power, what's going to happen to us? And what's going to happen to the world? And what I want to say is that African American Christians have rarely had any social, cultural or political power. And we've learned what it means to actually trust God.” — Esau McCaulley
“One of the things that I've taken encouragement from, looking back on the previous generation of African American Christians, is that they know how to be Christian while being deeply disappointed with other Christians.” — Esau McCaulley
“One of the things that I would say marks our current generation—and this is not a criticism, this is an observation—is there's almost this unfolding spiritual crisis rooted in the realization that the people who I thought were my heroes were actually often villains. They were often the people who presented to us as heroes actually were doing things that are really, really bad. African American Christians have the benefit of never believing in America's propaganda. If you come to faith in the context of slavery, you know that they're hypocritical Christians. If you read any abolitionist literature, it's filled to the brim speaking about the hypocrisy of Christianity. And so we know what it's like to search for Jesus in the midst of those distortions.” — Esau McCaulley
Mentioned in This Episode
Class: December Class “A Manger Misunderstanding” taught by Pete Enns
Books:
How Far to the Promised Land by Esau McCaulley
Andy Johnson and the March for Justice by Esau McCaulley
Reading While Black by Esau McCaulley
Join: The Society of Normal People community
Support: www.thebiblefornormalpeople.com/give
-
Jared: You're listening to Faith for Normal People, the only other God ordained podcast on the internet.
Pete: I'm Pete Enns.
Jared: And I'm Jared Byas.
[Intro music plays]
Jared: Hey folks, have you been looking for a fresh take on the nativity story without sacrificing scholarship? If so, we come bearing gifts.
Pete: Join me for our December class, “A Manger Misunderstanding: exploring Luke's narrative of Jesus's birth.” This live class dives into the first century Jewish context of Jesus's birth, challenging popular modern assumptions about the nativity story. We'll tackle questions like, what were first century Jews really expecting from a Messiah? And why does the rest of the New Testament stay so quiet about this pivotal moment?
Jared: The class takes place on December 18th, 2024 from 8-9:30pm Eastern Time, with a bonus Q& A from 9:30-10pm Eastern Time for members of our online community, the Society of Normal People. If you can't make it live, no worries, you'll still get access to the recording and slides afterward.
Pete: It's pay what you can until the class ends, and then it will cost $25. Learn more and grab your spot at thebiblefornormalpeople.com/manger. Don't miss out!
Jared: Well today on the last episode of season two of Faith for Normal People, we're talking about being who God created you to be with Esau McCauley. Esau is an author and associate professor of New Testament and Public Theology at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois.
Pete: And Esau has written numerous books and articles including Reading while Black: African American biblical interpretation as an exercise in hope, his memoir, How Far to the Promised Land, which comes up a lot today, and the upcoming kids book, Andy Johnson and the March for Justice.
Jared: Don't forget to stay tuned at the end of the episode for quiet time during which we'll reflect on this conversation. All right, folks, let's dive in.
[Music plays over teaser clip of Esau speaking[
Esau: “When we think about the journey towards God in kind of traditional white narratives, they don't actually deal with racial identity and being yourself. Part of my finding God involves, does God have something to say about this Black existence? I had to struggle through the things that were between me and God in my childhood: family, racism, poverty. That story is a story that is equally important. The universal stories aren't just the white stories.”
Pete: Esau, welcome to the podcast.
Esau: Thank you so much for having me.
Pete: Yeah, wonderful to have you. So let's just start right off here and ask you if you can share some of your story with your dad and how that impacted your young faith when you were a kid.
Esau: Yeah, so for people who haven't had a chance to read How Far to the Promised Land, the book centers around, kind of one of the originating events is, I'm tasked with giving the eulogy when my father passes away, about 10 years ago. And I didn't know him very well because he was in and out of our family's lives because he struggled with addiction.
And so to ask me how my father kind of shapes my faith is almost to ask me to tell the story of my spiritual journey. Because one of the questions that you struggle with as a kid, at least for me, it's like—why does God allow these things to happen? And so my father, because of his addiction, he was abusive kind of verbally and physically.
And so part of my early life as a Christian was making sense of having those experiences as a kid. And how could a good God allow these things to happen? As it went to the middle part of my life, I would say my father kind of became, rather than a source of angst, almost like a testimony. Like I overcame this thing so you can overcome difficult things in your life.
And I would say towards maybe the end of my life, not the end of my life. Hopefully I got a few more years, at least where I'm at now. [Pete and Jared chuckle] Post-eulogy is, what does it mean to make sense of forgiving and wishing the best for people who harmed you? And so in some sense, like my father's presence and absence has been a defining characteristic of my life with God.
Jared: Maybe we can talk a little bit more about that, because one thing that stuck out when I was reading your book, you say around these questions, and I think a lot of our listeners are familiar with these questions of where God is in suffering, you say, “we who have suffered must have some say in how that suffering is interpreted. We won the right through our scars to discern the significance of what we endured.” Then you say that God showed up not as an explanation, but as a presence. Can you say more about that idea?
