Christian Theology in the Age of Migration: Implications for World Christianity 2019955248, 9781793600738, 9781793600745

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Christian Theology in the Age of Migration

Christian Theology in the Age of Migration : Implications for World Christianity, edited by Peter C. Phan, Lexington Books, 2020.

Copyright © 2020. Lexington Books. All rights reserved. Christian Theology in the Age of Migration : Implications for World Christianity, edited by Peter C. Phan, Lexington Books, 2020.

Christian Theology in the Age of Migration Implications for World Christianity

Copyright © 2020. Lexington Books. All rights reserved.

Edited by Peter C. Phan

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Christian Theology in the Age of Migration : Implications for World Christianity, edited by Peter C. Phan, Lexington Books, 2020.

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefeld Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom

Copyright © 2020. Lexington Books. All rights reserved.

Copyright © 2020 by The Rowman & Littlefeld Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Control Number: 2019955248 ISBN 978-1-7936-0073-8 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-7936-0074-5 (electronic) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Christian Theology in the Age of Migration : Implications for World Christianity, edited by Peter C. Phan, Lexington Books, 2020.

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Christianity in the “Age of Migration” Peter C. Phan

ix

PART I: CONTEXTS AND RESOURCES

1

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1 Nativist Responses to the Challenge of Migration in Our Global Age José Casanova

3

2 Migrant Itineraries and the Catholic Church: An Anthropological Approach Valentina Napolitano

19

3 The Exodus as Memories about Migration: Examples from the Hebrew Bible and the Deuterocanonical Books Hendrik Bosman

33

4 Forced and Return Migrations as the Mitte of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament John Ahn

51

5 Migration in the New Testament: The Quest for Home vănThanh Nguyễn

69

6 Migration and Church History Ciprian Burlacioiu

87

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Christian Theology in the Age of Migration : Implications for World Christianity, edited by Peter C. Phan, Lexington Books, 2020.

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Contents

PART II: SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY

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7 God, the Beginning and the End of Migration: A Theology of God from the Experience and Perspective of Migrants Peter C. Phan

99 101

8 Jesus the Paradigmatic Migrant Kanan Kitani

129

9 Coalitional Church: Ecclesiology in the Age of Migration Ulrich Schmeidel

151

PART III: ETHICS

167

10 The Migrant Imago: Migration and the Ethics of Human Dignity William A. Barbieri Jr.

169

11 Migration and Structural Injustice Kristin E. Heyer

185

12 Immigration Policy, Democracy, and Ethics Joshua Mauldin

201

13 Too Late for Justice? Disappearing Islands, Migration, and Climate Justice Seforosa Carroll

221

PART IV: PRACTICAL THEOLOGY

237

14 Liturgy and the Age of Migration: Toward a Liturgy without Borders Kristine Suna-Koro

239

15 Migration and the Eucharist: A Sacramental Vision of Migration 255 Daniel G. Groody, CSC 16 Permanence and Impermanence: Architecture and Migration Karla Cavarra Britton

269

17 Migration, Religious Education, and Global Learning Kathrin Winkler

285

Bibliography 303 Index 327 About the Editor and Contributors

Christian Theology in the Age of Migration : Implications for World Christianity, edited by Peter C. Phan, Lexington Books, 2020.

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Acknowledgments

Our frst debt of gratitude is owed to the Center of Theological Inquiry (CTI) for the generous fnancial support it provided the participants in the research seminar on Migration and Religion in the spring of 2018. Without this support we would not have been able to conduct our research together and share with one another the fruits of our scholarly labor. Of course, CTI could not function and implement its mission without its director, Dr. William Storrar. To Will, who initiated the research seminar and who did everything possible throughout the seminar to assure its success, we express our profound gratitude for his personal care for each of us, his efforts to keep us on time and to the point during our Tuesday morning presentations, and the elegant lunches that followed. We offer our thanks to Will’s wife Joanna, too, for graciously welcoming us into their home and feeding us several times so we could feel at home away from home. To Joshua Mauldin, CTI’s associate director, we are grateful for his meticulous and patient guidance in the intricate business of getting all the required paperwork ready to move to Princeton and into the residences. We also thank CTI’s administrative assistant Jaime Basher for her many kindnesses, big and small, to make our stay at CTI smooth and enjoyable. We are also grateful to José Casanova, Valentina Napolitano, vănThanh Nguyễn, Joshua Mauldin, Kristin Heyer, Kristine Suna-Koro, and Daniel Groody for the chapters they generously contributed to the volume. We are grateful to senior acquisitions editor of Lexington Books Michael Gibson for his warm welcome of our book into his press. We are grateful also to assistant editor Mikayla Mislak for her expert and meticulous guidance of the publication process. We also thank James Shelton Nalley, a doctoral student in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, Georgetown University, for his editorial and computer services. vii

Christian Theology in the Age of Migration : Implications for World Christianity, edited by Peter C. Phan, Lexington Books, 2020.

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Acknowledgments

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Finally, we are grateful to one another for the rarest opportunity to work and live together for almost fve months. We will always fondly remember our time together at what is known as the “Circle,” where our residences are located. Of course, what happened at the Circle stays at the Circle. But we must confess that our life there was not purely academic research. It was (not infrequently) punctuated by shared meals, pre- and post-prandial “spirit-ual” conversations, and parties with indigenous foods. We are grateful to Sef’s husband Ralph for acting as our (free) Uber driver and for his Down Under culinary talents; to Hendrik’s wife Daleen for her tales on South Africa and on her indulgent husband. We were also grateful to Ciprian’s daughter Maria and Sef’s and Ralph’s daughter Sarah for reminding the oldies among us of the vitality and free spirit of our long-gone youth. Kathrin’s husband Peter and their family and Prof. Dr. Barbara Städtler-Mach, president of Lutheran University, Nuremberg, paid us a gracious visit from Germany. All in all, strangers and migrants we no longer were; indeed, we have become friends and the family of 2018 CTI Fellows, which is a rare and beautiful thing indeed. This book is a small souvenir of our lovely time together; may it also bring abundant love and joy to its readers.

Christian Theology in the Age of Migration : Implications for World Christianity, edited by Peter C. Phan, Lexington Books, 2020.

Introduction Christianity in the “Age of Migration”

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Peter C. Phan

The book you are now reading originated from a semester-long seminar in Spring 2018 at the Center of Theological Inquiry (CTI) in Princeton, New Jersey. In April 2016, the director of CTI, Dr. William Storrar, invited me to direct a research seminar for the Center on an issue of global concerns and public interest. Given the political and religious upheaval then caused by millions of refugees, mostly Muslim, feeing from the wars in the Middle East and seeking asylum in many countries of Europe as well as Donald Trump’s vicious racist, anti-migrant, and xenophobic rhetoric during his campaign as the Republican Party nominee for the US presidency and during his years in offce as president, and given my long-standing interest in the theology of migration, I proposed migration and its impact on Christianity as the theme of the research seminar. My choice of migration as the theme for the research seminar, I must confess, came to me not so much from some recondite insight as from events and images that kept crowding news sources and social media. The haunting images of the three-year-old Syrian boy Aylan Shenu washed up, face down, on a sandy beach in Bodrum, southern Turkey, in his bright red shirt, blue shorts and Velcro-laced black shoes in 2015, and, a year later, of a one-yearold drowned baby cradled, as if peacefully asleep, in the arms of a German rescuer have drawn worldwide attention to the tragic plight of migrants and refugees in the second decade of the twenty-frst century. But large-scale migrations are not a recent phenomenon. On the contrary, it has been a global phenomenon of unimaginable magnitude and complexity since World War II. There is virtually no nation on the Earth that has not been seriously affected by migration as country of origin, transit, or destination. According to a recent report released by the United Nations Refugees Committee, a record 65.3 million people were displaced as of the end of ix

Christian Theology in the Age of Migration : Implications for World Christianity, edited by Peter C. Phan, Lexington Books, 2020.

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2015, compared to 59.5 million just twelve months earlier. Measured against the current world population of 7,349 billion, these numbers mean that 1 in every 113 people globally is now an asylum-seeker, an internally displaced person, or a refugee.1 Whereas at the end of 2005, there were an average of six persons displaced per minute, today the number is twenty-four per minute. The three countries that account for more than half of the world refugees are: Syria (4.9 million), Afghanistan (2.7 million), and Somalia (1.1 million). About half of the world’s refugees are children.2 Beyond and behind these cold numbers lie human faces—thousands of Aylan Shenus and unnamed babies and their families—struck by tragedies of immense proportions, with loss of land and home, family separation, physical sufferings, rape and sexual violence, psychological damage, lack of opportunities for education, uncertain future, and death itself. Global population movements today are so worldwide, frequent, and immense that our time has been dubbed “The Age of Migration.”3 In planning the seminar, Dr. Storrar and I intended it to be internationally represented. Happily, the ten selected “Fellows” who formed the core of the seminar hailed from different parts of the globe and brought to the weekly seminar discussions their perspectives on migration derived not only from their diverse academic disciplines but also from the experiences of migration in their own countries. The Fellows’ countries of origin were Korea, Romania, Germany, Vietnam, Japan, South Africa, Australia, Mexico, and the United States. Their scholarly specializations include Biblical studies, systematic theology, practical theology, church history, religious studies, ethics, ecology, art and architecture, and religious education. In addition to the weekly presentations by the Fellows on their own researches, the seminar also invited scholars to address the areas of migration that were not covered by the Fellows’ specializations. Saskia Sassen, the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology, Columbia University, and David Hollenbach, SJ, the Pedro Arrupe Distinguished Research Professor of the Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, spoke about the current sociological and human rights issues in migration respectively. Albert J. Raboteau, the Henry W. Putnam Professor of Religion emeritus, Princeton University, lectured on Black Slave Religion. Kristin E. Heyer, Professor of Theological Ethics, Boston College, lectured on the ethics of migration; Valentina Napolitano, Professor of Anthropology, University of Toronto, on the nexus between the migrant labor and the reproduction of the Catholic Church and industrial economies; and Kristine Suna-Koro, Professor of Theology, Xavier University, on liturgy and worship in and by migrant communities. Daniel Groody, CSC, Professor of Theology, Notre Dame University, shared his insights on the spirituality of migration. On Islam, we benefted immensely from the lectures by Luis Xavier Lopez-Farjeet, Universidad

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Panamericana, Mexico City on Islamic philosophy, Anver Emon, University of Toronto, on legal history, and Urfan Khalid, Cardiff University, UK, on international law. At the end of the seminar in May 2018, the Fellows expressed the desire that the results of their own researches, enriched by the insights they had learned from each other as well as from the invited speakers, be gathered into a book so that the fruits of their labor could be shared with a wider public. As editor, I invited all the Fellows to submit their chapters for the volume, and where there are lacunas in the subject matter to be treated, I tried to fll them up by seeking contributions from other scholars. These include José Casanova, vănThanh Nguyễn, Valentina Napolitano, Joshua Mauldin, Kristin Heyer, and Daniel Groody. The book is divided in four parts. The frst provides the contexts and resources for a Christian theology of migration. A theology of migration must be informed by concrete sociological data. José Casanova discusses mass migration in the context of globalization, especially in its second and third phases, from the 1800s to the 1920s and from the 1950s to today, respectively. Within the European Union, Casanova points out the links among Islam, Christianity and secularism, and in the United States, the links among American nativism, Evangelical Christianity, and American civil religion. From Casanova’s sweeping but penetrating sociological analysis, it is clear that migration is an extremely complex phenomenon, economically, politically, and religiously. Putting his sociologist’s hat aside, as a Catholic Casanova believes that “for Christians and particularly for Catholics, to be open to migrants and refugees is a primary Christian duty reinforced even more so by the recognition of the demands of moral reciprocity.” He fnds in Pope Francis’s statements about and attitude toward migrants the model for fulflling such primary Christian duty. From her expertise in anthropology and ethnography, Valentina Napolitano offers insights into what she calls “migrant itineraries” within the Catholic Church in which migrant, especially female, labor on the one hand and the expansion of the Church and the reproduction of advanced industrial economies of the West on the other have been enmeshed. Napolitano documents this fact by studying the labor performed by migrant Mexican nuns taking care of their elderly sisters and retired priests at their order’s headquarters in Rome. She ends her chapter by noting how “migrants’ itineraries—with their entanglements of experience, histories, desires, materialities, and labour— help us to focus on where a labor of love is required and performed, not only as part of a normative family and wedlocked structure, but also outside of it. Together with a ‘sacrifcial’ labor—the labor of love and care as sacrifce— we need to put into focus the possibilities for new emancipatory horizons for both lay and religious gendered migration.”

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In addition to sociology and anthropology, the Bible and Christian Tradition also provide resources for a Christian theology of migration. The next three chapters deal with the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and church history as resources for a Christian theology of migration. Old Testament scholar Hendrik Bossman focuses on the central event of the history of Israel, namely the Hebrews’ exodus from Egypt. He explores this event as a migration by examining how it is remembered and interpreted. Bossman studies the exodus in turn as a motif, memory, and migration in both the Hebrew Bible, especially the book of Exodus, and the deuterocanonical books. He concludes his study: “The memories of the exodus were not focused on the entry into and settling in the Promised Land, but primarily concerned with the long and arduous journey (migration?) getting there. Even the Passover as annual commemoration of the exodus is focused on the start and not the conclusion of the migratory journey. Most of the instructions (‘toroth’) in the Pentateuch are given during the forty-year migration through the wilderness, starting with the departure from Egypt, and not during the period after the entry into the Promised Land.” Another Old Testament scholar, John Ahn, picks up where Bossman ends. He begins his chapter with an arresting remark: “Forced (597-538 BCE) and return (538-438 BCE) migrations form the epicenter of the Hebrew Bible/ Old Testament.” Using the sociological approach to the Bible, Ahn revisits the forced migration of the southern kingdom of Judah and suggests that it is the experience of this migration that enables the Israelites to appreciate the earlier conquest and deportation of the northern kingdom of Israel by Assyria as a migration. He then tantalizingly asks whether the forced migrations in the Old Testament had a negative, positive, or mixed impact on the migrants and their communities and gives a brief history of the scholarship on forced exile in which he himself has made signifcant contributions. Finally, Ahn studies the four separate return migrations of Israelites from Persia back to Judea, now known as the province of Jehud of the Persian Empire. He concludes: “Forced migration is a social and biological phenomenon. Be it out of Africa or Eden, the social construction of reality in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament begins with the experience of Judah’s forced migrations (Gen 3) and return migration (Gen 12). The single most important historical event for ancient Judah was the 597 BCE event. It was this migration event that brought about canonical consciousness.” Migration in the New Testament is studied by vănThanh Nguyễn. Canvassing the Synoptic Gospels, Nguyễn shows how Jesus was an abandoned and marginal Christ, whose refugee status had been affrmed in the infancy narratives, and how during his ministry Jesus acted as a guest and companion of the marginalized. He also shows that the Fourth Gospel presents Jesus, the eternal Logos, as a stranger born from above. He goes on to note how the

Christian Theology in the Age of Migration : Implications for World Christianity, edited by Peter C. Phan, Lexington Books, 2020.

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book of Acts depicts the church as a migrant church, perpetually in motion and in mission. Finally, the New Testament letters and the book of Revelation show Christians to be a people of strangers, sojourners, and aliens marching toward the new heaven and the new earth, the kingdom of God. Nguyễn concludes: “As strangers and sojourners who lived and worshipped in the hostile contexts of the Roman Empire, the early Christians promoted solidarity to sufferings and social cohesion and fraternal love in the midst of ostracism.” The Church historian Ciprian Burlacioiu uses migration as a lens to reinterpret not the whole history of Christianity but only four of its major features as examples to show how migration has had a determinative impact on the development of the Church: mission, diaspora, Church formation and reformation, and urban location. In each of these features, Burlacioiu adduces representative events as examples of how migrations have shaped the Church: for the frst, the Church’s missionary expansion to the east in the frst centuries along the Silk Road; for the second, the coming of Protestants to Latin America, the Russian diaspora; for the third, the migration of the frst Christians to Rome, the movement of the German tribes in the early Middle Ages to southern Europe, and the forced migration of over twelve millions of Africans through slavery to the Americas; and for the fourth, the rise of megacities in modern times. Burlacioiu concludes: “From a methodological point, by considering migration, we enrich our static historical maps of Christianity with maps of mobility where transfer, fuctuation, interaction, and fnally transformation are key elements. Thus, our understanding of the Church with a more static category of ‘local church’ must be supplemented by that of Christianity as a movement. The concept of migration represents an umbrella for different forms of mobility. The task of professional church historians is to make use of this category to paint a more accurate picture of Christianity’s past.” The second part of the book, which deals with systematic theology, attempts to rearticulate the key Christian beliefs in the light of migration. With regard to God, Peter C. Phan argues that the Hebrew/Christian God is the Primordial Migrant—the Deus Migrator—that is, the source and end of all migrations. Noting that human language about God is by necessity analogical, Phan shows that from the history of Abraham to the people of God’s migration from Egypt, wandering in the desert, exile, returning from exile, and rebuilding of the nation, God accompanied them as an exile and returning exile in God’s “glory/presence (kavod).” Phan then argues that the Christian God can be understood as a Deus Migrator in God’s trifold act of creation (God the Father), incarnation/redemption (God the Son), and consummation (God the Holy Spirit). He concludes that migrant is the living image not just of God in general but of this God as the Primordial Migrant: “What is distinctive and unique about the migrant is that he or she is the imago Dei

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Migratoris, the privileged, visible, and public face of the God who chooses, freely and out of love, to migrate from the safety of God’s eternal home to the strange and risky land of the human family, in which God is a foreigner needing embrace, protection, and love. Thus, when the migrant is embraced, protected, and loved, the Deus Migrator is embraced, protected, and loved. By the same token, when the migrant as imago Dei Migratoris is rejected, marginalized, declared “illegal,” imprisoned, tortured, or killed, it is the original of that image, the Deus Migrator, who is subjected to the same inhuman and sinful treatment.” Building on Phan’s refections on God as the Primordial Migrant, Kanan Kitani offers a portrait of Jesus as the Paradigmatic Migrant. Reinterpreting the fve stories narrated in Matthew’s infancy narrative, Kitani argues that Jesus is the frst refugee and migrant of the New Testament, and as the Paradigmatic Migrant, Jesus recapitulates the events in the life of Moses, thereby showing the continuity between Israel as the migrating community and the Church as God’s people-on-the-move. Kitani goes on to show that the incarnation of the Word of God in Jesus and Jesus’ ministry and death express the work of Jesus as a migrant. Finally, using John Calvin’s theology of Jesus’ triple offce of priest, prophet, and king, Kitani argues that Calvin’s Christological doctrine can be deepened by interpreting it in the perspective of migration. Kitani concludes with reference to the migrants: “And just as the sufferings and death of Jesus the Paradigmatic Migrant has been transformed into his resurrection and glorifcation by God the Primordial Migrant through the Holy Spirit the Power of Migration, so will the sufferings and deaths of migrants not be in vain but will be transformed into their resurrection and glorifcation.” On the theology of the church from the perspective of migration Ulrich Schmiedel argues that a new approach to ecclesiology is needed in the age of migration. Rejecting the Augustinian distinction between the “invisible Church” and the “visible Church,” Schmiedel suggests the evocative image of “Coalitional Church” as a central category for contemporary ecclesiology. Ecclesiology and ethics must be brought together to achieve a “concrete” concept of church. In other words, church must be viewed in its manifold contexts, especially when it brings together Christians and non-Christians in coalitions for refugees and receivers. Furthermore, this ecclesiology must be ecumenical. Citing a speech by the general secretary of the World Council of Churches Olav Fykse Tveit, titled “Perspectives on Migration,” to support his proposal of a “Coalitional Church,” Schmiedel summarizes it as follows: “The coalitional Church takes the other as its center, claiming that in the other the sociological and the theological come together in Jesus Christ. The double commandment and the double character of Church, then, can overcome the distinction between receiver and refugee—regardless of their religion— through a radical opening of the sociological and the theological identity of

Christian Theology in the Age of Migration : Implications for World Christianity, edited by Peter C. Phan, Lexington Books, 2020.

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Church. The ecumenical ecclesiology of the coalitional Church already exists in the practices of Churches worldwide, in those who are and in those who are not affliated with the World Council of Churches. But it also provokes the imagination.” The third part deals with the ethical aspects of migration. William A. Barbieri Jr. discusses human dignity in its dual role as a fundamental legal value shaping the administration of human rights and a basic principle of theological anthropology, Christian morality, and social ethics. He argues that human dignity is at the core of the churches’ response to the problems associated with migration. He frst introduces the modern conception of human dignity and comments on its relevance to current efforts to cope with migration. He then delves more deeply into how contemporary features of migration engage various aspects of human dignity. He closes with some observations about how Christian practices concerning migrants refect and embody the theological ethics of human dignity: “Human dignity plays an important role in shaping many of the intellectual features, moral commitments, and ethical practices that inform how governments, international organizations, and non-governmental organizations—including Christian agencies—interact with migrants. . . . However, this relation is not a one-way street. The human drama of migration, historically and in the present, is a rich source of insight into the ongoing process of discerning the character and implications of human dignity, both philosophically and theologically, and it can be expected to continue to fulfll this role in the future.” Kristin E. Heyer begins her chapter on migration and structural injustice with a brief narrative of US president Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant policies, especially against migrants and asylum-seekers from Central America. She then expounds biblical justice for migrants and the contributions of Catholic migration ethics, especially that of Pope Francis, with its concept of human rights, social sin, and solidarity. Heyer urges that Christians combat structural injustice against migrants and practice solidarity with them. She summarizes the connection between social justice and solidarity: “Cultivating empathy, civic virtue and solidarity will require we resist ‘the pervasive distortions that cloud our moral imagination,’ re-contextualize migrations within historic and contemporary structures of injustice, and draw near to the realities of immigrant communities marked by vitality and precarious vulnerability alike. Amid the pervasive misinformation that gives cover to the exploitation of immigrants, a Christian ethic of kinship across borders offers a humanizing counternarrative and surpasses compassionate welcome to address migration in terms of structural justice.” Joshua Mauldin extends Barbieri’s and Heyer’s concepts of human dignity, human rights, and solidarity with migrants further by refecting on the distinction between an “ethics of immigration” and a “legitimate public policy of immigration.” While agreeing that the Christian vision inspires a just “ethics

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of immigration,” he focuses on what a just immigration policy on the part of advanced liberal-democratic nation-states would be. Acknowledging the legitimacy of the nation-state system and national boundaries and consequently the state’s right to set up immigration policies, Mauldin discusses the validity of the “open borders” concept, the right to emigrate with the distinction between refugees and economic migrants, and the moral obligations of the people of one nation toward to those of another. Mauldin warns: “We need to think about the plight of migrants, their suffering, their reasons for leaving. But thinking about these matters, and having empathy for migrants, will not alone provide us with a fully worked out immigration policy for the nation-states where we live. As mentioned above, the problem with immigration debates in the United States today is that both political parties spend so much time ranting about the unjust immigration policies of their opponents that they never get around to proposing a workable immigration policy. As a result, each side is increasingly vulnerable to critique from the other side, since each spends more time criticizing their opponents than dealing with the real policy challenges surrounding immigration.” The last chapter in this section on the ethics of migration connects human migration to ecological disasters. Seforosa Carroll explores the notion of climate justice in relation to climate-induced migration, especially climateinduced displacement (the “climate exiles”), from the perspective of the people of the Pacifc. She argues that just as there is a pressing need to address climate-induced migration and displacement, there is also the need, equally urgent, to keep in the forefront the historic injustices that have caused the ecological devastation and forced the migration of people and nonhuman species from their habitats. The application of climate justice to the debate about climate change highlights the responsibilities of polluting countries that have contributed to global warming and challenges them to reduce their use of fossil fuel and to redress the damage they have caused by welcoming climate-induced migrants. Carroll, however, worries that climate justice is too late for several countries in the Pacifc that have been submerged by the rise of the sea level. But she holds out the hope that Pacifc Islanders will fght for the chance to undertake migration on their own terms and by their own choosing: “For many in the Pacifc, migration with dignity has come to mean the ability and freedom to choose to leave their homeland with dignity as well as the choice and freedom to stay until the end with dignity. There is a widely held strong view among Pacifc leaders that the Pacifc holds within its hands the solutions to responding to climate change. They welcome support, solidarity and dialogue from other countries and value their own ability to be active participants in determining their own solutions.” The fourth and last part of the book treats what is commonly referred to as “practical theology,” that is, theology’s implications for daily living. Kristina

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Suna-Koro refects on how Christian liturgy—opus Dei (the work of God)— should be celebrated in the Age of Migration. She approaches this question by examining three related issues: God in migration, liturgy in migration, and liturgy as migration. The God who is worshiped in liturgy is a migrating God, the God-on-the-move. Throughout its historical development, the liturgy responds to the physical and spiritual needs of the People-of-God-on-the move. Finally, the liturgy that is appropriate to the Age of Migration must be a “liturgy without borders,” because the borderless God who is liturgically worshipped can be found only in migration. What Suna-Koro is proposing is a “liturgical political theology that is deeply committed to postcolonial and decolonial ethics.” As she succinctly put is, “In the end, genuine and meaningful praise and prayer must migrate into righteous action or the ‘liturgy of the neighbor,’ and then back to the holy hush of contemplation and worship. Liturgy obtains as faithful, meaningful, and genuine only if it relentlessly and omnilaterally migrates: that is, if it crosses the stereotypical and dualistic borders between devotional worship and service to the neighbor, between aesthetics and ethics, between the sheer Godwardness of praise and the salvifc utility of healing action for both vulnerable neighbors and strangers alike.” Daniel G. Groody delves further into the theme broached by Suna-Koro with his meditation on the Eucharist. Against the backdrop of two momentous events in the Island of Lampedusa in southern Italy, the shipwreck of a boat carrying more than 500 refugees from Libya in May 2011 and Pope Francis’s visit to the island and celebration of the Mass in July 2013, Groody shows that, even as the world ignores and discards refugees as “no-bodies,” the church’s mission is not only to help each refugee discover their dignity as “some-body” but also to reveal that they are in fact connected to “everybody.” As the bread is transubstantiated into the body of Christ, the bodies of migrants, those who survived and those who drowned, are truly and really transubstantiated from “no-bodies” in the eyes of the world into “somebodies” in the eyes of God and the church, so that “every-body” is connected with “every-body.” This truth of the universal solidarity of true humanity is made into visible icons by Franco Tuccio, a local carpenter, who from the wood of the shipwrecked boat made crosses, the pulpit, and the altar for the Pope’s Mass. At which the Body of Christ is broken and shared with all. Like Suna-Koro, Groody draws out the implications of the eucharistic liturgy: “As we have explored the ways that theological narratives challenge some of the dehumanizing rhetoric around migration, we have discovered ways that the symbols at Lampedusa and their connection to faith narratives can reshape these operative narratives in more life-giving ways. The Liturgy of the Eucharist reveals an alternative narrative, one that reminds us of the centrality of relationships, our solidarity with the ‘no-bodies’ of the world, and our call to communion with God and one another.”

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Groody’s refections on Tuccio’s artistic creations segue into Karla Cavarra Britton’s chapter on architecture and migration. While scholarly attention has been given to the increasing number and variety of patterns of migration today (as represented by the chapters in this book), there has been relatively little subsequent focus given to the spatial implications and buildings—both permanent and temporary—where displaced peoples now gather. Recognizing that it is important to address the architectural and urban consequences of migration, Karla Cavarra Britton’s chapter examines these concerns through a series of built examples that address the needs of transient immigrant communities. Looking to emblematic contemporary buildings around the globe, the author traces instances of both humanitarian architectural interventions and recent iconic forms of sacred architecture which are representative of the religious identities of such communities. In the process, she argues for the theological implications of the cultural permanence and stability afforded by sacred architecture—themes which have particular relevance today in relation to the impermanence inherent in the human condition of migration and displacement. Finally, the presence of migrant children of different cultures and religions poses the question how Western educational system, which is for the most part monocultural and monoreligious, can meet the needs for an educational policy and system that respects and promotes cultural and religious diversity. From the European and more narrowly German context, Kathrin Winkler discusses the manifold challenges that recent immigration of mostly Muslim faith poses to education and religious education in mostly secularized host societies. Winkler notes the rise of both anti-Semitism among young Muslim immigrants and anti-Islam among some Christian and secular Europeans. Both attitudes present severe challenges to education in general, and religious education in particular, since the effectiveness of education and the preservation of cultural and religious identity demand safe physical and psychological space. From a theological standpoint, such education calls for a postcolonial and intercultural theology that facilitate interreligious dialogue, Winkler concludes: “It should therefore be the task of any educational theory and practice to create space for meaning and possibility in order to encourage this potential for development to unfold in children and young people. Both formal educational spaces, such as schools, and informal learning spaces such as offcial, organizational or church/religious children’s and youth groups contribute to the creation of these spaces that sit between the boundaries of reality and possibility. As well as facilitating formal opportunities for learning, their prime function is to provide informal educational processes in which social allegiance through community in peer groups can be experienced and social integration through engaging with a variety of democratic values and norms can be learned.”

Christian Theology in the Age of Migration : Implications for World Christianity, edited by Peter C. Phan, Lexington Books, 2020.

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There are of course many other themes in the issue of migration and Christianity beyond those explored in the preceding chapters. This book, and the research seminar at the CTI from which it originates, were quite limited in scope and were confned to the expertise of the participants. It is the fervent hope of all the contributors to this volume that it will spark a lively discussion of the religious impact of migration not only within Christianity but also in other religious traditions since it has become increasingly clear that the manifold and diverse challenges of migration cannot be fully understood and adequately met without the contributions of religion and religious people.

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NOTES 1. The United Nations Refugees Committee does not use the term “migrant” in general but only “refugee” to refer to people who are forced to migrate, often across national borders, by war or violence (international refugee). In this book, the terms “migrant” and “migration” refer not only to refugee as understood above but also to people who have to change their residences for a long time for reasons other than war and violence such as poverty, famine, ecological disaster, and professional occupation, either across national borders (international migrant) or within the borders of their own countries (internally displaced person), temporarily with plan to return (returning migrant) or planning to live permanently in the receiving countries (settler), by force (forced migration) or by choice (voluntary migration), or for political reasons (exile). 2. See http/​/www.​unhcr​.og/e​n-us/​news/​press​/2016​/6/57​63ace​54. Accessed June 24, 2016. 3. This is the title of the best one-volume study of international migration is Stephen Castles, Hein De Haas, and Mark J. Miller, The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World, Fifth Edition (New York, NY: The Guilford Press, 2014). On migration, the historical, sociological, anthropological, and political studies, in addition to specialized journals and websites, are numberless. The following general works are worth consulting: Paul Collier, Exodus: How Migration Is Changing Our World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Alejandro Portes and Josh DeWind, Rethinking Migration: New Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007); Caroline B. Brettell and James F. Hollifeld, eds., Migration Theory: Talking Across Disciplines (New York: Routledge, 2008); David G. Gutiėrrez and Pierette Hondagneu-Sotelo, eds., Nation and Migration Past and Future (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Thomas Faist, Margit Fauser, and Eveline Reisenauer, Transnational Migration (Malden, MA: Polity, 2013); Joseph H. Carens, The Ethics of Immigration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Karen O’Reilly, International Migration and Social Theory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); and Ato Quayson and Girish Daswani, eds., A Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2013).

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Part I

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CONTEXTS AND RESOURCES

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Chapter 1

Nativist Responses to the Challenge of Migration in Our Global Age

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José Casanova

Before examining the nativist responses in Europe and the United States to the contemporary challenge of migration, which is the focus of this chapter, I want to offer some preliminary remarks about migrations, globalization, and the world religions. Trans-societal migrations and the world religions, at times separately but often in conjunction with each other, have always served as important carriers of processes of globalization throughout human history. I am using a very broad and expansive defnition of globalization, as the process of increasing global connectivity and global consciousness between all societies and peoples on earth. In a certain sense, one could argue that the successive waves of migration of Homo sapiens out of Africa some 50,000 years ago and the subsequent settlements throughout the globe constitute the base and the point of departure for later historical processes of globalization. But these migrations had no subjective dimension of refexive consciousness and can only now be reconstructed objectively thanks to advances in DNA and other scientifc technologies. By contrast, the subjective dimension of imagining a single humanity sharing the same global space and the same global time was frst anticipated by the universalistic world religions that emerged frst during the Axial Age.1 Yet, these imaginary, and thus utopian anticipations, while serving as preconditions for the civilizational expansion of the world religions, lacked a structural, that is, objective and material, global base. Until very recently, the civilizational oikoumenē of all world religions had very clear territorial limits, set by the very world regimes in which those religions were civilizationally and thus territorially embedded and by the geographically circumscribed limitations of the existing means of communication. The bishop of Rome 3

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may have always claimed to speak urbi et orbi, to the city and to the globe. But in fact, this became a reality frst in the twentieth century. The contemporary context of growing anti-immigrant nativism in Europe and the United States is the emergence of a global age after Western European modernity and after Western hegemony. By global age, I mean the emergence of a world-historical age in which Europe, or the West, is no longer the center from which processes of globalization radiate to the peripheries, but fnds itself embedded in a decentered, multipolar, and multicivilizational world of multidirectional fows and exchanges, including global migrations, whose dynamics neither Europe nor any single power or center can control. To characterize the complex dynamics of this new global age, we tend to use the shorthand term of “globalization.” But processes of globalization did not begin frst in our global age. We may in fact distinguish three different phases of globalization, with their own characteristic dynamics. There have been certainly proto-globalizations or processes of increasing transcontinental interconnectivity before the early modern age. But the frst phase of proper globalization began with the age of discoveries in the sixteenth century. This was the time when the globe became for the frst time a tangible reality that could be circumnavigated, that could be represented in maps, and that could therefore become an actual reality in the imaginary and the consciousness of people. Although the process was initiated by Europe, indeed by the Iberian colonial expansion into the East and West Indies, it was a process of globalization before Western hegemony, which was characterized by interconnected histories, intercultural encounters, and economic exchanges that were not yet dominated by Europe. One can fnd throughout this phase multiple global dynamics, including mass migrations, but they do not have yet a world-systemic character. The frst phase of globalization can be dated tentatively from the 1500s to the 1770s. Any global historical dating is necessarily arbitrary, but following the British historian C.A. Bayly we can use 1780 as the date of “the Birth of the Modern World” and as the beginning of a new phase of globalization.2 It is during this second phase of globalization, now under European/Western hegemony, when global historical dynamics, including mass migrations, began to attain a world-systemic character, with the global expansion of the world capitalist system and the global expansion of the Westphalian system of sovereign territorial nation-states. This second phase of globalization can be dated, again arbitrarily, from the 1770s to the 1980s. The 1980s was the time when the term “globalization” began to be used frst by social scientists and economists. By the 1990s, the term “globalization” attained much wider use as a short term for global dynamics connected primarily with the global expansion of neoliberal capitalism and with the global expansion of digital media. There was a need to coin the new term

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Nativist Responses to the Challenge of Migration in Our Global Age

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“globalization” to denote the consciousness of a new reality, which could no longer be explained simply by the older concept of modernization, that is, as an expansion of Western modernity to the rest of the world. Global migrations of different kinds have been intrinsically connected with processes of globalization throughout the three phases. For over four centuries, from the time of the Iberian colonial expansion at the end of the ffteenth century until World War I, Europeans were the primary global migrants, settling all over the world, often by force and certainly without asking for permission from the native populations. During the frst early modern phase of globalization, European colonists and colonizers, missionaries and capitalist entrepreneurs, and indentured servants and penal laborers settled in all corners of the globe. During the second phase of globalization, from the 1800s to the 1920s, it is estimated that around eighty-fve million Europeans emigrated to the Americas and to the Southern Hemisphere, 60 percent of them to the United States alone. No European country was exempt from these overseas migratory fows. In the last ffty years, however, the migration fows have reversed and Western European societies have become instead centers of global immigration.3 It began in the 1950s, with guest worker programs attracting migrant labor from the less-developed Southern European countries (Italy, Spain, Portugal, Yugoslavia, Greece, and Turkey). Decolonization brought former colonial subjects from Africa, South and South East Asia, and the Caribbean to the former colonial metropolises. Global economic disruptions, famines, political violence and wars, and global smuggling rings added refugees, asylum-seekers, and illegal immigrants from less-privileged regions. The fall of communism in 1989 opened the gates to new immigrants from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Although the proportion of foreign immigrants in many Western European countries, at approximately 10 percent, is similar to the proportion of foreign born in the United States, most European societies still have diffculty viewing themselves as permanent immigrant societies, or viewing the foreign born, and even the native second generation as nationals, irrespective of their legal status. THE EUROPEAN UNION: ISLAM, CHRISTIANITY, AND SECULARISM One of the most signifcant consequences of the new immigration has been a dramatic growth in religious diversity on both sides of the Atlantic. But while in the United States the new immigrant religions have mainly contributed to

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the further expansion of an already-vibrant American religious pluralism, in the case of Europe, immigrant religions present a greater challenge to national patterns of limited religious pluralism and, even more importantly, to recent European trends of drastic secularization.4 Religious identities can be of two general types: those that differentiate religious groups from nonreligious “secular” groups and those that differentiate particular religious groups from one another, in the case of Europe, for instance, Catholics and Protestants. The modern European political system in most European societies was organized around such cleavages. After World War II in Western democracies, with the exception of Northern Ireland, the Catholic-Protestant cleavage disappeared. The Christian-Democratic parties that emerged in Germany and Holland after World War II already incorporated Catholic and Protestant groups. Eventually, with the advance of secularization in Western European societies, the secular-religious cleavage for all practical purposes also disappeared and the Christian-Democratic parties lessened their religious identity and became nonconfessional catch-all centerright parties. The issue of religious identities has reappeared in Western European societies with the increasing visibility of Muslim immigrants and the diffculties or unwillingness by those societies to integrate those immigrants either as full citizens or as full members of the various national communities. Here, Muslim identities function not as positive identities self-deployed by Muslim groups for the sake of political mobilization, but it takes the form of a negative foreign identity attributed to the minority by the self-defned native majority. In the process, the majority begins to assume a positive identity defned against the Muslim one. This self-defnition of the nativist majority can take any of the two forms we have already mentioned. It can take the form of the traditional religious-secular cleavage, or it can take the form of the denominational cleavage between two different religious groups, only one of which, the Christian, is defned as “native.” At the European level, it may take the form of the defnition of Europe as “secular” against the religious Muslims, such as: “European societies are secular, we are the native secular Europeans and Muslims are the non-native religious other.” Unintendedly perhaps, such an identifcation has the potential nonetheless of strengthening secularist identities against all religious groups, including European Christians. Alternatively, Europe can be defned as culturally (rather than religiously) Christian. Muslims are obviously nonChristian and therefore non-European. Most frequently, this is an identifcation deployed by post-Christian secular Europeans rather than by religious Christians. Both dynamics became evident and entangled during the controversies surrounding the drafting of the preamble to the European Constitution in 2004–2005. Indeed, one could argue that the European Union has been

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in prolonged crisis since 2005, when national referenda in France and the Netherlands failed to ratify the new treaty for a European Constitution. Three different issues became entangled in the acrimonious debates among the European elites concerning the new treaty. There was frst the question whether there could possibly be any mention of God or of the European Christian heritage in the preamble to the constitution, which pointed further to the diffculties in specifying what constituted the supposedly unique “European values.” Secondly, there were the problems experienced by most European societies, the most secular as well as the most religious, in integrating the new immigrants who were predominantly Muslim. Finally, there was the uneasiness about how to respond to Turkey’s determination to join the European Union. Taken together all three issues—the secular-religious cleavages, the integration of Muslim immigrants, and the imprecise defnition of European boundaries—pointed to the diffculties in redefning the geopolitical and civilizational identity of a decentered Europe in a globalized world.5 Post-referendum surveys in France and Holland indicated that resistance against enlargement, particularly against Turkey’s membership, nativist anxieties over Muslim immigration, and generalized apprehensions over Islam had played some but not a very large role in the punishment vote. More crucial in the rejection had been the lack of transparency in the constitutionmaking process itself and the failure to submit the constitutional text to serious national debates. Nevertheless, politicians throughout Europe preferred to interpret the shocking results as an indication of voters’ dissatisfaction with the rapid pace of enlargement and of the need to close the gates to immigration. The migrant-refugee crisis of 2015–2016 reopened the anti-immigrant nativist populism throughout Europe. But the right-wing populist parties now turned against the very project of the European Union, blaming their national establishments and the European technocrats for the crisis. A new antiEuropean populist discourse was becoming widespread throughout Europe, carried by the old anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and anti-globalization parties in France, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Austria, as well as by right-wing populist governments in Hungary and Poland. The threat of Brexit, the electoral success of the anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) entering the German Parliament as the third largest party and the shocking election of the Euro-skeptic and pro-Brexit Donald Trump as president of the United States seemed to threaten the very survival of the European Union. Pope Francis has been the most outspoken European voice in support of immigrants and refugees and has repeatedly expressed his support for the European Union and his rejection of nationalist populisms of any kind. Indeed, if there is any Catholic support for anti-immigrant nativism and for the conservative alliance with Putin’s Russia in defense of “traditional

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Christian family values” against “gender ideology,” it comes either from nonpracticing cultural Catholics or from conservative Catholics, who are bitter and disappointed with Pope Francis.

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AMERICAN NATIVISM, EVANGELICAL CHRISTIANITY, AND THE STRUGGLES OVER AMERICAN CIVIL RELIGION What distinguishes American Christianity from European Christianity is the fact that it has never had the character of a confessional state church. By contrast, every branch of European Christianity underwent a similar process of state confessionalization in the Early Modern era, following the post-Reformation religious civil wars and the imposition of the Westphalian principle, cuius regio eius religio. Europe solved the problem of religious diversity through emigration, by expelling or by letting their religious minorities fee their home countries, in order to fnd refuge frst in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and then overseas in the New World, particularly in the American colonies.6 One could argue that implicit in the freedom, that is, compulsion, of religious minorities to emigrate was the emergence of the modern conception of religion as something which cannot be imposed or coerced and which individuals carry with them, in their private consciences. It is this modern sectarian principle, which was to gain full institutionalization frst in those American colonies, where some of the radical Protestant sects, such as Quakers and Baptists, became infuential minorities. Eventually after independence, it gained institutionalization in the United States with the extension of the dual clause of the First Amendment, protecting the no establishment of religion at the state level and the free exercise of religion in society. Through continuous immigration, the system of denominational pluralism, which was at frst an internal Protestant model, has expanded to incorporate frst all the religions of Europe and today all the religions of the world. Indeed, one could venture to assume that there is no religion anywhere in the world, which does not have some congregational presence in the United States.7 Moreover, it has been repeatedly observed by immigration scholars that, immigrants today as much as in the nineteenth century tend to become more religious in America after immigration than they were in their home countries.8 The electorally triumphant anti-Obama nativist Trump coalition has to be viewed as a reaction against the dramatic demographic transformation of American society that followed the 1965 immigration law. The new law abolished the old pro-European quotas and opened the gates to immigrants from the rest of the world.

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As throughout American history, once again immigration since 1965 has been a major source of population growth and cultural change, bringing a major transformation not only to American Christianity but also to the American civil religion. Let me just mention frst a few striking demographic facts, before entering into the discussion of civil religion. Over thirty million new immigrants arrived in the United States between 1985 and 2010, at a rate of over one million new immigrants per year. The proportion of foreign-born immigrants living in the United States has quadrupled from less than ten million in 1970 to over forty million today. Contemporary immigrants tend to settle predominantly in seven states: California, New York, Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Illinois. Those seven states comprise about 44 percent of the US population as a whole, while their combined total immigration constitutes 70 percent of the total foreign-born proportion. But increasingly the new immigrants tend to settle throughout the United States. In fact, looking into the proportional change in foreign-born population in the last decade of the twentieth century, North Carolina had the fastest rate of growth, 273.7 percent, followed by Georgia with 233.4 percent. More important than the increase in numbers, however, are the changes in the regions of origin and in the characteristics of the new immigrants. In comparison with the old immigrants, two characteristics of the new immigrants are most relevant. Firstly, they are primarily non-European, increasingly from all regions of the world, but predominantly from Asia and the Americas. Among the top ten sending countries in the last two decades, fve are Latin American and fve Asian in the following descending order: Mexico, China, India, the Philippines, Vietnam, El Salvador, Cuba, South Korea, Dominican Republic, and Guatemala. Secondly, in addition to the tremendous range in all forms of human diversity (racial, ethnic, religious, cultural, linguistic) which they bring, the new immigrants are also extremely diverse, almost bifurcated, in the levels of human and social capital, skills, and resources which they bring. Half of all foreign-born have much higher levels of education and income than the average American, while the other half have much lower levels. Group relations and identities throughout American history have always been structured by the intertwined dynamics of racial and religious denominationalism. Nevertheless, while racial denominationalism in the past was structured along a rigid, hierarchical binary system segregating a large hegemonic and privileged white majority and the oppressed underprivileged black minority, the system of religious denominationalism had been based on a much more fuid, in principle egalitarian, super-diversity.9 The new post-1965 immigration has contributed not only to an ever-greater pluralization of American religious diversity, but more importantly, coming

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as it did on the heels of the civil rights movement, to an increasing pluralization of the American system of racial denominationalism, undermining in the process the binary black-white racial system. Today, the so-called “minorities” (blacks, Hispanics, Asians, etc.) constitute already a majority of the population in most large American cities. Moreover, since 2013 for the frst time in American history denominational Protestants constitute less than half of the American population. While the transformation in American religious pluralism is important, even more crucial has been the parallel redefnition of the American “civil religion.” As I have argued previously, by the late 1960s, the counterculture, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War and the anti-war movement, and the Catholic aggiornamento, all had contributed to putting the American civil religion on trial.10There were numerous indications that a “third disestablishment,” the disestablishment of the Protestant ethic from the American way of life, was under way. From now on, “the American way of life” would be characterized by the plurality of ways of life, by multiculturalism and by what could be called moral denominationalism. From the frst to the third disestablishment, the interpretation of the First Amendment was progressively extended from the constitutional protection of the “free exercise of religion”; to freedom of inquiry, thought, and speech; to freedom of mores, that is, of conduct, exemplifed above all in the new right to privacy and in the gender and sexual revolutions. It is in reaction to this third disestablishment that Protestant fundamentalism reemerged publicly and was reborn politically in the project of the Moral Majority and of the New Christian Right in 1979. But the very foundation of the Moral Majority as a trans-denominational Judeo-Christian coalition, attempting to include, in Jerry Falwell’s words, “Catholics, Jews, Protestants, Mormons, Fundamentalists,” would seem to indicate that Falwell himself did not believe that the reestablishment of nineteenth-century Protestant hegemony was either desirable or possible. Only if such a majority of religious conservatives and “moral” Americans could be put together could the restoration of the Protestant ethic and of the American civil religion succeed.11 One may ask whether the triumph of the Republican Christian Evangelical coalition that gained expression with the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush represented such a consolidation of a new hegemonic Evangelical establishment or rather was just a temporary cultural backlash against what I call the third disestablishment. We could reframe the question by asking, what are the contours of the newly transformed American civil religion? The modern concept of “civil religion,” as frst proposed by Rousseau at the end of The Social Contract, is related to the transformation of the modern

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absolutist state, of the modern Leviathan, from monarchic to popular or national sovereignty.12 The problem faced by Rousseau was the search for the adequate kind of civil religion, which would serve to ground the new popular democratic republican sovereignty, that is, the new demos, expressed as “We, the People.” The problem has two different dimensions. One is the democratization of sovereignty. But related with it is the equally signifcant dimension of the secularization of sovereignty, namely the de-confessionalization of the state. When Robert Bellah reintroduced the concept of “civil religion” in his 1966 seminal essay “Civil Religion in America,” he implied that the United States had found its own solution to Rousseau’s problem claiming that “few have realized that there actually exists alongside of and rather clearly differentiated from the churches an elaborate and well-institutionalized civil religion in America.”13 Unlike in Europe, where one fnds either a fusion between the national state church and the civil religion, as is the case in Nordic Lutheran countries, or the development of a laicist civil religion in contraposition to the national Catholic Church, as is the case in France, Bellah argued that, in the case of the United States, the civil religion conceived by the founding fathers was never “felt to be a substitute for Christianity,” even though there was a “quite clear division of function between the civil religion and Christianity.”14 For Bellah, “under the doctrine of religious liberty, an exceptionally wide sphere of personal piety and voluntary social action was left to the churches. But the churches were neither to control the state nor to be controlled by it.”15 As is well known, Bellah traced the contours and the transformation of civil religion in America through an analysis of presidential inaugural addresses from the First Inaugural Address of President Washington, through Lincoln’s Inaugural Address and Gettysburg’s Address, to President Kennedy’s New Frontier and Johnson’s Great Society addresses. A look at the inaugural addresses of presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush seems to point to a restoration of the nineteenth-century postmillennial Evangelical Protestant vision, which is that America is a City on a Hill, the redeemer nation that is building the Kingdom of God at home and abroad. President Reagan’s frst inaugural address referred to the United States as “this last and greatest bastion of freedom” and “the exemplar of freedom and a beacon of hope for those who do not now have freedom.” He reiterated that “we are a nation under God” and pointed beyond the shrines to the Founding Fathers across the Potomac to Arlington National Cemetery and its “row upon row of simple white markers bearing crosses or Stars of David,” reminding everybody that we are a Judeo-Christian nation.16 In his second inaugural address, President Reagan remembered “a time when people of different race, creed, or ethnic origin in our land found hatred and prejudice installed in social custom and, yes, in law,” contrasting it with

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“the progress that we have made toward the ‘brotherhood of man’ that God intended for us.”17 Implicitly, without any particular reference to Martin Luther King or other African American leaders, it was an acknowledgment of the achievements brought by the civil rights movement. President G. W. Bush’s frst inaugural address made explicit reference to the connection between America’s history and God’s providential plans for humanity. Additionally, anticipating his “faith-based initiative,” Bush made explicit reference to “church and charity, synagogue and mosque,” as if implying that we were moving from a Judeo-Christian to an Abrahamic conception of the nation and of civil religion.18 President G. W. Bush’s second inaugural address announced his ambitious interventionist “policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” Additionally, it reiterated a new Abrahamic conception of the nation by indicating that our national life is sustained “by the truths of Sinai, the Sermon on the Mount, the words of the Koran, and the varied faiths of our people.”19 It is, however, in the inaugural addresses of President Barak Obama that one can see most clearly the contours of what appeared to be the newly transformed American civil religion, one that refected the demographic and sociocultural transformations of American society since the 1960s and our new global and environmental consciousness. The frst inaugural address reiterated “that noble idea passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.” While stressing that “our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness,” Obama went on to redefne the national civil religion, affrming that “we are a nation of Christian and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and non-believers.” It was an expansion beyond the conception of an Abrahamic nation, which included for the frst time not only Hindus, as representatives of a nonmonotheistic world religion, but even more signifcantly “non-believers.”20 President Obama’s second inaugural address made the themes of the gender and racial expansion of the national covenant even more explicit, stating: For our journey is not complete until our wives, our mothers and daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts. Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law…Our journey is not complete until we fnd a better way to welcome the striving, hopeful immigrants who still see America as a land of opportunity.21

One could perhaps think that inaugural addresses are just words or, even more cynically, that Obama’s words were just an acknowledgment of the

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Nativist Responses to the Challenge of Migration in Our Global Age

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new moral majority made up of young people, women, racial and religious minorities, and new immigrants who had reelected him. But personally, I am convinced that Bellah was basically right, when he argued that presidential inaugural addresses were expressions and manifestations of the continuous reformulation of an American civil religion. Irrespective of the way in which history might judge the achievements and failures of the Obama presidency, his inaugural addresses point clearly in the direction of the new national moral consensus redefning the American civil religion. If my analysis is correct, such an emerging consensus signals not so much the hegemonic establishment of the Christian Evangelical Moral majority, but rather points in the direction of what I have called the third Protestant disestablishment and the formation of a new post-Protestant moral majority based on a more pluralist moral denominationalism. However, in 2016 came the surprising election of Donald Trump as United States president. Strikingly, Trump’s inaugural address was devoid of any of the traditional American civil religion tropes. Yet, Trump’s obsession to undo everything that the Obama presidency represented becomes more intelligible as a WASP racist nativist backlash. I have written elsewhere about the intertwinement of race (White Anglo-Saxon) and religion (Protestant) in American nativism and the similarities and differences between European and American anti-Muslim nativisms.22 By 2013, at the beginning of Obama’s second presidency, the increasingly loud and proliferating nativist anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim discourses had not become fused yet in the United States. Trump was the frst public voice to bring them together with his dual advocacy of a “Muslim ban” and a “Mexican wall.” Even Samuel P. Huntington, the author who may have contributed the most to the discourse of a “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West, failed to even mention Islam or Muslim immigrants in his American nativist manifesto Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity.23 It is Catholic Mexican immigrants and the threat of Hispanization of the southwestern regions of the United States that, according to Huntington, represent the real threat to America’s national identity. In a relatively failed effort to revive WASP nativism, Huntington claimed that America’s national identity and culture were shaped, apparently once and for all, by the “original” White Anglo-Saxon Protestant settlers. In order to become assimilated, all later immigrants would need to accept and adopt the language and the main values of the WASP settlers. Huntington makes no explicit reference to race or racism in his historical reconstruction, and the few references to African Americans one fnds in the text give the impression that for him “blacks” have become assimilated, insofar as they have incorporated the language, the religion, and the values (economic, cultural, and political) of the “white” settlers.

