Theology of Migration in the Abrahamic Religions

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

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137001047
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Religion

This book provides an indispensable voice in the scholarly conversation on migration. It shows how migration has shaped and has been shaped by the three Abrahamic religions - -Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. No theory of migration will be complete unless the theological insights of these religions are seriously taken into account.

Chapter 1

Theology, Migration, and the Homecoming

Dale T. Irvin

Migration and Religion: Beginning the Journey

The study of migration has expanded significantly over the past several decades in the academic world. The proliferation of programs, centers, journals, and monographs on the topic has been extraordinary. A search of the Internet for “migration studies programs” now turns up more than five million results. The increase in migration studies has been due in no small part to the explosive growth in human migration globally. According to the United Nations, more than two hundred million people, or more than 3 percent of the world’s population, now live in a country other than the one in which they were born.¹ Even if all migration were to end tomorrow (which does not appear to be about to happen), the social, economic, political, and cultural impact of those living in new locations would continue to be felt around the world for generations to come.

Migration of course is not a new phenomenon. Human beings have been on the move for thousands of years. In some cases, the physical movement across borders into new social, political, and cultural locations has been temporary, as in the case of merchants who traveled great distances in the ancient world to sell their goods or services, but who intended eventually to return home. In other cases, the movement has been permanent, as when peoples have been taken captive into exile, or have been forced to resettle due to climatic conditions, or have moved in search of better material economic opportunities.

Over the past five centuries in the modern era, the pace of migration and the typical distances that migrants have traveled have both greatly increased. Migration in the modern period has been forced as well as voluntary. The mass movement of tens of millions of people of African descent who were enslaved and sold into forced labor in North and South America is an example of the former, while the migration of European settlers who sought expanded material economic opportunities in America, Africa, and Asia is an example of the latter.

Even the most voluntary of migrations is seldom without a certain amount of ambiguity. Rarely is a move to a new country or cultural context undertaken without some underlying anxiety. Even in the most benign situations, migration has hardly ever been viewed as an entirely positive step by those embarking on such a journey. It is more often thought of as the least of several evils, as when approximately one million people emigrated from Ireland during the potato famine of the 1840s and 1850s to escape starvation. Anyone who migrates does so with a certain degree of hope and anticipation that reaches beyond whatever realistic expectations one might have.

In many cases over the past several centuries, those who migrated have successfully settled into the new territories into which they have moved, adjusting and even over time assimilating into the new social and cultural world where they had come to live. Even the most extreme forms of cultural assimilation hardly ever resulted in a total erasure of the natal identities, however. Some form of cultural retention could almost always be found even after several generations have passed, resulting in new mixed or hybrid forms of culture and identity.

For those who have undertaken migration, and often for their descendants who follow generations after them, the part of their memory and identity that reflects the place from which they migrated quite often continues to be configured in some manner or degree as the “homeland.” Even when migrants have successfully assimilated into their new “home,” they often retain some form of imagined image or memory of the “old home” from which they or their ancestors originally migrated. The transnationalism that migration brings about is structured along an axis of “home” and “away,” of home land and foreign land.²

The field of migration studies in recent years has included a significant number of works exploring the role of religion in the phenomenon. Most of these efforts have focused on the historical and cultural aspects of religion, looking at how migration has created more complex or mixed cultural forms, at how religion has played a role in preserving a home identity among immigrants, or how religion has helped immigrants assimilate into a new civic environment.³ Some of these studies have integrated other social factors such as gender and sexual orientation.⁴ Several authors like Thomas A. Tweed have made migration a central aspect of their overall theory of religion.⁵ Nonetheless, migration has not yet been a significant theme for Christian systematic or constructive theology, a somewhat surprising reality given the central role that migration has played not just in world Christian history and tradition over the centuries, but in the wider realm of Abrahamic traditions that links Christians with Judaism and Islam. Within all three of these Abrahamic faith traditions, migration is a trope for salvation. Thus the starting point for a theology of migration is fittingly in the story of Abraham himself.

Migration and Memory of Abraham

The figure of Abraham is significant in the religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The scriptures of all three remember Abraham and his family as having migrated in response to instructions from God. The earliest form of the story is found in the Tanakh, the book that Christians call the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible, in which Terah took his son, Abram (before his name was changed to Abraham), Lot, who was the nephew of Abram, and Sarai, the wife of Abram, and migrated from the city of Ur, in what is now southern Iraq, to settle in Haran, in what is now Turkey, where Terah died (Genesis 11:27–32). Settling in Haran proved to be profitable for the remaining members of the group, for Genesis 12:5b tells us that they amassed a significant amount of wealth, presumably in the form of livestock as well as other material goods, and acquired a number of “persons” (nephesh in Hebrew, often translated as “souls” in English), perhaps slaves they had purchased, or others from the city who attached themselves freely to the clan.