Esau: Yeah. So the first thing is, uh, let's start the second half of that sentence and then we go back to the beginning of it. I was annoyed at God. I mean, like I've said, like, like me and God have beef. Kind of like in the Old Testament, like the people are arguing back and forth with God, but it's God who they're frustrated with. And so for me, it was never a sense in my life that God was absent. It was more of, I don't understand why you're doing these things.
And the reason, I guess, that I never fully abandoned God is because there was no one else who could help. And one of the things, because sometimes we can develop intellectually, we can grow, and these things are important. You begin to ask better questions. And you can begin to read books and examine things and find out ideas to show you that, you know, that God wasn't real, that he wasn't there. But those books were only helpful to me after I got to college, right, after I kind of had enough social distance to reflect on spiritual matters.
But when I was actually there in that community, in that place, the people who were actually helping me were religious people, people who were motivated by their faith in God. And not only those people, but it was the presence of God himself. In other words, I never felt alone. And so the intellectual analysis or the implications of my suffering, I got to interpret. So it wasn't sufficient for me to say, because I suffered these things. Or people wanted to tell me because you suffer these things, God couldn't be good like that. You don't own my story. I own my story.
And so the sense of my own story that I made is, yes, like life was difficult, but God was there. One of the things that had a real strong impact on me, college was really important. I learned so much in college and kind of the simplistic faith that I had as a child was deeply made complex and interwoven into my life.
But I remember reading these books about, particularly, one of the things people always ask about is theodicy, the problem of suffering, and how much that issue kind of leads to people's loss of faith. And I was reading about suffering, and I was in some sense troubled by it, too. And then I said, well, my great grandmother, who was a tenant farmer, never read Bertrand Russell, never read the philosophers, never read humanistic thinkers. She'd never read those things, but she actually suffered, and she might not have had the vocabulary that I had or that my fellow classmates had, but she had to make sense of God in the cotton fields.
And that hard won reflection on God's existence in suffering is not any less significant because she lacked the vocabulary that we have to talk about it. And so when I began to talk about what it means to allow the people who are suffering to interpret their experience, it means to not stand outside of their experiences and look at them and say, “they're only hanging on to God because they haven't read the books that we have. They're only hanging on to God because it's a religious crutch that's helping them get through the day.” Maybe those people who are suffering have a theological sophistication we have to take seriously.
And so what I want to say is that I didn't know everything when I was 9, 10, 11, 12 years old, who possibly could? But I want to say that those experiences that I had as an elementary school person, as a middle school person, as a teenager, that those were real. And so what I was trying to do or talk about in that paragraph is to kind of push back on a certain kind of spiritual paternalism that treats those who suffer and remain in faith as less intellectually robust as those who don't, while taking seriously the fact that not everyone comes to the same conclusions that I do. But I would just say, give me the right to follow God as best as I can discern it.
Pete: Right. What this is bringing up for me is conversations I've had with people over the years, who say something very similar to what you're saying, that you don't have the right to interpret my suffering from your vantage point. And that's part of, I would say, so basic to being human because who doesn't suffer in some sense, right? So. And to have other people stand over you, paternalistic like you say, and to claim the intellectual right to tell you how you should be approaching this. People don't listen to that, I think, for the most part, either. They're like, just go away. You have no idea what I'm doing here. Yeah.
Esau: One of the things that was really difficult in writing this book in particular is to actually avoid doing the very thing that I criticized. In other words, my father did some things that were like, really evil and wicked. And I went through the process, you know, over the course of my life, of finding a place of empathy and forgiveness. But I didn't want to say to people who have experienced family trauma that you must follow my journey. Because I'm not actually inside of your story. And I don't know what the people did to you because certain things are just too complicated to easily forgive. It's what I wanted to do, was rather than be prescriptive in the book, you must go on the same emotional journey with the people who harmed you as I did. I want to be descriptive to say, this is what God did with me or in me through my relationship with my father.
Pete: So that, and that holds to, you know, Jesus says, forgive, right? Whatever that means exactly, right?
Esau: Yeah.
Pete: But maybe sometimes people are not in the place to process that in their suffering. They have to get to that in their own way?
Esau: Yeah. So I'm supposed to be a Bible scholar, supposedly. And it's supposed to be the Bible for Normal People. But this definition of forgiveness is not from the Bible. [Laughs] I hope that’s okay!
Pete: Yeah.
Esau: I think it's, I think it's like, filled with things from the Bible, but if someone did a lexical search of forgiveness, this isn’t where it comes from. But as I began to think about what does it actually mean to forgive my father, what I learned was the following. There was a part of me that didn't want him to change because as long as he stayed the way that he was, It justified my disdain for him. But the longer he stayed cruel, then I could be angry with him.
