In this first installment of our Faculty Spotlight Interview series, we get to know Dr Michael Legaspi, a noted biblical studies scholar and the newest addition to the St Vladimir’s Seminary faculty.
Dr Legaspi is Associate Professor of Old Testament at St Vladimir’s Seminary and will soon publish a commentary on the Book of Job. He is also teaching the upcoming 4-week online course, Orthodoxy & the Old Testament, offered to the public as part of the new St Vladimir’s Online School of Theology. Moving forward, he hopes to contribute to the development of a stronger Orthodox scholarly presence in biblical scholarship.
In this interview, Dr Legaspi shares his expert insights on the key assumptions of modern biblical studies and explains how we as Orthodox are to identify and counter these assumptions in our own thinking. He also makes valuable suggestions for the improvement of Orthodox biblical education at the parish level.
Where did you start out in your Christian journey, and how did you and your family come to the Orthodox Faith?
I was raised here in the States, but my parents are from the Philippines, and I was raised in a very devout Roman Catholic home. I also went to Catholic schools, but my form of teenage rebellion was to become a kind of religious experimenter – I started reading the Bible on my own and attending Protestant churches. I gave my religion teachers all kinds of grief.
In college at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, I joined a Christian fellowship and became very evangelical in my sensibilities. That's where I met my wife, Abby, as well. We were actually Bible study leaders together in the same fellowship group. We got married right after college and started attending various Reformed Protestant and Presbyterian churches; I even entered a Presbyterian seminary for a bit. We started having kids and raising them in these churches.
When I started my graduate studies, I began to examine the Bible more closely, and a lot of the convictions that were important to me as a Protestant started to unravel, and I went through a period of confusion and uncertainty. So a friend and I decided to meet every week and just read anything we could get our hands on. This happened for a couple of years, and eventually, we read our way to the Church Fathers. And from there, we started to look at other Orthodox books, as well. So it was then that I became aware of Orthodoxy.
When it was time for me to start writing my dissertation, my wife and I decided to move closer to family in Pennsylvania. At this point, my wife was still a happy Presbyterian, but I was getting more dissatisfied with Protestantism. We started looking around at churches and thank God, we ended up in an Orthodox church that had a lot of converts, who understood where we were coming from (St John Chrysostom Antiochian Orthodox Church in York, PA). My wife, four children, and I became catechumens and were all received into the Church by Chrismation on the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul back in 2004.
Tell us about the influence of Orthodox authors such as Fr Alexander Schmemann on your decision to become Orthodox.
I think what impressed me most was a fairly simple point about Orthodoxy, one that had eluded me before I read Fr Schmemann's work—that Christianity is fundamentally about life. I think I had come to understand it as belief, as doctrine, as intellectual system, as a kind of sense-making - and Christian sense-making seemed to me to be good. But the actual claim God makes on us is on the totality of our lives, not simply the way we process the world intellectually. That point comes across so beautifully, for example, in For The Life of the World, where Fr Schmemann talks about living life eucharistically. We receive, and then we offer back to God, and this is the core of the Christian life. The relationship that God has graciously begun with us, that He invites us to participate in, is the framework for not just Church or theology, but for everything - eating your food, raising your family, going to work, walking around in nature, everything. This understanding made things fall into place for me.
Another book that was helpful was The Orthodox Way by Metropolitan Kallistos of blessed memory, making a similar point, that at the heart of Orthodoxy is the impulse to unify life in this journey to God. Then you start to learn about the effects of living life this way, and you realize that there are people who are actually doing this, for example, monks and nuns, the saints. That was fascinating for me to begin to understand.
How have your academic interests and scholarship evolved over time?
It was my goal early on to be a university professor in biblical studies. I fell in love with the Bible and as an undergrad, I studied Greek and Hebrew and ancient history and wanted to go into biblical studies. Yet it didn't happen right away. I ended up teaching high school history for a while, and eventually, I was able to enter the graduate program in Hebrew Bible at Harvard University.
Harvard's Bible program takes a very traditional, philological, historical approach—it is very much focused on language, history, archeology, and text. As I went through the program, I was enjoying studying those things, but my favorite class was the History of the Study of the Hebrew Bible with Prof. Peter Machinist, where we examined different approaches to the Bible over time and how they changed and evolved. In the field of biblical studies, we seldom talk about why we study the Bible, what is it all for, why we use this method and not another, and why we learn all these languages and study this history. That was the one class that started to address those questions. My interest in those questions never faded, so when it was time for me to write my dissertation, I asked if I could write on a topic related to how and why the modern study of the Bible developed, which was very unusual for my department—my advisor, Prof. Machinist, had to go to bat for me and get permission.
In preparing my dissertation topic, I learned a great deal from Prof. Ann Blair, my other doctoral advisor, and I met with a number of scholars, including an intellectual historian at Princeton, Anthony Grafton. He said to me, “If you want to study this, you have to go to Germany because that's where it all started.” And I said, “Well, my German is not that good.” He said, “Too bad. Make it good.” So I got a fellowship to go to the University of Göttingen in Germany and took the family, which was the real adventure - we had four little kids at the time.
