Scripture and Society with Dr. J.P. Kang

Dr. J.P. Kang joins Dan and Rachael this week to introduce The Seattle School’s brand new Certificate in Scripture and Society. 

From the beginning, J.P. makes it clear—this isn’t just another Bible study course. As he explains, “It’s not the way that they’ve approached scripture in a previous church setting or perhaps faith-based educational institution. I think that what I’m trying to do is help students become better readers, both of the text and of their context, of themselves.”

This transformative, 12-month certificate program offers a fresh, psychologically-informed approach to studying the Bible. Students will explore scripture through diverse cultural, historical, and literary perspectives while being guided by esteemed scholars and seasoned practitioners. The program is designed to challenge and expand how we read and interpret both the text and our world.

If you’re a faith leader or someone passionate about engaging scripture through liberative, intellectually rigorous lenses, this program is for you. Live, online courses begin January 2025, and applications are open now through December 1, 2024. 

Discover more and apply at theseattleschool.edu/scripture. 

 

About Our Guest:

J. P. Kang (he/him), Ph.D., began teaching Bible courses at The Seattle School in 2014, first as an Adjunct and then as an Affiliate faculty member. He has also been a member of the Intercultural Credibility Committee since its inception in 2020.

J. P. enjoys working with students and helping them become better readers of the Bible, sharing with them his own journey of surprising discoveries. He thrives on helping students who come from spiritually toxic backgrounds begin to heal their relationships with the text. A language nerd at heart, he delights in constantly finding all kinds of examples from daily life to illustrate the dynamics of biblical language (especially Hebrew) and imagery. He views teaching at The Seattle School as a privilege, something he “gets to” do.

J. P.’s full-time vocation is as Pastor and Head of Staff of the Japanese Presbyterian Church of Seattle (established 1907), where he gets to care for a wonderfully diverse ohana!

He received his M.Div. and Th.M. (Bible) at Princeton Theological Seminary and a Ph.D. in Bible from Union Presbyterian Seminary (Richmond, VA) with a dissertation entitled “A Dictionary of Epigraphic Hebrew.” His dissertation contains the vocabulary found in Iron Age Hebrew inscriptions from about 40 Near Eastern sites that were roughly contemporary with the period of the composition of the Hebrew Bible and is a research tool.

J. P. tries to model faith as a “living relationship of belief, trust, commitment, and mystery” (see Rick Osmer, Teaching for Faith). A Presbyterian, J. P. is very open to learning from other traditions. He is growing into his identity as a writer and speaker with a distinct perspective on and relationship to the biblical tradition that allows him to correlate it in fresh ways for contemporary audiences. J. P. also has come to question the logocentric nature of his tradition and to seek ways in which the good news can be proclaimed in less verbally dense forms (e.g., through creative visual, sonic, and material forms). His social media bios often identify him as a “Digital scribe.”

He loves being immersed in foreign places and documenting those occasions as resources for teaching and preaching. In 2022, he was able to spend extended time in the Holy Land and South Korea, and the memories of those trips intersect his life every week. In the near future, he hopes to visit Japan (where he spent nearly a decade growing up), Scotland, and again South Korea. Also, music is one of his favorite languages. J. P. is married to Keren and together they have three children—Amanda, Olivia, and Linus—who keep them constantly on their toes and are always begging for a dog.

 

Episode Transcript:

Dan: We don’t often say this, but the Allender Center is under the umbrella of the profoundly wonderful Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, and we don’t really get a chance to talk with folks that often teach there. So Rachael, we’ve got incredible privilege of not only the person, but also the program that we’ll be talking about today. But to have J.P. Kang, Dr. J.P. Kang, who is an affiliate faculty teaching the Bible, but also the head pastor of the Japanese Presbyterian Church in Seattle with us. J.P., it’s just an honor and delight to have you with us.

J.P.: Thank you. I personally feel very grateful and energized to do the work that I get to do both in a congregational setting as well as at The Seattle School. It’s nothing like when I was in seminary in the 1990s, but my own development as both a person, a preacher, teacher, have enabled me to see no shortage of ways in which the Bible speaks to the present age, both among the pews as well as in the classroom and out on the street. And so, yeah, I just think it is so vital that people are given the tools, especially those who have come from what we might call spiritually toxic backgrounds, folks who have had way too much Bible who don’t want to have anything to do with it, to be given a reason and the curiosity, the tools to go back and see things that they’ve never seen before.

Dan: Yeah, I love that phrase. People who have in one sense born a toxicity in one sense, something foul from the very life-giving presence of God in the Bible. So how now do you engage the issue, the toxicity of what people have taken in?

