4. Dr. Aaron Higashi (Bible Scholar) – Serving Up Scripture: How to Interpret the Bible for Yourself and Others

🎙️ 4. Dr. Aaron Higashi (Bible Scholar) – Serving Up Scripture: How to Interpret the Bible for Yourself and Others

What if the Bible doesn’t actually present one unified doctrine of hell — and what if the answers you were given weren’t actually grounded in the text itself?

In this rich, accessible conversation, Alexis Rice dives deep with Dr. Aaron Higashi — biblical scholar, teacher, and TikTok theologian — about how Scripture actually works when you take it seriously: historically, linguistically, culturally, and personally.

If you’ve ever wondered why Christians disagree on hell, why pastors sometimes warn about Bible scholars, or how you can read the Bible without letting someone else’s interpretation do your thinking for you — this episode is for you.

What we cover

• Why the Bible does not contain one settled doctrine of hell
• The original words behind “hell” — Sheol, Hades, Gehenna, Tartarus — and why they matter
• How cultural and linguistic translation shapes theology
• Why people fear biblical scholarship — and how scholarship can actually liberate you
• The role of interpretation, bias, and your own voice in reading Scripture
• The relationship between pastors, scholars, and lay people

Key takeaways

• “The Bible is a multi-vocal text” — written across cultures, times, languages, and perspectives.
• No single biblical language term maps perfectly onto the English idea of “hell.”
• Interpretation always involves the interpreter — no one escapes bias, even if they claim to.
• Biblical scholars aren’t trying to take faith away — they’re trying to give access to tools to read the Bible well.
• You don’t have to accept a received interpretation — you are capable of engaging Scripture thoughtfully.

About our guest

Dr. Aaron Higashi is a biblical scholar and teacher whose work bridges academic theology and accessible real-world faith conversations. He serves as “nerd in residence” at @thebiblefornormalpeople, and brings humor, clarity, and depth to issues people care about most.

Resources & People Mentioned

🔖 Books & Study Materials
📘 Serving Up Scripture: How to Interpret the Bible for Yourself and Others — by Dr. Jennifer Garcia Bashaw & Dr. Aaron Higashi (Out Jan 27, 2026) 

Pre-Order/Order: https://a.co/d/ihDX060

👩‍🏫 Other Voices & Scholars

✨ @thebiblefornormalpeople — community bridging scholarship and everyday readers
✨ @jgbashaw — Dr. Jennifer Garcia Bashaw
✨ @maklelan — Dan McClellan, Biblical Scholar: Data Over Dog

Transcript

Aaron Higashi (00:00)
the Bible does not present a single unified settled doctrine of hell. and this is not an interpretive issue, this is just a matter of textual fact. It does not have a single unified definitive picture of hell.

And so anybody at any point in your life who's ever presented you a single unified definitive picture of hell is either mistaken or they are lying to you. And it's likely that they've been taught to lie to you because they were lied to as well. you take nothing else away from a conversation about hell with a biblical would be high point takeaway.

The Bible is a multi vocal text. It was written by many different people in different times and different places in different languages. And it contradicts itself. It has different opinions for example, what happens to people after they die. And the different terms, this gets flattened out in English. You pick up a Bible translated in English, you just see hell, hell, hell, hell, hell.

But underneath the surface in the original languages, this is discussing many different ideas, which sometimes contradict each other on exactly what's gonna happen to

Alexis Rice (01:19)
welcome to the sacred slope friends where the slippery slope meets sacred ground. I'm your host Alexis Rice and today it's going to be really interesting. I hope that you're ready to think and to do some really important analyzing of what you were taught growing up regardless of where you are now. Even if you were not raised in Christianity even if you were not

practicing Christianity now, the fact is, is that it is more crucial than ever, I think, to become more biblically literate and become more biblically fluent. And one of the reasons why is because whether or not we like it, we are living in a moment where the United States and also the world is being really largely impacted.

by certain interpretations of our faith that is really harming a lot of people. because a lot of these people currently have power. I want to equip you with knowledge and power and understanding

so today we're gonna talk to Dr. Aaron Higashi.

I have been following Aaron's work for years and man, he's helped me so much deconstruct and really analyze my Christian faith from the lens of a Bible scholar. really before COVID, know, things were different. And now it is so cool. Something that's really come out of the gifts of social media, of Zoom, of podcasting.

are that we now have more access to people who, as Aaron says, were in the ivory towers, the Bible scholars. What do these scholars think? What do they talk about? What do they believe? What do they discern? How do they interpret the Bible? And so I'm so excited to talk to him today. We're going to dive through hell a pretty long portion of this. So I really am excited for you to do that.

Did you know that there are four words in the original languages for hell in the Bible that were just translated all into English? there are two Bible scholars that I now have had on and they wrote a new book and it's coming out very soon. And this book, I believe is a mandatory reading, whether or not you're Christian, whether or not you were raised in the Christian faith, it is about biblical interpretation. called Serving Up Scripture.

and it's called How to Interpret the Bible for Yourself and Others. it's by Dr. Jennifer Garcia Bashaw who I have had on the podcast before. Go look for her episode. It'll be in the show notes. And Dr. Aaron Higashi now. I'm going to read to you a little bit about why this book is so important. So this talks about our biases. And on page 35, it talks about navigating biases. And it says, failing to recognize our biases.

Perhaps the worst way to handle our biases is to fail to recognize they exist at all. This failure is commonly expressed in a variety of ways. People might say, I'm not interpreting the I'm just reading what it says. Or they might say, that's not my view, that's the view given in the text. Or similarly, that's not my view, that's God's view. More simply, a person might say the Bible is X,

In each of these instances, the person is denying their own biases by denying their subjective role in the process of interpretation. The person is holding up a book and acting like they're not involved in the process of drawing meaning from it. But remember, interpretation is the result of asking interpretive questions and our biases, culture, preconceptions, demographics,

are what give us the initial motivation to ask and answer these interpretive questions. No biases, no interpretation. As a result, each of the above hypothetical statements is false. The person isn't just reading the text, they're interpreting it just like everyone else. view being expressed is not the view of the text, it's the view of the person who is interpreting the text. The Bible doesn't say X, the person

is using the Bible to say X. Would a person deny their own biases? It could just be a matter of innocent ignorance. A person might not know what biases exist that would influence their interpretation of the Bible. Perhaps they've never thought about it. No one's ever told them. And they've never read a handy book like this one. Or maybe they have been trained to deny their biases.

They've grown up in a context or have been educated in a context where denials of biases are commonplace. And so in fact, the denial of bias has become their bias, or perhaps even more alarmingly, they're denying their biases for the sake of power. Because of the prominence of the Bible in Western culture and in Christian, Christian adjacent spaces, there's a certain social power in the idea of saying objectively correct things about the Bible.

It's much easier to convince people your interpretation is objectively correct if you deny any subjective role in coming to that interpretation. You'll often find a denial of a person's biases paired with the idea that there's only one correct interpretation of any given passage in the Bible. So this is available right now for pre-order. It comes out on the 27th of January. So

I highly encourage you guys to get a copy of this I think this is really going to help us increase biblical literacy, which honestly is influencing our culture, our our faith, our policies, our laws. This is very important that all of us get serious about this. This is not a nice to have. This is a must have right now in this time.

