Episode 73: Ciarra Jones - Who Gets to Decide What The Bible Means?
In this week’s episode of Faith for Normal People, Pete and Jared talk with theologian and ethicist Ciarra Jones about who gets to decide what the Bible means and how our identities, experiences, and social locations shape the ways we interpret Scripture. Drawing on her own journey from Pentecostal Christianity to Black, queer, womanist, and liberation theology, Ciarra explores how dominant interpretations of the Bible have been used to justify slavery, white supremacy, sexism, and the marginalization of LGBTQ+ people. She also introduces the practices of biblical refusal and biblical reversal, challenging the idea that some interpretations are objective while others are merely subjective, and invites listeners to see deconstruction not as abandoning faith but as a process of reorientation, reconstruction, and discovering a more expansive and intimate understanding of God.
Mentioned in This Episode
Books:
Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman
African American Readings of Paul by Lisa Bowens, et al.
Our Lives Matter: A Womanist Queer Theology by Pamela Lightsey
Voices from American Prisons by Kaia Stern
God and the Gay Christian by Matthew Vines
Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God by Kelly Brown Douglas
The Gospel According to Eve: A History of Women's Interpretation by Amanda Benckhuysen
Tattoos on the Heart by Greg Boyle
Join: The Society of Normal People community
Support: www.thebiblefornormalpeople.com/give
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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.
Pete: What if we got 2 Timothy 3:16 wrong?
Jared: For generations, Christians have built an entire view of the Bible on 2 Timothy 3:16. This verse was proof that scripture is God-breathed, and therefore inerrant. But what if that famous translation misses the point? Our July class will help answer that question. We've invited biblical scholar, John Poirier, to teach our July class to look at one word, the word behind God-breathed.
Sound boring? It's not, I promise. So mark your calendars for Tuesday, July 28th from 8:00 to 9:30 PM Eastern Time.
Pete: Yeah, John will look at the ancient Greek context for the word behind God-breathed and suggest that it has been mistranslated, and therefore misunderstood for centuries. Together, we'll trace how this interpretation was lost, why it matters, and how it could reshape one of Christianity's most important conversations about the Bible.
Jared: Again, the class is taking place on Tuesday, July 28th from 8:00 to 9:30 PM Eastern Time. Go to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/inspire to sign up today. As always, the class will be recorded so you can watch it back later if you can't make it to the live session, and the cost is pay what you can, 1, 5, 10, 15, or $25 until the class ends.
Or even better, join our online community, The Society of Normal People, for $12 a month to get all our classes at thebiblefornormalpeople.com/join.
Pete: On today's episode, we're talking about who gets to decide what the Bible means with Ciarra Jones.
Jared: Ciarra Jones, also known as CJ, which you'll hear in the episode, studied at UC Berkeley and Harvard University, and has dedicated her career to helping organizations deepen their commitment to equity and inclusion.
Let's dive in.
CJ: This idea that we just throw away biblical passages when we become liberatory theologists is a fallacy. It means we read it from a different orientation, right? It means I think about a different person being present in that text but I didn't leave the text. I have a new orientation towards the text.
Pete: CJ, welcome to our podcast. It's great to have you.
CJ: Oh, I'm so honored to be here. Thank you both for having me.
Pete: Well, we wanna talk about interpretation today, and Paul, and all that kind of stuff. 'Cause Paul's easy to understand, isn't he?
CJ: So simple.
Pete: So easy- ... politically and socially ... and not controversial. Not controversial at all.
CJ: Not one bit. We all agree.
Pete: So let's, can we just begin with the basic concept of, what does it mean to interpret a text? And, why does it matter how we interpret a text? 'Cause some people say, "I don't interpret, I just read it."
CJ: Absolutely. You know, so I'm sure a lot of your audience is like me. I grew up Assemblies of God, Pentecostal in the Pentecostal church, which folks who are not familiar with the Pentecostal denomination, Pentecostals are very much about, uh, the Pentecost, what it means to feel the Holy Spirit in your body. So I grew up in a church where, uh, even though Assemblies of God is a pretty white denomination, my church was, like, 30% Black, 30% Latine, and about 30% white.
Very diverse church even though maybe the theology leaned towards white communities, which we'll get into a little bit more. But I wanna say it's all about kind of feeling the Holy Spirit and God in your body, kind of an embodied experience of God. Mm-hmm. But I was also taught there was a right and wrong way to feel God and know God.
For example, my church believed that a feeling of homosexuality or queerness was wrong, it was sin. So already there was a way that they kind of framed that we could feel God the wrong way. For example, a queer person could think loving another queer person is God. My church taught me that is not God.
That is sin that you're feeling in your body. And so I name that to say Pentecostals have a right and wrong way to feel and know God. So I grew up in this church that was all about feeling God in your body, but feeling God in the right way. I was taught if I'm feeling joy, it's God. If I'm feeling this idea of being pious, it's God.