J.P.: Yeah, I tell my students the first day, first week of class that this is not Bible study 2.0. It’s not the way that they’ve approached scripture in a previous church setting or perhaps faith-based educational institution. I think that what I’m trying to do is help students become better readers, both of the text and of their context, of themselves. And I try to accomplish that by asking provocative questions that trigger curiosity. I try to use humor and I pay really as much attention as I can to the emotional dynamics of the act of reading. And in that way I find that students, many students do respond. Again, to use another phrase, a lot of my students over the last 10, 11 years that I’ve been teaching at The Seattle School could be characterized as recovering fundamentalists. So I put myself in their shoes remembering what it was like when I was going through my own deconstruction many years ago.

Rachael: Yeah. What it makes me think about is, I don’t know if many of our listeners know this, but I actually have, my undergraduate degree is in Biblical Studies, so a Bachelor of Arts in Religion with an emphasis in Biblical Studies from Oklahoma Baptist University, which is a liberal arts school. And I would say for myself as a recovering fundamentalist, that educational pathway not only was part of my vocational calling, but it actually, I think it saved my life because I had professors inviting me to… Deconstruction’s, I know such a scary word for people because it feels like what does that mean? But in many ways they were so gracious because we were these very indoctrinated kids who had learned to have a relationship with the Bible as if fallen out of the sky the perfectly intact, directly from God, but also were wrestling and had really good questions, I feel like they just kept opening doors and windows and saying, well, here’s an interpretive tool for you to, here’s a good… keep asking more questions, but in a way that I look back now and say, oh my gosh, they were doing such stunning work, not deceptively, but actually really kindly. I think for me it really, the Bible did become… God through the Bible, became so much more of, I think, the true God that I was meant to be encountering along the way. And it’s always been a little paradoxical for me because when you’re coming out of a kind of more, and I have a lot of fondness for a lot of my Southern Baptist upbringing, I mean, I am rich in the word as far as being a part of just in my body. But when you’re coming from environments, we have such a tendency in our society to want to split off as if that will keep us safe or will help us mend. But in splitting off like that, we often have to split off really good parts of ourselves and things that we actually need for the road ahead and the journey ahead. So just your words about ways in which you engage students is deeply encouraging to me.

Dan: So provoke us. I want to hear a provocative question that you would invite your students to engage.

J.P.: Well, lemme tell a story. The very first year I taught at The Seattle School, it was the Old Testament genre class at the time, which was a precursor of the biblical survey that’s part of the certificate. I put as the final assignment, this was the first time I was teaching the course, I said, you can write a paper on any figure or text in the Bible that perhaps has bothered you or that you feel like there’s nothing new to learn there. So I want you to have the experience of maybe surprising yourself with the new tools and approaches. And most students don’t look at that till the last month of the course. But I had a counseling student come in the second week for office hour, and she said, I want to look at the story of Samuel and Hannah, the calling of Samuel. And I said, oh, okay. What are you interested in there? And she said, well, I, I’ve been reading that in the literature, psychological literature that children who are abandoned report hearing voices. And I said, oh, say more. She goes, I want to read the story of Samuel’s development as a story of abandonment. How did his being left by his mother at such a young age influence his later life and relationships? I said, go for it. And the light bulb went on for me in that moment that that kind of question, that interdisciplinary question would only be asked in a setting like the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology. I would have a hard time thinking about it happening in the settings where I got my own formation, where there was some counseling, pastoral counseling, psychology. But it was definitely not central.

Dan: No, that’s stunning. Well, that’s another of putting it is where you were provoked by wise and kind question. And I’m sure there’s an armamentarium of questions that you pose for your students. But nonetheless, do you have one or two that you generally like, this is something I want you all to have to think about.

J.P.: Well, I’ll tell you first week of class, we look at Genesis 1:1-3, and I give it to them in multiple translations. I want them to get up close and personal with the text. So they look at the King James, they look at contemporary translations, they look at Robert Alter, and I asked them, just, I’ve laid it out in parallel. What do you notice? What do you see? And they notice punctuation. They notice verb tenses, they notice grammar. They notice different translations for the word Hebrew, word, ruach, spirit, breath, wind. They all feel and land differently depending on the translation. And so we work through that together. And then I ask the students, well, how does this change your understanding of God as creator? Because if there’s a period at the end of verse one, God is done, everything’s finished. But if verses one to three or one long sentence and the verse two, now the Earth was formless and void or well-trained waste, if that’s just kind of the circumstance, it’s a very, very different understanding of God as creator or what’s being described.

