A Decolonial Response
Invariably, in the opening weeks of my introductory biblical studies classes, a student will share that they are there because they want to know the “truth” about the Bible and about what “really happened.”[1] It eventually becomes clear they have entered the classroom with two key assumptions: first, that the Bible is a history book that contains facts about the past, and second, that there is a recoverable, correct, single truth about the cosmos to be found therein. For my students, this desire seems to present with both a sense of anxiety regarding the boundaries around truth, fact, and fiction and a deep longing for a more capacious way of reading that honors and makes sense of their experience of being human.
In her piece “The Other,” Esther Meek argues that “knowing requires holding the other in regard and attentive empathy.”[2] In so many ways, it is this posture that I seek to embody, both in the classroom with students and co-learners and in my own work. To me, honoring the other—and being honored in return—is an exercise in mutuality and accountability. Just as true dialogue is only possible when both parties are open to being moved by the other, so too does ethical engagement with text(s) and reader(s) require networks of accountability in which there might be both rupture and repair.
And yet, it’s hard not to read Meek’s central claim, that “knowing is an intimate encounter and communion which is the dynamic of love,” as an ideal or abstraction.[3] Although she notes that the other cannot be rendered in the abstract or the universal, in this short piece, she deals primarily with the philosophical concept of “the other” rather than offering contextual examples. Even her central example of a mother and child is an abstraction that is not grounded in the contextual, embodied experience of a particular social, political, ethnoracial, or ecological community. Too often, the abstract and the universal are coded as both white and Western (the essentialism inherent in first-wave feminism is a prime example). Abstractions are necessarily divorced from the specificity and embodied realities of context and community. They sever rather than support communal efforts at imagining more livable futures and limit our ability to respond critically to death-dealing social and political legacies.
However, I do believe we need to be able to imagine the ideal—the more livable, more just, more mutual—as it helps leave open a horizon of possibilities to collectively grow toward. At its best, such collective imagining is rooted in the lived realities of particular communities and flourishes in those spaces that cultivate coalition across difference toward the common good. Aspiration toward a shared ideal offers its own sort of accountability, which, when coupled with relationships of mutual accountability among individuals and communities, helps to support and sustain social change. In this response, I seek to ground Meek’s ideal by exploring the concept of the other through the lens of decoloniality, arguing that it is only by engaging in the larger project of decolonizing epistemology that we can begin to approach the kind of mutuality and communion with the other that Meek describes.
Our very disciplines—to say nothing of the wider modes of knowledge production—are intricately bound up in the assumptions of Western modernity and the hegemony of Western political, social, and intellectual institutions. The Argentine semiotician and literary theorist Walter Mignolo articulates these relationships in this way:
Western civilization is not universal; it is one among several today. But because of the Eurocentric (and imperial) bent of Western civilization and its “success” in slaughtering people and expropriating lands and natural resources in the name of civilization, all other civilizations have to deal with it, have to define the particular “character of our relationship with it,” to define “our modernity,” with reference to it.[4]
Leaving the knower and the known as abstract or universal philosophical concepts thus ignores these important realities. Describing the self and the other without reference to the embodied experience and imperial or colonial projects within which we are each variously bound elides the ethical responsibility of knowers to attend to their location in the wider web of epistemological relationality.
In other words, if those who operate in the dominant (i.e., white, heteropatriarchal, Western) frame do not attend to the ways in which that frame has constructed them as individual knowers, the relationship between the knower and the known or other knowers will always be constructed as I and it and never as I and thou. In an I and it relationship, one party (the I) exists as a fully human actor imbued with a sense of self and agency, whereas the other party (the it) is acted upon as if that individual were an object, devoid of humanity and agency. Conversely, in an I and thou relationship, both parties are fully able to exercise humanity and agency and those qualities are mutually recognized.[5] A key part of the analytic decolonial task, then, is to see how we are framed. As Mignolo puts it, this task “consists in unveiling beliefs and assumptions, anchored in common sense, that naturalizes the world as we have been taught to see it . . . in learning to unlearn in order to relearn and rebuild.”[6] For knowers like myself, who have been brought up in the halls of white Western academic institutions and who continue to participate in the learning communities therein, this is a vital task. For deeply entangled in the project of modernity is coloniality (and all its attendant hegemonic phenomena)—one does not exist without the other. It is difficult to overstate the depth and pervasiveness of this entanglement. Without constant effort, the hegemony of colonial thinking will inevitably influence even the most well-intentioned endeavors.