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In any case, Huntington’s dissociation of the geopolitical threats presented by Islam and the more internal threats presented by Hispanic immigrants indicate the extent to which, at that time, geopolitical civilizational discourses and anti-immigrant nativist discourses did not converge yet. At least, they did not converge to the same extent that they already did in Europe, where the contested issue of Turkey’s entry into the European Union was inextricably linked with debates about the assimilation of Muslim immigrants.24 Certainly, Islam and Muslim immigrants also emerged as a contested public issue in the United States after the terrorist attacks of September 11. But the antiMuslim discourse that emerged was primarily connected with “homeland security” and the global “war on terror,” that is, with the security threats which Muslim “terrorists” and the states that supported them presented to “national security,” namely to the power of the United States abroad and to domestic security. Much more rarely was that it connected either with nativist issues of immigration or with the nature of Islam as an un-American and un-assimilable religion. Trump’s racist anti-immigrant nativism has fused again issues of race and religion, which had always been intertwined among white Evangelicals. If one adds the defense of “traditional” Christian values against the gender revolution, one can see how issues of race, religion and gender are likely to remain intertwined in future contestations over American “civil religion.” But nobody had anticipated the election of an American president whose populist nativist geopolitical slogans “America First” and “Make America Great Again” were tied to an attempt to dismantle the entire international system, which the United States had constructed and led since World War II, and with the proposal to return to a mercantilist struggle among nations, now on a global level. In the long term, only the consolidation of a legitimate international system based on international law, which limits the absolute sovereignty of each and every state, can offer the hope that the present crisis will not lead to a new global confagration between superpowers. But in the short run, the principle “might makes right” seems to be gaining the upper hand from the South China Sea to Crimea, from Syria to Yemen. CONCLUDING SOCIO-THEOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS The contemporary crisis of citizenship and democracy is so entangled with new global dynamics that nostalgic appeals to the restoration of national democratic citizenship are simply unrealistic. If new norms and governance structures are to emerge, which may serve to regulate the global geopolitical system and the world economic system, they will have to be nurtured and

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Nativist Responses to the Challenge of Migration in Our Global Age

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grown within the emerging global civil society. The crisis in global governance is ultimately a crisis of legitimacy, of accountability, and of participation. The ruling political and economic elites are too detached and inattentive to the people they represent and in which name they claim to govern. But the mere circulation of new untainted elites, of new leaders, which is what populist platforms offer, will not serve to reform the system. Only greater participation beyond electoral mobilization can lead to greater accountability and, in turn, restore trust and legitimacy. One should not minimize the enormous challenges that global migrations present today and will continue to increasingly present in the future to the entire global human community and to the international system of states. Yet, it should be obvious that a proper response can only be a global and international one, one that tries to regulate those migrations to ensure that they take place in an orderly fashion, with minimal confict, protecting the human rights of migrants and refugees, while also addressing the causes and distributing fairly the costs among all countries involved, sending countries, transit countries, and receiving countries. For Christians, and particularly for Catholics, to be open to migrants and refugees is a primary Christian duty reinforced even more so by the recognition of the demand for moral reciprocity. Like all universalizing religions, Christianity has been, from the very beginning, a migrant religion. What was Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, and the other Disciples, but migrants throughout the Mediterranean and the Hellenistic and Roman worlds? It was through migration and colonization, connected with the Portuguese, Spanish, and French colonial expansions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that Catholicism became truly a world religion, indeed the frst global religion. The process continued throughout the nineteenth century with the migration of millions of European Catholics, most signifcantly Irish Catholics following the British Empire. Today, Christians from Africa and the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America continue the same patterns of crisscrossing global migrations. Filipino Catholics are probably the largest group of global migrants today. A Christianity that is faithful to its mission cannot but be a migrant evangelizing religious community. But Jesus’ commission to go and make disciples of all nations demands that in reciprocity the so-called Christian nations of Europe and Christian America be open to all religious communities. In our global age and our global world, global migrations are, and will remain, inevitable. Therefore, whichever system of peaceful and cooperative world order we envision, which needs to have as its foundation and its goal “the common good” of all humanity, will need to accommodate global migrations not only as a basic social fact, but as a moral obligation connected with universal human rights.

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To a certain extent, capitalist globalization and the revolution in digital media have created the kind of open global civil society with relatively porous borders, which the early modern Catholic project of world evangelization presupposed. In itself, an open global civil society is one of the conditions for any kind of universal human globalization. But neoliberal capitalism privileges open borders for fnancial capital and for certain types of labor power, which can be turned into use value for proft and capital accumulation. Indeed, as Pope Francis has stressed in his encyclicals Evangelii Gaudium and Laudato Si’, neoliberal capitalism is indifferent and discriminates against those persons, who do not possess useful labor power and thus become systemically discardable. The problem of contemporary capitalism is not so much the exploitation of proletarian and postcolonial labor in the peripheries of the system, but the indifference of the center for those peripheries, foreign as well as domestic, which it considers of marginal utility. This is one of the new boundaries of discrimination created by the new global capitalist division of labor. The other is the internal boundaries of growing inequality, which it produces within the system, not only between center and periphery, but also between different types of capital and between different kinds of labor. As the new forms of working-class anti-globalization populism in the very advanced capitalist societies make evident, it is not labor exploitation per se, but the realization of being left behind, and becoming marginal for the functioning of the system, that produces the nativist resentment against the knowledgeable elites and against the power and privileges of the knowledgeable class. But this nativist resentment is most easily redirected by populist politicians against immigrants and refugees. Universalist transnational religions, such as the Catholic Church, have a moral obligation and a particular role to play in responding to the challenges of global migration. The primary obligation of the Catholic Church as the People of God is to be witness of its Christian catholicity, which transcends every particular nation and every society and embraces global humanity. The three fnal documents of the Second Vatican Council, Dignitatis Humanae, Nostra Aetate, and Gaudium et Spes, offer a clear theological rationale for such a Catholic attitude.25 Pope Francis has repeatedly indicated what the proper Catholic response ought to be. As the frst bishop of Rome to come from the global South, he adopted the name of Francis to signify that he wants to be Pontifex, that is, bridge-builder, of the poor, of peace, and of our common home, the earth, with all its creatures. This is a papacy that wants to be defned by the culture of the encounter, by building bridges rather than walls between nations, cultures and peoples, erasing borders and boundaries, particularly those that are discriminatory and reproduce unjust inequalities.

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Pope Francis has stressed the same message through words and gestures, through his poignant appeal to move “from a globalization of indifference to a globalization of fraternity,” in his frequent exhortations to European peoples, nations, and states to open its doors and to welcome immigrant and refugees, in his concrete and poignant pastoral request that each Catholic parish in Europe be open to serve as generous host to an immigrant family, without regard to country of origin or religion. Catholic communities throughout the world have a unique task and opportunity, to serve as a global network of networks, addressing the fundamental problems created by the uneven and unequal globalization. Foremost are the problem of the unequal distribution of access to knowledge and the need to help and to accompany those who are excluded and discarded by both, by global capitalism and by the global system of nation-states, primarily immigrants and refugees. Given its unparalleled global networks, the Catholic Church has the task and opportunity to contribute to the construction of a more open, pluralist, and global civil society, which is more responsible to the needs of global humanity, in our multipolar, multicultural, and multireligious global age.

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NOTES 1. On the Axial Age, see Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, ed., The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986); Johan P. Arnason, Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, and Björn Wittrock, eds., Axial Civilizations and World History (Leiden: Brill, 2005); Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011); Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas, eds., The Axial Age and Its Consequences (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012). 2. See C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2003). 3. See Charles Hirschman, Philip Kasinitz, and Josh de Wind, eds., The Handbook of International Migration: The American Experience (New York: Russell Sage, 1999); Leslie Page Moch, Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003); Robin Cohen, ed., The Cambridge Survey of World Migration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 4. José Casanova, “Immigration and the New Reigious Pluralism: A European Union/United Sates Comparison,” in Thomas Banchoff, ed., Democracy and the New Pluralism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 59–84. 5. Cf. José Casanova, “Religion, European secular identities, and European integration,” in Timothy A. Byrnes and Peter J. Katzenstein, eds., Religion in an Expanding Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 65–92, and “The Long, Diffcult, and Tortuous Journey of Turkey into Europe and the Dilemmas of European Civilization,” Constellations, Vol. 13, no. 2 (2006), 235–247.

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6. José Casanova, Global Religious and Secular Dynamics: The Modern Binary System of Classifcation (Leiden: Brill, 2019). 7. Diana L. Eck, A New Religious America: How a “Christian Country” Has Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation (San Francisco: Harper One, 2002). 8. R. Stephen Warner and Judith G. Wittner, eds., Gatherings in Diaspora: Religious Communities and the New Immigration (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998). 9. See Eric C. Lincoln, Race, Religion and the Continuing American Dilemma (New York: Hill & Wang, 1984); Forrest G. Wood, The Arrogance of Faith: Christianity and Race in America from the Colonial Era to the Twentieth Century (New York: Knopf, 1994). 10. José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (University of Chicago, 1994). 11. José Casanova, “The Religious Situation in the United States 175 Years After Tocqueville,” in Miguel Vatter, ed., Crediting God: The Fate of Religion and Politics in the Age of Global Capitalism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 253–272. 12. Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (New York: Hafner Publishing Co., 1947). 13. Robert N. Bellah, Beyond Belief (New York: Harper & Row, 1970) p. 168. The essay was originally published in Daedalus 96/1 (1967). 14. Ibid., p. 176. For a comparison of the Nordic Protestant and the Latin Catholic patterns, see José Casanova, “The Two Dimensions, Temporal and Spatial, of the Secular: Comparative Refections on the Nordic Protestant and Southern Catholic Patterns,” in Rosemarie van den Breemer, José Casanova and Trygve Wyller, eds., Secular and Sacred? The Scandinavian Case of Religion in Human Rights, Law and Public Space (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012), 21–33. 15. Ibid. 16. https://www.bartleby.com/124/pres61.html 17. https://www.bartleby.com/124/pres62.html 18. https://www.bartleby.com/124/pres66.html 19. https://www.bartleby.com/124/pres67.htm 20. https://www.bartleby.com/124/pres68.html 21. obama​white​house​.arch​ives.​gov/b​log/2​013/0​1/21/​secon​d-ina​ugura​tion-​barac​ k-oba​ma 22. José Casanova, “The Politics of Nativism: Islam in Europe, Catholicism in the United States,” Philosophy and Social Criticism, Vol. 38, no. 4–5 (2012), 485–495. 23. Cf. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996) and Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004). 24. José Casanova, “The Long, Diffcult, and Tortuous Journey of Turkey into Europe and the Dilemmas of European Civilization,” Constellations Vol. 13, no. 2 (2006). 25. For an English translation of these documents of Vatican II, see Vatican II: The Basic Sixteen Documents, ed. Austin Flannery (Northport, NY: Costello Pub. Co., 2007).

Christian Theology in the Age of Migration : Implications for World Christianity, edited by Peter C. Phan, Lexington Books, 2020.

Chapter 2

Migrant Itineraries and the Catholic Church An Anthropological Approach

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Valentina Napolitano

We1 live in interesting times, times in which the study of Catholicism, and the everyday forms of living and practice that Catholicism encompasses today, can be more fruitful than ever. To grasp an important particularity of the study of Catholicism today, my purpose in what follows will be to question a received understanding of the domain of Catholic Studies and its evolving relationship with sociocultural anthropology. Focusing on this broad and sometimes abstract-seeming entanglement of disciplines more concretely, I take up the problem of transnational migration—indisputably among the most urgent political concerns of our moment—and ask how an anthropological approach to Catholicism may be “good to think with” when grappling with contemporary migration. If Catholicism is “good to think with,” it is so beyond the strict domain of what we might typically assume to be the parameters of religion: the domain of the ritual, the sacred, the symbolic, and the liturgical. Such an expanded view of Catholicism is among the key affordances of an anthropological approach that puts Catholics themselves and their everyday lives, cultural practice, and religious experience at the center of the study of Catholicism. It also invites to think how aspects of the world(s) we live in—their social, economic, and political formation—are underpinned, overtly or covertly, by Catholic and Christian theological traditions. These continuities (and contradictions) between the reproduction of Western political economies and the reproduction of the Catholic Church as an institution not only reveal the residual Catholic histories of our ostensibly “secular worlds,” but in so doing they also illuminate the emergent points of convergence through which these histories become reactivated and revitalized. The migrant, and 19

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more particularly the female migrant and her labor, presents a particularly compelling case through which the contemporary reproduction of the Church and the political economy of the West appear profoundly and revealingly enmeshed. Thus, migrant labor has become indispensable for the reproduction of advanced industrial economies (see undocumented migration fows into Western Europe, for instance), so non-Western religious passions and migrant affective and devotional labor are ever more central to the rejuvenation of the Roman Catholic Church at its own historical center.2

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THE CHRISTIANITY OF ETHNOGRAPHY Anthropology is a discipline and feld of study that has cultivated and engaged with, but also controlled, ethnographic practices. Ethnography, or ethno-graphos, a practice of literally writing the other, emerges out of a powerful prefgurative Western tradition of recording in which writing has always implied coming to terms with estrangement, a mode of being otherwise. Given the church’s historical control of literacy in the West, it is unsurprising that from within the clergy are many of the earliest practitioners of what we would identify today as ethnography. More specifcally, it is in the earliest encounters of European explorers and missionaries with indigenous people of the Americans that we can fnd the formalization of a Western practice of “writing the other.”3 The work of early Dominican and Jesuit missionaries—for instance, Jesuit José de Acosta’s work The Natural and Moral History of the Indies—has long been considered among the earliest examples of ethnography and a foundation to anthropology’s comparative method. The impact of these writings, however, extends far beyond the prehistory of anthropology as a feld or practice. Those same early missionary writings also formed crucial conceptual and theological building blocks in the foundation of the Western imperialism, through “discourses invoking the civilizing mission, white man’s burden, manifest destiny and the triumph of the West.”4 Though this tangled history of ethnographic writing and the church is an essential (if conficted and sometimes forgotten) part of modern anthropology’s self-understanding, it is often quite detached from the understanding of the discipline within the church. While doing feldwork among Latin American migrants in Rome in the early and mid-2010s, I had many fruitful conversations among faculty and students at Pontifcal universities in Rome. Being trained as a sociocultural anthropologist, I found that the word “Anthropology” in those pedagogical circles implicitly described a quite different feld than the one I knew. In these spaces, the term “Anthropology” was used to refer to the study of human culture insofar as it touches on conceptions of

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“life” in a quite specifc sense. In these circles, “Anthropology” named an exploration of the sanctity of life imagined as part of a natural, timeless order, a problem, or a way of thinking that anthropologists themselves might today call “vitapolitics.”5 Anthropology, in these sophisticated Catholic hubs, was mainly used to name the study of a liturgical, precultural notion of life developing around the “nature” of the human. Pursuing this somewhat surprising understanding of my discipline and looking through my social science–trained eye, I began to see a tension within different pedagogical and missionary circles within the Catholic Church in Rome. It was a tension between what life “is,” in an abstract sense and as a given universal value versus what forms life may take in a concrete sense. Little did I know at the time that what I was coming up against—particularly in the ethnographic work I was carrying out in the Latin American Catholic mission in Rome—was a long-standing tension within the Roman Catholic Church between life and forms of living. Roland Barthes writes about “ways to be in common” and new forms of proximity and distance in his 1976–1977 Collège de France lectures, arguing that we need not be either locked in partner relationships (as in a couple’s love), or lost in the anonymity of a crowd. He suggests that there is at least a third way of “living together” that is neither dyadically exclusive (the couple) nor alienatingly distant (the crowd).6 For Giorgio Agamben, this third way is present in medieval monastic rhythms of life that unfold without a shared telos or common goal,7 but rather in terms of what Barthes calls the homeostasis of “Living-Together,” “the pure pleasure of sociability.”8 Agamben argues that the Catholic monastic way of life (modus videndi) predates a modern separation of oikonomia (economy, originally referring to the management of the household) from theology. In his analysis of Franciscan promotion of poverty and use (diametrically opposed to the existence and exercise of property), Agamben argues that forms of living emerge in the spatiotemporal tension between life and precepts. Neither of these latter two exist prior to each other, but they acquire a meaning through particular forms of living. In his interpretation, a monastic common life is not the “object that the rule must constitute or govern,” but instead the rule that seems to be born from the monastic life.9 In the words of anthropologist Tim Ingold then, anthropology should interrogate pathways of participation into the morethan-human-world, as pathways of attention which were already presented in early monastic orders.10 Those are pathways of living in common in the world of early monastic orders (sharing food, practices of prayers, etc.) that crafted a sociality and a self, in tension with a modern one, in which life is oriented toward the agency of the “individual” as a bearer of rights and duties under a codifed, written law. In light of some of these insights, therefore, the task of anthropology of Catholicism is not that of studying the merely

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epiphenomenal, “cultural” expressions of the church nature—for example, a transhistorical belief in the sanctity of “life”; it is rather to illuminate the everyday “forms-of-life” of Catholics that continue to underpin and reconstitute the “nature” of church itself. For the purposes of my own research, rethinking the long and historically sedimented debate within Catholicism on life and forms of living has also shaped my analysis of migrant forms of living in common. A contemporary anthropology of Catholicism that gives the stories of migrants and migration center stage casts Catholicism itself not so much as a system of belief and rituals, but as a constellation of forms of being and living in common. To put it in other words, I suggest then in studying transnational migration and Catholicism we focus on forms of living, not in the name of an abstract notion of, say, “life,” but to recognize the vitality and consequence of a plurality of modes of being. When putting forms of living in common (and in migration) at the center of an analysis of Catholicism today, the consistently gendered nature of these forms of living and their reproduction becomes unavoidable. In the second part of this chapter, I specifcally focus on one case, among many, of the affective labor performed by Latin American nuns taking care of their elderly sisters or male priests in religious orders’ headquarters in Rome. Since female religious orders have seen a shrinking of vocations in Europe, accompanied by their expansion in the global South, younger nuns from Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, India, and the Philippines fnd themselves caring for older nuns, often of European birth, who are living in their respective order’s headquarters in Rome. In Rome, these migrant nuns often perform a “labor of love” while caring for older nuns or attending the needs of male orders in the city. The labor of these Latin American nuns is perceived by some priests in Rome as a return of a Catholic “gift of faith” given to the New World by the Church in the sixteenth century, now reciprocated as missions in the Americas “return” to the “cooling,” increasingly secularized heart of Catholic Europe.11 This story offers an important view into the study of long-existing ties of love and caring and their complicated existence within a broader political economy in which care, migration, and affective labor plays an increasingly decisive role. The Catholic ethics of love and the labor of caring, in nationstate contexts such as Italy, have become functional to the current transformation of the labor market. On the one hand, Catholic ethics of voluntary labor can be seen as resonant with current neoliberalist capitalist regimes that encourage a “fexible” labor force, particularly in the advanced industrial metropoles of Western Europe, and an ever-greater reliance on voluntary, unpaid, and short-term contract labor. From such a vantage point, Catholic voluntary practices then become functional to fexible labor regimes of

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contemporary capitalism, particularly when unwaged/voluntary labor flls in for the labor of social welfare services that the state no longer provides. Or, to put it in other words, that there is a resonance and a tension between Catholic ethics as practices of care and current neoliberal regimes of voluntary labor and the feminization of the labor of care.12 This tension becomes explicit when we study the labor that is performed by Catholic (female) immigrants in Western Europe. In my own research on women of Latin American origins attending Catholic missions in Rome, I highlight how the Catholic Church seeks to bring migrants into its fold, yet in a way those migrants never end up fully “ftting” into the Italian Church’s expectation of how good Catholic migrants should behave. My own work’s focus, while drawing on the possibilities of migration, also introduces a notion of “migrant itinerary” to direct attention to possibilities for emancipatory rupture that migration can entail. My use of the term “itinerary” extends and specifes the appearance of the term in the work of Thomas Tweed, who has adopted the term to refer to cultural fows that “intensify joy and confront suffering by drawing on human and superhuman forces to make homes and cross boundaries.”13 My reading maintains the focus on the affective dimension in Tweed’s usage but stresses the historical situatedness and political economic conditions that guide, activate and fuel affective attachments. So much so that migrant itineraries do not “sum up” in neat “migrant communities;” in some cases, they actually undo a homogenized perception that a notion of migrant community entails. In this, I follow Michel de Certeau’s thinking that migration names experiences that are diffcult to contain, but also potential engines of revitalization through a “plurality of mixed itineraries that are diverse, changing and constantly being re-shaped.”14 Migrant itineraries are modes of living that are put in motion through multiple aesthetic, sensorial, and experiential ways of becoming. These openended and sometimes contested migrant itineraries are always also a record of ways of living (modus vivendi),15 in which the process of migration may be one of becoming otherwise. In this sense, migration not only intersects with political, economic, and ethical domains, but because migration itself is an open-ended, never fully representable process, it can be understood as an expression of a theological quest. Christian theological approaches may address the process of migration not only as a cultural construction (e.g., the cultural representation of migrant groups), but as a different and larger temporal and spatial scale of the effects of mobility on this earth. Examples of these scale are in the theological and biblical imagination referring to the effects of the Exodus and the Genesis food. In a dialogical way then, theological scales can be read productively by social scientists to consider focusing less on here-and-now processes of

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migrant cultural productions and more on how processes of migration pose new possibilities for living together on this earth, which are part of, though not fully contained by nations-states and their cultural formations. Tropes of “migrant communities” in the missionary work of the Catholic Church often stress the role of family and the suffering wrought by separation and “dislocation.” Catholic missionary language often frames the experience of individual labor migration and immigration as a heroic and suffering journey, but also a traumatic disturbance of the natural condition of family unity. Beyond the missionary discourse of the Catholic Church, however, migrant stories often convey other, often conspicuously gendered truths that do not always ft into an overreaching desire for family unity. Rather than exclusively teleological stories of love for the family, suffering, and redemption, migrant itineraries unfold also around conditions of betrayal of love and of failing kinship relations. The states (states of being, but also as nation-states) of origins of migrants, with their geopolitical and economic (often failed) opportunities for some of its people, struggle then to contain those people’s hopes and fantasies for a different labor condition and gendered life. That is the dynamic context through which migration takes place. Hence, there are also emancipatory desires to migration, which, again, are often gendered and rarely fully contained by in terms of the heterodox family and the desire for its reunifcation. Desires, passions, and fantasies are important focuses for understanding migrants’ religious experiences. Migrant “hearts” with their passions, their religious devotions (such as to the Sacred Heart of the Peruvian Lord of the Miracles in Rome), and their active participation in the life of the parishes drive a reanimation of churches in Rome, where, as in other parts of Western Europe, active church participation among locals has been shrinking for decades. Yet, migrant itineraries are also moving away from traditions of marriage that may have been a source of suffering back home. Hence, this ambiguity toward a heteronormative family unity, imagined exclusively within a wedlock, is a constant source of tension for the Church’s catechesis in Rome. The contradictions that run through the (gendered) discourse of family index a broader ambivalence structuring the relationship of the Church, Catholic migrants, and Catholicism itself. My close ethnographic work with American migrants in Rome has consistently revealed a deeper continuity of being Catholic and migrant that is not tied to a collective—as, for instance, being part of an “ethnic church” might—or to a universal (Catholic) religious identity. What emerges instead is an assemblage of multiple conditions of labor and aspirations to the belonging that join migration and faith through narratives of hope and seek regeneration of the homely and the unhomely, as well as experiences of intimate and matrimonial betrayal. Ethnographic engagement with migrant forms of living-in-common demands attention to

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such passions, desires, and fantasies just as an ethnographic account of any group would. Yet, as I have sought to argue, there is a particular resonance between this affective dimension of migration and the nature of the labor that migrant subjects, and particularly migrant women, provide that makes attention to this “passionate” dimension of migration especially important. To explain this in the second part of this chapter, I will briefy sketch a form of living-in-common by migrant nuns in Rome, adopting an ethnographic approach to evoke the richness and the complexity of these migrant itineraries. This is to encourage overall a study of religious life as informing wider parameters of gendered labor in current societies.

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MEXICAN NUNS IN ROME: AN ETHNOGRAPHIC STORY Rome, a spring in the mid-2010s. These are thick walls—my mobile phone does not pick up a signal. It is cool and damp even though it is already May. On the wall of my room and in other parts of the convent, there is a representation of the cross of the Apostolate, a nineteenth-century version of the Sacred Heart. Adela explains that it is an upright cross, a living cross that comes from the heart. It has thorns and smaller crosses over it; these are the sins of the priests, and nuns pray for them, dedicate their life to them. I am living in the Roman home of a nineteenth-century Mexican female order, with six wonderful women living within the thick walls of a sixteenth-century palace. This is now the home of a male Mexican order which hosts a related Mexican Catholic order of women formed in 1924 and offcially founded in 1937 by a French Father.16 The female order to which these women belong has been in this house in Rome for twenty-fve years, but the house has a longer association with Mexican Catholics, having been the refuge in Rome for another, male religious order escaping religious persecution in the 1920s, during what is today known as the Cristero War. Many chores need to be done during the day, particularly taking care of the bodies and souls of male priests who reside on the upper foors of the house. We always eat in the basement, with no natural light, watched over by two huge china vases and a bust of the founder in storage in this dining area. The air is stifing, almost gluey. We are underground, yet only a few yards away from a very busy tourist street that leads to the Campo de’ Fiori. Each day we need to prepare food for over thirty people. I start to bring down one of the many cases of food left weekly by the deliveryman on the ground foor. Rosa Maria, a nun from Monterrey, gently approaches and whispers that I shouldn’t do that chore. I am puzzled, but as a good anthropologist I bring the crate back to where I found it. Still puzzled, I rinse the salad. Rosa giggles

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and with her northerner accent says, “If we do it, the padres get used to it and that’s it; they pretend they become used to us doing it.”17 Here we are: the familiar tactics of gendered labor relations in practice. This gendered negotiation is an open secret among the clergy, and it is often portrayed to outsiders in terms of female heroism. But where there is heroism there is often strife. The evening before I leave the convent, Madre Consuelo, the superior of the house, shares what has been burdening her. She closes the door. They are at war. War is contained within these walls, not only dampness. It’s a historic war. They call it negotiation of labor between diocesans and religious orders and between gendered religious orders. They are at war with the padres of the house. She would like to negotiate a new and better three-year contract with them, but her superior in Mexico “doesn’t want to hear [about it].” Her superior does not know the real cost of living in Rome, and Mother Consuelo has to juggle the bookkeeping in order to avoid going into the red. Consuelo has told the nuns to take their time in doing the chores, to not iron too fast, to leave the mess the fathers may leave on display for longer, and to take time to study and eat more leisurely together. These are fallen words for some of the nuns. Consuelo is clear that doing too much weakens their collective labor position and creates too much of a wrong love: “The fathers may give you more and more to do, but it is hasta aqui [up to here].” I love the wit in her eyes and the spirit of her voice. There is not only Sor Juana de la Cruz, but there have been scores of nuns taking on that battle in Rome from all corners of the world. The walls bounce memories back, even in a tucked-away basement. And there is wrong love, too: “The love of when they step on you, they squash you and you carry on serving them, more and more even when they could do it themselves, without saying anything, but this is not love.” Tensions of intimacy and servitude, in the past phrased as tensions between choir and servant nuns, have a long history dating back to the time of the early modern monastic female communities. The products of a post-Tridentine Roman Catholic discourse, such tensions are still a signature of religious labor and love. The roots of servile love in the present day have multiple historical registers. In this case, it is not so much about a subjection to a mastery of personal care of upper-class nuns; instead, servitude exposes a language of rights rather than duties. Duties immolate female work and sanctify it. That others have a right to use what is the property of a person as a labor-object is not sanctifcation, however, but a tontería (a stupidity) for Madre Consuelo. The line between amor and tontería is a fne one. And there is still right love—the affective labor of praying. This female male order is dedicated to the support of priests; it was founded in Mexico in the mid-nineteenth century with the specifc aim of helping priests on their long road of priestly vocation. In Madre Consuelo’s words:

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What we do is strong. A nun has to love many who are in need, and sometimes this is very demanding. The priests take a long time in their formation, more than nine years, and after that we carry on following them so that they will be strong in their sacerdotal life, and we have to carry many of them. . . . This is another type of love; it is a vocation of the heart. If you get married, you have only one family, but we, you do not know how many we have. And those who do not know us think we are lonely between these walls. [She laughs.] Those poor people—they do not know we have so many.

The nuns then imagine their own migrant itineraries in terms of other forms of ambiguity, quite distinct from a heroic sacrifce over different boundaries of family and intimacies. They speak also of religious families that do not work, and of intimacies that are shared, but at times also resisted. Nuns do not only pray for priests; they also pray “for the love of my life that never was.” These are the words of Adela. She grew up in a little village in the state of Jalisco, on the road to Colima. Dirt poor and the eldest of seven children, she fell in love at fourteen, and the bond was very strong. One day he told her to come and live with him, regardless of what her parents would say. That was a form of marriage proposal, in the pueblo’s code. She recounts how she was set to do it, but then stepping out with him at sunset with her heart beating and about to leave, her mother came down the road, unexpectedly, with a shawl on her head. The chance was lost; she never left with him. Then he went to the States to try his fortune. When he returned to the village a year later, she had, in the meantime, heard the call and applied to enter the convent. A few years later, she was about to take the frst perennial vows and had gone back to the village after being away a long while. She asked his family if she could see him for the last time before marrying Christ—she knew he was married now with two children. “What, don’t you know?” his sister said in a quiet voice; he had died in a car accident the week before. Adela says she knew then that consecrated life was her true call, her true love; that death had strengthened her deed. But she has been praying for him since—every day of her life, she says. Nuns are, of course, not immune to earthly love. Loves left behind, loves met in prayers every day with an Archimedean precision; loves of distant lands and homely hearts. Pero no son tontas (but they are not stupid). With another nun, Ricarda, I discuss what the intimate root of love is and whether a missed earthly love is the root of “the love in which they walk over you.” She replies that the root of that love is fear, it is like a “fear of your parents” when one was living in the pueblo. But out of that fear can also be born the opportunity of a vocation. Love is not that simple, and sometimes you need to cut roots. Consecrated life is also a land of discovery and challenges. Some of the nuns’ female friends, from the time they were growing up together in the villages, have married but gone backward. Those friends hoped for a better life, in bigger urban centers, with an education, and some found themselves tied

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down by diffcult husbands, many children, and in small isolated ranches. Not the life of seeing different parts of the world that these nuns, in their way, live. This is a real option for women who have grown up in humble, rural, and semi-urban parts of Mexico. It is a vocation, and to them it is a liberation from the fimsy dream of a secular marriage. Although Mexican nuns are from relatively humble origins, their male diocesan counterparts in Rome often are not. Some of these men are chosen in their dioceses. If Mexican nuns of different orders often end up in Rome to care for the priests or for older (often Italian) nuns, priests and seminarians come to care for their vocation, education, and career—a problematic gendered divisions of religious labor. Nuns also have learned to wear el hábito earlier on their journey, though they may have shed some tears in the acquisition of such habits when they entered the order—tears of frustration. You have to learn to wear el hábito, Madre Consuelo repeats. It is all white, with a light cotton crinoline underneath, a tunic on the top, and then another tunic on top of that, open on the sides and kept together by two laced ribbons on each side. Their veil is black with white trim and kept in place with some wiring that they pass underneath the trim. The heavy dress garment, with a collar that wraps around part of the neck, is the same in winter and summer. It’s demanding to keep the garment white and spotless. The nuns now are relieved, since the general of the order has recently allowed them to wear a gray dress when they travel or go on visits. However, their everyday life is married to this handmade, deceptively simple garment. Matilda explains that you need to learn to wear it and move accordingly. You learn to stir the food at some distance, to wash your hands so that you do not wet the sleeves. Consuelo, who entered the convent when she was fourteen and is now thirty-six, remembers that she used to wear short sleeves before entering and liked fowered patterns. If you stain it, you quickly rinse it—skills learned for a never-ending reproduction of an earthly grace. The white dress is also a source of pride. Of another order of nuns, they know, who wear gray, they say: It is easier for them to get around, and appear to be in order, you do not see the dirt on their dress, but if you get close to them you pick up sometimes the smell of fried cooking. It is a labor [to keep our dress clean and suffer the heat in the summer], but we do not smell of cooking. The control of bodily smells and fuids is an acquired technique of a gendered body. Smell is an index of grace, too, although, historically, it was not always so.

Religious habits, horizons of love, the circulation of odors become the material and affective struggles of servitude and the production of love(s) that stick to migrant women. And if affects circulate between bodies and signs/objects, they also stick to the surface of certain religious bodies. Their articulation involves histories of gendered labor too, of absence of recognition, of

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abjection of histories, when reread in some male clerics’ perspectives on this labor as forms of “heroism” and a “payback” of missionary evangelization. These Mexican nuns pray for the well-being and vocation of the priests, for their strength in carrying on in the path, but with their affective labor and prayers they are also supporting a Mexico riven with violence as well as the reproduction of the Roman Catholic metropolitan center. As religious vocations of Italians die out, this transnational labor constitutes the reminder of a process of ruination of the traditional Roman Catholic core. While the convent’s walls may “defend” those sisters from some of the riddles and racialization of current exclusionary Italian policies on migrant citizenship, they nonetheless are witness to long histories of affective and immaterial labor that is today, perhaps more than ever, required from female lay Latin American transnational migrants who fnd a common labor niche in the care sector.18 If an ideal form of lay female Latin American transnational caring labor is professed by the church missionary discourse in Rome as a female “heroic journey,” it is constantly interrupted by ambiguity, strategies of concealment, and stretching the time taken to carry out tasks within and outside the convent. And “religious” female labor is no different. If religious transnational female vocations require a constant affective material and immaterial labor for both female and male orders’ reproduction at the metropolis, they are marked by subtle wars over the division of labor. I refer here to everyday forms of living and interaction carried out through delay and defection of labor and animated by wrong and right loves: the “stupid love” and the “true love.” They are forms of living in common that also point to horizons of changes within the Roman Catholic Church. When in the context of lay Latin American female migration, the concern—especially for orders such as the Scalabrinians, who are in charge of many migrant missions in Rome—is about formulating and developing a pastoral plan that pays particular attention to women and to the specifcity of their experience, a similar focus on religious labor is and should also be an area of research for migration and gendered studies. A research focus on affective labor and migrant itineraries can help up to move beyond unhelpful religious/lay divide and the homogenizing indexing of migrant/ ethnic churches’ perspective. CONCLUSION The aim of this chapter has been to introduce, however briefy, the richness of migrant itineraries and how they may help us to recalibrate gendered experience within a Catholic, migrant church. Those may not ft neatly, nor can confne a process of migration to a suffering journey, which has been one of the dominant discourses mobilized by the Catholic Church to understand the process of transnational (often undocumented) gendered migration. The suffering

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in this discourse pivots on the impossibility and the duress caused by family separation and the “sacrifce” that women, as mother, wives and daughters, perform for kin “back home.” I have suggested, however, that the plurality of migrant experiences is indeed composed by practices that regiment and “mold” for the good the body and social relations—a body that Talal Asad calls “docile,” standing within an old tradition of Christian rightfully listening within (2015:176).19 But they also point to a Catholicism “otherwise,” to an externality, a formation of plurality that is often at odds with narratives of suffering humanity and the universal normalization of heterodox, wedlocked families. Catholic migrant itineraries are always forms of living in the making. Finally, migrants’ itineraries—with their entanglements of experience, histories, desires, materialities, and labor—help us to focus on where a labor of love is required and performed, both as part of a normative family and wedlocked structure, but also outside of it. Together with a “sacrifcial” labor—the labor of love and care as sacrifce—we need to put into focus the possibilities for new emancipatory horizons for both lay and religious gendered migration. And it is at this kernel that the formation of a pastoral work that specifcally seeks to reach women should also be unfinchingly responsive to abuse and violence. As clerical sexual abuse has duly become a public focus of debate within and outside the Catholic Church, it is crucial to address how the abuse and violence toward women is nested in a tension between sacrifcial, coercive, and emancipatory horizons. As Maya Mayblin has rightly noted—studying dissensus through Roman Catholic Women priests, who have striven quietly for a recognition of apostolic succession—female subjectivity within the church is also “a matter of striving carefully and simultaneously for difference and repetition—for ritual repetition with a difference.”20 To study the Catholic Church and gendered migration together, then, calls for a focus on the repetition of a labor of care as part and not separate from the constitutive conditions of the labor market. And this also invites a focus on how religious life may inform the study of labor of care in society at large, producing not only long-existing but also renewed forms of female subjectivity and multilayered articulation of the homely and the unhomely. There are different modes of living in common, and more than one story is at stake. NOTES 1. A section of this chapter appeared in Chapter 6 of Valentina Napolitano, Migrant Hearts and the Atlantic Return: Transnationalism and the Roman Catholic Church (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016). 2. The concept of affective labor emerges out of Italian Marxist and feminist theory and practice in the 1970s, as thinkers and activists sought to describe and analyze

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traditionally “invisible” and often-unpaid forms of labor that centered on eliciting, reproducing, and managing desires, feelings, and emotional states. The voluntary and service industries offer some of the most conspicuous examples of the way affective labor has been incorporated into advanced industrial economies; yet domestic work, reproductive labor, and elder/child care remain the oldest and, in many contexts, still most aggressively exploited forms of affective labor. 3. Michel De Certeau, The Writing of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). 4. Barnor Hesse, “Racialized Modernity: An Analytics of White Mythologies,” Ethnic and Racial Studies Vol. 30, no. 4 (2007), 653. 5. Patrick Hanafn, Conceiving Life: Reproductive Politics and the Law in Contemporary Italy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 5. 6. Roland Barthes, How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 48. 7. Giorgio Agamben, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). 8. Barthes, How to Live Together, 48. 9. Agamben, The Highest Poverty, 58. 10. Tim Ingold, “Dreaming of Dragons,” Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute Vol. 19 (2013), 734–752. 11. Valentina Napolitano, “The Atlantic Return and the Payback of Evangelization,” Religion and Gender Vol. 3, no. 2 (2013), 207–221. 12. Andrea Muehlebach, “The Catholicization of Neoliberalism: On Love and Welfare in Lombardy, Italy,” American Anthropologist Vol. 115, no. 3 (2013), 452–465. 13. Thomas A. Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 36. 14. Michel De Certeau, Culture in the Plural (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 134. 15. Valentina Napolitano, Migrant Hearts and the Atlantic Return: Transnationalism and the Roman Catholic Church (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016). 16. To maintain confdentiality, I withhold both orders’ names. 17. The conversations reported in quotation marks in the remaining part of this chapter are recorded by me in the course of the interviews. 18. For an indication to relevant literature on this subject, see Encarnacion Gutierrez-Rodriguez, “Domestic Work–Affective Labor: On Feminization and the Coloniality of Labor,” Women’s Studies International Forum Vol. 46 (2014), 45–53 and Heidi Gottfried and Jennifer Jihye Chun, “Care Work in Transition: Transnational Circuits of Gender, Migration, and Care,” Critical Sociology Vol. 44, no. 7–8 (2018), 997–1012. 19. Talal Asad, “Thinking About Tradition, Religion, and Politics in Egypt Today,” Critical Inquiry Vol. 42, no.1 (2015), 176. 20. Maya Mayblin, “The Ultimate Return: Dissent, Apostolic Succession, and the Renewed Ministry of Roman Catholic Women Priests,” History and Anthropology (2018), 14.

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Chapter 3

The Exodus as Memories about Migration Examples from the Hebrew Bible and the Deuterocanonical Books

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Hendrik Bosman

“Migration” is usually described as a movement of people or animals (including antelopes and zebras) from one region to another in search of better living conditions. Synonymous terms for “migration” include “resettlement, emigration, diaspora and exodus,” and the following discussion will focus on references to the exodus in the Hebrew Bible and Deuterocanonical Books that can be interpreted as examples of migration. In general, the term “exodus” is usually defned as a mass departure of people—that is, the exodus of refugees feeing from a natural disaster, like an earthquake. More in particular “exodus” refers to the departure of the Israelites from Egypt. In the following discussion, the departure of the Israelites from Egypt will not be discussed as a historical event gleaning information from archeology and Egyptology, but as memories that surfaced in different texts in the Hebrew Bible and Deuterocanonical Books. There can be no doubt that the Exodus from Egypt formed an important part of theological refection in ancient Israel and early Judaism.1 Walter Brueggemann goes as far as to claim that “the Exodus grammar of God saturates the imagination of Israel” and that memories of the Exodus become “powerful, defnitional lens” through which many theological traditions in the Old Testament are retold.2 The exodus motif or theme can be found in two major clusters in the Hebrew Bible: the frst cluster comprises of allusions to a supposed ffteenthor thirteenth-century BCE exodus from Egypt that is found in the Book Exodus, the rest of the Pentateuch, the so-called Deuteronomistic and Chronist 33

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histories as well as a number of psalms and prophetic texts; the second cluster is made up of references to the sixth century BCE return from exile in Babylonia that was interpreted by Isaiah 40-55, Jeremiah and Ezekiel as a new exodus.3 References to the exodus in the Deuterocanonical Books will have to take into account how Jewish communities of faith reinterpreted the exodus to make sense within the diaspora, migrant contexts often saturated by Hellenistic and eventually Roman cultures. Can the exodus motif, as the departure from oppression in Egypt, be interpreted as narratives concerning migration and identity formation? During the past few decades, the reception history of the book of Exodus primarily focused on it as the classic text for theological refection that addressed liberation on different levels—not only on political but also on economic and social levels. Without negating the ongoing relevance of the continued refection on the praxis of liberation, we must acknowledge that we are living in the socalled “Age of Migration.” Although migration has been a part of our reality for millennia, it has grown as a signifcant global phenomenon; by this, we refer to about 270 million people that moved from political intolerance and socioeconomic deprivation to countries that could possibly provide political tolerance as well as social and economic fourishing and security. Therefore, we are obliged to at least consider the potential meaningfulness of investigating how migration opens up new ways of interpreting the exodus motif as an important unifying theological topic in different historical and theological contexts in the Hebrew Bible and Deuterocanonical books that resonate with our current migration challenges.

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THE EXODUS AS MOTIF David Daube discerned an “exodus pattern,” according to which God responded to the cries of the oppressed Hebrews in Egypt and delivered them from the hand of Pharaoh, a deliverance that led to the birth of Israel as a nation4. Later, Yair Zakovitch focused on the “concept of the Exodus in the Bible” because he considered the Exodus as “the central event in the historiography of the Bible and in the collective memory of the biblical period.”5 Erich Zenger made a useful distinction between different types of exodus “confession formulae,” building on research by Johannes Wijngaards6: The formula with the Hiphil of ʻlh (“led up”) is used more than forty times in older pre-Deuteronomistic liturgical and prophetic texts related to the Northern Kingdom and often indicates a geographical notion that Yahweh led Israel up from Egypt to Canaan. The formula with the Hiphil of jṣʼ (“led out”) is used more than eighty times, especially in Deuteronomic and Deuteronomistic

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theology where it usually refers to the exodus as an act of powerful liberation, often being “led out” from Egypt as “the house of slavery.” More recently, Bryan D. Estelle set out to trace the “echoes of Exodus” as “a Biblical Motif.” By following these “traces” of the Exodus in different parts of the Old Testament, he established that these reinterpretations constitute not “mere repetition” or “base recapitulation,” but transformative allusions to this motif that is anticipated by creation and fulflled in the eschatological “world-to-come.”7 Estelle makes use of a “synchronic canonical perspective” to establish the echoes of the Exodus as motif by means of proposed intertextual relations that cover both the Hebrew Bible and New Testament.8 Thus, the exodus as motif or theme can be considered in different ways. On the one hand, one can focus on a very specifc defnition of the exodus as only the departure from Egypt; on the other hand, a more general understanding can incorporate the different elements addressed in the book of Exodus (i.e., the so-called plagues or signs as preparation for the departure from Egypt, the subsequent journey through the Reed or Red Sea, the wanderings in the wilderness, and the theophany at Sinai).9 In the majority of the references to the exodus, there seems to be three corresponding elements to be found: (a) predominantly two verbs that allude to departure (usually Hi of jṣʼ = “to bring/ lead out” and Hi of ͑lh = “to bring/lead up”); (b) Israel or a similar reference to the people of God as object, and (c) “from Egypt” as modifer.10

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The Exodus as Memory According to Yair Zakovitch, the exodus functioned as a foundational memory in the religious history of ancient Israel and early Judaism. The exodus as memory is presupposed by most of the law, ritual and theological-ethics found in the Hebrew Bible—sometimes discreetly and in a covert manner.11 Instead of continuing the ongoing and often fruitless debates on the historicity of the exodus events that either opt for its supposed historical accuracy or consign it to the realm of folk tradition, one could investigate the exodus narratives as the product of “collective memories.”12 Any research on the exodus as memory must take into account the pioneering work by the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, the Jewish historian Yosef Yerushalmi, the American Biblical scholar Ronald Hendel, and the German Egyptologist, Jan Assmann. Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945), infuenced by the philosophy of Henri Bergson and the sociology of Emile Durkheim, described “collective memory” not as a given but rather as a notion produced by social construction due to its presupposition that a “collective memory” is undergirded by the support of a social group, contextually defned within the coordinates of time and

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space.13 Special attention should be given to the way Halbwachs describes ancient “religious collective memories” as traditions entirely permeated with religious ideas that produce in symbolic forms “the history of migration and fusions of races and tribes, of great events . . . and reforms” that can be traced back to the origins of the societies who maintain them.14 Memories are crucial for the formation of identity in the Israelite and early Jewish faith communities. As Yosef Yerushalmi puts it in his thoughtprovoking book: “Only in Israel . . . is the injunction to remember felt as a religious imperative to an entire people.”15 Yerushalmi focuses on the relationship between Jewish history and memory and shows that history has become “the faith of modern Jews” and that this inclination toward history has its roots in the way the early Jewish culture was informed by its conception of redemptive or salvation history. Eventually, Judaism became more concerned to remember past events like the exodus than to record the events in the past as history. Ronald Hendel argues that many members of early Israel had memories of Egyptian slavery and oppression and that these memories were linked to pharaohs as such and not to a specifc pharaoh—a good reason why the pharaoh remained anonymous in the collective memory of early Israel. In similar vein, he proposes that the “collective memories that constitute the exodus include the Egyptian oppression” and becomes the “past as people remember it [. . .] the past as perceived and colored by subjective concepts, hopes and fears.”16 Memories are inevitably selective and it is organized and embellished according to the challenges of the present. Memories of the exodus perceived as migration might open up new avenues of theological refection about current relevance. It seems appropriate to apply Jan Assmann’s understanding of cultural memories from his perspective of “mnemohistory” to the exodus narratives, according to which unlike history as conventionally understood, mnemohistory is interested in the past as it is remembered and not as it supposedly happened.17 There can be doubt that the exodus was remembered over many centuries, despite the lack of historical consensus when and even if it happened. In his recent publication on the role of faith and covenant in the book of Exodus, Assmann again confrms that mnemohistory is not interested in “What really happened?” but in “How it was remembered?” Applying this approach to the exodus tradition, he emphasized that there is “incontrovertible evidence” of “contacts between the Egyptians and their West Semitic neighbours” (including Canaanites, Syrians, and Hebrews) that must have impacted on the cultural memories embedded in the oral and literary traditions on which the Hebrew Bible is based.18 In summary, according to Miroslav Volf, the identities of Jews and Christians are defned, respectively, by the Exodus of Israel and the Passion of

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Christ.19 The memories of the exodus and of creation were the memories that were kept alive by “commemorative rituals and liturgies” such as the Passover.20 Philip Davies distinguishes three stages of cultural memorization in Israel: the nurturing of different histories; the selective combination of these memories into narrative form by the biblical writers; and the reception of these memories by modern historians.21 This contribution acknowledges both the coexistence of different theological traditions (broadly Priestly and non-Priestly) that led to different nuances in the formulation of the exodus as a type of migration and the reception of these memories of the exodus in current contexts where migration has gained growing importance.

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THE EXODUS AS MIGRATION At frst, some general remarks about migration which has been a research topic in the social sciences for several decades. More than three decades ago, Jacob Eichenbaum attempted to develop a migration matrix that classifed different types of migration, from voluntary to forced migration.22 The two axes of this matrix are the decision to move from origin (“push factors”) and the decision to move to destination (“pull factors”), both calibrated by indications whether the decision was made independent of society or infuenced or even determined by society in the most general sense of the word—thus establishing a continuum between force (“push”) and choice (“pull”) that might motivate migration. More than two decades ago, the Princeton migration expert Douglas Massey came to the sobering conclusion that social scientists have not yet accepted a single coherent theory that accounts for the emergence or perpetuation of migration in different regions of the globe and his remark probably still rings true today.23 As with other complex phenomena, migration across the globe keeps on manifesting new “emerging properties” that are not adequately explained by existing migration theories. Recently migration is slowly making its way back into the mainstream research agenda, asking different questions and taking new approaches, such as the bio-archeological methods that use DNA and isotope analysis to map the movement of individuals and groups over millennia across the globe. Against this backdrop, Hebrew Bible studies have made attempts to investigate the explanatory potential of migration studies to elucidate the interpretation of biblical texts. James K. Hoffmeier sets as his goal for the discussion of immigrants and aliens in the Old Testament “to take a comprehensive look at the Bible to see how it directly and indirectly tackles the issues surrounding aliens or immigrants.”24 He has tried to understand the biblical passages in their

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historical and cultural context and to consider them through the lens of Christian ethics presupposing the theological affrmation that immigrants are people made in the image of God. From Hoffmeier’s summary of immigration and aliens in the book of Genesis, only the following six points relevant to the discussion of the exodus as migration will be mentioned: (1) immigration was widely practiced in the ancient Near East and Genesis refects this reality (Abraham migrates from Mesopotamia to Syria, Canaan, Egypt, and back to Canaan, etc.); (2) national borders and personal property were recognized and respected (Edom denied the Israelites access to travel through); (3) the Egyptians and Sumerians constructed forts on the frontiers to control their border and to monitor movements of peoples; (4) immigrants moved considerably but could not just settle wherever they wanted; (5) permission was sought by and sometimes granted to immigrants who wanted to settle in another land (Abraham in Hebron, Isaac in Gerar, and Jacob’s family in Egypt); (6) there was a distinction between a foreigner and a legal sojourner or resident alien who was taking up more permanent residence.25 It is telling that the title of Hoffmeier’s well-intentioned book refers to “The Immigration Crisis” and thus the contents of the book presuppose the United States as the default option, that is, as the site of the “crisis.” Little attempt was made to engage comprehensively with “migration,” not just “immigration,” as an international or global challenge that has been researched by different social sciences and requires a multidisciplinary approach—even in biblical studies. M. Daniel Carrol Rodas, Professor of Old Testament at Wheaton College and national immigration spokesperson for the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, addresses the challenge of migration under three issues: (1) How should Christians respond to the immigration issue? (2) What do Americans need to know in order to respond in a manner consistent with our Judeo-Christian value system? and (3) Does the Bible provide any guidance on the issue of immigration? Carroll is focused on “how the Bible can orient the way the broader Christian community, denominations, local churches and individual Christians understand their identity and role in the world today.”26 Though Carroll acknowledges the frequent use of exodus motifs by migrants who seek a “Promised Land” as a cypher for a better existence in the proverbial “land of milk and honey,” he points out that most Hispanic theologians prefer exile as the most appropriate theological paradigm for comprehending the precarious position of Hispanic migrants from different parts of Central and South America. In a thorough and stimulating attempt to utilize migration studies in Hebrew Bible Studies, John Ahn gleans three different categories from

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migration theory to distinguish different migrant experiences of exile by ancient Israel: (1) derivative forced migration, which is usually the result of geopolitical rearrangement. Good examples would be the exile that took place in 597 BCE after the Babylonian conquest of Judah (2 Kings 24) and the return from Babylonian exile that led to limited autonomy in Yehud as a Persian province (Nehemiah 5); (2) purposive forced migration, which takes place when a population is forced to relocate by the dominant political power, such was the case in 587 BCE when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians and a number of Judeans were exiled (2 Kings 25); and (3) responsive forced migration, which refers to people who fee voluntarily to escape oppression of one sort or another—Jeremiah’s fight to Egypt in 582 BCE is but one example (Jeremiah 41–43). According to these categories, the return from Babylonian exile as second exodus in 540 BCE can be depicted as a “derivative forced migration.”27

THE EXODUS AS MEMORY OF MIGRATION IN THE PENTATEUCH AS TORAH

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Survey of References to the Exodus in the Torah It is remarkable to note that there are clear similarities between some of the promises made to the patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) and the exodus as departure or migration from Egypt. The Lord reminded Abraham, who brought him out of his home in Ur to the land he was promised in Genesis 15:7 “Then he said to him, ‘I am the Lord who brought you (jṣʼ) from Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess.’” Before a covenant was established between Abraham and God at the end of Genesis 15, the following forecast was made as to what will happen in Egypt with the frst reference to the subsequent departure or migration from Egyptian oppression. During the encounter that Moses had with God at the burning bush, he received the following divine command and assurance in Exodus 3:10-12 after he communicated his doubt whether he can lead the Israelites out of Egypt. It is noteworthy that the verb jṣʼ is used in three consecutive verses to emphasize that the commission of Moses to lead the people had divine sanction. This movement of the Israelites out of Egypt is depicted as a migration under the leadership of Moses, but on the authority of God. In Exodus, Moses is commanded by God to confront Pharaoh and given the assurance that the Israelites will be delivered from slavery—the link with the Egyptian burdens of slavery is taken into account when translating jṣʼ “to free,” that is, migrating to freedom. “Say therefore to the Israelites, ‘I am the Lord, and I will free (jṣʼ) you from the burdens of the Egyptians and deliver

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you from slavery to them. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment’” (Ex 6:6-7). The Feast of Unleavened Bread seems to be a cultic celebration of divine support for the migration out of Egypt, according to several references to the exodus in Exodus 13:3. From the start, in verse 3, Moses commands the Israelites to remember the day on which they migrated out of Egypt because through the strength of the hand of God they were freed from slavery. The same combination of commemoration and freedom from slavery is found in verses 13:14 and 16, and again this migration was only possible by means the strength of the Lord. The introduction to the Decalogue in Exodus reaffrms the authority of God as the Lord who brought Israel out of Egypt, as the house of slavery. It is signifcant that migration as authorized by the Lord functions as introductory qualifcation for each of the ten commandments: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out (jṣʼ) of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” (Ex 20:2). During the Golden Calf episode in Exodus 32, Moses interceded on behalf of his idolatrous people to infuence God to change his mind about destroying Israel by worshipping the Golden Calf in verses 11-12. There is a juxtaposed use of jṣʼ—in verse 11, it refers to the rescue from Egypt, while in verse 12 there is an ironical use because it would seem as if the migration is toward ferce wrath and disaster and not salvation. There are several references to the exodus in the Holiness Code (Lev 19:36; 22:23; 23:43) with the highest concentration of exodus references in Leviticus 25:38, 42, 55 where Israel is referred to as the servants of God—a progression from being slaves in Egypt and by means of migration induced by God to become servants of the Lord. Several references are made to the exodus in Deuteronomy 6, where in verse 12 Israel is cautioned not to forget that the Lord was responsible for migrating them out of the land of Egypt, while in verse 21 the children are instructed on how the Lord brought them out of Egypt where they were slaves of Pharaoh. In verse 23, the goal of the migration out of Egypt is described as to be given the land promised to the ancestors or patriarchs. Gerhard von Rad’s identifcation of Deuteronomy 26:5 as “small historical credo” or a foundational tradition of early Israel has interesting implications for interpreting the exodus from the perspective of migration: “A wandering Aramean was my father / ancestor; he went into Egypt and lived there as an alien / foreigner.”28 Although the book of Deuteronomy is saturated by a covenant theology undergirded by obedience to the Lord, focused on establishing the theological-ethical conditions for occupying and keeping the Promised Land, the credo in 26:5 contains a surprising memory reminding Israel as to who they descended from (Arameans) and that a sedentary future (settling in

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the Promised Land) has to be related to a migratory past (wandering and living as aliens or foreigners). The Passover as Commemoration of the Exodus as Migration Closely linked to the commemoration of the Passover was the observance of the festival of unleavened bread on the day the Lord brought Israel out of Egypt in Exodus 12:17: “You shall observe the festival of unleavened bread, for on this very day I brought your companies out (jṣʼ) of the land of Egypt: you shall observe this day throughout your generations as a perpetual ordinance.” After giving elaborate instructions for the celebration of the Passover in Exodus 12 on the eve of the exodus from Egypt, the exodus account forms an important part of the conclusion of the chapter in verses 41-42 and 50-5: “At the end of four hundred thirty years, on that very day, all the companies of the Lord went out (jṣʼ) from the land of Egypt. That was for the Lord a night of vigil, to bring them out (jṣʼ) of the land of Egypt.” “All the Israelites did just as the Lord had commanded Moses and Aaron. That very day the Lord brought the Israelites out (jṣʼ) of the land of Egypt, company by company.” Here the migration from Egypt is described as a military campaign with the Lord as Divine Warrior.