But if I'm feeling certain other emotions, it might not be God. For example, I took a class at my church called Battle Cry, which is all about how, like, pop music and hip hop are negative things, and there are some people who find God in concert spaces, who experience God around music and experience God with others.
My church saw that as demonic, as bad. And so I name that to say my church had a very right way to interpret God. They interpreted God on the side of heterosexuality. They interpreted God on the side of a certain type of patriotism and nationalism. My church was very xenophobic. They didn't believe in multicultural perspectives of God.
So when we think about interpretation as about who we say has the right to define God, it's about how we define God and how we feel God in our bodies, and it's even about how we believe God can or cannot transform. My church believed there was one right interpretation of God and that that interpretation was stagnant, and that if you offered another interpretation of God, it was something that they called cherry-picking God.
And so interpretation is this interesting thing that's connected to identity and our cultural values, and usually in our churches we say there are boundaries around who and what can interpret God, and who and what is a good interpretation versus what is a bad interpretation. So if folks who are Pentecostal or Assemblies of God like me, you probably also grew up in a rigid idea of how God is interpreted and what it means for God to be good or bad, or what a good or bad interpretation of God is.
Pete: No, it's interesting, CJ, because there are other people we'd ask that question, what's interpretation? And we'd probably get something like, well, here's a text and you read it in its original context and things like that, and now you sort “know what it means”. Um, you're going in a different direction.
You're going in terms of the impact, the results, the- you used the word embodiment, something beyond a, let's say, an intellectual exercise. Yes. It's beyond that, right? Okay. Yeah.
CJ: Yes, yes. It is beyond that. I think that, you know, right now we're experiencing in our country, this kind of takeover of white Christian nationalism, which is an ethno-religious identity that says God is on the side of white communities.
So when we think about interpretation, we can't divorce that from colonialism or slavery, and we also can't divorce it from the idea that certain people have the right to interpret God, and other people's interpretations become secondary or not important. When we think about interpretation in the academy, we usually use the term hermeneutics, which comes from Greek mythology, the god Hermes, which was an interpreter between the people and Greek mythological gods.
So, we have this idea, I think particularly in our mainline churches like our, as I mentioned, Assemblies of God or our Baptist churches, that there is one right interpretation of God, and only certain people get to be our Hermes. Only certain people get to be the voice of interpretation. Yeah. And other people are seen as secondary to that practice.
Jared: Yeah, can you say more about that? 'Cause I think it's fascinating that when we talk about interpretation, we talk about the Bible. So when we talk about God, that feels a little bit more like, oh, I can see that, because that's kind of abstract in some ways. But can you talk about who gets to define what it means as it, uh, relates to the Bible, the biblical text, this question of who gets to define? 'Cause I think people maybe haven't really thought about it that way.
CJ: Absolutely. I mean, as I mentioned, you know, growing up Pentecostal, I really wanted to adhere to my church's interpretation because like so many Christians, I want to be good. I want to be moral. I want to be in alignment with the values of my church.
And like I said, I was taught that that meant one interpretation of God. So when we think about who has a right to interpret God, I think it's important to go back all the way to slavery, and to look at slave master theology, which was a particular interpretation of God which said God is on the side of the dominant and against the oppressed, and that's a quote that comes from Howard Thurman's Jesus and the Disinherited, that we interpret God on the side of power, and that we don't interpret God through the lens of the marginalized.
And something I talked to Jared about a lot before this podcast was the Nat Turner Rebellion, which happened in 1831 in Virginia about 200 years after slavery came to the United States. And what's so interesting is before the Nat Turner Rebellion, there weren't so many laws against enslaved Black people reading the Bible because white slave masters felt like our interpretation that the Bible says Black people deserve enslavement is the interpretation that everyone will come away with.
And so slavery is based upon a biblical idea, the Hamitic myth. And the Hamitic myth comes from Genesis. Uh, there's a moment in Genesis where Noah becomes drunk, and he becomes naked. And so his son, Ham, comes to clothe him, put a towel over him, because his father is naked. But in Genesis, in the Old Testament, it was a sin to see your own parent naked.
So Noah curses his son for daring to look upon his naked body, and one of the curses he puts upon his son is a dark mark for his son, and a dark mark that will come upon his son's ancestry. Slave master theology interprets Black communities as descendants of this dark mark and this curse. And so slave master theology is predicated on the idea that by way of Biblical text, the best that Black people could hope for their lives is to be enslaved, that when you are already a cursed people, you are blessed to be enslaved because at least your body has purpose.
So we've had a society that has been built upon a certain interpretation of God, but that's also led to a certain interpretation of marginalized communities that can lead to suffering. And so I think the Hamitic myth is a great example of problematic Biblical interpretation that comes from dominant communities, and the harm that can happen when we interpret God on the side of the dominant against marginalized communities.
Jared: So within the Nat Turner Rebellion, how did that slave master theology play out?
CJ: Yes, absolutely. So we have, around 1616, 1619, we have the first folks that arrive to the United States as a result of the scramble for Africa and the Middle Passage, and bringing Black bodies as chattel, meaning Black bodies as property, to the United States.
