Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of theology in the ROM. My guest today is Dr. Joel Moodamale, who is the director of theology and research for Proverbs 31 Ministries. He also has a PhD in the New Testament under doctors Patrick Schreiner and Michael Heiser with an emphasis on Paul's household language and Ephesians, which is the foundation of our conversation today. We begin talking about the end of Ephesians, where Paul uses household language to describe the multiethnic kingdom of God that he is forming.

And we go back into the Old Testament roots of that passage and that spills over into a conversation about what it means to be a multiethnic church.

And then we end with a conversation about who is the better all-time basketball player, Michael Jordan or LeBron James. So come for the theology, stay for the basketball.

Please welcome the show for the first time, Dr. Joel Moodamale.

Joel, we've been connecting an offline for a bit now and finally, we are here on the pod. Yes, so thanks for coming on theologian around.

Thanks, Preston. Super excited to be on here. Give us just a quick background of who you are, how you got into scholarship, your journey, and kind of what you're up to these days.

My journey, if you can hear me, you might not be able to tell, but if you see me, I'm Indian.

And so my grandparents are missionaries in India, some of my earliest memories are of my grandfather preaching the gospel in India in rural villages with a class of people called untouchables.

So really, I think blessed to be able to have a strong heritage in the faith and seeing the gospel at play, you know, in my life.

And so part of just my journey has been trying to figure out what God wants of me and how to relate in different places.

I'm always felt like I never really quite fit in.

I have a joke when I came, I was born in the Chicago land area. So I grew up watching Michael Jordan win the three Pete, repeat the three Pete, incredible time to grow up in the city of Chicago.

And I found that the church really was the place where I felt welcomed.

It was the place where I was seen in some ways.

There are parts of me that were seen. It's really complicated parts of me were seen. All the parts of me were not seen and just kind of led me down a road of what is the Bible actually say about my ethnicity.

What does the Bible say about Joel as an Indian who is a child of an immigrant that was born in the States, but live the first two and a half years in India and then came back.

All of those questions. And so I ended up going to Bible college. I'm a theological nut.

I did an undergraduate degree at a penicostal charismatic Bible college in Sacramento, California.

I went to go work for logos, Bible software. And while I was working for them, I ended up doing going to seminary at Knox Theological Seminary, which is a Presbyterian spot, have done the gamut of the theological world.

I think I just need to go the Anglican route. And then I will look at everything.

PhD was at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. And so underneath Dr. Patrick Schreiner, who's my first reader.

And then my second reader is Dr. Michael Heiser, who's a Old Testament scholar.

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