Episode 321: H. Daniel Zacharias and T. Christopher Hoklotubbe - Native American Biblical Interpretation
In this week’s episode of The Bible for Normal People, Pete and Jared talk with Chris Hoklotubbe and Danny Zacharias about biblical interpretation through an Indigenous American perspective. They explore how cultural identity, history, and social location shape the way people read Scripture, and why Indigenous perspectives challenge assumptions many Christians take for granted. Together, they invite listeners to read the Bible more thoughtfully, remaining aware of their own context and open to voices that have too often been overlooked.
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Pete: You are listening to the Bible for Normal People, the only God-ordained podcast on the internet. I'm Pete Enns.
Jared: And I'm Jared Byas.
Pete: On today's episode, we're talking about Native American Biblical interpretation with Chris Hoklotubbe and Danny Zacharias.
Jared: Chris earned his ThD in New Testament in early Christianity from Harvard University Divinity School.
Pete: Daniel received his PhD in New Testament studies through Highland Theological College, which is part of the University of Aberdeen.
Jared: And together they've written a new book called Reading the Bible on Turtle Island, which is what we talk about today.
All right, let's get into the episode.
Chris: Everyone comes from real beautiful ancestral traditions. Nobody is just flat, uh, culturalist, right? We all come from a place, and in fact, we are all indigenous to a place.
Danny: We hope. We hope too that the non-indigenous readers, um, if they haven't realized it before, realize that they read from their own social location.
Pete: Chris and Danny, welcome to the podcast. It's so good to have you here and Chris to have you back.
Danny: Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thank you.
Jared: So we're gonna talk about some of these, these concepts around Native American interpretations of the Bible. But before we do that, because I think some of our audience will know, I’m Choctaw, I'm from the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, same as Chris here.
And you know, we were talking earlier, my, in my background, there wasn't a lot of incentive. We didn't talk a lot about how the Bible and reading the Bible and Bible scholarship fit culturally with being Choctaw. Those were seemingly very separate things that didn't often get commingled. So, before we jump into those principles, maybe for you guys, how did those worlds intersect?
Um, so a little bit of your story on that.
Danny: Yeah, so I mean, I would say that your experience would be typical for indigenous people because of so often the way that the gospel came to the people, you know, wedded with colonialism, often kind of the, you know, the, the frontline of colonialism and very much wedded with Euro-American culture and values.
And so that was the norm. And that's very much my story too, you know, with my, my indigenous, uh, maternal ancestry is also my Christian heritage. Uh, a very conservative tradition. And so we didn't have a lot of those conversations, uh, as I, uh, you know, in this last decade plus. I have undergone a process of cultural reclamation.
I recognize that there were things there. Um, in the way our family was and thought about things, but it wasn't named as part of our tradition. For, for us it was, you leave all that stuff behind when you become a Christian, right? You're, you're a citizen of the kingdom and that's it. Yeah, and so it's, it's been me and some others in my family that have asked those theological questions and, and for Chris and I, the, the questions of what does it mean for us as Bible scholars.
Chris: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Jared: Yeah. Chris, what about you?
Chris: Being in the Choctaw Nation, there is a way in which our Christian faith is compartmentalized into the Choctaw story.
If you look at our tagline, it's faith, family, and culture. And if you study indigenous spirituality, you know that you generally don't separate culture from spirituality or faith. They're intertwined. And so the faith generally is a Christian faith. If you go to the Choctaw Cultural Center in, uh, Durant, you'll see even one of the earliest churches preserved as part of our story that we tell about who we are.
And you know, I come from a line of Choctaw Presbyterians, the, there are many Presbyterians who walked alongside Choctaw people in along the Trail of Tears. And if you think about it, the church was one of the stabilizing institutes of, uh, of the Choctaw Nation when they had to reorganize themselves in Oklahoma after the, the Long Walk or the Trail of Tears.
Um. That's what I think about too, my friend Mitch Killian Pest who, um, you know, follower of Jesus scholar of religion. But um, also, you know, wrestling with the ways in which, uh, Christianity was complicit in the, the cultural silencing or genocide of many of our stories and rituals. Uh, and she went to write a whole dissertation kind of about that, that conflict.
And, and one thing that she discovered, which she wasn't expecting to discover, was the way in which actually the church, in a very complex way. Um, yes, let's count all those power dynamics, but also the institution of the church. All those grandmas and aunties in the church basements, were responsible for the preservation of so much of our culture and heritage and values and stories.
So it's really hard, um, or I don't think it does our story justice if we tell these flat stories of, um, of genocide versus, uh, you know, resistance or that it, it's all intertwined together in the survival of our nation. And so to this day, uh, the Choctaw nation, many of them are Christians and followers of Jesus.
Um, but that's not true for a lot of First Nations and Native Americans across North America. So I'll just add for myself, uh, like Danny, so much of my own cultural, uh, revitalization of my indigenous heritage came from walking alongside of, uh, the NAIITS community, which you'll read about in our book. But, uh, NAIITS stands for the North American Indigenous Institute of Theological Studies.
Um, and it's been around for about 25 years, but you have in this community, uh, people from Canada, United States, uh, and even a broader global community that's seeking to think about the question of what does it look like to be indigenous and Christian, uh, and fully indigenous, embracing all of our heritage stories.
And values and ceremonies while also thinking about, uh, the richness of the Christian faith that's not completely monopolized or, uh, really characterized by Western colonialism.
Pete: Well, you know, the, um, just hearing both of you, uh, introduce your own journeys this way, it just, the, and as hackneyed as it sounds, just the reminder that how Americanized Christianity has become.