All right, without further

Alexis Rice (07:45)
Welcome back, friends. Today I'm so excited to introduce to you Dr. Aaron Higashi. Hi, Aaron.

Aaron Higashi (07:52)
Hi, Gen Z wave, I got.

Alexis Rice (07:55)
Hello.

Aaron is a respected biblical scholar and teacher whose work sits at the intersection of academic theology and accessible real world faith conversations. He holds in philosophy from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, an MA in biblical studies from Providence College, a master of sacred theology from Chicago Seminary.

and a PhD in Bible culture and hermeneutics from Chicago Theological Seminary with a focus on Hebrew Bible. That is needless to say, I think you've studied the Bible a little bit. a little familiar with the two Corinthians, right?

Aaron Higashi (08:30)
Yeah, that's a lot. That's a lot to say. It's a lot of pieces of paper.

A little bit. I've read a couple of passages here and

Yes.

Alexis Rice (08:45)
Aaron serves as the nerd in residence at the Bible for Normal People, where he creates courses and videos and digital resources for everyday people, wrestling with the Bible, with church and theology in transition.

He's widely known on TikTok under the handle Aaron.Higashi where his teaching brings context, humor and scholarship to the scroll. He's also a contributor to the Bible, God's stories as told by God's children. You guys, I have this book. I love this book for my kids and I tell everybody about this book.

I also have the adult version that came from the kids version that I've been reading Aaron's also published a Bible commentary, first and second Samuel for normal people, a guide to prophets, kings, some pretty terrible men. He lives in Arizona with his wife and three daughters.

Aaron Higashi (09:24)
Very

makes it seem so much more impressive when you say it. don't, I don't think about it like that.

Alexis Rice (09:41)
Well, your And thank you for taking the work that you've done and blessing people on the internet that you don't know and most of them you'll never meet faith crises, faith audits, faith shifts, deconstruction, or just helping people in their faith in general. So thank you for helping us get public access the Bible.

Aaron Higashi (10:01)
So happy to do it. This is why I'm here. This is why I'm doing what I'm doing. So I'm so happy it's helping anybody.

Alexis Rice (10:07)
tell us a little bit about your faith life and what it was that made you decide to make theology your life's work.

Aaron Higashi (10:16)
Today I am a Methodist, so mainline Protestant tradition. That's why I go to a Methodist church when the spirit calls me to attend church. I'm also in an interfaith marriage, so my wife is Jewish and my children, insofar as tiny little babies can be anything at all, they're Jewish too. We practice Judaism primarily in the home. I grew up in sort of a, my father's not religious, my mother was, took us to church. I ended up at like a

a non-denominational mega church in Colorado Springs, Colorado, like a stone's throw from Focus on the Family where we talking about. One of those gigantic churches that has like 10,000 people and half the congregation watches it on TVs from like satellite stations and stuff like that. I ended up really hating that. It was a terrible experience at the youth level. It was all, don't be an atheist because they get addicted to drugs and depressed. Don't have sex before you're married because you'll lose.

that magical purity spark that for some reason you need. Vote Republican when you get a chance. And that was like all the entire content of the gospel was summed up in those three things. So it was very shallow and not that hard to walk away from when I found it to be dissatisfying. And that's kind of what I did. I got in college, I got really interested in, well, I first went to college to do creative writing. I wanted to write science fiction fantasy books.

And then I failed out because I wasn't any good at that. And I circled back and got a degree in philosophy and got really interested in questions about ethics in particular. Like, what is a good life and how do we decide the difference between good and evil? And that's what led me to biblical interpretation because I found it so fascinating that people could take a book, an old book, a book that at the time I didn't care much about and get ethics from it. I was in college during like the Bush administration. So

you know, our public policy, it seemed, was decided in some way by the Bible. People would cite the Bible for their opposition to same-sex marriage, for their opposition to abortion, for the war in Iraq. you know, our entire response to 9-11 seemed to be guided by the Bible. it was fascinating slash kind of terrifying to me that people were using a book to get their ethics on a public scale. And so,

I went to graduate school to study the Bible to learn how this happened. It seemed like magic to me that you could open a book and it could tell you how to live your life. I wanted to know how that worked. so it wasn't even really for the Bible that I went, but to be able to participate in conversations about ethics. And at the time I was kind of just agnostic and apathetic towards religion and probably more apathetic than agnostic. Like I was more that I just didn't care.

than I was committed to their being or not being a God or something like that. But the academic study of the Bible, which I didn't even really knew existed until I got there, until I showed up on the first day, just blew me away that this could be studied rigorously and methodologically, that it could be studied critically, that there were tools that you could bring to bear on the text, that there were different methods that you could employ in the interpretation of the Bible, that the Bible isn't just a handbook

of doctrines that have already been settled and answered, but rather it's a text full of tensions and contradictions. And it's really us as interpreters that gets theology out of a text. I mean, that opened my eyes to being a participant in the Bible rather than just a passive receiver of the Bible. that was enormously empowering. And so I went on for more degrees in Bible, sort of shifted my focus. No, I really want to dig as deep as I can. And so I got that

Alexis Rice (13:37)
Hmm.

Aaron Higashi (13:47)
the PhD in hermeneutics is just the fancy philosophy word for interpretation. So in biblical interpretation basically. And that's what eventually led me to TikTok that in COVID there's nothing else to do. So I was locked inside with tiny babies and had a phone and that was it. So I got online to share some of the things that had excited me and that I had the opportunity to learn with other people who hadn't had the opportunity.

Alexis Rice (14:00)
Yeah.

speaking of your TikTok I love about them is that I learn a lot, but they're smart and they're funny and they're witty you're not throw your personality out there. they're reaching people who have never heard this stuff in church, what is driving your passion besides the fact that it was COVID and

you you could have stopped. ⁓ Yeah, exactly. so what is driving this passion for continuing your public And then also, why did pastors warn us about Bible scholars so much?

Aaron Higashi (14:32)
I could have that's true. I don't have a mask anymore, so.

my passion for biblical scholarship. fundamentally, it comes from having had that experience of the scholarship being empowering, and then wanting to share that empowering experience with other people. It was to learn that I could do stuff with the Bible was just a transformational

insight for me. And I wanted to share with you too, can be the captain of your own, you know, interpretive voyage, you can do that too. so it's primarily that passion that I wanted to share with other people. there's also the fact that, biblical studies is one of the most ivory tower disciplines imaginable. It is chock full of very smart, very accomplished people who have discovered a lot of interesting things.

Alexis Rice (15:25)
Hmm.

Aaron Higashi (15:31)
but only talk to each other about it. It is the most gilded of guilds in intellectual culture. Part of that is a practical problem of a lot of this is done in like other languages and stuff and so it's difficult. But even without that, is very little will and even less ability amongst biblical scholars in general to communicate the things they know with the public. They don't have the desire or the ability to do it.