Dan: That’s so fun. It is so fun if there’s a period it’s done. And yet the process of allowing in so many ways the Word to be engaged with not a fundamentally critical eye, but an eye of just curiosity. It feels like a core gift that I know as I speak to our students, what they have said again and again is the two words that come up with regard to you. One is you are a profoundly kind man. And in that, but also you are provocative, you invite people into a process of curiosity. And sometimes curiosity seems to have killed the feline presence. And so there’s a danger in curiosity that as we come to the word, so many people want a finality. They want the period versus the implication of what a long run-on sentence might actually include. So I would love for you to put words to how did you get into the Bible?

J.P.: Yeah. Well, I was born the first born child of a Presbyterian missionary pastor couple. And so I grew up overseas mostly three years in Africa, and then about a decade in Japan. And the Bible was present in our home. We read it together as a family. We had prayers before meals like many do. And then when I went to college, I had this experience of kind of deep spiritual hunger crisis that precipitated a formal confession of faith. And that was the point at end of freshman year in college, I started to grow. I read as much as I could about Bible and theology and history as much as I could absorb as a young person. And around my junior year, I discerned, oh, I think perhaps I’m being called to go to seminary and maybe to teach. It was very, very kind of fuzzy notion at that time. So I ended up at Princeton Seminary in the fall of 1992, and very quickly I realized that I knew very little about the background of the Bible. I had been reading it in English and I didn’t know about the history, I didn’t know about the languages, and I had to take Greek and then Hebrew and that it was really under the influence of the faculty at Princeton Seminary in New Jersey who modeled what it was to be incredibly rigorous with the technical disciplines of language and translation and textual criticism and comparative method along with doing that in the service of the church. So that was my long journey. I went on to do a doctorate in Bible focusing on Hebrew Bible. My study produced a dictionary of the Hebrew inscriptions that have been dug up in the ground that are contemporary to the biblical period. And so I bring all of that. I tell my students, I’m a word nerd. I’m obsessed with words and meanings and syntax and grammar, but I definitely do not teach the way I was taught. I realize that I’m not here to make, you know, train biblical scholars as much as I am people who have a living relationship with the text who can use it as a resource for their work as artists, as therapists, as some of them as pastors.

Dan: Well, I know Rachael, I wish people could see your face as J.P. talks about being a nerd.

Rachael: I actually say a lot of times before I teach, because at the Allender Center, people assume you’re a trained therapist, and I have a Master of Divinity from The Seattle School, and J.P., you came right after I finished, but then I worked recruiting students to the MDiv program. So I got to hear a lot about you through the students that were coming into the school. But I laughed because I love biblical studies, and I often say to people, I love the Bible and that doesn’t mean I love everything in it or that I don’t wrestle with it or that I’m not confounded by it. And I just mostly what was coming up for me is my own word nerd-ness, and how often it’s gotten me in so much trouble in my studies, and I feel like Jesus has used this to humble me in case anyone, lest anyone think of me as an expert. For example, at The Seattle School in my New Testament or in Romans, we had to do an exegetical paper, and I actually failed it the first time around because I could not finish it because I like normal was like, what do I want to wrestle with? Okay, let’s look at Romans 3:22. Is it the faith in Christ or the faith of Christ that matters? Because that has huge theological implications for what we’re talking about with salvation. So it was like I entered my own. I’m just laughing at the amount of times my desire to get close has actually led to deep existential crises, good ones of wrestling that didn’t often happen in the timeline of my academic requirements. I passed it the second time around. But yeah, all that to say, I think part of what I think about a lot, especially in our current context as we kind of make a shift, why would someone want to get a certificate in Scripture and Society? What are some of the tools and gifts and not just academically, not just mentally, but emotionally and spiritually that someone could get? Part of why I’m very passionate about the Bible is because like I mentioned, growing up in a more fundamentalist environment and relationship with the text, and I grew up in Oklahoma and even just this past summer, Oklahoma superintendent, Ryan Walters, I think that’s his name, I sometimes try to forget it. Yeah, Ryan Walters, because he’s leaning very hard into Christian Nationalism and he’s kind of a lot of the playbook, which wants to dismantle the Department of Education, push people towards private religious education, but basically made a mandate that all Oklahoma school teachers, all Oklahoma classrooms incorporate the Bible in lesson plans from grade five to 12. And I have a cousin who is a computer teacher and a baseball coach in Oklahoma, and he’s really funny. And right after this mandate came out, I actually have a lot of people in education in Oklahoma. His Instagram title is “Just a computer teacher”. And so he came out and said, well, I guess I’m now just a computer teacher and a Bible teacher. And I think that what bothered me about this mandate one alone, that it’s a violation of the Constitution, it’s that there’s this assumption that just any person without any training, without any of the tools and frameworks that are really needed to understand how the Bible even functions, are just supposed to get up and teach the Bible. It just has a lot of power to shape our imagination. And I actually take that very seriously. Anytime I’m approaching the word of God that that’s a huge responsibility. It’s not meant to be such a responsibility that we’re frozen and we can’t utilize it, but it’s like, no, this actually necessitates a serious, thoughtful engagement and understanding of the implications on imagination, how we’re being shaped. 