And some may look at, well, native American reading of the Bible. Well that's like an extra thing out there someplace. And who would do something like that as if Americans haven't appropriated this tradition for themselves? And, um, not just in a sense of being complicit with, uh, what has happened to Native Americans, but actually architects of that happening all in the name of the Bible.
That, that is the tragedy I think, that we have to try to work through and try to understand better and, um, whatever we can do to make sure that doesn't happen again. Although that's unlikely, you know, we keep making the same mistake, mistakes historically.
Jared: Yeah. But I, I wanna, I mean, I, I think that's, I, I think that's all very true and I wouldn't spend our conversation, 'cause one of the things I think is very refreshing about how you, um, articulate.
This is, I think there's a lot of things that non-native people can learn from how you read the Bible, not apart from your culture, but integrated within that, that heritage and culture. And so, you know, one of the challenges of, of more evangelical Protestantism is that it, it relies solely on the Bible, which, you know, in my upbringing sounded really pious and, um, good.
It's not that stable. There's like not enough checks and balances in there. We put a lot of our eggs in that basket, and so a lot of our listeners will be familiar with the concepts we've talked about, like the Wesleyan Quadrilateral or Richard Rohr has this analogy of the tricycle that sort of starts to stabilize our faith and not have it be like solely based just on this as Bible.
And your framework starts with the idea of the medicine wheel as, as a framework for kind of this type of thinking. So can you talk about the medicine wheel? Explain what that represents and how it works for, uh, native American Christians when in, in the way you're thinking about it to put the Bible in this larger context.
Danny: Yeah. So the, the medicine wheel is a common, um, you know, it's a, it's a common thing that's being, that's used in many different places. It has, you know, four sections, four different colors, uh, represents a lot, you know, uh, it's often used a lot. And we thought it was, it was a good. It was a good illustration to use for us to think through this because as Chris and I, uh, researched the book, but also spent a lot of time with people in relationships, uh, we talked about it at the beginning of the book and the many people that we got to sit with, uh, do ceremony with, just ask questions.
Um, we started to see these patterns and, and so it helped us to kind of conceptualize it and say, as we come to scripture, uh, as indigenous people, we often bring it and, uh, converse with it in the context of something else and sometimes more than one. Um, and like you said, uh, quite often evangelicalism is kind of said it's scripture alone.
The reality is that that's not true. Right? So what, so why keep saying it if it's not actually true anyway? And so-
Chris: Stuff that we're evangel, evangelical, say I say this as a someone in the evangelical tradition, there are things that we say we do, but we actually don't do them. But it's so ingrained that we say it.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Danny: That's right.
Yeah. And so we would just wanted to say, well, this is actually, I think what's going on in our context and perhaps, uh, is helpful for others too, to see a way to approach a hermeneutic in which you're dialoguing with scripture and with other aspects of your life in which you, you seek wisdom, uh, and then you feel perhaps God is leading you or speaking to you.
And so that's, that's kind of the, the gist of that medicine wheel approach.
Pete: Which we're all doing in a sense, right? We're all, we're all bringing our own experience, our own cultures, into a conversation with the Bible. Just some of us don't know we're doing that. Right. Right. And that's, that's part of the problem of being a dominant culture.
Jared: So what did you, you mentioned the four. What are the four?
Chris: Yeah, the four would be, um, I mean it's basically building off the Wesleyan Quadrilateral. We just kind of condense, uh, experience, reason, um, into one category. But that makes room for, uh, third category with creation. But we share the idea that we care about scripture.
We care about our traditions like the Wesleyan Quadrilateral, but we would include special attention to our own indigenous, uh, traditions and stories and values, uh, and then our hearts and minds, which combines both reason and experience, but also actually opens up room for the things that we experience even beyond our reason, which would include dreams and visions, which we make a point to say, you know.
If you look at the witness of scripture, there's very few stories of people reading books and very few stories of people reading, interpreting texts to divine what God is saying. Usually, the vast majority of cases is God is speaking to his people through dreams and visions, and yet, because in the West we feel like dreams and visions are such a slippery slope to heresy or crazy ideas, we have to kind of wall that up and go back to the scriptural text.
But for many indigenous people, um, dreams of vision still remain an active part of how they experience the divine. Uh, so, so, uh, there, you know, Danny had this interview with someone who said, well, I don't, you know, as an indigenous person, I don't read the Bible from an indigenous perspective.
Then proceeds to tell Danny about a dream he had and how that informed his interpretation of scripture. And you know, that's not how we're taught in seminary, how to read and interpret the Bible faithfully.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Chris: Uh, now the one thing that probably surprised to most people is our emphasis upon creation.
That creation has a role in, uh, both being a source of, uh, wisdom, and that it, it, it, it teaches us things. But it's, Danny, I think put it nicely that creation is not just a place from which we think theologically, it is a relationship within which we think theologically.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Chris: And so our relationship to the lands that we're on forms the kinds of questions we bring to the text, but it also forms the patterns and behaviors that we look for in the text.
Nature in our appreciation, nature, uh, and, and thinking of animals as persons, uh, informs how we think about this world, then we may look into scripture and think about, well, where does creation have agency? Where are there stories where creator actually speaks with and appreciates creation apart from us?
That, that creation has its own relationship with scripture. If you don't have those questions. Based on your experience and your relationship with creation, you're not gonna see that in scripture. What we make out of scripture, we find meaning in scripture. What we, how we interpret scripture is all formed by the questions we bring to the table.
Pete: So, uh, I guess we're talking about, uh, creation, kinship at this point, right? Which is, uh, I think, uh, um, not a concept I ever would've thought of, you know, left to myself. So I wanna ask you something. Do you think the biblical tradition is as tied to creation in the way that the Native American tradition is, or is there something even lacking in scripture itself?