They can only talk to other people who also have PhDs they are content to talk to people who only have other PhDs. And that's where the that's where the endowed chairs are, that's where all the fancy appointments are and where the big books and stuff are. And so it's a very insular culture. I just, the massive disparity between what biblical scholars know and what everyday people sitting in the church pews know.

was infuriating to me. And I just wanted to do whatever I could to chip away at that distance to bring some of even the most basic things that biblical scholars know to people sitting in the pews to just show them what that's like. so that that's become over time, you know, I guess part of part of my calling, is just to share those things to bring them from one place to another as best as I'm able.

⁓ Why do pastors warn us about biblical scholars? Not all pastors, but yeah, I understand some for sure. There are a lot of reasons, I suspect. On the more compassionate side of things, mean, let's maybe start with that. Perhaps pastors are just, you know, it's entirely possible to give somebody too much information so that things become confusing for them.

Alexis Rice (16:44)
Hmm.

And all pastors, of course. ⁓

Aaron Higashi (17:07)
So on like the most benevolent end, a kind and compassionate pastor just might not want massive amounts of information dumped on somebody, right? If they have a genuine interest in the spiritual health of their congregants, that's an entirely reasonable stance to have, I think, that you don't want them drowning all these facts, right? But on a more nefarious side of things, I think a lot of pastors want to exercise

a measure of over their congregations. And when outside people are giving their members information, it's harder to do that. It's harder to pretend that your theology is the only game in town. It's harder to pretend that your interpretation is the natural only authoritative interpretation. It's harder to have that dominion over your space if there are other information coming in from other places. And because of social media,

it's harder now than ever to have, you can't keep a tight seal on your congregation anymore. The second they pick up the phone, that's, that's it. Even in places that used to be untouched, like rural America, where a pastor before could have been a king of their own little kingdom, they still go home and pick up a smartphone now. And that's, you know, that's impossible. So I think on the best end, it's to try and protect their congregation on the worst end.

they get their power from the absence of biblical scholars.

Alexis Rice (18:31)
Yeah, makes a lot of sense. And I appreciate even the that you frame that, It gives me insight into one of the ways that you approach the Bible potentially is could be compassionate angle of this and what could be a more nefarious angle? Is that part of what you learn how to look at a passage or story in the Bible?

Aaron Higashi (18:48)
Hmm.

Alexis Rice (18:48)
you look at it from very different angles?

Aaron Higashi (18:51)
Yeah, it could be. mean, there are always many ways to approach every passage in the Bible for sure. I think that it's possible to interpret the Bible poorly for innocent reasons. That is, you know, you've that's the only way you've been taught to do it. And I imagine there are some pastors who are in that position, they just they've never had biblical scholars contribute before. And so why invite them in now? Right. So

I think there can be an innocent ignorance in the process of biblical interpretation for sure. But then I think you also need to be on guard for people interpreting passages for these more malicious reasons to be able to exercise power over people, to push a harmful political agenda, to aggregate more privilege to themselves and to exclude other people from resources and.

livable lives and stuff like that. yeah, think you have to, or at least I'd like to, I don't know if you have to, but I'd like to try and look at it from several perspectives at once.

Alexis Rice (19:53)
Yeah, know, okay, so that makes me then think there are also a lot of pastors, I've been interviewing ⁓ them, that ⁓ are not fundamentalist and that are very open to several points of view. ⁓ how would you see then a future? Like, what would you like to see in terms of ⁓ biblical scholars and pastors and

Aaron Higashi (20:05)
you

Alexis Rice (20:22)
regular church people, like working together ⁓ perhaps to start, know, so we got this going. have people deconstructing, right? And people are starting to realize like, I, you know, maybe it's not like the fundamentalist way I grew up. But we have scholars over here online mostly that are saying, hey, we're gonna help you with this. ⁓ But do you, can you foresee some kind of future because the church is in the way that we know it?

Aaron Higashi (20:43)
Mm.

Alexis Rice (20:50)
as we know, they're emptying. Like, we have to make sure that church evolves, churches evolve to, you know, get people more interested or to get people more connected to the divine again in a way that's not working for people right now. ⁓ So is there anything that you would hope to see in how scholars and pastors could work together?

Aaron Higashi (20:59)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I mean, I think there are some.

I think you can approach the problem from a couple different angles at the same time. mean, one big problem just in church in general is that a lot of pastors don't go to seminary. They don't have degrees or they go exclusively to seminaries whose purpose is to

just to, you know, reproduce dogmas that they already have not to explore investigate the Bible or to construct theology is just you know, they go to a Bible college to learn Bible to learn biblical theology from their denomination and they go to their church to teach their denominations theology and that's it. And it's just that's that's just recycling. Right. ⁓ But there are other seminaries ⁓ more

sort of moderate seminaries and certainly progressive seminaries, where you go to learn about the Bible itself, right? Even people in like MDiv programs who have aspirations for to be pastors, they learn the Bible for the Bible's own sake. And then in another class, they will construct their theology, but these are sort of separate operations and separating those operations is important because it gives them a moment to see the Bible on its own terms.

before they then start imposing their theology. And I mean, that is still the goal to drive some theology from it. But they first come to appreciate the Bible ⁓ on its own terms. That's, mean, at Chicago Theological Seminary, I've taught several classes there over the years. And you have ⁓ MDiv students who, you know, they take my interpreting the Hebrew Bible course. you know, although we do sometimes have questions about, you know, how might this play pastoral and stuff, the purpose is just to learn how to interpret the text.

And then another class they'll take is theology and how to preach and stuff like that. So separating them, I think is important. On the lay and I mean, I think the more informed the laity becomes, the more access to information they have, I think they will hold pastors to higher standards. I don't think pastors will be able to get away with ignorance from the pulpit anymore because more people will be able to call them out. Right? So.

Alexis Rice (23:25)
Absolutely.

Aaron Higashi (23:32)
I think it could come in through that direction too. You have, you know, one person who comes into a Bible study and, know, the assistant pastor, whoever's responsible for the Bible study starts talking, you know, in this passage, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they'll be like, actually I heard, you know, from somebody with a PhD on the internet that's now easy to access. That's not the case, you know, and you keep them accountable and now they either have to throw a hissy fit in which case, you know, that's probably not a good place for you or they'll do better.

right in the future. so I think the, I mean, my ultimate goal is less. mean, it is not necessarily just to have more PhDs talking to people. mean, some of that is good too, but having more just informed lay Christians in churches who can do some of this stuff themselves in mass. So I think that'll end up being like, I think it'll reach like an inflection point where

churches will have to change because people simply know too much. They can't be lied to anymore. Maybe that's aspirational or optimistic, but that's my hope is that they know too much to be deceived.

Alexis Rice (24:46)
Yeah, that's my hope too. I don't see another way. We can't go back, right? The genie is out of the bottle. We have the internet. We have sources, like you said. Just FYI, it's really, really fuzzy. It's really pixelated. Mine is not. And so I'm wondering if it's mine or if it's yours. It goes in and out, but it's quite pixelated. So I was wondering if I can just maybe refresh. Oh, now it's fine.

Aaron Higashi (24:53)
No, no

is it?