THE EXODUS AS MEMORY OF MIGRATION IN THE FORMER AND LATER PROPHETS

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Survey of References to the Exodus in the Former and Later Prophets In the Former Prophets (the so-called “Deuteronomistic History” in Joshua to 2 Kings) reference is made to the exodus as migration in the farewell speech delivered by Joshua in 24:5-6 as part of the renewal of the covenant. During the seven-year oppression by the Midianites, the Lord reminded Israel through a prophet by means of two similarly formulated parallel phrases that God led them up from Egypt ( = `lh “to bring up”) and brought them out (jṣʼ = “to bring out”) of the house of slavery. It is interesting that in Judges 6:8 both verbs are used to indicate the exodus, `lh and jṣʼ, the former more geographically and the latter more fguratively. As part of the dedication of the temple in Jerusalem, Solomon delivered a speech in which mention is made of the exodus in 1 Kings 8:16 and 21. As part of the migration, the ark of the covenant was brought out of Egypt and the resting place had to be found for it—hence the building of the temple

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in Jerusalem. In his subsequent prayer of dedication before the altar in the temple and amid the people of God, a clear link is established in 1 Kings 8 verses 51 and 53 between the migration out of Egypt and Israel as the elected people of God, in fact as his heritage. All in all, it is signifcant that one fnds a fourfold reference to the exodus as a migration out of Egypt during the dedication of the Jerusalem temple in I Kings 8—the temple as a space for the worshiping of the Lord was one of the reasons why Moses asked the Pharaoh’s permission to depart from Egypt and worship the Lord. The fourfold reference to the exodus migration might have been a later attempt to combine the exodus tradition that probably originated in the Northern Kingdom as their “foundational or charter myth” with the temple in Jerusalem forming the center of Southern or Judean Priestly traditions—due to the forced migration of Northern refugees to Jerusalem after the destruction of the capital of the Northern Kingdom, Samaria, in 722 BCE. Now the focus shifts to the Later Prophets, and references to the exodus in pre-exilic, exilic, and post-exilic prophets will be discussed. Some of the earlier prophetic references to the exodus in Amos 2:10 and 3:1 are linked to judgment and not salvation. If one keeps in mind that Amos was addressing an audience in the Northern Kingdom during the prosperous reign of Jeroboam II and that the exodus probably formed part of a Northern charter or foundational narrative, then his announcement in 9:7 that the people of Israel are like the Ethiopians (Cushites or Nubians?), Philistines and Arameans—each with foundational migration stories similar to the exodus—is truly startling: “Are you not like the Ethiopians to me, O people of Israel? says the Lord. Did I not bring Israel up (͑ lh) from the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor and the Arameans from Kir?” There are several examples of references to the exodus in the book of Jeremiah (7:22; 11:4; 31:32; 32:21; 32:21; 34:13). In Jeremiah 7:22-23, less emphasis is placed on offerings and sacrifces by the migrants and more on obedience to God by those who walk the way that God commanded—the image of walking the way resonates with the reinterpretation of jṣʼ in the previous verse as an indicator of movement similar to migrations. A high concentration of references to the exodus can be found in Ezekiel 20 where the prophet chastises the people for their rebellious (idolatrous) history that continued well into the present. Again, the departure from Egypt is depicted as a migration under divine supervision, and, in this instance, mention is made of the destination of the migration—more emphasis on the pull factors of the Promised Land as a land fowing with milk and honey than in most other cases where the push factors of oppression in Egypt explain the exodus (vv. 6,9,10,14,22).

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The Return from the Babylonian Exile as an Exodus from the Perspective of Migration One can argue with Robert Carroll for a strong correspondence between the exodus as the departure from slavery in Egypt and the return from exile in Babylonia as a type of “second exodus.” Exodus and exile seem to constitute two theological topics that frame, undergird, and shape the rhetoric of many narratives in the Hebrew Bible.29 These two topics concern the movement or migration of people that depart from a context of oppression and journey toward Israel as the Promised Land in which freedom can be experienced.30 Bryan Estelle identifed several functions of the exodus theme in Isaiah 40-55: (1) God as the divine Sovereign leading the migration out of Babylon; (2) the development of a “new universalism” implied by the sanctioning of the migration by a non-Jewish ruler Cyrus; and (3) the shaping of their expectation of the future (eschatology) according to the pattern of the older exodus.31 A few examples of how the migration from Babylon back to Palestine (then known as Yehud, a province in the Persian Empire) was perceived as being a new or second exodus in Isaiah 40-55: Isaiah 41: 17-18; 43:16-21; 48:17-22; 49: 10-11; 50: 23; 52:11-12; etc. A striking illustration of how the return migration from Babylon was closely related to the exodus can be found in Isaiah 51: 9-11. Several trends can be discerned in the manner that the exodus is alluded to in Isaiah 40-55. Besides referring to the exodus as making a way in the sea or desert (Isa 43:16-19), the exodus was also the occasion when God sustained and cared for the Israelites during their wandering in the wilderness by providing food and water (48:21; 49:10-11). Of greater relevance for perceiving the return from exile as a new exodus or migration is the description of the departure from Babylon in Isaiah 48:20 with its reference to the exodus that forms the climax of the frst section Isaiah 40–55 (i.e., chapters 40–48). According to this description, the returning exiles or migrants will not return in shame but with joy, echoing the exodus from Egypt thanks to this redemptive act of God.32 THE EXODUS AS MEMORY OF MIGRATION IN THE WRITINGS Survey of References to the Exodus in the Psalms According to Susan Gillingham, the Psalms seem to be focused less on Moses and more on David and Zion and are more concerned with “an established nation, a royal state cult which ratifes claims to land and status through a

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deity ‘housed in a Temple.’”33 Against this background, it is hardly surprising that the exodus is not often referred to in the Psalter. This, however, does not mean that the relatively few allusions to the exodus can be ignored or neglected. There is no general scholarly consensus about what is meant by the expression “exodus psalm” other than a psalm in which elements of the exodus tradition play an important role. David Emanuel defnes an “exodus psalm” as one in which clear reference is made how Yahweh “actively” brings Israel out of Egypt and into the land of promise.34 The psalms that focus on what has been identifed as characteristic elements of the exodus tradition seem to be grouped in pairs: Pss 77 and 78; 80 and 81; 105 and 106; 135 and 136. In the following discussion of these paired exodus psalms, more attention will be given to Pss 77 and 78; 105 and 106. The lament in Ps 77 ends with a hymn about God as Creator with elements suggesting some orientation toward the Northern tribes of Israel in verse 15. Traces of the exodus tradition are apparent in vv. 19-20, where references are made to the passage through the Re(e)d Sea as well as the divinely appointed leadership of Moses and Aaron. There is a striking combination of exodus and Zion migration traditions in the judgment liturgy found in Ps 78. After a description of how God called his people out of Egypt, the rejection of Joseph and Ephraim (representing the Northern tribes of Israel?) is followed by the choice or election of David and Zion in verses 68-71. Several allusions to the exodus tradition can be found in this impressive psalm: the passing through the Re(e)d Sea (v.13); the “signs” or “plagues” in Egypt (vv.43,51); and the divine guidance out of Egypt and in the wilderness (vv. 52-52). If the exodus tradition initially functioned in the Northern Kingdom, then might Ps 78 be interpreted as an attempt to appropriate a Northern tradition after the fall of Samaria in 722 BCE. by linking it with the David and Zion traditions of the temple in Jerusalem? The references to the exodus in Psalm 105:39-41 focus on miraculous events that took place during the migration through the wilderness and are used as an appeal to obey divine commandments. It is striking that in this Priestly rendition of the exodus no mention is made of Moses as leader and only the Lord is said to bring them out (jṣʼ) of Egypt.35 The migrating Israel are referred to as “his chosen ones,” and this second exodus is based on the “holy word” or covenant with Abraham (vv. 42-45). The joyful Psalm 105 is followed by a lament in Psalm 106 that articulates the disappointment of the returning exiles whose hopes were not immediately fulflled. In this last psalm of the Fourth Book of the Psalter, there is a lamentation of the sinful events that took place during the exodus (vv. 6-47). It is as if the memories of the exodus and migration had become an extended recollection of sin and rebellion in vivid contrast to the usual depiction of the

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miraculous manifestations of the divine benevolence experienced in Egypt and thereafter.

THE EXODUS AS MEMORY OF MIGRATION IN THE DEUTEROCANONICAL BOOKS Survey of References to the Exodus in the Deuterocanonical Books References to the Exodus can be found in the following Deuterocanonical books: Baruch 1:18ff; 2:11; 28; Judith 5:12ff; 6:5; I Maccabees 4:9; II Maccabees 2:4, 8, 10f; Sirach 45; 46:7ff; Wisdom 5:7,22; 9:8; 11-19; and in the Pseudepigrapha: Assumption of Moses 1:4ff; 3:11ff; 11:1ff; 12:1ff; II Baruch 4:5; 84:2ff; 59:3; 77:3f; Book of Enoch 89:21ff; Book of Jubilees Prologue; 1; 4:26; 48:12ff; 49:23; 50:50:1f; and Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs: Simeon 9:2; Benjamin 12:4.

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The Exodus as Migration in the Wisdom of Solomon In the Wisdom of Solomon, memories about creation and salvation are combined in references to the Exodus to indicate how there is continuity between creation and salvation in the present and beyond. The historical overview from Adam to Exodus illustrates the ongoing and pervasive cosmic dimension of Wisdom that enables punishment for the wicked and blessings for the just and the righteous, not only in this life but also thereafter. The exodus traditions maintain a signifcant place in the ongoing negotiation of Jewish identity in the Greco-Roman Diaspora, the result of numerous migrations due to the Babylonian exile. On the one hand, they remind the Jews in Egypt of their long-standing association with the country by means of the memories of the exodus from Egypt; on the other hand, they emphasize the profound role Wisdom plays as a divine personifcation. Thus, the memories of the plagues as signs of the ongoing providential care of the Creator God leading up to the Exodus were incorporated into new narratives in the Wisdom of Solomon to remind the Jewish audience how God acts to save the just and the righteous.36 In a theologically creative manner, Wisdom (as divine personifcation) and history (as memories of salvation during the Exodus) are combined in the Wisdom of Solomon to convince the migrant Jews in the Diaspora that justice will prevail, not only in this life but also thereafter. By means of poetic imagery, rhetorical skill, historical reinterpretation, and imaginative wisdom theology, religious identity is bolstered not only to resist a dominant Greco-Roman culture but also to develop a positive view of

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creation according to the values of Wisdom exemplifed by the reinterpreted exodus traditions.37 CONCLUSION The Importance of Identity in the Reflection on the Exodus as Memory of Migration

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Why approach references to migration in the Hebrew Bible as memories and not as historical traditions? Research has shown that memories are crucial for identity formation—we are indeed what we remember (and forget?). Memories about past migrations are not only about the past from the perspective of the present; they are indeed also about the anticipation of the future and have the potential to establish continuity and community between diverging human beings, even among sedentary and migratory populations. The memories of the exodus were not focused on the entry into and settling in the Promised Land, but primarily concerned with the long and arduous journey (migration?) getting there. Even the Passover as annual commemoration of the exodus is focused on the start and not the conclusion of the migratory journey. Most of the instructions (toroth) in the Pentateuch are given during the forty-year migration through the wilderness, starting with the departure from Egypt, and not during the period after the entry into the Promised Land. It is not a coincidence that the collective body of Jewish religious laws (613!), based on the written and oral Torah, is called the Halakha—loosely translated as “the way to walk.” Remembering the initial exodus and the return from exile as migration resonate with the dynamic understanding of religious instructions embedded in the journey of human life and not snuggly (smugly?) rooted in the settlement of a Promised Land. Possible Theological-Ethical Relevance of the Exodus as a Memory of Migration Can the participation of biblical studies in the “Religion and Migration” debate avoid the ever-present possibility of anachronistic comparisons and appropriations by superimposing the modern concept of migration on the ancient exodus? What role can theological-ethical refection play in the current fundamental clash between neoliberalism, which promotes the free fow of capital, goods, and services including migrant labor and protectionism, which manages migration for the exclusive beneft of the own electorate?

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In their defnitive New History of South Africa, Hermann Giliomee and Bernard Mbenga conclude that “the early history of South Africa is not only about the evolution of modern humans between 200 000 and 100 000 years ago; it is also a history of migrations.”38 While everyone now living in the world is “out of Africa,” “everyone . . . is descended from a migrant.”39 Refection about migration is not only about explaining different types of human mobility according to push-and-pull factors, it also engages in the fnal analysis with who we all are. Theological-ethical refection cannot ignore the global impact that migration has on societies on every continent, not only on behalf of the vulnerable migrants to open up new spaces for migrants, but also to benefcially interact with the identity formation of hosting societies as they welcome migrants. But when all is said and done about the neglected importance of interpreting the Exodus from the perspective of migration, one should be hesitant to even suggest that the exodus motif “is a synecdoche for the whole salvation complex” and thus “paradigmatic in the Bible.”40 Reinterpreting the exodus tradition from the perspective of migration can never serve as a blueprint for contemporary debates about identity formation and about facing up to the challenges of the increasing migratory movement of human populations. The rapidly increasing impact of climate change and the ongoing confict between rival religions and ideologies will inevitably leave migration as one of the major problems to be addressed in time to come. Lawson Younger’s challenge requires a multidisciplinary response: “It is time for scholars to start looking at the evidence differently, developing explanations that incorporate more recent migration theory in their model.”41

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NOTES 1. Martin Noth, A History of Pentateuchal Traditions (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1972), 46–51 states clearly that the exodus from Egypt was considered to be part of primary confessions of faith in ancient Israel, probably with an oral version predating the Pentateuch in written form. 2. Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute Advocacy (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1997), 177–178. 3. Richard J. Clifford, “The Exodus in the Christian Bible: The Case for ‘Figural Reading,’” Theological Studies, Vol. 63, no. 2 (2002), 345–361. 4. David Daube, The Exodus Pattern in the Bible (London: Faber & Faber, 1963), 11–13. 5. Yair Zakovitch, “And you shall tell your son…” The Concept of the Exodus in the Bible (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1991), 46, points out that this collective memory of the

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exodus shaped events before (during the time of the patriarchs) and after the exodus (return from Babylonian exile etc), often in a covert manner. 6. Erich Zenger, “Exodus Tradition,” Religion Past and Present, Vol. 4 (2008), 761–762, is in broad agreement with the older research done by Johannes Wijngaards, “‫ היצוה‬and ‫הלעה‬, A Twofold Approach to the Exodus,” VT, Vol. 15 (1965), 91–102. 7. Bryan D. Estelle, Echoes of Exodus: Tracing a Biblical Motif (Downer’s Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2018), 2–3, goes further and states that “the exodus motif” entails more than “merely the liberation of the Hebrews from the oppressive iron furnace of the Egyptians” and then claims that it fnds its fulfllment in the eschatological “world-to-come” as envisaged by the book of Revelations. 8. Estelle, Echoes of Exodus, 96–97. 9. Christoph Dohmen and Matthias Ederer, “Wie Exodus zum Exodus wurde. Ein Buch und sein Thema,” in Exodus: Rezeptionen in Deuterokanonischer und Frühjüdischer Literatur, ed. Judith Gärtner and Barbara Schmitz, vol. 32, Deuterocanonical and Cognate Studies (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 1–2. 10. Wijngaards, ‫ “היצוה‬and ‫הלעה‬, A Twofold Approach to the Exodus.” 11. Zakovitch, The Concept of the Exodus, 46–98. 12. Ronald S. Hendel, “The Exodus in Biblical Memory,” JBL, Vol. 120 (2001), 601–622. 13. Lewis A. Coser, “Introduction,” in On Collective Memory, ed. Maurice Halbwachs (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 1–34. 14. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 84–85. 15. Yosef H. Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002), 9. 16. Hendel, “The Exodus in Biblical Memory,” 608. 17. Jan Assmann, Das Kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in Frühen Hochkulturen (München: Beck, 1992). 18. Jan Assmann, The Invention of Religion: Faith and Covenant in the Book of Exodus (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 34. 19. Miroslav Volf, The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006), 97. 20. Volf, The End of Memory, 98–99. 21. Philip R. Davies, Memories of Ancient Israel: An Introduction to Biblical History – Ancient and Modern (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2008), 1–19. 22. Jacob Eichenbaum, “A Matrix of Human Movement,” International Migration, Vol. 13, no. 1–2 (1975), 21–41. 23. Douglas Massey et al., Worlds in Motion: International Migration at the End of the Millennium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 17; Peter van Dommelen, “Moving on: Archaeological Perspectives on Mobility and Migration,” World Archaeology, Vol. 46, no. 4 (2014), 477–483. 24. James K. Hoffmeier, The Immigration Crisis: Immigrants, Aliens and the Bible (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2009), 18. 25. Hoffmeier, The Immigration Crisis, 56–57. 26. M. Daniel Carroll Rodas, Christians at the Border: Immigration, the Church and the Bible (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2013), xv–xvii.

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27. John Ahn, Exile as Forced Migrations: A Sociological, Literary, and Theological Approach on the Displacement and Resettlement of the Southern Kingdom of Judah, BZAW 417 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011). 28. Gerhard von Rad, “The Form-Critical Problem of the Hexateuch” in The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1966), 1–78. 29. Robert P. Carroll, “Exile! What Exile? Deportation and the Discourses of Diaspora,” in Leading Captivity Captive, ed. Lester Grabbe, JSOT Supplements 278 (Sheffeld: Sheffeld Academic Press, 1998), 62–79. 30. Carroll, “Exile!” 62: “Any journey into a different land or country is equally a journey into a different land or country. . . . So exodus equals exile or deportation and vice versa.” 31. Estelle, Echoes of Exodus, 179–180. 32. Isaiah 52:11–12 is similar to 48:20–22 and might be structural markers that indicate a specifc stage in the editorial process of the book of Isaiah due to the renewed importance of the exodus. See Joseph Blenkinsopp, Isaiah 40–55 Anchor Bible Commentary (New York: Doubleday, 2002), 296. 33. Susan Gillingham, “The Exodus Tradition and Israelite Psalmody,” SJT, Vol. 52, no. 1 (1999), 19–46. 34. David Emmanuel, From Bards to Biblical Exegetes: A Close Reading and Intertextual Analysis of Selected Exodus Psalms (Eugene: Pickwick, 2012) succeeds in trimming about twenty psalms with exodus motifs down to only four: Pss 105–106 and 135–136. 35. Gillingham, “The Exodus Tradition,” 41 36. Roland E. Murphy, The Tree of Life: An Exploration of Biblical Wisdom Literature (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 90–94. 37. Hendrik L. Bosman, “The Theological Paraphrasing of History: The Exodus Tradition in the Wisdom of Solomon,” HTS, Vol. 68, no. 1 (2013), 1–7. 38. Hermann B. Giliomee and Bernard Mbenga, A New History of South Africa (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2007), viii–ix. 39. Giliomee and Mbenga, A New History of South Africa. 40. Estelle, Echoes of Exodus, 318 and 322. 41. K. Lawson Younger Jr., A Political History of the Arameans. From their Origin to the End of their Politics (Atlanta: SBL, 2016), 222.

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Chapter 4

Forced and Return Migrations as the Mitte of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament

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John Ahn

Forced (597–538 BCE) and return (538–438 BCE) migrations form the epicenters of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament (HB/OT). Each major canonical division of the HB (Pentateuch, Prophets, Writings), or, for that matter, most books and important redacted sections, received reevaluations and rewrites based on these two seminal periods. These canonical and sociological experiences of forced and return migrations have come to shape and reshape the literary contours of the HB/OT. Stories and memories of migration1 in the HB/OT are framed in historical, theological, and sociological understandings and processes of exile and return, or, more specifcally, the experiences of forced and return migrations. “A time to cast away stones and a time to gather them” (Ecc 3:5a) captures the essence of forced and return migrations in the HB/OT. “To cast away” is best understood as forced migration and “to gather them” echoes political, literary, and social implications for return migration of peoples that were displaced and resettled to foreign and neighboring lands—Babylon (Persia), Egypt, the coastlands, and the wilderness. In the fnal four verses of 2 Chronicles 36, the text records the experiences of forced migration to Babylon (v.20-21), but from the perspective of “the people of the land,”2 that is, the remnant—those that were left behind with some signifcant political voice (Ezek 22:29). The Chronicler’s account appears to endorse some form of a return to monarchy over against the establishment of theocracy, while describing the desolate land of Yehud constructively, which enjoyed “a sabbath for seventy years,”—the duration of three or four generations, or, more precisely, 3.5 generations that marked the time of the forced migrations in Babylonia-Persia (twenty years mark one generation in the HB/OT).3 In the story of Ruth, a counternarrative to Ezra 9-10, after a Judean family migrates 51

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to Moab in order to escape famine, only the heroines Naomi and Ruth return to Judah. These and other narratives, like Numbers 32, are now best understood as memories of forced and return migrations.4

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SOCIOLOGICAL APPROACH AND MIGRATION Since Julius Wellhausen, Hermann Gunkel, and Martin Noth, the historical critical methodology (source, form, tradition, and redaction) has helped scholars advance HB/OT studies. Form criticism (Gunkel), in particular, has made signifcant contributions. It has given birth to two important current approaches—with emphasis on the fnal form—the canonical approach (Brevard Childs) and—greater attention to the Sitz im Leben or social settings— the sociological approach (Robert Wilson).5 According to a leading social theorist, Niklas Luhmann, the feld of sociology should no longer center around “peoples” and/or “actions.” He pushes for communication as the new center. In other words, communication for the sake of communication. For Luhmann, communication occurs through autopoiesis. Autopoiesis does not happen in a vacuum, but in a system. In turn, this system communicates to other systems. Luhmann has adopted his working defnition of autopoiesis from the natural sciences, biology (see Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela). As cells reproduce and become a member of its own system, it communicates with other cells and different systems. For example, a cardiovascular stem cell becomes part of the cardiovascular system. It then communicates within the cardiovascular system as well as to other cells and systems, like the pulmonary system, central nervous system, and so on. It should be noted that a cardiovascular stem cell does not become a pulmonary cell. Another example is that of a university. A department or school with its own set of faculty produces scholarship and communicates within a boundary or boundaries of its own guild and department. But it also reaches out and communicates with other departments and/or entirely different schools.6 In autopoiesis, communication must “reproduce.” This is the defning function of communication in Luhmann’s system, reproduction. Communication must reproduce for communication to be communication. This cadre genuinely and fundamentally answers: What is life? A living organism or system that reproduces. Biblically speaking then, texts communicate. They also reproduce. A biblical text gives birth to other biblical texts. That is, through the efforts of scribes and tradents—from one generation to the next. For example, an Ezekiel pericope can grow into a small collection (Ezek 15-19) while further reproducing its own genre or grow into a P, Holiness, or some larger corpus in the Ezekiel tradition. In the Luhmannian system, an Ezekiel text does

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Forced and Return Migrations as the Mitte of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament 53

not become an Isaianic or Pentateuchal text. It nevertheless communicates to other textual traditions or systems. By advancing this observation, issues and concerns on ancient forced and return migrations are communicated and reproduced, canonically. Each generation of authors or tradents refect and add their immediate and extended community’s migration experiences. Inasmuch as history has a way of repeating itself, so do social structures. They also repeat. How humanity collectively comes together to respond to hardships and, for that matter, a mother grieving the loss of her child after a Syrian air bombing are noticeably similar, if not identical, to a mother experiencing the loss of her child to the Babylonians (Ps 137:8-9). Even if humanity has advanced in many aspects of life, including technology, new materialism,7 and so on, our emotions, emotional responses, and collective approach to pain, loss, and trauma has not evolved. The collective social response to a collapsed nation, or, for that matter, expulsion from one’s habitual place of residence (home or homeland) in search of a new one, to seek safety for survival and some form of hope has not changed over the course humanity’s social history. When forced migrants are forced to return home, or to a homeland that that they can no longer recognize, or a home that no longer exists, “repatriation”8 in its worst state is experienced. On the surface, “re-patria” is used objectively, but at every juncture, politically and socially, it genuinely benefts the host nation that is sending the problem away. There are complexities involving legal, moral, and ethical consciousness factoring: return of setback and return of crisis.9 For biblical scholars, theologians, and religious educators in general, these and other issues from mass forced return migration ask us to critically reexamine hospitality, belonging, generational consciousness, liminality, transnationalism, and, most importantly, what does it mean to be a human being? Where is human dignity?10 How society, collectively and individually, responds to peoples in forced and, now, return migration during heightened times of nationalism, ethnocentrism, and xenophobia was not absent in ancient contexts (ffth to second centuries BCE). In the twenty-frst century, behind genocide, forced migration (and return migration) is the most pressing humanitarian crises confronting society. Today’s displaced Yemenis, Rohingyans, Syrians, North Africans, Central Americans, and South Americans have left a lasting mark. The same can be said of the ancient Judeans, Egyptians, Ethiopians, Sabeans, Cushites, among others, who were forcibly displaced and resettled to Babylonia (Isa 43:3). Once resettled, the frst and 1.5 generations experienced unspeakable hardships and challenges. Only with the passing of generations did opportunities for upward socioeconomic and political mobility arrive. But those upward swings in an ancient setting were only viable for the privileged or upper and skilled classes from the 597 BCE group (e.g. Daniel and his three friends).

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What happened to the poor or underclass remains hidden and buried in texts. This is one of the endeavors of this chapter. When peoples are divided between upper class and underclass, host and migrant, and dominant and subdominant, and should those demarcations be reversed, the newly minoritized, who were once the majority, can either succumb and collapse or, with inner resolve, reverse the antithesis and create a powerful subaltern message to outlive the past—transcending the present for the sake of the future generations. The transmissions by the frst and 1.5 generations down to the third and the fourth foster prophetic imagination and a tapestry of counterpoints and counternarratives to the empire’s metanarrative—be it under the Babylonians, Persians, Greeks (Greco-Persians), or Romans (Greco-Romans). These stories and memories have become the hallmarks of faith and inspiration in the HB/OT, the sectarian literature of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the New Testament. Through canonical consciousness, texts produced by diverse and competing communities on the move or those scattered in the diaspora offered their contextual understandings of faith, hope, and resistance, through negotiated integration, adoption, acculturation, and assimilation or, conversely, when required, by separation and isolation extending an apocalyptic worldview. The message is clear, however. Such modicum of success is not instantaneous. It takes time, at least three or four generations. This is the forced and return migrants’ generational consciousness (e.g., Gen 12-50; Letter to the Ephesians).

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THE FORCED MIGRATIONS OF THE SOUTHERN KINGDOM OF JUDAH Historically, the small nation of the Southern Kingdom of Judah lost its sovereignty and autonomy in 597 BCE. The last king of Judah, Jehoiachin, did not want bloodshed as in the reign of Manasseh, who is ironically blamed for the collapse and displacement of the nation. According to 2 Kings 24, it was Jehoiachin’s father, Jehoakim, who held an anti-Babylonian policy. Upon his death, Jehoiachin was forced to make a decision, either to continue with the previous policy and resist and, if so, the consequences would have been the complete destruction of the nation and its people terminated or relinquish the throne, hand over the nation’s sovereignty, and go into forced migration (with all the king’s family, royal offcials, skilled workers, including the military) for the sake of saving lives. Jehoiachin made the boldest decision in the HB/ OT. He brought the Davidic covenant to an end. He separated it from Zion theology. He broke it for the sake of saving his people and nation in 597 BCE. Zedekiah (Jehoiachin’s uncle) was Jehoiachin’s replacement. Ten years later, he rebeled against the Babylonians. No real satisfactory explanations have been offered, until recently. In forced migration studies, ten years is

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needed to fully assess the productivity of displaced and resettled peoples. For example, the hydro-dam projects sponsored by the World Bank notes in meticulous detail that ten years is necessary to evaluate projects.11 In other words, governments, institutions, or empires have fgured out that ten years is needed to determine if a forced ethnic group of people can truly produce (economic) output. The ten-year marker is not arbitrary. If the group of the displaced and resettled community of Judeans in 597 produced the necessary gains for the Babylonian economy, they would be deemed useful. If not, there could have been consequences, including termination of those in Babylon and even those back in the homeland. The people that once ran a nation would have known or been told about these potential and other consequences. The 597’s migrant work ethos and praxis would have ensured not only of their immediate survival, but also of their children, and their children’s children. Their engagement and advancement would dictate the future for all future Judeo-Babylonians, diaspora Judeans, and even the Judahites and the peoples of the land back in the homeland. Conversely, should they fail, there would be little or no use for these people in Babylon or in Judah. Zedekiah’s rebellion suggests that he may have been privileged to such information, and he knew about the inevitable repeated displacement and resettlements of persons (contrary to the mass-punctuated practice of the Assyrians), that is, the forcible taking of a second wave of his people (from Jerusalem to Babylonia) as corvee laborers. Zedekiah’s rebellion may have been a form of protest and resistance to denote that the Babylonians were not going to take a second wave of the people without a fght. He showed courage as a king. In the end, however, his fate and action were costly. His courage and will was broken with the discovery of the fssure in the walls of Jerusalem. Attempting to escape, he and his family were captured. His own children were executed before his eyes in Riblah; and with his own set of eyes removed, he was chained and forced to Babylon in 587, with a second wave of forced migrants. He would be executed there. Gedaliah was put in charge of Judah in Mizpah after Zedekiah. As the governor, Gedaliah advanced a progressive agenda, with Deuteronomistic ideals of integrating all existing peoples of the land—possibly, a parallel to the remnants in the North Kingdom of Israel (Samaria). With unifed pluralism in Mizpah (2 King 23:22-26), the mixed people of the land collectively produced the mandated quota of summer fruits, olive oil, wine, including balm, and other commodities for the Babylonians (Jer 40:10-12). But this mode of survival was short-lived and undermined by a king’s seed, a nationalist, Ishmael son of Nethaniah and his men. They murdered Gedaliah with the intent not only of sabotaging the pro-Babylonian policy but to send a strong message against integration. After being defeated by Johanan, son of Kareah, Ishmael and his men fed. They sought refuge in a bordering country, Ammon. Johanan and all the people he recovered from Ishmael’s capture

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voluntarily migrated to Egypt in fear of the Babylonians. The Babylonians came and then took a third wave of Judeans to Babylon in 582. Once the 582 group arrived in Babylon, both the 597 and 587 groups would reject them. Marked as the people of the land, ethnic purity was the determining factor. In fact, there is virtually no records of this fnal group except in the shadows of texts like Ezekiel 15 and the Book of Daniel, which records that Daniel faced Jerusalem and prayed three times a day: remembering the threefold collapse and displacements in 597, 587, and 582. Whereas the 597 group welcomed and incorporated the 587 group into their migrant community, the 582 group was deemed outcasts, doubly marginalized. Interestingly, in the Septuagint’s rendering of Ezekiel 15, the 582 group is blamed for the entire destruction of the Southern Kingdom of Judah.12 It should be noted that only after the collapse of the Southern Kingdom did canonical consciousness to include the Northern Kingdom’s collapse fully materialize.13 In other words, although the HB/OT presents the fall of the North Kingdom frst, recent scholarship suggests that the inclusion of the North Kingdom’s narrative to the Southern Kingdom’s would have been occurred only after the fall of the Southern Kingdom. After the North Kingdom’s mass displacement, a portion of the community that were not taken by the Assyrians took fight to Egypt. When the 582 Judeans arrived in Egypt, the Judeans in due course would integrate with the Israelites and the Arameans already present in Egypt. This gives strong credibility to the fuid and syncretistic community that worshipped Yahweh with other deities. They would eventually become the community of Jews in Elephantine (Egypt)14 (see table 4.1).

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IS FORCED MIGRATION NEGATIVE, MIXED, OR POSITIVE? In the HB/OT, there are three varying views on the phenomenon of forced migration. One set of voices denote that the experience was painful and terrible. Another view says it was indeed terrible but there were opportunities for some advancement. A fnal view suggests that the forced migration Table 4.1  Babylon/Persia

Source: Made by the author.

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Forced and Return Migrations as the Mitte of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament 57

experience was the best thing that happened to them. The critical problem in biblical scholarship has been: How did these varying views arrive in the frst place? Why not create one story or memory rather than allow for competing multiple views? At the expense of oversimplifcation, each generation offered and added its own views or experiences without diminishing the previous generation’s experience. For the frst generation, forced migration was negative, a complex communal lament (Ps 137). For the 1.5 generation, it was mixed feelings of loyalty to the parent’s generational view while arriving at hope for a modicum of success (Jer 29). For the second generation, the experience was positive, a new creation (Isa 43). But in order to do so, they rejected past traditions that did not ft into their ideology. The doctrine of sin was rejected as the cause for their displacement and resettlement. The third generation would move further by building a more positive understanding but inquiring about the deep existential quest for home: should it be Persia or Yehud—framed as in the Cisjordan and Transjordan debate (Num 32). It should be noted, however, that only the children and grandchildren of the 597 BCE displaced those that encountered Derivative Forced Migration (DFM) as Development-Induced Displaced Persons (DIDPs) over against the 587 BCE (Purposive Forced Migration (PFM) as Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs)), and 582 BCE (Responsive Forced Migration (RFM) as Refugees) advanced in Babylonia.15 Those that were teenagers (1.5 generation) raised in Babylonia and eventually those that were born in Babylon and elsewhere would integrate and advance. These diaspora stories of failure and success are found in Joseph, Daniel, Ruth, Esther, Ezra, Nehemiah, Susanna, Judith, Tobit, and others. In Egypt, however, the four-generational cadre would be reduced to two. This is the single most important variance between the two centers of the diaspora. Since every third and fourth generation becomes the frst and the second, those in Egyptian determined that all major decisions on behalf of the whole were made by the top two generations. This simplifcation makes sense since there were much more diversity and peoples competing for inclusion in Egypt over against the more monolithic community in Babylon-Persia. This simplifcation or reduction is observable in structural division of the Book of Numbers, where only the frst and second generations, which actually coincide with the third and fourth generations searching and returning home (Num 32), are accounted. Furthermore, from a return migration perspective, the third and the fourth generation would technically become, respectively, the frst and the second generation of return migrants. This is the missing picture in analyzing the Book of Numbers. Clearly, however we analyze the generational units, generational consciousness was and continued to be a marker for literary advancement and sociological progress.16

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Table 4.2  Judeo-Babylonians

597 587 582

1st Gen

1.5 Gen

2nd Gen

3rd Gen

Negative More negative Most negative

Mixed Positive (More) positive More negative Most negative Most negative Most negative Most negative Most negative

4th Gen (Most) positive Most negative Most negative

Source: Made by the author.

Succinctly, for those who may not be familiar with critical theories on generational consciousness, by the second generation, which surpasses all generations, three outcomes are possible: (1) “straight line assimilation” into the dominant majority or (2) “bumpy-line assimilation” (because of race and cultural affnity) into the dominant majority or (3) assimilation into the dominant underclass. For the second Judeo-Babylonians of the 597 BCE, they assimilated into the upper or skilled classes. However, for the second and subsequent generations of the 587 and 582 groups, they would assimilate into the underclass and remain there. The descendants of the 587 and 582 groups would never be afforded the same opportunity for upward socioeconomic advancements as their 597 counterparts. They were there, by the irrigation canals of Babylon, as corvee laborers, working and living for successive generations without ever having the opportunity for relief, recovery, or restoration.17 In the case of the third generation, Hansen’s law of third generation notes that the grandchildren recover what the parents lost in the assimilation process—namely, they swing back to the frst generation (notice how Jacob’s stories are more like Abraham’s) locating home18 (see table 4.2)

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BRIEF HISTORY OF SCHOLARSHIP ON THE EXILE (FORCED MIGRATION) There are three or four major scholastic periods on the history of scholarship on the forced migrations period.19 The frst wave of scholarship viewed the results of the period negatively. Scholars from the mid- to late nineteenth century noted that nothing good materialized from the exilic experience. A transitional generation of scholars shared both negative and positive views. The ensuing second generation of scholars, beginning with Peter Ackroyd20 moved the feld into a more positive view of the migration experience. By the third wave, in the early 2000, European biblical scholarship dominated by the former Sheffeld group (the late Philip Davis, Thomas Thompson, Peter Lemche, Bob Becking, Hans Barstad, and the late Robert Carroll) declared that the “exile never happened.”21 They truly transcended imagination. This

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was brilliant minimalism at its best. Framed as a mythopoetic construct that had no narratives or historical memory of the migration experience, Barstad’s “myth of the empty land” was pushed to the very center stage. Scholars, without critically refecting on the consequences of scholarship, were quick to assess that life in Judah continued on without any interruptions or disruptions because only a small minority of the elites were taken to Babylonia. This became the popular sentiment among scholars with broad infuence in Europe and North America. Moreover, these scholars said that there were no archeological evidences of destruction of Judah by the (Neo)Babylonians in the sixth century BCE. Their scholarship had the potential of dismissing every ancient and contemporary forced migrant’s experience. This entire generation of questionable scholarship is marked by their carelessly chosen word “deportation” as the replacement for “exile.” Little weight was given or refected on the political and social ramifcations on the current and wider implications behind “deportation,” when, in fact, the emerging literature and scholarship favored “displace and displacement” of persons. In passing, although the archeological work of Lawrence Stager clearly demonstrated that there was destruction of Judah as early as 1996, it appears as if the Sheffeld group dismissed or ignored facts to suit an ideology that they wanted to assert. In 2008, in the Society of Biblical Literature, a new group (consultation back then), “Exile-Forced Migrations in Biblical Literature Group” was formed to address and redress these and other scholastic matters. Having been the founder and helping inject new views through various platforms, several important works have been published to move exilic scholarship in a new direction: Exile as Forced Migrations (2010), By the Irrigation Canals of Babylon (2012), The Prophets Speak on Forced Migration (2015), Women and Exilic Identity in the Hebrew Bible (2017), and The Last of the Kings on Forced and Return Migrations (forthcoming), including updated articles and dictionary entries on “story and memory,” “migration,” “exile,” “diaspora,” and so on. Lastly, with the publication of Laurie E. Pearce and Cornelia Wunsch’s Documents of Judean Exiles and West Semites in Babylonia in the Collection of David Sofer (2014), the feld of biblical scholarship can no longer deny the existence of Judean communities in Babylonia (sixth century BCE). Currently, the feld is preparing for new research on “Return Migrations in Biblical Literature” (2019), challenging C.C. Torrey’s old view that “they never returned.” Behind text are communities. From a forced migrations’ point of view, the HB/OT is best understood as compromised texts from different communities in the diaspora.22 The dominant center of social location was none other than Babylonia/Persia. The community or communities in Egypt would come to challenge the primacy of Persia, however. Their views on the inclusiveexclusive intermarriage debate differed. Other important regions to where

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Judeans fed and eventually returned from are the coastlands and the wilderness. These places must now also be factored and considered when discussing return migration. The wilderness wandering tradition represents a signifcant portion of not only the Pentateuch, but also the experiences of migration in a much broader scale. In my judgment, the wilderness motif appears to be a by-product of the Egyptian-centered communities, an amalgamation of the Judean-IsraeliteAramean Egyptian communities standing up against the domination of the Judeo-Babylonians (or Judeo-Persians).

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ADDITIONAL BIBLICAL NARRATIVES ON FORCED AND RETURN MIGRANTS The most familiar stories and memories on forced and return migration are found in the Book of Genesis. Scholars date the setting of Genesis 1 to no earlier than the sixth century BCE, with infuences and noticeable variances from the Babylonian Creation Epic. Genesis 2 (a J or non-P text) is also dated to the sixth century BCE (John Van Seters).23 But the provenance of Gen 2 is questionable. Van Seters has never made a compelling argument for the non-P (J) author in Babylonia. It doesn’t make any sense for a second- or subsequent-generation Judeo-Babylonians to have any real affnity with a land on the fringes of the Babylonian empire with mixed groups or peoples of the land occupying it. It would make more sense for the J author to be in Egypt, closer in geo-physical proximity but, moreover, in light of shared values for integration and mixed marriages, as further refected by the remnants of the Northern Israelites or the origins of the Samaritan communities.24 Although some would suggest that J is still in the land during the time of the exile, I suggest that Gen 2’s provenance is Egypt. The frst two creation accounts are cultural memory stories of the diasporas’ two centers: Babylonia (Persia) and Egypt. Genesis 3 then tells the story of Adam and Eve, the fall of humanity, expulsion25 from the Garden of Eden or the homeland of Judah. This is a compromised text where both the Judeo-Babylonians and JudeoIsraelite-Aramean Egyptians all agree. It is a frst-generation cultural memory story. Recall that a faming sword is placed at the entrance of the garden to prevent any form of return to paradise (Gen 3:24). This is clearly a redaction, an ideology advanced by those that did not want a permanent return migration to Yehud (Persian Jews). In the ensuing narrative, Genesis 4, Cain and Abel is also a story about forced migration. After the murder of his brother Abel, he too is forced out of his habitual place of residence. He is forced to go east (Babylon). Cain literally represents the second generation’s experience of forced migration.

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Subsequently, Noah (Gen 6-9) and only his immediate family survive another form of forced migration, creatively on the waters. They represent the upper class, the 597 group’s account of survival with a new beginning. As a literary unit, Genesis 11 ends with the story of the Tower of Babel, in the land of Shinar (a code word for Babylon), where the nation of Judah is scattered. Genesis 1-11 is a composite of stories and memories about forced migration. Genesis 12 begins the story and memory of return migration. It should be noted that repatriation of the masses is now described as “forced return migration.” But for the wealthy, it is religiously framed as a “call.” Abraham (and Sarah) are called to return to a land that they never saw. With Abraham and Sarah, a new generational consciousness begins to mirror Adam and Eve. In turn, the second-generation Isaac and Rebecca would have their own experiences, including wandering and searching for belonging and acceptance. The third-generation Jacob and his family would encounter additional complex issues of living with different groups of peoples. But by and large, the third-generation Jacob cycle is a narrative within a narrative about both forced and return migrations. He migrates to Aram for safety, only to return to the land of his father and grandfather. Interestingly, in the end, Jacob migrates to Egypt (like Abraham). In the fourth-generation novella, Joseph becomes an Egyptian. His robe, a marker of his identity and belonging, is ripped off. This narratively and symbolically helps him to put on a new identity. With his old identity stripped, he is able to become an Egyptian through a gradual “bumpy-line” assimilation (enduring hardships), something that all nonnatives with color experience in a new setting. Because of his determinism, fate, or luck (dream), he moves upward. He is given one chance to fully integrate and become an Egyptian. Joseph would embrace his new Egyptian name, the signet ring which represents his Egyptian nationality, citizenship, and new political status, and through his intermarriage with an Egyptian wife, the daughter of an Egyptian priest, Asneath, they would have two Egyptian children, Manasseh and Ephraim. If motherhood was the determining factor, this etiological story attests to the forgotten fact that the origins of the forgotten North Kingdom of Israel’s tribe of Ephraim (which replaced the tribe of Joseph) are Egyptian. Israel and Egypt share a blood lineage. This makes absolute sense as retrospection of those who were living as assimilated peoples in Egypt, to counter Ezra-Nehemiah’s call for removal of all inter- or exogamous marriages. Jacob is invited to join Joseph in Egypt. After Jacob’s death, his remains are returned and buried in Canaan by Joseph. This is a pivotal moment in the narrative of Joseph, as he provisionally returns to Canaan only to permanently return home, to Egypt (e.g. Num 32). He could have stayed in Canaan, but he chose to return home, to Egypt. He then becomes a slave-master of his own people, a true Egyptian.

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The story of Moses is needed to ease the tension and problem caused by Joseph in Egypt. The Joseph-Moses narratives form an important ideological counterbalance to Ezra-Nehemiah (Ezra 9-10). But more centrally, JosephMoses form a story of return migration out of Egypt in the late ffth century BCE—traditionally framed as the exodus. As noted previously, whereas Ezra-Nehemiah advanced the purist and exclusivism ideals of ethnicity, Joseph-Moses suggest an open and inclusive understanding of community. Intermarriage is viewed positively. Afterall, the greatest law giver, Moses, marries a Midianite as his frst wife, and subsequently after her death, he marries a Cushite or African woman—normative in ancient Egypt. With the Book of Exodus, a new generational consciousness begins under Moses. He too would experience forced and return migrations. Echoing the salvifc waters in Genesis, Moses’ Sargon-like birth narrative, he too is drawn out of the waters. In his near future, he would lead his people across the waters of the Red (Reed) Sea. But from Egypt to the desert or wilderness, only to return to Egypt so that he might return to the wilderness to worship God, the wilderness is alternative space between the physical poles of Egypt and Persia. This geophysical and literary space has no political hegemony. God’s laws and stipulations are given in such a setting, highlighting the positive and negative features of the wilderness. Moses rightfully dies in his newfound liminal space, his home away from home, the wilderness. Joshua and Caleb (a foreigner) become new leaders. In Hebrew, Caleb’s name means a “dog,” or a foreigner who had joined the community. It echoes Third Isaiah’s words, “Let not the foreigner who has joined himself to the LORD say the LORD will surely separate me from his people” (Isa 56:3). Joshua and Caleb represent integration of leadership but, more importantly, the transitional and continuation of the Joseph-Moses tradition—not EzraNehemiah. Recall that Joshua is not counted as a second generation nor does he die with the frst generation in the wilderness. He was likely a teenager at the time, what sociologists call a 1.5 generation (an in-between generation) like Daniel and his three friends. On the New Testament side, the Apostle Paul is neither a true frst-generation apostle nor a second-generation Gospel author. He is a transitional fgure, best classifed as a 1.5 generation (apostle), favoring the genre of letter (between poetry and prose), a marker for the 1.5 generation in the HB/OT (Jer 29).26 The entire narratives about entering the promised land is now read with at least two layers—not just an initial infltration of Canaan but return migration stories centered around reclaiming lost ancestral land during the return migrations period. The period of judges then, marks the third generation of leaders. They decide if monarchy is positive or negative. Finally, the fourth generation of leaders, as the Deuteronomistic historian presents them, are

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kings (1 Sam to 2 Kings), who in turn, have their own succession of generations. 2 Kings 24-25 ends by recording the last Judean king and its peoples going into forced migration.

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RETURN MIGRATION Cyrus’ emancipation resolved the problem of his inherited overpopulation, collapsed economy, oversupply of laborers, not enough work, with additional infrastructure, and internal conficts. The immediate solution to all domestic problems was mass forced return migration of previously conquered peoples. This was done in God’s name, coaxed in humanitarian gesture. It would be a defning moment for the underclass in Persia. The Hebrew Bible records four separate return migrations from Persia: 538 BCE (Sheshbazzar), 520 BCE (Zerubbabel and Joshua), 458 BCE (Ezra), and 445-430 BCE (Nehemiah). But for those that made it in Persia, what would motivate them to return? What would make someone like Abraham, who was well off and established, return to a land that he never saw? A religious call to return from Persia (east) to Yehud is not enough. It was the promise of “land” to gain more wealth. That was the determining factor. In other words, a temporary return to reclaim and then lease the land and return permanently to Persia to reap the full benefts. Second Isaiah’s message, however, inspired all the displaced and resettled communities of underclass in Persia (east), Egypt (south), the coastlands (north), and even those getting by in the wilderness (west) for a collective return migration. This was Second Isaiah’s grand utopian universal message of new creation, a light to the nations. That light to the nations (Isa 42) was not a universal message of salvation, which includes and extends to gentiles, but a universal message for all scattered Judeans to the known four corners of the world. For the frst time, the suffering communities in Persia, the second, third, and fourth generations of the 587 and 582 groups would have relief. Their return to Yehud would inspire the scattered nations of Judeans abroad to return collectively. The Suffering Servant (Second Isaiah) represented this suffering segment of the community in Persia. Second Isaiah’s visionary call to return to Yehud offered economic, social, and physical restoration. New citizenship, new city-state experience, an opportunity to rebuild a collapsed nation, a restored temple worship would be a new creation, a new beginning for hope. There was heavy persecution against the (suffering) servant for preaching and disseminating the idea of a collective permanent return migration by the upper class. Financing the return would have been costly, not to mention travel diffculties, and other complications. With the support from the Levites and a segment of the priestly class, return migration was achieved.

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Once they returned, in gradual segments, like the gradual repeated movements of forced migrations, the return migrants did not experience paradise but faced new diffculties and hardships from high infation to ethnic tensions from the people of the land, returnees from Egypt, returnees from the coastlands, Moab, and so on. Competition for basic resources, like water, food, and security, compounded by poor or competing leadership, is captured in the wilderness wandering tradition. Identifed as the murmuring tradition, this may depict the early and middle Persian periods. Scholars now attest that even after Ezra-Nehemiah’s return, Jerusalem was not the center, but rather, it was Ramat Rahel.27 Momentarily returning to the Persian perspective, the famous known phrase “many of the older priests, and Levites, and the family heads, who had seen the former temple, wept aloud when they saw the foundation of this house” (Ezra 3:12) cannot be earlier than third- or fourth-generation JudeoBabylonians or frst- or second-generation Judeo-Persians. Only the frst- or 1.5-generation Judeo-Babylonians would have seen the frst temple. Those groups all died in Babylon. Their vision of the frst temple may have been passed down in some depiction or memory down to the third, fourth, and ffth generations. One interpretation is quite clear: they did not cry because they remembered what the frst temple looked like. Again, as social theory would suggest, the third generation (Hansen’s law of third generation) mimics the frst generation and the reference “they wept” is traceable to the behaviors of the frst generation (Ps 137) that they wept when they remembered Zion.

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CONCLUSION These two diaspora communities in Persia and Egypt would come to represent the foundations for all future stories and studies on migration. All past and current studies on migration begin with the basic determining inquiry: Is the migration in consideration involuntary or voluntary? Tracing the origins then, all forms of involuntary forced migration are associated with the Judeans taken to Babylonians. In contrast, all forms of voluntary (forced) migration are associated with the Judeans that went down to Egypt. The literary growth and expansions in the HB/OT grew out of these forced and return migration experiences. This is framed generationally (twenty years as one generation, and the 1.5 generation presenting ten years), as the frst-, 1.5- second-, third-, and fourth-generations would repeat, in a cyclical manner without dismissing the experiences of the previous generations’ cultural memory and trauma. Stories of faith and courage, taking risks and displaying good or bad character, became learning moments for everyday life. In short, Abraham may represent the initial First Return Migration under Sheshbazzar

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in 538 BCE. Isaac may represent the Second Return Migration under Zerubbabel and Joshua in 520 BCE, Jacob the Third Return Migration under Ezra 458 BCE, and fnally, Joseph may represent the Fourth Return Migration under Nehemiah in 445–430 BCE. In the Prophets, forced and return migrations also play an important role in the social, literary, and theological development of major and minor prophets: for example, Isaiah 5:13, “Therefore, my people go into exile…,” “All Judah is taken into exile” (Jer 13:19), “…mortal [Ezekiel] prepare yourself an exile’s baggage” (Ezek 12:4). In Amos, “Therefore, I will take you into exile beyond Damascus (coastlands)” (5:27). Micah, Nahum, Zechariah, and other prophetic books all reference forced migration. Oracles of salvation or pronouncements of restoration are centrally “return migration.” Interestingly, return is not the goal for those that decided diaspora (wilderness) as home. The vision of the new temple in Ezekiel 40-48 acts to compete against the physical (second) temple in Jerusalem as the spiritual center for worship. Finally, the phrase for “three and for four,” (Amos 1:3, 6, 9, 11, 13; 2:1, 4, 6) in the Book of the Four and other texts takes on new meaning as a framework to denote both forced (597, 587, 582) and return (538, 520, 458, and 445–430) migrations. In the Writings, wisdom literature holds a prominent place in the canon. The book of Proverbs references wisdom as a new ideology. At the cost of reductionism, the text says, do what is right and you will enjoy prosperity and longevity. Do what is wrong, you will be punished (sent into exile). This is a frst-generation point of view on how the exile or forced migration occurred. In the book of Job, a second-generation perspective, Job replies repeatedly that he did no wrong. In other words, the second and subsequent generations reject the view that “sin” caused their forced migration. God sides with Job and condemns those that argued for a traditional view. Qohelet represents the third and subsequent generational response. All is habel, meaningless, ephemeral, or temporary. There is no satisfactory outcome in trying to understand the causes of why God forced and returned the nation, only to be reconquered by new empires. Life in spite of such reality, hardships, and toils is to be enjoyed—one of the greatest contradictions in the experiences of forced and return migrations.28 In closing, forced migration is a social and biological phenomenon. Be it out of Africa or Eden, the social construction of reality in the HB/OT begins with the experience of Judah’s forced migrations (Gen 3) and return migrations (Gen 12). The single most important historical event for ancient Judah was the 597 BCE event. It was this migration event that brought about canonical consciousness. When the last king of Judah, King Jehoiachin relinquished his throne and subsequently peoples were displaced and resettled to Babylonia, Egypt, the wilderness, the coastlands, and elsewhere, to unify the

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scattered peoples, the authority of the king was replaced with the authority of the text. In the same manner, with the collapse of the temple in 587, true religious reform (beyond Hezekiah and Josainic) arrived. Worship, which was external, Jerusalem and temple-sacrifce centered, moved inwardly to prayer, which can never be destroyed or taken away. It should be noted that in circa 33 CE another Davidic king would relinquish his throne for the sake of saving his people. In 70 CE, with the destruction of the second temple, religiosity and outward practice of sacrifce turned inwardly again, giving birth to a new set of writings and a new religious disposition that would also come to experience forced migration in and around the Mediterranean basin. Those early Christian communities held fast to a powerful construct of “return,” which is still prevalent for those that continue to believe. Forced and return migration studies require of us to agree “that there is no justifcation for studying and attempting to understand, the causes of human suffering, if the purpose of one’s study is not, ultimately, to fnd ways of relieving and preventing that suffering.”29

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NOTES 1. John Ahn, “Story and Memory,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Theology, ed. Samuel Balentine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 332–343. 2. Marvin H. Pope, “Am Ha’arez,” IDB, Vol. 1, 106; Shemaryahu Talmon, King, Cult, and Calendar (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1986), 69–73. 3. John Ahn, “Exile,” in The Dictionary of the Old Testament: Prophets, ed. Mark J. Boda and Gordon McConville (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Press, 2012), 196–204. 4. John Ahn, Exile as Forced Migrations, BZAW 417 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010). 5. See Gene M Tucker, David L. Petersen, Robert R. Wilson, eds., Canon, Theology, and Old Testament Interpretation: Essays in Honor of Brevard S. Childs (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988); John Ahn and Stephen L. Cook, eds., Thus Says the LORD: Essays on the Former and Latter Prophets in Honor of Robert R. Wilson, LHBOTS 502 (New York: T & T Clark, 2009). 6. Niklas Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997); Luhmann, “Society, Meaning, Religion—Based on Self Reference,” Sociological Analysis, Vol. 46 (1985), 5–20; Luhmann, The Differentiation of Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); Luhmann, Funktion der Religion (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977); see also William Rasch, “Niklas Luhmann,” New German Critique, Vol. 132, no. 44.3 (2017), 189–203. 7. Tony Bennett and Patrick Joyce, eds., Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn (New York: Routledge, 2010); Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).