You know, I, I say this, my, my son who's now in his late thirties, when he was in his teens, he said, I think the reason why everybody's so angry in the Bible is because they just live in a desert. They're trying to survive. They just get a little bit touchy about things, and maybe that's why God kills people.
Everybody in chapter 6 of Genesis. Right. But, um, so, and, and there's a gentleness, a more of, I mean, that's a caricature more of a gentleness in other approaches to the Bible. So I just wonder if, if there's something about the biblical tradition itself that has to be struggled with in order to, uh, bring, uh, bring this aspect of creation into conversation with, with the tradition.
Danny: Hmm. I think one thing as you were talking that I, um, I frequently have to tell my students, uh, I teach New Testament frequently. Uh, well, frequently, that's the only thing I teach really. Um, but I have to tell them, like, you need to realize the Old Testament sits behind this text, this New Testament text.
Paul doesn't pause to reiterate everything he thinks, like every time he's just, he's assuming so often that, you know, some of this, that there's this Hebraic worldview that is, you know, there and so you don't have the type of language about this covenant in which you are placed in the land and have relationship with it and expectation towards it, and a reminder that God owns it, not you.
All of these things sit underneath the New Testament. The New Testament doesn't keep re-explicating it, and then of course, you, you add the problem that we're, we're not only practically biblically illiterate today, but the Old Testament is even one level above that. Like we don't in, in the, in the modern church are, are literacy in the Old Testament is so low.
And so what we know very often about the scriptures is New Testament in which that stuff isn't reiterated so much. But it's behind so much of it. That covenantal, uh, that covenantal kind of triangle between God, the people and the land. You know, that's what the Mosaic Covenant, uh, was like.
And, and it's explicated there. We just never read Leviticus and Deuteronomy.
Pete: Well, I mean, do you, do you think, and I'm, I'm genuinely asking the question. This isn't pushback. I want to understand. Um, one way of characterizing the relationship to the land in the Hebrew Bible is as a possession. And whatever care that you could say this, whatever care there is for the land is, um, uh, caring for it so that you can just survive there and not be thrown out.
You know, be, be obedient to the covenant, for example. And, um, so I'm, I'm still wondering if there's just, I mean, I'm critiquing the Bible here, right? I, I'm, I'm just trying to see, like, I, I'm not sure if I see some of that, um, land connectiveness in the Bible in the same way that the Native American tradition might see it.
And I, and I imagine that, um, reading the Bible from the point of view of connectiveness to the land. That can draw some things out that people won't see, but you might have to look a little bit beneath the surface, or, I'm not putting words in your mouth. I'm trying to understand 'cause this is, this is fascinating to me.
Danny: I mean, one thing I would say, and Chris probably has something else to add to it, but um, as I think about the relationship with land, I go back to the, like we do in Native American traditions, we go back to our creation stories and Genesis 1-2 are the creation stories and elsewhere in the Psalms, et cetera.
There those are creation stories of the Hebrew tribe and those creation stories show the relationship to land. And, uh, in one of our chapters in which we focus on, uh, the, the, you know, the creation lens that we're, we talk through, um, those creation stories, I think reveal a relational connectedness to the land and to creation.
Um, I'm struck by, uh, in that chapter we talk about kind of that, that point between the first creation story and the second creation story where, where it says, you know, this is the, uh, I would translate it. This is the family tree of the heavens and the earth. I mean, it's tolotos.
Yeah. This, this is a genealogy word, right. It's drawing a connection between all of us as being related. And then into that second creation story in which we're placed in the garden. And, and it's to serve and, and conserve, or as I've translated there, suggested serve and conform to, in other words, you, you have, there is this belonging to this place.
There's expectation of reciprocity, uh, because the land is the thing that feeds you. And so you, you, it, it deserves respect and reciprocity back. So I think there's. Again, like you said, we don't think this way. And, and, and that's what Chris and I are hoping to do, show people actually, this is here in the scriptural text.
Uh, just like it's in some of our traditions. And what does that mean for how we ought to think about how we live in the world today?
Chris: Yeah. Uh, one of the things we say is that the indigenous people in our cultures are much more similar to the ancient Hebrews and the ancient Galileans than we are as 21st century Canadians and members of the United States.
And so with our traditions, they come with certain kind of patterns and certain kinds of, uh, social and political expectations and things that we kind of connect together that, um, are different than Western expectations. And so when we put these patterns on, it's not just eisogesis. 'Cause we're always eisogesing in that sense 'cause we're so distant from these, uh, cultures, but, um, we make connections that maybe others wouldn't.
And this is all within the realm of plausibility, of how do we make sense of these teachings. The, you know what's funny too is as biblical scholars, we've always been doing indigenous interpretation of the Bible, except we just call it cultural or ethnographic interpretations, you know?
Or, you know, when the ethnographers and anthropologists are coming up with their cultural patterns. Agrarian societies, et cetera. They're oftentimes going to different indigenous tribal peoples and observing their patterns of life. And then in some sense, it gets a little bit whitewashed through the academy.
And now we have all these cultural patterns that look at us as good scholars. We're reading it within the Ancient Galilean Society and Ancient Hebrean Society according to these values, but they're in many ways just indigenous frameworks for thinking about patterns of relationships and what to look for.
But I will say it is, you know, so much of our interpretation actually, you know, as a New Testament scholar who wrote a whole first book on one word, in the smallest corpus of the New Testament, the pastoral epistles, right? You know, interpretation really sings underneath the text, right? We're constantly saying, well actually it's, that's the flat reading.