At Göttingen, I sat in the library for a year and just read. I chose one scholar in particular (Johann David Michaelis, 1717-1791), read everything he wrote, and ended up writing my dissertation on him and his role in the development of the modern, critical study of the Bible.
When I finished that dissertation, no one really wanted to hire me, because if you have a degree in biblical studies, you write a dissertation on Isaiah, or Joshua, or the Iron II period, or something like that. There was one school, Creighton University in Omaha, that was willing to give me a shot, and I started teaching in the theology department. After that, I taught philosophy and religious studies at Phillips Academy in Andover, MA (2010– 2014; 2020–2022), and many courses on ethics, early Christianity, and Jewish Studies at Penn State (2014- 2021).
I enjoyed teaching in universities, but I have this sort of thing where every couple of years I completely lose faith in academia. It’s like, this is all pointless. All these articles, all these books, we spend all this time and it's just kind of useless. I ended up going back to Phillips Academy after Penn State because I thought, at least I can try to make a difference in the lives of high school students.
I was happily teaching at Phillips Academy when this position opened up at St Vladimir’s Seminary. Dr Alex Tudorie reached out to me and asked me to apply. I didn't really want to come at first, but he was quite persistent. Then when I visited, I just fell in love with the community. We have Vespers, Matins, and all the services here—it's an amazing community, and I couldn't pass it up. So we ended up coming here and now I'm trying to reengage the academic life in support of the Seminary, with a kind of conscious attempt to contribute to the Orthodox world.
What basic assumptions lie at the core of modern biblical studies, and how are you, as an Orthodox Christian, compelled to question them?
I think you have to remember a simple point, which is that modern, critical study of the Bible is very much tied up with the rise of modernity itself, and with modern culture, more broadly speaking. I think what makes modern culture, modern, is a kind of self-conscious reevaluation of tradition. So whether you're talking about traditional attitudes in physics, morality, or political philosophy, the early modern period featured this widespread interrogation of all those attitudes and stances. Likewise in biblical studies. A core imperative for modern biblical studies scholars is to develop a way of understanding and coming to terms with the Bible that is somehow independent of tradition and confessional identity.
This is odd, of course, because what makes the Bible, the Bible, is a commitment to understanding the Bible within the framework of religious identity, right? I mean, people before the modern period weren't just sitting down with the Bible to read it for fun, in cold blood, so to speak. But that's one assumption that people share in the scholarly world: we have to read this text in a way that's independent of confessional identity, independent of theological belief. And then the second assumption that follows is that the Bible is this thing, this object, this entity that you have to make sense of. It becomes the object of your inquiry. By approaching the Bible in this way, scholars believe they are practicing objectivity in their study of the Bible.
I think that both assumptions are problematic for us as Orthodox. Scripture is what it is to us and for us because we receive it as part of Holy Tradition. It’s a super important part of Tradition, but it's still a part of a greater whole.
The other thing I would say is that as a biblical scholar, you try and learn about everything in the ancient world in order to make sense of the Bible. As Orthodox, we turn to the Scriptures in order to make sense of the world.
We’re not looking at the Bible as a thing. We're looking through it to understand what our position is in the world, what our responsibilities are, and the way we are to live. So the moves that we make as scholars are understandable from the development of modern culture but not necessarily always productive for us as Orthodox.
Does this analytical, non-confessional approach to the Bible have broader implications for how modern-day Christians tend to understand the Bible?
Yes. I think that contemporary culture has inherited this particular way of problematizing the Bible as a thing to be understood. So as modern people, if you have this big old book that's very influential, the first thing we turn to in trying to understand it is history. Okay. So how does the Bible match up to history? What does history teach us about the Bible? If you look at what the Bible says about history, is it accurate? Is it trustworthy? Is it correct? Is it good history?
Science is another thing that modern people naturally turn to. What about creation? What about evolution? What about miracles? Another focus is morality, and in particular, sexual morality. Modern people know that the Bible has certain things to say about how we treat each other. We think some of them are really good. The golden rule is super, but with some of the teachings, like traditional sexual morality, many of us say, oh no, that's not good.
A lot of the discussions about the Bible in our culture presuppose that we have to posit these other categories (science, history, etc.) by which to come to terms with the Bible. Whereas for us as Orthodox, we don't see the Bible as a document that stands in the tribunal of history or science or morality. We think of the Scriptures exactly as what Christ said about them. He said, “the Scriptures testify of Me.”
Our confession is that the scriptures are about Christ. If you want to get to the core of the Scriptures, you're only going to get so far looking at it as a historian, scientist, or philosopher. The scriptures come alive and become real to the extent that they're understood in Christ.
How do you think Orthodoxy relates to the study of the Bible in the wider academic world? How can Orthodox scholars contribute in meaningful ways to the field of biblical studies?
