Der holds a B.A. in Christian Ministry from Trinity International University in Deerfield, IL, and an M.A. in Theology with an emphasis in biblical studies from Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, CA. He has spoken at conferences on topics relating to multi-ethnic ministry, musical worship, and racial/ethnic identity and the Christian faith. Der is married to Alice. They have a daughter, Penny, with another baby on the way.
An hermeneutic is a method of interpreting texts.
As you are reading this right now, you are employing a hermeneutic whether you realize it or not. You may be considering who I am as the author – my social location, age, gender, race, theological tradition, and my authorial intent. You may also consider the context surrounding this article – factors such as the blog where you accessed this article, the genre of a “blog”, and the basic literary structure of this article. And finally, what I would argue as the most important variable in the interpretation of texts (but perhaps the least considered): YOU! As the reader, you bring yourself and your subjective experiences and lens as you read and interpret this article. You are, at this moment in time, engaging in a hermeneutic or a method of reading and interpretation of this text.
If indeed readers bring a level of subjectivity to their texts, what, then, does it mean to read Scripture as Hmong Americans? Doesn’t the Bible just speak plainly for itself regardless of who reads it? Does the social and cultural location of the readers really matter when reading the Bible?
If you answer “no” to this last question, then I would pose to you the question of why there exist a plethora of Bible commentaries? Perhaps you may even own two or more Bible commentaries on a single book of the Bible. Why should this be necessary if, indeed, the reader (or commentator) of Scripture does not matter? To take this logic even further, why should there exist any Bible commentaries at all if, indeed, the Bible just speaks plainly for itself regardless of who reads, interprets, or comments on it?
To be sure, the Bible as God’s word does speak to us (2 Tim 3:16; 2 Pet 1:20-21). But it needs to be interpreted, and the reader (or community of readers) of Scripture matters significantly in this interpretive process.
Much could be said about the history of biblical interpretation, that is, the different ways the Bible has been interpreted throughout the 2,000 years of church history. We could start as early as the apostle Paul’s hermeneutics; his use and interpretation of Old Testament texts in explaining the Christ event in the New Testament (e.g., 1 Cor 10:4; cf. Exod 17:6). We could explore how certain theologians of the Middle Ages articulated atonement theories in light of their sociopolitical and economic context. And closer to our context today, we can identify Martin Luther in the context of the Catholic church gone amok and how severely this shaped his interpretation of Romans and Galatians.
The fact that there exists a “history of biblical interpretation” is strong evidence that different readers and interpreters of Scripture arrive at different theological emphases based on their historical, social, and cultural locations.
As Hmong Americans, we are bringing our unique historical, social, and cultural experiences to Scripture as we read it. As a people group, it is our deep desire that the God revealed in Scripture is able to relate and have compassion towards our particular Hmong American context and needs. We long for Scripture to speak to our Hmong American marriages, our Hmong American family dynamics, our Hmong American churches, and our Hmong American communities. With strong patriarchal values in traditional Hmong marriages, how should headship and submission in Ephesians 5:21-33 be read and practiced as to glorify God and honoring of Hmong customs? With deep intergenerational conflicts in Hmong American families, how should Deut 6:6-9 or Prov 22:6 be read and practiced by 1st generation Hmong parents and their disconnected 1.5 or 2nd generation children? Within a clan-based society where leadership and power are entrusted to clan leaders, how might Scripture uniquely shape Hmong American ecclesiology and church polity? Finally, for the larger Hmong American community practicing traditional Hmong shamanism, how does Scripture speak to such a worldview (e.g., demon possessions in Mark 7:26; Matt 17:18; Luke 4:33; Peter’s trance and vision in Acts 10; Paul’s visionary experiences in 2 Cor 12)? Then there’s also how Scripture speaks to dynamics of honor and shame, inclusion/exclusion, and social/racial marginalization.
In my own reading and interpretation of Scripture, one hermeneutical lens I have been developing is to find significance in the subtleties of Paul’s bicultural identity as evidenced in his epistles. It was precisely Paul’s bicultural identity (i.e., a “Hebrew of Hebrews” and also a Roman citizen) that enabled Paul to straddle in and out of minority Jewish and majority Greek contexts so effectively. In 1 Corinthians 1:18-25, the bicultural Paul, leveraging and displaying his expertise in both Jewish and Greek paradigms, is able to confront, dismantle, and reconfigure both Jewish and Greek metrics of “power” for Jews and “wisdom” for Greeks. Paul writes, “Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor 1:22-24, NIV, emphasis added). It was Paul’s intimate knowledge of Jewish and Greek cultures, that is, his biculturalism, that enabled him to speak a gospel message confronting dual audiences, all within a single breath.
As a bicultural Hmong American person reading 1 Corinthians 1, it jumped off the pages that Paul was able to do this because he, too, was bicultural. It gave me biblical grounds to leverage my own biculturalism for gospel proclamation, rather than to suppress it. This is the hidden potential of a consciously Hmong American or Asian-American hermeneutic.
By embracing a hermeneutic that is conscious of the readerly community’s historical, social, and cultural location, it not only affirms our unique story as an ethnic group within God’s creation, but it also reminds us that God desires to incarnate himself among us for who we are – Hmong Americans and not as “honorary white” Christians. According to Revelation 7:9, nations, tribes, people groups, and languages will retain their distinctions in worship before the throne of God. In other words, our ethnic uniqueness will go with us into eternity, just as Jesus now stands at the right hand of God as a Jewish, male person (Heb 10:12; 12:2).
In summary, a Hmong American hermeneutic is the intersection of Hmong American stories and the story of redemption through Jesus Christ as revealed in Scripture. I believe God sees me as a Hmong American male (in addition to seeing me as a beloved child, servant, friend, leader, ambassador, etc). And because God sees me as such, God invites me as such when reading and interpreting God’s written Word.