But if you know a little bit something about the Roman culture, this blew up blossoms in a really interesting way. And, and so what we wanna say is, if you know something about indigenous cultures, you might be able to see something that's happening underneath the text. We can't fully know this for sure, but nobody, nobody knows for sure what's underneath these texts.
But this gives us a plausible pattern that then makes this sing. So, uh, you know, I was just recently thinking of my friend, uh, Samoan, Hebrew Bible scholar, Brian Kalia, who with Emily Colgan has been thinking about, uh, uh, Leviathan and, you know, the stories of, you know, God taking up the, the leviathan and, and speaking about it in Job.
And what's really interesting is we mostly approach this text of like, God's just boasting about how awesome he is and like, look at this fish that he like describes and he's able to describe all the different body parts of this. But he, in this SBL presentation, Society of Biblical Literature presentation, Brian says you know, we never think about this within the genre of Song of Songs.
Where in the songs God is the Lover is constantly describing all the aspects of the body of the beloved. And this is kind of a love genre, is this God's kind of like love letter or sentimental description of this fantastic ferocious body of this being that that we see is a terrible monster in other stories, but now has become kin to God, has become part of creation family.
And not just this monster that's dangerous. And something that God just takes delight in for its own sake as a part rather than just some kind of machismo boast of power.
Jared: Yeah. I think, you know, and that's what, whenever you were asking that, you know, Pete, I was thinking too of one thing that stuck out, um, that was resonating with what I was thinking about was just thinking culturally.
It's almost an anachronism to think that they somehow were able to extract themselves from the land because in an agrarian society, and in that way, the land was just more significant. It just had to be. Right. Um, and so to, you know, maybe it's not on the surface. I think some of, of what you're thinking about more, I'll say for me is when we start talking about like creation care as lik a, as a modern way of thinking about creation.
And sort of saying, these concepts that we've created now in the 20th or 21st century about climate change are in the text. And I, for me, what I'm hearing you say, Chris, which resonates with me, is more, well no, just from an indigenous worldview, based on the location and, and technology and living, there's just gonna be more resonance.
With the biblical texts, just from a, a state of, of, of worldview and living, kind of embodied existence. Um, and we can find those resonances when we look through the lens of a culture that still has that as a value. Um, and that can be a real asset to how we come to the text.
Danny: Yeah. And I think we wanna, we, I mean, hope to encourage that push into what I see as the relationship to creation that's in the scripture, that's in our cultural traditions. So that, because you know, like everything you said, I just, I, I agree with and, and the creation care is excellent. What I wanna push and say, uh, to Christians today is that creation care is first based on the fact that creation care is for you.
There's, there is something you receive first, and God has created it that way.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Danny: Genesis 1 makes that very clear. And so your care is a reciprocity, uh, in which you can never really pay it back. I mean, we would all not exist if the land didn't feed us. And so how, how do we act in a world like that, as opposed to thinking of it as possession, as things that we can just ravage and then leave like we are bad kin to creation? And we need to change that as, as humanity continues to try to exist, we need to become good kin.
Pete: I think one reason, um, and I'd love to hear your perspective on this, uh, is, is I think a very bad understanding of being made in God's image. And now you have dominion over the creation. And, um, how, how do you guys read that?
How, how, how can you, um, maybe help people who might actually think, well, yeah, we can pretty much do what we want. It's, it's under our thumb, creation. That's what dominion means.
Danny: That's a great question, Pete. It's probably the most, one of the most frequent questions as I talk about this for people for which it's entirely new.
And, uh, I try to remind people that even when we think of dominion, that kind of almost like a regal term, uh, a sovereign term, we need to do it in the context of how God talks about sovereignty. Uh, how does God express himself as king of the universe? How does he expect the Israelite kings to treat his fellow people?
And then that gives us some framework for saying, is this a, an act of service and creativeness as, as we try to imitate the creator? Or is it an act of domination? Right. Well, we know it has historically worked out. As an active domination, and I would wanna push back and say, maybe we need to think, uh, with the text as to what it means to be, uh, with, um, in a, in a place with that type of power.
Because the reality is I think that, um, being the made in the image and likeness of God gives us the most creative potential and the most destructive potential.
Pete: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Danny: And, and we have unfortunately leaned into the destructive component instead of the creative component.
Pete: So, you know, the prophetic critique of kings, of being among other things, unjust, of not treating the people fairly, of taking bribes Exactly. And things like that.
Danny: Piling up the war horses.
Pete: Exactly. And to tie that to the concept of dominion, I think is a very helpful way of taking a step back and saying, how, how does this, this, Hebrew scriptures, how do they talk about what God expects humans to do?
And no, they're not gonna recycle. You know, we're not up to that yet. Right. But it's, it's, it's in, in a, in an, uh, age-appropriate way. Um, in a way that we, we would expect from ancient cultures. This is how they talked about what God was like, and, and, uh, even the, you know, the, the, um, the royal status of human beings in Genesis 1 that we don't really see, we don't, we don't see in other ancient cultures.
It's like this, these are little signals, you know, it's, it's not written on a banner. Nice. And like, here's exactly what you do, but do, do you see what's happening here? It's a little bit different in this story.
Danny: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And in that case too, again, you, we say, and what, how are we tied into relationships with the rest of creation there?
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Danny: So that, um, is it one of rulership or is it one of kind of continuing the work that the creator starts.
Pete: Yes.
Danny: What, what if that's what it means to be in the image of God, uh, because he's asked creation to do other things, and we can partner with that. We can truly be creator’s representative, or we could harm, you know, just take it all for ourselves.
