Beeson Podcast, Episode #693 Reverend Dr. Susan Eastman Date >>Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University. >>Linebaugh: Welcome to the Beeson Podcast. I am your host for this edition, Jonathan Linebaugh, and it’s my pleasure to be joined today by the Reverand Dr. Susan Eastman. Susan is in town here at Beeson Divinity School because she’s this years Biblical Studies lecturer. And Susan, once we get going, I’d love to hear a little bit about those lectures. But I just wonder, to get started, if you could tell our listeners a little bit about who you are, maybe what you’ve been doing most recently. I know you had a post at Duke Divinity School. And then we can also maybe back up and hear a little bit about how you found yourself called to ministry and how you found yourself in the academy studying Paul, writing on his letters, those kinds of things. >>Eastman: Alright. Well, I’m really glad to be here, thank you. I’ve had such a warm welcome here at Beeson, which has been and continues to be just great. Let’s see, who am I? Well, that’s a question I’ve been asking my whole life long so, I’m not really interested in that question. But I can talk about what I am doing now. I retired from Duke Divinity School in 2022 and basically, I’m enjoying retirement, I’m writing, I am coming down the whole stretch on a commentary on Romans, which is the interpretation series for pastors. And so, I’ve been marinating in Romans for years now. That’s one way of thinking about it. And then I continue to do some public lectures and involvement in different kinds of conferences. I’m going to a conference in Poland, actually, in November called Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem, bringing Muslims and Christians and jews together. And I do Muslim Christian dialogue conferences every year. And then I also have been involved in conferences more focused on Paul and on the New Testament through different organizations and writing about Paul. And I’m active in my local church. I teach Romans. I preach and celebrate periodically. I hike. >>Linebaugh: Lots of wonderful things. >>Eastman: I try to have a balanced life. >>Linebaugh: And I know before you found yourself, at least officially, teaching and writing on Paul, I know you’ve had an interest in theology for a long time. But before it was your job to write on Paul, to teach the New Testament and train people for ministry at Duke, you yourself were called to ministry and had a ministry in parishes kind of across the country, I think maybe some ministry experience abroad as well. I just wonder if we could hear a little bit about that, that sort of phase of ministry before Duke Divinity School. >>Eastman: Yeah, sure. I went to Yale Divinity School in the 70’s and I went there because I was and English lit major in undergrad and I was a Christian, had become a Christian as a teenager, and I was really interested in putting together counseling, pastoral care, and theology. And I found that while I was in my master’s program, I really loved scripture study and theology a little more than I loved the courses in psychology and things like that. Well, that’s a lifelong interest. And out of that, and then coming into an Episcopal church where ire ally heard good gospel preaching and the liturgy together in New York City, I discerned a call to ordination a lot through the feedback I got from other people when I preached. And so, that’s what I did. And I served parishes in Alaska, in Oregon, in Pittsburg, and then moved to North Carolina and went back into my doctorate in New Testament at Duke. Ask me some more that you want to hear about. >>Linebaugh: One of the things that’s always struck me about your work as a Pauline Scholar, and I mean you and I have an interesting overlap, we are both good friends, if the listeners are interested, but we’ve also are both people who have ordained ministries in the Anglican community and have also primarily worked as Pauline scholars in the academy at divinity schools. But I think one of the things that stands out about your work is that there’s just a clear kind of untieable knot between your parish ministry, your pastoral vocation, and your scholarship on Paul and on the New Testament. So, I’m especially interested in that kind of move from full time parish ministry to full time teaching at Duke Divinity School. Did that feel like a change of vocation? Did it feel like the same vocation in a different form? I mean, the listeners might be interested to know that, not a number of years ago, fairly recently there was a collection of essays put out in your honor and I think it's called something like Practicing with Paul, which is all about Pauline theology as exercises in pastoral care and gospel proclamation. And that was such a fitting collection and honored view because you’ve combined these two things. And it wasn’t just one was one phase of life and then you switched to another. But they just seem fully integrated, and I’m interested both in how you discerned that it was time to go from full time in the parish to being a professor but also the extent to which that wasn’t as fundamental of a change as maybe it would sound like to some people. >>Eastman: Okay. In one way, it’s that the ministry is with a different population. In teaching, you’re teaching with younger people, by in large, not always, and at a certain point in your life, and for me I