And so 200 years later, around 1830 in Southampton, Virginia, we have Nat Turner, who is an enslaved Black man who has the ability to read and write. Very rare for enslaved person to have the ability to have access to literacy. And he begins to have visions from God, and he feels that he hears God telling him that God wants him to liberate Black folks.
And I wanna pause right there because we see that Nat Turner has an experience with God that is outside of Biblical text. He says, "It's not about the text. I feel God in my body." And that becomes a foundation of Black theology. Who is God inside of the Black body? So after Nat Turner has these visions, and as he's reading Biblical text, he believes in his vision that he hears God say, "I will give you a sign."
And a few days later, or weeks later, there was a solar eclipse in Virginia. He sees that as a sign to bring about this rebellion. Through this rebellion, Nat Turner does kill 60 white folks along with his Black comrades, and eventually does end in his capture and his death. But after 1831 and the Nat Turner Rebellion, the laws around literacy and enslaved Black people's right to read Biblical text change.
Because white slave masters have this, a moment where they say, "Oh, our interpretation of the text is not objective? If Black people have access to this text, they might read God on the side of their liberation." And I think that becomes a very pivotal moment in Black theology and Black politics, that Nat Turner reads the Bible differently from slave masters.
And this allows white slave masters to realize there are other interpretations of God. Our interpretation is not objective. And like I said, it leads to a lot of anti-literacy laws for Black enslaved people in this time.
Pete: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think this really slides into, maybe we can start talking about Paul a bit now too.
Yes. And how, um... Well, let me ask the question, how do the experiences of Black folk, especially Black women- affect how we might understand Paul?
CJ: Oh, that's such a good question.
Pete: From a non-dominant point of view, right? Yeah.
CJ: Oh, I love that. So I think, you know, when we think about Paul and Black communities, we have to think about two terms.
One is Biblical reversal, which is kind of what Nat Turner did, reading Biblical text through a marginalized perspective. So one example of Biblical reversal is, I often talk about this, and actually James Talarico has a whole sermon on this. Uh, in Matthew 16, when Jesus asked Peter, "Who do you say that I am?"
Um, and it leads to a conversation where Jesus and Peter are talking for some time about who is Jesus. And at the end of that conversation, he says to Peter, you know, "Whatever you do on heaven will be loosed on earth, and whatever you forbid on earth will be forbidden in heaven." And he talks, Jesus tells Peter about this interconnectedness between heaven and earth.
And James Talarico, and actually myself, both have sermons where we talk about how we think that heaven is about transcending our suffering. But what if we bring marginalization with us into heaven? What if what happens on earth matters in what happens in heaven? And what if how we treat marginalized people comes with us into heaven?
The Biblical reversal is about locating marginalized people in our perspectives in passages, and considering how we care for the poor, the marginalized, the pressed down, through Biblical text. So we have Biblical reversal, taking passages that might have been used to harm people. Uh, and we can see this with Paul.
Currently I'm reading African American Readings of Paul by Lisa Bowen. It's a phenomenal text. And something she says is, there are some Black people, which Howard Thurman talks about this, 'cause his grandma was one of these Black folks, who decided to forego reading Paul at all.
We call this biblical refusal. We are not going to read passages that harmed us. The reality is Galatians, Corinthians, all these letters and passages written by Paul were utilized to justify slavery. The idea that slaves obey their masters was a foundational text that justified enslavement. So there are some Black folks that will say, "We will not read Paul at all because Paul was used to justify our dehumanization."
That becomes biblical refusal. But there are folks who engage in biblical reversal, which is, you know, Paul talks about, uh, for example, in this book, African American Readings of Paul, Lisa Bowen has passages where Black folks would say, "You know, our slave masters say Paul says wives should submit to their husbands, but under enslavement, we all have to submit to white supremacy.”
Isn't that heretical? A Black wife can't even submit to her Black husband under enslavement because we all are submitted to white supremacy. So Black folks would take these passages and say, "Even if we wanna follow Paul and his ideas of submission and family, we can't because we all are submitting to white supremacy, and this is dehumanizing us in a way that means we cannot follow the passages of Paul."
So we see people who say, "We won't read Paul at all," but we saw also Black folks that would say, "You know what? We will read Paul, but we're gonna interpret him differently than our slave masters. If our slave masters say we must be enslaved through Paul, we will show how enslavement actually means we cannot follow the word of Paul because being enslaved to white supremacy means we cannot follow Paul's order of family, of love, of connection."
So we kinda see these two things, a refusal to read Paul and a reversal of what Paul is saying about life and family and happiness and joy.
Jared: When we do these reversals and when we read from the perspective of the marginalized, I've heard these arguments that say, "Well, you can't just do that because there are these objective rules. Texts just mean something, whatever the outcome of these rules, when we apply the rules, then you get the outcome.
So for that, how would you respond to that argument that says, like, "Well, you can do that, but it sort of seems like you're... We have just regular interpretation, and then you're kinda playing fast and loose and coming up with these other interpretations because you're not applying the same rules."