And I realized that if he changed, then that would actually force me to change my relationship towards him as well. And so forgiveness actually wasn't for me, the process of forgiving him for the things that he did. That wasn't it, right? Forgiveness was for me to say, I want you to become a better person for your own flourishing. Even if that makes it hard for me.
In other words, forgiveness was for me to wish him well and say, I hope that you don't spend the entirety of your life alienated from the people that you love trapped in addiction, even though that might mean for me that I would then have to change our relationship. And so I guess before I could forgive him, I wanted him to become the kind of person who would benefit from that forgiveness.
And that was a long process because sometimes when people do you wrong, you want them to stay jerks because it's easy to dislike a jerk. The worst thing is when someone hurts you and then they change. Like, no, no, no, I want to be mad at the person who hurt me. I don't want to meet this new nice person.
Pete: [Chuckles] Well, can I, can I ask, is wanting your dad to become a better person to flourish, I mean, I'm, I'm, I want to make sure I'm tracking with what you're saying. Is that in and of itself an act of forgiveness?
Esau: That was the first step, right? In other words, the first step in forgiveness for me was wishing him well. In other words, you can say, I forgive you for what you've done, but I'm still harboring such resentment for you that I want you to kind of continue to suffer the negative consequences of your actions.
When I, I am a clergy person, but I used to pastor in a church. And I would meet people on the other side of my narrative. In other words, I didn't always meet the kid that was abandoned by their parents. I would sometimes meet the parent that abandoned the kid. And they would sit in my study and they would talk to me about all the ways they had failed in life and the people who they had harmed and all of these things. And part of my job as a clergy person was to say, “No matter what you've done in life, God is gracious. You can start, you can begin again. Your story is not over.”
And what I realized is that I couldn't say that to strangers and not actually believe it for my own family members. If I believe that someone who had made mistakes in the past could begin again and still have kind of a positive life, then I had to hold out that hope for my own father.
And so when I started having that hope for him, and I would pray for him and these kinds of things, we weren't talking, right? Our relationship was still broken, but there was a sense of, I began to see his narrative on its own and not in relationship to me. In other words, he wasn't simply my father who had abandoned me. He was the father who didn't know his kids. And if you ever meet someone just in life who has no contact with their family anymore, your heart breaks for them, even if you know they're partly responsible. And so when I talked about the first step in forgiveness, for me was to see his story separate from my own and to hope that it doesn't end in tragedy.
[Ad break]
Jared: In my experience, and I'm curious what you would say to this, the other way of looking at it is, when I can wish somebody well, when I do want them to flourish, it does mark a change of heart for me. It shows me that I am, if I can't get there, it shows me that I still have some things I need to work through.
Esau: Yeah, and the reason I say I'm careful when we talk about these things, this stuff was done from a distance. You know, one of the things that, like, at least one of us on this phone call is from the same age. I don't want to age all of you. I'm 44. And so I remember I used to watch the TV shows back when they would, like, be on TV with commercials and all those other things.
And, like, no matter what the problem was, there was always, like, the last 5 minutes in a 30 minute episode where they had the big conversation, whatever the issue was, it was kind of resolved. And you had this idea of a beginning and an end, kind of these neat bows. And so what I worried about is that I can tell this story in a way that feels like a neat bow and then someone might be inspired by listening to this and then they run back into some toxic relationship where they're harmed again.
And what I want to say is that isn't what happened in my case. I said, because I don't feel emotionally safe around you, I was long, it was long since I was in any physical danger. Because I wasn't emotionally safe around him for a long period of time, I wished him well from a distance. And I do think that some people can at least work on getting to that point.
Like, I can't have this person who's hurt me directly involved in my life because it's emotionally dangerous. And I'm not there yet. But I can say, I wish you to become the kind of person one day who can take real ownership with their actions, and then we could have, if not reconciliation in some kind of Pollyannish future where we're hanging out together, but at least some mutual recognition of the harms done and an acknowledgement of that, which provides its own healing for those who were negatively impacted.
Jared: How do we balance forgiveness with also justice and, and, you know, what, how does grace fit into those things where we still though have, have good boundaries and we still have, you know—because I think for a lot of people in the tradition I grew up in, there was a confusion that forgiveness meant everything gets set back to the way it was and we just need to get over it and let the scenario, the situation, the system be what it was. And that can lead to a lot of hurt. So, how do you navigate that?
Esau: I would say that forgiveness is rarely in the Bible used as a weapon against the oppressed. In other words, forgiveness is usually offered rather than demanded. And so what I mean by that is oftentimes the people who are demanding forgiveness are also demanding both forgiveness and an erasure of everything that came before.
And I would say that that idea that forgiveness is a weapon, that God designed forgiveness to function in the church to allow people with power to abuse those without power without any recompense is in significant tension with the biblical narrative.
