Shari Oosting:
What does it mean to take the Bible seriously without taking it literally? Questions about how to read the Bible have never been more important or contested than they are today. In today's interview, President Jonathan Lee Walton talks about what it means to read the Bible through a socio-historical lens, and how identifying the politics of ancient Judean writers can help us navigate the twenty-first century. President Walton's book is titled A Lens of Love: Reading the Bible in its World for Our World. Join us as we explore the biblical path to a new moral imagination, and as we quite simply learn what it means to see and love our neighbors. President Jonathan Lee Walton is both a social ethicist and he serves as the president of Princeton Theological Seminary. You are listening to The Distillery at Princeton Theological Seminary.

President Walton, thank you so much for joining me today.

Jonathan Lee Walton:
Thank you so much for having me.

Shari Oosting:
I am very excited to talk about your book, A Lens of Love, and we'll just dive right in. You open with a story that's interesting about a Bible study that you hosted when you were at Harvard University, and you share how those students made it imperative for you to write this book. So, can you share that story with us?

Jonathan Lee Walton:
Yes, you're absolutely right. It was young adults and any graduate students and young professionals that attended the Memorial Church at Harvard University, and they were wanting to engage the Bible as people of faith with the understanding that the Bible is just a very complicated book. These were incredibly bright people; physicians, lawyers, graduate students—right?—and they were expressing their issues with how they pick up the Bible—like so many people—pick up the Bible with sincere hearts and they're ready to learn and then after a few late night attempts it ends up decorating their nightstands. And that's probably just true for so many of us, and that's one of the reasons that I think that so many people appeal to the Bible without necessarily ever reading the Bible. And many of us evoke its authority and we make sincere attempts to try to understand it, yet we often come up short.

And so, these young adults, they were gathering for a regular Bible study with the opposite intent, they wanted to engage it. They wanted to better understand it. Most importantly, they wanted the Bible to inform how they were wrestling with the big questions of contemporary life: How do we live ethical and just lives as Christians? How do we become deeply rooted in our Christian faith while respecting those who may not look, love, or believe as we do? And how do we engage rather than ignore the more problematic dimensions of the Bible, such as its overt sexism and violence? And so, this is what brought us together. It reminded me of the maxim that we could either take the Bible literally or we could take it seriously. And these precious young adults, they wanted to take it seriously.

Shari Oosting:
Yeah, what a gift and what an opportunity. That reminds me of a former colleague of mine who was a young adult when I worked in the finance industry who picked up the Bible to try to read it for the first time. And she started with what she called the Book of Job because she had a job and she wanted to read about it. And imagine encountering the story of Job as your first encounter with scripture.

Jonathan Lee Walton:
[Laughs]
That story is just so common—

Shari Oosting:
Yeah!

Jonathan Lee Walton:
—and it speaks to the complicated dimensions of our faith. But more importantly, it also typifies sincere people who are just looking for ways to engage this text that has meant so much to so many.

Shari Oosting:
Absolutely. Later in the book, you also connect the pressing need for this serious approach to scripture with the election of Donald Trump. Can you talk a bit about that as well?

Jonathan Lee Walton:
I will say that it was probably less about Donald Trump specifically and more about the kind of culture wars that he and others typify. I mean, a valorization and amplification of purity politics—how we appeal the sacred categories and cultural myths to establish social hierarchies and narrowly define what it means to be a Christian or even what it means to be an American. And this was the very sort of xenophobic and nativist and even exclusionary impulses that we see throughout our society, that those in this Bible study were seeking to push back against. I would also say that unfortunately, this is also the history of the Christian church, and it's a history that we cannot avoid.

Again, it's much bigger than someone like Donald Trump. I mean, from Constantine through the Crusades, North Atlantic slave trade, Nazi Germany, neo-fascist impulses across the globe today—the Christian Church has been complicit and too often we know that the Bible has been weaponized. And so how do we reclaim this? I really like the way that the writer Anne Lamont put it in describing this terrible and tragic history. She says you can always tell when man has made God in his own image because God hates all the same people that we do.

Shari Oosting:
Oh, that's an indictment, isn't it?

Jonathan Lee Walton:
[Laughs]
But this book, I mean—it was written for those who are more concerned with love and compassion than the purity politics of judgment/exclusion. And this is why it's my humble offering to the world.

Shari Oosting:
Well, you offer some really tangible approaches. You're not simply refuting some typical approaches which exist and are very common in lots of churches and in lots of people's assumptions about how to approach the Bible, but you're offering what you call a socio-historical approach. So, can you break that down for us?