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8. Kathy Long, A Point of No Return: Refugees, Rights, and Repatriation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 9. Jean-Pierre Cassarino, “Theorising Return Migration: The Conceptual Approach to Return Migration Revisited,” International Journal on Multicultural Societies, Vol. 6, no. 2 (2004), 253–279; Katie Kuschminder, Reintegration Strategies: Conceptualizing How Return Migrants Reintegrate (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 10. Marcus Düwell, Jens Braarvig, Roger Brownsword, Dietmar Mieth, eds, The Cambridge Handbook of Human Dignity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 11. Ahn, Exile as Forced Migration, 62–66. 12. John Ahn, “Ezekiel 15: A ‫לשמ‬,” in The Prophets Speak on Forced Migration, ed. Mark Boda, Frank Ritchel Ames, John Ahn, and Mark Leuchter (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2015), 101–120. 13. Israel Finkelstein, The Forgotten Kingdom: The Archaeology and History of Northern Israel (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013). 14. Bezalel Porten, “The Religion of the Jews of Elephantine in Light of the Hermopolis Papyri,” JNES, Vol. 28, no. 2 (1969), 116–121; Bezalel Porten and Ada Yardeni, Textbook of Aramaic Documents from Ancient Egypt, 4 vols. (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University/Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1986–1999). 15. Ahn, “Exile.” 16. Generational consciousness is a marker for technological advancement. For example, the semiconductor industry’s advancements in chips are all referenced as ffth-, sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-generation chip, or for that matter, 3G, 4G, and 5G technology, where G represents generation in the wireless industry. 17. John Ahn, “Psalm 137: Complex Communal Lament,” JBL, Vol. 127 (2008), 267–289. 18. Detailed study on frst to third generation is found in Ahn, Exile as Forced Migration. For a recent application of the sociological on the third, fourth, and ffth generations, see, Dominik Markl, “The Sociology of the Babylonian Exile and Divine Retribution ‘to the third and fourth generation,’” in The Dynamics of Early Judean Law: Studies in the Diversity of Ancient Social and Communal Legislation, ed. Sandra Jacobs (Berlin: de Gruyter, forthcoming). 19. For a comprehensive study, see Ahn, Exile as Forced Migration, 8–34. 20. Peter Ackroyd, Exile and Restoration, OTL (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1968). 21. Lester L. Grabbe, ed., Leading the Captivity Captive: “The Exile” as History and Ideology, JSOTS 278 (Sheffeld: Sheffeld Academic Press, 1997). 22. John Ahn, “Diaspora,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Biblical Interpretation, ed. Steven L. McKenzie (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 23. John Van Seters, The Pentateuch: A Social-Science Commentary (London: Bloombury T &T Clark, 2015). 24. Gary Knoppers, Jews and Samaritans: The Origins and History of their Relations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 25. See Saskia Sassen, Expulsions (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2014).

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26. Ahn, 1.5 Generation in Exile as Forced Migration. 27. Oded Lipschits, Yuval Gadot, Benjamin Arubas, Manfred Oeming, eds., What Are These Stones Whispering: Ramat Rahel: 3000 Years of Forgotten History (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2017). 28. John Ahn, “Pervasiveness of Wisdom in (Con)Texts,” in Oxford Handbook of Wisdom Literature, ed. Will Kynes (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 29. David Turton, “Who is a Forced Migrant,” in Development-Induced Displacement: Problems, Policies, and People, ed. Chris de Wet (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005), 13–37, 32.

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Chapter 5

Migration in the New Testament The Quest for Home

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The whole meta-narrative of the Bible is essentially a tapestry woven together from the stories of migrants seeking a home. It begins with the frst human parents banished from Paradise and ends with the prophet John exiled on the island of Patmos. Encapsulated between these two bookends—literally from Genesis to Revelation—are stories of God’s people constantly on the move as they struggled to fnd their way home. The human quest for a place of belonging is not unique to our time or at any epoch, just as migration is by no means a new phenomenon. Since the dawn of human history, wave upon wave of people have been on the move for a variety of reasons, including trade, war, persecution, natural disasters, economic opportunities, asylum, and even adventure. But the pursuit for a home is innate and manifested in every age and culture. It was particularly evident with the frst generations of Christian disciples. Their profession of faith in Jesus as the Jewish Messiah caused estrangement and marginalization from the Jewish community and even persecution by many Gentiles, who were simply unsympathetic to the Christian movement. The impact of religious hostility and social exclusion forced the early Christians to turn inward for support, strength, and cohesion. The yearning to belong was fundamental for the early Christians. The question is what kind of home was the earliest generation of believers longing for and why. The aim of this chapter is to unpack the story of migration in the New Testament in order to discover the early Christians’ alterity and identity and why they sought not so much for an earthly dwelling but rather a heavenly home. Our investigation begins with Jesus Christ who is portrayed as a marginal Jew.1

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THE FOUR GOSPELS: JESUS AS THE MARGINAL CHRIST

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Son of God as Homeless and Abandoned Mark’s gospel is believed to be the frst gospel to have been composed, likely in Rome around 70 CE. The clues from Mark 13 reveal that this gospel was written during or soon after the frst Jewish war with Rome, which began in 66 CE and reached its climax in the destruction of the temple in 70 CE. The results of this war and its devastation caused a massive blow to the Jewish people and created a huge crisis of migration called the “Jewish Diaspora.” Many Jews were forced to abandon their homes in Jerusalem and escape to the surrounding regions of Palestine and even beyond. A large population was taken to Rome as prisoners to be slaughtered in the Coliseum for entertainment or to be sold as slaves. Evidently, Christians were also affected by the rebellion even though they probably were not involved. While many Christians might have fed before the actual war broke out, those who remained in Jerusalem at this time likely emigrated all over the Roman Empire. Literary and archeological evidence show that by the beginning of the second century CE, there were Christians present in most major cities of the Roman Empire, for example Antioch, Damascus, Adessa, Ephesus, Philippi, Corinth, Athens, Alexandria, and Rome, just to name a few.2 It is within the social and political circumstances of migration and displacement that the evangelist Mark portrays Jesus as a suffering Christ who was the Son of God, yet he was misunderstood by the people and even by his own disciples, rejected and persecuted by the religious leaders of the time, and left to die alone on the cross. Mark’s portrayal of Jesus as the crucifed Christ and an abandoned Son of God purposely provided meaning and encouragement for a community which was being persecuted for its beliefs and displaced from home. For this evangelist, discipleship literally means picking up one’s cross daily and following him just as their teacher had done (Mk 8:34). Mark’s Gospel begins with a Christological confession of Jesus as the Christ who is the Son of God (1:1; cf. 1:11; 9:7; 15:39) with whom his audience can relate and identify. This Jewish Messiah does not come from a royal lineage. His origins are completely unknown. He does not even have a place he calls home. He simply appears in the desert or wilderness (1:3, 4, 12) where John the Baptist dwelled. The wilderness or desert (eremos, in Greek) is considered a place of solitude and temptation. It is often described as the inhospitable abode of evil and wild beasts. For Mark’s audience, the opening scenes of Jesus being in the wilderness (1:2-13) echo the period of Israel’s wandering in the desert. Furthermore, the wilderness imagery is symbolic of Jesus’ homelessness. Throughout his life and ministry, Jesus moves about

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as an itinerant preacher who never settled in one place. Just as the opening scenes of the wilderness depict a powerful representation of homelessness, so the gospel’s fnal scenes of Jesus being crucifed on the cross and buried in the tomb of a stranger serve as the inclusio of Jesus’ ultimate experience of homelessness. Jesus’ cry on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” is actually a plea to God for a home. Trainor writes: “What Jesus encountered as divine abandonment became instead the vehicle for divine encounter. For Mark’s audience, the death scene of Jesus affrms the myriad of human experiences of failure, rejection, misunderstanding, and ultimate loneliness as the path of divine communion.”3 It has been proposed that the gospel of Mark is framed or sandwiched between the two scenes of Jesus’ homelessness and abandonment, while the central section is mainly about a community of disciples seeking for home in the reign or household of God.4

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The Jewish Messiah as a Refugee In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus’ origins and childhood are depicted within the context of migration. First, Jesus comes from a genealogy that includes female foreigners: Tamar, Rahab, and Ruth. Secondly, right after Jesus’ birth, Matthew recounts the dramatic exodus of the Holy Family escaping the wrath of King Herod, who felt threatened by the news of the birth of a new king in Bethlehem. The story of the Holy Family seeking refuge in Egypt obviously reinforces the underlying theme of the Moses-Jesus typology. An informed reader would notice its allusions to Exodus 1-2: a powerful but fearful ruler issued a death decree, a fight to escape the death threat, a slaughter of innocent children, and a return after the wicked ruler is dead. According to many historians, Herod was a wicked ruler who reigned with fear, suspicion, murders, and intrigue. Herod’s brutality and suspicion against his rivals point to the truth of an ancient joke: “It was better to be Herod’s pig than his son.” Under such horrifc circumstances, migration seems to be the only means of survival, especially when Herod intentionally seeks to destroy the infant Jesus. Withdrawal from opposition is sometimes absolutely necessary. Joseph therefore obeyed the angel’s commands, took the child and his mother “by night,” and swiftly fed to Egypt for refuge. Consequently, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph became asylum-seekers.5 Without travel documents, they crossed borders looking for safety and sanctuary. Like many other immigrants before and after them, Jesus and his family were political refugees seeking asylum in a country that would open the doors for them, “Egypt”—the traditional place of refuge for many Israelites in biblical times (1 Kings 11:40; Jer 26:21). According to the geographical structure of Matthew 2, the scene of the “Flight into Egypt” is concentric:

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A 2:1-8 (Israel/Jerusalem) B 2:9-12 (Bethlehem); C 2:13-15 (Egypt); B` 2:16-18 (Bethlehem); A` 2:19-23 (Israel/Nazareth).

It seems that the thrust of the movement of Matthew 2 is to have Jesus the Messiah go into Egypt in order to come out of Egypt, which clearly alludes to Israel’s exodus and liberation. Another literary indication of the Exodus motif is the fulfllment formula in Matthew 2:15 citing Hosea 11:1, “Out of Egypt I have called my son.” By quoting Hosea, Matthew provides scriptural basis for and prophecy fulfllment of the Messiah’s exile and return. After having heard the news of Herod’s death, the Holy Family returned to Bethlehem only to discover that Archaelaus, the heir to the territory of Judea, is just as cruel, if not worse, than his father. Once again, Joseph and Mary take the child Jesus and migrate to the north, to Nazareth, to start a new life in a completely new place and among new kinfolk. In depicting Jesus as a refugee and immigrant, the evangelist Matthew evokes Israel’s experience of migration from Canaan to Egypt and from Egypt back to the promised land, fulflling the ancient prophecies. Although Son of God and Messiah, Jesus is driven into exile, estranged from his own country, and returned to his homeland only to be displaced once again.6 Another notable literary feature found in Matthew 2 that reinforces the motif of migration is the frequent usage of the Greek verb anachōreō, which is often translated as “to withdraw,” “to depart,” or “to take refuge.” It is a verb depicting movement typifying migration and displacement. The Greek verb anachōreō appears four times: twice with references to the Magi eluding Herod (Mt 2:12, 13); and twice referring to the Holy Family feeing, frst from Herod by taking refuge in Egypt (2:14) and, later, from Herod’s son Archelaus by withdrawing to Nazareth instead of returning to Judea (2:22). In fact, the verb anachōreō reappears in several important places in the Gospel in connection with this same theme of seeking asylum.7 After receiving news of John the Baptist’s arrest, Jesus “withdraws” into Galilee (4:12) rather than go back to Nazareth. As a matter of fact, Jesus takes refuge and makes his new home “in Capernaum by the sea, in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali” (4:13). After having healed the man with a withered hand, Jesus again has “to fee” to a safer place because of the Pharisees’ plot to kill him (12:15). At the news of John’s death, Jesus “withdraws” to a solitary place (14:13). Finally, at 15:21 Matthew recounts Jesus withdrawing into the region of Tyre and Sidon because his confict with the religious authorities has greatly intensifed. In other words, Jesus seeks sanctuary in a Gentile territory. Ironically, this is where he encounters the Canaanite woman whose faith is said to be “great” (15:28).

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Matthew frequently uses the Greek verb anachōreō to highlight that from early childhood to his adulthood Jesus was a migrant who had to continually seek refuge in different places to survive. Furthermore, to fulfll his mission as the Jewish Messiah, he had to trek across various ethnic boundaries to engage with those who were located at the margins. Jesus’ migrant movement across borders, boundaries, and barriers foreshadows the commissioning of the universal mission: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations” (28:19). Jesus’ life as a migrant Messiah encourages future missionary disciples to eagerly cross over to foreign territories as places of refuge, mission and transformation. Since he lives and dies at the edges of society, Jesus naturally dwells at the borders. Jesus’ migration experience possibly refects the story of many believers in the Matthean community. Since the Gospel of Matthew was written around 80 CE, which is only a decade or so after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, it is likely that there were Christians who became refugees due to the frst Jewish revolt and are now settled in the community at Antioch in Syria. Furthermore, their faith in Jesus as the Jewish Messiah would certainly cause them estrangement and alienation from their own Jewish community. As such, the story of the “Flight into Egypt” and other migration motifs not only provide a message of comfort and hope for those who are displaced, but an invitation for all believers in the community to care for the strangers in their midst. Just as the child Messiah and his parents freely crossed international borders and relied exclusively upon the hospitality of others for survival, so the foreigner who comes into their midst not only as a neighbor but as Christ himself should be welcomed by Christians, because when one welcomes a stranger one welcomes Christ: “I was a stranger and you welcomed me” (25:35).

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The Savior as a Guest and Companion at the Margins As for Luke, Jesus is distinctively characterized as the universal Savior who delivers humanity from the consequences of sin and offers salvation to all people. Luke’s unique portrait of Jesus makes much sense for a predominantly Gentile audience who were continually challenged by the mystery cults and imperial theology that claimed ancient gods and emperors as “god and savior.” For this evangelist, discipleship is bearing witness to Jesus as the one and only Son of God who is light and salvation for all people (Lk 2:29, 32). According to The Gospel of Luke, the birth of Jesus is situated at the time when Joseph and Mary had to return from Nazareth to their ancestral home— namely Bethlehem—to enroll in a census imposed by Emperor Augustus (2:1-7). Thus, Jesus the divine savior is literally born on the road, sheltered in a stable, and surrounded by animals and shepherds from the feld. Likewise,

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Jesus’ entire adult life portrays him as an itinerant who is often viewed by others as an outsider and a vagabond.8 Jesus leaves behind family and possessions and calls his followers to do the same (9:1-6; 10:1-12). He constantly moves about from one town to another without even a place to lay his head: “Foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head” (9:58). Jesus’ whole life is actually portrayed as a “journey” to Jerusalem (9:5119:28). Along “the way,”9 Jesus is uniquely portrayed as a guest who relied on others for hospitality.10 Jesus frequently is portrayed as a guest at meals (5:29; 7:36; 14:1; 22:14; 24:30), and he gets criticized for eating too much (7:34; 5:33) and for eating with the wrong people (e.g., tax collectors and sinners, 5:30; 15:1-2). It is noted by many biblical scholars that in Luke, Jesus was either “going to a meal, at a meal, or coming from a meal.”11 Having been cured of her fever, Simon’s mother-in-law “got up immediately and waited on them” (4:39). After responding to Jesus’ call to follow him, “Levi gave a great banquet for him in his house” (5:29). Along the journey, Jesus stopped at the home of Mary and Martha and received hospitality there (10:38-42). He was a guest at the homes of the Pharisees and lawyers (11:3752; 14:1-24). Having met Jesus, Zacchaeus the tax collector not only invited Jesus into his house and offered him hospitality but promised to give half of his possessions to the poor and repay four times over anyone from whom he had extorted money (19:8). Finally, Jesus dies as a crucifed criminal, hanging between heaven and earth and is buried alone outside the city wall in a stranger’s tomb.12 Thus, the evangelist Luke correctly calls him a paroikos, which can be translated as a “visitor” (NAB) or “stranger” (NRSV). In the Emmaus story, when asked what they were discussing along the way, the two despairing disciples respond to Jesus, “Are you the only visitor (paroikos) to Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?” (24:18). Obviously, the evangelist Luke depicts Jesus in one way or another as a paroikos,13 which is equivalent to the Old Testament concept of ger (singular) or gerim (plural) that can be translated in different ways in English: “stranger,” “resident alien,” “sojourner,” or “immigrant.”14 According to Luke, Jesus knows and feels what it is like to be a marginal paroikos in this world. He often travels with those in need and associates with those on the fringe of society, namely women, the poor, the sick, and Gentiles. He even breaks Sabbath regulations and social customs to accommodate their needs. He knows exactly what it is like to depend on the hospitality of others since he too has been a guest on numerous occasions. In The Gospel of Luke especially, Jesus dines with all sorts of people: a Pharisee (7:36-50), women (10:38-42), tax collectors (5:27-32; 19:1-10), and strangers (24:13-35). Although a teacher with no place to lay his head, Jesus graciously welcomes the lost and generously feeds huge crowds (9:10-17). At the hour

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of his passion and death, Jesus breaks bread and shares a cup of wine with his disciples as a last remembrance of his covenant of love. Furthermore, in his teachings, he urges human hosts to invite those who could not return the favor to come to their banquets (14:12-14). He uses parables to highlight the virtue of hospitality in the kingdom of God: the Friend at Midnight (8:5-8), the Wedding Banquet (14:15-24); the Lost Sheep, Lost Coin and Prodigal Son (15:1-32); and the Rich Man and Lazarus (16:19-31).

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The Eternal Logos as a Stranger Born from Above Independent of the Synoptic Gospels, the Gospel of John portrays Jesus in a unique way. Many stories in this Gospel are not told elsewhere in the New Testament.15 Noticeably, the Johannine Jesus does not tell parables, cast out demons, or eat with outcasts. Rather, Jesus performs seven “signs”16 and delivers long philosophical discourses. He repeatedly describes himself by using the expression “I am” (egō eimi).17 Contrasting with Mark’s portrayal, Jesus publicly and openly reveals his true identity as the Messiah, King, Lamb of God, Son of Man, Savior of the world, resurrection and life, the only begotten Son, just to name a few important titles.18 Moreover, since he embodies divine qualities and essence, Jesus, the personifed divine Wisdom or the incarnate Logos or “Word,” is one born from above who is with the Father and therefore is eternal and God. Although being the divine Word (logos), Jesus became fesh and dwelt (or literally pitched his tent)19 among us (Jn 1:14); yet the world does not know or accept him (1:10-11). It is not surprising therefore for Jesus to feel like a stranger in this world. This view is artfully developed in John. Jesus is portrayed like a temporary resident alien who is constantly crossing borders, geographically and ethnically. The story of his encounter with the Samaritan woman in John 4 is paradigmatic. When Jesus spoke of going to a place where the Jewish crowds cannot come (7:32-36), they thought that Jesus was going “to the Diaspora and join the ranks of the Jews permanently away from home.”20 In John, Jesus often says that his home is not of this world (18:36) but from above (19:11), and therefore he will return to his Father in heaven (16:28) to prepare a place for his disciples (14:3). Jesus’s frst words to Mary Magdalene after having been raised from the dead reiterate his intention to return from whence he had come, “Go to my brothers and sisters and say to them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God” (20:7). The motif of Jesus being born from above and thus being estranged is recurrent in John (see also 1:17; 3:17, 31). The Johannine emphasis on Jesus as one alienated from this world arises out of the situation in which the gospel was written. The Johannine Christians were being or had been expelled from the synagogue (9:22; 12:42; 16:2). The

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synagogue was much more important than just a place of worship. It was the community center where friends and family members gathered. To be excluded from such a place, especially when they are already estranged from their homeland, would be a devastating shock that causes social isolation and psychological trauma. Rensberger notes, “Expulsion would have meant social ostracism and thus the loss of relationship with family and friends, and perhaps economic dislocation as well. It would certainly have meant religious dislocation.”21 The community that produced this gospel (circa 90-100 CE) was in deep crisis because they had lost the home where they had worshipped. Why did this happen? The story of the healing of the man born blind in John 9 gives us clues to the historical reconstruction of the separation of the Jewish-Christians from the non-Christian Jews in the Johannine community. In the beginning, both Jews and Christians worshipped side by side in the same synagogue. Gradually, however, the Jewish Christians elevated Jesus above the status of a prophet and even above the position of the Messiah. Eventually, they regarded Jesus as the divine and preexistent Logos having the same status and nature as God. This Christological profession was considered blasphemous and heretical. Such a claim obviously threatened the essence of Judaism. Christian Jews were also trying to get others to abandon Judaism as well. This led to outright hostility and resentment between the Christian Jews and the non-Christian Jews. Thus, the Christians Jews were cast out of the synagogue. Not only were these Christians thrown out of the synagogue, but there appears to have been further persecution such as beatings and imprisonment. As a result of the expulsion and persecution, the Christian group became a small and isolated minority. They became fearful and suspicious of outsiders and hostile toward non-Christian Jews. Consequently, the community turned inward upon itself for support and survival, becoming what scholars classify as a “sect.”22 In a sectarian tone, the author records these words of Jesus: “If the world hates you, be aware that it hated me before it hated you. If you belonged to the world, the world would love you as its own. Because you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world—therefore the world hates you” (Jn 15:18-19). The Acts of the Apostles: A Church in Motion and on a Mission The Acts of the Apostles is a fascinating book, illustrating that migration and mission go hand in hand. Luke—who is also the author of Acts—recounts the origins and expansion of the Christian mission from Jerusalem to Rome—the heart of the Roman Empire. Defying all odds, the early followers of Jesus Christ brought the good news of salvation from “Jerusalem, throughout Judea

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and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). It is well recognized by New Testament scholars that the author of The Gospel of Luke and The Acts of the Apostles develops a single theological vision. What is predicted in the Gospel is fulflled in Acts, and what Jesus does, the apostles also imitate. These two volumes, also known as Luke-Acts, are therefore meant to be read together as one continuous work. Interestingly, the division of Luke-Acts forms the basic movement of a single story with a double three-part geographical structure.23 Acts 1:1-2 points back to the geographical structure of the Gospel (“All that Jesus did and taught until he was taken up”): • in Galilee • on the way to Jerusalem • in Jerusalem

(Luke 1:1—9:50) (Luke 9:51—19:44) (Luke 19:45—24:53)

Acts 1:8 looks ahead to the missionary expansion of the church (“You will be my witnesses”):

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• in Jerusalem • in Judea and Samaria • to the ends of the earth

(Acts 1:1—6:7) (Acts 6:8—12:25) (Acts 13:1—28:31)

Since Jerusalem and its temple have special geographical and theological signifcance, Jesus’ ministry and mission is naturally “centripetal” or a movement toward its center (Jerusalem), while in Acts, the disciples’ activities are “centrifugal” or a movement away from its center (Jerusalem) to the ends of the world. Apparently, both the structure and content of Luke-Acts emphasize the universal mission of salvation and that the Christian movement from its very inception is missional. The age of the church is the age of migration and mission under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. From beginning to end, Luke shows that the Holy Spirit directs and guides the work of salvation every step of the way, whether by design or force. Ironically, the persecutions of the Greek-speaking Jewish-Christians (the “Hellenists”) after Stephen’s martyrdom (circa 32) and killing of the apostle James (circa 44) led to various waves of migration of Christians from Jerusalem to the countryside of Judea and Samaria (8:1) and as far as to Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Antioch (11:19). The effect of migration gave impetus to the Christian mission that reached out not only to Jews in the Diaspora but also to Gentiles.24 The Spirit is an essential prerequisite for witness and mission. Just as Jesus’ whole life was “flled with the Holy Spirit” (1:35; 3:22; 4:14, 18; 23:46), Luke—in Acts—continues to show that it was the same Spirit that gave birth to the church (2:1-4), inspired a community of believers to “share all things in common” (2:44),

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and united them in “one heart and mind” (4:32). Furthermore, it is through the empowerment of the Spirit that the apostles, as well as other women and men, were able to boldly give witness to the risen Christ as the Messiah. More importantly, Luke takes special interest to show that the mission to the Gentiles was directly initiated and guided by the Holy Spirit. It was through the action of the Spirit that Philip was led away from Jerusalem to initiate the Samaritan mission (8:5), which Peter and John verifed (8:14-15). The same Spirit guided Philip to a southern desert road of Gaza to encounter and convert the Ethiopian eunuch who probably brought the message of Jesus Christ to the southernmost end of the earth (8:26-39). But it was through Peter—a leading pillar of the Jerusalem church—that the Gentile mission was offcially recognized. As the apostle to the Jews and the pillar of the church in Jerusalem, Peter dominates the frst half of Acts (chapters 1 to 12). Representing the Twelve, Peter is the primary witness to Jesus as Messiah and Lord in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria. Having received the gift of the Holy Spirit, Peter boldly delivered the powerful mission sermon at Pentecost (2:14-41) and other evangelical speeches (3:12-26; 10:34-43), performed miraculous deeds (3:1-10; 5:12-16; 9:32-43), fearlessly confronted hostile opposition (4:18-20; 5:2932), and endured fogging and imprisonment (5:18, 40-41; 12:3). Peter even courageously ventured into a Gentile territory—namely Caesarea—to deliver the message of salvation to a Roman centurion, Cornelius, and had tablefellowship with the Gentile soldier and his entire household. Peter’s acts of testimony are hallmarks of one sent (apostolos) on mission in the name of the risen Christ. Once the Gentile mission has been fully endorsed and authorized by the Jerusalem church (11:1-18; 15:1-35), Paul—the apostle to the Gentiles— takes the central stage of Acts (chapters 13 to 28) as the primary instrument of carrying the message of repentance and salvation to Galatia, Asia Minor, Greece, and, fnally, to the heart of the Roman Empire—Rome. But to fulfll the missionary mandate of the risen Christ, the great apostle had to endure many trials and sufferings for the sake of Christ and the Gospel. As one imbued with the fre of the Holy Spirit (9:17; 13:2-3), Paul ventured out into uncharted territory establishing Christian communities in many towns and cities. Nothing could weaken his missionary zeal and spirit, not stoning (14:19), imprisonments (16:23; 28:30-31), physical torture and beatings (16:22-23; 22:22-30), constantly being chased away or pursued (13:50; 23:12-22), shipwreck (27:1-44), or interrogations (24:23-35; 26:1-32), just to name a few incidents (for a longer list of Paul’s own testimony of sufferings, see 2 Cor 11:21-28). His relentless determination to share the good news of the risen Christ altered the landscape of the Mediterranean basin within a short period of time.

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Peter and Paul of course did not and could not complete the mission by themselves. They relied on other apostles, coworkers, companions, friends, and associates. Noticeably, Peter was often accompanied by John (3:1, 11; 4:13, 19; 8:14). There were also seven Hellenist deacons who were appointed by the Apostles to serve at tables (6:5); however, two of them gave outstanding witness to Christ in Jerusalem and Samaria: Stephen (6:8—7:60) and Philip (8:4-40). The rest of the Hellenist deacons seemingly brought the message beyond Judea (11:19-20). Paul too depended upon a network of friends and coworkers. The following were the most notable ones: Barnabas (13:2), John Mark (12:25), Silas (15:22), Judas (15:22), Timothy (16:1), Apollos (18:24), and Luke (16:11). There were also women who worked alongside Paul and assisted him in his ministry. The frst European convert happened to be Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth, who migrated to Philippi from the city of Thyatira in western Asia Minor. After her conversion, Paul and his traveling companions frequented her home and were greatly encouraged by her generosity (16:15, 40). Another outstanding couple worth highlighting is Priscilla and Aquila.25 While in Corinth, Paul met up with this migrant couple, who were expelled from Rome because of the Edict of Claudius in 49 CE, and resided in their house. The three worked together as tentmakers and as collaborators in building up the church in Corinth (18:1-3). Having spent eighteen months working side by side in Corinth (18:11), they accompanied Paul on a 250-mile journey across the Aegean Sea to Ephesus. Luke records that Paul left them at Ephesus as soon as they arrived, which indicates that the missionary couple must have founded the church in Ephesus and prepared the stage for Paul when he rejoined them on his third missionary journey. This immigrant couple was constantly on the move for the cause of the gospel. Even though they relocated both their home and their trade at least three times to three different sites (Rome, Corinth, and Ephesus), they never faltered in their commitment to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ, risking everything because of faith. Not surprisingly, Paul mentioned this couple in several letters giving them the highest honor and accolades by regarding them as “co-workers” and faithful friends who risked “their necks” for his life (Rom 16:3-5; 1 Cor 16:19; 2 Tim 4:19). Paul obviously had many other coworkers and associates that Luke did not mention in Acts. The farewell address in Romans 16 is testimony to the women and men Paul relied on in his missionary endeavors. Obviously, it was the Spirit who animated all sorts of women and men in the early church and rallied them for the universal mission of salvation. The book of Acts is an action-packed missionary adventure that is structured around the deeds and journeys of Spirit-flled Apostles and many other individuals whom the risen Christ commissioned and sent out into the world. These women and men courageously and boldly bore witness to Jesus Christ

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and his universal mission of salvation. Despite the numerous obstacles that they faced, the mission of the church from start to fnish prevailed over these barriers “unhindered” (Acts 8:36; 10:47; 11:17; 28:31). Furthermore, Luke shows that the mission mandate of Christ has no geographical boundaries and knows no human restrictions. It falls within the master “plan of God” (boule tou theou) fulflling the Old Testament prophecies (Acts 8:30-35; cf. Isa 53:7-8) and the Abrahamic covenant (Acts 3:25; cf. Gen 12:2). Luke’s primary reason for this emphasis is to encourage and convince the readers of his day, who were still skeptical of the Gentile mission, that God had welcomed the Gentiles as part of God’s people. Since “God shows no partiality” (Acts 10:34), there are no social barriers or ethnic rivalries that can interfere with the expansion of the church’s universal mission. Since migration and mission are often intertwined, every Christian is also empowered by the Spirit to be an agent of God’s mission. As portrayed in Acts, the early church was constantly in motion and on a mission, which is true to her pilgrim nature and missionary character. THE EPISTLES AND REVELATION: LONGING FOR THE HEAVENLY HOMELAND

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Seeking a Spiritual Home The theme of Christians being strangers and sojourners in the world permeates the New Testament epistles and Revelation. The author of First Peter, for example, addresses his audience as follows: “To the exiles of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia” (1 Pet 1:1). The author identifes the churches located in the fve Roman provinces in Asia Minor. It is likely that “Dispersion” refers to all Christians (Gentile or Jewish) residing in these regions. Several references in the letter (1:1-2; 5:9) indicate that Christianity was widespread in Asia Minor when the letter was written, probably around the turn of the second century (90-110) CE. The social tensions and the suffering refected in the letter indicate that Jewish and Gentile Christians were despised because their beliefs and values conficted with those of the society around them. Christians were often misunderstood and even alienated by their neighbors, former friends, and families.26 Understandably, the author calls these estranged Christians resident aliens (paroikoi) and visiting strangers (parepidemoi). These two important Greek terms, paroikoi and parepidemoi, found in First Peter (1:1, 17; 2:11), are essentially sociological categories that reveal the Christian’s self-understanding at this time.27 The early Christians apparently saw themselves as strangers and sojourners who were seeking a home (oikos), and the home that they were seeking was a heavenly one.28

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The theme of Christians seeking a heavenly homeland is more developed in the letter to the Hebrews. The audience of the letter appeared to be suffering from severe social ostracism (Heb 10:32-34). The community therefore was forced to redefne themselves. In chapter eleven of Hebrews, the author cleverly depicts Israel’s ancestors as “strangers and foreigners” who were seeking a homeland.29 But the homeland that they were looking for was not the one that they had departed. The author writes, “If they had been thinking of the land that they had left behind, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; indeed, he has prepared a city for them” (Heb 11:15-16). According to Chin, the contrast is one of a cosmological/spiritual sojourn from earth to heaven. Chin writes, “These people were longing for the heavenly country, one which God had prepared for them. It is beyond doubt that they were [pareidēmoi] before in their time, but something of a deeper signifcance was taking place, and the writer was not slow in [recognizing] it.”30 In the letter to the Ephesians, the author reminds the Gentile Christians that they were once “strangers” (zenoi) because they were without Christ (Eph 2:12). Having been redeemed through the blood of Christ, they are no longer “strangers” (zenoi) and “aliens” (paroikoi) but are “citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God” (2:19). Ephesians, which was probably not written by Paul,31 appears to be a circular letter intended for many churches residing in Asia Minor around the end of the frst century CE. The author points out to his Gentile Christians that although their legal status in the secular and political society has not changed, their theological status has because of the new relationship with God and the church.32 Since they were established upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus as the cornerstone, the author reminds them, “In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God” (Eph 2:21). A New Heaven and New Earth The early Christians seemed to be in a liminal state or, as Peter C. Phan puts it, “being betwixt and between” two worlds.33 Without a doubt the best New Testament text to illustrate this point is none other than the book of Revelation. Revelation belongs to the genre of apocalyptic literature (apokalypsis in Greek means “revelation” or “unveiling” by which the book also gets its name, the “Apocalypse”). The book was composed during a time of crisis, giving comfort and hope to those who were normally on the fringes of society. Needless to say, Revelation does not only offer hope and comfort,

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but it also served as protest literature. It is a protest against the prevailing worldview of the dominant culture. The narrative framework of this literary genre attempts to assist the readers to grapple with the complex realities of being “in-betwixt, between, and beyond.”34 Since there is no extra-biblical evidence of systematic persecution at this time, there is no scholarly consensus as to whether the crisis or struggle described in the book refers to a persecution that was initiated by the Emperor Domitian.35 Nevertheless, it is clear that Revelation was composed during a time of spiritual crisis and social calamity, probably in the mid-90s CE, when Christians in Asia Minor were either facing or about to face a major setback. As a voice from the periphery, John, who is now exiled on the island of Patmos, encourages his readers not to accept the beliefs and worldview of the dominant society, but to remain true to their own convictions and faithfulness to God despite alienation and marginalization. To the seven scattered Christian communities that were being weighed down by discouragement and fatigue, the author, who identifed himself as John (Rev 1:1, 4, 9; 22:8), wrote to give strength to the faint of heart and security to the despairing. John seemed to have been a wandering Christian prophet (1:3, 10-11; 22:9, 18-19) who was perhaps originally from Palestine and was displaced as a “refugee” during the Roman-Judean War in 66–76 CE. He is well versed in the Jewish heritage and Scripture. While his usage of Greek is impressive, Greek was probably not his mother tongue. He was likely a resident alien in Asia Minor who had been exiled to Patmos because “of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus” (1:9). His anti-imperial stance might have been the primary cause for his alienation. Because of his parallel situation, John was able to identify with poor and marginalized Christians of Asia Minor and offer them a glimmer of hope for a new heaven and a new earth. The question is, “What do the new heaven and a new earth look like?” According to John’s vision in Revelation 21, “the new heaven and a new earth” is none other than the New Jerusalem, the holy and ideal city of God’s future home. There are stunning contrasts between Babylon and the New Jerusalem: the whore (17:1) versus the Bride (21:2); the beast (17:3) versus the Lamb (21:9); the great city (17:18) versus the holy city (21:2); darkness (18:23) versus light (21:23); dwelling of demons (18:2) versus dwelling of God (21:3); smoking ruin (18:9) versus splendid garden (22:3); weeping and wailing (18:11, 15) versus no tears or sorrow (21:4); death (18:24) versus life (21:4). The stark contrasts between the two cities reveal them as polar opposites. Since Babylon (Rome) is evil (18:24) and full of vices (21:8) and stands in diametric opposition to the ways of God, Christians must “come out of her” (18:4) in order to enter into the new heavenly city where God and people live side by side under one tent (21:3).

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John’s vision of the New Jerusalem shares some commonality with Ezekiel’s fnal vision (Ezek 40-48) but with signifcant differences. In the New Jerusalem, there is no temple since God and the Lamb are the temple (21:22); there is no need of sun or moon, for the glory of God and the Lamb are its light and lamp (21:23); there is no need for locked gates, for only those who are righteous and pure may enter it (21:25-27). The architecture, measurements, and materials that adorn the city are symbols of perfection, plentitude, and preciousness par excellence. Noticeably, the symbolic number 12 is used repeatedly: 12 gates (21:12, 21), 12 angels (21:12), 12 tribes (21:12), 12 foundations (21:14), 12 names of apostles (21:14), 12,000 stadia (21:16), 144 cubits (12x12) (21:17), 12 pearls (21:21), and 12 kinds of fruits (22:2). The number 12 commonly represents the tribes of Israel, but here the consecrated number is no longer limited to Israel but rather represents all nations—a new chosen race that is inclusive and universal. Even foreigners (ethne) stream to the holy city with their treasures and are welcomed (21:24, 26). John’s vision of God’s future home is flled with life (22:1-2) and joy (22:3) so transforming and radical as to be a “new creation” or “new center” that does not marginalize anyone because of race, ethnicity, gender, or class. Consequently, John’s depiction of the New Jerusalem is a vision of a “new space” without borders and boundaries. The state of being “in-beyond” is a realm of perfect harmony.

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CONCLUSION A close reading of the New Testament story through the lens of migration has given us helpful insights into the early Christians’ self-understanding. They obviously referred to themselves as aliens and outsiders. Their alien identity and status may be gleaned from the stories of the life and ministry of Jesus. All four Gospels portrayed Jesus as the Jewish Messiah who was estranged and marginal. Each evangelist described Jesus differently: as homeless and abandoned (Mark), a refugee (Matthew), a permanent guest (Luke), and a stranger born from above (John). The marginal and alien status of Jesus actually expresses the experience and life setting (sitz im leben) of the early Christians and their communities. The Acts of the Apostles reports that from the very beginning the early church was on the move to carry out the great commission of Jesus to go to the ends of the earth (1:8). Whether their migration was forced or planned, the earliest disciples spread the good news of Jesus Christ wherever they went. During this period, migration and mission were intertwined, and the church was depicted as a pilgrim that was constantly on the move but not without hindrance. However, under the protection and wings of the Holy Spirit, many communities and churches consisting of Jews and

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Gentiles were established throughout the Roman Empire. By the end of the frst century of the Common Era, Christians now found themselves estranged and alienated from the larger fabric of society. The New Testament authors at this time, for example the writers of First Peter and Revelation, needed to address and respond to the predicament of their audiences’ social and religious estrangement. The Greek terms, paroikoi and parepidemoi, found in several epistles and texts, help confrm the description of their sociological and legal status. These terms are descriptive of the early Christians’ liminal experience and alien identity. Furthermore, as strangers and sojourners who lived and worshipped in the hostile contexts of the Roman Empire, the early Christians promoted solidarity in sufferings and social cohesion and fraternal love in the midst of ostracism. The longing for communal fellowship, belonging, and security is expressed in their quest for a home that has no borders or boundaries and is without distinctions of race, ethnicity, gender, or class.

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NOTES 1. For an extensive investigation of the historical Jesus as a “marginal Jew” see John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus (5 vols; New York: Doubleday, 1991, 1994, 2001, 2009, 2016). 2. Peter C. Phan, “Migration in the Patristic Era: History and Theology,” in A Promised Land, A Perilous Journey: Theological Perspectives on Migration, ed. Daniel G. Groody and Gioacchino Campese (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 41–43. 3. Michael Trainor, The Quest for Home: The Household in Mark’s Community (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2001), 171. 4. Trainor, The Quest for Home, 72. 5. M. Daniel Carroll R., Christians at the Border: Immigration, the Church, and the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008), 115. 6. vănThanh Nguyễn, “Seeking Asylum: The Holy Family in Egypt,” The Bible Today, Vol. 56, no. 1 (January/February 2018), 21–28. 7. For a fne examination of the six withdrawals found in Matthew, see Paul Hertig, “Jesus’ Migrations and Liminal Withdrawals in Matthew,” in God’s People on the Move: Biblical and Global Perspectives on Migration and Mission, ed. vănThanh Nguyễn and John M. Prior (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2014), 46–61. 8. Donald Senior, “‘Beloved Aliens and Exiles’: New Testament Perspectives on Migration,” in A Promised Land, A Perilous Journey: Theological Perspective on Migration, ed. Daniel G. Groody and Gioacchino Campese (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 26–27. 9. The believers or disciples of the Lord were called followers of “the Way” (he hodos), which is a designation that appears in several places in Acts (9:2; 19:9, 23; 22:4; 24:14, 22). Luke also uses a longer phrase, “the way of salvation of God” (16:7; 18:26), to possibly express a fuller designation of the Christian movement.

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10. John Koenig, New Testament Hospitality: Partnership with Strangers as Promise and Mission (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985); see also Brendan Byrne, The Hospitality of God: A Reading of Luke’s Gospel, Revised Edition (Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 2015). For a concise survey of the texts in Luke-Acts which deal with hospitality, see Adelbert Denaux, “The Theme of Divine Visits and Human (In)Hospitality in Luke-Acts,” in The Unity of Luke-Acts, ed. J. Verheyden (Leuven: University Press, 1999), 255–279. 11. Robert Karris, Eating Your Way Through Luke’s Gospel (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2006), 14. For a complete picture of the theme of food in Luke’s Gospel, see pages 16–39. 12. Ancient burial practices gathered from archeological remains show that family members are buried together in one tomb. It is an anomaly for a person to be buried alone. 13. Interestingly, in Acts Stephen used the same Greek word to describe Israel’s ancestors (7:6) and Moses (7:29). 14. The Hebrew ger (singular) or gerim (plural) is translated into Greek in basically four ways: xenos, parepidemos, proselyte, and paroikos. For a concise study of the word paroikos and its LXX counterparts, see Moses Chin, “A Heavenly Home for the Homeless: Aliens and Strangers in 1 Peter,” Tyndale Bulletin, Vol. 42, no. 1 (May 1991), 96–112. See also Maurizio Pettena, Migration in the Bible (Exodus Series 2; Quezon City, Philippines: Salabrini Migration Center, 2005), 10–15. 15. Some of the most noted stories are: calling of Andrew, Philip, and Nathanael (Jn 1:35–51); changing of water into wine at Cana (2:1–12); conversation with Nicodemus (3:1–21); encountering the Samaritan woman at a well (4:1–42); healing of a crippled man at the Pool of Bethesda (5:1–18); healing of a man born blind (9:1–41); raising of Lazarus (11:1–44); washing of the disciples’ feet (13:1–20); resurrection appearance to Thomas (20:24–29). 16. There are seven or eight miracle stories (Jn 2:1–12; 4:46–54; 5:1–9; 6:1–13; 9:1–7; 11:1–44; 21:1–6; maybe 6:15–25). 17. Jesus is the bread of life (Jn 6:35, 51), the light of the world (8:12; 9:5), the door (10:7, 9), the good shepherd (10:11, 14), the resurrection and the life (11:25), the way, the truth, and the life (14:6), the true vine (15:1, 5). 18. Christological titles of Jesus in John’s Gospel are numerous. Here are just a few titles and their references: Messiah (1:41; 7:41), King of Israel (1:49; 18:37; 19:19), Lamb of God (1:29, 35), Son of Man (1:51; 6:27; 13:13), Prophet par excellence (4:44; 6:14; 9:17), Savior of the world (4:42), God’s eternal Son (1:18), light of the world (8:12; 9:5; 12:46), good shepherd (10:14), and the way, truth, and life (14:6). 19. Noticeably, in using the Greek verb eskenosen, which is literally translated as “tabernacle” or “tented,” John evokes the Old Testament image of God’s presence traveling about with his people through the tent of meeting. 20. Senior, “‘Beloved Aliens and Exiles,’” 23. 21. David Rensberger, Johannine Faith and Liberating Community (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1988), 27. 22. Rensberger, Johannine Faith, 27.

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23. vănThanh Nguyễn, “Mission in Acts: An Inspiration for the Pilgrim Church,” The Bible Today, Vol. 52, no. 3 (January/February 2014), 135. 24. Phan, “Migration in the Patristic Era,” 41. 25. vănThanh Nguyễn, “Migrants as Missionaries: The Case of Priscilla and Aquila,” Mission Studies, Vol. 30 (2013), 194–207. 26. John H. Elliott, Confict, Community, and Honor: 1 Peter in Social-Scientifc Perspective (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2007), 27–48. 27. Reinhard Feldmeier, “The ‘Nation’ of Strangers: Social Contempt and Its Theological Interpretation in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity,” in Ethnicity and the Bible, ed. Mark G. Brett (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996), 241. For an in depth study of 1 Peter, see John H. Elliott, A Home for the Homeless: A Social-Scientifc Criticism of 1 Peter, Its Situation and Strategy (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1990), 37–49. 28. This theme extends well beyond the New Testament period into the Apostolic Fathers. See Chin, “A Heavenly Home,” 109. See also Phan, “Migration in the Patristic Era,” 35–58. For an examination of the resident “alien topos” in the Epistle to Diognetus, the Shepherd of Hermas, Similitudes, and the Apocryphon of James, see Benjamin H. Dunning, Aliens and Sojourners: Self as Other in Early Christianity (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 64–102. 29. By the middle of the second century CE, when the 2 Clement was composed, Christians began to describe themselves as sojourners in a foreign land (paroikia). Eventually, the corrupted Latin form, parochia, found its way into the terminology of church administration as “parochial” or “a parish.” See Feldmeier, “The ‘Nation’ of Strangers,” 264. 30. Chin, “A Heavenly Home,” 109. 31. Interestingly, about several decades earlier the apostle Paul had urged the newly converts at Philippi to press toward the ultimate prize that lies in heaven where their true “citizenship” belongs (Phil 3:20). 32. Chin, “A Heavenly Home,” 108. 33. Peter C. Phan, “Betwixt and Between: Doing Theology with Memory and Imagination,” in Journeys at the Margin: Toward an Autobiographical Theology in American-Asian Perspective, ed. Peter C. Phan and Jung Young Lee (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999), 113. 34. vănThanh Nguyễn, “Revelation from the Margins,” in T&T Clark Handbook of Asian American Biblical Hermeneutics, ed. Uriah Y. Kim and Seung Ai Yang (London, UK: T&T Clark, 2019), 439–448. 35. The sources that are dated to or around the time of the Book of Revelation do not support the popular image of Christian martyrs being thrown to the lions in the Coliseum of Rome or that the Romans tried to stamp Christianity out through relentless persecution.

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Chapter 6

Migration and Church History Ciprian Burlacioiu

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PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS ON MIGRATION AND CHURCH HISTORY For the purpose of this chapter, I step back from historians’ occasional refex to turn past history into a lesson for the present and to state that what we consider today as a new era—“the Age of Migration”—is not really so new over the longue durée of history. However, refections on the new and the old in history, on the continuities and discontinuities of our time with earlier periods, is normal and must of course be done. Since migration is a complex universal human experience, its different forms and types have to be distinguished. In general, the search for resources can be regarded as a factor determining the movements of people we today call “migration.” Modern scholarship differentiates between push-factor and pull-factor, trying to describe in this way the reasons that pressure people to leave a certain territory and resettle in another. Regarding distance and duration, individuals or groups change their living space temporarily or quasi-permanently, undertaking long voyages or moving only to a neighboring region. Very often, processes of migration are circular or repetitive, being induced mainly by economic reasons or a certain way of life. Forced migration—due to human-made or natural catastrophes—has been a permanent reality, affecting a huge number of people. Religious and ethnic intolerance have led to migration as well. A desire for a change in lifestyle is responsible for rural to urban migration and vice versa. Migrants undertake the process of migration as individual, as group (in chain migration), and sometime en masse. Being multifaceted, migration can be adequately understood only through a comprehensive and interdisciplinary approach. Moreover, not only statistics 87

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and quantitative information about the number of migrants and the direction of their movement, about the economic or political conditions of their regions of origin, and so on provide useful insights, but a close study of the lives of individual migrants and their concrete histories is necessary for a better understanding of migration. With these observations in mind, the following pages will not discuss the various religious reasons causing migration such as persecutions, alleged divine revelations, or the search for new and proper places to practice religion. Rather, I will refect on the impact of migration on Christianity regardless of specifc forms of religious migration. For Church history, migration can be understood to represent, albeit not exclusively, the element of mobility. Since Church historiography studies Christianity mainly as a sedentary religion, or how through extension and mission it became settled in a certain region, the integration of migration will add a further dimension which widens our historical survey of the past. Compared with other forms of religious mobility such as mission, pastoral visitation, monastic exchange, or pilgrimage, migration is a movement from below, beyond the decision or control of religious authorities; it is spontaneous or even forced and, as such, bears all the marks of displacement. As a consequence, in the past, religious authorities were often surprised by the reality of migration. Depending on the region and historical epoch, it took decades or even longer for church institutions to adapt themselves to the new situation. From this perspective, migration was sometime the source of changes for institutionalized religion. During the last decades, speaking of different “turns” became fashionable in social and historical sciences. I am not proposing here another “turn” in church history as a whole. I am not attempting to rewrite or to reinterpret the entire history of Christianity from the perspective of migration, but only to draw attention to some epochs and events in the development of Christianity that have been crucially infuenced by migration. Admittedly, migration was not always and everywhere crucial in shaping Christianity, but only in certain places and times, and that only in tandem with other factors. Thus, it is essential to determine its role and importance in relation with other historical factors. For example, ius reformandi was far more important than ius emigrandi in the history of European Reformation. Therefore, it is necessary to specify the contributions of taking migration as a methodological lens to understand the church’s past without abandoning other more familiar methodologies. Such an approach does not merely aim at integrating neglected voices such as those of the marginalized, oppressed, colonized, women, or migrants into the study of Christianity but searches for a new understanding in church history: What more or new can we learn about the past of Christianity if we take migration as the lens, along with other lenses, for the study of church history? We will attempt to answer this question by examining certain key issues.

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MISSION AND EXPANSION OF CHRISTIANITY When refecting on the geographical spread of Christianity from its beginnings in the New Testament to the modern era, we must acknowledge that our understanding has been heavily infuenced by the picture of “professional” missionaries such as the Apostle Paul, monastic communities, and modern missionary societies. In addition to this planned and professional mission, Christianity expanded over centuries also thanks to the migrations of its followers. This was true already in the time of Paul, and the Christian community in Rome may be cited as an example. Different from his other letters, Paul did not address his letter to the Romans from Corinth in the winter of 56/57 as to a church founded by himself. In fact, there had been Christian communities for some time in the imperial capital. The edict of the emperor Claudius in AD 49 expelled Jews from the city due to controversies regarding “Christ.” Based on this information, it can safely be assumed that Roman Christianity had its beginnings in the early 40s and is—at least in part—connected with free or enslaved migrant Jews in the capital. Here migration was probably the most important element contributing to the foundation of Christianity. For other periods of Church history, Klaus Koschorke draws attention to other examples of the spread of Christianity along migrant routes.1 During the early Middle Ages, the Church of the East—also known as the Nestorian Church—reached from its heartland Persia as far as China, Siberia, and South India. Over the centuries, this church maintained connections with its dioceses in these regions, among different ethnic groups and under different political authorities, almost always as a religious minority. The drive for such as geographic expansion was primarily the trade networks of Christian Persian merchants along the different routes of the Silk Road. Following the foundation of merchant Persian colonies, the Catholicos-Patriarch of Seleucia-Ctesiphon and his synod considered necessary to send missionary monks for the pastoral care of the faithful. The church’s presence in China is documented for the year 635. Beginning in the same period, the Church of the East missioned among Turco-Mongol tribes in East and Central Asia and became an infuential religious community in the Mongol Empire until the conversion of Ghazan Khan to Islam in 1295. Because of their connections with Persia, local Christians in South India became part of the Church of the East long before the arrival of the Portuguese in the region in 1498. Using the same pattern of expansion along existing diaspora networks, the Armenian Church experienced a similar extension. But different from the Church of the East, who went beyond its original Syriac character and enculturated in several local contexts, the Armenian Church remained largely confned to the ethnic diaspora.

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The transatlantic African Christianity is another prime example for the connection between migration and the spread of Christianity. The works of John Thornton and Andrew Walls among others have emphasized this aspect. Thornton regards the Christianization of Africans in the New World as a process commencing in Africa, where some of the enslaved natives were already Christians. “Much of the Christianity of the African world was carried across the seas to America.”2 Together with catechists, enslaved Africans made a signifcant contribution to the formation of an African Christianity in the Americas as early as the seventeenth century. Later on and on the other side of the Atlantic, the foundation of Sierra Leone in 1792 goes back to the remigration of free Protestant African Americans from British territories. Considering the impact of transatlantic migrants in the beginning of Protestant Christianity in West Africa around 1800, Andrew Walls concludes: “In this way, in November 1792 the frst Protestant church in tropical Africa was established ... It was a ready-made African church, with its own structures and leadership.”3 Thus, Freetown emerged as a Christian city, following its foundation by the black returnees. These are only a few examples for the spread of Christianity along the routes of migration. Next to professional missionaries and mission bodies, migrating Christians infuenced in a substantial way the historical and present map of Christianity. Eventually, churches were compelled to deal with migration so that mission and church activities for some time followed the routes of migrants.