In this way, I am struck by Meek’s comment that to undertake the mutually transformative communion that is knowing, “We need to recover the other.”[7] I immediately want to ask: Who is the “we” she speaks of? In what networks of relationality are “we” embedded? How do the intellectual, political, social, and ecological frameworks through which “we” engage the world impinge upon or make space for human thriving? And perhaps most importantly, is not the move to recover the other, rather than to allow the other the freedom to self-determine, overtly colonial in and of itself? To me, this small turn of phrase contradicts the piece’s call to relinquish frameworks of domination and adopt models of reciprocity and intimacy. The availability of both such sentiments in this single piece highlights the ongoing and necessary work of decolonization: like those communities whose knowledge and very beings were subjugated to Western modernity in the experience of colonialism, so too has the subjectivity of those who benefit from the dominant social, political, and epistemological paradigm been constrained and constructed by coloniality. Notably, Meek both critiques Western modernity and demonstrates the kind of thinking it seems she is trying to resist, as evidenced by the turn of phrase noted above and the fact that she speaks of a single modernity.
To return to Mignolo: “Living is knowing and knowing is living. And when living is no longer possible, it requires a different epistemic path.”[8] The postmodern impulse, bolstered by the rise of critical theory, is to assert that we cannot know anything apart from the sieve of our own experience. This is, at least in part, a needed corrective to the colonial hegemonic imperial gaze, especially for those who, like me, were brought up in and benefit from the dominant social, political, and epistemic frame.
I see an important resonance between Meek’s move to resituate knowing in the dynamic of love, as reflected in the mother’s smile, and Mignolo’s assertion that decolonizing knowledge requires unlinking “from rules of the game managed by modern imperial languages and institutions,” namely those politics, theological and otherwise, grounded in racist, heterosexist, and patriarchal norms.[9] Meek’s advocacy for a more relational and dynamic way of knowing resembles Mignolo’s disruption of the idea that knowing is about mastery, hierarchy, and control, even if, in doing so, she simultaneously reproduces aspects of the colonial gaze.
In some ways, I can relate to the challenge of attempting to carve out ways of being and knowing that are characterized by mutuality in spaces that are deeply marked by coloniality. My own discipline, biblical studies, came of age during the rise of global imperialism. As Stephen D. Moore explains, “The very period when critical biblical scholarship was being invented in Europe—principally the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—was also the period when European colonization of the globe was in a phase of unprecedented ascent.”[10] Both the colonial project and the invention of my discipline are wrapped up in the pervasive logics of sovereignty and supremacy that are inherent to the modern era. Both are rooted in a claim to a particular kind of authority, one that is totalizing and possessive and that does not leave room for multiplicity.
The frameworks and methods at the foundation of critical biblical scholarship in this era reflect a fascination (obsession?) with objectivity, something Eduardo Mendieta observes is deeply connected to the production of what he calls “the epistemic machine” and to which postmodern criticism directly responds. This epistemic machine is a knower who has “empt[ied] out his subjectivity so as to become a receptacle for objectivity.”[11] The epistemic machine is thus both empty of agency and too open to totalizing political and epistemic regimes. It is not possible to fully escape oneself and enter into a realm of pure fact, uninfluenced by personal experience and collective identity.
In other words, context matters. To take Meek’s image of the mother’s smile as an example, we know that a lack of love and attention from caregivers in early childhood has a demonstrable negative impact on later social-emotional growth and can even increase susceptibility to illness.[12] We can bet, then, that individuals who have experienced unconditional positive regard from caregivers at any point in their lives will necessarily engage with theological concepts like grace, love, and forgiveness differently than those who have not. As any good postmodern critique will remind us, objectivity is a dangerous farce that lends itself all too easily to erasure, subjugation, and alienation (of oneself and others).
