By Bernon Lee & Isaiah Hobus
D
uring the second year of my Biblical Theological Studies program at Bethel University, I enrolled in Dr. Bernon Lee’s class, Reading the Hebrew Bible. We spent a class period analyzing the Chinese American Biblical Scholar Gale Yee’s chapter, “‘She Stood in Tears Amid the Alien Corn’: Ruth, The Perpetual Foreigner and Model Minority.” This was the first time in my life any aspect of my identity as an Asian American was explicitly bridged to any aspect of my faith. I credit Dr. Lee for shaping much of my discipleship to Christ and vocation by helping me heal a split inside myself that had been implicitly preached to me without words. I pray what follows has a similar impact. In this edited interview with Dr. Lee, I asked him about his background, experiences, and the importance of seminary education to explicitly engage culture and identity.
As an Asian American professor, how has your identity impacted your scholarship and teaching?
That was a relatively late development for me. I grew up in postcolonial Singapore. Singapore was a British colony until 1963. I was born in 1968. I was born into a world where the clout of the British way still hung over all of us: its cultural norms, its sense of beauty, a sense of what is proper, a sense of what is civilized. Singapore remains until today, a nation living under the Anglo-American umbrella. All that to say, it never struck me—for many many years—as a plausible or profitable course of action to pursue Asian American interests in anything because if you live in a postcolonial world where the ghost of England inhabits the world, you know, your thinking is that the way of progress runs west.
So much of my thinking in my early academic life was doing the stuff I saw many scholars doing, which in Biblical Studies was the historical and literary approach that came out of the German academy. But sometimes when you get older, maybe you call it the Asian American midlife crisis, I don’t know what it is, but something inside of you catches up. It is not uncommon. You realize, I have been inhabiting a White world all my life. There is an itch inside me saying, “what about your early years, this other way of thinking, these other languages that are dancing inside of my head?” It’s just back there, buried back in you for a long time, because you have been trying to grow up and live in this world under Anglo-American hegemony. There was just an innate curiosity to ask myself, “What am I doing?” I guess it comes out in my writing. What all writers do is essentially… when they write, they start from the question of, “who am I?” So I began to ask myself, “Who am I? What am I doing? What do I have to say to the world?” The natural answer to that comes out of the stuff of childhood, the Singapore stuff and how it inhabits the way I look at everything, not just Biblical Studies.
Can you explain challenges directly related to working in an academic context as an Asian American faculty member?
From conversations and my own experience, it is not uncommon for Asian Americans to feel we’re entering a context where we feel diversity and difference and our heritage is celebrated when we are interviewed and pursued for positions. Once you’re in, the expectation is that you will pursue a method of teaching that is very much just what evangelical scholarship does—methods conforming very much to the shape of a modern Western mold. Many of the specific interests that inform the Asian American mind in interrogating these subjects are viewed as suspect. Largely because we are exploring ways of seeing and ways of thinking that are “other” with respect to the mainstream. It is not uncommon for many Asian Americans to come into the academy in an evangelical context and, well, the complaint is typically something along these lines, “They wanted me for my different perspective but they want me to sing the same tune as everyone else. They just want me to do it [sing the tune], looking the way that I do.”
Evangelicalism, in the context of the broader North American culture, from how I see things, feels as if it’s under assault. Gatekeeping is on the mind. Everyone wants to deconstruct eurocentrism and everyone would be willing to admit that so much of what we do in just about anything is filtered through that particular vision. But the worry is that you will throw the baby out with the bathwater. If Christianity is so hitched to Western culture as it developed, and as we try to move away from that, there is a fear that we will lose the Christian message altogether. It is very hard to unhitch the wagon without spilling the goods.
What are your thoughts on the lack of AAPI representation in seminaries?
A former colleague of mine, a retiring professor, said to me, “Bernon, you need to keep your eye on maintaining diversity.” He was talking about gender and racial diversity. The ‘natural’ thing to do [in the white academy] is [keep] go[ing] White, he says. When I walk into the room—a bit of a confession here—my eyes are drawn to people that I think are like me. If that is what we all do quite naturally, and there’s a certain warmth in our hearts for people we think are like us (whether they are or not is a different thing altogether), I mean, doesn’t that influence the way we make decisions? If people of European ancestry are in positions of power, what goes on in my mind might be the stuff that goes on in theirs as well.
If you are not intentional about checking that, then it’ll wield its power over us. It is not about saying that we’re just going to pick an inferior candidate just for the sake of getting someone ‘different’ from us [however we perceive ourselves]. I’m talking about those cases where candidates are close to being of equal standing, all things considered, and the majority group in an institution simply, quite unintentionally in most cases I think, just reproduces itself. We all have to check ourselves, really.
How do we go about unraveling the claim, whether implicitly or sometimes explicitly, that Asian American Biblical/Theological studies is “liberal” or “illegitimate”?