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DIASPORA Out of migration emerged, under certain conditions, diaspora communities, living as a minority in the middle of ethnic, cultural, and other religious groups and preserving the consciousness of a specifc and different identity vis-à-vis the majority. Such diaspora communities are constituted by a multitude of elements, including religion. It is useful to mention here that not only Christianity as a whole spread through migration but also particular confessional bodies experienced signifcant changes in their traditional geographical expansion thanks to migration. Churches originating historically in a certain region spread to faraway regions, without mission and contrary to the logic of an organic geographical extension, bringing about long-term changes in both the local religious landscape and the geography of the own confession. One prominent example is the emergence of Protestant Churches in Latin America in the nineteenth century. From the sixteenth century, the Roman Catholic Church had a religious monopoly in the continent. After becoming independent from Spain and Portugal, different Latin American countries opened themselves to non-Catholic immigrant groups in the hope that European

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migrants would contribute to the modernization of their countries. Thus, several groups of German Protestants emigrated to Latin America, mainly to Brazil, Argentine, and Chile, founding both ethnic and religious diaspora communities. Beyond the earlier efforts of occasional English or American missionaries to introduce their forms of Protestantism, these groups of immigrants contributed signifcantly to the development of a Protestant Christianity on the continent that had been closed to non-Catholics for centuries.4 Similarly, the beginnings of charismatic Christianity in Brazil lay with a migrant community of Swedish Baptists in the north of the country. Their later spiritual leaders, Daniel Berg and Gunnar Vingren, arrived in Brazil in 1910 after spending some time in the United States. Berg became familiar with the charismatic awakening in the Church of William Durhams in Chicago, and Vingren, prior to his arrival in Brazil, went through the Bible school of Charles Parham in Topeka, Kansas. Because of their disagreement with the local Swedish pastors over the experience of the Holy Spirit in the community, Berg and Vingren, together with eighteen other persons, were excluded from the Baptist Church in June 1911.5 This group continued to worship in their own way as an independent congregation and became the starting point of the Pentecostal Assembléias de Deus in Brazil. Another interesting case is the global spread of the Russian Orthodox Christianity in the twentieth century.6 Traditionally, Eastern Orthodox Christianity was located in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Missionary activities of the Russian Church brought Orthodoxy to East Asia, including China and Japan, and to the North American continent. Despite such efforts, the Orthodox communities remained numerically small. In the West, the Russian upper class was present in all important European cities such as London, Paris, Berlin, or Nice, and occasional or semi-permanent Orthodox parishes were brought into existence. After the 1917 October Revolution and during the next decades, because of the civil war between monarchists and Bolsheviks and the fnal takeover by the latter, millions of Russian Orthodox faithful were forced to leave the former Russian Empire. In different waves and at different times, Russians settled in signifcant numbers in European cities, in China, other regions of East Asia, Australia, South Africa, countries in Latin America, and not least, in the United States. After the World War II, Russian Orthodoxy became a truly global faith community, with millions of believers of frst and second generations living in different corners of the world. Furthermore, the political and social conditions of the Stalinist era brought the institution of the Russian Orthodox Church in Russia itself to the brink of destruction. In the pre-revolutionary period, the church enjoyed state privileges, with about 90 million members organized in 67 dioceses with 163 bishops and approximately 50,000 priests, 80,000 church buildings, more than 1,200 monasteries, and 250 theological schools of different levels. After the Revolution, the church was reduced institutionally until 1939 to a small

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remnant of itself, with offcially only 4 active bishops and some 100 priests serving the same number of churches. All monasteries, all theological and non-theological schools, and all social activities of the church were offcially closed. The number of clergy and faithful killed was huge. Although the material situation of the large majority of Russian refugees abroad was precarious and at times even desperate, thanks to a signifcant number of bishops (a dozen) and priests who accompanied the exiles, the church quickly began to organize itself. Until the World War II, dozens of dioceses and hundreds of parishes were set up all over the Russian diaspora. Many times, church communities served as gathering places for political, social, and cultural activities of the diaspora. Most importantly, comparing the church in Russia with the church abroad, Russian Orthodoxy has practically shifted its center for a time from the Russian heartland to the diaspora. Beyond the number of active clergy and parishes abroad, the church in the diaspora was able to found institutions for theological training, such as those in Belgrade and Paris, and to print religious literature for both the diaspora and, through smuggling, for the church in Russia. The diaspora was able to conduct theological debates and the atheistic policy of the Communist regime of the Soviet Union was vigorously condemned. However, this shift of the ecclesiastical center from Russia to the diaspora also brought serious problems with it. Due to the conditions under which the diaspora Orthodox Church emerged, the canonical jurisdiction became a contentious issue among different groups. In a single city like Berlin or Paris, or in a broader regional context such as Western Europe or the United States, sometimes three different Russian Orthodox jurisdictions operated in parallel. With time, these groups began to show various patterns of dealing with the new situation, from trying to revive the pre-revolutionary Russian Orthodoxy in the diaspora, through adopting a gradual change in response to the new circumstances to, fnally, offcially recognizing the Patriarchate of Moscow and submitting to its canonical authority. Each group made exclusive claims of authenticity and legitimacy for itself and, except a few isolated cases, there is no reason to deny such claims to any of them. Thus, thanks to migration, a genuine Orthodox plurality emerged, even within the same ethnic group. In summary, migration and the resulting diasporas were crucial to both the beginning of Protestantism in Latin America and for the development of the Russian Orthodox Christianity in the twentieth century. FORMING AND REFORMING CHRISTIANITY Not only in its beginnings was Christianity in Rome linked with the fate of migrant communities in the imperial city. At the end of the second century, its

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composition was very heterogeneous due to the existence of different migrant groups in the capital. The controversy over the celebration of Easter among Christians in Rome around the year 195 testifes to the existence of a signifcant community of Christians from Asia Minor there, which observed the tradition of their home church of celebrating Eastern invariably on the 14th of Nisan (the so-called Quartodecimans). By contrast, Christians under Victor, the bishop of Rome, celebrated Easter only on the Lord’s Day. As a result, Victor held a synod in Rome and condemned the practice of the Quartodecimans. Christians of the Asia Minor diaspora appealed to Polycrates, bishop of Ephesus, who defended the practice of celebrating Easter on the 14th of Nisan as an apostolic tradition going back to the Apostle John. Irenaeus, bishop of Lyon, did the same, even though he himself did not observe the 14th of Nisan. Irenaeus knew this tradition well, having grown up in Asia Minor, though at the time he was living with other fellow Asia Minor Christians in Gaul. What is important here is the historical context of this Easter controversy. At the end of the second century, in cosmopolitan Rome, there was a diaspora of Asia Minor Christians who insisted on observing the religious tradition of their home church and not that of the local community. (As a side note, it took a while before the different Christian communities in Rome became subject to one single bishop.) Obviously, this community of migrants maintained tight links with the church of their country of origin—links that were perhaps stronger than those with other Christian communities in Rome. Also, they were supplied with clergy by their mother church. From the available sources, it is diffcult to make a frm assessment of the numerical strength of this diaspora. However, the fact that the bishop of Rome considered it necessary to call a synod and started a controversy with other local churches shows that not only the matter was signifcant in itself, but also the Asia Minor Christian diaspora was of great importance. This incident provides important information about the composition of Christianity in Rome at the end of the second century. Clearly, it was a church in a heterogeneous urban context with a plurality of Christian communities, some of which were organized along their ethnic origins. This situation is confrmed by a detailed analysis of literary and archeological testimonies.7 No doubt, this scenario is true not only of Rome but also to a certain extent of all cosmopolitan centers in the Roman Empire such as Alexandria, Antioch, Corinth, and so on. This insight—not quite new and surprising—should increase our awareness of the processes of migration and diaspora formation when studying Christian communities in a certain place and at a certain time. The idea of a “local church” has often misled historians to imagine it to be a homogenous local group of Christians under the jurisdiction of a church authority. On the contrary, many times, such local churches were a juxtaposition of different groups brought together in part by migration.

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Another major example of how migration changes Christianity is found in Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages, known as the “migration period” (German: Völkerwanderung). From the fourth to the seventh century, different Germanic, Hunnic, and, fnally, Slavic tribes crossed Europe from east to west and north to south, with the Vandals reaching even North Africa by 430. Through peaceful or violent interaction with the Roman Empire, they reshaped the ethnic and cultural composition of whole territories and even founded new states in the west after contributing to the downfall of the Western Roman Empire in 476. Because of the conversion of a frst group of Visigoths to a semi-Arian form of Christianity under the missionary activities of Bishop Wuffla (Ulflas) during the frst half of the fourth century in the eastern part of the Roman Empire, a majority of the German tribes remained linked to this heterodox faith long after they moved to the west. Consequently, these Germans remained for a long time separate from the Romanized orthodox Christian population. Only under King Reccared I on the Iberian Peninsula did the Visigoths turned from semi-Arianism to the Nicaean faith in 587, thus beginning the process of submission of other German tribes to the faith of the Roman Church. Subsequently, the entrance of Slavs into the Eastern Roman Empire at the beginning of the sixth century introduced an irrevocable change in the composition of Eastern Christianity, which up to that point was predominantly Greek. Even though church historians have long paid attention to such events and the changes they brought about in the church, the notion of a homogeneous church still prevails. Today, however, we are witnessing a new phenomenon that undermines that notion. There has been a spectacular growth of Christianity in the southern hemisphere, whereas it has been experiencing stagnation or shrinking in the northern hemisphere. Globally, in terms of membership, Christianity is dramatically shifting from a Western religion to one the majority of whose members live in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In addition, the migration of Christians from the non-Western world to the West is changing the profle of the church. For instance, in the United States, the European character of the Roman Catholic Church (historically with mostly Irish, Polish, or Italian roots) is fading under a strong Hispanic infuence. Many Charismatic and Free Protestant Churches in Britain have an African origin. They are made up by a growing African diaspora community but also attract the native born. Different Protestant Churches in the United States are experiencing a similar infuence of African or Asian Christianity. If church history has taken seriously into account the “Germanization” and “Slavicization” of Christianity of the Middle Ages, now a similar adjustment is called for with regard to the shift of contemporary Christianity to the southern hemisphere. This new focus of church history should include refections on newforms of Christian fellowship, liturgy, piety, interreligious dialog, and so on.

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The crucial importance of migration for church transformation is even more obvious if we consider the creation of an entirely new church, namely the “African American Christianity.” As the term suggests, this ecclesial reality emerged out of the contact between Africa and the Americas. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, forced migration brought more than twelve million Africans over the Atlantic. The Christianization of these African slaves and people with African ancestry in the New World led to the creation of a new form of Christianity from the unique experiences of these people, including Bible exegesis, theology, piety, fellowship, and worship. The African American Christianity is the religious dimension of the so-called “Black Atlantic.” During the nineteenth century, African American religious experience contributed to the formation of a noncolonial, missionary-independent form of Christianity on the African continent itself. Moreover, the African American experience was sometimes regarded by Africans as providing a direct connection to the roots of a genuine African Christianity in its recourse to the Bible and the ancient North African and Ethiopian traditions, thus breaking off the monopoly of Western missionaries.

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CHRISTIANITY AND THE URBAN SPACE As already noted, Christianity was from its very beginning associated with the urban environment. Currently, the place of religion in the urban context is investigated by the use of sociological and psychological analysis. Religion is explored from the perspective of the resources it offers to individuals and communities living in cities. Urban conditions are thought to create certain needs which are met by religious actors. The urban landscape mirrors the religious history of the city. The city is the site where religious plurality is experienced, and religion is permanently transformed. Other disciplinary approaches complete the picture.8 This is especially true of large cities which are places of encounter for people with different histories. The townsfolk are not only the people born and raised there but the sum of locals, newcomers, and temporary residents. Members of the last two groups usually go through different forms of migration when they arrive. Conversely, sometimes a city becomes the starting point for migration. Thus, the city is the place where different migrant experiences come together in a unique way. Traditionally, church history and religious studies name urban migrant churches “diaspora churches” (or religions). If such a category is imposed from outside, it implies that such religious groups do not, to a certain extent, belong to the place, their existence being regarded as merely temporary and accidental. Their permanency and lasting contribution to the religious

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landscape of the city are thereby ignored. Furthermore, empirical studies have shown that religious communities—old and new—in cities, more than anywhere else, are made up of migrants. To assume that these communities of migrants operate alongside the local religious bodies and residents is one possible way of representing the situation. But it is more likely that these migrant communities are developing in or outside established religious communities a particular religious experience which may transform the local religious landscape. In addition to this type of cities in which migrants form a new kind of Christianity, there are, especially in modern times, cities in which Christianity is the majority religion. Many colonial cities in Africa such as Cape Town, Johannesburg, Kimberley, and Nairobi; modern metropolises in Latin America such as Belo Horizonte, Brazil; and booming cities on the foundation of older urban centers such as São Paulo, Singapore, and Bombay, have been deeply shaped by migration. In this context, the role of Christianity is traditionally considered from the perspective of missionary activities of foreign missionaries to the natives. In fact, however, both missionaries and the people missioned were largely migrants. Both groups engaged in a process of adaptation to the new situation and their new social roles. In many cities of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, migrant workers of the emerging industrial areas became the new frontier for the Christian mission. In South Africa, for instance, the urban migrant population under the infuence of Christianity challenged missionary paternalism and created new religious forms, namely the so-called African Independent Churches. In this urban context, a form of nonmissionary, ethnic-overarching African Christianity emerged as a mass phenomenon. The above cases are taken from the Global South; however, the impact of migration, as has been noted above, is crucial also in regard to historically Christian European and American cities.9 The role of migration in the history of Christianity proves to be on a global scale in traditionally Christian as well as newly emerging non-Christian cities. CONCLUSION As already mentioned, this chapter does not intend to propose a “migration turn” in ecclesiastical historiography. However, migration may be a possible and at times necessary lens for widening our perspective on the past of Christianity: There are times and places where migration played no role in the expansion of Christianity, while there are other times and places where it was crucial. Certainly, the spread of Christianity cannot be fully understood only through planned or professional mission. Entire Christian branches such as the African American Christianity have their origins in migration processes.

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The spread of some Christian churches centuries ago (as, for example, the Church of the East and the Armenian Church) and in more recent times (such as Protestantism in Latin America and Russian Orthodoxy globally) cannot be explained without migration or at least without including migration as one factor among many. Furthermore, the micro-level analysis of Christianity in a certain city must include migration and diaspora communities. From a methodological point, by considering migration, we enrich our static historical maps of Christianity with maps of mobility where transfer, fuctuation, interaction, and, fnally, transformation are key elements. Thus, our understanding of the church with a more static category of “local church” must be supplemented by that of Christianity as a movement. The concept of migration represents an umbrella for different forms of mobility. The task of professional church historians is to make use of this category to paint a more accurate picture of Christianity’s past.10

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NOTES 1. Klaus Koschorke, “Religion und Migration. Aspekte einer polyzentrischen Geschichte des Weltchristentums,” Jahrbuch für Europäische Überseegeschichte, Vol. 16 (2016), 159–180. 2. John K. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 262. 3. Andrew Walls, “Sierra Leone, Afroamerican Remigration and the Beginnings of Protestantism in West Africa,” in Transcontinental Links in the History of nonWestern Christianity, ed. K. Koschorke (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2002), 55; cf. Lamin Sanneh, Abolitionists abroad. American Blacks and the Making of Modern West Africa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 4. Cf. Jean-Pierre Bastian, “Protestantism in Latin America,” in The Church in Latin America: 1492–1992, ed. Enrique Dussel (Tunbridge Wells: Burns & Oates, 1992), 321–322. 5. A short account of this event by Daniel Berg himself is printed in Klaus Koschorke, Frieder Ludwig, and Mariano Delgado, eds., History of Christianity in Asia, Africa, and Latin America: 1450–1990: A Documentary Source Book (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2007), 303. 6. Cf. for more details Ciprian Burlacioiu, “Russian Orthodox Diaspora as a Global Religion after 1918,” Studies in World Christianity, Vol. 24, no. 1 (2018), 4–24. 7. Cf. Peter Lampe, Die stadtrömischen Christen in den ersten beiden Jahrhunderten. Untersuchungen zur Sozialgeschichte (Tübingen: Mohr, 1989); cf. as well the short summary of information by the same author: “Urchristliche Missionswege nach Rom: Haushalte paganer Herrschaft als jüdisch-christliche Keimzellen,” Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft und Kunde der Älteren Kirche, Vol. 92, no. 1–2 (2001), 123–127.

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8. A recent publication with a global outreach is Irene Becci, Marian Burchardt, and Jose Casanova, eds., Topographies of Faith. Religion in Urban Spaces (Leiden: Brill, 2013). 9. Cf. the classic work of Edward P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Penguin, 2013, reprint). 10. I would like to express here my gratitude to the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, Germany, for its generous fnancial support for my work as Fellow at the Center of Theological Inquiry, Princeton, during the Spring term 2018.

Christian Theology in the Age of Migration : Implications for World Christianity, edited by Peter C. Phan, Lexington Books, 2020.

Part II

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SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY

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Chapter 7

God, the Beginning and the End of Migration A Theology of God from the Experience and Perspective of Migrants

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Peter C. Phan

This chapter is an exercise in systematic theology from the experience and perspective of migration and migrants. By “theology” here is meant not simply the quest for understanding the Christian faith in general—to use the eleventh-century theologian St. Anselm of Canterbury’s celebrated defnition of theology as fdes quaerens intellectum—but a specifc refection on God as such.1 “Systematic” refers to the logically coherent, structurally well-ordered, and epistemologically critical nature of this scholarly refection within theology as an academic discipline. Theology in general, as well as systematic refection on God, as David Tracy has proposed, is addressed to three “publics,” namely academy, church, and society, each with its own concerns, method, agenda, and criteria of coherence, adequacy, and truth.2 This theology of God from the experience and perspective of migrants and migration, while not neglectful of the academy, addresses primarily the other two publics, namely church and society, as it seeks to equip both church members and secular citizens to respond to one of the greatest challenges of our times, namely global migration. Lastly, “migrant” here refers to people who have changed residence within their countries of birth (internal displaced persons) or across national borders, either voluntarily (migrants in general) or by force (refugees). The title of the chapter, “God, the Beginning and the End of Migration,” hints at its theme and scope and requires some preliminary clarifcation. “God” here is understood in the Christian sense of the Trinitarian God and refers both to what theologians call the “Economic Trinity,” that is, God as 101

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present and acting in the world, according to God’s plan of salvation (from Greek oikonomia, literally “plan” or “design”), and the “Immanent” or “Transcendent” Trinity, that is, God in God’s eternal inner mutual relations (“persons”) as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.3 The question to be considered here then is whether God, as both the Economic Trinity and the Immanent Trinity—in that order—displays any of the features generally associated with migrants so that Christians, and migrants in particular, can call upon God as the “Migrant God.” To anticipate the thesis of our refections, it will be maintained that the Christian God is the “Beginning” and “End”—the Alpha and the Omega—of migration, taking the two terms in both their theological and temporal meanings. “Beginning” indicates God as the creative source as well as the primordial initiator of migration, and “End” describes God as both the temporal termination and the fnal goal of migration. To put it tersely, the God of the Christians is essentially Deus Migrator. One fnal preliminary observation: Since the nineteenth century, especially after Friedrich Schleiermacher (1769-1834), Western theology is generally divided into four specialties: biblical, historical, systematic (or dogmatic), and practical (or pastoral). Though this fourfold pattern has proved helpful in promoting academic specializations and organizing seminary curricula, it has been rightly criticized for fostering a silo approach to theology, each specialty having its own sources and method, thus jeopardizing the unity of theology as a mode of knowledge itself.4 To counteract this danger, in these refections on Deus Migrator, recourse will be made to what the Scottish theologian John Macquarrie calls the “formative factors” of theology, namely experience, revelation, Scripture, Tradition, culture, and reason. Needless to say, an adequate theology of migration must make use of all of these sources.5 Consequently, besides Scripture and Tradition, which together constitute the primary and unifed source of Christian theology, insights on migration will be garnered from contemporary geographical, historical, sociological, anthropological, and legal studies of migration and especially the experiences of migrants themselves to understand who the Migrant God is. YAHWEH MIGRATING WITH HIS PEOPLE For the Jewish-Christian faith, Yahweh/God’s migration in history begins with the story of Israel. There are of course many and diverse ways to narrate this story, ranging from a purely secular to a distinctly religious perspective. In telling the history of ancient Israel, it is commonplace for believers to frame it as an encounter between Yahweh/God and God’s people Israel that is punctuated by a series of paradigmatic events. These events include God’s

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call of Abraham and God’s promise to grant him and the other patriarchs land, progeny, and prosperity; the liberation of the Israelites from Egypt under the leadership of Moses; God’s covenant with the people of Israel at Mount Sinai; the occupation of the Promised Land by the twelves tribes; the establishment of the Davidic monarchy; the destruction and exile of the ten tribes in the north (Israel) to Assyria; the exile of the leaders of the two tribes in the south (Judah) to Babylonia; the return of a number of Israelites from Babylonia to Palestine; national restoration and independence; the domination by the Greeks; the conquest by the Romans; and the Diaspora.6

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BIBLICAL AND THEOLOGICAL LANGUAGE ABOUT GOD While all these events, which spanned some eighteen centuries, can be authenticated, at least in their broad outlines, by contemporaneous extrabiblical records and archeological fnds, it is their theological interpretations, proposed both within the Tanakh/Old Testament and by postcanonical writers, that are of interest here. One common thread in these interpretations, however divergent among themselves, is that the center and principal agent in the history of Israel is always God, who accompanies God’s people throughout their migrations and acts for their salvation. Another shared doctrine is that God, in spite of God’s self-revelation to Israel, remains the transcendent, sovereign, and mysterious Lord. Indeed, the name that God reveals to Moses as God’s own, namely YHWH (Exodus 3:14), came to be regarded as early as the Second Temple period following Israel’s return from exile in the ffth century BCE so sacred that its public pronunciation was forbidden. This practice powerfully bespeaks of God’s permanent mysteriousness, whose name YHWH is not susceptible of a single translation.7 As a consequence, the many different names as well as attributes that are ascribed to God in the Bible must not be understood as literalist representations of the divinity. Biblical imagery of God, even anthropomorphic metaphors, do of course tell us something real and true about God and not just our feelings and projections, as Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx would have it. However, biblical language and theological discourse (theologia) do not provide empirical descriptions of who and what God is. Rather, as Thomas Aquinas has shown, theological language is analogical, that is, similar and different. For instance, the term “king” as applied to God (e.g., “God is king”) and to humans (e.g., “Louis XIV was a king”) does not have exactly the same meaning (univocal language), nor a totally different meaning (equivocal language), but a similar-and-different meaning (analogical language). Were God-talk, or theology, univocal language, God’s transcendence and

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infniteness would be annulled. On the other hand, if it is equivocal language, it would tell nothing about God.8 Furthermore, since, as the Fourth Lateran Council IV (1215) states, there is greater dissimilarity than similarity between God and humans, and the import of our language about God is more negative than affrmative; thus, our statements about God indicate more our ignorance than our knowledge of God.9 Ultimately, we know only what God is not and not what God is. To maintain this dialectic between knowledge and ignorance in our statements about God, a triple epistemological movement must be made: First, something is affrmed of God. For instance, “God is wise” (via affrmationis). Second, this very statement is simultaneously negated: “God is not wise the way wisdom is humanly experienced” (via negationis). Third, both the affrmation and the negation are transcended (via eminentiae): “God is infnitely wise.” Were we asked what we mean by the third statement, we must confess that we do not really know. We are justifed in predicating wisdom of God because it is a perfection, but we only know what God is not, that is, God is not wise the way we know wisdom in our experience. We do not and cannot know what God is, that is, how God is “infnitely” wise, the term “infnite” being itself negative, namely nonfnite. Thus, our knowledge of God ends in ignorance. To use the celebrated expression of the ffteenth-century theologian Nicholas of Cusa, our knowledge of God is docta ignorantia (learned ignorance).10 It is vitally important to keep in mind all the foregoing observations regarding God’s absolute transcendence and the analogical nature of theological language as we refect on Deus Migrator. It must be acknowledged at the outset, among the plethora of names and attributes, that the Bible and Christian Tradition predicate of God, and none explicitly refers to God as the Migrant. Part of the reasons for this absence is that the notions of “migration” and “migrant” immediately connote weakness, destituteness, vulnerability, and movement, which at frst sight seem to contradict the traditional concept of God as the all-powerful, infnitely self-suffcient, all-perfect, and immutable Being. Yet, a careful—perhaps against the grain—reading of the story of Israel, especially its paradigmatic events enumerated above, shows that God not only commanded the migration of the ancestors of the people of Israel and migrated with God’s people throughout their migratory movements but also bears all the marks of a migrant. Of course, in carrying out these refections, we need to recall the triple movement in our statement about Deus Migrator: God is a migrant; God is not a migrant; and God is infnitely a migrant. Ultimately, what is meant by Deus Migrator can be grasped not primarily through intellectual apprehension but in the concrete experience of migration and in the effective solidarity with the migrants themselves.

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ABRAHAM THE MIGRANT ANCESTOR For Jews, Christians, and Muslims, Abram/Abraham, whose life can be reliably placed in the frst half of the second millennium BCE and whose stories are narrated in the Book of Genesis 12-25, is revered as the model of faith, trust, and obedience in God.11 The greatest test of faith for Abraham is commonly taken to be God’s command to Abraham to sacrifce his only son Isaac, who is the fulfllment of God’s covenantal promise of progeny and land (Gen 22). Abraham passed the test at Moriah, and, according to Paul, it is this faith that was reckoned to him for righteousness (Rom 4: 3-12; see Gen 15:6). As a consequence, “the Israel of God,” again according to Paul, are those who have faith; these are “Abraham’s children,” and not the physical progeny of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. For the author of the Letter of James, too, Abraham’s obedience to God’s command to sacrifce his son Isaac makes him the ancestor of Israel, though James, differently from Paul, counts this act of obedience, and not faith alone, as that which makes Abraham righteous and God’s friend (James 2:21-24). The Letter to the Hebrews too says that this act of obedience makes Abraham a model of faith (Heb 11: 17-19).12 While it is certainly valid to underscore Abraham’s obedience to God’s command to sacrifce his son as an archetype of faith, it is important to examine what Abraham has become as a result of his faith prior to this event. As the Letter to the Hebrews puts it tersely, “By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; and he set out, not knowing where he was going. By faith he stayed for a time in the land he had been promised, as in a foreign land, living in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise” (Heb 11:8-9).13 The story of Israel as a nation, properly speaking, began with God’s call to Abraham. Though in Genesis 15:7 God is reported to have said to Abraham in Canaan: “I am the LORD who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess,” God’s call was frst addressed to Abraham not in Ur but in Haran, located today in modern Turkey, about ten miles of the Syrian border, where his father Terah, his wife Sarai/Sarah, and his nephew Lot had settled on their way from Ur to Canaan (Gen 11:31). It was here that God said to Abraham: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you” (Gen 12:1). Amazingly, God’s frst act in human history, leaving aside the prehistory in Gen 1-11, was literally making Abraham into what we call today a “migrant.” God’s words “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you” no doubt resonate in the depth of the heart of every believing migrant at the beginning of her or his journey. In fact, Abraham’s life subsequent to his obedience to God’s call until his death

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was that of a seminomadic migrant, constantly on the move, a tent-dweller and not a settler in an urban environment, from Haran to the various cities of Canaan such as Shechem, Bethel, Salem, Hebron, Mamre, Beersheba, and so on to Egypt and then back to Canaan, where the only piece of land Abraham bought was the cave of Machpelah and the adjacent land near Mamre as a burial site for his wife Sarah. Because of his wealth and power, Abraham could easily have settled down in any city or in one of the many little kingdoms of his choice and become a permanent and preeminent “citizen.” But Abraham intentionally chose a migratory way of life for himself and his family, erecting tents as temporary dwellings, rather than being incorporated into the local communities. This is made clear by his decision to send his servant Eliezer back to Haran to fnd a wife for his son Isaac among his kinfolk (Gen 24) rather than letting him marry local women and be absorbed into the native population. Such was Abraham’s life-on-the move that he was considered as a resident alien (gēr), not a “citizen” (Gen 15:13; 23:4). By “citizen” is meant not in the modern sense of possessing citizenship in a nation-state, but in the sense of being the subject of a city or monarchy. In this sense, Abraham was a “citizen” of Ur. “Resident alien” refers to anyone living outside their place of birth, that is, a “stranger,” of which there are two kinds. A “sojourner” (tôśāb) was a transient, a temporary and dependent inhabitant (Lev 22:10; 25:6), whereas the “resident alien” (gēr) was a more permanent albeit still a foreigner.14 Abraham and his kinsfolk were residents alien. When trying to buy the cave of Machpelah as a burial site for his wife Sarah, Abraham said to the Hittites: “I am a stranger and an alien residing among you: give me property among you for a burial place” (Gen 23:4). Indeed, Abraham as well as Lot was regarded as “alien” by the natives of Canaan, the former in Gen 21:23 and the latter in Gen 19:9. Finally, Abraham is the frst biblical person to be called a “Hebrew” (Gen 14:13). “Hebrew,” an ethnic term, is a disparaging name used by non-Israelites to designate a group of people known as Habiru/ Apiru who were a propertyless, dependent, and immigrant social class. Thus, according to the Bible, Abraham is the frst voluntary migrant in human history. Like millions of migrants today, his father and his family migrated from Ur to Canaan in search of a better life, and not unlike many migrants, they could not reach their country of destination directly and immediately but had to settle down in intermediate places on the way. Later, Abraham himself migrated from Haran to Canaan upon God’s promise of the land that later is described as “fowing with milk and honey” (Ex 3:17), a veritable Promised Land in migrants’ imagination. Again, like millions of today migrants, he went in search of food in Egypt when there was famine where he was living (Gen 12:26).

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It was noted above that God’s frst act in human history is to make a migrant out of Abraham. Moreover, it must also be noted—a fact that has often been missed—that Yahweh not only initiated migration in human history but himself became a migrant. Rather than staying as it were behind in Haran after sending Abraham forth from his father’s country, home, and kinfolk, Yahweh accompanied Abraham and shared his migration through the many cities of Canaan and even to Egypt. In different localities, Yahweh came to Abraham in vision (Gen 15:1), apparition (Gen 17:1), theophany in a human form (Gen 18), conversation about his plan to destroy Sodom (Gen 18;17), and dream (Gen 20:6). Yahweh accompanied Abraham and made and renewed his covenant with him several times and in different places (Gen 15; 17). It is interesting to note that Yahweh also migrated in the company of Sarah’s Egyptian maid Hagar when she was sent away after her pregnancy (Gen 16:7) and, later, after the birth of Ishmael, when Hagar and her baby Ishmael were chased away from home by Sarah. They were the frst biblical “refugees” in the strict sense of the term, violently forced to leave their home and wandering in the desert of Beersheba, exposed to thirst, hunger, and death (Gen 21:16-18). Thus, Yahweh himself became a migrant with and for all migrants, and not just God’s covenanted people. God heard their weeping, even the boy Ishmael’s cries, saw their sufferings, and came to protect and bless them.

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GOD MIGRATING WITH ISRAEL, GOD’S PEOPLE-ON-THE-MOVE The motif of God migrating in the company of God’s people is even more pronounced and explicit in the story of God’s liberation of the Israelites from Egypt. Socially, politically, and economically, their “exodus” from the land of their slavery was a mass migration, one that is familiar to people of all times trying to escape persecution, oppression, and exploitation. It is most important to note what God said to Moses when he balked at God’s order to go to the pharaoh and tell him to let the Israelites go free, due to his lack of qualifcations: “I will be with you” (Ex 3:12). Note that “you” here in Hebrew is plural; that is, God promises to be not only with Moses but also with the entire people of Israel, migrating with them and protecting them with God’s “mighty hand and outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders” (Deut 26:8). God is always God-with. It is this memory of migration that the Israelites recite when they present their frst fruits to God: “A wandering [migrating] Aramean was my ancestor; he went into Egypt and lived there as an alien” (Deut 26:5).

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The Israelites’ fight from Egypt and wandering for forty years in the desert is the frst biblical mass migration. This migration and its surrounding events are presented in Ex 1-19, which provides a narrative of Egyptian oppression of the Hebrews, the origins and call of Moses as a political and religious leader, the contest with the pharaoh, the ten plagues, the celebration of the Passover, the Hebrews’ departure from their land of slavery to Canaan, the “land fowing with milk and honey,” the miraculous crossing of the Red Sea/ Sea of Reeds, and the establishment of the covenant between God and God’s people at Mount Horeb/Sinai. The remaining part of the Book of Exodus (20-40) further lists the legal and ritualistic laws contained in the Book of Covenant and narrates the construction of the portable shrine called the “Tabernacle” or the “Tent of Meeting,” the fabrication of the Ark of the Covenant which contains the two stone tablets, the Israelites’ violation of the covenant by worshipping the golden calf, the renewal of the covenant, and the fnal movements toward the Promised Land. A majority of scholars do not consider these narratives as “historiography” in the usual sense of the term, as they lack historical data that would permit the exact dating of the Exodus and the determination of the route of the Israelites’ journey to Canaan.15 However, after the skepticism of several modern historians against the historicity of the events surrounding the Israelites’ migration, many scholars today acknowledge that the narrator of the Exodus shows deep familiarity with many features of contemporaneous Egyptian culture.16 Of course, these elements of Egyptian coloration do not by themselves prove the authenticity of the Hebrews’ migration and related events as narrated, but there is no reason to doubt that there is a substantial historical core to this narrative of the Israelites’ migration from the land of their slavery and their initial formation into a nation.17 To account for repetitions, discrepancies, and theological differences within the Book of Exodus, modern critical scholarship, associated mainly with Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918), has postulated, as it has done with the Pentateuch as a whole, four documents or sources designated as Yahwistic (J), Elohist (E), Priestly (P), and Deuteronomist (D). Presumably, an editor or a series of editors or redactors, called R, combined the four sources into a single book, most likely during the Babylonian exile (586–538 BCE). This “Documentary Hypothesis” has been much critiqued and emended, especially with regard to the chronology of the four documents and how they are incorporated into the canonical text. It has been supplemented by other models such as the “Fragmentary Hypothesis,” which sees the Torah as a collection of small fragments, and the “Supplementary Hypothesis,” which sees it as a single core document supplemented by fragments taken from many sources. These hypotheses are helpful in determining the key events surrounding the migration that shaped the birth of Israel as a nation—the liberation of Israel

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from slavery in Egypt, God’s self-revelation to and covenant with Israel at Mount Sinai, and Israel’s occupation of the Promised Land. Given the centrality of this migration for our theme, it would be appropriate to explore it in greater detail. How large was this mass migration? Ex 12:37 states that “the Israelites journeyed from Rameses to Succoth, about six hundred thousand men on foot, besides children. A mixed crowd also went up with them, and livestock in great numbers, both focks and herds” (see also Num 11:21). Instead of a round number, Ex 38:26 and the Book of Numbers give a precise number of 603,550 (Num 1:46; 2:32), and Num 3:39 adds 22,000 Levites. According to Ex 38:26 and Num 1:46-47, these fgures refer to men of military age. If older men, women, children, and the “mixed crowd” are added to these men of military age, the number of migrants could amount to two and a half million. Such a huge number of people would have made the fight from Egypt and the crossing of the Red Sea a logistically impossible feat and the wanderings in the desert impracticable. Some scholars try to overcome this problem by suggesting that the Hebrew elef does not mean “thousand” but “clan” or “squad” (as in Num 1:16; Judg 6:15; and 1 Sam 10:19), reducing the purported number of 600,000 individual young men to 600 clans or squads, with a more likely total of about 72,000 people. However, this interpretation seems to contradict the explicit affrmation in Ex 38:24-26 and other passages that the number refers to individuals and not groups. Nevertheless, this number of 600,000 is most likely a hyperbole since the land of Goshen and later the Sinai Peninsula could hardly accommodate such a population. Perhaps one likely reason for the infation of the number of Hebrew migrants is to express God’s absolute power and total victory over the pharaoh. Such number infation was a common practice among Arabian Bedouins and is found in Assyrian inscriptions and annals to underline the magnitude of the event being described. As with any group of migrants, the feeing Israelites experienced doubts about the wisdom of migrating, especially when suffering from hunger, thirst, and physical danger. Then they grew nostalgic of the land of their slavery and fondly recalled sitting by the “feshpots” and eating “their fll of bread” (Ex 16:3). Such reaction on the part of migrants is, humanly speaking and apart from the context of faith, fully understandable, especially when facing the possibility of loss of life and an uncertain and risky future. Without leaders such as Moses and Aaron, the Israelites would have gone back to Egypt, just as today, without the support of others, both fellow migrants and the native born, migrants would rather return to their miserable lot in their old countries. It must be noted that however important the roles of Moses, Aaron, and the people during their migration from Egypt were, the central character of the story is not they but Yahweh, “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac,

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and the God of Jacob.” Now, during this migration, this God chose to be their God and did so through a covenant. Here, as in the Book of Genesis, this God shows Godself again as the Deus Migrator accompanying God’s people throughout their wanderings in the wilderness. Though the expression “wilderness wanderings” has become a common shorthand to describe the Hebrew migrants’ journey for “forty years” in the Sinai desert as punishment for their unfaithfulness to Yahweh, it is rather misleading if it is taken to imply that the journey was an aimless and leaderless meandering. On the contrary, the Hebrews’ migration is depicted as totally under the benevolent control of the all-powerful and ever-present God from beginning to end. Yahweh is repeatedly portrayed as a trustworthy guide and a watchful protector of the migrating Israelites, charting the route of their escape, providing them with foods and drinks in miraculous ways and defending them against their attackers. Yahweh’s guidance is symbolically represented by “a pillar of cloud by day, to lead them along the way, and in a pillar of fre by night, to give them light, so that they might travel by day and by night” (Ex 13:21). Sometimes Yahweh’s guidance of the Hebrew migrants was carried out indirectly, through the mediation of an angel: “I am going to send an angel in front of you, to guard you on the way and to bring you to the place I have prepared” (Ex 23:20). The climax of the Israelites’ migration is the covenant God established with them by which they became God’s “treasured possession out of all the peoples,” “a priestly kingdom and a holy nation” (Ex 19:5-6). God’s closeness to God’s people is also demonstrated in God’s giving them the Torah— not a set of laws but instructions for leading a faithful and holy way of life (Ex 20-23)—and guaranteeing justice for all. In particular, God enjoins justice for migrants, reminding the Hebrews of their former status as migrants: “You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt” (Ex 22:21). Clearly, the foundation for the Hebrews’ moral obligation to treat migrants with justice and kindness is their own experiences as migrants in Egypt. Another way God visibly accompanied God’s migrating people is God’s abiding in the “sanctuary,” for the construction of which God gave explicit and detailed instructions (Ex 25-27). The sanctuary, the place where God dwells among the Israelites, issues commands to them, and receives their sacrifcial worship, is referred to by three Hebrew terms: mikdash, literally “sanctuary” or “sacred place;” mishkan, literally “tabernacle” or “abode”; and ohel mo’ed, literally “tent of meeting.” The entire compound of the sanctuary is composed of three parts of descending degrees of holiness and restricted access: (a) the “Holy of Holies,” where the Ark and the Tablets are kept and is accessible only to the High Priest on the Day of Atonement; (b) the “Holy Place,” which is the “Tabernacle” proper and houses the “Tent of Meeting” and is accessible

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only to Moses and the priests; and (c) the surrounding courtyard to which the nonpriests are allowed to go. An essential feature of the sanctuary is that it is mobile; it is as it were a portable Sinai. It was erected wherever the migrants stopped, and was disassembled whenever they departed, in such way that the “Presence/Glory (kavod) of the Lord” (also referred to as Shekinah in later rabbinic tradition), symbolized by a cloud covering the sanctuary, migrated with the Israelites and abided constantly with them (Ex 40:34).18

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GOD-IN-EXILE WITH THE EXILED COMMUNITY The next mass migrations in the history of Israel are the forced deportations, frst of the ten tribes in the Northern Kingdom of Israel by the neo-Assyrian empire in 721 BCE and then of the two remaining tribes in the Southern Kingdom of Judah by the neo-Babylonian empire in 587 BCE. At the death of Solomon in 922 BCE, the Davidic-Solomonic “united kingdom” collapsed. Solomon’s son Rehoboam, who was slated to continue the Davidic dynasty, was rejected by the assembly of “all Israel,” that is, the northern tribes, at Shechem (1 Kings 12:1) because he refused to abolish Solomon’s imposition of forced labor and heavy taxation. Instead, Jeroboam was chosen to establish the Northern Kingdom as politically and religiously independent of Judah. Of the two kingdoms, which would coexist alongside each other for about 200 years, the Northern Kingdom, known as Israel, with the center in Samaria, and with a population of 800,000, was the more powerful and prosperous but politically highly unstable, having nineteen kings, only ten of whom legally succeeded to the throne and seven were assassinated. The Southern Kingdom, which was known as Judah, with a much smaller population of 200,000, and developed signifcantly later than the Northern Kingdom, was politically stable, thanks largely to the legitimacy of the Davidic dynasty, the centrality of the city of Jerusalem, and its Temple as the focus of the nation’s political identity and religious life. The survival of these two tiny kingdoms, which never constituted a united kingdom and indeed often were rivals, depended on their political alliances with the powerful empires of Assyria and Babylonia to the east and Egypt to the south. When the king of Israel Pekah attempted to rebel against Assyria and joined Aram (Syria) in an anti-Assyrian coalition, the king of Assyria Tiglath-Pileser reduced Israel to a rump state ruled by Hoshea (r. 732–724) and deported 13,529 people to Assyria, marking the beginning of the Diaspora of the ten northern tribes (2 Kings 15:29). When in turn Hoshea ceased to be a compliant vassal, stopped paying tribute, and attempted to enlist the aid of Egypt to throw off the Assyrian domination, the Assyrian monarch Shalmaneser V, and his successor Sargon II laid siege to Samaria for three

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years, destroyed it, and incorporated what remained of the Northern Kingdom into the Assyrian provincial system. What is of interest to us is that following the Assyrian policies of population deportation to prevent pro-independence revolts, Shalmaneser dispersed the conquered Israelites from Samaria to Gozan on the Upper Habor River, to Halah beyond the Tigris northeast of ancient city of Nineveh, and to towns on the Persian plateau (2 Kings 17:6). The number of the exiles in this forced migration from the Northern Kingdom is not given in the Bible. The Israeli archeologist Israel Finkelstein estimates that only a ffth of its population, about 40,000, were actually deported. Many also fed south to Jerusalem, whose population appears to have expanded fvefold during this period. Furthermore, no reliable historical details are available about the ultimate fate of these ten tribes; numerous, some fantastic, claims have been made as to where they settled permanently.19 At any rate, however big the number of deportees was, this dispersion or diaspora of the Israelites constitutes a forced migration of immense signifcance. By 721, with the dispersion of the ten northern tribes, the kingdom of Israel ceased to exist as an independent nation, its towns populated by non-Israelite immigrants brought in from other parts of the Assyrian empire, who were called “Samaritans” and would later be regarded as ethnically non-Jewish and religiously impure.20 It is interesting to note that the Bible does not say whether God accompanied these exiles and refugees of the Northern Kingdom when they were deported from their country. Perhaps the reason for this failure to affrm God’s presence and migration with the Israelite exiles is that, contrary to the liberation of the Hebrews from Egypt, which was an act of God’s love and power, the destruction of the Northern Kingdom is seen by the Deuteronomist historian(s) as God’s punishment for the apostasy of its kings and people. However, given the Deuteronomist theology that divine punishment is inherently an invitation to repentance, it may be said that God was not absent from the dispersed ten tribes but migrated and dwelt with them since they remained God’s own people in virtue of God’s eternal and irrevocable covenant with them. In contrast to the exile of the Israelites of the Northern Kingdom in 721, a more detailed narrative is given of the destruction of the Southern Kingdom of Judah, Jerusalem, the Temple, and the fnal exile of the Judean people in 586 BCE. According to the historical books such as 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, and 1 and 2 Chronicles, David, a shepherd from Bethlehem and anointed by the prophet Samuel to replace Saul, became the king of both Judah and Israel after his victory over Ish-bosheth, one of Saul’s surviving sons and the ruler of Israel, at Gibeon. To unify the two kingdoms, David conquered Jerusalem, the Jebusite city on the border of Judah and the northern tribes, and made it the capital of the new nation. He also made Jerusalem the

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religious center by moving the Ark of the Covenant there (1 Sam 6-10). One of David’s most cherished dreams is to build a house for Yahweh, or, more precisely, for the Ark of Alliance. As it turned out, God declared through the prophet Nathan that it would not be David but his son Solomon who would build a temple for God. Notably, God’s words to David in the Deuteronomist account confrm what is said above about God’s migrating with the Hebrews and dwelling in the Tabernacle during their wanderings in the desert: “Are you the one to build me a house to live in? I have not lived in a house since the day I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt to this day, but I have been moving about in a tent and a tabernacle” (1 Sam 7:6, italics added). Among Solomon’s many accomplishments, the most prominent, from the religious point of view, is the building of the Temple (1 Kings 5-8). What the Temple represents in terms of God’s dwelling with God’s people, especially in the context of migration, will be elaborated below. As mentioned above, after Solomon’s death, the ten northern tribes seceded from Judah to form the Northern Kingdom of Israel, which came to an end in 721. After the destruction of its northern counterpart, Judah struggled on, entangled in the political ambitions and military conquests of the two empires, Assyria to the east and Egypt to the south. Toward the end of the eighth century, one of its kings, Hezekiah, rebelled against Assyria in an attempt to regain independence. His revolt was ruthlessly quashed by the Assyrian king Sennacherib, who destroyed most of the cities and towns of Judah, except Jerusalem in exchange for a heavy tribute (701 BCE). At the end of the seventh century BCE, Assyria was overthrown by a resurgent Babylonia. In the initial years of this new empire, Judah attempted to assert independence, especially during the reign of the king Josiah (640-609), who carried out a religious reform on the basis of Deuteronomist theology. After Josiah’s untimely death in the battle of Megiddo (609) at the hands of the Egyptian pharaoh Necho (609), Judah rapidly declined. When, under the kings Jehoiakim and Zedekiah, the country allied itself with Egypt and rebelled against Babylonia, the king of Babylonia Nebuchadnezzar laid siege to Jerusalem in 597 and 586, and in the latter military campaign, destroyed the city, burnt down the Temple, and brought the Davidic dynasty to an end. Moreover, he deported a number of the royal and priestly elites, among whom the king Jehoiachim and the prophet Ezechiel, to Babylon. Others escaped to Egypt, including the prophet Jeremiah, settling in Alexandria and on the island of Elephantine, near Syene (modern Aswan).21 This sixth-century BCE migration decimated the political and religious leadership of the Judean population, though a signifcant number of Judeans remained in the country. Due to these migrations, a large proportion of Jews would live outside the land of Israel, constituting the Jewish Diaspora. Now, the Torah and other writings of the Hebrew Bible replaced the core

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institutions to shape the identity of the Jews. As the migration of the Hebrews from Egypt in the thirteenth century had shaped their identity as God’s covenanted people and a nation, this migration of the Judeans in the sixth century (leaving aside the migration of the Israelites in the eighth century) contributed greatly to the formation of a new Jewish identity and way of life in the Diaspora in place of the traditional markers of Jewish identity—land, kingship, temple, priesthood, and sacrifces—which had been irretrievably lost. Once again, migration, which now became a permanent feature of Jewish life and history and not simply their sporadic events, played a key role in transforming the religion of Judah into what would later be called Judaism, which would not have come into existence and would not persist and evolve into new forms until today without such migration.22 Facing this monumental loss, it is natural that Judean migrants would cry out: “By the rivers of Babylon—there we sat down and there we wept, when we remembered Zion” (Ps 137:1). Asked by their captors to play musical instruments and sing songs to entertain them, the migrants hang their harps on the willows and lamented: “How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” (Ps 137:4). Poignantly, they asked where God was in all their forced migrations and their sojourn in “a foreign land.” God’s seeming absence was thought to be the result of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Of this First Temple nothing remains, and what can be known of it is derived from its descriptions in 1 Kings 6-7 and 2 Chronicles 3-4, though the latter text is late and seems to have imported certain features of the Tabernacle and the post-exilic Second Temple. What the Temple represents is stated by Solomon in his dedication prayer: “I have built you an exalted house, a place for you to dwell in forever” (1 Kings 8:13). It is the place where the Deus Migrator settled down among his people. How God dwells in the Temple is variously expressed by the Priestly and the Deuteronomic Schools. According to the former, the Temple is the place where God manifests God’s kavod, translated as “glory,” or “majesty,” or “glorious substance.” Kavod is God’s shining radiance which overwhelms those who gaze upon it and is shrouded by a cloud. According to the latter, God dwells in the heavenly realm and not in the Temple; the Temple contains not the transcendent God but only God’s “name,” which can be called upon there. God’s “Glory” and “Name” are the two ways the migrating God is said to dwell in the Temple. As to the presence of Yahweh among his migrating people, according to the prophet Ezechiel’s vision, when the Temple was destroyed in 586, God, or the “Presence of the Lord” (the divine kavod), left not only the Temple but also the city of Jerusalem on the chariot-throne carried off by the cherubim as they lifted their wings and ascended from the earth (Ezek 10:18-19). Ezechiel does not say where the Glory of the Lord went, only that God’s departure

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from the Temple and the city was a sign of God’s abandonment of the sinful city and the defled Temple (Ezek 9:9-10). But it is not far-fetched to argue that if God’s presence was not limited to Mount Zion and if God could freely leave God’s dwelling there, God could follow the Judeans into exile and protect them. Indeed, this is what biblical history affrms, as God is shown to have guided the exiled people through leaders such as Ezechiel, DeuteroIsaiah, Daniel, Esther, Zerubbabel, Ezra, and Nehemiah.23

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GOD THE-RETURNING-MIGRANT WITH THE COMMUNITY OF HOMECOMING MIGRANTS Most, if not all, migrants, not only seasonal immigrants but also settlers, nourish the dream of going home, if not for permanent resettlement, then at least for a long visit. For the Jews in Babylonia, homecoming was not inspired by nostalgia for the old country but by God’s promise to them through the prophet Ezechiel and the prophet (man or woman) now referred to as Deutero-Isaiah (40-53). Ezechiel, addressing his fellow migrants in Babylonia, narrates his vision of a valley full of dry bones which were brought to life by God’s breath. The revival of the dead bones symbolizes the restoration of the Jewish exiles to their own land to form a single nation, no longer divided into the Northern Kingdom (Israel) and the Southern Kingdom (Judah), with David’s descendants as their king (Ezek 37:1-28).24 The fulfllment of Ezechiel’s prophecy began in 539 BCE when King Cyrus allowed Judean migrants to return to Judah with the captured Temple treasures under Zerubbabel’s leadership. In 458 BE, the priest Ezra won the approval of Artaxerxes to bring additional migrants home. The third return of Judean migrants to Jerusalem took place under Nehemiah in 445 BCE. The prophet Deutero-Isaiah lived in Babylonia a generation after the Babylonian empire destroyed the Judean state and exiled much of its population (587 BCE). He promised his fellow migrants that the Persian king Cyrus, who he anticipated would defeat Assyria, would allow them to return to their homeland and to rebuild the Temple there. From chapter 49 on, the prophet seems to be living in the land of Judah, where he likely moved as soon as Cyrus allowed the migrants to go home in 539 BCE. As often happens with returning migrants, reality falls far short of their dreams. Both Ezechiel and Deutero-Isaiah predicted that the return to Judah would usher in the reestablishment of Israel and Judah as one nation under the Davidic dynasty, an era of world peace and prosperity, and the universal acknowledgment of the rule of God by all nations. In fact, however, as the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah show, only a small number of migrants chose to return home; those who prospered remained in Babylonia and vicinity,

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especially in Nippur. Many prosperous Judean migrants chose to remain in the foreign lands, including Egypt, where life was much more comfortable, and became the nucleus of a large and highly infuential Jewish Diaspora community. Furthermore, Judah did not become an independent nation but remained an impoverished and insignifcant Persian province of Yehud. The rebuilding of the Temple was not completed until 516 BCE, over twenty years after Cyrus’s permission to repatriate, and the construction of Jerusalem’s wall under Nehemiah in 445 BCE was fercely opposed. In addition, there were severe conficts between those who returned from the Diaspora and those who had not gone into exile, the former group, more powerful, cosmopolitan, and educated, styled themselves as the “children of the exile” and contemptuously referred to the latter group as “people of the land” (am ha’aretz) whose “Jewishness” was deemed questionable. Again, as often happens in returning migrant communities, there was the issue of authentic national and cultural identity, especially in cases of racially and ethnically mixed marriages. The most important task of the returnees was to rebuild the Temple, for which Ezechiel provides a lengthy and detailed description (40-48). Ezechiel’s earlier visions of God’s departure from Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple (1-7; 9-11) are complemented by his visions while in exile of the rebuilding of the Temple and the return of God’s Presence (40-43). In these visions, the prophet was transported back to the site of the Temple and was given to see the future Temple with its walls, gates, courtyards, architectural plan, functionaries, and sacrifces. Furthermore, Ezechiel saw the return of the Presence of God to the Temple through the eastern gate from which it had earlier departed. God said to Ezechiel in the inner court: “This is the place of my throne and the place for the soles of my feet, where I will reside among the people of Israel forever” (43:7). Thus, in this new phase of the history of the covenanted people’s migration, God assumed a new role, that of the “Returning Migrant,” dwelling with the returning migrants as they rebuilt their nation, their center of worship, and their cultural and religious identity. GOD AND THE JEWISH DIASPORA AMONG THE WORLD EMPIRES During the Persian period (539–333 BCE), to construct and strengthen a distinctly Jewish community, returning migrants from Babylonia were intensely engaged in collecting, revising, and editing works they considered foundational to their identity as God’s covenanted people, such as the writings of the older prophets, works now referred to as Deuteronomistic History, and the Psalter. New works were composed as well, such as 1 and 2 Chronicles, Ezra,

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Nehemiah, and many others. Yahweh is believed to be present through his Spirit guiding the returning migrants in this process of national and religious reconstruction by means of scriptural composition and canonization. This two-century period was followed by the Hellenistic period (333–63 BCE), which began when Philip of Macedonia, and then his son Alexander the Great, attempted to overthrow the Persian empire as it tried to extend its power into Asia Minor. After his rapid and spectacular conquests, Alexander died in 323 at the age of 32, leaving his far-fung empire, from Greece all the way to India, to be carved out among his satraps, including Ptolemy and Seleucus. The Ptolemies ruled Egypt, Libya, and Arabia; and the Seleucids Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and parts of India. The wars between the Ptolemies and the Seleucids carried enormous consequences for Judea and Jerusalem, which were wedged between the two empires and torn apart by internal proPtolemaic and pro-Seleucid factions. During this period, migration again played a signifcant role in expanding the Jewish community. During his frst attempts at conquering of the eastern Mediterranean territory, Ptolemy I captured Jerusalem and took many Jews back to Egypt. Later, many Jews migrated there, probably for economic reasons. In Alexandria, Egypt, there was a large Jewish Diaspora community. In the island of Elephantine, the Jews worshiped in a temple of their own though they kept contact and consulted with Jerusalem to settle various religious matters. By the Roman period, after 63 BCE, there were in Egypt hundreds of thousands of Jews, including many wealthy and infuential families. It was in Alexandria that the Hebrew Bible was frst translated into Greek, commonly referred to as the Septuagint (LXX), so named after the legend that in 275 BCE, Ptolemy II Philadelphus commissioned seventy-two Jewish scholars to translate the Hebrew Bible into Greek, a task they completed in seventy-two days. Thus, it was thanks to Jewish migrants that Judaism was propagated not only geographically, outside the country of its birth, but also culturally, in languages other than Hebrew. Meanwhile, there were also Jewish migrants who settled in eastern Mesopotamia. Though not much is known about these Diaspora communities, it is most likely that there were lots of contacts between these Jewish migrant communities and the religions of Babylonia and Persia, especially Zoroastrianism. Thanks to this interreligious exchange, a new biblical genre developed, namely apocalyptic literature, which refects the dualistic beliefs of Persian Zoroastrianism. The eventual triumph of the Seleucid dynasty over the Ptolemies in 198 BCE brought about profound changes to the Jews of Judea. Though the Seleucid king Antiochus III allowed Jews to practice their religions, the Seleucid empire governed through a network of Greek cities (polis) with their political, economic, and cultural systems. Unfortunately, conficts arose between the

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Jews and the next Seleucid king, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, when two rival Jews, Jason and Menelaus, curried favor with Antiochus IV for the offce of the high priesthood. Jason paid Antiochus to have Jerusalem established as a Greek polis, whereas Menelaus sold the golden vessels of the Temple to raise money to pay Antiochus. When the forces of Jason and Menelaus went to war with each other, Antiochus took this violence to be Judea’s revolt and sent in Syrian troops, who retook the city of Jerusalem and ransacked the Temple. In 167, the Temple was reorganized to accommodate the religious needs of the Syrian-Greek troops and was dedicated to Zeus Olympus, and an altar was set up to offer sacrifces to Zeus. Furthermore, circumcision and the observance of the Sabbath were proscribed. These acts were met with resistance by the Jews, and the Hasmoneans, Mattathias and his three sons, Judas Maccabeus, Jonathan, and Simon, led what is known as the “Maccabean Revolt.” In 146, they retook control of the Temple and rededicated it, giving rise to the festival of Hanukkah. It was however not until 142 that Simon was able to establish national independence, and the Hasmonean family ruled the country as both kings and high priests until the Roman conquest of Judea in 63 BCE. In response to a series of Jewish revolts, the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE, and another Jewish, much larger and much longer, Diaspora/migration began.