J.P.: Yeah. What I would say is, like you, I resonate very strongly that there’s such a need to correlate scripture in society. If it wasn’t clear, like I focused on the Hebrew scriptures, the Old Testament, and part of my reason for doing that is to provide somewhat of a corrective voice to the overemphasis on the New Testament in most Christian settings. I use the analogy of music. I talk about how if Jesus is a new song that God is singing, you really cannot understand or appreciate that melody without the harmony of the Hebrew scriptures. Jesus was Jewish. And so if you don’t know what the law and the writing say, you don’t get what Jesus is saying about the greatest commandments. Right?

Rachael: That’s right.

J.P.: So again, part of the approach that I use because of my training in comparative ancient near Eastern and other cultural backgrounds is it simultaneously makes the text as we look at it, stranger, more foreign, right? Students many times have not been exposed to this Mesopotamian Egyptian Canaanite context. And so in making the Bible seem different from how they had read it before, say, in a popular English translation, they also gain kind of a respect for the historical and cultural distance between a 21st century reader and that first century or 3000 year old text. And so I think that’s healthy for the reader. I need help reading the Bible. I can’t just pick up a text and say, I know all the stuff. I need specialists and commentators. And so students hopefully come out with more humility in their approach to the text and to pick up or reference something earlier in the conversation, you want them to engage their curiosity and their imagination, because I mean, you have to, because the biblical writers did not provide every last detail and motivation that we would want to know. But Dan, as you point out, that process of engaging, that can be very frightening. There’s a lot of fear. And so I attend to that in my classes when students start raising these kinds of personal, spiritual, theological questions like, well, if that’s not true or if it’s not literal, then what does that do to my potentially do to my conviction about the reality or the existence of God? Or some related existential question.

Dan: Just so well important to be able to say that, as you said earlier, that our own experience, we are a reader, but we bring bias, prejudice often that we don’t even know. We bring assumptions that we’ve not really even had articulated the core presuppositional base of how we enter reading any text. That idea that as a reader, I’m not objective. I never have been. I never will be. But there is this shaping of encounter with scripture where the interplay of my reading, I’m meant to develop a hermeneutic based within the warp and woof of the scripture. And that in some sense, scripture is mutually read. I read it, but it reads me if not more so than I read it. And so I’m just so curious how you came to, in one sense, a pretty radical hermeneutic that requires this level, both of humility and curiosity, and yet deep, deep, deep, profound trust and reverence in the word of God.

J.P.: Yeah. All I can say is that my journey has enabled me to be able to develop myself as a reader, to allow myself to ask all these questions and then to know how to show up in the pulpit or in the classroom in a way is engaging and invites both my parishioners as well as my students. I think the work is actually very mutually informing. I think I’m a better pastor because I read, to prepare to teach, and then being a pastor helps me to be a better teacher, a more compassionate teacher. Yeah.

Dan: Well, to come back to the program, the certificate that you and two other brilliant colleagues have developed, give us a sense of what’s in that. What are you doing?

