Daniel Eng is an author, professor, and Ph.D. candidate. He has a passion for serving the Asian American Church, and is a member of our SOLA Network editorial board. He was once a pastor at an Asian American church, but is now planning to use his expertise to teach and write to better serve our broader Asian American Christian community.
I spoke with Daniel about his upcoming commentary, Christian scholarship and academia, Biblical hermeneutics, and Asian American representation. I hope our conversation encourages you not only to think carefully about our faith, but to faithfully apply the Gospel of Jesus Christ to our lives. Watch our interview on YouTube or listen to the audio on Spotify and Podcasts.
Editor’s Note: Below are excerpts of the conversation. It has been condensed and edited for clarity and length.
Aaron Lee: What I appreciate about your [online] articles is that you bring it down to the church level, and you try to speak specifically to Asian American church contexts. It shows that it’s what you’re passionate about. You’re actually writing a new commentary on James and it intersects with this. Can you tell me about that?
Daniel Eng: This is a project that’s going to be with Intervarsity Press called The New Testament in Color. It’s meant to be a one-volume commentary on the entire New Testament, and they call it The New Testament in Color because it’s written by a team of minority scholars. So there’s a chapter on each biblical book, so I’m writing the chapter on James.
I was told, “Daniel, you just write from where you are, from where you’re standing.” So for me, [that’s as] a Chinese American in England, but now back in the States, and I’m seeing it from my perspective.
Editors of commentaries are asked, “How do I get diverse voices on my syllabus?” So the idea is that here is one volume with 20-something diverse voices for the classroom, but also we’re aiming to write for those in the church — people who are preaching, teaching, or studying the Bible.
My doctor of ministry is in Asian American ministry, so I’ve been able to engage with a lot of practical ministries, and thinking through what it means to have contextualized ministry to Asian Americans. So this is a project that helped me marry some of my passions: one is for the biblical text and the other is for the Asian American community. Writing this has been edifying for me to be able to serve the church this way. I’ve been studying [the book of] James for my Ph.D., so I was invited to do this. I’m really excited about this project. I think it’s going to really serve the church well.
I’ll give you an example. When James writes in 1:1, he says, “To the 12 tribes in the diaspora.” A biblical epistle, it starts off with the author and then to the recipient. So when James writes to the 12 tribes of the diaspora, he means people who are scattered away from their homeland.
As soon as I hear diaspora, I’m thinking immigration. I’m thinking of refugees. I’m thinking of marginalization, racism — I’m thinking all the things that I’m familiar with and that becomes personal to me. As I’m writing through this commentary, I’m thinking about these minorities who are outside of Palestine, who are facing discrimination because they’re different. People don’t know how to interact with them because they look different or they might have different customs — and so I know something about that. So it was really good to think through that and to think, “Okay, what, you know, why is James writing it this way? And what are we learning about this through the lens of James writing to the people that are going to be reading his letter?”
And so I’ll give you an example of what that looks like. In James 4, James writes about “why do you have fights and quarrels among you” and things like that, and it’s because you are friends with the world and not friends with God. James goes on and gives them a remedy for their enmity with God. He tells them to submit yourself to God, you know, and to humble yourself before God, and he says something really poignant in James 4:8: Come near to God, and He will come near to you.
Some of your translations might say: “Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.” That’s really poignant for me. Because as I was thinking about that, I’m thinking these are people who are outside Jerusalem, they’re far away from the temple. And they’re feeling the stigma that they can’t worship God the way that their people are meant to. They’re so far away from the center of their faith, and they’re ashamed. And you think you think, “Oh, well, I can’t be a proper Jew.”
But James writes this: Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. So for a Jew who’s far away from Jerusalem, facing this minority experience, feeling like they don’t belong anywhere, and yet God and James says that you have an opportunity for God to be near to you. That means a lot to them. And I think it would mean a lot to us as we think through our own experiences of what we are ashamed of and how we’re feeling like we are separated from God, too.
Aaron Lee: How is this writing process for you? Are you taking the entire book of James and looking at it through that lens? How does this process come together for you?
Daniel Eng: The way that the process goes for me for a project like this is to think about it with two ladders. So let’s say we’re on the ground [in one area], and the ground level is first-century culture and first-century situations. And then where we’re at is 21st century California. We’re on the ground [in a separate area].
How do we get from this ground to this other ground? So one of the things that we’re trying to determine is what’s going on here on the [first-century] ground, then we’re going to go up the ladder and say, “Okay, is there a principle that we’re learning about? Is there an overall principle that is timeless, that is true for everyone about God and how he relates to his people?”
An example might be that God keeps his promises to his people. So we have Abraham and his childless existence in biblical times on the ground [on this side], and God makes a promise to Abraham. So we go up [the ladder] and we’re in the clouds and we say, “Okay, God makes a promise to his people; God keeps his promises to his people.”
So on the other end, we start coming down the ladder on the 21st-century side, and we say, “God isn’t promising us the same thing he’s promising Abraham. But when he does make a promise to us, he’s intending to keep it. God by nature is a promise keeper.” So when we land on the 21st-century side, we’re saying “If God is promising something in Scripture, then we know he’s going to keep it, even when we’re not faithful.”
