The Inaugural Session of the Asian American Biblical Interpretation research group at IBR 2020 Boston

Milton Eng

, East Coast Project Director for ISAAC, and I are delighted to announce the inaugural session of the newly constituted Asian American Biblical Interpretation research group at the annual meeting of the

Institute for Biblical Research

(#IBRAABI) and the Society of Biblical Literature in Boston, November 2020.

Our first session features plenary papers and a panel discussion with

Russell Jeung

(San Francisco State University),

Amos Yong

(Fuller Seminary), and

Janette Hur Ok

(formerly Asuza Pacific University, now Fuller Seminary). This first session focuses mostly on East AsianAm contexts but will expand in succeeding meetings to include Southeast Asian, South Asian and Pacific Islanders.

We invite all IBR members and friends to attend. The research group mission statement and the session programming is below. Many thanks to

Carmen Imes

, IBR Research Groups Coordinator, and

Lynn H Cohick

, IBR President, for their enthusiastic support.

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Inaugural Plenary Session for IBR/SBL 2020 (#IBRAABI2020) in Boston

Theme: Setting the Table: Asian American Studies, Evangelicals and Biblical Interpretation

Milton Eng, William Paterson University, Presiding

Max J. Lee, North Park Theological Seminary, Presiding

Welcome and Announcements (10 min)

Russell Jeung, San Francisco State University

Asian American Studies and the Development of Asian American Theology (30 min)

Amos Yong, Fuller Seminary

To the Seven Churches in Asia: An Asian (American) Apocalyptic Hermeneutic after Pentecost (30 min)

Janette Ok, Fuller Seminary

Asian American Biblical Interpretation: Evangelical Engagement and Critique (30 min)

Discussion (20 min)

These papers will be available on the IBR website after October 25th under the Research Groups tab at www.ibr-bbr.org (IBR Member login required). Attendees are encouraged to read the papers in advance though drop-ins are welcome. During the session, presenters will summarize their papers in ten minutes allowing for twenty minutes of discussion. Non-IBR members are welcome to attend. For further information, please contact Milton Eng (miltoneng@verizon.net) or Max Lee (mlee1@Northpark.edu)

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Research Group Description: This new research group (#IBRAABI) provides a space for Asian American evangelical scholars to engage with, critique, integrate and indeed pave new ground in current approaches in Asian American Biblical Interpretation. The fact that the majority of Asian American Protestants remain evangelical makes their voices even more imperative. “Asian American” is understood in its broadest sense to include East, Southeast, South Asian and Pacific Islander Americans.

Asian American biblical interpretation by its very nature is interdisciplinary. Thus, sessions will include invited guest theologians, historians, sociologists &scholars from other disciplines to inform our research.

Asian American Biblical Interpretation more broadly has come of age in recent years. Publications continue apace with works as recent as the encyclopedic T&T Clark Handbook of Asian American Biblical Hermeneutics (2019). In addition, Asian American biblical scholars have now attained the highest &most visible positions in the academy including presidents &deans of seminaries, the presidency of the Association of Theological Schools &even most recently the highest office in our premier guild, President of the SBL.

Yet, most of such scholarship &representation has come from non-evangelical or mainline theological schools. Evangelicals are less represented (see Chloe Sun, 2019). #IBRAABI hopes to fill in the gap on representation in this burgeoning field, explore how it connects with shared issues of concern with African American, Latinx American, and other ethnic American biblical intepreters, and explain why this work is relevant to the mission of the church at large. #AAPIHeritageMonth

A More Technical Description of My 2020-21 Carl F.H. Henry Residential Fellowship Project

An interview/profile of my project can be found at the Henry Center website (here)