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THE GOD OF JESUS CHRIST: THE PRIMORDIAL MIGRANT According to the Christian Faith, Yahweh, the Deus Migrator of the Jews, came to be present in the fesh, frst with the Jews and through them with the whole humanity. Central to Christianity is the belief that God, more precisely the Son or Word of God, is incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth. As the Gospel of John affrms, “the Word became fesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth” (Jn 1:14). Though the idea of God’s becoming fesh is often seen as a major dividing line between Judaism and Christianity, biblical and Second Temple Judaism, as we have seen, strongly affrms God’s presence among God’s people, especially during their migrations, and that God at times appeared in human and angelic forms (see Gen 18). GOD “TABERNACLED” AMONG US The verb “lived” in “lived among us” in Jn 1:14 translates the Greek eskēnōsen, literally “tabernacled,” an allusion to the wilderness Tabernacle,

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the precursor of Salomon’s Jerusalem Temple, which was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar and replaced by the Second Temple, itself destroyed by the Romans. It may also be connected with the Hebrew shekinah, a technical term for God’s presence among God’s people, which in turn is the equivalent of the Tanakh’s kavod, God’s radiant glory. Given the intimate historical connection between Yahweh’s tabernacle, shekinah and kavod on the one hand and Yahweh’s migration with his covenanted people on the other, as has been shown above, it is possible to affrm that there is also an intimate connection between the Christian God, who is confessed to be one God in three personal relations named Father, Son, and Holy Spirit on the one hand and the many migrations of the community of Jesus’ disciples on the other. In later chapters we will discuss how Jesus of Nazareth was essentially a migrant, indeed the “Paradigmatic Migrant,” and how the Holy Spirit is the “Power of Migration.” Here, our task is to construct a theology of the Christian God as Deus Migrator or “the Primordial Migrant” or “God-onthe-Move.” Of course, as has been argued above, the threefold movement of affrmation-negation-transcendence in God-talk must also be applied: God is, is not, and is infnitely a migrant. With this caution in mind, we can explore how the Christian God can be thought of as the Primordial Migrant. Even though the term “migrant” is not predicated of God in the Bible, there are hints suggesting that God possesses most, if not all, the characteristics commonly associated with migration and migrants.25

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DIVINE IMMUTABILITY AND GOD’S MIGRATION Before broaching a theology of God as Deus Migrator, a philosophical objection must be considered. The notion of the Migrating God, however wellfounded from the biblical point of view, meets a formidable challenge from the metaphysics of God’s immutability. Migration means movement and change. To explain the possibility of change in the world, Aristotle argues that in order for there to be movement at all, there must be ho ou kinoumenon kinei (the Unmoved Mover), proton kinoun akineton (the Prime Mover), protaitios (the First Cause), that which moves everything in the universe but is itself not moved by any prior mover. This Unmoved or Prime or First Mover/ Cause is named God. Subsequently, classical metaphysics of substance argues that God as the Unmoved Mover implies that God is immutable and impassible. Hence, it does not seem correct to speak of God as “migrating” in space and time and sharing the sufferings of migrants. Over against this substance metaphysics, it has been pointed out that it does not follow from the notion of “Unmoved” that God cannot be conceived as living, and, hence, “moving.” Aristotle himself holds that in God “unmoved”

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and “life” are not mutually incompatible; as he puts it, “life also belongs to God; for the actuality of thought is life, and God is that actuality, and God’s essential actuality is life most good and eternal. We say therefore that God is a living being, eternal, most good, so that life and duration continuous and eternal belong to God; for this is God.”26 Furthermore, it is to be noted that in denying change and suffering in God the intent is not to deny movement in God but to affrm God’s absolute perfection or God’s eternal and perfect life. What is denied is the idea that there is within God change as increase from imperfection to perfection, from lack to fullness (or as Aristotle puts it, from potency to act), and loss of perfection and fullness. But this denial of change in God does not entail that God cannot and does not “move,” “change,” and “suffer,” not out of necessity or by chance, but out of God’s own all-powerful will and infnite love.27 At any rate, whatever philosophical arguments can be mounted in defense of God’s immutability and impassibility, from the point of view of the Christian faith in God’s creation of the world and especially in God’s incarnation in Jesus of Nazareth, it is incontrovertible that there are “events” or “movements” in God. These events or movements, while not entailing increase in or loss of divinity and attributing temporality in the sense of successive moments of time in God, do affrm a real movement within God.

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GOD’S THREE MIGRATORY ACTS: CREATION, INCARNATION, CONSUMMATION From the perspective of the Christian faith, there are three divine acts whereby God as it were freely “leaves” the “home” of Godself (the Immanent Trinity) and “migrates” to another “country,” that is, the “world”—human and cosmic—and assumes a new way of existing and acting (the Economic Trinity). These three acts are creation, incarnation, and consummation. Though these acts are performed in a common and undivided manner by one God, they are “proper” to each of the three divine persons and express their distinctive characteristics: The Father as creator, the Son as incarnated, and the Holy Spirit as consummator, and it is in these proper and distinctive modalities that the three divine persons relate themselves to humans and humans to them. In other words, humans relate to the Father (and not to the Son and the Holy Spirit) as his creatures and sons and daughters; to the Son (and not to the Father and the Holy Spirit) as his fellow human beings and brothers and sisters; and to the Holy Spirit (and not the Father and the Son) as her transformed and perfected creation. As these three acts are performed by God in (not before and after) time and in the world, I suggest that they may be interpreted as God’s migratory acts

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in which God goes out of Godself and returns to Godself. This exitus-reditus schema, which has an ancient and venerable pedigree, is commonly used to describe the journey of creatures coming out of God (their origin) and returning to God (their end), especially since Thomas Aquinas made use of it to organize his Summa Theologiae, though without the neo-Platonic emanationist overtones. To describe this process in terms of migration, creatures may be said to have made the “original migration” out of God, their native country as it were, and are now doing the “return migration” back to God, their native homeland, not unlike the Hebrews migrating out of Egypt and settling in the Promised Land as God’s covenanted people, and the Judeans migrating out of Judea, from which they had been exiled, and returning to it to rebuild their national and religious community. What has not been done is to refect systematically on how the Christian God himself is the Deus Migrator/Primordial Migrant, accompanying all migrants and migrating with them in their distinctive roles as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Not only do the creatures embark upon the “going-out-andcoming-back” migration, out of and back to God, but also the Trinitarian God has undertaken the same migratory movement. Indeed, it is only because God migrates out of Godself and in the company of and in solidarity with migrants that human migration is possible. Indeed, as noted above, it was Yahweh’s frst words in history, those addressed to Abraham (apart from the prehistory of Genesis 1-11), that started the frst human migration. God’s migration into history is the condition of possibility for human migrations in history. What has been said above about Yahweh migrating with and dwelling among the Jewish migrants must be applied to the God of Jesus Christ, who migrates with all migrants throughout human history.

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CREATION AS GOD THE FATHER’S MIGRATION Whereas God the Son’s incarnation in Jesus of Nazareth, especially his ministry during which he was an itinerant preacher, can readily be seen as an act of migration, making him the Paradigmatic Migrant, and whereas the Holy Spirit as giver of life and consummator of history can naturally be seen as the Power of Migration, it is not immediately obvious that God the Father’s creative act be understood as a migratory act. Part of the diffculty in thinking divine creation as divine migration lies in the fact that in the biblical tradition and especially in later theological developments, God’s creative act is presented as an act of God’s omnipotence and omniscience. Among the many Hebrew terms referring to God’s creative act, bārā̛, which is exclusively used for divine activity, bespeaks free and uncircumscribed power. Its Greek equivalent, ktizō, denotes acts of intelligence

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and freewill. The frst account of creation, Gen 1:1-2:4 presents God as the absolute Lord over matter and time who creates by God’s word alone. As Ps. 33:9 proclaims: “Let all the earth fear the Lord; let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him. For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood frm.” Creation is the deed of God’s power; there is no instrument and no collaborator, a kind of demiurge, no necessity and no process of emanation. Thus, created things, by their coming into existence, proclaim the immensity of divine power and their utter dependence on it. Later, biblical texts express this understanding of divine creation as an act of absolute power with the idea of creation ex nihilo (creation out of nothing). Thus, in 2 Macc 7:28 the mother of the Maccabees says to her son: “I beg you, my child, to look at the heaven and the earth and see everything that is in them, and recognize that God did not make them out of things that existed.” The Fifth Lateran Council in 1215 professes that God is “one principle of all things, creator of all things invisible and visible, spiritual and corporeal; who by his almighty power at the beginning of time created from nothing (de nihilo) both spiritual and corporeal creatures, that is to say, angelic and earthly.”28 This view of God’s creation as an act of power from nothing, that is, without making use of and dependence upon preexisting matter, is deeply connected with that of God’s providence, which implies God’s preserving all things in existence (conservatio), acting with fnite, secondary causes in the world (concursus), and directing history toward God’s purpose and goal (gubernatio). However, while this theology of creation is rooted in the biblical and theological traditions, God’s creative act must also be viewed from the perspective of God himself by examining the risks that God undertakes upon Godself by creating an “Other” endowed with intelligence and freedom. Human freedom, though created, remains uncontrollable and unpredictable, even for God, otherwise it is not genuine freedom. Without creating, God would have maintained God’s absolute power and total independence. On the contrary, in creating humans and endowing them with intelligence and freewill, God lays Godself open to being rejected by them and not given welcome and hospitality in the very world God created and continuously creates through the process of evolution (creation continua). The creating God cannot fulfll God’s purposes without the consent and collaboration of free human beings. Such dependence is voluntarily and freely assumed by God inasmuch as God’s creative act is not done under inner necessity but out of gratuitous love. Whereas the view of God’s creation as an act of sovereign power founders in the presence of evil, especially moral evil, in the perspective of creation as God’s going out into the world of creatures endowed with fnite and fallible freedom, evil and sin are possible, even inevitable (albeit not necessary).

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Indeed, that is what happened, according to Genesis 3, where Adam and Eve are said to have disobeyed God’s command not to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God’s vulnerability to human betrayal is indicated by the fact that he appears to have been taken by surprise by the frst human beings’ sinful act: Upon asking where they were, and being told by them that they were hiding because of their nakedness, God asked them who had told them that they were naked and whether they had eaten the forbidden fruit (Gen 3:11). In this perspective, God’s creation can be interpreted as God’s migration out of what is divine into what is not divine, the “other” of God, a movement that bears all the marks of human migration. In creating that which is other than Godself, God crosses the border between Absolute Spirit and fnite matter, migrating from eternity to temporality, from omnipotence into weakness, from self-suffciency (aseity) to utter dependence, from secure omniscience to fearful ignorance, from the total domination of the divine will over all things to the utter subjection of the same will to the uncontrollability and unpredictability of human freedom, from immortality to death. In the creative act, God experiences for the frst time the precarious, marginalized, threatened, and endangered condition of the migrant. Like migrants, God enters a new country, that is, the world, and its inhabitants may not, indeed, as it turned out, not only did not offer him welcome and hospitality but also put him to death. God remains a stranger and a resident alien, even though God has every right to be a citizen in that country, since after all God has created that country and all its inhabitants. Like God, migrants risk not only rejection but also death at the hands of the native people, and in their tragic condition they know that they are not alone and abandoned, since in the act of creating a world other than God, God assumes the condition of a migrant. MIGRANTS AS IMAGES OF DEUS MIGRATOR Thus, the migrant is not only the imago Dei, as any other human being equally is, created in the image and likeness of God, which is the ontological ground of the human rights. As such, the migrant possesses all the human rights which must be respected by all.29 However, as imago Dei, the migrant does not enjoy any stronger claim to human dignity and human rights than the citizens of the host country, or anyone else for that matter.30 What is distinctive and unique about the migrant is that he or she is the imago Dei Migratoris, the privileged, visible, and public face of the God who chooses, freely and out of love, to migrate from the safety of God’s eternal home to the strange and risky land of the human family, in which God is a foreigner

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needing embrace, protection, and love. Thus, when the migrant is embraced, protected, and loved, the Deus Migrator is embraced, protected, and loved. By the same token, when the migrant as imago Dei Migratoris is rejected, marginalized, declared “illegal,” imprisoned, tortured, or killed, it is the original of that image, the Deus Migrator, who is subjected to the same inhuman and sinful treatment. Thus, the theology of God as Deus Migrator is the foundation for a Christian ethics of migration.

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NOTES 1. See St. Anselm, Proslogion II–IV, in St. Anselm: Basic Writings, trans. S. N. Deane (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1962), 7–10. This understanding of theology has been anticipated by St. Augustine. 2. See David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology (New York: Crossroad, 1975), 3–14 and The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Crossroad, 1987), 3–46. 3. On this distinction, see Karl Rahner, The Trinity, trans. Joseph Donceel (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970), 21–33. 4. On this fourfold pattern of theology and a critique of it, see Edward Farley, Theologia: The Fragmentation and Unity of Theological Education (Minneapolis: Augsburg Press, 1994). 5. See John Macquarrie, Principles of Christian Theology (London: SCM Press, 2003). 6. Any history of Israel offers a synopsis of these major events. See the three chapters entitled “Biblical Geography,” “Biblical Archeology,” and “A History of Israel” in The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, ed. Raymond E. Brown, Joseph A. Fitzmeyer, and Roland E. Murphy (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1990), 1175–1252. I will use “Israelites” to refer to the people of the Old Testament from 950 BCE to 576 BCE (the period of the First Temple), “Judeans” from 520 BCE to 70 CE (the period of the Second Temple), and “Jews” from 90 CE to our time (the period of Rabbinic Judaism). See John J. Pilch, The Cultural Dictionary of the Bible (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1999), 100–101. 7. YHWH, (’ehyeh ’ašer ’ehyeh) can be rendered as “I am that I am,” “I am who I am,” I am what I am,” “I will be who I will be,” and “I create what I create.” In Exodus 3:14, Moses is told by God to tell the Israelites that “I AM” has sent him to them, with I AM functioning as a personal name. Since YHWH is not to be pronounced, in its place readers are to say: “The Name” (shema) or “The Lord” (Adonai). 8. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I.13.5. In his Summa Contra Gentiles, Book I, Question 3, Thomas says: “Concerning God, we cannot know what he is, but only what he is not, and how other things stand in relation to him.” 9. On the Fourth Lateran Council, see Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils: Nicaea I-Lateran V. Vol 1 (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1990), 232: “For between creator and creature there can be noted no similarity so great that a greater dissimilarity cannot be seen between them.”

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10. See Jasper Hopkins, Nicholas of Cusa on Learned Ignorance: A Translation and Appreciation of De Docta Ignorantia (Minneapolis: The Arthur Banning Press, 1985). The theology of God in this tradition is called apophatic or negative theology (theologia negativa). 11. I prescind from the discussion of the various theories regarding the historicity of Abraham proposed by biblical scholars such as Julius Wellhausen, Hermann Gunkel, Martin North, William F. Albright, Ephraim A. Speiser, Thomas L. Thompson, J. Van Seters, Alan R. Millard, and others, suggesting that the biblical Abraham is a free invention, or a literary construction, or a substantially historical fgure. 12. Biblical scholars have pointed out that there are three accounts of the call of the patriarch, called Abram in the frst two narratives and Abraham in third. In the frst (Gen 12), attributed to the so-called Yahwistic author (J), the focus is on Yahweh’s promise of the land of Canaan. In the second (Gen 15), attributed to the Elohist source (E), the focus is on God’s promise of numerous progeny after God’s cutting a covenant with Abram. The third (Gen 17), ascribed to the Priestly source (P), focuses less on land and more on progeny through Sarah, that is, Isaac, and though his change of name from Abram to Abraham, the patriarch becomes not only the progenitor of Israel but also “the ancestor of a multitude of nations” (Gen 17:4). This story of Abraham of the Hebrew Scriptures is creatively interpreted by the New Testament writers such as Paul for whom God’s promise of land and progeny plays no role (Mt 3:9; Jn 8:39); instead, it is Abraham’s faith that becomes central, on account of which those who believe, including the Gentiles, are Abraham’s true descendants. It is interesting to note that the Qur’an views Abraham as neither Jew nor Christian but as a hanif, that is, an Arab monotheist, one who has submitted himself to the one and only God (muslim). See Patrick J. Ryan, Amen: Jews, Christians & Muslims Keep Faith with God (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2018), 44–77. 13. The New Revised Standard Version is used throughout this chapter. 14. For an explanation of these three terms, see John J. Pilch, A Cultural Handbook to the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012), 59–62. 15. Most scholars date the Exodus to the middle of the thirteenth century BCE, likely between 1260 and 1220, under the Pharaoh Rameses II. As for the Israelites’ migration from Egypt to Canaan, there were three possible routes once they were out of the Egyptian eastern borders. The frst, easier and quicker, is along the northern Sinai coast (the “Way to the Land of the Philistines”) but was forbidden by God (Ex 13:17). The second, which runs across the barren and waterless desert of Shur in the central part of the Sinai Peninsula (the “Way of Shur”), is impracticable. The third, the most likely, is toward the southern part of the Sinai Peninsula (the “Way of the Sea”), where Mount Sinai/Horeb is located, and from there moves northeast, toward Kadesh-barnea. 16. For a discussion of these features, see Nahum Sarna, Exploring Exodus: The Origins of Biblical Israel (New York: Schocken Books, 1986). 17. See Kenneth A. Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006). 18. It is to be noted that this theology of God as Deus Migrator is reconstructed on the basis of the narrative of the Book of Exodus, irrespective of whether the settlement of the Israelites in Canaan was by way of “conquest,” “peaceful infltration,”

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or “peasants’ revolts.” According to contemporary historians, archeological evidence suggests that during the Iron Age I (1200–1000/950 BCE), there were two groups of people moving into what was known as Canaan. The frst group, consisting of seminomadic and outlaw elements, occupied the central highland, around the city of Shechem, changing from seminomadic to sedentary culture, from sheep herding to agricultural economy. The second group settled in the southern coastal plain and the western lowland, mostly around the city of Ekron. The majority of these two groups of people were local Canaanites and not the tribes which had escaped from Egypt and whom the Bible represents as the progenitors of Israel, though the second group did exhibit foreign traits characteristic of the Philistines. 19. Peoples who at various times were said to be descendants of the lost tribes include the Nestorians, the Mormons, the Afghans, the Falashas of Ethiopia, the American Indians, and the Japanese. Among the numerous immigrants to the State of Israel since its establishment in 1948 were a few who likewise claimed to be remnants of the Ten Lost Tribes. See Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, The Ten Lost Tribes: A World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 20. See Bustenay Oded, Mass Deportations and Deportees in the Neo-Assyrian Empire (Wiesbaden: Ludwig Reichert Verlag 1979). 21. Jer 52:28–30 mentions three deportations of Judeans into Babylonia, the largest one consisting of 3,023 Jews who were deported by Nebuchadnezzar, including King Jehoiakim and the prophet Ezechiel, in 597 BCE. Eleven years later, Nebuchadnezzar deported 832 more Judeans. Six years later, the commander of the Babylonia army Nebuzaradan took 745 Judeans into exile at Riblah, bringing the total of Jewish deportees to Babylonia to 4,600. 22. On the Babylonian Exile, see John J. Ahn and Jill Middlemas, eds., By the Irrigation Canals of Babylon: Approaches to the Study of the Exile (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2012). 23. See Mark J. Boda, Frank Ritchel Ames, John Ahn, and Mark Leuchter, eds., The Prophets Speak on Forced Migration (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2015). 24. This vision will be interpreted in postbiblical times as affrming the literal resurrection of the dead. 25. For further refections on God as a migrant, see Ched Myers, Our God Is Undocumented: Biblical Faith and Immigration Justice (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2012). 26. Aristotle, Metaphysics, Bk XII,1072b. English translation by W. D. Ross in: The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 1695. 27. I am not here engaging with the arguments of Process philosophy and theology in favor of change in God, especially as they are put forward by Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne. I am simply arguing that it is possible from the Christian faith in creation and the Incarnation to affrm change in God if it is understood not as arising out of necessity or need or chance on God’s part but out of God’s freedom and love. In this I am inspired by Karl Rahner’s thought on the Incarnation. See his Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, trans. William Dych (New York: The Seabury Press, 1978), especially 212–228. Furthermore, I am interpreting this change in God as God’s migration into the world.

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28. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils: Nicaea I-Lateran V, 230. 29. Of course not all thinkers ground the human rights in the fact that humans are created in the image and likeness of God. This claim for human rights is unique to the Abrahamic religions. 30. Daniel G. Groody, one of the few Catholic theologians who have written extensively on the theology of migration, makes an eloquent and forceful case for the migrant’s human rights based on the fact that the migrant is the imago Dei. Groody elaborates on the need to cross over the four divides separating migration from theology by (1) moving from treating the migrant as a problem to seeing the migrant as the imago Dei; (2) joining the divine with the human by seeing Jesus as Verbum Dei (3) uniting the human with the divine in understanding Christian mission as missio Dei, and (4) overcoming xenophobia by subordinating nation/country to the kingdom of God by considering the goal of human existence as visio Dei. See his “Crossing the Divide: Foundations of a Theology of Migration and Refugees,” in And You Welcome Me: Migration and Catholic Social Teaching, ed. Donald Kerwin and Jill Marie Gerschutz (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009), 1–30.

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Chapter 8

Jesus the Paradigmatic Migrant

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Kanan Kitani

The theological project of reinterpreting Christian beliefs and practices from the perspective of global migration must of course engage the Christological question, given the central importance of Jesus and his work in the history of salvation. Today we need to formulate a new answer in the context of migration to Jesus’ question to his disciples: “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” (Mt 16:13; Mk 8:28). The answer to this question constitutes not only Christology but also soteriology, the two treatises that deal with who Jesus is and what he does, respectively. Who Jesus is cannot be separated from what he does. Together, Christology and soteriology deal with the “Christ-event,” including Jesus’ birth, ministry, death, resurrection, ascension, sending of the Holy Spirit, and coming in glory at the end of time to judge the living and the dead. In other words, they expound what is professed in the second article of the Christian creed. In the gospel narrative of Jesus’ questioning his disciples at Caesarea Philippi about what people thought he was, they are reported to have answered that he was popularly thought to be John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah, or one of the prophets. Jesus then asked them what they themselves thought who he was: “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter responded: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God” (Mt 16:16). There are three elements in Peter’s reply that constitute the affrmation of the Christian faith about Jesus: Messiah (Anointed, Christ), Son, and the living God.1 Hence, a Christologysoteriology from the perspective of global migration must address these three realities. In this chapter, I will not discuss who “the living God” is from the perspective of global migration, as this has been done by Peter Phan in the previous chapter on God as Deus Migrator, or God as the Primordial Migrant. Presupposing Phan’s refections on God as the Primordial Migrant, that is, God/Yahweh as the originating source and eschatological goal of human 129

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migration, I explore the identity of Jesus as the Messiah (ho christos) and as the Son of the living God (ho huios tou theou tou zōntos) by employing the image of Jesus as the “Paradigmatic Migrant.”1 I frst delineate Jesus as the migrant, and, more precisely, as a refugee, that is, a forced migrant, by examining the infancy narrative of the Gospel of Matthew. Next, I reinterpret the incarnation of the Logos in Jesus of Nazareth as a migration from the divine to the human. The third part revisits the traditional doctrine of the three offces of Jesus, especially as elaborated by the Reformers, especially Calvin, in the light of the new understanding of Jesus as the Paradigmatic Migrant.

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JESUS, THE “SON OF GOD,” AS THE FIRST REFUGEE IN THE MATTHEAN INFANCY NARRATIVE It is now widely accepted that the New Testament does not contain a “Christology” understood as a systematic and comprehensive elaboration of the person and work of Jesus as a divine Person within the Trinity and the Savior of humanity. Rather it does contain what has been called an “indirect” or “implicit” Christology that can be derived from Jesus’ own self-understanding implied in his statements about his personal relationship to Yahweh and in the unique ways in which he exercised his ministry. In addition, there are the post-Easter Christian community’s narratives of the life of Jesus and interpretations of his words and deeds. Both Jesus’ own gradually evolving self-understanding and his immediate followers’ manifold and varied interpretations of him constitute a rich source for the church’s subsequent theologically more elaborate Christology. One of the ways New Testament scholars attempt to delineate this “indirect Christology” is to investigate the “Christological titles,” those that Jesus allegedly claims for himself and those that the early Christian community attributes to him. While Jesus does not preach about himself but about the coming of the kingdom of God, there is a title that Jesus most likely claims for himself, namely the “Son of Man.” This title is used in three contexts to refer to Jesus, frst as the future judge who comes from heaven (Mk 8:38); second, as one who must suffer, die, and is raised up on the third day (Mk 8:31; 9:8); and third, as God’s agent acting in the present (Mk 2:10). Other Christological titles include Messiah/Christ (Anointed), Lord/ Kyrios, Son of God, Son of David, Servant of God/Ebed-Yahweh, teacher/ rabbi, end-time prophet, High Priest, Lamb of God, and Word/Logos. These titles have most certainly not been used by Jesus to describe himself but represent the profession of faith by diverse Christian communities to express who Jesus is and what he does for them.2 The variety of these Christological

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titles clearly indicates that the New Testament does not contain a homogeneous Christology. Nevertheless, despite this diversity, one title, namely the “Son of God,” seems to be central in all the Gospels, arguably the most well-known and the most important Christological tiles in the New Testament. As we have seen above, Peter confesses that Jesus is “the Son of the living God.” At his baptism, Jesus is declared to be God’s Son (Mk 1:11). Again, in his transfguration, Jesus is identifed by God as his Son (Mk 9:7). At his trial before the high priest, Jesus responds affrmatively that he is “the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One” (Mk 14:61). Finally, at his death, the Roman centurion confesses: “Truly, this was the Son of God!” (Mt 27:54; Mk 15:39). Conversely, as he is God’s Son, Jesus commonly addresses God as his “Father” (abba). In later Christology, especially at the councils of Nicaea (325) and Chalcedon (451), the title “Son of God” will be given a metaphysical or ontological interpretation to affrm that Jesus is, to quote the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, “from the substance of the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, consubstantial with the Father (homoousion tō patri).” Chalcedon gives a lapidary formula: “the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, the same truly God and truly man, of a rational soul and body; consubstantial with the Father as regards his divinity and the same consubstantial with us as regards his humanity . . . acknowledged in two natures which undergo no confusion, no change, no division, no separation . . . the property of both natures is preserved and comes together into a single person and a single subsistent being; he is not parted or divided into two persons, but is one and the same onlybegotten Son, God, Word, Lord Jesus Christ.”3 While such metaphysical Christology may be regarded as a legitimate development of certain New Testament affrmations about Jesus’ preexistence as the divine Logos and his incarnation, especially as represented in the Johannine Gospel, it suffers from serious defciencies, chief among which is the severance of Jesus from the history of Yahweh’s co-migration and “tabernacling” in the company of his people Israel, as Peter Phan has argued in the previous chapter. Within this history of God’s dwelling with Israel, the title “Son of (the living) God,” in Mark and Matthew, and somewhat less so in Luke, indicates that Jesus is a royal messianic fgure, the Anointed One, the Christ, as Peter confesses in Mt 16:16. Jesus is God’s Messiah and King; it is his messianic kingship that is the basis of his identity as the “Son of God.” Given this meaning of the title “Son of God,” it may be asked whether it is possible to interpret it and the title “Messiah” to mean that insofar as Jesus is the royal messianic fgure of God the Primordial Migrant, he acts as God’s representative and agent. If so, then Jesus may be described as the Paradigmatic Migrant, the migrant who best exemplifes the nature of God

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as the Primordial Migrant since he is the Son of this migrant God. I intend to explore this thesis by looking at the infancy narrative of the Gospel of Matthew (1:18-2:23).4 Matthew 1:18-2:23 narrates fve stories surrounding Jesus’ birth and childhood: (1) the virginal conception of Jesus in Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit and the naming of the child (1:18-25); (2) Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem and the magi’s travel frst to Jerusalem to inquire with the people, including King Herod, where the “king of the Jews” had been born and then to Bethlehem to pay homage to Jesus (2:1-12); (3) the Holy Family’s fight into Egypt (2:1315); (4) King Herod’s slaughter of all the boys two years old and under in Bethlehem and its vicinity (2:16-18); and (5) the return of the Holy Family to Nazareth (19-23).5 For many historians, the fact that these stories are reported only by Matthew and are not mentioned anywhere else in the New Testament, and, strangely enough, have no exact parallels in Luke’s infancy narrative, casts serious doubt on their historicity. Furthermore, the stories are laden with miraculous elements such as a star which at its rising revealed to the magi the birth of the “king of the Jews” and showed them the house where Jesus was by stopping over it; dream as a means of divine communication; and angelic appearances to convey a secret divine message, all of this is stuff of legends and not historiographical data. Leaving aside the much-debated question of the historicity of the Matthean infancy narrative, the fve stories narrated in Mt 2:1-23, especially their main characters, such as the Holy Family, the magi, Herod, the chief priests, the teachers of the law, and Herod Antipas, assume a huge signifcance in the context of migration. By examining these fve stories in this context of migration, we may sketch an outline of a migration Christology. Before considering each of these fve stories of Matthew’s infancy narrative, it is important to note the way Matthew tries to tie Jesus’ story to that of the story of Israel in general and to the migrations of the People of God, especially that of Moses, in particular. Matthew makes use of fve “formula quotations,” that is, citations from the Hebrew Bible to show that each of these events fulflls a specifc prophecy (“All this took place to fulfll what has been spoken by the Lord through the prophet”). Each of these quotations displays a specifc feature of Jesus’ identity as the Paradigmatic Migrant representing Yahweh the Primordial Migrant. The frst story tells of the conception of Jesus in Mary the virgin from the Holy Spirit and his naming (Mt 1:22-23). Whereas Luke reveals the virginal conception of Jesus through the annunciation of the angel Gabriel to Mary (Lk 1:38), in Matthew it is Joseph who is informed of this fact in a dream by an angel. The Old Testament text that Matthew quotes to confrm the virginal conception of Jesus is Isaiah 7:14: “Look, the virgin shall conceive and

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bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel.” Whereas the Hebrew text speaks of a “young woman” (̛almȃ), the Septuagint translates it as parthenos (virgin), which more explicitly confrms Matthew’s teaching on the virginal conception of Jesus. Furthermore, what is highly signifcant for our migration Christology is that Isaiah says that the child will be named “Emmanuel,” that is, God-with-us. Both the virginal conception and the child’s name mirror perfectly Yahweh’s action on behalf of his migrating people from Egypt, the former indicating God’s miraculous intervention in favor of the feeing Hebrews, the latter God’s presence and dwelling with God’s people in the tabernacle throughout their migrations. Jesus’ conception is here presented as an act of God’s power that is similar to that by which God liberated God’s people from slavery by leading them on a migratory journey, whereas JesusEmmanuel is the visible embodiment of God-being-with-us, God’s glory in human fesh. The second story narrates Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem and the visit of three magi or “wise men” from the East to worship him (Mt 2:5b-6). Contrary to Luke, Matthew does not tell us the circumstances surrounding Jesus’ birth, with singing angels and adoring shepherds; indeed, he does not say anything about Jesus’ birth as such, but only what happens after it. After noting in one line the time and place of Jesus’ birth (“In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea” (Mt 2:1), Matthew proceeds to narrate the visit of the magi in search of the “king of the Jews,” their meeting with Herod, Herod’s fear of this newborn king, and his question to “all the chief priests and scribes of the people” as to the place where Jesus had been born. Matthew uses the answer of Jewish religious leaders to Herod that Jesus had been born in Bethlehem to cite the texts of Micah 5:2 and 2 Samuel 5:2: “And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah: for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel” (Mt 2:6). It is very interesting that Matthew changes Micah’s description of Bethlehem as “one of the little clans” to “by no means least among the rulers” and characterizes Jesus’ function as “shepherd.” As the Paradigmatic Migrant, Jesus leads other migrants as their Shepherd. Indeed, as the “Good Shepherd,” Jesus calls the migrants by their names and leads them out of their countries, no longer “one of the little clans,” and lays down his life for them. Jesus knows each of the migrants and the migrants know him (Jn 10:1-24). The magi, whoever they were, be they astrologers, magicians, wise men, Zoroastrian priests, or court counselors, may be regarded as the forerunners of modern transnational migrants, willing to undertake a long and arduous journey, across national borders, in their case to fnd the king of the Jews. Having found him, they prostrated and worshiped him with gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Like the magi, many contemporary refugees

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undertake perilous journeys at the risk of life and limbs to escape religious persecution in order to have the freedom to practice their faith. Herod (the Great) was a superstitious, wily, and cruel despot and a vicious and paranoid ruler who did not hesitate to kill his enemies, even three of his sons, his wife Mariamne, her mother, and thousands of babies to safeguard his rule. In the context of migration, he may be viewed as the prototype of political leaders who oppose migration and for political careers and personal interests, and under the banner of national security, enact anti-migrant policies. As for the chief priests and the teachers of the law, who collaborated with Herod by giving him counsel and information on the infant Jesus, are they not the forerunners of some of our religious leaders who are willing to sell the integrity of Christian faith and morality for a mess of pottage of conservative causes? While Matthew does not explain why Joseph and Mary, who lived in Nazareth, happened to be in Bethlehem when Mary gave birth to Jesus, Luke informs us that they were there because of the decree of Emperor Augustus ordering a census obligating all males to register in their birthplaces. Joseph, who was from Bethlehem, the city of David, had to take Mary there to register.6 They had to travel from Nazareth in Galilee to Bethlehem, a city some fve miles south of Jerusalem, a journey of some eighty-fve miles, mostly uphill, across the Judean mountains and through Samaria, where, as Jews, they would meet with hostility. The journey was physically taxing as Mary was in advanced pregnancy. Most probably they had to go on foot, and it would take eight to ten days. In Bethlehem, Mary gave birth to her son Jesus in a manger because “there was no place for them in the inn” (Lk 2:7), a situation experienced by undocumented refugee pregnant mothers who could not afford delivering their babies in a regular hospital. The third story in Matthew’s account tells of what has been referred to as the “Slaughter of the Innocents.” The magi, who had been warned by an angel in a dream not to return to Herod to tell him where Jesus was, went home by another route. Infuriated by the magi’s trickery, Herod ordered the massacre of all male children two years old and under in and around Bethlehem (Mt 2:17-18). The text of the Hebrew Bible that Matthew cites as prophecy for this slaughter is Jeremiah 31:15: “Thus says the Lord: A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children; she refused to be comforted for her children, because they are no more.” It is interesting that the next verse, which Matthew does not cite, speaks of God’s promise that the Jewish migrants “shall come back from the land of the enemy; there is hope for [their] future” (Jer 31:16). Thus, today migrants, in spite of the tragedies that happen to their families, are comforted and sustained by God’s promise that their descendants will be

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able to fee from their countries where they are persecuted and eventually return to their homelands. Later in the same chapter, a favorite text of Christians, Jeremiah predicts for the returning Jewish migrants a “new covenant,” unlike the one God made with their ancestors when he took them “by the hand out of the land of Egypt,” a covenant with its laws written in their hearts, in virtue of which God will be their God and they God’s people (Jer 31:3133). Similarly, all migrants can fnd in Jesus the Paradigmatic Migrant this “new covenant” by which “they shall all know me [God], from the least of them to the greatest,” and God will remember their sins no more (Jer 31:34). The fourth story narrates the fight of the Holy Family into Egypt. Shortly after the magi’s departure, Joseph was told by an angel in a dream to take Mary and Jesus to escape to Egypt because Herod was planning to kill their child. Herod’s violent persecution made Jesus and his parents into refugees in the modern sense of the term, the very frst in the New Testament The distance from Bethlehem to the Egyptian border is about forty miles, which would make the trip more arduous than the earlier one from Nazareth to Bethlehem, since this time the trip was started out “by night” (Mt 2:14) and also there was a baby to take care of and protect. Again, we are reminded of refugee parents who escape with their children and have to provide for all their needs with whatever they can get. Matthew does not say where precisely in Egypt the Holy Family went and settled. He simply notes that they “remained there until the death of Herod” (Mt 2:15).7 However, wherever it eventually settled, there was no doubt that like most refugee families today, Joseph, Mary, and Jesus had to survive among strangers whose language and customs they did not know, in unfamiliar surroundings, depending on their neighbors’ hospitality and generosity. Of course, there were large Jewish colonies in Egypt at the time but most of them were located in faraway places such as Alexandria, Elephantine, and Oxyrynchus. Like many migrants, the Holy Family must have wanted to live in these Egyptian cities among their fellow compatriots but surely it could not afford to, given their meager fnancial resources. The Old Testament text Matthew cites in reference to the Holy Family’s fight to Egypt is Hosea 11:1: “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I call my son.” With his text Matthew explicitly connects the Holy Family’s fight into Egypt with the slavery of the Israelites and their migration out of Egypt, thus making Jesus the Paradigmatic Migrant. The ffth and last story of Mathew’s infancy narrative is the Holy Family’s return to Nazareth (Mt 2:23). Matthew tells us that at Herod’s death Joseph was told by an angel in a dream to bring his family back to his native land. Joseph had intended to return to Bethlehem, but upon discovering that its ruler was one of Herod the Great’s sons, Herod Archelaus, he was afraid to settle his family in this city.8 His fear was confrmed when he was told in a dream

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to go further north back to Nazareth.9 The distance from the Egyptian border all the way to Nazareth is at least 106 miles, and the Holy Family’s trip, again mostly on foot and with an infant, would be enormously burdensome. The Old Testament text Matthew quotes to illustrate this return migration to Nazareth cannot be attributed to any particular prophet. Indeed, he speaks of the fulfllment of what the “prophets” (in the plural) have said: “He [Jesus] will be called a Nazorean” (Mat 2:23). Both the precise source of the text cited and the meaning of “Nazorean” are much disputed. Isaiah 11:1 has been proposed as a likely candidate: “A shoot shall come out from the stock of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of its roots.” Jesus the “Nazorean” is the nēṣer (branch), the Son of David sprung from the “stock of Jesse,” the promised Messiah, “God-with-us.” The second possible meaning of “Nazorean” is “Nazirite,” a person consecrated to God, like Samson (Judg 13:5, 7; 16:17). The third possible meaning of “Nazorean” is derived from Nazareth and connected with Nazōraios and Nazarēnos, translated into English as “Nazarene,” meaning someone from Nazareth. Jesus was called a Nazarene (Mt 26:69-73) and the disciples of Jesus are called “the sect of the Nazarenes” (Acts 24:5). While each of the three meanings of “Nazorean” highlights a specifc aspect of Jesus as a migrant and connects him with the history of his own people, the third, which derives from his geographical roots, recalls the way migrants are often given a local name identifying their national origins and their adopted countries (e.g., Mexican American). In returning to Israel, Jesus and his parents became part of what is referred today as refugee return movement. Despite current attention to fows of asylum-seekers and refugees, a surprisingly large number of refugees, perhaps tens of millions, have returned since the mid-1990s to their countries of origin, notably Angola, Rwanda, Afghanistan, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Jesus and his parents are thus twice-refugees. Furthermore, for political reasons, he could not return to his hometown Bethlehem, not unlike refugees who are forced to migrate due to climate change and who have no home to return to. Undergirding Matthew’s infancy narrative is his extensive use of the Moses-Jesus typology. In the Hebrew Scripture, Moses is portrayed mainly as the prophet and legislator par excellence. Elsewhere I have chosen to highlight his role as the “migrant-in-chief” during the migration of the Israelites from Egypt and it is this role that will be focused on as we attempt to formulate a migration Christology. Moses is referenced thirty-eight times in the four gospels (seven times in Matthew, eight times in Mark, ten times in Luke, and thirteen times in John; in addition, thirteen times in Acts), mainly for Christological purposes in order to show that Jesus is the “prophet like Moses” that Yahweh promises to raise up to whom the people should listen (Deut 18:15, 18).

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Here I leave aside the role of Moses as prophet and as lawgiver in Jesus’ teaching and in his Transfguration (Mt 17:1-9) and focus instead on Matthew’s depiction of Jesus as a migrant like Moses. His infancy narrative is saturated with Mosaic motifs. The citation of Hosea 11:1 (“Out of Egypt I have called my son”), which refers to the story of Moses and Israel’s forced migration from Egypt, serves as the leitmotif to interpret Jesus’ birth and childhood: (1) Both Moses and Jesus as newborn babies were threatened with death by kings (the pharaoh and Herod the Great) who were terrifed by the news of the birth of a savior; (2) both infants were providentially delivered from their would-be killers; (3) both were forced to fee from their native countries; and (4) both returned to their homelands after the deaths of their persecutors. By this use of the Moses-Jesus typology, Matthew shows that the role of Moses as the “migrant-in-chief” is fully fulflled by Jesus as the Paradigmatic Migrant, and that there is continuity between Israel as migrating community and the church as people-on-the-move.10

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THE INCARNATION: GOD THE SON’S MIGRATION INTO HISTORY Christian faith professes that Jesus of Nazareth is the God’s only-begotten Son made fesh. This belief has been formulated in what is called “classical Christology” or “Chalcedonian Christology” which, as alluded to above, interprets the person of Jesus in ontological terms of “person” and “nature.” Jesus is one “person,” that is, the Logos, existing in two natures, divine and human, characterized by four “without”: without confusion and change, without separation and division. The incarnation of the Logos is understood in Chalcedonian Christology as his assumption of the human nature while retaining intact his divine nature. While this formulation expresses something true about Jesus the incarnated Logos/Son, it fails to represent fully Jesus the Paradigmatic Migrant as portrayed in Matthew’s infancy narrative, and, as we shall see below, in the Gospels’ narratives of Jesus’ ministry, death, and resurrection. The Logos does not merely take on human nature in the abstract; rather he becomes a migrant in the company of other migrants, like his Father did with the people of Israel. In the light of what has been said above about Jesus the Paradigmatic Migrant, it is possible to view God the Son’s Incarnation as God’s migration into the world, indeed God’s second migratory movement, the frst being God the Father’s creative act, as Peter Phan has shown in the preceding chapter. The Logos’ being made fesh and “tabernacling” among us (Jn 1:14) is preceded by God’s act of creation which can be interpreted as God’s migration out of what is divine into what is not, a movement that bears all the marks of

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human migration. In creating that which is other than Godself, God crosses the border between Absolute Spirit and fnite matter, migrating from eternity to temporality, from omnipotence into weakness, from self-suffciency to utter dependence, from secure omniscience to fearful ignorance, from the total domination of the divine will over all things to the utter subjection of the same will to the uncontrollability of human freedom, from life to death. In the creative act God experiences for the frst time the precarious, marginalized, threatened, and endangered condition of the migrant. In the context of divine migration, the Incarnation is not to be understood as God’s emergency plan as it were after humanity’s fall into sin but rather as the telos and culmination of God’s frst migration into creation. In this migration into history as a Jew in the land of Palestine, God the Son, like a human migrant, entered a far country where God, as part of a colonized nation, encounters people of different racial, ethnic and national backgrounds, with strange languages, unfamiliar customs, and foreign cultures, among whom God, again like a migrant after a life-threatening journey, “pitched the tent” or “tabernacled” (eskenosev: John 1:14). Furthermore, as truly divine and truly human, the incarnated Logos, like the migrant, dwelt betwixt-and-between two worlds, acting as the mediator between God and humans. Not unlike the migrant, the incarnated Logos both is rooted in his native country (divinity) and makes a new home as a stranger in the land of Israel (his Jewish humanity), acquiring thus a double identity and a double belonging (he is both divine and Jewish), so that he is no longer just divine or just human. This existential situation as a migrant did not occur only in the incarnation. Rather, Jesus lived it out daily, as a migrant prophet, throughout his entire ministry, including his death and resurrection. As a Jew in Roman-occupied Palestine, Jesus was not a Roman citizen, a political privilege enjoyed by only a few, like Paul. Like undocumented immigrants today, he was a man without a country, a foreigner and a stranger in his own homeland. By choice, he was also homeless during his ministry. Jesus is reported to have said to someone who wanted to follow him after he was refused welcome by a Samaritan village: “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man have nowhere to lay his head” (Lk 9:58), a condition shared by many migrants in both their own homelands and their host countries. It is to be noted that I speak of Jesus as the “migrant prophet” rather than “itinerant” or “wandering” preacher, as is the common practice. Of course, in the gospels Jesus was depicted as a traveling preacher and teacher: he did not teach in a fxed geographical area or as member of an offcial establishment but as an itinerant or wandering rabbi, making use of course of synagogues whenever available, as Mark 1:39 summarizes Jesus’ early ministry

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succinctly: “And he went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons.” Mark further notes that Jesus also “went around teaching from village to village” (Mk 6:9b). While in Galilee, Jesus stayed mostly in Capernaum, which served so to speak as his “home base”: “He (Jesus) left Nazareth and made his home in Capernaum by the sea. In the territory of Zebulon and Napthtali” (Mt 4:13).11 Jesus’ preaching took him to cities and villages near Capernaum such as Bethsaida and Gennesaret. But he also wandered afar, into the Decapolis, and even as far north as Caesarea Philippi, Tyre, and Sidon. Of course, Jesus’ most important journey was from Galilee through Samaria and Jericho to Jerusalem, the fnal destination of his ministry. This journey is the leitmotif of Luke’s gospel: “When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he (Jesus) set his face to go to Jerusalem” (Lk 9:51, 53). According to John, Jesus went to Jerusalem to attend the Passover three times (Jn 2:13; 6:4; and 11:55-57), which implies that he traveled far more in the Johannine gospel than in the Synoptic Gospels, which have Jesus celebrate the Passover in Jerusalem only once. One of the reasons I prefer “migrant” to “itinerant” preacher when speaking of Jesus during his public ministry is that, even granted that it lasted three years, the space he covered was relatively small since he stayed mostly around Capernaum, and even when taking into account his trip(s)from Capernaum to Jerusalem (the direct route through Samaria is about 90 miles, and 120 miles if the circuitous Jericho Road is taken), the distance is not enormous. “Itinerant” may falsely suggest that Jesus was continuously on the road, moving from one place to another successively, without going back to the territory already covered, whereas the gospels report that he and his disciples frequently returned to their “home base” in Capernaum. What makes Jesus a migrant teacher is not the distance and the number of his trips but the situation in which he performed his public ministry. Like many migrants, Jesus was frequently not welcomed by the inhabitants of the cities and villages he entered, not even in his hometown, even though he brought them material benefts such as foods, physical healing, and exorcisms. Again, like many migrants, he was threatened with physical harm and at the end put to death by his opponents, especially political religious authorities. He was a migrant teacher not so much because he continuously moved from place to place—indeed, like most migrants, he settled in a a place—as because he lived in a permanent precarious and dangerous situation, always liable to harassment, arrest, torture, imprisonment, and death. Furthermore, like migrants living at the margins, Jesus carried out his ministry at the margins of his society. A migrant and border-crosser at the very roots of his being, Jesus performed his ministry of announcing and ushering in the kingdom of God always at the places where borders meet, and hence

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at the margins of the two worlds separated by their borders. A marginal Jew himself, Jesus crossed these borders back and forth, repeatedly and freely, be they geographical, racial, sexual, social, economic, political, cultural, and religious. He is said to have often crossed over into the Decapolis, the ten cities on the east and southeast of the Sea of Galilee, inhabited chiefy by Greeks and other foreigners, who kept numerous herds of swine, a practice forbidden by the Mosaic Law (Matthew 8:30). It was at Jacob’s Well in the Samaritan town of Sichar that he held a conversation with a Samaritan woman of ill repute, to the scandal of his disciples (Jn 5:4-42). Indeed, what is new and unique about Jesus’ preaching of the kingdom of God is that for him it removes all borders, both natural and manmade, and is absolutely all-inclusive. Jews and non-Jews, men and women, the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the powerful and the weak, the healthy and the sick, the clean and the impure, the righteous and the sinners, and any other imaginable categories of peoples and groups, Jesus invited them all to enter into the house of his merciful and forgiving Father. Even in his “preferential option for the poor” Jesus did not abandon and exclude the rich and the powerful. These too are called to conversion and to live a just, all-inclusive life. As a stranger and a migrant, Jesus gratefully and gracefully accepted the hospitality others showed him, just like migrants welcomed into the homes of the native born. He was a guest at the home of the Pharisee Simon (Lk 7:36-49), Lazarus, Martha, and Mary (Lk 10:38-42), of Andrew and Simon (Mk 1:29), and of Zacchaeus (Lk 19:1-10), and he did not hesitate to share table fellowship with sinners and tax collectors (Mk 2:15). Indeed, he was accused to be “a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners” (Lk 7:34). Paradoxically, just like migrants hosting the native people with their own ethnic foods and drinks, though a stranger and a guest, Jesus also played the host. In his many parables, he presents the kingdom of God as a banquet to which all are welcomed, especially “the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame” (Lk 14:21). In the same vein, once, when he was invited to dinner, he told his host: “When you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind” (Lk 14:13). At the Last Supper, he put on a towel and washed his disciples’ feet, though he was their “Master and Lord” (Jn 13:120). After his resurrection, he prepared a breakfast for his exhausted disciples after a night of unsuccessful fshing (Jn 21:4-13). Like migrants, standing between the two worlds, excluding neither but embracing both, Jesus was able to be fully inclusive of both. But this also means that he is the marginal person par excellence. People at the center of any society or group, as a rule, possess wealth, power, and infuence. As the threefold temptation shows, Jesus, the border-crosser and the dweller at

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the margins, renounced precisely these three things. Because he was at the margins, in his teaching and miracle-working, Jesus creates a new and different center, the center constituted by the meeting of the borders of the many and diverse worlds, often in confict with one another, each with its own center which relegates the “other” to the margins. It is at this margin-center that marginal people meet one another. In Jesus, the margin where he lived became the center of a new society without borders and barriers, reconciling all peoples, “Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female” (Ga 3: 28).12 A marginal person throughout his life, Jesus also died as such. His violent death on the cross was a direct result of his border-crossing and ministry at the margins which posed a serious threat to the interests of those occupying the economic, political, and religious center. Even the form of his death, that is, by crucifxion, indicates that Jesus was an outcast, and he died, as the Letter to Hebrews says, “outside the city gate and outside the camp” (Heb 13:1213). Symbolically, however, hung between heaven and earth, at the margins of both worlds, Jesus fulflled his mission of the Paradigmatic Migrant, and acted as the mediator and intercessor between God and humanity by living out in his own life his Father’s migration with the people of Israel, thus extending God’s love and liberation to the entire human family. But even in death Jesus did not remain within the boundaries of what death means: failure, defeat, destruction. By his resurrection he crossed the borders of death into a new life, thus bringing hope where there was despair, victory where there was defeat, freedom where there was slavery, and life where there was death. In this way, the borders of death become frontiers to life in abundance.

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JESUS THE PARADIGMATIC MIGRANT AND HIS THREEFOLD OFFICE OF PROPHET, PRIEST, AND KING In this concluding part, I would like to essay a new understanding of the traditional doctrine of the threefold offce of Jesus Christ. This doctrine holds that Christ exercises the threefold offce (Latin: triplex munus) or function (offcium) of prophet, priest, and king. Though the attribution of these three functions to Jesus has its origin in the New Testament, the functions of prophecy, priesthood, and kingship themselves, and the people who exercise them, are already found in the Old Testament. Indeed, their meanings and modes of exercise as attributed to Jesus cannot be understood apart from their roots in the Old Testament. Hence, it is necessary frst to examine, albeit cursorily, these three functions as they are exercised in the Old and New Testaments before turning to Calvin’s exposition of Christ’s threefold offce and attempting a new interpretation in the perspective of global migration.

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The Three Offices of Prophet, Priest, and King in the Old Testament Prophecy. Like the other peoples of Ancient Near East, ancient Israelites had among them functionaries designated as prophets, priests, and kings, though these offces are understood and exercised quite differently.13 The Hebrew Bible (the Tanakh) divides the prophets (nevi’im), also known by other terms such as “seer,” “visionary,” and “man of God,” into two groups: The Former Prophets and the Latter Prophets, called “Latter” because they are placed after the Former Prophets, and not according to their chronology. The Former Prophets are found in the four books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings, which together with Deuteronomy constitute what biblical scholars call the “Deuteronomistic History.” The Latter Prophets are Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve Minor (that is, short) Prophets. Only the Latter Prophets are relevant here. It is customary to distinguish the Latter Prophets chronologically into pre-exilic and post-exilic, with 586 BCE, the beginning of the exile of the ruling classes of Judah into Babylonia and 539 BCE, the year of the return of some of the exiles back to Judah, now known as the Province of Yehud, as the dividing line. This division has been made more specifc by distinguishing the Hebrew prophetic movement in four periods: the early monarchical period (eleventh through ninth centuries), the Assyrian exile (eighth century), the Babylonian exile (late seventh through early sixth centuries, and the postexilic restoration (mid-sixth through mid-ffth centuries). Despite substantial differences, which will be detailed below, between pre-exilic and post-exilic prophets, they were both made “prophet” by divine inspiration which made them speak out in God’s name and made others accept them as God’s spokespersons. The prophets were essentially an intermediary between God and God’s people, functioning mostly as God’s messenger (their message is preceded by “thus says the Lord”) and at times as an intercessor for the people. In the Deuteronomistic History, Moses is identifed as the great prophet sent by God and the model of the prophet who is to come (Deut 18:15-19; 34:10). Other notable prophets include Samuel, Nathan, Elijah, and Elisha. Among the pre-exilic prophets, the most important are the eighth-century prophets Amos, Hosea, Micah, and Isaiah, and the late seventh-century prophets such as Zephaniah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Nahum, and Habbakuk. Among the important post-exilic prophets are the author of Isaiah 40-55 (often called Second Isaiah), Haggai, Zechariah, the author of Isaiah 56-66 (also known as Trito-Isaiah), Joel, and Malachi. Given the fact that prophets were God’s messengers to the people of Israel in specifc sociopolitical and religious situations, their message, language, and means of communication were of necessity varied. In general,

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the prophets of the Deuteronomistic History (the pre and early monarchical period) were king-makers and king-breakers as well as ferce critics of the kings, especially when their marriages with foreign wives threatened the older tribal and religious institutions. In the eighth and early seventh centuries, the pre-exilic prophets functioned less as private counselors to the royal court and more as public fgures interpreting international affairs, critiquing lax religious policies, and condemning social injustices. Of great relevance to our theme is their understanding that the right worship of God demands the treatment of all human beings, especially the orphans, widows, foreigners, and migrants, with justice and love. As far as cultus is concerned, they did not condemn sacrifces, offerings, and rituals as such, for true worship of God without these would be for them unthinkable. Rather, they denounced worship and rituals that were directed to other gods in “high places” and those that were devoid of just and loving behavior toward others, especially those who were without legal protection. As prophets, they saw that their society was corrupt, and charged the monarchy with responsibility for their people’s unfaithfulness to Yahweh and for rampant injustice in the society. They were often accused of being prophets of doom, threatening their people with God’s imminent punishments, and when calamities happened to the nation, they pointed out that these tragedies were God’s ways of calling the people to repentance and to sociopolitical, economic, and religious reforms. When both the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah were destroyed by Assyria and Babylonia in 721 and 586, respectively, and their leaders were brought into exile, the post-exilic prophets urged the people to accept these national calamities as God’s just punishments, and when the time of their sufferings came to an end, to have hope that God would bring them back to their homeland. This change from gloom to hope does not however signal a rejection of the message of the pre-exilic prophets, whose predictions were indeed fulflled and whose message about the intrinsic connection between social justice and authentic worship remained permanently valid. What was new in these post-exilic prophets is their message that since God’s punishments on Judah had already been as it were paid in full, the people could look forward to a time of return to their homeland and of national restoration. This is the message of Jeremiah 30-33, Ezekiel 40-48, and especially Second Isaiah (Is 40-55). Furthermore, since the rebuilding of the Temple was part of national reconstruction, great importance was given to the full restoration of the cultus, as is clear in Trito-Isaiah (Isaiah 56-66), Joel, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. Finally, during the post-exilic national and religious reconstruction, literary efforts were made to record the oral prophetic tradition in writing. This made possible the reception of God’s message to the nation through a study

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of past prophetic texts instead of through God’s direct revelation through new prophets. As a result, there grew during the Second Temple period the notion that prophecy as God’s living voice had been rendered obsolete and had ceased. This belief of course was proved false in the New Testament, where John the Baptist is regarded by Jesus as the last and greatest member of the prophetic succession (Lk 16:16), and Jesus himself is professed to be the eschatological prophet. Priesthood. Contrary to divine inspiration, and with it, prophecy, which could come to any person from all walks of life, including women, the priesthood as an institution of ancient Israel was restricted to males of a certain tribe. The history of Hebrew priesthood is highly complex. Biblical scholars, especially the nineteenth-century German Julius Wellhausen, argue that it began as a relatively unregimented function at local shrines and developed into a class of highly competent religious specialists who claimed the exclusive right to perform what may be regarded as priestly duties. The watershed event in this development is King Josiah’s religious reforms in 622 BCE, which attempted to abolish all local shrines and temples and concentrate on worship and sacrifces in Jerusalem. The priests in Jerusalem, who claimed descent from Zadok, David’s priest, and the frst priest serving in Salomon’s temple, retained the exclusive right to serve as full priests, while the priests at other shrines were demoted to assistant clergy. As a result, a priestly hierarchy emerged: only the sons of Zadok were entitled to be the high priests; the sons of Aaron priests; and the sons of the tribe of Levi clerical assistants. This three-tier hierarchy, Wellhausen notes, was not established until after the Exile.14 The functions of priests have been described as consisting of three types (Deut 33:8-11): frst, divining God’s will by manipulating the Thummim and Urim (whereas it is made known to the prophets by direct divine inspiration); second, teaching the Law; and third, and more extensively, offciating at sacrifces at the altar. The various duties of the third function, which is more sacral, are spelled out in great details in the so-called priestly materials in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. Of special interest to our themes are the duties of the high priest, the most important of which is representing the whole people on the annual Day of Atonement, during which, vested in a white linen robe, he entered the holy of holies and presented the blood of an expiatory sacrifce for the sins of the people.15 Kingship. Of the three institutions of ancient Israel, kingship, which shares much in common with those of the ancient near-eastern word, is the youngest, and, interestingly, also the most subjected to prophetic criticism. Israelite kings, more than prophets and priests, tended to arrogate for themselves qualities that belong to God. The origins of Israelite kingship lay in the people’s request for a king to replace the system of government and military

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leadership by divinely appointed charismatic chiefs. This request, which was reluctantly granted by Samuel, was seen as an implicit rejection of God’s kingly rule over Israel. After Saul, David established a dynasty that lasted 400 years until the conquest of Judah by Babylonia in 586 BCE. Following Solomon’s death in 968 BCE, the united monarchy was divided into two kingdoms, Israel (the Northern Kingdom) and Judah (the Southern Kingdom). All the kings of both Israel and Judah, except Hezekiah and Josiah, both of kings of Judah, were judged by the Deuteronomistic Historian as wicked because they failed to maintain Jerusalem as the sole center of worship and eliminate the illegitimate worship of any deity other than Yahweh. Only David, despite his many sins, is regarded as the ideal king, to whom Yahweh has made an unconditional covenant of an everlasting kingdom. However, because David’s successors in Judah failed to live up to the ideal kingship, the hope for a righteous ruler who would descend from David got projected further and further into the future.16

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Jesus as Prophet, Priest, and King in the New Testament This righteous descendent of David, who is professed to be the eschatological fulfllment of all the three offces together is Jesus of Nazareth. Whereas in the Old Testament a prophet could also be a priest and vice versa, and a king could on occasion also take on the role of a high priest for his people, but a person could not be all three together, only Jesus is said to be prophet, priest, and king all at one. Indeed, in his case, it is more appropriate to speak of the “triple offce” than “three offces,” the former expression indicating the unifcation of the three offces in one person. Furthermore, because in ancient Israel a person was consecrated a priest or crowned a king by the offcial ceremony of anointing, and because the prophet is said to be “anointed” by God’s spirit, Jesus is said to be anointed, or better, the “Anointed One” (the Messiah (Hebrew)/the Christ (Greek). There is no place, nor is there the need, to cite all the New Testament texts that name Jesus Prophet, Priest, and King. What is important to note is that the New Testament proclaims Jesus to be more than a prophet, as he does not simply speak in the name of God but is the Word of God. Similarly, he is more than a priest, as he is, as the Letter to the Hebrews 5-10 explains at length, “designated by God a high priest according to the order of Melchizedek” (5:10; 7:17), “the guarantee of a better covenant” (7:22), “the mediator of a new covenant” (9:15). Jesus is both priest and victim, and his sacrifce he offered is “once for all” for the forgiveness of the sins of all (9:28). Lastly, Jesus is more than a king, as he has been raised from the dead and is sitting at the right hand of God, “far above all rule and authority and power and dominion” (Eph 1:21) and his kingdom is an everlasting kingdom (2 Pet 1:11).