CJ: Oh, I love that question.
So, uh, there's a few universities and nonprofits who talk about the idea of white supremacy work culture. I name that because there are sist- there are 16 components of white supremacy, and one of that is considered worship of the written word, this idea that white folks have a claim to objectivity.
So when we think about who has a right to interpret Scripture and whether Scripture is subjective or true, something I think about all the time is Zora Neale Hurston has this quote where she says, "Gods always behave like the people who make them." And I love that quote because Zora Neale Hurston is an anthropologist, and religion necessarily connects to anthropology and culture, and this idea of meaning making, how we make meaning of Scripture, how we make meaning of our experiences, and that flows through our identity.
And what we see when we think about white supremacy culture and the idea of worship of the written word is, the only culture and race that has the right to claim objectivity are white folks. It is only Black and womanist and queer interpretations that become subjective. And we have to ask, why are only white male interpretations of Biblical scholarship objective?
Why are all other interpretations subjective? Hmm. And so that was what I would say when folks say there's one right interpretation. I would say, we have about 10 to 20,000 denominations just in the United States of Christianity. So that shows us how, within the Christian Church, we often don't agree about right and subjective and objective interpretation, and the idea of who gets claims to objectivity is also connected to power.
It is very rare that a woman's idea or a feminist idea of Scripture is seen as objective and right, but it is very often that we see dominant and white male interpretations as objective and right. And I think we have to interrogate that together.
Pete: Yeah, even interrogate whether there is such a thing as objective readings of text.
CJ: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Jared: That slippery slope. You're just going down that slippery slope, Pete.
Pete: I am.
Jared: Just right off the end.
Pete: Well, we do have this little saying here that Jared came up with many years ago, that all theology has an adjective. There's no, like, well, there's Black theology, there's womanist theology, there's queer theology.
Mm. Well, what do you do? I just do regular theology. I don't have anything added to that. But, you know, that's the post-modern turn, I think to become aware of our own... All of us have locations that affect interpretation, and we can't escape that, and to be open to other voices with humility, which is a, which is an act of humility, I think, to be open to other people and what they think about something that's the most important thing in the universe to you, and you're gonna hear people who think about it differently, right?
That's a big thing, and that's a big step for a lot of people to make. But I think the more they're a part of different voices and hear different voices, hopefully over time, the more that can happen. Hopefully, or they get more hardened, one or the other.
CJ: No, absolutely. I mean, like, I, something I mentioned is in my Pentecostal church, I was taught that any interpretation that didn't come from my pastors was, like I said, cherry-picking God or making up God.
And it was my time at, uh, being a student at UC Berkeley in my ethnic studies classes and African American studies classes that I learned about Mujerista theology, which is how Latina folks interpret God; Asian liberation theology, how Asian folks interpret God; Black liberation theology, how Black folks interpret God; and then womanist theology, which is a response to how Black theology didn't include women; and then queer womanist theology, which is a response to how womanist theology didn't include queer folks.
And so we always have this way that we are in conversation with each other. But something that I wanna highlight is even for myself, leaving the Pentecostal church and becoming open to theological interpretation felt scary because it felt like leaving certainty. There was a certainty that I had about God when I was following the Pentecostal Assemblies of God interpretation of who God is, and when you leave that, it feels like stepping into a wilderness.
That can feel scary, and I imagine that comes up for your audience. Who is God if it's not who my pastor says God is, you know?
Jared: Well, with that, too, how do you... 'Cause I think another y- something you said earlier falls into the same category, which is- Our experience of God and how God is in our bodies and how that also creates different interpretive frameworks.
Like, that feels subjective. Like, I was taught to reject that because objective is kind of what we would all understand. The assumption is that we would all understand the divine the same way using these logical and rational principles. So once I bring my subjective experience into it, I'm distorting the real thing.
So how- Yes ... 'cause I think this is something that womanist scholarship in particular emphasizes this embodiment in a way that challenges it, but sometimes I think it's such a stretch. Maybe can you provide the bridge from this older way of thinking to helping see the value of embodiment in our theology?
CJ: Oh, I love that. I mean, something I talked about a lot is I grew up Assemblies of God, which is overall a white Pentecostal denomination that is very focused on individual relationship with Jesus and feeling the Holy Spirit in our body. And I think there's this way that white theology believes it's disembodied when actually it puts forward so much embodiment.
Who is God in our bodies? How does God show up? I think the boundaries of white theology comes into the idea that there is a right way to feel God in our body, something that I've... I recently had a therapist on my podcast to talk about religious trauma and why she focuses on religious trauma in her work, and something we talked about is how if you grew up Pentecostal, you learn to feel God in your body. I should speak for myself.
I feel like in my church as a Black woman and a Black queer woman, I learned to feel God in my body as correction. So I located God in my anxiety. I located God in disapproval. I located God in shame. So in Pentecostalism, I was learning an embodied relationship with God, but it was a negative embodied relationship.