Jared: Alright, so let's move from creation to salvation. And, you know, one of the refreshing takes, um, that you guys have is talking about salvation. And its relationship to maybe what we'd call like the bright path, right? That that's what the Choctaw call it. So can you talk about this way of viewing sin and salvation in, in contrast to maybe more conservative or traditional evangelical ways of thinking about salvation?
I mean, even in the, the terming of it as a path. It's giving us some indication that it's gonna be a little different, and I found it really refreshing. Can you, can you talk more about it?
Chris: Yeah. So if you think about it, cultures across the world have had different metaphors describe what it looks like to live in a right way.
And even the Hebrew Bible and New Testament talks about following Jesus and following God as a path, a road we walk on. Um, for the Choctaw and for many others, one of the operative metaphors for thinking about living well is, is walking the good road, is walking a good path.
In fact, actually the Choctaw, because we are not a noun-based language. We're largely verbs, a verbal-based language. You know, there's not a word for peace, and it's not because the Choctaw don’t know what peace is. It's that we say it a little bit longer. So it means to, to walk the good road or to walk the right path when you're translating it, uh, from English to Choctaw.
So that said, it, it provides a different kind of metaphor for how you think about your living your life. So much of the operative metaphors we use when thinking about the Christian life are actually based in this courtroom, right? We talk about righteousness. We talk about justice. These are all courtroom metaphors that have different kinds of stakes and that people have different kinds of emotional responses to.
And so part of this is to show, look, the Bible has many metaphors for how it talks about living well, how it talks about, uh hat, uh, a falling out with God looks like, that we we're so dedicated to this word sin all the time. But the Bible has other stories to tell. Right. And, and, and for many indigenous people, uh, sin, the rhetoric of sin was used so broadly and so poorly.
A lot of indigenous people have knee-jerk reaction to that language when everything about your culture is called sinful. When the drum is called sinful, when your songs are called sinful, you, you've broken the term sin to just basically mean barbaric or dirty or pagan. And so that's gonna have a lot of baggage to it.
So for, uh, in some indigenous churches and some indigenous people who are working among other indigenous people to talk about the gospel, they need a, a fresh set of metaphors in order to get at what we ultimately want to talk about is life adds best in harmony with creator in all our relations.
The bright path is one of many metaphors that we think is really compelling to, uh, take the wisdom of our culture and put in a conversation with scripture because you don't get a society lasting for hundreds, for thousands of years without doing some things right, without knowing how to organize communities, how to raise children, how to honor, uh, elders and how to make decisions in a consensus based way that lead to good outcomes.
These, we would all, we, we would argue, are part of salvation. Salvation is not just us getting to heaven. But from a real New Testament perspective, it's living well here. It's living, uh, in the way that God has called us to live into community.
Jesus is saving us from our past destructive lifestyles that are destructive of community and destructive of relationships, and inviting us to a new way of orienting our desires and our habits such that we live well with all our relations.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Pete: Yeah. And, um. You know, when, when salvation is transferred to the celestial sphere and, and not to what we do down here now is about as anti-biblical a concept as I can think of off the top of my head.
It makes no sense, but yet again, uh, people have done that and, and um, you know, the Western tradition has done that. And if, if you do that successfully, it doesn't really much matter how you treat other people. They just have to conform to something so they can escape fire one day when they die.
Danny: Yeah. And if salvation is, is purely thought of, of a, a decision made, you know, that, uh, brings you from darkness to light, what reduces it, you know, what it reduces your life and view to is if the person isn't in that state of light as opposed to darkness, it's like nothing else matters. So what about the good things that they do? What about the fact that they're trying to help communities flourish or whatever it might be?
Pete: Doesn’t matter. Doesn't matter.
Danny: Right? It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. That's right.
Pete: So yeah, have that intellectual concept and put it in the right language, and then you're done.
Danny: Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, things that we wanted to highlight within this is that it is a lot more holistic. It's not just that you've made a decision, said a prayer, uh, it's all about your soul.
Uh, but it's about the here and now. It's about relationships and that we see that in the scripture. Like, it, it, that's the shalom construct that you see living in harmony with God and others.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Danny: Uh, in the creation. And you see that in Jesus's ministry, you know. The, the language of salvation that, you know, the words, uh, from Greek, it's not, it's not When he comes and people pray the prayer like it is that, but it's not just that.
It's also about bringing healing and wholeness to people. Like salvation does all of those things. And so it's just, we, we've, we've narrowed it so much and just had such a limited imagination around what it means for God to enter into our lives and, and bring good things and, and actually seeking the flourishing of his creation.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Danny: As opposed to just snatching them out of the fire, like you said.
Jared: It's, it's wild to me that that's considered kind of, uh. I don't know, like liberal talk, when we have-
Pete: Yeah.
Jared: In, in the New Testament, it's like we're, people are called followers of the way that, that's like a, before you're a Christian. Yeah. There's not, before that term exists, the way it's the, the verb, it's that movement that you are following in the way. And so that's why I like that metaphor of the path because it is that verb-based. It's something that we are continually doing and, and working on and in the here and now, and not just a state of being, once you say a prayer for all time.
Pete: Yeah. What, what struck me as you were just talking, Danny, is um, and maybe if riff on it, please, the story of Zacchaeus
Danny: Mm.
Pete: And salvation connected to that story.
Danny: Yeah, exactly. I mean, that, that's such a prime example. Uh, we have a good friend that, uh, just wrote a book on that, and it is related to reparation, uh, in the context of, uh, indigenous people's, uh, land reparations.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Danny: Um, because yeah, in the story, he doesn't call Zaccheus to repent and pray the sinner's prayer. Um, it's actually the presence of Jesus, the love of Jesus, a relationship with Jesus causes him to recognize how he has had bad faith relationships with others.