though that teaching in a seminary or divinity school setting was a good fit because I could use all my pastoral experience in forming, shaping, equipping people who are going to go be pastors. But in the parish, you’re ministering with anybody there and that’s all kinds of folks of all ages, all walks of life, all levels of education, and so forth, which is incredibly rich and demanding in a different kind of way. So, that is simply a difference in the setting but of course, the job descriptions are different too. I mean, in Alaska, it included things like insulating the ceiling, the attic above the sanctuary, learning how to run a boat, stuff like that. I would say that one of the big links for me is that the questions that I bring to my work as an academic are questions that arise in ministry so that in the guild of academia, New Testament scholarship, or any guild, often the questions are simply the questions being batted around by other scholars. And so, you form your questions in agreement with or opposition to another scholar. And it’s an inner, it’s a very inner contained conversation that can feel quite separated from the world outside the academy. Doesn’t have to be, but it can feel that way. And my questions come from years of pastoral experience and simply experience, life. Trying to take scripture seriously and think about life. So, in the New Testament, I think about that in relationship to history as well, but not purely in relationship to history. Many New Testament scholars will consider themselves only historians and I am not in that camp. So, I think that is a way they connect and for me, quite seamlessly. But by thinking about it in terms of questions rather than in terms of answers, I think that keeps a little more integrity to the process, if that makes some sense to you. >>Linebaugh: Absolutely. [crosstalk 00:08:42}. That’s a meaningful reflection and I’m especially interested in the lectures you’re here to give. And I don’t want this to be a kind of hard pivot to a new thing because I know the lectures you’re here to give are on one of Paul’s letters and they’re on Paul’s theology and perhaps once we hear a little bit about what the lectures are we can also think a little bit about Paul as a theologian and Paul as a pastor and the way that these inform some of these questions. But maybe just to introduce them, you’re doing a lot while you are here including a podcast for example, surprise, but you were invited to come and give a couple of lectures for our annual Biblical Studies lectures. I know that you’ve chosen to speak on Paul, but I wonder if you can tell us what text you’ve chosen, if there’s a main thing that you’ll be exploring over the course of the lectures, if there’s a kind of thesis or headline news. The lectures will be recorded. Listeners to this podcast can go and find those lectures. But if you could give us a taste of what you’re going to be up to, that would be great. >>Eastman: Okay. The lectures are on Roman. No surprise there. I never do anything unless it’s on Romans these days because I’m writing a commentary on Romans. And my topic is really God’s son in the flesh. And what I noted, this is a teaser, in my work on Romans is that in three places in Romans, Paul speaks of Jesus in the flesh. It’s very interesting. In Romans 1:3, he speaks of Jesus “descended from the seed of David according to the flesh, resurrected son of God empowered according to the spirit of holiness by the resurrection of the dead.” In 8:3, he says “God and light of the weakness of the law, weakened by the flesh, powerlessness of the law, sending His son in the likeness of the flesh of sin, condemned sin in the flesh.” And then in 9:5, not long after, he speaks of, well he speaks of his Jewish relatives “according to the flesh, from whom comes the Christ according to the flesh.” So, that got me very interested in the structure of Romans 1-11, in particular. The theme of the incarnate son of God as, in some ways, structuring the letter and it got me interested in what role that plays in the salvation of both Jews and Gentiles because that’s a theme all through Romans right from Romans 1:16-17, “The gospel is the power of God through salvation for all who believe, the Jew first and also the Greek.” He keeps repeating this emphasis on Jew and Greek or Gentile through Romans. And so, I was interested in Jesus’ identification with David, in particular, only mentioned in Romans. David doesn’t appear in any of Paul’s other letters. Only in Romans three times and key points. And then Jesus as sinful flesh, which I take as a summation of the gospel in Romans 1-8. So, that’s what the lectures are about. The first one will focus on Romans 8:3 as a summary of the incarnate son’s solidarity in exchange with humanity, all humanity under sin. I see pattern of solidarity between Adam and Christ. That’s why I did the sermon on Adam and Christ because I didn’t have time to talk about it that [inaudible 00:12:23] sermon. But other places in Roman 1-8. We’ll track that. We’ll track Jesus’ solidarity with sinners, really, and with those under sin. And then, we’ll look at in the next, on Thursday, we’ll look at His solidarity with David and how that relates to His solidarity with all sinners and then the pattern of exchange between Christ and sinful flesh and then the pattern of exchange between Jews and Gentiles learning solidarity with one another