We have to think about it as two ladders. And preachers have to do this all the time, where we have to figure out how to get to a concept, a principle that would be timeless. What are we learning about God? And then how do I explain what this looks like in the 21st-century church, in America, or at work?
Aaron Lee: We do have pastors, preachers, and scholars that are familiar with this concept. How would you talk to collegians who are trying to do this? How can they get better at being able to get that truth and bring it to their own personal life?
Daniel Eng: One of the things is to be able to start thinking about that “cloud”: What are we learning about God? Because ultimately, the Bible is not about us. For a lot of people that has to be a newsflash: the Bible is not about you. The Bible is about God and what he is doing.
So when David fights Goliath, it’s not about the kind of giants you’re facing in your life. So at the point where the Israelites are fighting the Philistines, there’s
this idea: What are we learning about God here? So a lot of times when we’re looking at the Bible, we need to think, “Okay, are we learning about God’s character and how he relates to people?”
Aaron Lee: From all your articles that I’ve read, it’s very clear to me that you’re a scholar and that you’re knowledgeable, but you do find ways to bring them down to practical church issues for collegians and laymen.
You actually wrote an article [for SOLA], “6 Movies on Disney+ For Discussing Biblical Values with Your Family.” You’re able to bring theology back down to people that just watch Disney+ and challenge us to think about it in different ways. How did that article come about?
Daniel Eng: Once lockdown started, we realized we’re all at home. It’s really tempting just to let the kids watch TV all day, so I was thinking, “We probably can be a little bit more purposeful about what the kids watch and [maybe we can] even have a fruitful conversation about something.
We happen to have Disney+ and I’ve [already] seen a lot of these movies, which for many grownups was a draw of Disney+. It’s not the new stuff; it’s the stuff that we were familiar with, and we have access to this entire Disney, Star Wars, and Marvel Universe library. So I was just thinking, “What do I let my kids watch? Is there something we can discuss?”
So I actually did that with a couple of movies I highlighted. One of them was The Sound of Music and the other was Inside Out.
I’m not saying that Disney is biblical. I’m just saying that there are opportunities to have some themes that we can discuss fruitfully and even things where we can say, “Okay, how is this not biblical?” So I just made it and ran with it. I wanted to have them in different genres, so I had one classic Disney, one Star Wars, one Marvel, and so on.
Aaron Lee: So [as of this recording], Mulan is coming out. There’s a dialogue about representation, and how this is an important thing. How should we as Christians think about representation, while also understanding this is secular entertainment?
Daniel Eng: Mulan actually makes me think about representation that has happened throughout my life and how that made me connect more. In mass media, we’re given messages about what is normative, what is beautiful, what is praiseworthy, and things like that. So for many of us who don’t fit the description of what we’re seeing on the screen, we get the message that we’re not good enough or not accepted. We’re not beautiful or we’re not valuable. That last one — “not valuable” — means that we don’t have worth.
So for many of us, especially for me as an Asian American, whenever I see someone on the screen, that is not just for me but is for the general public to celebrate, that’s something that I celebrate, too. For some people in my generation, that was someone like Michael Chang, the tennis player, or people who are a little bit later, it might have been someone like Michelle Kwan, the figure skater. I can name different things that helped people to connect a little bit more and say, “That connects with me and my heart.” So shows like Fresh Off the Boat or Kim’s Convenience have really reached us in ways that others couldn’t. It was celebrating something that the world could see — that an Asian American, not just Asian but Asian American, would be celebrated and accepted and shown to be worthy and that meant a lot.
Aaron Lee: Daniel, thank you so much for speaking to these issues and for making the time to do this. I do want to respect your time. Can you just quickly tell me about your position in Portland and how people can pray for you? If people are going to see your name — I’m sure more often and when your book comes out — how can we be praying for you, for your new position, and even for this forthcoming title?
Daniel Eng: Sure. My position is Assistant Professor of New Testament [at Western Seminary in Portland]. I’m going to be teaching Greek and I’ll be teaching New Testament courses. Pray that God would continue to equip me. This is what I’ve been working towards. I’m a full-time prof now, and suddenly I’m feeling like, “Man, this is too big for me.”
Pray that God is going to equip me. [My students] are people who are preparing for ministry. Some of them are in full-time ministry already and they want to get equipped. Some of them are looking at being a pastor, chaplain, counselor, or leading a prison ministry or women’s Bible study and things like that. So it’s not just ministering to these people but to the people who they are going to be serving. And I’m feeling the weight of all that, and so pray for God to equip me, pray for God to use me — because it’s not about me. It’s about his church and how I get to be part of that.
Pray for my family to have a good transition to Portland. It’s a new place we’re going. We need to find community, places to serve, school for the kids — all those things.
Also, I’m not finished with my Ph.D. yet. I’m actually very close to submitting. So pray for favor with my examiners that I would pass and be able to commit myself full-time to serving the students at Western Seminary.
We are committed to serving and serving the Chinese American church specifically, so pray for what that would look like for us in Oregon and how my whole family can have an impact on the local church but also the church-at-large. And for the New Testament in Color publication. It’s looking good and we’re looking forward to seeing how it’s going to impact others.