Alexis Rice (25:16)
⁓ I know it's annoying. Let me... I might refresh. I'm going to stop this for a second because it's bothering me how pixelated it is on you. Hold on.

Aaron Higashi (25:18)
Maybe.

Okay.

Alexis Rice (25:27)
Okay, so let's talk about hell, Aaron Let's rip this bandaid right off. Here's the

Aaron Higashi (25:29)
Mm-hmm.

Alexis Rice (25:33)
I think it starts with this. the end, if I don't believe and I didn't pray that sinner's prayer and I don't get everybody that I know to pray this sinner's the end, I can live my life the way I want what I want, but we're going to burn in hell forever.

Aaron Higashi (25:38)
Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Alexis Rice (25:51)
that's what God says, that's what Jesus says, and that's what the Bible says. as a younger person, I was always a very inquisitive, curious person, I've talked before on the podcast about this, I was given apologetics what that told us,

is when we talked about this part of eternal conscious torment, which by the way, I didn't even know that term until I started deconstructing, it was just hell, right? It was just going to hell forever. That's all there was.

Aaron Higashi (26:11)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Alexis Rice (26:15)
you might not like what the Bible says, that's what it says. And so you might not be happy you might feel upset about this, but the Bible's clear. And sometimes we just don't like what the Bible has to say.

Aaron Higashi (26:19)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Alexis Rice (26:31)
was always also opposition to LGBTQ values. This was was the answer we are always given. It's like, you may not like it, but the Bible's clear about it, and you can't cherry pick your way out of the things that you want it to

Aaron Higashi (26:40)
.

Alexis Rice (26:47)
I think this is the breaking point for people feeling comfortable going down this deconstructed road we have been given an interpretation that is not agreed upon by all scholars, that is not agreed upon by all Christians over time,

Aaron Higashi (26:55)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Alexis Rice (27:02)
let's talk about hell and the English language there's four actual terms, Sheol, Gehenna, Hades, Tartarus,

Aaron Higashi (27:09)
Sure, I really like the way that you framed it as far as the deconstructive journey is concerned because hell really is like the, it's the sign on the door on the way out. It's the thing that they use to keep your butt in the might have all these reasonable, I don't like this, I don't like that, this is making me uncomfortable, this doesn't really seem like God, this isn't working for me, but the second you get up and turn around and start to walk away, there's that lingering threat over your head.

You can walk out, but then hell, right? starting from like cold hard facts, the Bible does not present a single unified settled doctrine of hell. so anybody who ever, and this is not an interpretive issue, this is just a matter of textual fact. It does not have a single unified definitive picture of hell.

And so anybody at any point in your life who's ever presented you a single unified definitive picture of hell is either mistaken or they are lying to you. And it's likely that they've been taught to lie to you because they were lied to as well. And so if you take nothing else away from a conversation about hell with a biblical would be high point takeaway.

The Bible is a multi vocal text. It was written by many different people in different times and different places in different languages. And it frequently contradicts itself. It has different opinions about, for example, what happens to people after they die. And the different terms, this gets flattened out in English. You pick up a Bible translated in English, you just see hell, hell, hell, hell, hell.

But underneath the surface in the original languages, this is discussing many different ideas, which sometimes contradict each other on exactly what's gonna happen to us.

so, yeah, we can start with Sheol Sheol Hebrew word that you'll find throughout the Hebrew Bible and Old Testament. It occurs 60 something times. It gets translated in a variety of ways, the grave, the underworld.

best understood in most contexts as just death. That's it. It's just the concept of death. what happens to virtually every single person when they die. In fact, throughout the old Testament or Hebrew Bible on 99.9 % of occasions when people die, they all go to exactly the same place. They go to Sheol a grave, they just die.

The very first time Sheol is mentioned in the Bible is in Genesis 37 in the Joseph story, and there it's just synonymous with death. Jacob is talking about how upset he is that Joseph has been taken, and he says, well, I guess I'll go down to Sheol in my misery. I'm going to be sad all the way until I die.

It's not a fiery place. It's not a place where people are conscious. It's just, you're just dead. In fact, it's defined almost exclusively in terms of what people cannot do there. They are silent. They don't move. They have no existence at all. all we really have in the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible is just a concept of death. There are a couple interesting deviations from that.

⁓ one story that's kind of fun to tell around Halloween is the witch of Endor story in first Samuel 28, where Saul is kind of on his way out and he's about to fight the Philistines and God won't talk to him because they've just broken up. It's been very painful and God is leaving him on red and he's, he's tried all the legitimate ways to get in touch with God and none of them are working. So he finds this witch who calls up the soul of Samuel.

And the word Sheol isn't used in that passage, but presumably that's what they're talking about. He calls up his soul and Samuel pops into his tent and they have a brief conversation. But everything that we can infer from that is that Sheol is a place there's just everybody. mean, even Samuel is a righteous person. He goes there when he dies. Everybody goes there when they die. He says that Saul is going to join him there when he dies in those battles the next day. So it's a common grave for everybody.

that's it. There's really no, I mean that's pretty consistent, but that's really all the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament has to offer as far as the after, there is no afterlife. And it would be very safe to say that in the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament there is no afterlife. The closest we get hint of one is at the end of the book of Daniel there's a verse, Daniel chapter 12 verse 2,

where it says, amongst the people who sleep in the earth, some will rise to everlasting life and some to everlasting shame. And that's it. That's all we get. There's no description of that. it doesn't even sound like hell. It just seems like some people will be brought back to life and it'll be cool. And some people will be brought back to life and it won't be. And that's it, right? There's no fire. There's no torment. There's no criteria aren't spelled out. And this isn't a fantastically symbolic passage anyway. So it gives us very little.

When the Hebrew Bible gets translated into Greek in an edition or a series of editions that we call the Septuagint, and the Septuagint is what the New Testament authors cite whenever they're citing the Old Testament, when it gets translated into Greek the Hebrew word sheol becomes the Greek word Hades, and Hades is the Greek god of the underworld slash the underworld itself. The word does double duty for both ideas.

And it's a pretty decent translation. Hades is also a place where virtually everybody goes when they die, especially in the earliest stories about Hades. It's undifferentiated. It's not a place for just the bad people or the good everybody goes there. And it also has that sense that it's, you're not really doing anything there also. spirits sort of just float around and they're not even really conscious of the world. It's shadowy and dark and there's nothing really happening there. So it's not torment. It's just that it's nothingness. mean, it's got sort of what you would expect for people who are dead.

And the term Hades appears like a dozen times or so. It's not frequently used in the New Testament, but it does appear every once in while, but it gets translated into hell. And when it gets translated into hell in English, it comes with all the baggage that's attached to it. It's for bad people or people who don't accept Christ or whatever your denominations version of bad is, or failed or unfaithful or whatever. And it's fiery and you're tortured forever. And the word never had that connotation its original usage. It's just death.