And in her amazing text, Our Lives Matter: A Queer Womanist Theology, which really is the seminal canonical text of womanist theology, Reverend Dr. Pamela Lightsey says, "Black queer folks should consider heretical any idea of God that rejects them." And I name that because for me, the start of my deconstruction was being 19 and queer at UC Berkeley and trying to pray the gay away, because that's what my church taught me.
That was my embodied experience of God, to pray away any sexuality that I was taught was deviant or bad. And the way I describe it in my work is, I started dip my toe in liberation theology because I felt like God rejected that prayer. I felt like every day for months I came to the altar of God and said, "Take my queerness, because I know it is bad, and I know it is wrong, and I know it is sin."
And what God did every day for me I felt like was show me love back into my spirit. This thing never left me, though I prayed it away for months and fasted it away for months. And something Pamela Lightsey also says in her work is, for a queer womanist, God is experiential, not just textual. And we see that as well with Nat Turner.
His vision went beyond the identification of who God was through slave master theology. He had a vision that went beyond white supremacist interpretation. So as I mentioned, I think for folks who grew up in mainline churches, I would say embodiment is not a foreign idea to you. You have just been taught to embody God in a certain way, maybe through shame or through self-rejection, and for me, through prayer.
And through an access to womanist theology, God has been something else. An improving spirit, a compassionate spirit, a loving spirit. How I locate God in my body has changed. That embodiment relationship has changed.
Pete: You know, you're talking about embodying God with a sense, an anxiety. Maybe a shame, a guilt, and that is so prevalent in churches everywhere in the West. I mean, fundamentalist churches, and it's white people who feel less than, you know, and shamed. And there's something maybe wrong with how we communicate God to people. And, you wonder, like what, where, why would anybody communicate a God like that?
CJ: Mmm.
Pete: What do you think? I mean, what's the benefit to some people about keeping people, you know, under their thumb?
CJ: Ooh. I love that question. I think, you know, especially as a Black queer theologian who doesn't believe in... I'm a proponent of restorative justice, meaning, I don't really believe in prisons or punishment as a way to reconcile folks, and as a way to make people change. I don't think violence, uh, upon those... Like, um, Kaia Stern has this amazing book, and she is an amazing, uh, professor at Harvard. She teaches both in Harvard Divinity School and the Harvard School of Education, I think. Or the Graduate School of Education.
This book of Voices From American Prisons, she talks all about how, um, prisons are based upon Protestant ideals of punishment. She says, you know, even in our churches, we do this deep punishment to people who we think are wrong. Women who are pregnant out of wedlock, people who are not celibate, people who have sinned.
We punish them, we exile them, we make them feel bad. And I name that to say I think, you know, so many white folks become bought into a certain theology because they think it will benefit them. But I think white folks as well are dehumanized by these frameworks of punishment. Uh, my Protestant Assemblies of God church didn't really believe white women could be pastors outside of children's ministry or women's ministry.
That's a dehumanization to white women as well. Um, my Assemblies of God church believe that women should submit to their husbands. That's a dehumanization to white women as well. And so I think white men and white women become bought into theological ideas that keep them caged as well. Only one white man can be the pastor of that church.
So I think a lot of white men become bought into theologies of hierarchy and power because they think one day they will be the man imbued with power. But actually, the crux of hierarchy is only a few of us are at the top of that hierarchy. And so I think the false promise of kind of white nationalist, white Christian nationalist theologies is all white folks will be at top, but only a few white folks come out the top of that theology, too.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
CJ: And so I think it's important for white folks to see there's so much for you to gain, actually, from Black theological interpretation and womanist and feminist interpretations because it might include your humanity in better ways, too. White supremacy dehumanizes all of us. We are all victims of it, even white communities, too.
Jared: Mm-hmm. I feel like I keep playing the devil's advocate, but I keep w- wanting to . . . I appreciate the way you're able to help different perspectives on this 'cause I can see people saying, well now you're talking about tearing down, like, the hierarchy, and I think for some people, the fear of the chaos or that we're gonna have all this disorder if everyone kinda defines it their own way, they're almost, like, willing to be subjected.
Sorta like, well, for the sake of order, there is a place for everything, and if I'm not at the top of that, that's okay, but we can't have just everybody running amuck here. So how do we think about... I mean, what's a theological way to think about the structures of what kinda keeps things in order?
Because we can't talk really about power or theology, I don't think, without talking about these structures of how we order things, even people.
CJ: Oh my gosh, I love this. And, you know, there has been a big conversation, some of your audience probably has heard about it, uh, currently with, and I wanna be very clear, I'm a big fan of this person.
Matthew Vines wrote God and the Gay Christian, and this has a very popular book that helps us think about interpreting LGBTQ identity as something sacred and important. And recently he came out saying, I love gay-affirming theology, but I don't know if I like queer-affirming theology because does this include polyamory? Does this include the idea that people don't have to be celibate?"