Biblical studies was once a bastion of the cult of objectivity, and even now it remains centered on a desire to recover, unearth, and exegete a historical and/or originary authorial intent in the biblical text.[13] This preoccupation with origins has always bothered me insofar as it reflects the two assumptions regarding knowledge that Meek attributes to modernity: that knowledge is possessive and egological. Surely, there is comfort in the idea that there is a correct answer to life’s big questions, a logic to the organization of the world and the unfolding of history, and yet that desire for answers is always in tension with the fact that even if there is a grand logic to all things, we cannot apprehend it. I often wonder, then, how much we are missing in trying to recover an unknowable past, in trying to possess the ephemeral, in the hopes that by understanding what was, we will learn what we are to be. Instead, what might we glean from the polyvocality and multiplicity and contradictions of the canon and its perpetual tension with the archive? What possibilities might we find in other more liberative, nonhierarchical assemblages—ones that are not reliant on classist, gendered, and racialized systems of power and control?
Despite its inherent flaws—or perhaps because of them—I remain fascinated by the questions of my discipline: What makes this text sacred? How do communities live with and around and through this text? What makes for good—ethical, responsible, liberative, well-resourced—biblical interpretation? How might we equip people of faith, leaders and lay folk alike, to engage with the text and the traditions that suffuse it toward the common good?[14] These are big questions with a variety of tenable answers—it is precisely this capaciousness that keeps me coming back to the biblical text and the communities that gather around it again and again and again. Given the ways my own subjectivity has been shaped by the dominant frame, each return is as much a risk as it is a window of possibility to imagine differently. To me, responsible engagement must actively work to dismantle the colonial gaze (à la Mignolo’s analytic decolonial task) and must take place in community (à la Meek’s dynamic of love)—in other words, responsible engagement is both self-aware and accountable.
There is a necessary tension in the push and pull between anxiety and longing, objectivity and subjectivity, modernism and postmodernism, memory and imagination, the past and the future. Resituating knowing in the dynamic of love requires attending to the necessary tensions, and to the historical realities of oppression, marginalization, and subjugation that have limited the freedom and personhood of others. In the tension between Meek’s ideal (the aspirational) and the historical realities with which we must cope (the legacy of imperialism/colonialism) there exists an epistemic posture within which we might find the kind of communal flourishing that Meek seeks. In that space, we might create the kinds of intimate encounters where knowledge is not about sovereignty, possession, and power but accountable mutuality, shared intimacy, and interdependence.
[1] It is important to note that I have largely taught in seminary contexts, and these students are often training for vocational ministry contexts.
[2] Meek, “The Other: Returning to Our Natal Philosophy in the Mother’s Smile,” The Other Journal 38.5 (2024): 9.
[3] Meek, “The Other,” 10.
[4] Mignolo, “Decolonizing Western Epistemology / Building Decolonial Epistemologies,” Decolonizing Epistemologies: Latina/o Theology and Philosophy, ed. Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz and Eduardo Mendieta (Fordham University Press, 2012),39–40.
[5] I/it relationships always make me think of the Bechdel test insofar as the Bechdel test highlights the presence or absence of agency, humanity, and objectification.
[6] Mignolo, “Decolonizing,” 26.
[7] Meek, “The Other,” 4.
[8] Mignolo, “Decolonizing,” 20.
[9] Mignolo, “Decolonizing,” 29.
[10] Moore, “Postcolonialism,” A Handbook for Postmodern Biblical Interpretation, ed. A. K. M. Adam (Chalice, 2000), 186.
[11] Mendieta, “The Ethics of (Not) Knowing: Take Care of Ethics and Knowledge Will Come of Its Own Accord,” Decolonizing Epistemologies: Latina/o Theology and Philosophy, ed. Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz and Eduardo Mendieta (Fordham University Press, 2012), 248.
[12] See, for example, Gabor Mate, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture (Avery, 2022).
[13] This is an oversimplification and a generalization of biblical studies, to be sure. However, one need only open the Society of Biblical Literature’s annual meeting program and compare the number of program units focused on the historical-critical and philological paradigms to those dealing with alternative methodologies (i.e., sessions that are often more contextual, ideological, and rooted in critical theory) to conclude that the former paradigms still hold sway.
[14] This is obviously not an exhaustive nor uncontested list of questions for my discipline. Rather, these are the questions I find most pressing from where I sit as a biblical scholar invested in theological education, which involves the formation of vocational ministry leaders and public interpreters.