in Christ in 9-11. So, that’s a teaser. >>Linebaugh: It’s a teasing teaser, I think. I’m certainly looking forward to hearing them and I hope people will tune in. One of the things that your scholarship has been marked by, and you could put this in one of two ways, I mean it as a compliment, has been you’ve had diverse conversation partners in your scholarship, but you’ve also had a pretty singular intense focus on the writings of apostle Paul and you’ve put Paul in conversation with his philosophical contemporaries, with modern scientists, with the theological tradition, lots of conversation partners. But Paul is sort of always there as the orienting point. And you were just with a few of our students and you had this phrase about the context in which you grew up where you said it was a transition that sort of inoculated you to the grace of God and you contrasted that with Paul as the reason why the language of grace is so prominent and has a particular emphasis and shape in the Christian theological tradition. And I wonder if you could just give us some sense of what role Paul has played, both in moving from having been inoculated against the grace of God to being someone who’s giving their life to studying it and proclaiming it. And also, how you understand Paul’s letters structured by celebrating focused on what we mean by grace. I mean, this is just such a drum beat in your own writing and ministry. I’m wondering what role Paul plays personally in your ministry, professionally as an academic. >>Eastman: You know, I don’t know that Paul played a role in my conversion, so to speak. It was really that I was just haunted, you know, the hound of heaven was after me was really how I felt. And then, I sometimes tell this in sermons, so I one night, I’m a teenager, and I thought I should read the Bible. And I went looking for a Bible in the house and there was and old King James. That was all. You know, never used, on the bookshelf. And I pulled it off the shelf and I started reading in Genesis. I thought, I’ll just read the Bible. Well, I will tell you, I didn’t get too far. You know, I don’t really recommend that as the way to try to start out reading the Bible. And then I think when I got involved in a church and I heard sermons that were from Paul, then maybe that’s when that began. But it wasn’t a conscience thing on my part that I started going to Paul, reading sermons on Paul, Paul’s letters I should say. But I always preached those. When I was preaching, I preached those. I think that then it gets, I think that in different churches where I heard preaching that was really kind of reformation preaching influenced by Paul, maybe that’s really where I got that focus as well. I think, you know, it just occurs to me, one of the things I studied when I was studying infant development, child development is what’s called joint attention. And joint attention is a stage in development. Initially, the baby looks at the parent. It’s the face to face, eye to eye mirroring between parent and child that’s so powerful and so important and amazing to watch once you pay attention. Then there comes a point, and at that point, if the parent points at something else, the child continues to look at the parent’s face. They don’t follow where the parent is looking, or anybody is looking. They’re looking at the face. Joint attention begins when the child follows where the parent is pointing or looking and looks at a third object. So, it’s a shared looking at something else, not just looking face to face, eye to eye. I’m not looking at Paul and Paul looks at me. You know, like, I look at Jesus and Jesus looks at me. No. Paul and I are together looking at what God has done in Jesus Christ. We’re looking at Jesus Christ. So, it is that shared joint attention with the apostle, the real content of the good news, and I hear it that way and I want to be joined in that focus. I just thought of that this very moment here in public. And in doing that, in scholarly work, I’m able to do that so that Paul is sharpening my vision in that way. If I were working on the gospels, I’d have to get all involved in debates around the historical Jesus, which is something I’m not really interested in. That’s fine for others but it’s just not for me. I’d rather just read the gospels and then have really studied Paul in depth. But it sharpens my perception of what really matters, the subject matter of the gospel, which is not Paul, you know. He’s like John the Baptist pointing away from himself. >>Linebaugh: “Behold the lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world.” >>Eastman: Yeah. Yeah. >>Linebaugh: One of the ways you’ve done that, I mean, Dr Eastman’s written a number of books Recovering Paul’s Mother Tongue, Paul and the Person. You’ve just had a collection of your essays come out called “Oneself in Another.” But in Paul and the Person in particular, you, this is an interesting example of how you focus on Paul but have multiple conversation partners. You’re thinking about what makes a human person a person, questions that are perennial but also very much acute pitch in our contemporary context about human value, self-worth, what gives a person dignity, do they have dignity only once they’ve met certain criteria, whether those happen to be can they lose that dignity if they don’t meet those criteria anymore. You’ve fought with Paul deeply about that precisely so that by