Right. And that's how Hades plays out for most of the New Testament as well. The two other terms, they get translated into the English hell and the New Testament are Gehenna and Tartarus. And Gehenna is not an afterlife at all. Gehenna is a place, a place you could visit now if you wanted to. If you wanted to take a trip to Jerusalem, you could go to Gehenna. It's literally the veil, the valley of Hinnom. And it's just outside Jerusalem.

there are couple of potential places it could be, it's probably just outside Jerusalem. And it's just a valley. a valley with trees and you can Google Earth pictures of it right now and you'll see there are no fires there and nobody is being tortured there. Last time I checked there's just a bunch of grass and some trees that's about it. But starts to take on a theological significance. Starting in the Hebrew Bible, it becomes associated with child sacrifice.

There are a couple of places in the book of Jeremiah where Jeremiah the prophet chastises kings for children alive in acts of sacrifice to other chastises people for that and says that God doesn't approve of this and God never commanded it of them and this isn't something that they should be doing. And so this tradition sort of develops that that's a place where people meet a fiery end.

And that tradition continues to develop into an idea of God's judgment is also about death and fire. And so by the composition of a relatively late text like Isaiah 66, all of God's enemies are burned to death, their dead bodies are burned just outside Jerusalem. And so it also sort becomes tied up in this idea of divine judgment.

It's not eternal, it's not conscious, it's just a fiery Death by fire. and it's often used sort of in the same way that Hades is, just one of the ways that people can die, shameful way that people can die. But again, it really carry all this baggage with it that it has in contemporary thought. And then last is Tartarus, which only appears once and only as a verb to throw into Tartarus, and that appears in,

the letter of Second Peter. Tartarus is also taken from Greek religion, just like Hades is. Tartarus was originally a place that well, first that the Cyclopses were imprisoned and always used for godlike beings. First, it was where the Titans were imprisoned, it was where gigantic monsters were imprisoned. Eventually Greeks continued to tell stories and some particularly nasty kings end up imprisoned When this influence

affects biblical authors, primarily authors of texts that didn't end up Protestant or Catholic canons, but books like Enoch, they need a place to put imprisoned angels. And so Tartarus becomes the place, it's a handy cross-cultural, we need a place to put imprisoned angels, Tartarus becomes a place to put imprisoned angels. So when Second Peter talks about Tartarus, it's a place that the angels, sinning angels are cast into.

And it's defined by its darkness and its eternality. This is an eternal, eternally dark prison. So what ends up happening is that people sort of take all these things. They take the fiery, shameful death. They take the concept of kind of the grave or the underworld. They take the concept of punishing sinful angels and maybe angels being there. And they blend them all together. And when you blend them all together, you get a place of fiery, eternal conscious torment.

Alexis Rice (36:20)
Hmm.

Aaron Higashi (36:47)
that sinners go after they die. But that's a choice. It's a choice to combine all these things. It's a choice to combine them in that particular way. And that choice feels set in stone to us because we're receiving it in the pew. It's prepackaged for us and then handed over. And then we get the text and we just, we read it through the eyes that we've been taught to read it. But you could make other choices. You don't have to read it that way.

Right, you could prioritize the passages where dead people are simply destroyed, which is another position called annihilationism, where people are just dead there is no afterlife, especially for bad people or whatever that looks like to you. So make choices about how we bring these very originally different ideas together.

And that's why, like I said at the beginning, anybody who tells you this is a settled issue, they have settled it for themselves and they are hoping to settle it for you. But in the text, it's not settled. It cannot both be the case a conception of Hades and Gehenna is true at the same time. It can't be the case that we just die and everybody goes to the same place and we experience nothing. That can't be true at the same time that people experience a fiery, painful death as a result of God's... Those two, they can't be true.

Alexis Rice (37:51)
Hmm.

Aaron Higashi (38:03)
It doesn't even make sense, like a conventional picture of hell that we burn for, that doesn't make any sense to burn forever. Burning hurts because your body is destroyed, but then how does it keep going? Right? So like on a basic logical level, that tips you off that these were originally distinct images, right? Cause you can't burn to death, but then you're dead and there's nothing else, right? But then because we imported another idea of eternal, imprisonment. Now we got to marry.

you're stuck there forever and you're burning. We gotta find a way to join these two things together. And that awkward combination is part of what produces this doctrine of hell. And then it just takes off because it's so good at controlling people, right? If you walk out of here, you'll die like everybody else is not, is not, okay, fine, right? I'm just gonna walk out here. That doesn't keep your butt in the seat, right?

Alexis Rice (38:42)
Mm-hmm.

Aaron Higashi (38:53)
But if you walk out of here, you will burn forever. you sit back down and you rethink things, right? these ideas exercises a lot more control over people's minds than the other. And so that's the one that the church ended up with, the more invasively terrifying and controlling one.

Alexis Rice (39:16)
Wow. Thank you.

Aaron Higashi (39:18)
Sure, we could pause

reflect.

Alexis Rice (39:23)
Yes, one of the questions still is lingering in my head is about universalism. can you talk a little bit that school of thought and that potential conclusion? for people who are a little bit further in this journey of understanding what you talked about, there's videos online about people debating annihilationism versus universalism. My understanding.

Aaron Higashi (39:41)
Mm-hmm.

Alexis Rice (39:45)
correct me if I'm wrong, is that you can make good arguments for both and there's not like a clear winner or answer. I don't know, though I'm not a PhD. So could talk a little bit about universalism and if people to a church, for example, have a universalist approach to hell, they've come from ECT,

Aaron Higashi (39:52)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Alexis Rice (40:07)
eternal conscious torment, which is burn in hell forever. you just kind average lay person biblically, is this it's pretty extreme if you go from one to the other. So can you talk a little bit about that?

Aaron Higashi (40:08)
Yeah, that's what the cool kids say. Eat easy.

Yeah. Yeah,

well, yeah, that that is kind of in the conversation today. Those are kind of the three positions. is like what's going to happen to us in the end times, eventually in the absolute sense. ECT, annihilationism and universalism are kind of your options, I suppose.

Alexis Rice (40:27)
Cough cough

Aaron Higashi (40:39)
Universalism is the idea that eventually everybody will be saved. Eventually everybody will experience heaven. Although, mean, there's some variety about exactly what heaven means. But eventually everybody universally, regardless of how they live their lives, regardless of their religious convictions, regardless of whether they were good or bad people in this life, eventually somehow, some way, God will reconcile God's self to all people and all people will experience heaven.

the immediate experience and presence of God. perspective draws on not so much the hell passages, but from other passages, a lot in Paul, in fact. And if you were to, you will find no hell in Paul's thought. find occasional references to wrath or God's judgment.

but no hell, Paul is not really a hell guy. What you will find are, for example, in Romans five, the end of Romans five, you'll will describe the scope of salvation as equal to the scope of the sin introduced by Adam. So from Romans chapter five, verse 18 and on, everybody, Adam introduced the first sin and through Adam, we've all come into sin.