There is, in many minds, this mainstream and its bag of methods that are undertaken and used to integrate ways of looking at things; and then there is another bag, outside the mainstream. That’s debatable, questionable, but that’s the context we inherit. The Asian American scholar who wants to pursue Asian American interests in whatever discipline, needs to understand this construct, even as it wanes. How are you going to help people see that there is a diversity in the mainstream as well, and this distinction that we've made between this bag and this bag is, in many ways, quite arbitrary? We might go as far as to say that it’s based on a racialized way of looking at things. My recommendation is that when you undertake scholarship and teaching that is focused on Asian American issues, gender issues, socio-economic issues, class issues, you articulate an argument and a position that brings your argument together with some of the methods that are deemed to be in the so-dubbed mainstream. This is a very old method deployed by people on the fringes. If you are going to influence people in the main, in the spaces of power, you have to use their methods to make your arguments because those are the methods that are respected, well regarded. And, in many cases, they are also deeply relevant to what is happening in Asian American studies.
So, when I undertake scholarship that touches on Asian biblical interpretation, I talk about things through the lens of poststructuralism. I use the language of psychoanalysis, of the brand of aesthetics deployed by the Geneva School of phenomenology and reader-response. Lately, trauma theory has shaped my thinking. I try to understand how the experience of something catastrophic influences the way we read things, influences the way we remember things, and therefore influences the way we write. It influences the way we think about biblical law and the historiography of the Hebrew Bible. I bring what I do into conversation with affect theory. I bring it into conversation with biblical scholars' understanding of the exilic and post-exilic landscape and how Persian and Hellenistic hegemony influenced the way Jewish scribes composed their literature. This is all stuff most consider to be in the mainstream. Much of Asian American studies is breaking ground in the sense that it’s focused on Asian American interests, but many of the methods are well worn paths of thinking in the academy.
So, my advice to Asian American scholars is read broadly. Make sure what you are doing is thoroughly embedded in the broader discourse of the academy. Your particular pursuits should not prove myopic in the final analysis of your peers. Once you begin to use that kind of language—the well-established ways of the West—it’s just so much harder to dismiss your work and to sweep it into the margins.
What resources and biblical scholars and theologians would you recommend for both AAPI Christians and AAPI seminary students to engage with and what encouragement can you give in this?
It’s natural to go to notable Asian American scholars: Gale Yee and Tat-Siong Benny Liew in Biblical Studies, or Kwok Pui-Lan in theology. Certainly, read their work. Understand them well. But when you read these scholars and you check their footnotes, you see how well read they are! Tat-Siong Benny Liew is increasingly involved, I think, in expanding the footprint of psychoanalysis and trauma theory in biblical interpretation in exciting ways. If you read Gale Yee you will find a battery of sources on social scientific methods applied to biblical interpretation. You will find a rich trove of sources there. They are involved in Biblical Studies and Asian American studies, but they are not just reading in that area. Look at their footnotes and look at what they are reading. As you decide what angle of vision is going to be appropriate to what you want to do as a writer, go and read deeply in that area. Start with Asian American religious studies, pay attention to what interests you. Then, find what the movers in those areas are reading: look at their footnotes.
But always, be mindful of the stuff that moves you. Find a way in your research and writing to channel your interests and energy. When you find that, it’ll just flow. It may take you out of Asian American studies, but that’s ok too. Read broadly, read outside of your area of interest. Pay attention to how different authors use language and the passion they have. Read good literature like Pramoedya Ananta Toer, one of my favorites, who is speaking out against Dutch colonialism in what is now Indonesia. If we can bring some of that into the academy and mix that up with good solid thinking that is interdisciplinary and that is thoroughly embedded in the rich methods of the academy, mainstream or not, magic can happen. Read broadly and let that channel your passions.
For more articles in this series:
“Being Asian American in Seminary: The Good, the Bad, and the Hopeful” by Christy Chia.
“An Asian American Seminarians Journey Homeward” by Derek Wu.
“The State of Asian American Theology in Seminary: Thoughts from an Outgoing Graduate” by Justin Nitta.
“The Need for Asian American Theological Scholarship” by Chiwon Kim.
Bernon Lee grew up in Singapore. He arrived in Canada to complete his formal education at the University of Calgary and the Toronto School of Theology at the University of Toronto. Before his current position as Professor of Hebrew Scriptures at St. Andrew's College in the Saskatoon Theological Union, he taught at Bethel University (Minnesota) and at Grace College and Seminary (Indiana). Currently, his research focuses on nineteenth-century biblical interpretation in imperial contexts.
Isaiah Hobus is a recent graduate of Bethel University with a degree in biblical and theological studies, and currently a Master’s of Divinity student with an emphasis in Christian community development at Northern Seminary. He is also a youth outreach associate at a nonprofit ministry for teens, Treehouse Hope in Minnetonka, Minnesota, where he mentors teenagers. In his spare time, he enjoys reliving his days as a college athlete in cross country and track through runs, sticking his nose in a book, and guzzling black coffee.