It opens out- "Are we going too far?" It opens up too much. "Are we going too far outside of the bounds of our theologies?" And one thing I will say is, you know, Black theology necessarily embraces the idea that God is change.
Octavia Butler says in her work, "God is change." And though she wasn't inherently a theologian, I think Parable of the Sower, Kindred, they have deep theological ties. And womanist theology and Black theology embrace the idea that God does change. Most white Christians would say, at least if they are on video would say, they don't think slavery is biblical, but many white Christians believed in the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s, 1900s, that slavery was biblical.
And something Dan McClellan says in his work is, our experience of Biblical text is much more around social consensus than truth. And something I say in my work is many folks have called white supremacy God. They see systems of inequality, and in her work, Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God, Reverend Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas says, "White folks often believe in na- natural law theo-ideology," I'll say that term again, natural law theo-ideology, which believes God ordered the world in a certain way. Particularly with white communities on top, with straight communities on top. And so I think we also, what I wanna say, I think we think certainty around God gives us so much.
We think natural law theo-ideology gives us so much, but it actually places rigid boundaries around who God can never be. Within natural law theo-ideology, God can never be queer. God can never be a woman. God can never be Black. God can never be non-white. That is a very narrow idea of who God is. So what I wanna say, when we think about the boundaries around God, it actually takes much more than it gives us to not think about God as having the ability to change.
And as I mentioned through slavery, we see that God changes through social consensus because, again, most white folks would say, at least on paper, that they don't believe slavery is ethical. Number two, I think a product of white dominant theology is this idea that any other theology becomes, uh, theologically lawless.
Black theology is very based in Biblical text. If we wanna use one of the most famous Black theologians in the world- Martin Luther King, if you read his writings, that man was steeped in Biblical text. That man has his PhD. So, his writings are steeped in Biblical text. It's just a different orientation towards that text.
As a Black queer theologian, I'm in the text all the time. I still read Sodom and Gomorrah, which is considered one of the clobber passages that dehumanizes LGBTQ people. But when I was 16 in the Assemblies of God Church, reading Sodom and Gomorrah meant that queer people were sinful. Now, at 32, with someone who has a master of theological studies, when I read Sodom and Gomorrah, I see an indictment on rape and sexual assault.
So this idea that we just throw away Biblical passages when we become liberatory theologists is a fallacy. It means we read it from a different orientation. It means when I think about Jesus flipping the tables, I think about anti-capitalist ideas. I think about ideas of pushing back dominant power structures.
It means when I see Jesus talking about how he's a prophet not accepted in his hometown, I think about how many queer and trans people are not accepted by their families, right? It means I think about a different person being present in that text. But I didn't leave the text. I have a new orientation towards the text.
So I just wanna push back against maybe this idea that progressive interpretation leaves the text out. No. Most progressive scholars are deep in the text because we need to prove our interpretations again and again and again.
Jared: Well, and that idea is just an indictment on how closely aligned people make their particular reading with the text itself.
So in a sense, if you change that orientation, you're actually not reading the text anymore. That's how closely they've identified those together.
Pete: CJ, I think I know how you would answer this question based on what you've said, but . . .
CJ: I might surprise you.
Pete: You might. I hope you do. We can either stay with Paul or we can go beyond that anywhere in the Bible that you'd like.
CJ: Take me anywhere.
Pete: Are there parts of the Bible that just are dehumanizing?
CJ: Mm.
Pete: Or, that have to be redeemed through some alternate hermeneutical lens?
CJ: You asked me the right question. Okay, all right. So right now I'm reading, which you both would love this book, I'm currently reading The Gospel According to Eve. God, it is a gorgeous text. All about interpretations of Eve in biblical texts throughout time and space.
So I will say as a Black queer theologian who identifies as a womanist, queer theologian, ecotheologian. We haven't even gotten to ecotheology, so I'll define that a little bit. But staying with the womanist and feminist interpretation, I do think God is objectively wrong for framing Eve's punishment around childbirth pain and menstruation pain.
This has led to incredibly sexist interpretations of women and our suffering, this idea that women should suffer because of Eve's original sin. So yeah, I do think we have passages that are just across the board terrible.
Pete: Well, can I ask something? Yeah. Just, yeah, 'cause I mean, that's a great example. I just want some clarification. Yeah. 'Cause I know people are gonna ask this question. Is it God saying that, or is it people saying that God says that? I mean, I'm talking about the biblical writers themselves now.
CJ: Absolutely. I mean, I'm someone who doesn't believe in biblical inerrancy. Meaning I don't believe the Bible is perfect by any means.
So, it depends. I wanna speak to both places from your audience. If you're someone who believes, as the Bible says, that all scripture is God-breathed in two, I think God is objectively wrong in that. Okay? And if you're someone who believes that the Bible is written through, you know, man or people, then I believe man is wrong in that.
Either way, I think it's wrong. And I would say as a theologian, I'm not against saying God is wrong. I think when God floods the Earth in Genesis, God is inherently wrong. Because God is a genocidal maniac in that passage. I think killing all of humanity because humanity is not serving you in the way you want is inherently and objectively abhorrent.