Christ has introduced life and through Christ life and justification for everyone just as one trespass leads to death for all so one Righteous life will lead to life and justification for all So the scope of sin Paul makes very clear the scope of sin and the scope of salvation are identical and if that's the case I Mean, I think most people would say that the scope of sin is universal. So the scope of salvation must be universal also

You get a similar picture in 1 Corinthians 15, in sort of the middle there, I can't remember the verses off the top of my head, but in the middle of 1 Corinthians 15, Christ is just the first fruits. His resurrection to life is just the first sign of things to come. But eventually, everything, the entire universe will become subject to Christ. Eventually everything, God will be all in all. Everybody will get to experience that same thing.

And there are other places, I mean, you can sort of make the argument out of other places. mean, Paul says that to be saved, you need to believe in your heart and confess with your mouth that Christ is Lord. But he also insists on other occasions that eventually every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Christ is Lord. And if you put those two things together, the scope of salvation is universal. So there are half a dozen or more other verses that universalists sort of point to as evidence that

whatever is happening with hell, it's something else. It is either doesn't exist at all, or it is temporary and for the purpose of rehabilitation, almost like an idealized prisons. We don't really try and rehabilitate people here, but ideally it wouldn't be great in the criminal justice system where we took an interest in rehabilitation, in which case prison could be a transformative experience and people could come out much better.

Alexis Rice (43:27)
What?

Aaron Higashi (43:32)
But then hell would sort of be like that too. Yes, it would be judgment and that would be uncomfortable. There would be weeping and gnashing of teeth as we confront our sins, certainly. That might even feel like the fire of guilt burning within us. But that's a process, a refining fire, a purifying fire. And out of that fire emerges a tempered thing, a pure thing, a beautiful thing.

Alexis Rice (43:32)
You

Aaron Higashi (43:59)
Something that has been made better by those flames. And then they enter into this promise of life for everyone, this universalism. So there's some universalists with hell entirely. There are others who see it as a period of purification of some some of our early church thinkers like Origen, who was like the first person to really warrant like the label of Bible scholar really studied the languages, really studied the biblical text.

from kind of what was then an academic perspective, he too was a universalist. And in fact, he thought even Satan would be saved eventually. And I think that's a powerful testimony. It would be a powerful testimony to God's power. there is a certain degree in which I think God's omnipotence and omnibenevolence is compromised by being unable to save some people. Why not? What's stopping you? Why aren't you able to do it?

a mark against him. And people will bring up free will. Well, what about free will? What about free will? You became a Christian with your free will intact. And so all somebody had to do is play some songs at you and blow some smoke machines at you and make you feel good in church. And that was enough to make you a Christian. Why can't God blow some smoke machines and play some music for you just in an infinite way, right? Why can't God talk you into it? You don't have to overwhelm somebody's free will.

to talk you into doing something, to persuade you lovingly to adopt a position. So I think the universalist would see, you know, even God's failure to persuade Satan as a mark against God. It's gotta be everything. And that's the real testament to God's power in the end is that God can save literally every single creature that has ever been created.

Alexis Rice (45:35)
Hmm. I think that's probably one of the reasons a lot of people have walked away from church is getting to that point and just being like, I guess God's not powerful enough if God exists. Right. that is I don't think that's where biblical scholars ended up. Right. So I'm curious about Dan McClellan often talks about like the biblical consensus.

Aaron Higashi (45:40)
the

Mm.

Alexis Rice (45:55)
I still don't know what that even would assume that is the majority of Bible somehow magically meet somewhere what the majority. OK. I mean, it would be so interesting to understand that ivory tower. my question is there a

Aaron Higashi (46:04)
on Discord together, taking polls. ⁓

Alexis Rice (46:15)
biblical consensus on what the best guess is about what the Bible is saying that hell is? What is hell? Or is it just like we pick what we think is the best? Like Where do we go now as lay people?

Aaron Higashi (46:28)
I,

as far as biblical scholars are concerned, because that is a little bit different from theologian, you know, biblical scholars are more the text itself rather than the theology that we use the text to make. But I think the consensus among biblical scholars would be that there is biblical support for all three of these positions. There is biblical support for eternal conscious torment. There is biblical support for annihilationism. None of these are unbiblical.

Alexis Rice (46:35)
Mm-hmm.

Aaron Higashi (46:54)
None of these are not in the text somewhere. They are all in the text somewhere. And what that tells me then theologically is that the Bible is not going to be able to resolve this no amount of proof texts that you can assemble to beat the other positions into submission. You're not going to win with the Bible. The argument is going to be decided by your conception of God. Which one do you think is more appropriate for God?

one is more coherent with a God that is powerful and loving and just? eternal conscious torment make more sense of God's attributes? Or does annihilationism make more sense of God's other attributes? Or does universalism make more sense of God's other attributes? I think the consensus is that the Bible cannot solve the issue.

to bring somebody else another field in philosophy theology to try and break that argument.

Alexis Rice (47:50)
Hmm. Yes. And then you start to understand why, again, you know, certain pastors want to just say what it is ⁓ to keep it simple. Because Bible is so complex and complicated. And so I think we've done quite a disservice to fellow Christians by just saying like, well, you just go read it and see what you think. And

Aaron Higashi (47:59)
Yeah.

Alexis Rice (48:13)
without having people who are really qualified to train us in how to read it.

Aaron Higashi (48:18)
I mean, it is both a scary thing, but I think it can also take some of the pressure off, If you have grown up in an environment where eternal conscious the only game in town, I think just to hear that, that is one up with. think having it presented as a choice rather than.

the necessary conclusion of the biblical text can also be a liberating thing, right? Because it doesn't have to be that way. there's just as many verses that you can bring to bear for these other positions, right? what some people, they'll try and bring them all together at the same time. Then you just end up with like a hodgepodge random stuff. really is the case that you could have three entirely distinct conclusions.

Alexis Rice (48:41)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Higashi (48:59)
that puts it on people. Which one do you think is more suitable for a loving and just and merciful God? Which one makes the most sense for that I am not an unbiased am a universalist used to be, come to that conclusion. Not from reading the Bible over and over and over again, but from discovering that the Bible wasn't gonna break the tie.

and then going to philosophy and theology to help me do that. So am a universalist primarily for philosophical reasons, not because the Bible said that that's what I had to be.

Alexis Rice (49:24)
Hmm.

Hmm.

let's talk about rewriting Bible stories, Bibles for our kids. write God's stories, it's a children's Bible. It's written by scholars, to reflect love and justice and curiosity. There's no white Jesus. That's great.

Aaron Higashi (49:50)
Hahaha

Alexis Rice (49:51)
what was that process like for you both as a scholar and as a you're parenting and having to really think about how to simplify engage in a way that doesn't scare the hell out of we all were?

Aaron Higashi (50:06)
was the hardest thing I've ever written. It was harder than my dissertation. It was harder than I've written novels. I've written books, academic books. It was the hardest thing ever. It was like 500 words and the hardest thing I've ever written for exactly those reasons. Here, I almost feel like scholarship don't know if it's helping or hurting in the end really, the section on Ezra and Nehemiah God's stories, and that's what I did my dissertation on as well.

Alexis Rice (50:10)
Hmm

Wow.

Aaron Higashi (50:28)
would be happy to talk about it for 40,000 words. I'm much more hesitant to talk about it in four to 500 words and for a child, But I mean, having children and thinking about what I would say to them if they asked me, was really the key at the end for getting anything at all on the page. What would I feel comfortable telling my very sensitive, very curious children?