focusing not on yourself or the person themselves, but on the one that Paul points to, Christ in him crucified. You can speak to a human person, announce their dignity and value, but it’s anchored in what you’ve just called that joint objective attention. There’s something about the lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world, the crucified Christ that answers the deep human question, what am I worth, when am I loved. And if I remember that book rightly, you root that in Philippians 2 and Christ participation in the human condition, which then sort of crates this human participation in Christ to kind of Galatians 2, “I’ve been crucified with Christ.” But how did something like that happen? I mean, how does a scholarly project that has these conversation partners, is reading Paul in relationship to such an urgent pastoral question, a human being basically saying, am I worth anything, does anything love me? So, it’s academic, it’s pastoral, it’s exegetical. Where does a project like that really come from? Because you don’t get there just by saying, let me see what scholars are talking about, I’ll join the conversation, take sides and we’ll see what happens. >>Eastman: A very wise person once said to me, listen to your life. So, I suppose that’s part of an answer. I’ve just followed where my curiosity and passions are. I mean, that’s that. I could say that I sought to, and I do still often seek to open up the windows and the doors and the guild to let in fresh air by having conversation partners other than each other. And I think my conversation partners are my life experience and the people I know outside of the guild as well as inside of the guild and being a parent and spouse and all that stuff, you know, life. But I do think that something, my way of doing that, and I’m not the only one, of putting conversations across disciplines. It’s very tricky. It’s wrought.it opens up new questions and it opens up the same questions from different angles and then that brings Paul’s voice or any, for me it’s Paul’s voice, into conversations, contemporary conversations around personhood that are fought and intense and important right now. And if you’re not engaging with the other people asking those questions, why should they listen to you? I mean, you know. So, it comes from my own questioning, my own experience, my own passions. You have to ask yourself, you think, where does this interest come from, and often it’s a bit mysterious. You know, why do I have to write about this, somebody else has to write about that? but also, wanting to get out beyond the boundaries around Pauline scholarship to bring this to bear, to engage with folks who do very different things. I think that comes maybe from having been a pastor and a preacher. So, what really excites me is when I get a letter from say, an Occupational Therapist who’s read Paul and the Person and says it has really changed the way they think about their work. To me, that’s very exciting. You know, I think that’s who I’m writing for in part, you know. But to do that kind of work requires more than quoting Ramachandran, you know. Requires studying and it’s fought in these different fields that one can never become an expert in, pretend to be an expert in, but at least right some questions. And so, for me, that meant I read Epictetus, who I adore. I really like Epictetus. He’s so funny. He’s very perceptive. And I weren’t a Christian, I would go with him, you know. But I am a Christian and I’m glad of that. But he’s really sharp and I decided how to do this. Do I do this with all stoics? Thought a lot about personhood. There were theologians and theological anthropologist, I mean they did, you know, and they thought how a person is constituted and so how do I do that? And I finally decided I’d just have one conversation partner and then it would be sharper. So, to put Paul and Epictetus together. The other is, you know, the stuff I’ve already mentioned around the development of persons. So, how does that happen? It happens by a lot of study, a lot of work, trying to find conversation partners. Hard to find conversation partners who bridge these different disciplines and doing that as best you can. I don’t know what else to say about that. >>Linebaugh: It’s helpful to hear. It’s encouragement. The result of it is just one of the most meaningful kinds of gifts. It’s of the highest quality in terms of academic writing but it also has the character of sort of an announcement of the gospel. It says to the hurting person that’s wondering what they’re worth, “Behold the lamb of God who loved you and gave himself for you.” And that answers the question of what you’re worth and I’ve read that book, and both learned from it and heard the good news in it. S0- >>Eastman: Thank you. That’s the best. >>Linebaugh: I’m grateful for that. And I think that leads me to what really is my last question which is that many of our listeners are students at Beeson, they’re alumni, they’re people who are considering divinity school, they’re somewhere in the stage of discerning whether they’re going to or maybe they’re currently training for, or maybe they’re actually currently in pastoral ministry. And you’re a person with years of pastoral ministry experience, both doing it and also educating and training people for it. And I just wonder if you might have any encouragement, anything you might want to share. And that