Great news! I'm elated to share that I am a recipient of the 2020-21 Carl F.H. Henry Residential Fellowship for science and theology. As part of the grant funded by the John Templeton Foundation for the center's Creation Project, the plan is that I will spend the next academic year on the Trinity Evangelical Divinity School campus with three other fellows (Josh Jipp, Kevin Kinghorn, and Alexander Stewart) in a collaborate environment as each of us work on our individual projects. 
     My project is titled: Natural Desire as a Moral Index of What Is Good: What Paul and the Epicureans Have to Say about the Orders of Pleasure. Click the title of the project for a nice article and interview by Matthew Wiley and why I think a theory and theology of pleasure matters for the church today. 
     Here, I'm happy to give more technical details about my work for the coming year. The goal is to write a book under the more user-friendly and general audience title: Pleasure: Enjoying God and His Good Gifts in an Epicurean World (currently looking for a university press publisher). The book examines the issues of food consumption (1 Cor. 8:1–13; 10:23–30), sexual pleasure (6:12–20), and entertainment (15:12–58) in the ancient dialogue and debate between the Apostle Paul and the group which New Testament scholarship has called “the Corinthian strong” or “the Corinthian wise.” I make the case that the Corinthian slogans: “I am free to do anything” (6:12; 10:23), “Food for the stomach and the stomach for food” (6:13), “Let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die” (15:32), and other maxims find their origin in Epicurean hedonism. 
      Contrary to modern popular caricatures, the Epicureans were not gross hedonists. They practiced a type of moral naturalism where satisfying natural desires for food, sex, wine, and other bodily pleasures were seen as goods as long as they did not cause pain. Their brand of hedonism was self-controlled, pragmatic, and culturally influential. The Epicureans and Paul each provided moral instruction on how best to consume pleasurable goods in a way that led to eudaimonia, or human flourishing. In my analysis of Epicurean moral naturalism and Paul’s interaction with its major tenets, I examine not just key Pauline texts but also the treatises of Epicurus, Philodemus of Gadara, Lucretius of Rome, Diogenes of Oinoanda and other ancient ethical theorists. 
      Both Paul and the Epicureans affirm that the body matters, but Paul uniquely understood that bodily experience can be transformed by a believer’s participation in God (15:20–50). The believer’s union with Christ changes the temporal and futile condition of embodied existence, infuses it with meaning, and allows for eating, drinking, human intimacy, and other created goods to be expressions of faith and divine-human correspondence. Sharing in the triune life of God is an important theoretical and theological category for Paul because of its transformative effect on the participant. While Paul does believe that natural desire and aversion can function as an epistemological index for assessing what is good and can act as a means of moral valuation, he is also aware of how dangerously overpowering and idolatrous desire can become.
      This project is interdisciplinary. It brings a biblical theology and theory of pleasure in conversation with neurobiology, philosophy (ancient and modern), cognitive science, and experiential psychology to explore both the potential and limits of natural desires to gauge what is beneficial or harmful. Medical studies on trauma, for example, demonstrate that while the mind of victims might not recall the violence done to them, the body does remember. There is an epistemology of experience measured by the human body’s interactions with its environment which Christian theology cannot ignore and must take into account.
       However, embodied human experience can neither be the sole arbitrator of what is true and moral. Sin taints human existence and places limits on the extent of an experiential epistemology. I'm hoping to define those limits more precisely in my work.

       My work would be incomplete if it does not offer new biblical, theological, and spiritual insights which inform the practices of the Christian church. We live in a culture of consumption, and so did the churches of Paul. My suspicion is that most Christians consume pleasures much more like modern Epicureans than as believers who participate in the triune life of God. If the virtue of pleasure is no more than its moderate consumption and enjoyment, Christians today may not be wanton hedonists but our practices are no different from ancient Epicureans or contemporary ones. Pleasure by itself is incomplete. It sends the person on a search for something transcendent and eternal. That search ends when we discover our ultimate delight in the person and presence of Christ. I plan to offer some examples of healthy Christian practices that make pleasure a gift which leads us into the grace of God and helps us avoid harmful, idolatrous patterns of living. MJL. 

** Postscript: My home institutions North Park Theological Seminary and North Park University featured the news of the fellowship on the university website here. I'm indeed very grateful for their support and making it possible for me to take the next academic year as a sabbatical research leave.