Contemporary Issues of Migration and Theology

E. Padilla, P. Phan, E. Padilla, P. Phan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137032881
• eBook ISBN: 9781137031495
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Cristianismo

With a diverse list of contributors, this volume seeks to discuss in depth some of the key issues that migration poses to World Christianity in the fields of constructive theology, ethics, spirituality, mission, ministry, inculturation, interreligious dialogue, and theological education.

Chapter 1

Circumambulating Exodus-Migration-Conquest: A Theological Hermeneutics of Migratory Narrativity

Marion Grau

National memory is always the site of the hybridity of histories and the displacement of narratives . . . we learn the ambivalence of cultural difference: it is the articulation through incommensurability that structures all narratives of identification, and all acts of cultural translation.

—Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture¹

This chapter offers some reflections on the many meanings of the narratives found in the biblical books of Genesis through Judges. It considers how context, history, and place continue to inform our theological approaches to mission and argues that these many meanings are a crucial resource in understanding and reframing theologies of divine favor, identity, land, and settlement as well as attitudes toward migration, exodus, and conquest.

In his Exodus: A Hermeneutics of Freedom, the Argentine scholar Severino Croatto points to the generative ambivalence of the biblical narratives of exodus, migration, and conquest: “Is not the Exodus theme of immense hermeneutical richness?”² Indeed, it is a most fascinating example of the fecundity, density, and complexity of biblical narrativity and its reception history and the worlds, textual and otherwise, it has created. Colonial movements have been frequent throughout human history and it has been pointed out that there were significant collusions between territorial expansion and claims of divine favor for such quests. Exodus and conquest motifs have been a staple of Christian theologies from the beginnings of doctrinal formation. The motif was important for the typological interpretation of the church fathers who established a historical succession narrative by way of the rhetorical strategy of prototype and fulfillment. The intertextual accretions, the layers and variations are theologically, ethically, and politically troubling and perplexing. Much Christian theology and preaching stays with the exodus and omits the settlement. Christian theologies of the Exodus often stay on the metaphorical level, which tends to leave behind the real places, people, and their problems.

I suggest here that these narratives are neither simply mandatory itineraries for our own travels toward identities nor completely erratic meanderings. Rather, they provide movable theological maps—pilgrimage routes rather than full-featured maps—of tales of homelands and strange lands, forms of hospitality and settlement patterns. When we come to the biblical texts on these matters, attempts to render these texts safe have failed. We can offer corrective interpretations, but their potential to produce contradictory interpretations and applications remains unerasable.

In a global setting where migration has become endemic due to the migrations of capital as well as changes in climate resulting from industrial production and its migration around the globe, many questions about land, belongingness, identity and community assail us. We can learn from theological engagement with biblical texts how struggling, contested cultures combine, extend and recombine their narratives toward a contested identity narrative. This may help us reflect on cultural tensions concerning migration and colonialism today.

The narrative of the Israelite exodus informs much of Christian liberation theology. It is also part of the memories of a people with one of the most intense migratory histories, the Jews. The Exodus narrative is often read either as a myth of liberation guided by divine power, or as a myth of colonization that invokes divine power for genocide and displacement. These interpretations do not have to be an irreducible double-bind. Many important questions can be brought into a lively engagement with the texts: How do we reroot ourselves and become people of the land wherever we are? How do we understand land and home on a planet where a changing climate is forcing many to migrate? What in the narrated changes and shifts of population allows the preservation of important cultural elements, while being open to other cultural practices? What would be a viable theological engagement with land, community, and livelihood seen under the aspect of migration?

Underlying are methodological considerations about modes of reading. Two initial options present themselves: to attempt to establish the relative historicity of the events described or to look at the narrative’s reception history. We will do some of each in this essay. To support what Musa Dube refers to as “liberating interdependence” both methods can be used: a historical critical approach, seeing the narrative as an ideological/theological document rather than displaying outright historicity. Rereadings across time and space, while fertile and rich, always contain the danger of slippage between oppressed to oppressor. Few reading strategies can help prevent that the same evidence could be seen to mean the opposite.³

Whose Migration, Which Rationale? On the Hermeneutics of Biblical Migratory Narrativity