What forgiveness actually does within the context of the Christian story is this recognition that not only have I been harmed, that in my life, I have harmed others. And that the grace that I need to function as a Christian coming from God himself, part of what reflects God's work in me is to extend that grace to other people. But that extension of grace for the other person is for their transformation, not the maintenance of status quo. So if grace is functioning as a means of normalizing ongoing mistreatment or, or, or failing to recompense for previous action, then that's not biblical grace or biblical forgiveness.
And so I do think that one of the things I think that people misunderstand about the Black church is this this exact idea. It’s the idea that because we can sometimes be very critical of kind of racism, anti-Black racism, [people] think that we don't want community. That we don't want to forgive. But what we're actually saying is we could only be in community as equals. And so I must tell you the things that you've done so that on the other side of forgiveness is true community. And so I don't think in that sense that community or reconciliation and forgiveness are in competition with one another, as long as we understand that forgiveness doesn't involve me lying.
One of the great things about the cross is that it shows that God takes it really, really seriously and puts things back to rights. But, right, the point is things are really, really bad, but there's also a possibility of things beginning anew. And keeping those two things in tension. The world is really messed up, and we really, really harm one another. It was sufficiently serious for Jesus to come amongst us. But also, that brokenness that we see in ourselves and in the world doesn't have to be the end of the story that God is telling. And so, as long as forgiveness happens in that context, it's not nearly as problematic as the forgiveness that is used to maintain the status quo.
Jared: Hmm. That's good. Maybe that's a good segue into talking about some of your experiencing racism as a kid. Because I think some of that is the idea that that happened a long time ago. I just know people in my family and around and it's sort of like no, this is it is that we have to come as equals and there are current experiences that lead me to believe we are not coming as equals. So can you talk about, you said an interesting phrase in your book. Talking about having an experience that divided your blackness in two. Can you talk about that experience and how that's impacted you?
Esau: I mean, I could talk about, so let me, let me give a little bit of a context of what I, what I was trying to get in the book. In telling a story, we can get into a bunch of arguments about this statistic and that statistic and this event, and that event. But what I wanted to show, at least in my narrative, is that people think that there's a debate about the existence of racism in America. It’s actually not a debate because Black Christians actually experience it on such a regular basis that it's not a contested topic.
The extent of racism in any given place in the situation may vary, but the idea that it is there is there. And what I wanted people to be able to see through telling the story of my family is the way the racism changes over time, over the course of generations. Like my grandmother, like I said, picked cotton. And both my grandparents worked in the cotton fields in Alabama during Jim Crow. And both of them were economically exploited. Neither of them could have recourse to the law because the law didn't respect the rights of Black people during that time.
My grandparents went to segregated schools and were denied access to education. My mother went to integrated schools, and then she started somewhere midway through in elementary school. And I am the first person, I think, in my family, I think my mom might have been in an integrated school starting in first grade. But even when she was in integrated schools in first grade, you have to imagine what is it like when the law forces integration, the schools shut down because they refused to integrate, and then they restart the school as a new school that is both Black and white?
And you ask yourself, what kind of education would a young Black girl, one of the few Black girls in her school, experience as the first generation of people to go through? That was my—that, that wasn't like some previous generation. That was my mother. I am the first member of our family, I think our generation is the first one, to kind of go through integrated schools all the way through. And my children are the first children of parents who had equal access to education. And my youngest child is eight years old.
So we think about the past—we don't think about it. We think about it because it wasn't black and white as a long time ago. We all know that every study that has ever been done has shown that the biggest predictor of the future educational attainment of children is the educational attainment of their parents. And so, if my mom was denied equal education, then that isn't something that was just a product of the past. That’s happening now.
Now, when I talk about the division of Blackness in two, and that's like, what it means to be Black in my neighborhood. To be Black in my neighborhood, it's normal. It's soul food. It's barbecue chicken. It's like, it's my mother's red velvet cake. Like, it is Black ass normal. But once you get to a certain age and my voice got deeper and I could grow a beard, I began to see how people responded to my Black body outside of my community.
And that is to see Black as danger. And so these two realities that some places that you go, Black, to be Black, is to draw attention and to be considered dangerous. And so this, these two dual experiences, Black is normal, Black is ordinary, and Black is danger, are the things that kind of marked my experience. And it's not just mine, that's the same thing as my parents, right? The space that we can inhabit, right, as Black people and not be dangerous may have expanded since segregation, but there's still that duality of existence of being black in America.
[Ad break]
Jared: The second story that stuck out to me in your book was a phrase that you used that your rebellion felt scripted when you were in college. Can you say more about that?
Pete: I love that. Yeah.
Esau: Yeah. So one of the things that it's really hard to do as an African American is to actually be yourself. That's probably like, it sounds hard. Maybe it's hard for everybody to kind of find exactly who it is God called you to be. And so what I mean by my rebellion felt scripted—I used to do youth ministry. And one of the things in a white church, and I would say, why don't all of y'all put the Mohawk down the middle? If you really want to be rebellious, like do a Mohawk on the side. And they didn't get the point.