And it was difficult. almost wish I had a different book to have written on because Ezra and Nehemiah are difficult largely boring, just as far as stories are concerned. And the parts that aren't boring are kind of terrifying. a mass divorce scene in Ezra chapter 10. That's sort of the climax of the story, is Ezra, a priest, forcing a hundred couples to get divorced because they've married outside the ethnic bounds that he's trying to create.

So talking about divorce to small children, especially divorce for such strange reasons, difficult. And so I really tried to err on the side of this is about community and this is how we are gonna welcome people to our community and the boundaries that we draw around our community so that we can feel safe. This is about who we're going to worship alongside.

is how we're going to think of ourselves, how we're going to celebrate ourselves and where we come from. Those are all there too. I think they're smaller parts of the story, to be entirely honest, but I think they are valuable parts of the story for even the smallest child. So that's kind of the direction that I ended up going in. Even in the midst, I mean, it's like 99 % rough.

think there is something even for the smallest children that you can extract from there.

Alexis Rice (52:09)
So a lot of us were taught these Bible stories that cause fear or shame, right? So it was like, okay, we came from Adam and Eve, and then we learned at school about evolution, and then we went home, and we said, hey, we learned about evolution and the Big Bang. And then they said, yeah, well, that's not real. they don't have the...

the spirit of God in their hearts. And that was very conflicting as kids and as teenagers. That happens all the time now. ⁓ And so I was wondering if how you think we can reclaim these sacred stories ⁓ besides just saying to our kids like, Adam and Eve weren't real. was just a nice story. But like, how can we make this sacred? How do you go about making these stories if you're not saying, hey, this was all real and evolution wasn't?

⁓ So we're not as parents repeating these harmful patterns that we were raised with.

Aaron Higashi (53:14)
That's a big question, a big project. mean, it's gonna be a project that... It is more than any one parent can do. I think that's an important takeaway. You are doing a small part of it in your own home and your own life. So you don't need to figure out a way to do it all by yourself. All you need to do is a little bit better than the people who...

Alexis Rice (53:28)
Mm-hmm. Hmm. Hmm.

Aaron Higashi (53:39)
did it to you. All you need to do is a little bit better than what was done to you. And that by itself is infinitely valuable, I think. But I think part of it is

I think part of it might even be sometimes just stepping away from the story entirely and coming back to it later and starting with the stories that you know are going to that you don't have to like filter through. Right. Like if I if I was responsible for just coming up with a book, it was just the Bible stories I wanted to share with kids. It would be a very short book. It would not be 66 books long and it would be a very short book.

Alexis Rice (54:21)
Hmm.

Aaron Higashi (54:24)
But there would be some stuff in there, right? And I think starting with the things that you are most confident about, and then the things that you are gonna be able to model in your life. Somebody once told me that lives depend on how well we love, and I try very hard to present everything that I can to my children in the most loving way possible, to focus on that.

presenting God's love to them, examples of God's love to them in the Bible, in life, weaving those two things together, in a sense, turning their everyday experience into opportunities to reflection on God's love. ⁓ And then just using the Bible when it's convenient to use it. I think sometimes it's like we have this book and now we have to find some way to give it to them, right?

I would encourage us to dispense with that pressure. You don't have to. It can sit there for a long time. You can do a lot of the heavy lifting of theology just in conversation with them about God's love and justice and mercy and the call for social justice that we find in the prophets and the call for humble service that we find in the life of Christ and the call for the resistance of the world's evils and stuff like that. You can do all that without having to

point to specific Bible stories, give them that foundation of the love of God. And then later, you know, perhaps much later, ⁓ actually bring in the Bible. And I think there's something very biblical about that. You know, the Bible itself does not tell stories about the Bible, right? The Bible tells stories about people's lives. So to just have God speak into your life,

is a biblical thing to do even if the Bible itself is not involved

Alexis Rice (56:24)
Hmm.

Aaron Higashi (56:26)
That's a lot of weird answers to that question, but I think that's some of my thoughts in trying to work through that.

Alexis Rice (56:30)
No, it's so helpful.

Yeah, I think what's helpful in that is, you know, I've been, right now I'm going to an Episcopal church. I have an Episcopal tradition right now. And I've been, you know, learning about the three leg of, yes. With the, you know, I've been learning about the three legged stool, right? And experience is part of that. And in the Methodist tradition, the Wesleyan quadrilateral, right? Where like experience,

Aaron Higashi (56:47)
yeah.

They get the best outfits.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah.

Alexis Rice (57:06)
You're trusting your own experience ⁓ is part of this equation as a Christian, as a person of faith, right? ⁓ And that is not necessarily part of a lot of fundamentalist traditions, right? So I think that's what you're also saying is like, hey, we need to also lean on like, ⁓ what is spirit? What is the spirit moving in us, right? Like, what is God teaching us right now and today?

Aaron Higashi (57:08)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Alexis Rice (57:34)
right

as part of our experience to teach our kids. Is that what I hear you saying a little bit?

Aaron Higashi (57:37)
Absolutely.

Yeah, mean, yeah, that's, that's, that's for sure. I mean, I think there are some traditions that do a better job of encouraging that than others. And having that three legged stool or that Wesleyan quadrilateral. Yeah, experience is important. Reason is important. Our everyday lives are the scene of God's ongoing revelation with the world. And that is largely what the Holy Spirit is.

I mean, if you believe that God is, the Holy Spirit is God and that is active in your life, the Bible's, I mean, it's not more important than God, right? So, I mean, why, in a sense, you don't even need the Bible if you have the Holy Spirit. ⁓ But I mean, yeah, some, I mean, the fundamentalist and conservative evangelical spaces have really turned that on its head.

Alexis Rice (58:19)
Right.

Aaron Higashi (58:29)
or it feels like you only have access to God if you're reading the Bible. And that would be an attitude that's completely foreign to anybody in the Bible. That would be an attitude completely foreign to all the first generations of Christians who didn't have a Bible and couldn't read one even if they had it, right? But they still had thriving Christian communities. So our obsession with the Bible and the way that we've centered it is a very modern phenomenon. ⁓

Alexis Rice (58:36)
Hmm.

Aaron Higashi (58:58)
And in some ways it's good because maybe we, ⁓ I mean, it does get us into the text and that can be fun and it gives me a job to teach Bible, but ⁓ at the end of the day, it's either a tool that's helping us get to God and if it's not helping us get to God, then we can set it aside for a little bit and do something else.

Alexis Rice (58:59)
Wow, ugh, that's so cool.

Yeah, definitely. All right, so we're gonna finish up here. ⁓ Let me see, so ⁓ I know this is a ridiculous question for a scholar, but I would love to know what scholars, books, or voices ⁓ have shaped your thinking the most, influencers, people on social media, books, podcasts, like...

Aaron Higashi (59:39)
Hmm.