Seeks to repair, uh, and Jesus says salvation has come to the household.
Jared: Right?
Danny: Right. So it was holistic. It involved, it involved that reparation and that work with many different individuals in his life. Not just the solely vertical relationship with God. It actually involved the network of relationships that he was involved in, um, and had, you know, done so much damage to.
Right. And, and so you see that and say, okay. Relationship was restored there, not just between Zacchaeus and God, but between Zacchaeus and his community.
Pete: So important.
Danny: And Jesus says salvation is here.
Pete: Yeah. It just, it just, I mean it, it, it is. That's a radical notion for how I think I was sort of in involved in church communities when I was young.
That never came up. It's always vertical. It's never, um, it's never horizontal.
Chris: Yeah. And, and speaking of someone who was raised and, uh, uh, really bled evangelical culture in life. I mean, I was involved with Campus Crusade for Christ. I did an outreach event, the very place that Bill Bright started his ministry at UCLA.
Uh, you know, I've got the, you know, I'm like Paul boasting Galatians. I'm a Hebrew of Hebrews when it comes to evangelical culture and many of it I, much of that I really appreciate.
Um, but what that trained me to do in this view of salvation made me view all relationships as transactional, of how is every sentence I'm saying, leading this person to Christ or leading me, leading to an opportunity for me to share the four spiritual laws where this perspective really makes relationships and in and of itself, that living well is really hard.
We spend so much time in evangelical culture talking about the sales pitch to get somebody in. But the rest of your life is this pathway, is this pilgrimage, is this path of walking the Jesus Way. Which is really hard and super complex because people are complex and situations are ambiguous about what the right decision is.
Pete: Yeah.
Chris: And so we are constantly in need of, um, practices of forgiveness, of grace. Of grace for others, grace for ourselves as we veer off the path. But I love about the path analogy is you can get back on and you keep plotting along. You know, people have often asked us like, so what difference did writing this book make for your own spiritual lives?
And I think for me it really has been centering relationships more in my life. Not just in an interpersonal way, but really in a deep spiritual way of how am I living the right relations with everything that's around me in an intentional way?
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Chris: Even slowing down to say grace and thank you for the food.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Chris: So much of indigenous spirituality is about this posture of appreciation, saying thank you. You know, we talk about tobacco being this gift from creator that we give when harvesting, uh, to say, thank you. This, this, it's a sacred medicine that God has given us for the very practice of saying thank you.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Chris: And that just, it's a powerful lesson in of itself.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Chris: Um, but I will add, if we're thinking about relationships, one of the things that this path leads us to think about is, uh, in what ways is Jesus invested in creating right relationships with plants and animals, or restoring our relationships with plants and animals?
Because if it all is about relationships, there are other persons out there beyond us and, and God, yeah. And I think one of the sweet points of this book was writing with Danny. Um, we make fun of each other a whole lot on this book. You might think we're not friends, we're really not that good friends, but we sure do care about each other.
But, but what I like to take us to these moments of, I call like theological jazz, where he says something and I say something. And we have this really beautiful moment, uh, at Danny's college, at Katy Divinity College, where we were thinking about the story of, um. Jesus at the Lake of Galilee, um, telling Peter to put off the water and to then throw the nets out to gather fish.
Now, pause there. In a lot of indigenous cultures, there are so many stories about humans breaking relationships with animals because they've over harvested or overfished, especially in the north coast among the sailors. There are all these first salmon stories where the people, uh, have broken covenant, broken treaty with the salmon and have not taken care of the waters and have not taken care of the fish.
And so the fish gets sick and they stop showing up. And so, you know, when a representative from the village goes to talk to the fish, that person is brought underwater and told what's up. Yeah. And a new covenant is made and new songs are given, new rituals are given to help evoke this. Uh, a relationship of appreciation and gratitude and mutual care.
And only after these things are done are the salmon returning and is health restored. And so if you hold these stories close, you then return to the story of Jesus out on the Lake of Galilee, and you have to ask why do the salmon come back? And, you know, even, uh, the, the Chosen series right, gets at this idea that it may be that the fish are not so present there because, under pressure from the Roman Empire.
You have a lot more fishing happening here. The fish are, you know, being over harvested. No one's saying thank you. And you know, indigenous tradition, we say that, you know, the fish would not be presenting themselves. They're there. They're just not giving themselves to the humans.
But when Jesus is out there on that lake, creator himself is there with the promise, the embodied promise of restoring relationships. Could it be that the fish, knowing the, the surety of the promise of this creator and the good relationships that is in our vision, give themselves abundantly to Jesus and to his disciples as this gracious act of, of good faith to say we trust you and we are hoping for better relationships between us and the Galileans because of your teachings and what you represent.
Pete: Hmm.
Chris: Now that's not, that's midrash, right? This is, uh, extending the story. But you have to imagine something. 'Cause otherwise what we usually imagine is something like from the X-Men, like just like, bam, these fish all of a sudden appear out of nowhere and like, just miraculously appear in these nets.
Right? Yeah. Or that Jesus is a super fisherman and just happen to know the right place. Right. But, um, I think we're permit, we're, we're invited for to these retellings, uh, that, that that can have a good impact.
Pete: Well, the little secret is that all interpretation is midrash. We just don't, we just don't, we we're not willing to admit it.
Chris: That's right.
Jared: Well, in, you know, speaking of that, I think one thing I was gonna share earlier when we were talking about Genesis and our place at, uh, as, um, domination or dominion versus service, and I think one of the truly transformative things for me connecting just with just Choctaw culture was a, a light bulb switched on, which I think you're talking about.