I was like, well, because when you—this is back in the day in the eighties, like, you'd go to Spencer's and dress in all black. Well, they have a store that markets teen rebellion. It’s scripted. So when I went to college, the intellectual journey that I was supposed to go on was I was supposed to learn a lot about the world and understand that the Christian faith that I received as a child was simplistic, and I should set that aside for kind of the modern liberal democracy, political, cultural consensus.
And within that script, my job, right, my job was to complain about racism, right? But to say that the conservative racists were worse than the liberal racists, that's kind of the job, right? To say that like, you know, and listen, if it's between like Jim Crow and, you know, I'm going to go like, yes, like what the, what was happening in the South on the right was bad, right? But I felt like even my critique of anti-Black racism was itself a part of an intellectual, cultural world that shaped me. Like, why was it that all of us young Black people who are coming out of these, um, liberal arts colleges thought, talked and spoke the same?
And so the line that I use in the book is that I needed more Frederick Douglass and less Bertrand Russell. And what I meant by that was there was a distinctively Black Christian critique of white supremacy that kept something essential from the Black experience tied to it. And so I felt like I wanted to rebel against the rebellion.
In other words, everybody wants to co-opt your voice. If you're a Black person in America and you want to say racism is so bad, and you want to be kind of like the Black Republican who, who gets it, quote unquote, there's a lot of money, speaking opportunities, finances, book sales, tons of those, right? That was one script that was available.
Or if you want to be kind of like a simply secular Black progressive who kind of has these—and so like, I felt like I could see the options available to me. And none of them felt authentic. And I wanted to find a way to be myself.
One of the things, there's this line on Chance the Rapper is one of my favorite rappers, and he has this line in this, I think it's a song called Ultralight Beam. And he said, “This is my part. Nobody else speak.” And the point of that is when he is writing and he's performing, all of the voices are still and quiet. And what I was trying to do in how far to the promised land is to say, “This is my story. This is my experience. I know who all of you all want me to be, but this is my part. And during my part, I am going to be myself. And I'm going to try to rebel against the script.”
It feels like sometimes as a writer or as a person, there's these doors closing behind me, trying to stop me from being who I want to be. And I'm running ahead of those doors to try to stay in front of them. And so what I was trying to get at there is just this, this, this strong desire. I don't know how to describe other than to be myself. It is hard to not be apart in some kind of arrogant way, but to actually be your own person and not follow the cultural narratives that are given to you.
Pete: Sure. Especially those narratives that are, as you said, given to you. So what I'm hearing you saying is that there are various scripts that are, let's say, presented as acceptable by those who have some social clout and power and it seems like you became aware of that reality and then just decided, I'm not going to do that anymore. It’s, I mean, it's, it's a matter of just becoming aware and then just being determined, being determined to present yourself as authentically as you possibly can and not worrying about what script that you would be reciting.
Esau: Yeah, I think that's what it is. I think it was, everybody's influenced by the cultures that we inhabit and the people who we admire.
Pete: Yeah.
Esau: You know, so I did my PhD in New Testament under N.T. Wright, and I recognized that I'm, I'm not a very good white British evangelical. Like I'm really bad at being N.T. Wright, but I'm much better at being a Black Southern guy who struggles with issues of race and injustice. And so when all of the models that you see have one way of being in the world, me being myself was almost the most rebellious thing that I knew how to do. And to make that decision every single day is not easy.
Jared: So what's the—what's ringing in my head is what you said earlier about forgiveness and the definition you gave isn't particularly in the biblical text. But when we think about this idea of being ourselves as a rebellion—and I think that's probably true in a lot of ways just in the culture that we're in now—How does that intersect with your faith and your understanding of God and your understanding of your place in the world?
Esau: Yeah, so I guess I'll say two things. When I say being myself, I mean by that, being the person that God made me to be. There's this passage in Ephesians that says, Paul says he bows his knees to the father for whom every family on the earth derives his name. This idea that our identity comes from God, we find our truest self in relationship to him.
But the second thing I wanted to talk about is how these two stories work together. When we think about the journey towards God in kind of traditional Christian narratives, if you think of like white narratives, they don't actually deal with racial identity and being yourself. You don't deal with family trauma. It might be, you know, these intellectual questions. You think of something like C.S. Lewis, surprised by joy. I think that's just his conversion story.
But what I want to say is that when you are a Black person in America and who we are and who we're allowed to be is suppressed by society, the question of “who am I?” is a religious question. And so part of my finding God involves, does God have something to say about this Black existence? And so for me, it wasn't “here are 15 kind of intellectual objections that I had to Christianity.” It was family trauma, poverty, and anti-Black racism.
