Interview with Carmen Imes:
So I’m curious across this trilogy that you’ve written, how your views have changed or modified in the process of writing these books. Are there things on which you’ve found yourself shifting such that now, at the end of this journey you’ve been on with these three books, you find yourself in a different place just maybe theologically or the way you see the Bible?
I do think one shift has been a growing awareness of how the same message can land differently in different communities. So, bearing God’s name — in that book, I’m arguing that every believer has been stamped with God’s name or claimed by God as belonging to God’s family. And so, therefore, we should live in alignment with that, we should represent Him well.
And I noticed when I was speaking at a Chinese seminary last year that there was some pushback to that. There was a sense of: this is too much like the pressure that our parents put on us to perform in order to keep up the honor for our family. And I realized that it could be received more as pressure than invitation. Whereas in a very white Western context, the problem is we think: my faith is just between me and God and it’s nobody else’s business. And so I was wanting to say, no, look, we belong to each other and what you do, the way you live matters for faith. But I think in an Asian context, actually, the emphasis might need to be in a different direction. There might need to be different framing of that.
So one friend suggested that maybe I should have used the illustration from Toy Story where Andy is the boy, and he’s got all these toys, and you’re watching the toys go through this adventure. And there’s a part in the movie where Woody, the favorite toy, gets separated from Andy, and yet he proves that he still belongs to Andy. And he goes through this crisis where he rediscovers his belonging to Andy by looking at the bottom of his shoe where it says “Andy.” So maybe that’s a less pressureful way of thinking about bearing God’s name.
So that’s one place I’ve shifted. I still believe in the message of bearing God’s name, but I’m realizing that for different contexts, it might need a different framing.