can be general, but if it’s also anything that’s more particular from your study of Paul or from your own pastoral experience that you might want students or ministers to hear. >>Eastman: Okay. Well, I would say preach the gospel. Don’t worry about you’re saying the same gospel over and over again because people don’t hear it anywhere else. I mean, they may hear it other places. Sometimes I quote Leonard Cohen songs and they’re amazing. For example, they’ll recognize there’s a shaping of the imagination, the social imaginary, a shaping of the way of seeing the world. I sometimes talk about, for Ash Wednesday, I’ve preached about putting the cross on our frontal lobes so that it’s not how people see us, it’s how we see the world is how we process, is how we perceive, how we judge or don’t judge. And so that when we’re beginning to have our way, our mental and emotional apparatus shaped by the gospel, then we’re going to see in that way and that’s the goal. That’s my goal for students and future clergy. I would say that you’re bound to fail. If God is gracious to you, you will fail and then you’ll learn that God is the one that makes your ministry happen. If you don’t [inaudible 00:27:18], then you know. There’s a real paradox in the job of being a pastor that’s different from other jobs. Other jobs, you can say I did this, this, and this. I’ve done my job. As a pastor, you do all the things you do but really has to happen is something only God can do. So, you know, you’re setting the stage for the Holy Spirit, but you are not the Holy Spirit. You’re setting the stage for the work of Jesus Christ, but God forbid you should be the Messiah, you know. You’re not. That’s a bad idea. So, there’s is this sense in which what you do is both immeasurable in a positive sense and immeasurable in a negative sense. You can never have done enough, but then on the other hand, God’s the one who does it. So, it’s a very odd vocation. It’s not quite like any other because of that underlying sense that it all times, apart from Jesus, I can do nothing. I think that’s a really profound lesson in the ministry and a good one to hold onto because of course, the other side is that God does act, and you get to be the privileged witness, very often, to things that you can’t share with other people of how God has acted in people’s lives. It’s a great privilege both to hear the wonderful things and also the grief and the sorrow and to be with people in that is, I think, a great privilege. Those are some things I would say. If God has called you to it, then God will bring fruit. I have funny, sort of funny story from when I began my first parish ministry in Alaska in a very remote place and back before internet or any of that, so it was very isolated. There were no time zones like my time zone around. And when the weather was bad, there was no mail, and nobody got on or off the island. So, you know, and I was thinking, what am I doing? Why am I here? And I was talking on the phone with my sister long distance, and I was telling her how I felt, and I felt just you know, like totally not up to the task. And she said, do any of the other clergy you know feel this way? Have they felt this way? And I thought back about over all the clergy who’d had such an influence on me, and I didn’t think about what I was saying. I said, the best ones do. She laughed and then I laughed. And you know, I think there is that kind of ongoing lesson. So, I guess it’s what I said in the sermon, you know, we don’t hold grace, but grace holds us. We are held. We are held by God. When I was at Yale many years ago, I had a job typing letters for one of the faculty on a Dictaphone. Tells you how long ago it was. And I remember one letter in which he said, “The older I get, the more I think that the only thing that matters is that God holds us in the palm of His hand.” And he was a, you know, famous scholar but that’s what he said. I think things get simpler as you get older. Yeah. So, I guess we are held, and I think clergy, pastors need to know that they’re not the healers, they’re held. They need to hear the grace of God over and over and over again for themselves so they can preach it to others, otherwise they get bitter and that’s not good. But they need ways in which they hear that for themselves. >>Linebaugh: Well, thank you. I can’t think of a much more encouraging word to include to preach the gospel knowing that the grace of God, that sometimes we don’t reel we can hold onto, always holds onto us. And I’m encouraged by that. Thank you again. Listeners, thankyou for tuning in. I would encourage you to find Dr Eastman’s writings on Paul, Paul and the Person, Oneself in Another, and Paul’s Mother Tongue. You will find academically, exegetically rich engagements with Paul, but especially readings of Paul that announce the grace of God that holds us in the palm of God’s hands. Susan, thank you for sharing that with us. Thank you for being with us. It’s a joy to have you. >>Eastman: Thank you so much John. Enjoyed being here. >>Rob Willis: You’ve been listening to the Beeson podcast; coming to you from the campus of Samford University. Our theme music is by Advent Birmingham. Our announcer is Mike Pasquarello. Our engineer is Rob Willis. And our show host is Doug Sweeney. For more episodes and to subscribe, visit www.BeesonDivinity.com/podcast. You can also find the Beeson Podcast on iTunes and Spotify.