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John Calvin’s Theology of Christ’s Threefold Office

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The doctrine of Christ’s threefold offce is frst formulated by the church historian Eusebius of Caesarea (263-339).17 Among the Reformers, whereas Luther (1483–1546) and his followers speak only of Christ’s two offces of priest (munus sacerdotale) and king (munus regium), John Calvin (1509– 1564) expounds at great length on all the three offces, but only in the third edition of his masterpiece Institutes of the Christian Religion18 and in his Catechism of the Church of Geneva.19 Calvin discusses Christ’s triple offce in his exposition of the second article of the Creed, that is, the work of God as Redeemer in Christ. After the discussion of Jesus as Mediator, God and man in one person, he asks for what end Jesus was sent into the world by the Father, and answers that it was to assume the threefold offce of prophet, king, and priest.20 Calvin begins by noting that in the Old Testament the holders of these three offces were all “anointed with holy oil.” Whereas it is well known that this anointing was done to kings and priests, it is not so with prophets, so Calvin cites Is 61:1-2 (“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me”). Since Jesus is anointed as prophet, priest, and king, he is, Calvin argues, the Messiah/Christ/Anointed. He then goes on to explain what each of these three offces implies in terms of Christ’s redemptive work. As prophet, Jesus “is to teach us, that in the doctrine which he delivered is substantially included a wisdom which is perfect in all its parts.”21 Regarding Christ’s kingship, Calvin insists that his kingdom is spiritual and provides Christians with six benefts: it raises them to eternal life; enriches them with all things necessary to salvation; makes them invincible by spiritual foes; animates them to patient endurance; inspires in them confdence and triumph; and supplies them with fortitude and love.22 Lastly, Christ exercises his priesthood in his death on the cross in which he is both victim and priest. As priest, Christ intercedes for humanity; gives confdence in prayer, and bestows peace of conscience. Lastly, Christ shares his priesthood to all Christians making them all priestly.23 Christ’s Threefold Office in the Perspective of Migration Of the three major Protestant reformers, Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin, only the latter experienced what might be called migration in the modern sense. He had to fee Paris for Basle in 1535 because of threats of religious persecution. In 1538, Calvin, together with Guillaume Farel, were expelled from Geneva after the city council rejected their attempt to regulate the organization of the church and worship. Calvin went to Strasbourg at the invitation of Martin Bucer. Three years later, he went back to Geneva to establish the Genevan Church. Until 1559, Calvin’s status was that of a legal resident alien; he was made a citizen of Geneva only fve years before his death in 1564.

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Given Calvin’s long experience as an international refugee, it would not be far-fetched to inquire how his teaching on Christ’s threefold offce or ministry would be different if it were formulated from the perspective of global migration. Such reinterpretation would add new insights to the theology of Jesus as the Paradigmatic Migrant. Only a few broad strokes are possible here. Regarding Jesus as the Prophet, Calvin emphasizes his role as teacher of perfect wisdom. This is in line with his deep concern about the true knowledge of God and of humanity, to which he devotes the entire frst book of the Institutes. However, as has been shown above, the prophets in the Old Testament were not only teachers of the Torah but also and primarily “foretellers” and “forthtellers” of God’s demand not only for true worship of the one God but also a worship accompanied by the practice of social justice and care and love for the orphans, widows and migrants. This is abundantly true also of Jesus the Prophet whose “preferential option for the poor” is evident in his preaching as well as his miracle-working. His ministry was directed at saving not only the “lost” but also the “least,” among whom migrants are of course included. Jesus the Prophet, like the pre-exilic prophets of ancient Israel, fercely attacked political and religious authorities when they failed to protect the “least” among them. Regarding Jesus the King, Calvin highlights the spiritual character of his kingship and the many spiritual benefts it brings to Christians. While these spiritual benefts should not be denied or belittled, the duties of the Old Testament kingship include securing the material well-being of their subjects, especially the weakest ones, and justice within the nation. Jesus the King fulflls the roles attributed to Yahweh the King: “The Lord is our judge, the Lord is our ruler, the Lord is our king; he will rule us” (Is 33:22). God’s rule and judgment, that is, the kingdom of God/Heaven, constitutes the central theme of Jesus’ preaching. The coming of this kingdom of God is made evident not only in the forgiveness of sins and the offer of salvation but also in the proclamation of the good news to the poor, the release of the captives, the blind’s recovering of sight, the liberation of the oppressed, and the proclamation of the year of God’s favor” (Lk 4:18-19). Lastly, when Jesus the King appears to judge the nations, his criteria of judgment will be feeding the hungry, quenching the thirsty, welcoming the stranger (migrant), clothing the naked, caring for the sick, and visiting the prisoners (Mt 25:35-36). A migration Christology will contribute to the recovery of the economic and sociopolitical dimensions of the kingship of Jesus. Finally, concerning Jesus the High Priest, Calvin emphasizes the death of Jesus as a sacrifce in which Jesus is both victim and priest. However, his elaboration on the priesthood of Christ highlights his priesthood and neglects his victimhood. A Christology of Jesus as the Paradigmatic Migrant will retrieve this second aspect. As a migrant in the midst of other migrants, Jesus

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brings to the cross the sufferings and deaths of millions of migrants, past, present, and future and transforms these migrants into priests who unite their victimization by xenophobia, racism, greed, and exploitation with the death of Jesus on the cross. And just as the sufferings and death of Jesus the Paradigmatic Migrant has been transformed into his resurrection and glorifcation by God the Primordial Migrant through the Holy Spirit the Power of Migration, so will the sufferings and deaths of migrants not be in vain but will be transformed into their resurrection and glorifcation.

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NOTES 1. Note that Mark reports Peter’s reply as simply: “You are the Christ” (Mk 8:29). It is likely that Matthew adds the expression “the Son of the Living God” to the Markan narrative. 2. Of studies of Christological titles, two classical works merit mention: Ferdinand Hahn, The Titles of Jesus in Christology: Their History in Early Christianity (London: Lutterworth, 1969), and Reginald H. Fuller, The Foundations of New Testament Christology (New York: Scribner’s, 1965). 3. Fuller, The Foundations of New Testament Christology, 86. For the full text of the Defnition of Faith, see Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, Vol. 1 Nicaea I-Lateran IV (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990), 86. 4. As is well known, in addition to Matthew, Luke also contains an infancy narrative (Lk 1:5–2:40). However, for our study of Jesus as the Paradigmatic Migrant, only that of Matthew is directly relevant. 5. For an interpretation of the Matthean infancy narrative, I make extensive use of Peter C. Phan, “Matthew & Migration: Reading the Birth Story of Jesus in New Light,” Nurturing Faith Journal & Bible Studies, Vol. 36, no. 6 (November/December 2018), 44–46. 6. This census, allegedly by Augustus, who ruled 27 BCE–14 AD, is not externally attested. Also, there is no external evidence of a Roman census under Herod the Great. Quirinius was the legatus (military governor) appointed to suppress a rebellion in Cilicia; the actual governor of Syria was Publius Quinctilius Varus. The Jewish historian Josephus reports a census under Quirinius, which however took place in 6 CE, a decade at least after the birth of Jesus. Luke’s story is perhaps a midrash on Psalm 87:5–6: “And of Zion it shall be said, ‘This one and that one were born in it’; for the Most High himself will establish it. The Lord records, as he registers the peoples. ‘This one was born over there.’” 7. Herod the Great died sometime between March 29 and April 4, 4 BCE. This would date Jesus’ birth between 6 and 4 BCE. 8. Archelaus was reputed to be even more cruel than his father. He was named King of Judea and ruled Samaria, Judea, and Idumea for nine years, from c. 4 BCE to 6 CE. He was deposed for incompetence in 6 CE and replaced by direct Roman rule.

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9. Galilee and Perea were governed by Archelaus’ brother Herod Antipas, who ruled from 6 CE to c. 29 CE. In the gospels, Antipas was known as responsible for the execution of John the Baptist, who condemned him for divorcing his Nabatean wife and marrying Herodias, the ex-wife of his half-brother Philip, and for the death of Jesus, who called him “that fox.” 10. See especially Allison, Jr., The New Moses: A Matthean Typology. 11. At the time of Jesus, Capernaum, a fshing village located along the northwestern shores of the Sea of Galilee, had a population of about 1,500. Peter and Andrew had a house there, where Jesus healed Peter’s mother-in-law of fever. It was there that Jesus recruited his frst disciples, namely Peter, Andrew, John, and James. Mk 2:1 (“When he returned to Capernaum after some days, it was reported that he was at home”) is taken by some scholars to imply that Jesus had a house of his own there, but the verse may simply mean that Jesus was staying at someone’s (Peter’s?) home. 12. In his insightful study of Jesus’s migrations and his marginal status, Paul Hertig investigates six events in which Matthew characterizes Jesus’ migrations as an act of “withdrawal” (anechōrēsen), and thereby highlights the marginal status of Jesus. See “Jesus’ Migrations and Liminal Withdrawals in Matthew,” in God’s People on the Move: Biblical and Global Perspectives on Migration and Mission, ed. vanThanh Nguyen and John M. Prior (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2014), 46–61. 13. There is of course no point in giving an overview of these three offces as they were practiced in the Old and New Testaments. The purpose here is simply to highlight very selectively those aspects that contribute to an understanding of these three offces as they are predicated of Jesus. For a helpful survey of prophecy and prophets, see the entries, “Prophecy (ANE),” “Prophecy (Pre-exilic Hebrew),” “Prophecy (Post-exilic Hebrew),” and “Prophecy (Early Christian)” in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 5, ed. David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 477–502. 14. See Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel (New York: Meridian Books, 1953); original German frst published in 1878. Of course, Wellhausen’s documentary hypothesis and his reconstruction of the priesthood in Israel did not go unchallenged. 15. For a helpful survey of Israelite priesthood, see the entry “Priests and Priesthood” in Samuel B. Balentine, ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Theology, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 191–211. 16. For a helpful survey of Israelite kingship, see “Kings and Kingship,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Theology, ed. Samuel B. Balentine, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 9–13. 17. In his Ecclesiastical History I. 3.8 Eusebius writes: “And we have been told also that the prophets themselves became, by the act of anointing, Christs in type, so that all of these have reference to the true Christ, the divinely inspired and heavenly Word, who is the only high priest of all, and the only King of every creature, and the Father’s only supreme Prophet of prophets.” See Philip Scaff, ed., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 1 (New York: The Christian Literature Co., 1890), 86.

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18. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge, 2 vols (Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1983). This work went through fve editions: 1536, 1539, 1543, 1550, and 1559. The last edition is fve times longer than the frst edition. 19. John Calvin, Tracts Containing Treatises on the Sacraments, Catechism of the Church of Geneva, Forms of Prayer, and Confessions of Faith, Vol. II, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: The Calvin Translation Society, 1849), 33–56. The Catechism of the Church of Geneva went through four revisions: 1536, 1538, 1541, 1546. 20. Calvin devotes an entire chapter to this topic: Institutes, Bk II, chapter 15. For an exposition of Calvin’s teaching on this point, see François Wendel, Calvin: Origins and Development of Hid Religious Thought, trans. Philip Mairet (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 215–232. Note that Calvin does not follow the traditional order of prophet, priest, and king, placing king before priest, most likely because in his theology the priestly function is the least important. 21. Institutes, 427. 22. Ibid., 427–431. 23. Ibid., 431–432.

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Chapter 9

Coalitional Church Ecclesiology in the Age of Migration

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Ulrich Schmeidel

“Cement versus Choir,” the New York Times titled its report about the incident at Calais. Since 2015, when millions of migrants made their way into Europe, the encampment there had been known as “the Jungle.” A former landfll, the Jungle housed about 10,000 migrants—some recognized and some not recognized as refugees—who had built make-shift huts, including a church, while waiting for a chance to get across the channel into the United Kingdom by hiding on a ferry or a lorry. When the UK government decided to build a wall in order to cut off the Jungle from the vehicles that cross the channel—“border barrier” they called it—the Church of England could no longer keep quiet. In statement after statement, Anglicans from inside and outside the UK had called for both more humane and more humanitarian immigration policies in Europe. When she heard that the government was about to invest the millions that were needed for precisely such policies in the construction of a wall, the Archbishop of Canterbury exclaimed in one of her sparkling sermons: “enough is enough!” The congregation of Canterbury Cathedral—a center of World Christianity past and present—took its choirs, the girls and the boys, to Calais. In full regalia, the singers of the celebrated choirs who were used to concerts in cathedrals and churches across the world sang their hearts out on a construction site as the cement for the wall was delivered: “All people that on earth do dwell, sing to the Lord with cheerful voice. Him serve with mirth, His praise forth tell, come ye before Him and rejoice.” Shocked, some of the workers stopped unloading. Of course, the cement was still being unloaded, but much more slowly and much more sparsely. The security staff that had been called by the site supervisor was startled too. “O enter then His gates with praise, approach with joy His courts unto. Praise, laud, and bless His name always, for it is seemly so to do,” the choir continued. Now that the cameras were clicking—nobody 151

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knew who had called the journalists—the singers were afraid of what would happen, but there was no unwanted quiver in their voices. “To Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the God whom heaven and earth adore, from men and from the angel host, be praise and glory evermore.” By the time of the choir’s triumphant “Amen,” what would happen was clear: “it was cement versus choir,” the New York Times concluded, “the choir won.” This story is not history. Although it never happened, it illustrates both the challenges and the chances that confront churches in a context that has been characterized as “the Age of Migration.”1 In this chapter, I analyze and assess the core concerns and the core concepts of ecclesiology under the conditions of modernity and under the conditions of migration. I argue for a coalitional church as a central category for ecumenical ecclesiology in the age of migration. The chapter comes with a crucial caveat. Ecclesiology is always already contextual. Even if it is concerned with international rather than national challenges, such as migration, it cannot escape its context. The category of coalitional church is intended for the contexts of receivers rather than the contexts of refugees. But by centering on the “other”—the one who confronts people with difference2—the category of coalitional church aims at overcoming the contrast between refugees and receivers in order to make church a church for all.

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ECCLESIOLOGY UNDER THE CONDITIONS OF MODERNITY What is ecclesiology? The concept of ecclesiology covers the thinking and the talking about church throughout the history of Christianity. Ecclesiology is caught in a hermeneutical circle: in order to think and talk about church, one needs to know what church is and in order to know what church is, one needs to think and talk about church. The concept that centers ecclesiology— “Church”—is complicated and complex. The Bible comes up with a concert of metaphors for church, such as church as a “building” (1 Corinthians 3) or church as a “body” (1 Cor 12). With migration in mind, these metaphors could be structured on a spectrum from immovable to movable. The letter to the Hebrews characterizes Christians as a wandering people on its way to God’s peace (Heb 3:7-4:11). For most of these metaphors, Jesus Christ is central. Although Jesus was interested neither in the constitution nor in the conceptualization of church—church never comes up in the Gospels3—he was considered the center of the community at Jerusalem from which a church emerged that would eventually encompass the whole world. How can a community center on Jesus Christ? Ernst Troeltsch, the ecclesiologist who combined sociology and theology for the frst time, contends that Jesus Christ is crucial for the “double character” of Christianity: church interrelates sociological relations between creature

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and creature and theological relations between creature and creator in Jesus Christ.4 Hence, church is concerned with both the sociological other (which is to say, the creature) and the theological other (which is to say, the creator) as expressed in the double commandment of love (Mk 12:28-31; Mt 22:35-40; Lk 10:25-28; Jn 13:31-35; see also Lev 19:17-18; Deut 6:4-9). However, church is not ecclesiology and ecclesiology is not church. For the conception of ecclesiology as a core concern of systematic theology, Reformation and Counter-Reformation were crucial. The breakup of Christendom into Protestantism and Catholicism provoked the competing and conficting confessions to conceptualize what it meant to be or not to be church. Since its emergence, then, ecclesiology exposes a controversy. While both confessions insist on the importance of church, historically Catholicism prioritizes the institutional over the individual and Protestantism prioritizes the individual over the institutional. Orthodox churches, by contrast, take the concrete community, gathered around a bishop, as a point of departure for thinking and talking about church. Although far too rough-and-ready, these historical priorities have consequences.5 Until today, the contrasts between ecclesiologies are seen as so consequential that some churches refuse to accept some churches as churches. As thinking and talking about church, ecclesiology has to be comparative and controversial today. Even though there is a trend toward inter- rather than intra-confessional ecclesiologies inside and outside the academy, ecclesiologists cannot expect that all are agreed on one concept of church. In order to analyze and assess ecclesiology in the age of migration, then, it seems more pertinent and more promising to characterize the conditions that ecclesiologists of all confessions have to consider when thinking and talking about church. If church is where sociological relations between creature and creature and theological relations between creature and creator interrelate in Jesus Christ, thinking and talking about church is caught in two contrasts: a methodological contrast between the conceptual and the concrete and a thematic contrast between the church and the context. ECCLESIOLOGY BETWEEN THE CONCEPTUAL AND THE CONCRETE Methodologically, ecclesiology combines sociological and theological approaches to church. The combination is tricky because often the church that people practice and the church that people preach differ from each other. How can ecclesiologists tackle this difference? Augustine, the bishop of Hippo whose theology has had a huge impact on ecclesiologies past and present, already accounts for the difference. In On Christian Doctrine (De Doctrina Christiana), he interprets church as

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a corpus permixtum, a mixture that includes those who are called by God and those who are not called by God.6 Accordingly, he draws a distinction between the “invisible Church” referring to those who are called by God on the one hand and the “visible Church” referring to those who are and to those who are not called by God on the other hand. The Reformers applauded Augustine’s account. Although they differ both in their analyses and in their applications of Augustine’s concept of church, they agree on the result: the distinction between the invisible (theological category of) church and the visible (sociological category of) church.7 The problem with this distinction is that it provides theologians with a cop-out. When everything they dislike about their church can be defned as sociological rather than theological and everything they like about their church can be defned as theological rather than sociological, ecclesiologists construct cloud-castles: they forget the failures of church and focus on the features of church. Of course, already in the sixteenth century, critics exposed the contrast between invisible church and visible church as a cloud-castle construction that immunizes the church against critique and self-critique. Ecclesiologists need to take both the failures and the features of church into account. Nicholas M. Healy offers a compelling critique of what he calls “blueprint ecclesiologies.”8 Characteristic of the modern mindset, these ecclesiologies aim to plan church programmatically according to a blueprint. Once the ecclesial plan is put into ecclesial practice, church can become and can be perfect. But Healy insists that church cannot be programmed according to a plan because the ecclesial practice needs to impact the ecclesial plan as much as the ecclesial plan needs to impact the ecclesial practice. Otherwise, the ecclesiologist might take cover in cloud-castles again. Hence, Healy commends a combination of theological and sociological approaches—ecclesiology and ethnography—in order to connect plan and practice.9 What appears as academic and abstract quibble about methodology is crucial for the analysis and the assessment of church. The split between the sociological and the theological approach has ramifcations for how ecclesiologists characterize what can and what cannot count as church, the church and the context of the church. The identity of church is at stake. ECCLESIOLOGY BETWEEN THE CHURCH AND THE CONTEXT Thematically, ecclesiology draws a distinction between what is church and what is not church, “the world.”10 Ecclesiology, then, is the medium through which theologians think through society: if society is interpreted positively, ecclesiologists will be interested in minimizing the difference between church and world and if society is interpreted negatively, ecclesiologists will be

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interested in maximizing the difference of church and world. But is there such a difference? Again, the theology of Augustine is telling. He argues against identifying the church with its context and the context with its church. In City of God (De Civitate Dei), he suggests that the “divine city” (civitas dei) and the “devilish city” (civitas diaboli) are mixed up throughout the history of humanity.11 Since God will separate the one from the other only at the end of history—the civitas dei to eternal heaven and the civitas diaboli to eternal hell—Christians live their lives in history as pilgrims. Churches are always already on the move: pilgrims who neither support nor stay in any societal order. In the history of theology, Augustine has been so infuential for the interpretation of the relation between church and context that ecclesiologists with very different and diverse agendas claim to be Augustinian. Stanley Hauerwas’ popular and provocative account of Christians as “resident aliens” points to the promise of the contrast between church and context.12 According to Hauerwas, practice shapes persons, so that the character of persons who live their lives inside church differs from the character of persons who live their lives outside church. The church pits Christians against non-Christians in a way that turns Christians into “aliens.” Christians and non-Christians share one world, but since the character of Christians contrasts with the character of non-Christians, the church has a special status. However, no matter how suggestive and successful these concepts of church are, their positive account of church rests on their negative view of the world and their negative view of the world rests on their positive account of church: Church is identifed at the cost of the world and the world is identifed at the cost of church. To summarize, ecclesiology—the thinking and talking about church—aims to analyze and to assess how sociological relations (between creature and creature) and theological relations (between creature and creator) interrelate in Jesus Christ. Accordingly, it is caught in two contrasts: the one between the conceptual and the concrete and the other between the church and the context. How ecclesiologists handle these contrasts decides and defnes their interpretation of the identity of church. Ecclesiology, then, revolves around the issue of identity. Of course, identity is the issue in the age of migration. ECCLESIOLOGY UNDER THE CONDITIONS OF MIGRATION Migration is diffcult to defne. Although there are different defnitions that come with diverse descriptive interests and distinct prescriptive intentions, these defnitions concur in the concept of movement (from the Latin migrare): migration has to do with the movement of people between places.

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While the movement can be national or international, it is a constant in the history of humanity. The Bible is full of stories of migration. Whatever else these stories explore, they explain that mission and migration go hand in hand. There would be no church without migration. Accordingly, theologians have pointed out that migration—“migrantness,” as Peter Phan argues—is a marker of church, both historically and systematically.13 Church is always already on the move. However, in the twenty-frst century, migration is also the marker of a worldwide crisis. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, about 68.5 million people are forcibly displaced today: some 80 percent accommodated in the Global South and some 20 percent accommodated in the Global North.14 Considering these statistics, one has to be careful with the concept of a current migration crisis. Often the migration crisis of the receivers in the Global North camoufages the migration crisis of the refugees in the Global South. If there is a crisis, it is frst and foremost the crisis that migrants experience when they fee from situations—commonly caused by environmental and economic exploitation—that make their lives unlivable.15 They come in search for life, sometimes better life and sometimes bare life. Of course, the current migration crisis is a central concern for churches. However, scholars who are searching for studies on ecclesiology in the context of migration will soon start to doubt their research skills. While churches—in concert with other religious and nonreligious organizations—have been vital to the work in refugee relief worldwide, little has been written about the impact that migration has on ecclesiology or the impact that ecclesiology has on migration.16 The separation of theology from ethics and of ethics from theology seems to have caused the lack of studies on ecclesiology in the age of migration.17 But if church is where sociological relations (between creature and creature) and theological relations (between creature and creator) interrelate in Jesus Christ, ecclesiologists cannot circumvent ethics. On the contrary, they have to search for the ethics in ecclesiology and for the ecclesiology in ethics. Through such double-edged searches, migration can be tackled as a locus theologicus: a location from which theologians gain new insights into theology.18 In view of ecclesiology, such insights can be gained because migration intensifes the two contrasts in which all thinking and talking about church is caught: the methodological contrast between the conceptual and the concrete and the thematic contrast between the church and the context. ECCLESIOLOGY BETWEEN THE CONCEPTUAL AND THE CONCRETE The split between the sociological and the theological approach to church is mirrored in many theologies of migration. In his analyses of these theologies,

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Gioacchino Campese distinguishes two approaches: a more theoretical approach which concentrates on the conceptual signifcance of the philosophy of the other for theology and a more practical approach which concentrates on the concrete signifcance of the presence of the other for theology.19 Pleading for the priority of practice, Campese argues that the abstract philosophy and the acute presence of the other must be held together in any theology of migration. For the ecclesiologist, Campese’s argument is both important and instructive. Throughout the history of Christianity, church has been conceptualized theologically as universal and characterized sociologically as particular. Since Augustine the split between sociology and theology has been alleviated by approaching the particular church as the visible and the universal church as the invisible. As Joshua Ralston argues, this approach left theologians unprepared to criticize the construction of homogeneous rather than heterogeneous communities as church.20 In practice, churches are often or all too often communities where like-minded meet like-minded. In view of migration, such communities are not necessarily problematic. It is important for migrants to meet migrants after their arrival in a new country. If the church offers a space where they can meet, it is turned into a home away from home, a hub from which processes of integration can be started and sustained. The problem with a church for migrants arises when the home away from home is constructed in a way that keeps migrants among migrants: when receivers close off their church communities against refugees or when refugees close off their church communities against receivers. Hence, inasmuch as it sustains a split between theological universalism and sociological particularism, it is crucial to overcome the difference between visible and invisible church. If church is where sociological relations between creature and creature and theological relations between creature and creator interrelate in Jesus Christ, church needs both the sociological and the theological other. Only if all are one in Christ can church become and be the agent of integration that makes change among both refugees and receivers possible. In the age of migration, then, conceptualizations of church as community are problematic and pointless if the practice of church and the preaching of church are torn apart. On the contrary, the sociology of the church and the theology of the church need to be combined, the one needs to form and inform the other. ECCLESIOLOGY BETWEEN THE CHURCH AND THE CONTEXT Like the split between the conceptual and the concrete, the split between the church and the context is intensifed by migration. Empirically, the world is not separate from church and church is not separate from the world: the

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people who attend church are also part of the institutions of the world and the people who are part of the institutions of the world also attend church. The church would have to be a secluded enclave of eremites for a strict separation from the world to succeed. Instead, the church spills over into its context and the context spills over into its church. When it comes to migration, the spillage between church and context can be seen in Christians’ attitudes toward migrants. Already in the stories of the Bible, Susanna Snyder suggests, one sees how the stranger is met either with an “ecology of fear” or with an “ecology of faith.”21 These stories, then, are much more ambiguous than simplistic calls for integrating or for not integrating migrants suggest. Today, populists inside and outside the parliaments put churches in a predicament by claiming Christianity for their programmatic proposals of a clash of civilizations.22 They argue that one saves and sustains Christianity by keeping the other— particularly if they are Muslim—outside of one’s country and outside of one’s church. In the context of the current migration crisis, the statements of clergy are again ambiguous: some are confrming while some are criticizing the populist proposals. The ambiguity casts doubt on any claim that the world differs decidedly from the church and the church differs decidedly from the world. Although it is often argued that the conceptualization of church as a community of “resident aliens” connects the church to the existence of the migrant and the existence of the migrant to the church—together, all are pilgrims toward God—it cannot provide a practical path out of the predicament. When Christians characterize church members as migrants and migrants as church members, they conceal that their characterization changes neither the social, legal, and political status of the migrant nor the social, legal, and political status of the member: the member is still a citizen with the rights and the responsibilities guaranteed by the state, the migrant is still a noncitizen without the rights and the responsibilities guaranteed by the state. The conceptualization of church as a community of resident aliens, then, runs the risk of romanticizing and rationalizing the status of alienness.23 Only if churches back up their claim by offering migrants opportunities for participation in society that come close to those offered by the state—which is the case in some communities—can the claim be more than anesthesia that supports the social, political, and legal status quo.24 The risk that conceptualizations of church run is both more accentuated and more acute when the migrants in question are non-Christians rather than Christians. All members of church—migrants and nonmigrants alike—are asked to be “one in Christ” (Gal 3:28) which could inadvertently imply a call for a prioritization of Christian over non-Christian migrants. Given the rift between public rhetoric about “the Migrant” (who is often portrayed as

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a female, passive victim in need of support) and public rhetoric about “the Muslim” (who is often portrayed as a male, active villain in need of suppression), such a prioritization is neither surprising nor strange.25 Yet it turns God into a tribal God—a turn which has had catastrophic consequences throughout history. To make matters more complex and more controversial, scholars of integration insist that migrants ought to be recognized as subjects rather than objects of the society to which they migrated. But can churches recognize refugees—say Muslims—as subjects of their church rather than objects of their charity? Can a church contribute to the life of a Muslim without ceasing to be church? Can a Muslim contribute to the life of a church without ceasing to be Muslim? Answering questions like these requires both a radical sociological rethinking of the institution of the church and a radical theological rethinking of the identity of the church. Politically, the split between church and context translates into a split in the church’s communication to the inside and to the outside. Theorists such as Jürgen Habermas have called churches to translate their communication from the sacred language that is spoken inside the churches into the secular language that is spoken outside the churches so that state and society can listen and learn from what churches have to say.26 The possibilities and the impossibilities of such translations depend on how one characterizes church and context. If ecclesiologists assume convergence between church and world, the church’s communication to the inside and to the outside converge too: translation becomes almost obsolete. If ecclesiologists assume divergence between church and world, the church’s communication to the inside and to the outside diverge too: translation becomes almost outrageous. If ecclesiologists assume that there is convergence as well as divergence, they will be worried about the communication that is “lost in translation.” Public theology is particularly promising for churches, because it presents theology as a bilingual project: sacred and secular at the same time.27 As a bilingual project, public theology is in a particularly promising position to criticize both the purifcation of the identity of the church and the purifcation of the identity of the context. It allows churches to open themselves up to the other.28 To summarize, migration—movement of people between places—is a locus theologicus because it provokes and provides new theological insights. Under the conditions of migration, the contrasts between the conceptual and the concrete and between the church and the context become more accentuated and more acute. Ecclesiology is still about the issue of identity, but in the age of migration the identity of church needs to be opened to the other. Crucially, the interpretation of the identity of church is not innocent: how ecclesiologists think about identity impacts the capability of churches to bring refugees and receivers together in Christ.

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ECUMENICAL ECCLESIOLOGY FOR THE CURRENT MIGRATION CRISIS In 2018, when the current migration crisis had already been acknowledged in public squares and political spheres worldwide, the general secretary of the World Council of Churches Olav Fykse Tveit delivered a speech, “Perspectives on Migration,” at the headquarters of the United Nations in New York City.29 In what follows, I take the short speech with which Tveit summed up a UNICEF symposium on the role of religion in international affairs as an encouraging example of ecumenical ecclesiology in the age of migration, because it expounds a radical rethinking of church, both in what is said and in what is not said in the speech. Thus, the speech comes close to presenting and promoting the category of coalitional church. The central concern is humanity: “The ‘Ecumenical Vision’ shared by the churches is to see all human beings created in the image of God,” Tveit suggests. However, the concept of creation is not introduced to contrast religious anthropologies with nonreligious anthropologies so as to conclude in a triumphant apology for religion. On the contrary, Tveit’s call for a common humanity loses neither its religious nor its nonreligious listeners, because it understands the concept of dignity as an interpretation of creation and creation as an interpretation of the concept of dignity. The speech, then, is public theology inasmuch as it speaks sacred and secular language at the same time. What can the World Council of Churches contribute to the call for a common humanity? According to Tveit, it is the ecumenical experience: “The ecumenical experience has been that this vision . . . for more unity can become true. We can as human beings . . . relate in an accountable way to one another—even when we live in . . . different contexts and conditions. We can see some signs of what it means to be one.” Hence, the critique that commonly confronts the World Council of Churches—that it comes without a clear-cut construal of identity because it is a cooperation rather than a combination of churches—is turned into its most exciting and its most encouraging contribution: “We need changed attitudes to handle . . . the many challenges of our time. We need the attitude of mutual accountability in all our relationships. It is a central attitude that has brought the ecumenical movement to life as a fellowship of Churches. We can show this attitude in acknowledging that all have something signifcant to contribute.” The contribution of the churches, then, is not a conceptual proposition but a concrete practice: the practice of mutual accountability to which all are invited to contribute critically and creatively. “By exercising this attitude of mutual accountability in a symposium like today we strengthen our relationships among the many actors represented. We also become wiser . . . in our shared commitment for a better world.” Through the concept of creation, then, Tveit calls for a

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common humanity that connects the church with the world and the world with the church.30 Together with its religious and its nonreligious partners, the World Council of Churches is “committed to confronting the vicious cycle that has emerged” in view of migration. The cycle is centered on a constellation where marginalized migrants (the poor from outside a country) compete with marginalized nonmigrants (the poor from inside a country), a constellation that has been exploited by “populist politics seeking short-term advantage.”31 Again, Tveit refrains from constructing a contrast between ecclesial and nonecclesial practices by admitting that such populism is found both inside and outside churches. However, there is more to the signifcance of the marginalized. By contributing to the practice of mutual accountability which prevents the populism that marshals those from outside the country against those from inside the country, refugees against receivers, it is the marginalized who can counter the vicious cycle. The marginalized are seen as subjects rather than objects. Their contribution is crucial for both ecclesial and nonecclesial communities. Tveit concludes with the picture of pilgrimage that is so pertinent to ecclesiologies’ past and present. However, the picture is not interpreted in a lofty way that romanticizes or rationalizes alienness, but to point out that the World Council of Churches is “inviting all people of good will to join” the journey toward justice in the context of marginalization and migration. “It is about being human.” The speech is exemplary for ecumenical ecclesiology in the age of migration, both for what is stated and for what is not stated. First and foremost, identity is not mentioned—neither the identity of the church (against the world) nor the identity of the world (against the church). Instead, what churches contribute to the current context is a practice: mutual accountability. The practice of mutual accountability is open and open-ended, contributions can be made by each and every community, regardless of whether they are religious or nonreligious. Humanity is introduced as a concept that connects those who are religious and those who are nonreligious because it is open to secular and sacred language. Theologically, creation is the core category to capture what humanity is about. Since it insists that the other is the image of God (Gen 1:26-27), regardless of whether she is or is not a migrant, the theology of creation interprets the encounter with the other as an encounter with God (and the encounter with God as an encounter with the other). The theology of creation, then, returns ecclesiology to both the double commandment and the double character of church: Church is where sociological relations (between creature and creature) and theological relations (between creature and creator) interrelate in Jesus Christ. Church means fnite sociological other meets infnite theological other. But church is not above all suspicion. Since maltreatment of the marginalized other, migrant or not migrant, can be

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found inside and outside the churches, the theology of creation is interpreted as a corrective that prevents the construction of a contrast between church and world or world and church. Echoing the letter to the Hebrews, both are explored as on a pilgrimage toward justice. In-between the lines, the ecumenical ecclesiology explored in the example of Tveit’s speech interprets identity as a task. Accordingly, ecclesiology approaches church neither in the direction from the theological to the sociological (where new plans for church defne new practices) nor in the direction from the sociological to the theological (where new practices for church defne new plans), but acknowledges and appreciates both: practices inform proposals and proposals inform practices. Tveit’s speech, then, comes close to the concept of church that I call and characterize as “coalitional church.” The category of coalition comes from a controversy in political philosophy, where it counters the concept of identity politics. Expectably enough, identity politics assumes that politics circles around identities. In the 1960s and the 1970s, it was used to understand struggles for liberation worldwide. Where oppressed groups struggled against oppressing groups, identity was at stake. In identity politics, identity is the engine for political and practical mobilization. While it is crucial to confrm that identity politics countered oppression across the world, people who would not or could not ft the categories of identity that the politics required have come up with coalitional politics as a counter-category. Queer activists and analysts have been vital here. Drawing on Judith Butler, their core concern is to convey that identities are performative: they can be done and they can be undone. The contingency of the category exposes the risk that identity politics always already runs: defning the oppressed self in contrast to the oppressing other or the oppressing other in contrast to the oppressed self can cement the hierarchy between oppressed and oppressor that it is supposed to criticize and counter. In order to avoid this risk, coalitional politics takes “coalition” as its core category. While the struggle against any and all oppressions remains, the engine of the struggle is now a fuid and fexible mix of people. Pointing to the experience of protest in streets and squares, Butler proposes, “when we arrive, we do not know who else is arriving, which means that we accept a kind of unchosen dimension to our solidarity with others. Perhaps we could say that the body is always exposed to people . . . it does not have a say about. . ., and that these conditions of social embodiment are those we have not fully brokered. I want to suggest that solidarity emerges from this.”32 As Tveit’s speech emphasizes, a coalitional church is open to coalitions with religious and with nonreligious partners for the sake of the other. Openness to otherness, then, is the central criterion of the coalitions which it enters. In these coalitions, it is not concerned with saving its identity, but with saving its alterity—the other. What Kristin Heyer captures as “a move

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beyond charity” can be seen as revolving around the other.33 The other is at the core of the identity of church, subject of church rather than object of charity. It sounds comfortable, but is challenging. To return to the questions raised above, the category of coalitional church implies that non-Christians can contribute to the identity of the Christian community (as much as Christians can contribute to the identity of the non-Christian community). It is hard to imagine, but—if taken seriously—the speech by the general secretary of the World Council of churches calls for such imagination. Yet, in spite of the signifcance of imagination, the coalitional church is no ecclesiological pipe dream. It exists wherever church communities are concerned with the other, where they run shelters, schools, or soup kitchens for the sake of the other. In these cases, sociological relations between creature and creature and theological relations between creature and creator are interrelated in Jesus Christ. In conclusion, then, the insight gained from migration as a locus theologicus is that the concept of identity has to be radically rethought. I have analyzed and assessed how the contrast has been tackled by ecclesiologists both under the conditions of modernity and under the conditions of migration in order to offer the coalitional church as a central category for ecumenical ecclesiology in the age of migration. The coalitional church takes the other as its center, claiming that in the other the sociological and the theological come together in Jesus Christ. The double commandment and the double character of church, then, can overcome the distinction between receiver and refugee—regardless of their religion—through a radical opening of the sociological and the theological identity of church. The ecumenical ecclesiology of the coalitional church already exists in the practices of churches worldwide, in those who are and in those who are not affliated with the World Council of Churches. But it also provokes the imagination: The New York Times returned to Calais. After about a week, the choirs of Canterbury Cathedral were running out of steam, wondering how to sustain the singing that had stopped the construction of the wall so far. A number of religious and nonreligious communities contacted the Archbishop of Canterbury. She was delighted to accept their offer to support the singers. Slowly but surely, the Jungle was transformed into a concert site where religious and nonreligious musicians from all over Europe, some famous and some not so famous, came together. Even atheist associations joined in. The Jungle was now a multifaith space where music from all over the world was turned into a tool of resistance. From time to time, musicians from different traditions would create music together. Some of these performances were recorded. The income from the record sales was spent to support the refugees and the resistance. Calling themselves “The Jungle Committee,” the refugees coordinated and contributed to the activities in the Jungle that soon had spin-offs in

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refugee camps all over the continent. Of course, there were tensions between the different and diverse groups, but the hope to prevent the construction of the wall held them together. After one year of continuous concerts on what was supposed to be a construction site, the UK government gave in. Plans for the resettlement of the refugees from the Jungle in the UK were discussed. It was cement versus choir. The choir won.

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NOTES 1. Stephen Castles, Hein de Haas, and Mark J. Miller, The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World, 5th edition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 2. Of course, “the other” is a concept with a chequered career in the histories of philosophy and theology. See Pamela S. Anderson, “The Other,” in The Oxford Handbook of Theology and Modern European Thought, ed. Nicholas Adams, George Pattison, and Graham Ward (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 83–103. What runs through these histories is the idea that “the other” signals and singularizes difference. 3. According to the Gospels, Jesus created the circle of the twelve, but he never called for the constitution of a church. The concept of church never comes up (given that Matthew 16:18 and 18:17 are commonly considered additions that project the church from the present into the past). 4. Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, vol. 1, trans. Olive Wyon (London: Macmillan, 1931), 57 (translation altered). See also Ulrich Schmiedel, Elasticized Ecclesiology: The Concept of Community after Ernst Troeltsch (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 5. See Gerard Mannion and Lewis S. Mudge (eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Christian Church (London: Routledge, 2007) for chapters on the different and diverse ecclesiological traditions. 6. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine (De Doctrina Christiana), 3.32. See Roger Haight, SJ, Christian Community in History, vol. 1: “Historical Ecclesiology” (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 224–234, for a succinct summary of Augustine’s ecclesiology. 7. See Roger Haight, SJ, Christian Community in History, vol. 2 “Comparative Ecclesiology,” 13–80, for the ecclesiology of Martin Luther and 82–147 for the ecclesiology of John Calvin. 8. Nicholas M. Healy, Church, World and the Christian Life: Practical-Prophetic Ecclesiology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 9. Healy, Church, World and the Christian Life, 154–185. See also Christian Scharren, Field Work in Theology: Exploring the Social Context of God’s Work in the World (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2015). 10. See Roger Haight, SJ, Christian Community in History, vol. 3: “Ecclesial Existence” (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 233–269.

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11. Augustine, City of God (De Civitate Dei), 18.49; 19.17. See again Haight, Christian Community in History, vol. 1, 224–234. 12. Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1989). 13. Peter C. Phan, “Deus Migrator—God the Migrant: Migration of Theology and Theology of Migration,” Theological Studies 77/4 (2016), 845-868, here 849. For the ecclesiological and the ethical consequences of the migrantness of church, see also Peter C. Phan, “Christianity as an Institutional Migrant: Historical, Theological, and Ethical Perspectives,” in Christianity in Migration: The Global Perspective, ed. Peter C. Phan and Elaine Padilla (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 9–35. 14. See the UNHCR’s statistics at http:​//www​.unhc​r.org​/uk/f​i gure​s-at-​a-gla​nce.h​ tml (accessed October 2018). These statistics are updated regularly by the UNHCR. 15. See the striking but shocking account by Saskia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). For her analysis of contemporary migratory currents, see Saskia Sassen, “Three Emergent Migrations: An Epochal Change,” SUR 23/13 (2016), 29–41 16. See Gioacchino Campese, “‘But I See That Somebody Is Missing’: Ecclesiology and Exclusion in the Context of Immigration,” in Ecclesiology and Exclusion: Boundaries of Being and Belonging in Postmodern Times, ed. Dennis M. Doyle, Timothy J. Furry, and Pascal D. Bazzell (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2012), 71–91. 17. See Susanna Snyder, “Introduction: Moving Body,” in Church in an Age of Global Migration: A Moving Body, ed. Susanna Snyder, Joshua Ralston, and Agnes M. Brazal (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 1–19. 18. Regina Polak, “Migration als Ort der Theologie,” in Migration als Ort der Theologie, ed. Tobias Keßler (Regensburg: Friedrich Pustet, 2014), 87–114. 19. Gioacchino Campese, “Theologies of Migration,” in Migration als Ort der Theologie, 167-188. 20. Concentrating on Reformed churches in the United States, Joshua Ralston points to the impact that theologies of the two kingdoms have had on both ecclesiologies of migration and ethics of migration. In “‘Gathered from All Nations’: Catholicity, Migration, and Reformed Ecclesiology,” in Church in an Age of Global Migration, 35–50, here 40, he suggests that in accordance with “the claims of the Belhar Confession, it can be argued that confessing the . . . catholicity of the church while failing to struggle to enact . . . this . . . through concrete local congregational action is heretical.” 21. See Susanna Snyder, Asylum-Seeking, Migration and Church (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 129–198. 22. See Ulrich Schmiedel, “‘We Can Do This!’ Tackling the Political Theology of Populism,” in Religion in the European Refugee Crisis, ed. Ulrich Schmiedel and Graeme Smith (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 205–224. 23. See the compelling critique by David L. Johns, “Being an Otherwise-Documented Church: An Ecclesiology for All Us Immigrants,” in Ecclesiology and Exclusion, 93–103. 24. See the studies of refugee relief by Scandinavian churches, Sturla J. Stålsett, “Asylbarn og menneskeverd: Etiske refeksjoner med utgangspunkt I erfaringer fra

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Helsesenteret for papirløse migranter,” Etikk i praksis: Nordic Journal of Applied Ethics 6/2 (2012), 23–37 and Trygve Wyller, “Glimt av en felles menneskelighet,” in Rom og etikk: Fortellinger om ambivalens (Oslo: Cappelen Damm Akademisk, 2017), 19–32. 25. See Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, “The Faith-Gender-Asylum Nexus: An Interesctionalist Analysis of Representations of the ‘Refugee Crisis,’” in The Refugee Crisis and Religion: Secularism, Security and Hospitality in Question, ed. Luca Mavelli and Erin K. Wilson (London: Rowman and Littlefeld, 2017), 207–220. 26. See the discussions in Judith Butler, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Cornel West, The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, ed. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 27. For a comprehensive overview of the feld, see the contributions to A Companion to Public Theology, ed. Sebastian Kim and Katie Day (Leiden: Brill, 2017) 28. Gioacchino Campese, “Theologies of Migration,” 167–188, calls for openness to otherness in churches. 29. Olav Fykse Tveit’s speech is available at https​://ww​w.oik​oumen​e.org​/en/r​ esour​ces/d​ocume​nts/p​erspe​ctive​s-on-​migra​tion-​displ​aceme​nt-an​d-mar​ginal​izati​on-in​ clusi​on-an​d-jus​tice-​an-ec​umeni​cal-v​ision​/ (accessed October 2018). All citations are taken from here. 30. Arguably, Tveit is infuenced by the tradition of Scandinavian creation theology. See Niels Henrik Gregersen, Bengt Kristensson Uggla, and Trygve Wyller, “Reconfguring Reformation Theology: The Program of Scandinavian Creation Theology,” in Reformation Theology for a Post-Secular Age: Løgstrup, Prenter, Wingren and the Future of Scandinavian Creation Theology, ed. Niels Henrik Gregersen, Bengt Kristensson Uggla, and Trygve Wyller (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck, 2017)11–33. 31. See also Zygmunt Bauman, Strangers at Our Door (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016). 32. Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 152. 33. Kristin E. Heyer, “The Promise of a Pilgrim Church: Ecclesiological Refections on the Ethical Praxis of Kinship with Migrants,” in Church in an Age of Global Migration, 83–98, here 92.

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Part III

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ETHICS

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Chapter 10

The Migrant Imago Migration and the Ethics of Human Dignity

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William A. Barbieri Jr.

What does migration have to do with Christian ethics? In an era in which, according to UN estimates, roughly a billion people around the world can be considered migrants,1 mass migration might well be considered to be, in Christian parlance, a “sign of the times.” This is to say that the great numbers of people on the move today—immigrants, those feeing war and persecution, migrant workers, humanitarian refugees, and so on—together mark a momentous historical circumstance of the sort that must be taken account of in Christian prescriptions for how to live in the present. The teachings and practices that constitute Christian ethics ignore at their peril the legacies of past migrations and the challenges accompanying new ones. The dislocations and tensions attached to the present large-scale patterns of migration call for a global Christian response; indeed, they provide a test of Christianity’s integrity and relevance in the modern world. At the same time, attending to the reality of migration can shed new light on the scriptural roots, doctrinal traditions, and reservoirs of experience that inform the moral stance of the Christian churches. If rising migration is a sign of the times, nothing less can be said of the emergence of human dignity. In the period since the end of World War II, the venerable idea of human dignity has seen a sudden and steep rise to prominence in world affairs. It has been frmly established as the foundation of the architecture of human rights and international morality constructed by the United Nations. It has likewise been ensconced as a cardinal legal value in the constitutions of a host of countries around the world including Germany, Ireland, Israel, and South Africa. In a similar way, it has been elevated to a preeminent principle of Christian moral teaching as articulated by the Catholic Church, the World Council of Churches, and numerous other religious bodies. The signifcance attached to the notion has made it in turn 169

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an important component of systems of professional ethics and a powerful term in political discourse. Even though the concept of human dignity is not without its critics and detractors, the consequence of these developments is that it enjoys an unparalleled moral and legal weight in international relations and the language of morals. When one adds to this the central role that has been accorded to dignity in Christian theological ethics, one has a value that is comparable to the venerable conception of “just war” in the manner in which it commands widespread intellectual currency, theological relevance, and legal heft. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the role of human dignity in Christian migration ethics. In its dual role as a fundamental legal value shaping the administration of human rights and a basic principle of theological anthropology, Christian morality, and social ethics, human dignity is at the core of the churches’ response to the problems associated with migration. In the dialectical spirit of migration theology, however, it will also be relevant to inquire here into how migration interacts with evolving understandings of human dignity itself. In what follows, I will frst introduce the modern conception of human dignity and comment on its relevance to current efforts to cope with migration. I will then delve more deeply into how contemporary features of migration engage various aspects of human dignity. I will close with some observations about how Christian practices concerning migrants refect and embody the theological ethics of human dignity.

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THE MIGRATION OF HUMAN DIGNITY To speak of human dignity today is to invoke the claim that human beings possess a unique worth which sets them apart from other beings and determines how they must or must not treat one another. This worth is enjoyed, inherently and equally, by all people, simply in virtue of their being human. That is what is implied when, for example, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights states, in its preamble, that “the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family . . . derive from the inherent dignity of the human person,”2 or when the Catholic Church’s Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes alludes to “a growing awareness of the exalted dignity proper to the human person.”3 But this is a distinctively modern understanding, one that has come a long way from the wellsprings of Western thought about dignity in Greek antiquity, where the term designated the exceptional leader or “dignitary.” The path taking dignity from a deeply hierarchical and aristocratic notion dependent on social acclamation to the present egalitarian, intrinsic, inalienable conception is a complex one. Moreover, it is stamped with the imprint of past migrations.

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It was the transition from Hellenistic to Roman culture, for example, that brought the frst incipient mention of human dignity (dignitas hominis), a worth ascribed in Cicero’s De Offciis to all men in virtue of the capacity of rationality enabling them to act in accordance with reason while eschewing sensual pleasure.4 The spread of Christianity then linked this Stoic understanding to the crucial, comparatively egalitarian signifcance of the imago Dei. For medieval thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas, the dignity of humans was assured by their creation in the image and likeness of God, by the dominion over creation ceded to them in the Bible, and in particular by their constitution as “persons”—a marker of status and value of which God was the highest instance. In addition, the incarnation of God in human form was understood to accord dignity to all humanity. The transition to Renaissance humanism then added a crucial new wrinkle emphasizing radical freedom or autonomy. Pico della Mirandola summed up this new outlook when he proclaimed in his Oration on the Dignity of Man that the human, a “creature of indeterminate image,” was endowed with the unique ability to determine by its own will its very nature.5 Both this protean mutability and this power of choice became emblematic of a modern conception of human dignity. Immanuel Kant then took the stage as the defnitive Enlightenment expositor of human dignity, drawing on these earlier materials in developing his own powerful articulation in which reason, autonomy, and the capacity to self-legislate the moral law account for the lofty status—the dignity—of humanity. In many ways, the conception attributed to Kant represents the apotheosis of accounts of human dignity, and this view remained extremely infuential in those momentous developments of the post–World War II era that elevated human dignity to its current status. Migration played a potent role in this development. In the proximate history of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the massive tides of refugees, expellees, stateless persons, and internally displaced persons were a crucial impetus—alongside the depredations of the death camps—behind the move to enshrine human dignity as the basis of the new regime of cosmopolitan humanitarian law. In the 1960s, for the Catholic Church, the intercultural wanderings of Christianity and the new demographic confgurations of a decolonializing world became important stimuli for the conciliar process of Vatican II that ratifed human dignity’s place at the core of a renewed moral theology. The result of the migratory history of human dignity is a present-day conception embodying what the social theorist Hans Joas has called the “sacralization of the person.”6 This conception revolves around the elements of rationality, divine likeness, creativity, moral autonomy, and equal personhood that have emerged along the way. The historicity of dignity raises the question of which further elements the present “Age of Migration” is likely to highlight.