Jonathan Lee Walton:
Yes. I mean, it's important to note—and I always have to say this—particularly out of respect for my extraordinary colleagues in the guild who are trained in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament studies—I was not trained as a biblical scholar, though clearly I engage scripture both professionally as a scholar of religion and personally as a person of faith, as a Christian. But I was trained as a social ethicist. That means one who's concerned with cultural values and how societies define the right, the good, the just, the fitting. This is one of the reasons why when preparing sermons and reading scripture, I often employ what you note as the socio-historical approach. And this is an approach that begins with the belief that there is no text without context. And so this approach of—it pays attention to the social relations and the political dynamics within the ancient world. It helps us to identify meaning in a particular space and time, and this is how we can then better understand the power dynamics and the class structures as well as the influences of surrounding cultures such as the Egyptian, Babylonian, and Roman empires.

Shari Oosting:
Yeah, that's great. It pulls us into particularity—there is no vague universal context. There's only particular different contexts.

Jonathan Lee Walton:
Exactly! And it helps us to understand across context, right? And so, when we better understand power dynamics—say in the ancient world between men and women, Judeans and Samaritans, Romans and Jews—then we can better understand the metaphors and the cultural scripts of the biblical texts and better understand and unpack the parables. And, to the subtitle of the book, we can understand power relations, but particularly Jesus's approach to compassion in the ancient world so that we can then begin to apply it in our world ethically.

Shari Oosting:
Rather than trying to literally apply verse by verse to our own context, which is so different. I imagine for some this approach is a welcome relief—thinking of the students in your Bible study—and for some this might feel threatening to the way that they had perceived the Bible before.

Jonathan Lee Walton:
Particularly when we are trained to think that divine revelation and divine inspiration is about, you know, that they were ancient stenographers in the ancient world that just dictated words from God directly. But that’s just…we know the power of story and myth and the ways that meaning changes over time. And so, really it's just about opening up our moral imaginations to really getting at what are some of the overarching messages and themes of the biblical text that the writers were trying to impress to us, even if they were using language and metaphor that was appropriate for their time and their context. That's one of the reasons that so many of the metaphors, for instance, are agricultural and monarchial. That was their world! That's how they understood! And I think that those teachings are still applicable to our world if we just have a more capacious and generous understanding of meaning-making.

Shari Oosting:
So, let's talk more specifically about better understanding this book that we call the Bible—which is of course a collection of books, not a single book—but let's start with what it took for something to be considered sacred.

Jonathan Lee Walton:
Well, what we consider sacred is often determined by communities: sacred narratives, sacred histories, things that we view as set apart from the mundane and everyday life. Of course, I could get into more theoretical definitions of what is sacred, you know, in terms of these narratives that create, ground us, that form an axis mundi—a center of the earth. But I mean, if you don't mind, I can even speak more personally—

Shari Oosting:
Yeah, please do.

Jonathan Lee Walton:
I mean, I could talk about how I grew up in a beautifully enchanted world! Like so many, my parents took me to church and I listened to the preacher make biblical characters come to life. I was able to learn from David's triumphs and his tragedies and his tragic failures as king. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, their courage and their ultimate deliverance from a fiery furnace, that's comes to mind in moments of adversity and challenge. It's these stories passed down, these narratives that pulled me into a sacred world that transcends time and space, but more importantly it connects me with and to communities that came generations before me and communities that will come after me. And really, that's the ground of religion. The Latin term religare—to connect, to bind—and that's part of the productive power of our religious faith because at best it shapes us into a living tradition.

I think of my 99-year-old grandfather—my 99-year-old grandfather who continues to inspire me with his daily ritual of biblical devotion. He was a successful newspaper man and community leader in Raleigh, North Carolina, born under what W. E. B. Du Bois described as the “veil of racial segregation,” and lived most of his life under that unjust Southern structure. But the Bible is sacred for him because it represents the love of God, the love of self, the love of humankind. And even when people tried to use the Bible to justify his dehumanization at an early age, he learned to read and interpret this text with a critical mind and a sensitive heart and he was brought into a sacred tradition of love and human liberation. And so, when I think about that which is sacred and the stories that we tell, I cannot divorce it from this beautiful larger context, again, that transcends space and time.

Shari Oosting:
I love how you just described your grandfather as having a critical mind and a sensitive heart, and how that allows you to have an imagination to dream of a world that you haven't seen yet in your own life, which is I think where you're pushing us. Is that fair?