J.P.: Sure. In the first course, we’re doing the survey of the entire Christian Bible, Old and New Testaments. You’ll get a healthy dose of both scaffolding to know how to approach different genres, narrative verse, legal material, wisdom material, apocalyptic, prophetic. And almost every class session will both engage the reception history of that material. So how an ancient text functions in the modern setting in multiple ways. And then there’s just connections to the themes that we find in the text. So when we do the prophets, we’re talking about justice. How is justice defined in ancient Israel? It turns out it was pretty economic, right? Are you paying a fair wage? Are you treating your neighbor with dignity and respect? And then looking at how the justice emphasis on justice, the widows and the orphans was carried out in the civil rights movement and in contemporary movements for environmental care. So that’s the first term. In the second term, we go deeper each class on a particular text, and we practice the kinds of methods of reading: feminist literary criticism, historical criticism, historical comparative readings, and in that way, empower students to gain confidence in their ability to read for their context. In  my classes, the emphasis I tell my students, what I’m looking for in your written assignments and your interactions is a robust engagement with the text. It can be messy. It doesn’t have to resolve. But I do want to see that you are wrestling with, captivated by a word, a phrase, an image. I want you to be specific and tell me what your experience is. Are you angered by this? Are you frustrated? Are you grieved by this episode? And I want you to be specific and not just as some students will do, they’ll immediately go to a spiritualized interpretation or make a theological claim, and that’s not what we do in my classes. Let’s look at the text and then come away with, oh, you read it this way. I read that the tradition has read it this way. And you are adults. You get to decide for yourself. So a lot of students need help with that, owning that authority as readers and yeah.

Rachael: Obviously this would be a great offering for pastors or faith leaders or community leaders or people who are encountering these kind of theological questions from your point of view, because I know sometimes people need help imagining themselves in a certain setting, who do you imagine this certificate being for?

J.P.: Yeah, I think that this certificate would be amazing for people who know, who can sense that they have a hunger and a curiosity. They’ve gone as far as they can go with their own reading, and they want kind of, in a sense, a tour guide who can show them, here’s something about the terrain. Here’s something about the trail that I need exposed to me, and then I can find my passion digging further or deeper into something. So I don’t presuppose. Some of my students have never read the Bible, and that’s really fascinating. Some of my students who come in reading it for the first time, their classmates who come from heavily churched backgrounds are like, I’m jealous of you. So I love that we have this range of experiences in the program, in the classroom, and it’s not about academic performance. Yes, I use Chicago Turabian style for the few places where you need to footnote and document, but it is about how robustly have you engaged the text, because I believe you cannot leave that encounter unchanged or unaffected.

Dan: I would love to take this, I mean, again, you are a remarkable teacher and you’re with two colleagues that again, bring unique and different perspectives. Do you want to talk about your fellow colleagues?

J.P.: I could primarily speak about Ron since I’ve known him for a long time. Ron’s actually the reason why I’m at the Seattle School. He connected me with Derek many years ago, years ago and years. He and I have breakfast a couple times a year. And we’ll invariably talk about all the new books that we’ve been reading and wrestling with. I just love how Ron’s mind works and just his presence, right? It’s provocative, it is engaging. And so I feel like that’s the alchemy or the magic you get. I’m a little more buttoned down and I’m more systematic and logical in my approach, but I think we both care about very similar things, right? The word has to make a difference in the real world, on the street with homeless youth or helping us to make sense of all of the heartache, the tragedy of the world, and to give us hope that we are able to make a difference. They’re able to understand with deeper perspective.

Rachael: Which is something I think people coming to do a certificate in Scripture and Society at the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, as you put words through, so well, are going to get inherently, because that’s what we’re asking our students to develop. And it’s just another way of saying, yeah, how does the word speak to the traumatized? And how does trauma even become a lens that helps us read? And I think in some ways that’s what your student was bringing to you. How does the trauma of abandonment actually help us to maybe see something in this text with what we know of its implications? So I think there’s a lot of richness here.

Dan: Well, as much as it’s a good formal category that is Scripture and Society, I think you’ve put it even better in terms of it’s really scripture in the street, the reality of what does it mean with my neighbor and is my neighbor someone who’s a homeless kid on the street and maybe homeless, in part because they’ve been ejected from an environment because their sexual orientation didn’t fit the family’s core theological conviction. That’s a reality for a lot of homeless kids. So you’re already in the realm of how do we bring scripture into the conversation of a broken Christian, so-called, nation and into the reality of broken families and into the reality of homeless kids. How do we bring the reality of scripture into the interplay? And how does the street help us read scripture just as we need to read our own reading. We need to be able to read our own culture and the reading of scripture in the midst of that. And it feels like you all are taking on, shall we say, not merely a monumental task, but you’re taking on a cultural, deeply disruptive and imperative task. And to that end, all we can say is we are so proud, so glad for the privilege of being able to say to folks, check this program out.

J.P.: Dan, your comment just now, the phrase that came to mind is Henri Nouwen and sort of the Wounded Healer. I feel like we the faculty are wounded healers. We’ve found healing, and we want to help our students who may come in with their wounds to find that capacity for wholeness and then to be present in their communities, whether it’s the street or the state house or the pulpit, to also mediate that kind of healing experience.

Dan: So grateful.