Alexis Rice (59:49)
You really did talk about wanting to give access to the lay person, the Christian. And so are there a few resources that you can think of that are great places to start? I'm going to throw out the Bible for normal people and all your work in that, and all of your work as well that I talked about earlier. yeah, what would you say on that?

Aaron Higashi (1:00:02)
yeah.

boy, ⁓ mean, far as resources are concerned, like you, you have taken an interest in Bible. You want to look at it from a more academic perspective. A good study Bible is going to get you a long way. ⁓ the new Oxford annotated study Bible, ⁓ is my recommendation for people who interested in this great explanatory essays at the beginning, written by a diverse group of people, atheist, agnostics, Christians, Jews.

people from all sorts of different traditions, men, women, all different ethnicities. So you get, mean, that's the, there's nobody that's not biased, but a diversity of biases is like the best, the closest you can get to something like neutrality. So it's, it's a great book if you want to dip your toe in Bible. ⁓ Something I listen to over and over again, because I'm a nerd, but perhaps other people might be interested as well. There's a ⁓ Hebrew Bible scholar named Christine Hayes.

who put her entire class on, Yale has this open courses thing where they just put entire courses up online for free. And you can listen to her introduction to the Old Testament as like a podcast if you wanted to. ⁓ So if you're just like, I just wanna hear a scholar introduce me to the Bible in my car on my way to work or something like that. I've listened to that like 10 times now on road trips and stuff and it's been a lot of fun. ⁓

Yeah, the Bible for Normal People, absolutely fantastic. mean, best in the business as far as getting people access to biblical scholars. And then providing, I think an important part, providing a community for people who are in a similar place to you. So it's not just making books and it's not just teaching classes, but then providing a community where people who have heard that material can then come and discuss it and reflect on it. So that community part is important too. ⁓

I mean, some of the things that have been most influential to me in particular are like very personal to me and might not be interesting to everybody. in seminary, I got very into Black liberation theology. I'm a mixed race person. I am white, Black and Japanese. And I grew up with some white culture in my house and some Japanese culture in my house, but not a lot of Black culture in my house. And so going to seminary and studying the work of Black theologians and scholars who are really drawing upon Black experience was

an absolutely wonderful experience for me. It felt like I finally got like part of an inheritance I had never had before. So that was a very precious experience for me. But there are some great black scholars in theologian. ⁓ James Cone sort of founded Black Liberation Theology in the United States. He's got some great books. There's a feminist version of Black Liberation ⁓ Theology called womanism, womanist scholarship.

Alexis Rice (1:02:43)
Hmm

Aaron Higashi (1:03:01)
⁓ Dolores Williams book Sisters in the Wilderness ⁓ had a big effect on me. ⁓

just integrating Black American experience into the doing of theology. mean, the church in America is very white. It's very white. And so having an alternative perspective to that is wonderful, I think.

Alexis Rice (1:03:21)
Yes.

I love that. Yes. And that is thank you for sharing that. That's so important. ⁓ So where can people find your work, your classes, follow your work?

Aaron Higashi (1:03:38)
You can follow me on TikTok. TikTok is the place I post most often. You can just search my name, Aaron Higashi. Aaron.Higashi is my username on TikTok. also post on a lot of those videos, then get posted on Instagram at abhigashi. ⁓ You can find me on YouTube. Search the same. Just search my name. ⁓ Those are the best places to find me. you want to buy my book, you can buy my book. You can buy the Bible for Normal People's.

Children's Bible, you can buy my book, First and Second Samuel for Normal People. ⁓ Yeah, that's about it.

Alexis Rice (1:04:16)
Awesome, awesome. All right, 826. Do you wanna do a lightning round for one minute? Finish up?

Aaron Higashi (1:04:21)
Sure.

yeah. I will brace myself. will bird my loins. Yes, yes, yes.

Alexis Rice (1:04:23)
All right. Okay, ready, ready, ready? Here we go, here we go. Okay.

Okay. ⁓ Okay, first thing, if you had ⁓ one day left on this earth and you had to do something super fun, what would you do? It has to be fun.

Aaron Higashi (1:04:37)
Jeez.

It has to be fun. I would ⁓ play video games with my kids. Or I'd watch them dance. That's what I do. Or I would watch my kids love to dance. I would watch them dance. I would like go to a dance class and watch them dance.

Alexis Rice (1:04:43)
Yes.

I love it, of course you would. Okay.

⁓ so

good.

What's a Bible verse or a passage that means something to you?

Aaron Higashi (1:05:12)
There's so many. mean, the one I think about the most often is in 1 John 4, 20, that if you cannot love your brother or sister that you can see, you cannot love God that you can't see. That's been a foundational passage, I think, for me. Or the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25, which I think is also...

You know, we interact with God through other people. If we cannot love people around us, even people who are very different from us, we stand no chance at all of loving God. People get that backwards all the time. They will claim to love God and hate everybody around them. And it's exactly the opposite of that, I think.

Alexis Rice (1:05:58)
A favorite hymn or worship song or artist?

Aaron Higashi (1:06:03)
Ooh, I don't listen to much worship music. My favorite hymn though is easy. It's a, O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, which I listen back to back around Christmas time every single year. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir has an absolutely heavenly version on YouTube that I found some years ago. And I will just replay the hell out of that thing. And that is exquisite, an exquisite piece of music.

Alexis Rice (1:06:28)
Aaron's in the flow with O come, become Emmanuel during Christmastime. What's one idea that you used to believe about God that you've completely let go of?

Aaron Higashi (1:06:30)
I asked so much so yeah yeah

I used to believe in hell. used to believe in eternal conscious torment. It used to be very important to me because I wanted bad people to suffer. There are sins in this world that people commit, abuses of children in particular, that I thought warranted hell. And then I thought that

Forever? Forever is so long. Maybe for a while, but forever? I think their rehabilitation from even the most terrible of evils would be more beautiful and fitting of God than for them to suffer forever for God's glory or something like that, or for my vindictive entertainment or something like that. So, yeah.

Relevant to the episode, I guess.

Alexis Rice (1:07:34)
Yeah, absolutely. If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about the American church in its current form, what would it be?

Aaron Higashi (1:07:43)
⁓ I would make every pastor in the country a woman of color.

Alexis Rice (1:07:49)
Ooh, I love it. What's something that you hope people remember after listening to your social media?

Aaron Higashi (1:08:02)
⁓ that, that you, you have power as an interpreter of the Bible. The questions are not yet settled. Work is still yet to be done. You can contribute your voice to this great human project of theology. Your voice is valuable. Your experience is necessary. Please contribute. Don't, don't just be a, ⁓ pat. Don't just receive theology passively.

Alexis Rice (1:08:30)
Dr. Aaron Higashi, thank you so much for being on the Sacred Slope today.

Aaron Higashi (1:08:34)
Thank you for having me.

Alexis Rice (1:08:40)
Thank you for joining us today on The Sacred Slope. If you'd like to nominate a pastor, priest, or clergy member anywhere in the world, send me an email at Alexis @ thesacredslope.com. Music was by Brett Rutledge, Eddie Irvin, and Sean Spence. May the fruit of the spirit guide you this week. I'm Alexis Rice. Go in peace, friends.