Jonathan Lee Walton:
It's how we expand our moral imaginations so that we're able—I mean, that's the power of parable, that's the power of metaphor, because meaning operates at so many different levels. That's why Jesus was such an incredible teacher. And it also speaks to the lasting import when we talk about a man who was besieged by thieves along the Jericho road. It wasn't a person who was a part of his fraternity or sorority. It wasn't a fellow alum. It wasn't somebody who was a part of his political party that stopped to help him, but it was the Samaritan—those that in a more quote-unquote “pristine culturally appropriate context” he would've shunned. And think about the way that that story speaks to us across generations, the ways that it expands our moral imaginations when we ask ourselves the question, who is your neighbor? There's just power there.

Shari Oosting:
You also write about another story about a Samaritan woman, which struck me because that was the lectionary text in our congregation for this past Sunday about the Samaritan woman at the well. Can you unpack that story a little bit and kind of how your approach to scripture has helped you see that story afresh?

Jonathan Lee Walton:
If we were to take that story, this precious woman of the well, where Jesus is passing through Samaria and this woman is at a well, and the ways that that story is often used—and even the very term “woman at the well” has come to signify “sex worker” in the contemporary context—that may have been the case or that may not have been the case, particularly when it says that she had many husbands and now she lives with a man that was not her husband. Well, there were many reasons for that. It could have been that she was a part of ancient Hebrew marriage arrangement where when one's husband dies she's passed to the next living brother. But, the fact of the matter is none of that comes up in the story.

Shari Oosting:
Yeah, Jesus never passes judgment on that.

Jonathan Lee Walton:
Jesus never passes judgment! And so again, once again, we impute all kind of meaning—we frame the story in that way. But what we do know about this story is that this is the longest dialogue between Jesus and anybody that we have in scripture. And it's Jesus simply engaging this woman, seeing her not as a Samaritan, not as someone who is on the wrong side and would be deemed impure or unceremoniously clean. But no, he goes and he engages her, even to her own shock and surprise, where she says, "How could you ask me for a drink of water?" And I have to say, this is just something about the ways, again, that we view one another. We are so tempted in our society to view one another through these varying stock caricatures that we are based upon race, gender, your zip code, rather than actually just viewing one another as precious people made in the imago dei, the image of God.

Shari Oosting:
Yeah. It's telling how surprised the woman was as she goes and tells those in her village, like, this man told me about myself—to be truly seen, not simply as a Samaritan and all that would've carried with it—but to be seen in her full humanity. It's beautiful. So, you also, to pivot a little bit, you start with dynastic literature—and you did bring up King David when you were sharing kind of the enchanted world that you grew up in. But why do you start with dynastic literature? Well, let's first define what that is, and then kind of say why that's an interesting starting point.

Jonathan Lee Walton:
The dynastic literature, I mean, it's the books of the Bible that provide an account of the rise and fall of Israel's monarchy. And I chose to begin here in the middle of the Hebrew Bible because so many of the figures and events of this period, first of all, can be historically verified independently of scripture. Historians and archeologists have discovered facts about the Egyptian, the Assyrian, the Babylonian, and Persian empires that help us to better understand biblical stories about Israel's monarchy and their captivity and exile. So that's one reason. But also, I began there because really the dynastic literature provides backdrop for the entire Hebrew Bible, particularly the period of exile. This period shapes how ancient Israel, how they reconstructed their past and how they imagined their future—so just as the United Kingdom under David as well as the subsequent split to the Northern Kingdom of Israel and Southern Kingdom of Judah—I mean, this provides us better understanding of the Hebrew prophets, the wisdom literature, and even the origin narratives in the Pentateuch. They all speak to the split and into their ideal of themselves as a United Kingdom. So therefore, when we read some of the very familiar stories, even going back to the Book of Genesis, we'll see that there are political allegories that people are trying to defend. We'll see that they're trying to make sense of behaviors of individual leaders as well as the nation of Israel during its rise and fall. So that's why I felt it important to start there with the dynastic literature.

Shari Oosting:
Would it be fair to assume that the experience of exile also shaped which oral histories eventually were recorded?

Jonathan Lee Walton:
Oh, it was definitely a power play! [Laughs] It's a power play between the Southern and even Northern Kingdom. So many of these stories are where they're playing the dozens with one another. There's a story, for example, of King Jeroboam and his golden calves. And by the way, during that period, golden calves were quite common. And so, it's interesting to see that when we read, there's a particular account that we're all very familiar with, when Moses comes down the mountain and everybody is taking their gold and they're building their own god in the form of a golden calf. Well, it doesn't take too much imagination to know that that's a critique of King Jeroboam. And so again, that's one specific example of why I began with the dynastic literature.