'Cause when you're talking about the fish, you're giving the fish agency and power. Yeah. And I think that's what I was not ever taught it was that creation doesn't have power agency. We are there to not just to dominate it, but to animate it. Like there is no life there really. And so to see the, the power and the agency of creation, which is a very vulnerable thing.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Jared: In my tradition to grow up to, to kind of have a recognition of how dependent we are. That, that spirit of, of gratitude and reciprocity, that, that spirit of dependence, Danny, that you're talking about, where it is creation came first and we are dependent on that. That was kind of the light bulb moment for me to see our place in that.
And it actually, it came through, um, during, uh, COVID, uh, where there was a lot of fear, uh, you know, a lot of there, right. There's a lot of fear about creation. And climate change and all of that. And then when COVID happened, it, there were these right or wrong, was sort of like, oh, creation's renewing itself and all of this.
And then reading through some just, uh, you know, Choctaw stories and connecting to that. I came to the realization, it's like, oh, this creation's gonna be fine. It's to me. It's us that are not gonna be fine.
Pete: We’re screwed.
Chris: Yeah.
Jared: We keep talking about taking care of creation because we're positioning ourselves as the caretakers, the dominator even.
So yeah, the idea that even if you know, not to push back, Danny, on what you're saying when we read Genesis 1, it's not even just, oh, we need to be servants, servant leadership. It's actually to take ourselves off the throne altogether and to find this kinship within creation in a vulnerable position.
And I think that's really hard for our culture to do.
Pete: It’s impossible, I think right now.
Jared: Yeah,
Danny: Yeah. There's an elder who, uh, we, uh, interact with, uh, Randy Woodley, and I can't remember if it was in a book or just in person where he kind of said, you know, if we all die from a nuclear war, like, every human being, which he said, you know, it's, it's might be increasingly likely.
He said the earth is gonna be fine. It’ll take, you know, a couple, couple thousand years to get it out of its system. But it's, it's already a couple million years old. You know, it will be gone, but Earth will heal itself. Mother Earth will take care of itself.
Jared: Right, right. Exactly. Well, you mentioned elder, and you've mentioned elder a couple of times.
Can you talk about that as a, as a value? And again, it feels like, as you guys have talked about biblical interpretation, that's another lens through which that maybe a lot of, uh, people in modern culture have kind of lost that. And sort of what do we miss from reading the Bible when we don't have that understanding of a deep respect for elders and for ancestors.
Um, I would include ancestors in that as well. Um, how does that culture understanding help us see the Bible in a new way?
Chris: The ancestors are present throughout the Bible except, when you read it with a certain lens that has been antithetical to incorporating ancestors into our traditions, um, it, it makes, it, it blinds us to what's kind of there in front of us.
When I speak to my Lakota friends about the story of the transfiguration, they, they say, whoa. Oh gosh. This is obviously just like one of our, uh, rituals where the ancestors come back and you talk to 'em, like we don't think about that transfiguration scene as Jesus talking with his elders and his ancestors to get inspiration and encouragement for the hard road ahead.
That's what it kind of is, isn't it? Yeah. Seems like, and every time that we say is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, it's this invocation of the ancestors. And even Hebrews, you get this idea of the cloud of witnesses. And are we only to think that it's the biblical patriarchs that are up there cheering us on, or should we think about our own grandparents and our family members who have passed on. As, as cheering us on.
There, there, there's a story of an indigenous family that, that is bringing their, uh, a meal to their family's grave. And a white woman comes up and says, why are you doing that? Like, is this ancestor worshiped? They can't eat that.
And so the indigenous person pauses and, and, and thinks, well, why do you have flowers? Your, your dead relative can't smell flowers and they can't, they're not gonna do anything with that.
Pete: Darn it.
Chris: Darn it. Right. But, but actually I would say just like dreams and visions, uh, respect for the ancestors and for those dear to us are actually things that non-indigenous cultures do, that white cultures do, but we haven't been given the the language to appreciate it that much or that we're told that these are what the pagans do, and especially within Protestant theology.
Right. The Catholics and the Orthodox. They have this rich tradition of the saints and the icons, right? And that, that we remember the ancestors.
And that by honoring the icons we're, you know, we're honoring the ancestors who are, uh, are still alive in, in heaven, that they're still active and they can, they can pray for us. It's, there's a difference between honoring them and honoring Jesus. Um, there, there's a much. I mean, that's more akin to some indigenous thoughts around the ancestors in those traditions.
But, uh, for, for many reasons, Protestant tradition has, uh, uh, stepped away from this very ancestral way of thinking about the fullness and the activity that is in heaven.
Danny: And I think one of the things too is like we've, over time in the church kind of large, we've slowly removed ourselves from remembering our ancestors.
You know, there's still some churches today where you walk through the graveyard to get to the church, but it's few and far between. Uh, it's certainly not in, it, almost no evangelical church, you know? So you, we used to have those reminders that the ancestors are close, that they've returned to the Earth.
It's a reminder that Ash Wednesday, you know, you'll return to dust too. So there was common, more common reminders of your connection with your ancestors, and it was interconnected with your connection with the land. Um, you know, our, our mother Earth and, and those things have been removed from our culture.
We don't, we don't like to think about that. And so we, yeah. So, and, and therefore it kind of goes away, but for indigenous peoples, it's, it's still present. And, and it's present because it's continued in our ceremonies in which we honor ancestors, we recognize that, that our ancestors have brought us to this place.
Um, and that it's, it's had an effect on you. You know, they're, they're downstream of where you are now, and so how do you honor that?