At some point, however, according to Genesis 12:1, God spoke directly to Abram and instructed him to leave his land, relatives, and patriarchal household in order to go to a new land that God would show him. The instruction to migrate was accompanied by a promise of blessing: “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:2–3).⁶

Genesis 12 tells us that Abram did as he was commanded, taking Sarai and Lot with him, and setting out for the land of Canaan. Shortly after arriving there, famine forced Abram and Sarai to journey with their livestock and slaves to Egypt, where they resided until the famine had subsided, allowing them to return to Canaan (Genesis 12:10–16). Even then, however, their migrating days were not over. Abraham and Sarah (their names were changed by God in Genesis 17:1), though quite wealthy, continued the nomadic life of wandering throughout Canaan with their flocks. At the end of their days, the only land they had come to own was the field in which they were buried (Genesis 23:17 and 25:7).

The story of Abraham’s call and migration is remembered in the book of Acts in the scriptures that Christians generally call the New Testament. Stephen says in his speech that God first appeared to Abraham (not Terah) “when he was in Mesopotamia, before he lived in Haran, and said to him, ‘Leave your country and your relatives and go to the land that I will show you.’” (Acts 7:2b-3). The memory of Abraham in the Second Testament is largely genealogical in character. The first followers of Jesus sought to identify themselves and their movement as having descended from Abraham and Sarah in order to lay claim to being legitimate heirs of the legacy of faith and salvation. But they also lifted up the promise of the blessing for all nations that Abraham and Sarah were to bring, as seen in passages such as Acts 3:25. The Apostle Paul in particular came to understand Jesus Christ to be the means by which that blessing would be realized among all nations (as seen in Romans 4:17–18 and Galatians 3:8–16). That horizon comes fully into view in the book of Revelation at the end of the New Testament, where representatives of all nations of the earth are depicted as coming up to worship in the New Jerusalem.

The Qur‘an, the holy scriptures of Islam, also recalls Abraham’s migration as part of the foundation of his faith. According to Surah 21, “The Prophets,” Abraham’s initial migration was actually an act of deliverance by Allah, who rescued the patriarch and his nephew from the hands of angry idolaters after Abraham had broken their idols. In rescuing them, Allah directed them to the land of promise (21:58–71; see also Surah 29, “The Spider,” 16–26). According to the Qur’an, Abraham built the Sacred House or Kaaba in Mecca with Ishmael, his son, and instituted the pilgrimage (al-hajj) to it, a holy form of journeying that is closely akin to his initial migration in the manner in which it secured a promise (see Surah 22, “Pilgrimage,” 26–27). Islam links Abraham’s legacy with the Kaaba in Mecca most concretely and clearly with the universal aspects of the faith. It is in al-hajj that the universal aspects of Islam are most clearly experienced. Abraham’s migration in Islam links deliverance with pilgrimage. The ongoing practice of al-hajj extends that to the ends of the earth.

Migration in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

Abraham and his family set Judaism, Christianity, and Islam on the initial road to migration. Each faith tradition through the ages has, in its own way, continued the journeying. Several generations after Abraham and Sarah first came to Canaan, their Hebrew descendents were forced by famine to take refuge again in the land of Egypt. This time they stayed, and grew strong in number. The Egyptians came to oppress them, however, forcing the Hebrews into slavery until God called Moses to lead the people to freedom.

The exodus was another kind of migration, as was the wandering in the wilderness for 40 years and the entrance into the land of Canaan that was led by Joshua. The last migration took on the form of conquest in the memory of the Hebrew people. Migration of a different sort was later forced upon this same people by another conquest, first by the Assyrian Empire against the northern kingdom of Israel, and then by Babylon with the fall of Jerusalem in the south. Ezekiel was a migrant who had been born in Jerusalem but forced into exile in Babylon, where he lived out his days in a foreign land. Ezra, on the other hand, was born in Babylon, according to Jewish texts and tradition, but he joined the migration back home to resettle and rebuild Jerusalem, the city not of his birth but of his ancestry.⁷

The majority of people of Hebrew descent did not return to Jerusalem in the days after Ezra and Nehemiah. Most continued to live in the diaspora, or “scattering.” In Jewish history, dispora came to be understood as “wandering” as well. Wandering and exile were closely related, as seen in the story of Cain in Genesis 4:11–12. Following the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, even ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Migration in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
• Chapter 1 Theology, Migration, and the Homecoming
• Chapter 2 “You Will Seek From There”: The Cycle of Exile and Return in Classical Jewish Theology
• Chapter 3 Divine Glory Danced: Jewish Migration as God’s Self-Revelation in and as Art
• Chapter 4 Theology of Migration in the Orthodox Tradition
• Chapter 5 Embracing, Protecting, and Loving the Stranger: A Roman Catholic Theology of Migration
• Chapter 6 Protestantism in Migration: Ecclesia Semper Migranda
• Chapter 7 The Im/migrant Spirit: De/constructing a Pentecostal Theology of Migration
• Chapter 8 Migration: An Opportunity for Broader and Deeper Ecumenism
• Chapter 9 Toward a Muslim Theology of Migration
• Chapter 10 Challenges of Diversity and Migration in Islamic Political Theory and Theology
• Chapter 11 Signs of Wonder: Journeying Plurally into the Divine Disclosure
• Selected Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index