So whether it is, I wanna, like I said, speak to both parts of your audience. Folks who, those who believe scripture is true, then I think God is wrong, and for those like me who believe scripture is written, I think the folks who interpreted God are wrong personally.
Pete: Okay, okay.
CJ: But both ways is wrong. But I name this to say when we look at feminist interpretations of Eve, we see a whole bunch of ways we can reconcile those texts. There are feminist interpretations of Eve that argue about the chronology of when Adam and Eve were created. Some feminists believe they were created at the exact same time.
Some feminists believe the fact that Eve came from Adam's rib means that Eve is the kind of final touch on creation, which still means that she is the most important because she is like the final bloom in a garden, right?
Pete: Mm-hmm.
CJ: Uh, there are people that believe that God's punishment towards Eve, ultimately becomes a gateway for us to be self-reflexive and consider our relationship to the divinity.
So I just name it to say there are many ways to think about these passages. For myself as a theologian, I think punishing Eve's female body and her womb and her menstruation is objectively wrong, no matter how you look at it. Uh, but I think the gospel according to Eve is an interesting way to look at how we reconcile even passages we think are abhorrent or lack any value at all, which I think is kind of fascinating.
Jared: Yes. I wanna maybe shift as we come to the back end of our time together. You mentioned a phrase to me when we talked before and, for some reason, it really stuck out, and I couldn't remember the rest of the context. But I want you to say more about this idea of “robbing intimacy” through textual interpretation.
I thought that was a great phrase. And I think it, it takes us to a different register than just looking at the text and how textual interpretation actually, if we zoom out, we can miss some things with that.
CJ: I love that. I mean, I think deconstruction sometimes can be seen as a nihilistic practice 'cause this idea that we kind of, like, pick apart God until there's nothing left.
And something Christina Cleveland says in her work is, "Imagination is theology." I think that's such a beautiful quote around what theology can give us, and I think particularly when we think about white fundamentalist interpretation, it has such rigid endpoints where we can no longer know God beyond white definitions of God.
As I mentioned, you know, when I deconstructed my faith. Actually, before I even deconstructed, I mentioned praying the gay away a lot when I was 19, and I did. I went to a fundamentalist church even though I was at a very progressive institution at UC Berkeley.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
CJ: And I prayed away the gay again and again and again, which meant I had a limited idea of who God could possibly be.
And I remember calling my sister around this time, and she said, "You know, you can fracture and fissure and maim yourself in the name of the God of our childhood, or you can go beyond this rigid definition to figure out if God exists beyond these walls." And in his work, Tattoos on the Heart, Father Gregory Boyle says, you know, "Soon we imagine with God the circle of compassion, and no one stands outside these margins. No one stands outside of the circle of God." And so I think so many folks in particular have a limitation on the God they can know because they've decided that they know the rigid boundaries of God. They've decided God cannot go beyond whiteness. God cannot go beyond heterosexuality. God cannot go beyond certain ideas.
But I found so much more of God in my queerness and in my body and in my Blackness and in my womanhood that exists beyond the confines of who my Pentecostal church told me God could be. There are many folks that grew up in my Pentecostal church that will see my faith and my perspective as heretical, and I am okay with that because to be heretical for me in my church's perspective is actually to know God, I think, more fully, to know God more intimately because I've gone beyond the confines of how my pastors define God, and I've stepped into a broader definition of who God could possibly be.
Uh, and I think even we see this in, I think about this all the time when God floods the Earth in Genesis as a result of being frustrated with humanity's sin. What does God do after this? God puts a rainbow in the sky as a promise God will never do this again. And as a queer theologian, I've always seen this as God's moment of transformation and change too, of God going beyond the confines of God's self to say, "I thought I could only relate to humanity if humanity was subservient to me, but maybe I can know humanity that doesn't serve me in a way that felt legible to me in Genesis or felt legible in the Garden of Eden."
God even goes beyond God's self in Genesis in a really beautiful way, and I couldn't see that until I allowed queerness to give me a new lens of interpretation. Because in a Pentecostal idea, God can never change. But in a queer theological idea, God can change, which I think speaks more to our humanity.
I have made many mistakes in my life, needed to apologize and change and transform, and if I treated myself like the Church treated God, then I would be a stagnant being that could never change. Isn't that godless to say we are without the ability to transform? I think God can change, and we can too, and that's why I say this rigid idea of God robs us of intimacy. It robs us of a textual intimacy and also interpersonal intimacy as well, I think.
Pete: Well, anytime we try to, um, even our loved ones, and try to label them and, and give the final definition- Yes ... for who they are, there's no curiosity, there's no growth. There's actually no relationship. There's certainly no love in a setting like that.
CJ: Ugh.
Pete: Brilliant. And as I'm sure you know, many theologians have talked like that over the history of the church, that this is, you know, God is love, and that makes a difference in how we think about God. And some, I mean, our friend Tom Ward and others would say this is God in process.