Jared: We're coming to the end of our time. And so I wanted to ask one more question as folks are, are listening to this, there's a lot of people listening that are not indigenous.
How do you feel and, and maybe just giving some guidance, um, you know, I know this, there's a sensitive topic of cultural appropriation. But these are, I think, good tools for people to sort of broaden their scope of, of how to see the Bible and how to read through different lenses. So what, what are some ways that, that folks can, um, can you give permission to folks here, um, for how to think about or utilize these tools in their own ways?
Danny: You can send $50 to Chris and he can make you a member of the Choctaw Nation immediately. That's good.
Jared: That's how it works.
Chris: That's how it works, is as long as you pay a native, it's not appropriation.
Pete: Good point.
Chris: So please donate to, uh, Bible for Normal People or the Indigenous Theological Circle.
And you're good to apply all these things to your life
Pete: And we'll send you a towel or something, too.
Chris: No, there are lessons that are shareable for certain. Um, and I think about how I have learned so much from, uh, my brothers and sisters in the African American traditions and Asian American interpretations of the Bible.
Um, and, and certainly indigenous people don't own the trademark of thinking about one's relationship to the land. And so there really is this open invitation that's really sincere in this book that come and listen to these stories. Um, because at the end of the day, we want to be in right relationship with you all.
And we, we think that in our stories, and as we have listened and know, certainly know your stories, that we can find common understanding to move forward in a better way than we have yet to. Uh, so, you know, it's one thing to, you know, read our book and think, well, I'm gonna start a sweat lodge, or I'm going to, you know, smudge all these things.
The thing is everyone comes from real beautiful ancestral traditions. Yeah. And the invitation of our book too is go and learn your own stories. Go and learn your own ancestral stories. Nobody is white, nobody is just flat, uh, culturalists, right? We all come from a place and in fact we were all indigenous to a place.
And if we are very far from those roots, we can naturalize our place self to a place. We can build new relationships to the land we're on. And if you're curious about that project, I really highly recommend the work of Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Chris: And toward the end, she has such beautiful stories of what it looks like as someone who's coming into a land, to live in a good way, to give more than one takes, and to always think about how do I honor the ancestral care keepers of land?
And how do I carry on that and, and take good care of my watershed and take good care of my neighbors? Um, not at the end of the day that you could look back and say, I think I've left this land and this place a little bit better than I came into it.
Danny: Yeah. And I, we hope, we hope too that the non-indigenous readers, um, if they haven't realized it before, realize that they read from their own social location.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Danny: And that social location may have very good things that help you read that way, and that's, that's okay. Uh, the problem is so many Christians don't realize that at all. They just, they just think “I read the right way.” Um, I, you know, “I'm asking the right questions,” but like Chris said, we have all these riches from different traditions and this is just another offering.
Uh, from a particular social location, uh, within Indigenous North American, uh, thought. And so we hope, we hope non, we hope indigenous readers find it encouraging. We, we kind of wrote it thinking about ourselves 10 years ago, but, uh, we expect lots of non-indigenous readers to also read it. And, and one of the things, like Chris said, not only, uh, seeking to reengage their own traditions that maybe they've forgotten about, but also even just stepping back and realizing, oh, I, I've been trained or shaped to read the Bible a certain way, and I shouldn't presume that it's the top dog way to do it.
Jared: Mm-hmm. Right. Well, in the same way that, uh, you mentioned earlier that, that Choctaws don't have a, a word for peace. We also don't have a word for, we don't say goodbye. And so, uh, you know, Koki.
Thank you.
Pete: Does that mean we just have to sit here all day?
Jared: Yeah, that's, that's it. That's what it means.
Pete: We can't leave.
Danny: We're gonna be here for a long time.
Jared: Yeah. Be long day. So thank you so much, um, for being here. Until we see you again.
Jared: Well, thanks to everyone who supports the show.
If you wanna support what we do, there are three ways you can do it. One, if you just wanna give a little money, go to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/give.
Pete: And if you wanna support us and want access to our library of over 50 classes, plus bonus episodes and ad-free podcast feed, and a thoughtful community of people asking tough questions about the Bible and faith, you can become a member of our online community, the Society of Normal People at thebiblefornormalpeople.com/join.
Jared: And lastly, it 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 The Bible for Normal People. Don't forget, you can catch our other show, Faith 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.
[Blooper Clip plays]
Jared: Oh, do you remember when we used, there were some, those buttons used to be programmed to certain, it was like, are they, are they.
Pete: We should do that in the middle when somebody makes a great point. We should just have this music blasting or something that, yeah, that's it. I want that.
Danny: You too, need a teleprompter even for a free ranging discussion.
Jared: Yeah, exactly. Yes.
Pete: Yeah.
Jared: That's how bad we are at this.
Pete: That's so bad. We are. Hello. How are
Danny: Hello? You.
Pete: You. It's good to have. You hear
Danny: Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jared: We're gonna hold up a second. There's some background noise and Joel is giving me a side eye about it.
Danny: Well, your children Chris, is that you?
Chris: Yes. But there should not be a-
Pete: They shouldn't be.
Chris: There should be. My house is haunted. One second. I don't, they don't hemp. No, they, they would, but I, that's funny. I have actually
Pete: pick that up.
Chris: Let me, uh, my daughter is singing in the room next door. One second.
Pete: Good for her. I think that's wonderful. Yeah, but not for this. That's fine.
Chris: Hold on.
That's not, hold on. Let me just tell her to calm down her joy. Um, because it's bothering Joel. Thank you. So lemme make a little girl cry downstairs real fast.