And the thing about family trauma, poverty and anti-Black racism, they don't like line up, right? They don't say, okay, on Tuesday, you're gonna deal with family. On Wednesday it's gonna be anti black racism on Thursday. It's gonna be poverty. No, these things are interwoven with one another. And one day, like, when I wake up in the morning, no one said at two o'clock today, it's going to be pulled over by the police, you're going to be in the midst of racial trauma. And so for me, when I wanted to write about finding God, I had to struggle through the things that were between me and God in my childhood, family, racism, poverty. And I wanted to say that story is a story that is equally important and that the universal stories aren't just the white stories.
Jared: Hmm. As we think about wrapping up our time here, I wonder, could you say more about that? Because I think if I've learned anything over the last eight years doing this podcast, it is how much people who have been oppressed by our culture, people who have all the reasons not to show up as themselves because they've—showing up as yourselves leads to trouble. That people in those situations actually have a lot to teach people who haven't ever experienced that.
It's not just a matter of the idea of the white savior. How can we help you in this oppression? But it's more like, well, you've grown up, you've matured in some ways past me by the experiences that you've gone through. So what are some of those things that you feel like the Black experience in America has to teach people broadly about what it means to be human?
I'm just thinking of—what I'm thinking in particular is like my, my gay friends taught me a lot about being authentic because it finally hit me. These are people who had to work through a lot to be themselves and they've learned how important and how precious and how fragile it is to be able to be yourself. And that was something I needed to learn because I have my own social pressures not to show up as myself and that kind of thing. So what are some of those, maybe one or two things?
Esau: Yeah, I don't know if I could speak for all Black people, but I'll say a couple of things that I have reflected upon. One of the things is that I think that sometimes we're in this culture where, especially as it relates to voting and elections. Where there's this fear that if we lose political or cultural or social power, what's going to happen to us and what's going to happen to the world. And what I want to say is that African American Christians have rarely had any social, cultural or political power. And we've learned what it meant to actually trust God. Not to trust God, but if things get bad, we can turn back to our social, cultural, political power. No, we have to trust God.
The second thing that I would say is that one of the things that then if all you can have is God himself, then God becomes the basis of your argument. So African American Christians looked in the biblical text and saw a God who cared about the people who were tossed aside. And so when we preached and we communicated, we spoke God's word to people because that was the only argument that we had. We didn't have any other argument. And so I would say something like understanding what does it actually mean to depend upon God and his word.
I would also say one of the things that I've taken encouragement from looking back on the previous generation of African American Christians is that they know how to be Christian while being deeply disappointed with other Christians. One of the things that I would say marks our current generation, and this is not a criticism, but this is an observation, is there's almost this unfolding spiritual crisis rooted in the realization that the people who I thought were my heroes were actually often villains. They were often the people who presented to us as heroes actually were doing things that are really, really bad.
What I want to say is that African American Christians have the benefit of never believing in America's propaganda. Like, if you come to faith in the context of slavery, you know that they're hypocritical Christians. If you read any abolitionist literature, it's filled to the brim speaking about the hypocrisy of Christianity.
And so, we know what it's like to search for Jesus in the midst of those distortions. And the last thing I'll say about that, is that when we went on that search, we weren't simply looking for a Jesus who told us the things that we already wanted to know. We're actually challenged by the God who we encountered in prayer and in the Bible. What I mean by that is the AME, one of the AME’s early models is God our father through Christ our brother, humanity is our family. And there is just simply no reason for the descendants of the enslaved to call the people who oppress them members of their family, except for the fact that they, when they read in the text, they saw the divine community. The people from every tribe, tongue, and nation gathered around Jesus.
And so they didn't get rid of the possibility of the divine family, right? So not the divine family, the human family gathered around as the people of God. They say in order to get there, we must have justice. And so that ability to function as a Christian in the midst of disappointment with other Christians while still holding out the vision that God has revealed to us in his text, those kinds of things are things that are challenging me.
In other words, it's hard for me to think about what it meant to be a Christian during slavery. And their faith challenges my own sometimes. Frustrated experience of saying, well, why didn't God liberate them earlier? I said, well, the people who were there at the time, they maintained their faith. And so what I want to say is that their faith in the context of very difficult circumstances challenges my own faith. And that's just something that I've never been able to set aside.
Jared: Thank you so much Esau for, for jumping on and sharing some of your story. It's, we, we interview a lot of academics and we talk about a lot of theoretical things at the Bible for normal people. So on Faith for Normal People, it's really refreshing to just hear a personal story and hear just the rootedness of your faith and all of that. So thank you so much for coming on and sharing with us.
Esau: Thank you. That's been one of the weirdest parts of having a memoir. You probably shouldn't do this, because it's much easier to hide behind ideas, but it's much harder to talk about like the person behind those ideas. So thank you for giving me a chance to do that. It means a lot.
Pete: Absolutely.
Jared: And now for quiet time…
Pete: …with Pete and Jared.
All right, Jared. So Esau said that it's very important to allow those who suffer to interpret their own experiences rather than having them defined by others. And, you know, I think about that for myself, but I want to ask you, how does your, whatever it is, whatever it looks like, how does your personal experience of suffering, how has it shaped your understanding just of faith, of God, or take that in any direction you want to take it.