Shari Oosting:
Thank you for that. As you've been speaking, the word “power” has come up over and over again between the Northern and Southern Kingdom, but also through the kind of critique this kind of reading of scripture can bring. So, I'd like to turn our gaze toward oppressive systems in our own time, and I'd love to hear you talk about what does this reading, how does it help us understand power?

Jonathan Lee Walton:
One of the things when taking this approach and understanding power dynamics and relations in the texts, I cannot help but walk away with a reading of the Bible—New Testament particularly—in terms of that it was vulnerable people who Jesus cared about the most. These are the people who Jesus saw. Now, I want to be clear, I'm not just ascribing this to the New Testament, right? Because we understand that Jesus, a Jewish teacher, part of a renewal movement—and what was Jesus doing? Jesus was identifying what he understood as the recurring theme throughout the Hebrew Bible, from the Pentateuch to the prophets. Jesus identified with this God who sides with those on the underside of power. God looks for those who we overlook. God hears the cries of those who we don't even know exist. Welcome the stranger because you were once a stranger in the land of Egypt! And it's this ability to see is what leads Jesus to that woman at the well, that Samaritan woman at the well. It's this ability to see is what leads Jesus to call out and heal that woman with an issue of blood. And it's Jesus' capacity to empathize that leads people to seek him out as a unique and special teacher in God's kingdom. And so, yes, it's understanding power dynamics. And once we understand power dynamics and who is on the underside of power, and we're able to see them, that's when we are putting on what I like to call the lens of love.

Shari Oosting:
Which again, to return to this idea of things being particular and not vague, you get very particular speaking about some of the perplexing, persistent systemic problems in our own society, things like gun violence and mass incarceration. Can you make some of those connections more explicit about how you pulled together kind of interpreting our own cultural moment in light of your reading of scripture?

Jonathan Lee Walton:
Absolutely. Whether it's those who are trapped under oppressive systems, whether it's those who have been locked into our pernicious system of mass incarceration or global sex trafficking, it's those in the shadows and those who we have been conditioned not to see.

Shari Oosting:
In a sense, we all have blinders that hopefully scripture can help remove.

Jonathan Lee Walton:
Yes, I mean, and it's those blinders that—again, we're all socialized into it, even as we're all complicit in varying forms of injustice. Again, we cannot identify with those who we do not know exist. And so as long as we live in a state of plausible denial or what James Baldwin would euphemistically refer to as a “state of innocence,” then it allows us to ignore the pains, the problems, and the perplexities of our world. And we opt for an existence of blissful ignorance. And our world becomes the world, our cares become all that matters. And this is where I believe that God's corrective lenses can help us.

Shari Oosting:
So, we began our interview talking about young adults, and they're really pressing questions about scripture, which I think speaks to some true longings. I'm curious, what do you most want young adults to hear about the Bible and about living as a Christian in our own cultural moment?

Jonathan Lee Walton:
There is real power in Jesus' commandments around love! We should not just write these off as empty platitudes. I mean, consider “love your neighbor as yourself.” How many of us hear the first part of that commandment but we miss the second clause “as thyself?” How many of us know what it means to love ourselves wholly and completely? And I'm not talking about being proud of our accomplishments or of our personal achievements. I'm referring to loving the person that we know best, the one who's often emotionally fragile, filled with flaws, anxious, insecure. Loving that person. I mean, again, this comes back to sight and a lens of love. I am so glad that I serve a God who sees me not as the world sees me. I'm glad I serve a God who sees me not as I often see myself! Think about the amount of time that we spend covering up and concealing our actual and our presumed flaws. We're smiling on the outside, we exude confidence, moral character, some of us. Many of our young people, we know the ways that they're posturing and preening for social media, young people and old people alike.

Shari Oosting:
Yes.

Jonathan Lee Walton:
Yet, suicide remains a leading cause of death among young adults. Depression, anxiety, loneliness—they've only been exacerbated by our hyper-mediated, hyper-connected world, and maybe because it's social media platforms have conditioned us to judge our neighbors as we judge ourselves. And so, I think heeding and learning how to love ourselves as a pre-condition of being able to love one another, that's an important commandment that I would want our young people to walk away with.

Shari Oosting:
Well, that's a beautiful note to end on. Thank you so much for talking with me today, President Walton.

Jonathan Lee Walton:
Thank you so much for having me.

Shari Oosting:
You've been listening to The Distillery at Princeton Theological Seminary. Interviews are conducted by me, Sherry Oosting. Our editorial and production staff include Nathanael Hood and Byron Walker. Like what you're hearing? Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and don't forget to leave us a review. Even better, share an episode with a friend. The Distillery is a production of continuing education at Princeton Theological Seminary. Until next time, thanks for listening.