This is part of God being truly intimate with us, which involves some sort of change on both parties, not just one. Now, whatever that change is, who the heck knows? That's above my pay grade, frankly.
CJ: No, but I love you saying that. I recently had a good friend on my podcast, Colton Barnaby, who is an amazing public theologian, and something we talked about was he talked about his wife, and he said, "If I say this is all my wife can be, I have necessarily stagnated our relationship."
And I think we do this to God as well, but I wanna highlight, as I mentioned, like, progressive theology is not just like a lawless swamp of like endless biblical interpretation. I see it more as a gardener, as a slow pruning, right, of who God can, who God was and who God can be.
It doesn't mean we take a hatchet to God. It doesn't mean we throw it all away, but it means we might say, for example, we just saw the Southern Baptist Convention say that women cannot be pastors, and it means you might wanna ask the question: What might a feminist interpretation of God give us?
It's a slow pruning. Yeah. A slow reorientation, not this cutting down and maiming of who we know God to be because I think that's also too violent of a change for many people and their bodies. And so I always say deconstruction and reconstruction starts with these little questions, these little curiosities, not this wide, sweeping throwing in the trash of all we know about God.
Pete: Right.
Jared: Well, I think that, you know, we often argue here that's actually just deconstruction. Mm-hmm. Deconstruction is that winnowing process, the pruning process, not to cut it down. That would just be destruction, right?
CJ: Exactly.
Jared: Yes. But deconstruction is let's prune it so that it becomes a new, vibrant, beautiful thing that if we actually didn't prune it, it dies.
Yes. And so I think how you're saying that's really great. Right. Son.
Pete: Well, uh, as we come to the end here, right? I mean, we're moving towards the end, unfortunately, but I do have a question I that has interested me since you started talking. You seem like a very positive person. You really do.
CJ: I am.
Pete: And I would even say a joyful person. So amid all the challenges that you face, maybe professionally, maybe dealing with people who might not see things your way, where does your hope come from? I mean, how do you see hope in all this?
CJ: Oh, that's such a beautiful question.
I think, you know, one thing I say about my work, period, which I think makes it really joyful, is like when I grew up, you know, Pentecostal, and like I wanna be clear, like I was really religious. Like bring my Bible in the backpack to school religious. Evangelize people, get them saved religious. Like I was a very, very religious kid and teenager, and embraced all the theology my church gave me, you know, so fully.
So deconstructing was like pulling off my own skin. It was a process, but I think one thing that makes me joyful is like Evangelicalism made me feel like if people in a room don't believe like me, I'm under threat. And what I love about deconstruction is I don't care what anyone believes.
I just want them to be well in what they believe. I want us to be well together in what we believe. I always say, "I don't care what god you believe in, I just don't want us to harm each other with our interpretations of God." So I think one thing that gives me joy in this work is like I'm not in the business of convincing.
Like my work is just for people with open hands, who are curious and want to know more about God.
Pete: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
CJ: I think what makes me excited is, you know, I see religion as a social determinant of health. We don't just go to church every Sunday. Church is also in our family. It's in our way that we see ourselves.
It's in our identity, how we relate to others. So what has made me hopeful is reconstruction. It's been realizing I don't just have to say, "God isn't this," I can also say, "And I think God is this." Mm-hmm. And it gives me hope that God gets to be this ever-evolving being that comes together through collective interpretation.
And maybe folks will see it as naive, but I have hope for how humanity might continue to define and know God. I have hope for what progressive interpretations could give us. But I think every day I also just feel like it's a miracle that I get to be queer and myself, and also still know God. My most depressed moments were when I deconstructed God and I felt like being queer meant my life is godless.
And now I have so much hope that my life is so God-full. Mm-hmm. And I get to work in a whole community of progressive pastors and leaders who see the world the way I do, and that gives me joy even in the midst of all this chaos, you know?
Jared: Mm-hmm. I mean, that's a great benediction for us as we leave.
Mm. So thank you so much for joining us via Rome.
CJ: Of course.
Jared: So thanks for taking out time. Wonderful conversation.
CJ: Oh my gosh, thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much.
Jared: If today's episode stirred something up for you, we'd encourage you to find people to talk to about it.
And if we can help, we want to.
Pete: The Society for Normal People is full of people who just listen to exactly what you listen to and are probably having similar thoughts and feelings. Some of them figured it out, many of them haven't, and all of them are okay with that.
Jared: That's kind of the whole vibe, actually.
Pete: Come process with people in the society. The link is in the show notes, or go to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/join.
CJ: There we go. Whoa. How's this?
Jared: Yeah.
Pete: Good. That's fantastic.
CJ: But I don't like the angle. Hold on. Ah. All right. Let's get rid of that guy. There we go.
Jared: That's good. Yeah.
Pete: Yeah. You just read my mind right there with that pillow. I was thinking, "She's gotta get rid of the pillow."
Jared: I was thinking, "It looks cozy."
Pete: ‘Cause we both missed our naps today, so, um-