Jared: Yeah, I found it interesting, and I thought about this a lot in the episode with Esau, of how different people interpret their suffering. And I find it fascinating and curious that people can interpret it in such different ways. I mean, it definitely had this element for me of questioning things, because the logic of my youth when it came to faith, was what we've, you know, we'll use the big word here, this Deuteronomistic karmic view of God. If you do good things, good things happen to you. If you do bad things, bad things happen to you.
So with that logic, suffering didn't make sense. So I had these, you know, I mean, here are my, uh, a straight, uh, guy in America. I didn't have a lot of suffering, but even in my own experience and context, you know, those little things that I would have had even in high school would have caused me to question like, wait, what is this faith about? If doing good doesn't bring good things and when I do bad things, I'm not going to get intellectual suffering. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. And it becomes a question of, I mean, whenever, whenever “bad things” happened to me, it did cause me to question that logic. And whenever that logic is equated with my faith, I start questioning my faith, right?
If, if my faith is rested on the idea that I just need to do good stuff so that good things happen to me, it is this vending machine idea of faith that it's like, I just gotta push the right buttons and I'm gonna get the things that I want. Then when that doesn't work, it sort of shakes the foundations.
And so, that's a, that, I think that's one of the problems with how faith can be presented to certain, in certain traditions. But this idea that, you know, for Esau, that sometimes suffering can actually bring about a deeper faith. Frankly, I just think for myself, and this may be a shame on me, it's not as relatable to me. I don't relate to that experience of suffering. What about you? How do you see it?
Pete: Well, unfortunately, you and I are in the same boat. I think, you know, we've all had our shares of, of difficulties and challenges, which I think are part of the world of suffering too. I think an intellectual, like when nothing makes sense anymore for whatever reason, that is suffering in a sense. But I think for me too, and I, you know, I wrote about this a bit in the sin of certainty, but having, you know, uh, one of my children at a young age going through a lot of anxiety and depression and not knowing what to do. I, as a parent, of course, I'm suffering as well in, in my own way, not the same way, but in my own way. And all sorts of upheavals happened as a result of that, you know? I mean, I don't think praying is helping here. And so that, it changes how you think, I don't think the answer is read another psalm, I think it might be medication, and if it's medication, are we just—bags of chemicals in our heads? Is that, is that what makes us human?
So you have these kinds of intellectual, uh, intellectually driven, I'm going to say moments of suffering that are real. And some people they're pushed out of their bubble by other kinds of suffering. Namely the family member in question, right? Who's going through all this stuff I'm watching helpless to do anything about it. So yeah, it's, it does shape. Yeah, I don't like the word. It doesn't shape my understanding of faith in God. It comes, like it's yeast. It just sort of goes into my whole being and my whole consciousness as I keep moving forward It becomes a part of I'd rather put it that way it doesn't shape it. But it influences, becomes a part of the whole journey of faith. Because these are my experiences and my experiences are, are big, you know, as, as for all of us are.
Jared: Yeah. Those experiences shape how you see faith. Right. In some form or fashion.
Pete: And they, they just, but they invade my whole consciousness too. I mean, that's why the word shape for me is fine, but I just, I want to find a deeper word. It's just, it, it, I am different. I am different as a result of these things.
And, of course, your views of, of faith and what it means to be a person of faith and what it means to believe in God or trust God, all those things, they are the result of those experiences. And with Esau, I want to say, yeah, I'd rather not have somebody else tell me how I should be experiencing those things, which happens all the time, right?
“You shouldn't have those thoughts because this Bible verse over here proves you wrong.” And that's just, that's, that's dehumanizing. You know, we all suffer in our own ways and, you know, I'd like to think God can handle it.
Jared: Well, speaking of suffering, maybe we can turn the table over to suffering maybe at the hands of others. And, you know, Esau talked quite a bit about forgiveness. So for you, like, what does forgiveness look like? Have you, how have you done it well? Have you maybe not done it well?
Pete: Mmhmm. Yeah. Boy. Okay. So I remember after I left Westminster Seminary, which is something we, I think our listeners probably sort of know what happened there. But after leaving Westminster, I remember sitting in church and not listening to the sermon because I never do. My mind's always wandering. And I was really getting, I was angry at what happened to me. Of being sort of forced out and here I am and you know, my life, I don't know where it's going to go, blah, blah, blah. And getting really, really angry.
And I remember just thinking and talking to God sitting there not listening to the sermon, and saying I just want justice. That's all I want. I just want justice. And the thought immediately popped into my head. “Okay, let's start with you.” I said, oh crap. That's not what I'm asking for, right?
So but, that, my point is that that pushed me into thinking about what does it mean for me to forgive people who are human beings, who have their own flaws as I do, who have their own stories to tell, their own reasons for being who they are. How can I forgive them? And for me, it meant not harboring hate or vengeance.