I don't necessarily want my students to contribute to the world of biblical studies. I want them to be good priests, chaplains, catechists, and Christian leaders! Good priests, for example, who can handle the kinds of questions people have in parishes, and who can be part of the culture. I do think that undertaking academic biblical studies can be good preparation for dealing with parishioners’ questions about the Bible because those are often the same questions asked in the academic environment.
The discipline is getting more interested in the history of interpretation of the Bible and academics are getting more and more interested in traditional Jewish and traditional Christian modes of interpretation. So I think we have a contribution to make in looking at the patristic interpretation of the Scriptures. I'll mention Fr Bogdan Bucur, Associate Professor of Patristics here at St Vladimir’s Seminary, who has done quite a lot in what we might call reception history, specifically the way the Fathers read Scripture. We also have a lot to contribute in looking at how the Scriptures are enacted liturgically and in iconography and hymnography, as well. These are all areas that are of increasing interest to people who are not Orthodox.
I also think that there is this unfortunate perception that as far as actually sitting down and understanding the Bible, all the Orthodox can do is quote the Fathers - they don't really have the means to be interpreters of the Bible on their own. I think that's just foolish, but at the same time, we haven't produced as much as Catholic and Protestant scholars, and we are behind. So I think that there is an obvious place for us to make a contribution.
What was your guiding principle in choosing to write on the Book of Job and on the topic of Wisdom in biblical tradition?
For me as an Orthodox Christian, researching wisdom seemed like a natural way to bring to bear the insights of Tradition into an area of biblical studies where I thought people might be willing to hear it and receive it. As for the Book of Job, I've been interested in that for a long time. I think it is one of the central sites in the Bible for grappling with what wisdom means, and doesn't mean, quite frankly.
Another thing I'm interested in doing is to speak to the idea I mentioned earlier, that we as Orthodox don't have that much to contribute to biblical studies. I'd like to look at Orthodox biblical scholarship in the 18th and 19th centuries, to recover and tell the story of how biblical scholarship has actually developed in Orthodox countries, and to share the wisdom of Orthodox biblical scholarship more widely. I’m trying to learn modern Greek and Russian because I do eventually want to delve into this.
What are your recommendations for biblical education at the parish level? How might your students guide their future parishioners in reading and studying the Bible?
I think right now there is definitely a void, that I think is being filled to some extent by podcasts. There are several podcasts out there that people are turning to because they're hungry for knowledge about the Bible. Daily Orthodox Scriptures is a good one, and Lord of Spirits has really become a phenomenon. People are hungry to understand the Old Testament and its relation to Orthodoxy. I think it's a little bit unfortunate, though, that podcasts are succeeding where parishes themselves need to step up.
In an ideal world, parishes would do all the vesperal services for the Great Feasts and for the saints, and people would come to Vespers—that's where you actually hear the Old Testament. I would love it if after Vespers were over, the priest, because he had good training in seminary, could really talk about the Old Testament readings and help people understand them in the wider context of the Tradition. We read Genesis, Proverbs, and Isaiah every weekday during Lent, and I think it would be amazing if after Presanctified Liturgy, during the Lenten potluck, we had a discussion about the Old Testament readings for the week. I would like to see parishes start by building on features of the liturgical calendar that are already there to help us understand the Old Testament.
I also don't think that's quite enough, though. We need to start looking more at Sunday School curricula. I know that Protestant churches, when they decide they want to have a Bible study, they have a wealth of Bible study resources that they can order online. And before you know it, they have this study that's organized and people are willing to lead it, because they have materials. It's not daunting. I don't think we have these materials in the Orthodox world. So those kinds of things need to get written.
To end our interview on a more personal note, tell us about what you do for fun—we’ve heard you are a martial arts practitioner and instructor, and a fan of Bruce Lee!
Yes, I've been doing martial arts since I was a little kid. My dad did boxing and taught us boxing in our basement. I did Taekwondo as a youngster and then all throughout life, wherever I live, I try and get involved with something martial arts related. I taught martial arts at Phillips Academy, and it's what I like to do to stay in shape - you gotta do something right?
As for Bruce Lee, I grew up watching Bruce Lee films and we didn't have a lot of Asian role models then. And Bruce Lee was that for me— this sort of dynamic, unstoppable man, who was just a force to be reckoned with, and he was Asian—that to me was an amazing model. Over the years, I've gotten to know more about Bruce Lee, and now, as someone who's older, I just appreciate all that he accomplished in a very short time, having died at 32. What I like about him was that he had this thing that he wanted to share with the world, and even though he didn't know how it was going to fit or how people would receive it, he believed in himself enough to go out and do it. There wasn't a template for him to follow - he just had to do it. And I think that the courage it takes to just be yourself when there's no template is inspiring.
Dr Legaspi is also known to be an avid football fan and past high school coach, as well as an athlete in general. If you visit the St Vladimir’s Seminary gym at 6 a.m., he can be found there most mornings with fellow fitness enthusiasts among the Seminary faculty and staff.
Dr Legaspi resides on campus with his loving wife, Abby Legaspi, often visited by their adult children, Josiah, Sister Glykeria, Ana, and Cato.