The texts in question interpret divine will and agency in ways that have informed many issues in the doctrine of God. Why did God harden the heart of Pharaoh against letting the Israelites go and precipitating the seven plagues? What is the power of God in regards to the destruction of the Egyptians? How ought we to understand the will of God in relationship to wars, interethnic relations, religious difference, exile, and suffering? How ought one to associate divine favor with political and economic fortunes? Though inconsistencies in biblical texts were not studied in ways they are today, ancient readers noticed the problems in the text, but solved them with other reading strategies. Kevin Burke argues that liberation theologian Ignacio Ellacuría imagines history “as the place where God meets humanity and humanity meets God” and rather than reducing history to the “mechanical unfolding of a present divine plan, this account views history as radically open to the future.”⁴Claims about divine agency in relation to exodus/migration/conquest narratives may be best done by way of the via negativa in recognition of the ambivalence of the hermeneutics of texts and events.

It seems hardly necessary to elaborate on the fact that in many cases the narratives in question have been read as legitimation for the readers’ colonial impetus: In a supersessionist mode of reading some Christian ideologists of nation claimed the status as the “new Israel” as Spanish,⁵ British, and American colonists, and others saw themselves called to new lands. Interpretations of the exodus remain as manifold as the places from which the narratives are read. Marginalized groups on the verge of establishing a separate identity can read themselves into the narratives.⁶ Thus, British readers used the exodus metaphor to describe their felt oppression by the British Crown and hierarchy: Oliver Cromwell and Benjamin Franklin both invoked God’s action as liberative from their perspective,⁷ while Dryden and the Puritans employed the conquest stories to justify the restoration of the monarchy and their treatment of Native Americans respectively.⁸

The figure of Moses in particular became attached to symbolic leaders of certain communities’ liberation: George Washington, Brigham Young, Denmark Vesey, and Martin Luther King Jr.⁹ Harriet Tubman, a leader of the underground railroad, was dubbed the black Moses, leading her people via a secret route to the North to freedom. The exodus inspired, as is now more widely understood, a number of gospel hymns, following the biblical narrative as well as being inscribed with hidden transcripts for an exodus along the Underground railroad: Go Down Moses, Steal Away, Deep River, Swing Low Sweet Chariot, Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho, and others. Elsewhere, Delores Williams’s Sisters in the Wilderness resists James Cone’s use of the exodus narrative as an unambiguously positive announcement of black liberation. For her, the place Black women find themselves in the extended narrative is in the household of Abraham, as female slaves such as Hagar, impregnated by their masters.¹⁰ They did not experience liberation, but rather remained in captivity, even as their masters were migrating to other places, and bore their children, remaining in some form of captivity until today. God’s agency here appears more accurately described as the one who sustains in captivity rather than simply liberating from it.¹¹

Various communities in Africa have named Nelson Mandela and Kwame Nkrumah as their own Moses figures. Ghanaian theologian Mercy Oduyoye shows how the Exodus helped imagine the identity of postcolonial African nations, in which figures such as Jomo Kenyatta participated in the liberation of the colonized. God leads the Israelites out of Egypt’s slavery, and manifests himself as warrior for Israel in conquest of Canaan. Oduyoye’s reading includes the conquest narrative, and she appears to confirm God as warrior for Israel without ambivalence.¹² The Zimbabwean Dora Mbuwayesango, however, remarks on the ambivalence of the conquest narrative, noting that “the deity has a grand scheme for the Israelites—a scheme that involves replacing other peoples in the land. For Africans, this picture of divine purpose is ironic in the face of the Shona peoples’ displacement by the European settlers.”¹³Another African interpreter, Musa Dube, articulates a suspicion of travel, of “myths of power” that do not cor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Migration and Christian Theology
• Chapter 1   Circumambulating Exodus-Migration-Conquest: A Theological Hermeneutics of Migratory Narrativity
• Chapter 2   Xenophilia or Xenophobia: Toward a Theology of Migration
• Chapter 3   Expanding Space: A Possibility of a Cavernous Mode of Dwelling
• Chapter 4   Migration and Cities: Theological Reflections
• Chapter 5   A New Way of Being Christian: The Contribution of Migrants to the Church
• Chapter 6   An Asian Theology of Migration and Its Interreligious Implications: Insights from the Documents of the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences (FABC)
• Chapter 7   The Spirituality of Migrants: Mapping an Inner Geography
• Chapter 8   Migration and Mission: Pastoral Challenges, Theological Insights
• Chapter 9   The Experience of Migration as Source of Intercultural Theology
• Chapter 10   Race, Power, and Migration: Reimagining
• Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index