To me, it was that simple. I don't like what happened, but I don't want it to pervade. So for me, forgiving was letting go of the need to, um, control that particular outcome, to try not to hold it against them. Which is a hard thing to do sometimes. It has happened, Jared, as you know, that in the years since, um, I've gotten back into contact with colleagues of mine who are now, I'm going to say, are friends of mine who have also processed these things in the meantime.
Jared: They were people who were maybe not as friendly.
Pete: Right. Exactly. Right. They were “on the other side.” But we've had a lot of great discussions, um, over a few points at a pub. And, and we do this on a semi regular basis. Right? And I, I think to myself, had I been harboring anger and not forgiven them, I would not have been in the place to receive their invitation when they came to me and they said, Pete, can we talk?”
Right? And I was completely open to that. So for me, forgiveness, it's not just I did it one time and that's it. It's like I tried to make it a part of me, and then that led to like a very good thing, a really good thing. But Jared, how about you? I mean, I'm sure you're perfect too, in all your interpersonal…but try to make something up if you have to, right? Because you never do anything wrong.
Jared: No, uh, no, this is about forgiveness. So this is about other people doing wrong to me, which has happened a lot.
Pete: Has it?
Jared: [Sarcastically] Oh, a lot. I never do anything wrong to them, but they do lots of wrong to me. That's how I think that's a balanced approach, right? No, I mean, what I resonated with, with what you said was this word control. I think that's for me, what it is, is, is from a young age, I have this, this real sense of justice. That things need to be just even not just for me, but for people that I see. If wrong is done to someone, or someone's cheating at a game that I'm not even playing, I as a kid would have a rage fest about it. So I think it is about control or this belief that life needs to be fair.
And so a lot of forgiveness was actually me changing my mindset to accept the reality that life is not fair. And that still really sticks in my craw, you know, I don't, I don't like that. Yeah, but that is something that's a mantra for me. I have to accept life isn't fair. And so if I'm not responsible to set everything, right and control everything so that it's set right, then what am I really doing when I'm not forgiving someone?
What am I up to? I'm, I'm just suffering for no reason. I'm, I'm suffering on behalf of something that's not real. And so that's been for me is how can I get to that point where I'm not trying to control the outcome here? And it also gets very practical at an emotional level for me. Forgiveness is, you know, Can I sit with somebody and genuinely want them to succeed? Can I want you to win? That's always been my litmus test for have I forgiven them? If I rejoice in the fact that they have some setback, I'm like, I probably have not forgiven them. Cause I'm, I'm still keeping a tally in my head and they're, they're in the debit section. And so when something bad happens to them, it's like, gives me a little bit of the credit.
And so now I'm trying to get us back to zero because that's justice. But for me, forgiveness is saying, what if I don't keep score anymore? I actually just, I want you to win. And I understand, you know, that we're all just doing the best we can here.
Pete: Yeah. I mean, I can hear Richard Rohr and other contemplative types saying something like, yeah, forgiveness is all about just putting your ego to rest. The control and the tallying and self-protection. Forgiveness is vulnerable. It is vulnerable. And again, this is not cheap forgiveness. You know, I've been abused. Do I just forgive my abuser? Well, that's a whole different thing. We're not talking about that. And I don't think the Bible addresses those situations in the remotest way.
Jared: Well, and forgiveness is also not, uh, I mean, just to be very clear, forgiveness is also not inviting harm back into your life.
Pete: Exactly right. It's like, oh, it's okay. Just whatever you want to do. Um, but it's, it's, it's these different kinds of interpersonal situations that we encounter really on a regular basis, and all of us do, right? And to what extent are we going to try to maintain control over those things and try to come out on top? Forgiveness is a way of not coming out on top.
[Outro music plays]
Jared: Well, thanks to everyone who supports the show. If you want to support what we do, there are three ways you can do it. One, if you just want to give a little money, go to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/give.
Pete: And if you want to support us and want a community, classes, and other great resources, go to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/join.
Jared: And lastly, it always goes a long way if you just wanted to rate the podcast, leave a review, and tell others about our show. In addition, you can let us know what you thought about the episode by emailing us at info@thebiblefornormalpeople.com.
Outro: You've just made it through another episode of Faith for Normal People! Don't forget you can catch our other show, The Bible for Normal People, in the same feed wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was brought to you by the Bible for Normal People team: Brittany Hodge, Stephen Henning, Wesley Duckworth, Savannah Locke, Tessa Stultz, Danny Wong, Natalie Weyand, Lauren O'Connell, Jessica Shao, and Naiomi Gonzalez.
[Music ends]
[Beep signals blooper is about to play]
Pete: Have I left you speechless?
Jared: Sounds good. Thank you for that.
Pete: Okay.
Jared: I don’t know, I thought you were gonna, you just gotta volley. What did we go to say after that?
Pete: Okay, now, now this is the transition.