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There is no question that human dignity is an intricate and multifaceted value. The complexity of its normative makeup is refected in the rhetoric of dignity: in how dignity is spoken of in law and jurisprudence, in church statements, in the declamations of activists, and, not least, in the testimonies of migrants. We may say, for instance, that people’s dignity is untouchable, and then worry that their dignity may be violated or stripped; or we may posit that all are equal in dignity, and then applaud some as being particularly dignifed; or we may proclaim that dignity is innate or God-given, and then go on to suggest that people have the capacity to assert or aspire to dignity. Dignity as inherent, dignity as unearned, dignity as acquired, dignity as embodied in behavior, dignity as vulnerable, dignity as attributed—all of these senses and more are well represented in discourses about migrants. As in other domains of ethical debate in which the vocabulary of dignity fgures prominently, such as bioethics or sexuality, we should not expect to unearth a single defnition, however complex, that unifes all the senses in which people invoke dignity. In light of the antinomies of dignity I have identifed, we must be content with seeing dignity as a complex of diverse usages linked by genealogical lines, family resemblances and marriages by analogy. Scott Cutler Shershow’s model of the triadic semantic structure of worth, status, and bearing that has characterized dignity talk down the ages remains a useful tool for analyzing appeals to dignity in connection with migration.7 At the same time, the particularities of migration experiences tend to highlight particular usages of dignity, including those related to the integrity of groups and other collectivities. Having said something about the language of dignity, we should also note here principal uses or applications of human dignity—specifc ways, that is, in which the term tends to be deployed in public debate. It is important to note that although human dignity is universally acknowledged as a basic value, its practical implications can be interpreted in different and at times conficting ways; indeed, some would argue that it is an “essentially contested” concept or even that it is too controversial—or vacuous—to be useful.8 Nonetheless, there are certain prevalent contexts of application that make up an identifable repertoire of ways of effectively appealing to dignity. One type of appeal invokes the material requirements for living a minimally fourishing life: the baseline conditions for a “life of dignity.” Two additional uses are predicated on the importance of individual will or autonomy and the desire to maintain control over one’s bodily functions and appearance; these values are both invoked in appeals for “death with dignity,” for example. Finally, and most infuentially, there is the assertion—found in UN documents, Christian teachings, and Kantian philosophy alike—of an inherent, inviolate sacral value associated with human personhood from which fows the broad panoply of human rights. Importantly, this last conception of inherent dignity is often invoked as a moral “trump,” an indefeasible value that is incommensurable

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with and cannot be weighed against other concerns. As we will see below, all of these uses are applied with respect to migrants. Let us turn now to look at how the value of human dignity has shaped the feld of migration. HUMAN DIGNITY AND MIGRATION There are two basic ways in which appeals to human dignity can structure areas of human endeavor: by reasoning from foundational premises about the positive features of human dignity to their implications for how people should be treated, or extrapolating from perceived violations of human dignity to imperatives regarding how people should not be treated. Both of these approaches play an important role in shaping the law, ethics, and politics of migration. In this section I will discuss how human dignity contributes (1) to the legal mechanisms regulating migration, (2) to the ethical analysis of types of migration—especially “forced migration,” and (3) to public policy debates about how to respond to problems associated with migration.

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HUMAN DIGNITY AND THE LAW OF MIGRATION To begin with, human dignity is at the core of the assemblage of global human rights instruments that regulates the international laws governing migration. In its preamble, the UDHR establishes the “inherent dignity” and “worth of the human person” as, in effect, the moral basis of the rights that it enumerates,9 before going on to specify that economic, social, and cultural rights are “indispensable for” dignity (Art. 22), that all have a right to “remuneration ensuring . . . an existence worthy of human dignity” (Art. 23), and that “[e]veryone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each State” as well as “the right to leave any country, including [one’s] own, and to return to [one’s] country” (Art. 13), and fnally, “the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution” (Art. 14).10 In 1990, the UN adopted the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, a document that safeguarded dignity with reference to equality of conditions with nationals (Art. 70) and humane conditions in cases of detainment (Art. 17). In 2016, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon issued a report entitled “In Safety and Dignity: Addressing Large Movements of Refugees and Migrants” in preparation for a UN effort to create a new architecture for coping with migration. In that report, dignity appeared as shorthand for protecting human rights in general, as in a specifc paired formulation endorsing commitments to protect the “safety and dignity” of migrants at various points in the migration process.11

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The resulting New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants12 added the point that “[d]emonizing refugees or migrants offends profoundly against the values of dignity and equality for every human being” (No. 14). This process prescribes the creation of two major UN compacts, one on refugees and the other on “safe, orderly, and regular migration”; work on these keystones for a new comprehensive framework on migration is currently underway. At the same time, a coalition of international lawyers organized by the Global Policy Initiative in New York has proposed a Model International Mobility Convention designed to embrace and improve on the components in the two UN compacts. This document aims to “establish a system that recognizes the human dignity of all while promoting the interests of countries of origin, transit, and destination.”13 Alongside the legal and institutional structures in which the idiom of human dignity is embedded, it is appropriate to cite the authoritative documents of churches and other religious bodies, which collectively constitute a very large sector of the agencies working with migrants and refugees globally. The Catholic Church is especially prominent in this role, and human dignity fgures especially prominently in the Catholic teachings that guide its work. The concept is anchored in the pastoral constitution Gaudium et Spes and the body of encyclical letters through which recent popes have articulated authoritative Catholic social teaching, and it is acknowledged to have foundational importance in a series of statements in which Catholic leaders have addressed migration. For example, “Strangers No Longer: Together on the Journey of Hope,” a pastoral letter issued jointly by the Catholic bishops of Mexico and the United States, reasserts the fundamental value of human dignity in the ordering of human societies before going on to speak of the particular dignity of unauthorized migrants. A growing literature has sprung up to explicate and further refne the implications of a theological understanding of human dignity for practical engagement with migrants.14 This development within Catholicism is mirrored in stances adopted by the World Council of Churches and various other Christian denominations.15 ETHICAL DISTINCTIONS CONCERNING TYPES OF MIGRATION As mentioned above, one of the most central elements of human dignity is the importance of personal autonomy. To respect human dignity entails protecting persons from infringement on their capacity to act freely and exercise responsibility for their lives. The importance of relations of responsibility, accountability, freedom, and coercion in the feld of migration studies is refected in the tendency in the feld to draw a normative distinction

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between “forced migration”—displacements of populations through war, development projects, and/or disasters—and, by implication, other types of presumably “unforced” migration. This distinction is susceptible to being overdrawn in ways that risk effacing the agency of migrants, but it does point out a crucial feature in ethical evaluations of the treatment of migrants: voluntariness counts. Unavoidably, receiving countries engage in explicit or implicit valuations of prospective admittees. On the one hand, judgments are made about the desirability of accepting and including migrants, based in large part on the ties they have to the receiving country and the benefts they might bring. On the other hand, there is a tendency to rank the rights-claims to assistance and acceptance that can be made on behalf of various classes of migrants with reference to what we might call the agential circumstances of their departure. The idea is that the more the sphere of free agency is limited by adverse conditions—threats of genocide, dangers of disease, “dead” or vanished land—the greater the affront to human dignity and hence the stronger one’s human rights-based claim to succor and safe haven becomes; conversely, the more one’s decision to move is motivated by the “free” pursuit of a better life—through access to better economic opportunities, or greater social liberties, or family reunifcation—the less that person can claim that critical issues involving the protection of human dignity buttress the case for admittance. The distinction between forced migrants and the so-called economic migrants routinely underestimates the degree of coercion constraining decisions to fee hostile environments—for example, communities where youth are subject to threats of violence by gangs—or desperate economic conditions occasioned by disastrous government policies, failed states, or exploitation at the hands of transnational actors. Nonetheless, the principle remains a useful one for tracking the relevance of dignity debates to different forms of migration. With those points in mind, then, we can usefully outline an ethical typology characterizing several discrete types of migration with reference to the principles of voluntariness and accountability implied by human dignity. Those migrants commonly thought of as “forced” to leave are the frst class here. Factors forcing migration include targeted, genocidal violence, particular threats related to gangs, and focused political persecution—all acknowledged direct causes of fight for which various identifable parties bear culpability. Much the same can be said with respect to victims of traffcking. In a way, the so-called Dreamers—children brought to a new country by family members—occupy a similar position characterized by a lack of consent, and it is this feature that places them in a category apart from other unauthorized migrants; however, responsibility in this case devolves in signifcant measure to those who bring them. Another class of migrants we must introduce here are forcibly repatriated groups including, for example,

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those recipients of Temporary Protected Status in the United States who have been designated for deportation despite the fact that they have establish frm roots there. A second broad categorization is of “impelled” migration or “displacement.” Loss of habitat due to rising sea levels, deforestation, or other forms of ecological degradation, and “disasters” of various sorts—earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis—each involve displacements due in some measure to human agency, so it is misleading to describe them simply as “natural”; rather, to some extent they involve breaches of responsibility. At the same time, they leave little choice to those they affect. Next, we have dangerous or threatening situations: ambient warfare, disease and famine, extreme poverty, religious discrimination, and similar circumstances in which signifcant but not necessarily direct or targeted threats or risks strongly encourage fight.16 In such cases, there are accountable parties and signifcant limitations placed on the autonomy of migrants. Where migration is no longer forced or impelled, we enter the realm of “reluctant” migrants. There is a sliding scale of necessity that serves to incentivize refugees and would-be migrant workers to leave their homes and undertake the hazards of unauthorized migration; this relation also involves links of responsibility related both to the economic hardships that spur mobility and to the commercial benefts of mobile labor that accrue to receiving countries. Formal migrant worker programs reduce this frst factor but augment the second one, creating a set of moral connections that deepen the longer workers move along a trajectory toward fully settling in the receiving country. Lastly, we come to the class of more or less voluntary migrants. In the United States in particular, a tradition of privileging family reunifcation has created a special class of to some extent voluntary migrants with preexisting ethical ties to the receiving country. With the exception of the groups noted above who are forcibly repatriated, “return migrants” who move back to their homeland generally constitute a class acting largely voluntarily. Prospective immigrants who seek membership not so much out of necessity but in order to pursue new opportunities are toward the voluntary end of the spectrum, followed by students, tourists, and other similar visitors-by-choice. For each of these classes, there are distinctive patterns of ethical argumentation about policies toward them: about how they should be treated. Under what conditions should refugees be aided? What sorts of refugees should take priority? Which would-be migrants might justifably be excluded? Should the “Dreamers”—or other groups of long-time noncitizen residents—be allowed to stay? The migration debates surrounding such questions are structured in large part, as we will see, by the ethical aspects of human dignity related to responsibility and voluntariness.

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HUMAN DIGNITY IN MIGRATION DEBATES Debates about the ethics of migration are informed both by the general propositions about human dignity embedded in religious ethical systems and the treaties, covenants, and customary norms of international law and, within this framework, by more specifc invocations of dignity in opposition to practices of humiliation, maltreatment, infringements on autonomy, and other types of abuse characteristically encountered by migrants. In tracing the role of the ethics of dignity in migration debates, it will be useful to organize the discussion around the different stages of cross-border migration, addressing in sequence (1) conditions in sending countries, (2) issues that arise in transit, and (3) the treatment of migrants in receiving countries.17

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In Sending Countries With respect to sending countries, we have already considered above how human dignity is impinged upon by the range of circumstances and “push” factors—war, persecution, catastrophe, criminality, economic injustice, ecological degradation, and so on—that produce “forced,” “impelled,” and “reluctant” migrations. These are, by and large, infringements on human rights ftting into the negative model of violations of human dignity. But it is also worth noting that migration can be linked with positive assertions of human dignity. This connection is modeled by the response of the government of the island republic of Kiribati to the prospect of climate change-induced displacement. Confronted with higher tides, storm surges, fooding of residential areas, loss of arable land, salinization of freshwater, and other effects of rising sea levels associated with global warming, Kiribati’s leaders have devised a policy called “Migration with Dignity” that aims at proactively outftting its population for successful relocation to other countries. Their approach seeks to encourage early migration to establish expatriate communities abroad, and then to subsidize the educational training and “upskilling” of remaining inhabitants so that they might follow as wellqualifed, desirable immigrants. In short, the policy is an attempt to preempt forced displacement by creating conditions that maximize the voluntary character of migration. Migrating with dignity in this sense means exercising autonomy in a manner designed to enhance self-respect. Intriguingly, a similar kind of application of dignity language can be made in reference to the migration debate surrounding the notion of “brain drain.” It has often been argued that the migration of the best-educated, most accomplished citizens of developing countries should be discouraged on the grounds that it deprives the sending countries of vital resources, unfairly enriches receiving countries, and thus contributes to the overall exacerbation

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of international inequalities. The case can be made, however, that remittances and other forms of transfers greatly ameliorate the negative effects of brain drain, and that respect for human dignity requires deference to the autonomy of the so-called STEP OUT (Scientifc, Technical, and Educated Professionals Out of Underdeveloped Territories) migrants.18 Here again, invoking dignity serves to empower prospective migrants, even in the face of competing collective goods.

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In Transit In regard to the ethics of situations that arise during journeys of migration, various aspects of dignity are relevant. Particularly important here are references to dignity made with the purpose of authorizing protections against various types of maltreatment of migrants. Once again, we encounter here the formal sense in which any sort of human rights violation involves an infringement on human dignity. Practically, in the feld, however, claims about human dignity often revolve around a specifc subset of types of wrongful treatment. Human traffcking is one example.19 According to Mark Lagon, what distinguishes human traffcking from human smuggling and illegal immigration and establishes it as an affront to human dignity is that it “involves a defning element of gross exploitation and control over an individual.”20 Dignity of language functions here as a trump commanding protection against the specifc abuse of domination and enslavement involved in traffcking. Other comparable situations involve widespread sexual abuse: especially of migrant women, but also the transactional or “survival sex” which both female and male migrants—often unaccompanied minors—can fnd themselves impelled to engage in.21 Demeaning or humiliating treatment of migrants is another topic to which dignity language is readily applied.22 Syrian refugees, for example, have invoked the notion of dignity in protesting forms of humiliation ranging from images portraying them as helpless victims, to invasive questioning, to conditions in which refugees seem to be treated as beggars.23 Another application of dignity in migration ethics has to do with the sort of conditions in which refugees live, for example in transitional camps.24 At issue here is, for the most part, the use of dignity language related to basic living conditions and minimal grounds of self-respect. One concern in this feld is with dignifed housing.25 Another is with education, refected in the criticism that humanitarian organizations ministering to refugees overemphasize material needs while failing to acknowledge the importance of education to a life of dignity.26 Enforced and protracted waiting in refugee camps has been identifed by some as an additional challenge to maintaining a sense of dignity or self-worth.27

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In Receiving Countries A last set of dignity concerns are related to the treatment that migrants and refugees face at the hands of receiving countries. Perhaps the most central issue in this feld is the effective campaign of xenophobic, nationalist, and populist discourses in Western countries to dehumanize refugees and other migrants—to treat them as what the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called “human waste.”28 In ways that are reinforced both by pejorative metaphors— “swarm,” “marauders,” “tidal wave”29—and by the invisibility of many transient populations, opponents of migration pursue a strategy of effacing the common humanity, value, and enfranchisement of migrants. Citizenship becomes the marker of human worth and the primary determinant of responsibilities and obligations to help others; migrants become nonentities or, worse, parasites or predators. In the face of this tendency, human dignity becomes a watchword for reasserting the equal worth and the “right to have rights” of migrants.30 It evokes the idea of equal entitlement to human rights as a counter to the inequality imposed by differential citizenship rights. In this context, to promote recognition of the human dignity of migrants is to invoke a cosmopolitan logic asserting that personhood, rather than national membership, is the primary ground of rights and obligations. For unauthorized migrants arriving in receiving countries, violations of human dignity can take the form of abusive treatment by smugglers, enforcement agents, and vigilante groups. When migrants are detained by the state, the conditions of detention often become a particularly neuralgic locus for dignity-based protests. Maintenance of harsh conditions, the privatization of prisons, solitary confnement, reliance on electronic monitoring devices, the separation of families, discrimination against LGBT detainees, and detention of minors are practices that have all been held to offend against elements of human dignity.31 Once migrants and refugees secure residence, dignity appeals come into play in other ways. Catholic discourse, which situates its view of human dignity in an integral body of moral theology and social teaching, characteristically highlights as additional pressing concerns in the feld of migration the dignity of work and the dignity of the family. In this view, human dignity requires the right to work, since the ability to participate in economic life is an expression of self-determination and a means of contributing to the greater good.32 Conversely, then, discrimination, exclusion, or the denial of a just wage—conditions often faced by migrants—militate against human dignity. Dignity is likewise counteracted by dividing families, for example by deporting the noncitizen parents of children who are citizens. More broadly, many would hold that the dignity of migrants is served by efforts on the part of both government and civil society actively to pursue a policy of social and political

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integration.33 Finally, a number of migration advocates insist that there is a cultural dimension to human dignity that is served by ensuring promotion of and respect for the distinctiveness of immigrant groups.

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CHRISTIAN MIGRATION ETHICS AND HUMAN DIGNITY The Christian churches are able to draw on a wealth of scriptural narratives, ecclesial practices, and theological refection in formulating ethical responses to the challenges posed by contemporary patterns of migration. The Good Samaritan parable, for example, is emblematic of the biblical imperative to provide assistance and be a “neighbor” to all those in need. A repetitive theme in the Bible is the imperative to show hospitality to strangers: after all, “some have entertained angels without knowing it” (Heb 13:2). A spirit of inclusiveness is refected in the injunctions in the Hebrew Scriptures not only not to oppress, but indeed to love the alien as oneself (Ex 22:21, Deut 10:19, Lev 19:33-34). More generally, a special concern for the poor, an abiding commitment to promoting justice, and the example of God’s unlimited love and compassion are biblical values that tilt Christian ethics toward a posture of receptivity and solicitude regarding migrants. These themes are refected in Christian efforts around the world to minister to migrants, advocate for them, and provide them with assistance where needed. In this picture, the theology of human dignity, rooted in the Genesis account of the creation of humans “b’tselem elohim” (in the image of God; imago Dei), plays an important and distinctive role. The conception of the dignity of human persons requires not just hospitality but equal respect for all, including migrants and aliens, as beings whose existence has divine origins and who have a place in God’s orderly creation. Of the many ways in which human dignity adds contours to the Christian ethics of migration, I will confne myself here to commenting on two. One signifcant response to migration that relies heavily on Christian understandings of human dignity is the practice of “accompaniment” employed by many Christian faith-based organizations working with displaced persons, refugees, and other “forced” migrants.34 In contrast to models of humanitarian assistance that revolve around large-scale provision of services and may tend, in effect, to commodify their clients, accompaniment is an approach that emphasizes personally standing with and sharing the journey of migrants in a spirit of compassion and respect. It is an ethos of service through companionship that prioritizes—alongside aid and advocacy—deep listening, mutual witness, and joint action. In its focus on consulting with the accompanied, empowering them to participate in improving their situation, and fostering in

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them a sense of self-worth and hope, this model hinges on responding to the dignity of migrants as fellow children of God. An acknowledgment of this dignity is refected in the understanding that the accompanied are not only recipients of support but also take part in the evangelization of their accompaniers. At the heart of the practice of accompaniment is the Christian virtue of solidarity, the imperative to recognize our bonds with and act on behalf of all others, including strangers, and especially the vulnerable. The Christian spirit of solidarity is rooted in the egalitarianism and universality of human dignity, and these features of dignity tie it to a second practice, that of modern sanctuary or Kirchenasyl (“church asylum”).35 Sanctuary involves the leveraging of sacred spaces—usually churches—to protect migrants from attempts to detain and deport them that are judged to infringe on the rights afforded by their human dignity. As a practice that engages local communities in closely supporting and validating the worth of migrant individuals and families, sanctuary partakes in something of the accompaniment ethos. At the same time, the practice draws on the commitment of many Christian theologies to the promotion of human rights and an accompanying global imaginary that can serve as a counterweight to the interests of states in maintaining exclusionary regimes of citizenship and bounded rights. If this imaginary is associated for many Christians with the world church or the Body of Christ, it is also refected in the cosmopolitan moral community implied by the UN instruments that name human dignity as the source of international human rights, including the right to freedom of movement. The confuence of humanitarianism, Christian thought, and international law in the idea of human dignity makes it a uniquely powerful normative instrument for structuring responses to the ethical problem of how best to respond to and manage the diffculties that attend today’s large-scale migrations. As this chapter shows, human dignity plays an important role in shaping many of the intellectual features, moral commitments, and ethical practices that inform how governments, international organizations, and nongovernmental organizations—including Christian agencies—interact with migrants. As we have also seen, however, this relation is not a one-way street. The human drama of migration, historically and in the present, is a rich source of insight into the ongoing process of discerning the character and implications of human dignity, both philosophically and theologically, and it can be expected to continue to fulfll this role in the future. NOTES 1. The UN International Migration Report 2017 estimates that 258 million people presently live in a country other than their country of birth, while the UN’s World

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Migration Report 2018 cites a 2009 estimate of 740 million internal migrants. Of these billion or so migrants, 22.5 million were classifed as refugees and 40.3 million as internally displaced due to armed confict, generalized violence, or human rights violations. 2. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) is a multilateral treaty adopted by the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2200A (XXI) on December 16, 1966, and in force from March 23, 1976. 3. For an English translation of Vatican II’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World Gaudium et Spes, see Vatican II: The Basic Sixteen Documents, ed. Austin Flannery (Newport, NY: Costello Pub. Co., 2007), 163–283. Here, p. 191. 4. For an English translation of Cicero’s De Offciis, see On Obligations, trans. P. G. Walsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 5. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man: A New Translation and Commentary, ed. Francesco Borghesi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 6. Hans Joas, The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human Rights (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013). 7. Scott Cutler Shershow, Deconstructing Dignity: A Critique of the Right-to-Die Debate (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 31. 8. See Philippe-André Rodriguez, “Human Dignity as an Essentially Contested Concept,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Vol. 28, no. 4 (2015), 743– 756; Ruth Macklin, “Dignity Is a Useless Concept,” British Medical Journal, Vol. 327 (December 2003): 1419–1420; and Steven Pinker, “The Stupidity of Dignity,” The New Republic (May, 2008), 28–31. 9. The UDHR lists dignity and human rights without clearly spelling out their logical relation, but later documents make it clear that rights fow from dignity. On this point see, e.g., Glenn Hughes, “The Concept of Dignity in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” Journal of Religious Ethics, Vol. 39, no. 1 (2011): 1–24. 10. It is often pointed out that the UDHR (and the ICCPR, Art. 12) ensures a right to leave one’s country, but not—apart from the case of asylum from persecution—to be welcomed in any other country. Commentators disagree as to whether this asymmetry is logically and ethically inconsistent. The Catholic Church, in the encyclical letter Pacem in Terris (1963), goes further in its own enumeration of human rights to include not just emigration but immigration: “[E]very human being has the right to freedom of movement and of residence within the confnes of his own State. When there are just reasons in favor of it, he must be permitted to emigrate to other countries and take up residence there” (No. 25). 11. For an analysis of the meaning of the injunction in international law that the return of refugees and other migrants must take place in “conditions of safety and dignity,” see Megan Bradley, “Return in Dignity: A Neglected Protection Challenge,” Refugee Studies Centre Working Paper No. 40, Oxford University, June 2007. 12. UN General Assembly Resolution 71/1 (September 19, 2016). 13. Global Policy Initiative, Model International Mobility Convention (New York, NY: Columbia Global Policy Initiative, 2017), 4. 14. For example, Daniel Groody, “Crossing the Divide: Foundations of a Theology of Migration and Refugees,” Theological Studies, Vol. 70, no. 3 (2009):

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638–667; Kristin E. Heyer, Kinship Across Borders: A Christian Ethic of Immigration (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2012); Gemma Tulud Cruz, Toward a Theology of Migration: Social Justice and Religious Experience (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Marianne Heimbach-Steins, Grenzverläufe gesellschaftlicher Gerechtigkeit (Paderborn, Ferdinand Schöningh, 2016); Susanna Snyder et al., eds., Church in an Age of Global Migration (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Elizabeth W. Collier and Charles R. Strain, Global Migration: What’s Happening, Why, and a Just Response (Winona, MN: Anselm Academic, 2017); and Donald Kerwin and Jill Marie Gerschutz, eds., And You Welcomed Me: Migration and Catholic Social Teaching (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009). 15. For an overview of the stances on migration of various Christian denominations, see Mark R. Amstutz, Just Immigration: American Policy in Christian Perspective (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2017). 16. See Alexander Betts, Survival Migration: Failed Governance and the Crisis of Displacement (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). 17. Many of these issues apply in comparable measure, it should be noted, to internal migrants as well. 18. Michele R. Pistone and John J. Hoeffner, Stepping Out of the Brain Drain: Applying Catholic Social Teaching in a New Era of Migration (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007). 19. The Dignity Health Foundation, based in San Francisco, has created a campaign against human traffcking in line with its mission (dignityhealth.org); while Human Dignity Project, Inc. is a “pro-life” group in Kentucky that characterizes human traffcking as “after abortion . . . one of the most prominent offenses against human dignity, worldwide” (humandignityproject.com). 20. Mark P. Lagon, “Traffcking and Human Dignity,” Hoover Institution Policy Review, Vol. 4 December 2008 (hoov​er.or​g/res​earch​/traf​fcki​ng-an​d-hum​an-di​gnity​). 21. Rachel E. McGinnis, “Sexual Victimization of Male Refugees and Migrants: Camps, Homelessness, and Survival Sex,” Dignity: A Journal on Sexual Exploitation and Violence, Vol. 1, no. 1 (2016), art.8. 22. On cruelty to refugees in Australia, see Phil Glendenning, “Asylum Seekers, Refugees, and Human Dignity,” Social Alternatives, Vol. 34, no. 1 (2015): 27–33. 23. Kholoud Mansour, “Protecting the Dignity of Displaced Syrians,” Forced Migration Review, Vol. 57 (February 2018): fmreview.org/syria2018. 24. On the morally problematic tendency to hold refugees in between states for increasingly prolonged periods, described as the phenomenon of “encampment,” see Serena Parekh, Refugees and the Ethics of Forced Displacement (London: Routledge, 2017). 25. See, e.g., Didier Fassin et al., “Asylum as a Form of Life: The Politics and Experience of Determinacy in South Africa,” Current Anthropology, Vol. 58, no. 2 (2017): 160–176. 26. Friedrich W. Affolter and Carine Allaf, “Displaced Sudanese Voices on Education, Dignity, and Humanitarian Aid,” Refuge, Vol. 30, no. 1 (2014): 5–14. 27. Rahul Chandrashekhar Oka, “Coping with the Refugee Wait: The Role of Consumption, Normalcy, and Dignity in Refugee Lives at Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya,” American Anthropologist, Vol. 116, no. 1 (2014): 23–37.

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28. Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004). See also Daniel G. Groody, CSC, “Passing Over: A Theological Vision of Migration,” in Scattered and Gathered: Catholics in Diaspora, ed. Michael L. Budde (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2017), 62–75. 29. David Shariatmadari, “Swarms, Floods, and Marauders: The Toxic Metaphors of the Migration Debate,” theguardian.com, August 10, 2015. 30. The phrase is associated with Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, NY: Harcourt, 1973). It is worth pointing out that Arendt insisted that human dignity was a political concept that could not claim a metaphysical grounding. On this point, see John Douglas Macready, Hannah Arendt and the Fragility of Human Dignity (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018). 31. USCCB, “Unlocking Human Dignity: A Plan to Transform the US Immigrant Detention System,” Journal on Migration and Human Security, Vol. 3, no. 2 (2015): 159–204; Sharita Gruberg, Dignity Denied: LGBT Immigrants in US Immigration Detention (Washington, DC: Center for American Progress, 2013); UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, Art. 37. 32. Another positive measure of the dignity of migrants is the level of their participation in community service and charity work. See Alex Stepick et al., Churches and Charity in the Immigrant City: Religion, Immigration, and Civic Engagement in Miami (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009). 33. See, e.g., Donald Kerwin and Breanna George, US Catholic Institutions and Immigrant Integration: Will the Church Rise to the Challenge? (Vatican City: Lateran University Press, 2014). 34. As a particular model of how to work with the poor and vulnerable, accompaniment derives from liberation theology. It has been especially infuential for Jesuit agencies such as Jesuit Refugee Services, but is evoked by Christian organizations across the denominational spectrum. 35. This practice has roots in the American Sanctuary Movement, an interdenominational network of churches shielding Central American migrants in the early 1980s, but it quickly became established in Canada as well as in Europe, where it continues to be deployed by Catholic and Protestant communities under the rubric of the New Sanctuary Movement.

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Chapter 11

Migration and Structural Injustice

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Kristin E. Heyer

Efforts to instill fear in communities and erode migrants’ human rights refect growing tendencies to approach migration in crisis management mode, with populist leaders capitalizing on anxieties related to the global economy and to cultural shifts. In spite of the “security crisis” drumbeat, immigration to the United States has declined in recent decades, and those arriving at its southern border are less likely to be seasonal workers than family units and children from Central American countries seeking asylum, the vast majority of whom turn themselves over to Border Patrol.1 Both the treatment and characterization of immigrants under the Trump administration address symptoms rather than causes of migration, whether a misconstrued border emergency or the trauma effected by its “zero tolerance policy,” forcibly separating of thousands of migrant children from their parents. The US government already spends more on federal immigration enforcement than on all other principal federal criminal law enforcement agencies combined.2 Signifcant changes wrought by President Donald Trump during the early years of his presidency refect his campaign rhetoric that cast immigrants and refugees as threats to the United States.3 He campaigned on promises to deport undocumented immigrants and secure the border with Mexico, a country he charged with sending its drug dealers and rapists. He immediately made good on campaign promises, issuing executive orders within the frst few weeks of his presidency that called for constructing a wall at the USMexico border, a selective travel ban, and expansion of the nation’s detention capacity and expedited removal practices.4 Subsequently, his administration has ended Temporary Protected Status for foreign nationals from six countries, reduced refugee admissions to the lowest ceiling since the program’s creation in 1980, and called for a military response in anticipation of the arrival of a “caravan” from Northern Triangle countries in Central America 185

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in late 2018. Those targeted for deportation now include anyone who immigration offcers judge to pose a risk to public safety or national security.5 Whereas the Obama administration initially deported those immigrants who had committed minor offenses—and went on to deport more immigrants than all twentieth-century administrations combined—it altered its policy to target primarily those convicted of serious crimes or who had violated deportation orders. This administration’s internal enforcement measures and accompanying rhetoric have fanned the fames of nationalism, sowed fear in immigrant communities, and eroded civic life. Politicized characterizations remain out of step with my own personal encounters with immigrants near the US-Mexico border. For example, during my last visit to the Kino Border Initiative—a binational project of Jesuit Refugee Service, the California and Mexican provinces of Jesuits, the Missionary Sisters of the Eucharist, and two bordering dioceses in Ambos Nogales—I spoke with recently deported migrants at their aid center. One gentleman had spent twenty-six of his twenty-seven years in central California, brought there as a one-year-old by his uncle. He had worked harvesting pistachios and almonds to support his wife and four US citizen children without trouble, even on the occasions he could not produce a driver’s license for a routine stop. In the past two years each such stop landed him in jail—with the third resulting in deportation to Nogales. He expressed dread at starting over in a country foreign to him. Up the road at Casa Nazaret, we sat with deported women planning to reattempt the journey north in spite of the considerable dangers it posed. The women at the shelter were simply desperate to be reunited with their families in the United States. One had worked at a Motel 6 in Arizona for many years supporting her two citizen children on her own after her husband left them; describing her initial reason for migrating from Mexico, she said, resigned, “at home you either eat or send your children to school.” The Nazareth House residents repeatedly broke into tears as they shared the pain of being separated from their children and their experiences in detention. In my university work, I encounter undocumented college students similarly struggling with impossible choices. One recounted how a month after her high school graduation, Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] agents with loaded guns, bullet-proof vests, and steel-toed boots surrounded her house and nearly pounded down her front door, demanding to see her. As she tells it: I came out to the front yard where the head agent asked my name while pulling out handcuffs as if standing in front of some criminal. No GPA or letter of recommendation could save me then. I fell to my knees in front of the agent and began pleading with him to let me stay, telling him I was starting college in a

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month on a special scholarship. He said, “Fine, I will let you go, but only if you tell me where your dad is.”

When her mortifed mother nodded “yes” to go ahead and tell them, the student revealed the information and ICE left to arrest her dad in front of his boss and coworkers and deport him. The student refects, “I stood in complete disbelief; I had sold my own dad for an education.”6 Experiences wherein questions of citizenship and enforcement tactics take on fesh and blood challenge caricatures of migrants and politicized bargaining. In an era of unprecedented migration, an outdated system endures in the United States issuing from decades of congressional inaction. When residents are confronted with newcomers, some reactions refect the nation’s historic openness to immigrants, and others, its deep ambivalence about “outsiders.” Legitimate concerns regarding disproportionate burdens on local services and the need to set workable limits or safeguards understandably persist. At the same time, mounting threats to human dignity indicate the urgency of the system’s genuine overhaul. The country’s immigrant nation “celebratory narrative” underscores ideas like hospitality, liberty, and democracy. Yet legislative debates about immigration have historically centered around issues of national security, economic instrumentalism and social costs rather than human rights. Today policy debates remain framed by a law-and-order lens, which casts unauthorized immigrants as willful lawbreakers, posing national security threats. (Trump adopted a “law and order” mantle throughout his campaign, promising to “Make America Safe Again.”). A criminal rhetorical frame facilitates scapegoating immigrants as threats to the rule of law, without evoking skepticism about outdated policies such as the considerable mismatch between labor needs and legal avenues for pursuing work. Recent studies indicate that immigrants are less likely to commit serious crimes than US citizens and that higher rates of immigration correlate with lower rates of violent and property crime.7 The rule of law rightly occupies a privileged place in the country, yet a sharp contrast persists between its law-and-order rhetoric on the one hand and the lack of accountability or transparency in Border Patrol procedures on the other—or the lack of due process afforded immigrant detainees. In the case of increasingly employed expedited forms of removal, absent a courtroom and administrative judge or viable avenues for review, the rule of law lies within the hands of ICE or Customs and Border Protection offcers alone, “who serve as both prosecutor and judge.”8 Migrants from Honduras and El Salvador fee homes with the world’s highest number of homicides per capita where gang members murder with impunity—the threat driving many such migrants is precisely the breakdown of the rule of law at home. Trump has

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continued to collapse distinctions between immigration and terrorism, symbolizing the centrality of law-and-order bravado to his immigration narrative. Another common paradigm frames newcomers as posing economic threats, whether as a net burden on the tax base or competitors for fnite social resources and low-wage work opportunities, a perception heightened in times of economic downturn. Beyond studies that consistently show immigrant laborers provide a net beneft to the US economy, the detention industry profts off of irregular migrants and confounds the “economic threat” frame. Elements of the “immigration industrial complex,” have become a transnational, multibillion-dollar affair.9 Private companies house nearly half of the nation’s immigrant detainees, compared to about 25 percent a decade ago. Share prices for GEO group and Corrections Corporation of America rose over 100 percent after election day, given the president’s avowed commitment to nearly double the incarceration rates of immigrants. Despite a congressional warning to ICE not to exceed its budgeted detention capacity, the Department of Homeland Security transferred $200 million from other agencies such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency to meet signifcant daily overfow. In September of 2018, the Department of Health and Human Services announced its intention to triple the size of a temporary “tent city” detention center in Tornillo, Texas, to house up to 3,800 children, with $266 million in funding to increase shelter capacity coming from a number of other programs, including Head Start and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.10 Finally, the new administration has connected these economic anxieties with enduring anxieties over cultural and national identity, casting newcomers as threats in this regard. Tapping into related anti-immigrant sentiment has provoked the demonization of racial, ethnic, and religious minorities. Bias-related hate crimes surged following the election.11 Whereas appeals to nostalgia or anxieties about rapid cultural and demographic changes may have remained more hidden or coded in the recent past, a resurgence of white nationalism has brought overtly racist and xenophobic fears into the open. Representations of the outsider as a social menace or a border out of control have long shaped US society’s collective imagination. In the 2016 campaign, Trump consistently played upon the fears of cultural displacement of white working-class voters. Such voters who reported often feeling “like a stranger in their own land” were 3.5 times more likely to favor Trump than those who did not share such concerns.12 His campaign performed strongest among those who reported that their ancestors are “American.” Robert Jones has argued that Trump successfully converted white evangelical Protestant “values voters” into “nostalgia voters” by naming and elevating their anxieties about the country’s recent demographic and cultural shifts (“Make America Great Again” as restoring cultural displacement and economic displacement

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alike). He suggests that white southern Christians have been vulnerable to the lure of nostalgia as they perceive a loss of unquestioned white power and its attendant hierarchy of social roles and order.13 Conversations about the role of civic ideals, histories, and traditions in understandings of national identity are worth engaging. Frameworks raising security and economic questions also entail legitimate concerns, yet employed on their own they serve to distort and eclipse fundamental features of the whole picture. Fear of difference is relatively easy to mass market and shapes society’s imagination in powerful ways. Encounters with reluctant or desperate migrants signal signifcant dissonance between these exclusionary frameworks and the inhumane impact of recent rhetoric and measures alike. If fear and proft largely hold sway, dehumanizing newcomers according to these dominant scripts, this chapter suggests that the Christian tradition’s commitments shape a different story, a (counter)narrative of our common humanity, with implications for a just immigration ethic. Christian understandings of what it means to be human radically critique pervasive exploitation and these prevailing immigration paradigms. Such commitments yield not a meek, naïve paradigm that simply condones open borders, but defense of universal human rights and shared responsibility for the effects of structural injustice. Insights from scripture and the Catholic social tradition challenge myths that enable exclusion and hold potential to promote a shared good for newcomers and citizens alike. Given the prevailing political focus upon discrete actions of emigrants wherein individuals remain the primary site for enforcement, relational emphases in Catholic social ethics can help reorient analyses to consider the roles historical relationships and transnational actors play in abetting migration. Whereas standard communitarian and cosmopolitan models tend to primarily focus upon rights to freedom of movement and political communities’ self-determination, categories like structural justice and the global common good contextualize the individual acts of migrants and underscore social dimensions of justice and sinful complicity alike. This chapter will probe the foundations of such frameworks and ways they (re)orient immigration analyses toward root causes of displacement and shared accountability. BIBLICAL JUSTICE FOR MIGRANTS The story of the Jewish and Christian pilgrim communities is one of migration, diaspora, and the call to live accordingly. Indeed, after the commandment to worship one God, no moral imperative is repeated more frequently in the Hebrew Scriptures than the command to care for the stranger.14 Despite convenient amnesia in our own nation of immigrants, “it was Israel’s own

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bitter experience of displacement that undergirded its ethic of just compassion toward outsiders: ‘You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt’ (Ex 22:21).”15 When Joseph, Mary, and Jesus fee to Egypt, the émigré Holy Family becomes the archetype for every refugee family.16 In Matthew’s gospel “Jesus begins his early journey as a migrant and a displaced person—Jesus who in this same gospel would radically identify with the ‘least’ and make hospitality to the stranger a criterion of judgment (Mt 25:35).”17 Patterns of migration across scripture do not readily resolve complex modern dilemmas. Yet scripture shapes moral perception. By engaging the voice of scripture in a manner that dislocates dominant frameworks of interpretation, we become attuned to how our perspective impacts our moral response and how scripture might enhance our perceptive imagination. If the conventional politics of immigration are driven in large part by instrumental values, then, how might a scriptural of politics of immigration shape a Christian counternarrative? One of the most persistently recurrent themes in Scripture is justice and compassion for the vulnerable.18 The prophets repeatedly connect bringing justice for the poor to experiencing God. Concern for the economically vulnerable echoes throughout the New Testament as well, particularly in the Gospel of Luke, which depicts Jesus being born in a stable among mere shepherds and as inaugurating his public ministry in terms that emphasize his mission to bring good news to the poor and release the oppressed. New Testament scholar Donald Senior notes that in “the overall landscape of the gospel stories, the rich and powerful are often ‘in place’—reclining at table, calculating their harvest, standing comfortably in the front of the sanctuary, or seated on the judgment seat passing judgment on the crimes of others. The poor, on the other hand, are often mobile or rootless: the sick coming from the four corners of the compass seeking healing; the crowds desperate to hear Jesus, roaming lost and hungry; the leper crouched outside the door.19 Senior suggests experiences of people on the move “reveal a profound dimension of all human experience” and “challenge the false ideologies of unlimited resources [or] of unconditional national sovereignty” that “plague our contemporary world, choking its spiritual capacity.”20 Roberto Goizueta has written about security functioning as an idol in this regard, as well.21 Hence, whereas the Scriptures do not provide detailed solutions to contemporary challenges posed by immigration, “for people who turn to the Scriptures for guidance on how to live and what sort of people to become, it is clear they should show a deep concern” for marginalized persons.22 Biblical justice—which demands active concern for the vulnerable and prophetic critique of structures of injustice23—challenges approaches to immigration driven by market or security concerns alone. A key contribution a scriptural

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imagination offers, then, is to bring perspectives of the most vulnerable and often silenced into the equation. In Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan, for example, he identifes neighbor love and just living with care for the vulnerable stranger among us. Recall that Jesus reverses the lawyer’s expectations with the story of a perceived enemy’s loving response to one in need lying in the ditch. Jewish audiences would have been shocked to hear of a discredited priest and a Samaritan exemplar. In the parable, the priest and the Levite notice the wounded man, yet “keep their distance to avoid any contact that might defle them.” Unlike the Samaritan who sees the man as a fellow human being in distress, the others did not allow themselves to be affected by his plight. By sharp contrast, the Samaritan “apprehends the situation as the man in the ditch experiences it.” Typical of Jesus’ parables where the “extraordinary keeps breaking out of the ordinary,” the Samaritan “surpasses the care that would be appropriate for a fellow countryman to aid this stranger, who might belong to his ethnic groups’ worst enemies.”24 As William Spohn notes, “Jesus stretches the limits of vision and compassion precisely where fear, enmity and inconvenience want to constrict them.”25 How might this parable where Jesus exposes the lawyer’s categories as “too cramped” shape imagination about immigration? Posing the lawyer’s very question of “who is my neighbor?” erects boundaries between members and outsiders. We quickly remove ourselves from the scene to balance abstract obligations. Perceptions of immigrants as threats alone signifcantly infuence immigration analyses. This prior question of perception shapes our assessment: Whom do we see as the immigrant? Freeloaders who take advantage of American generosity while taking jobs from US citizens? Men cueing up outside Home Depot? Threats to the neighborhood? Outsiders overcrowding our kids’ schools? The women I described at Casa Nazaret? DACA recipients? If we “see” the face of immigration as “illegal”—anchor babies, forever foreigners—or if we “see” separated mothers, displaced third-generation family farmers, taxpayers, and honest workers, we pursue different avenues of analysis. Seeing immigrants’ humanity as primary does not resolve conficting claims over stretched resources or absolve cases of immigrant crime. Yet it does foreclose on death-dealing practices and invite us away from simplistic scapegoating. To get at root causes and complex motives, like the Samaritan, we must identify with and become neighbor to the immigrant.26 Taking the victim’s side as our own enjoins not only compassion but also liberation. Just as the Good Samaritan promises additional recompense to the innkeeper, Christians are called to enter the world of the neighbor and “leave it in such a way that the neighbor is given freedom along with the very help that is offered.”27 The “unfreedom” of present and would-be migrants pointedly illustrates the urgency of this responsibility. The radical hospitality that

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tutors our vision does not reduce the immigration paradigm to charity or largesse, or move it out of the inclusive civic conversation, but requires justice. Immigrants encounter legion forms of injustice: the standard treatment of day laborers violates fundamental fairness in exchange (commutative justice). The regional juxtaposition of relative luxury and misery while basic needs go unmet challenges basic notions of distributive justice. The nearly 2,000mile US-Mexico border, spanning six Mexican and four US states, bisects the sharpest divide in average income on the planet. The impact of free trade agreements and utterly outmoded visa policies impede rather than empower persons’ active participation in societal life (social justice). A Christian ethic of immigration demands basic, unmet responsibilities in justice, particularly given the role the United States has played in shaping conditions that directly contribute to irregular migration.28 Recent measures, such as those highlighted at the outset, perpetuate the myth that responsibility for irregular migration lies with border crossers alone. Transnational actors responsible for violent confict, economic instability, or climate change are eclipsed from view, much less blame. Some have proposed an “instability tax” be levied upon private and governmental entities that destabilize refugee-producing regions—whether hedge funds profting off of commodity trading in African minerals, or weapons manufacturers profting from selling arms to the Middle East, or multinationals that proft from degrading or destabilizing poor nations.29 In terms of the proposed border wall, the inability of small family farmers in Mexico to compete with agricultural subsidies implicates taxpayers to their north. An immigration ethic attentive to structural and restorative justice demands the national and global community resist a crisis management approach in favor of honest, contextual assessments of what enduring patterns the crises reveal. Whereas communitarian and cosmopolitan models tend to focus on rights to movement and reception alone, attention to structural justice through categories like the global common good help contextualize the individual acts of migrants and underscore social dimensions of justice and sinful complicity alike. Such frameworks rightly signal that it is not merely those who overstay visas or unscrupulous employers who bear responsibility for an undocumented presence; they orient analyses toward root causes of displacement and shared accountability. In this vein, David Hollenbach has offered norms that better account for histories of relationship and complicity, applying the Kew Gardens principles and elements of the just war tradition.30 He suggests countries that have gained economically from their colonies or with histories of military involvement in another nation “have special obligations to people in fight from that nation.”31 Beyond particular duties to refugees from wars in Vietnam and Iraq, Hollenbach notes that benefts gained by the United States through its dominant role in nations like Guatemala, Haiti, and

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the Philippines also lead to particular duties to those countries: such duties “include making signifcant contributions to the development of these countries and admitting migrants in ways that will beneft both the migrants and those remaining in their home countries.”32 Hence, attitudes and policies that compel and then punish irregular migration are profoundly at odds with Christian commitments. The tradition’s understanding of human rights and the political community squarely challenges the fact that the vast majority of contributing and vulnerable migrants remain excluded from a viable, timely path to citizenship and its protections.33 Undocumented immigrants remain deprived of the primary good of membership, in Hannah Arendt’s terms, “right to have rights.”34

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HUMAN RIGHTS AND SOCIAL SIN: CONTRIBUTIONS FROM CATHOLIC MIGRATION ETHICS Flowing from its Scriptural “optic nerve of compassion,” the Catholic social tradition champions robust rights for immigrants in its documents, outreach, witness, and advocacy. A Christian immigration ethic is grounded in its vision of the person as inherently sacred and made for community. All persons are created in imago Dei and therefore are worthy of inherent dignity and respect. Whereas this vision does not compromise autonomy, it understands humans as profoundly interdependent. Hence, human rights are claims to goods necessary for each to participate with dignity in community life.35 Catholic principles of economic and migration ethics protect not only civil and political rights, but also more robust social and economic rights and responsibilities. These establish persons’ rights not to migrate (fulfll human rights in their homeland) and to migrate (if they cannot support themselves or their families in their country of origin).36 Once people do immigrate, the Catholic tradition profoundly critiques patterns wherein stable receiving countries accept the labor of millions without offering legal protections. Such “shadow” societies risk the creation of a permanent underclass, harming both human dignity and the common good. From Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 warnings against employers’ exploitation through Pope Francis’ condemnations of harmful global economic practices, the protection of human dignity has remained the central criterion of economic justice. The tradition makes clear that “every economic decision and institution must be judged in light of whether it protects or undermines [human dignity] realized in community.”37 Pope John Paul II condemned the exploitation of migrant workers based on the principle that “capital should be at the service of labor and not labor at the service of capital.” This idea that the economy should serve the person raises serious concerns not only about the freedom

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of markets compared to people, but also about the signifcant fnancial stakes in the broken immigration system—detained immigrants fll beds, deportations fll private buses. A counternarrative of economic ethics emerges, then, critiquing global dynamics that allow capital and goods and information to fow freely across borders but not laborers. Pope Francis has been outspoken about the dictatorship of faceless economies; his image of humans as commodities in a throwaway culture38 particularly resonates with vulnerable migrant workers’ experiences. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s interviews with undocumented women across sectors of the food industry indicate respondents overwhelmingly report feeling like they are “seen by employers as disposable workers with no lasting value, to be squeezed of every last drop of sweat and labor before being cast aside.”39 Hence, the Catholic social tradition explicitly protects the basic human rights of undocumented migrants in host countries in light of long-standing teachings on human and workers’ rights, which do not depend on citizenship status.40 With 66 percent of undocumented immigrants in the United States having lived here for over ten years, and stopgap measures to provide relief from deportation for young people in legal limbo, a “double society” increasingly threatens the common good: “One visible with rights and one invisible without rights.”41 Obstructing viable paths to legalization for the majority of immigrants welcomed in the marketplace but not the voting booth, college campus, or stable workplace risks making permanent this underclass of disenfranchised persons, undermining not only Christian commitments but also signifcant civic values and interests. Ultimately an approach rooted in human rights championed by Catholic commitments must both reduce the need to migrate and protect those who fnd themselves compelled to do so as a last resort. During his frst papal visit outside Rome to Lampedusa, Pope Francis commemorated in ritual and word the then-estimated 20,000 African immigrants who had died over the past twenty-fve years trying to reach a new life in Europe. His homily there within sight of the “graveyard of wrecks” noted the pervasive idolatry that facilitates migrants’ deaths and robs us of the ability to weep. He lamented an anesthetizing “globalization of indifference” and international economic structures that treat migrants like pawns on a chessboard. At the border mass he celebrated in Juarez, he also spoke of tears that purify our gaze and enable us to see the cycle of sin into which very often we have sunk; tears he said can soften our hardened attitudes opening us to conversion. His theological and pastoral emphases are well suited to addressing systemic and ideological barriers to justice for immigrants, summoning a recognition of humans’ fundamental relatedness in light of the harm borders wreak. Isolation from immigrants’ realities allows citizens to commodify, politicize, scapegoat, or ignore them.

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Through these emphases Pope Francis underscores how sin is hardly a private transaction. He highlights the impact of social sins through participation in harmful structures. Distinct elements of social sin—dehumanizing trends, unjust structures, and harmful ideologies—shape complex dynamics that perpetuate inequalities.42 Social sin indicates how powerful narratives casting immigrants as threats or “takers” are connected to collective actions or inaction that impact migration. Portraying immigration through a lens of individual culpability obscures these multileveled dynamics at play. At a more subtle level than overt xenophobia, a consumerist ideology shapes citizens’ willingness to underpay or mistreat migrant laborers either directly or through indirect demand for inexpensive goods and services. In Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis warns that an “economy of exclusion and inequality kills.”43 Preoccupation with “having” over “being” can impede solidarity with immigrants as much as distorted nationalism: it shapes loyalties, frames questions, and informs votes.

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FROM STRUCTURAL INJUSTICE TO SOLIDARITY Hence, talking points highlight border emergencies and scheming lawbreakers or demographic threats fail to register the social contexts that compel migration and its harmful consequences. Christian understandings of economics, human rights, and structural justice issue a prophetic immigration ethic. In contrast to the reductive sound bites and fear mongering that dominate airwaves, pursuing justice in terms of the global common good reorients contested political and social questions. Understanding immigration dynamics as related to unjust international political and economic divides also requires nations to share accountability in the wake of the Westphalian model’s “partial eclipse” and to convert from opportunistic patterns of interdependence. Migrant deaths in the Arizona desert and Mediterranean alike make poignantly clear the stakes of nations failing to understand themselves as collectively responsible for these shared challenges. The category of social sin can help citizens consider their economic and political complicity in generating migrant fows rather than perpetuate amnesic scapegoating enforcement-only responses. The Catholic conception of the common good radically challenges a culture that prioritizes economic effciency over solidarity with the weak and marginalized, or narrow national interest over global concern. A culture in which “good fences make good neighbors” due to isolationist fears signifcantly hinders deliberative engagement about common goods. Whereas fear of the other is easily mass-marketed, mutual understanding across difference can be harder to come by and engender. Pope Francis’ attention to building

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bridges rather than walls signals one path forward. His own dialogue with the “existential extremities” and expressed preference for a street-bound over a risk-averse and “self-referential” church provide an apt orientation. Preoccupation with safeguarding against such risks impedes a culture of encounter and ongoing conversion by the suffering and resilience of those at various borders. A radical hospitality that welcomes the least may also entail prophetic resistance, just as Bishop McElroy insisted, “we must all be disruptors” at the US Regional World Meeting of Popular Movements a few years ago: “We must disrupt those who portray refugees as enemies rather than our brothers and sisters in terrible need. We must disrupt those who train us to see Muslim men and women and children as sources of fear rather than as children of God.”44 Religious institutions regularly risk offering sanctuary in their classrooms or parish halls. In one sense, President Trump’s migration rhetoric and policies are of a piece with a “growing tendency to replace collaboration for the international common good with pursuit of an illusory understanding of national selfinterest,” due to cultural backlash against unfamiliar intrusions or responses to economic suffering.45 Beyond manipulative narratives or distorting echo chambers, senses of real and perceived loss—and accompanying grief and resentment—foster receptivity to exclusionary rhetoric and measures. Addressing not only nativism and debasing rhetoric but also deeply seated fears remains another essential element of the path forward. In There Goes the Neighborhood, Ali Noorani captures the unexpected nature of the challenge immigrant activists faced in recent legislative battles: most waged a political battle, attempting to change minds with data, and neglected to appreciate that the country was having a cultural debate about identity and values.46 This frst-generation Pakistani-American models a form of “subversive hospitality” through his encounters with Baptist peach farmers in South Carolina, sheriffs in Utah, and businessmen here in Texas seeking to forge common ground: he writes, “We need to be able to meet people where they are but not leave them there.” Given the deepening tribalization of partisanship, the need to rebuild public trust and a shared sense of community cannot be underestimated or bypassed.47 Cultivating empathy, civic virtue, and solidarity will require we resist “the pervasive distortions that cloud our moral imagination,”48 recontextualize migrations within historic and contemporary structures of injustice, and draw near to the realities of immigrant communities marked by vitality and precarious vulnerability alike. Amid the pervasive misinformation that gives cover to the exploitation of immigrants, a Christian ethic of kinship across borders offers a humanizing counternarrative and surpasses compassionate welcome to address migration in terms of structural justice.

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NOTES 1. Portions of this chapter are adapted from “The Politics of Immigration and a Catholic Counternarrative: A Perspective from the United States,” Asian Horizons 8, no. 4 (December 2014), 719–737. 2. See Doris Meissner, Donald M. Kerwin, Muzaffar Chishti, and Claire Bergeron, Immigration Enforcement in the United States: The Rise of a Formidable Machinery (Washington DC: Migration Policy Institute, 2013). 3. For an analysis of the early Trump Administration’s impact on immigrants and refugees in light of the themes explored in this chapter, see my “Internalized Borders: Immigration Ethics in an Age of Trump,” Theological Studies 79, no. 1 (March 2018), 146–164. 4. Faye Hipsman and Doris Meissner, “Trump Executive Order and DHS Implementation Memo on Border Enforcement: A Brief Review” (Washington DC: Migration Policy Institute, April 2017), available at https​://ww​w.mig​ratio​npoli​cy.or​g/res​ earch​/trum​p-exe​cutiv​e-ord​er-an​d-dhs​-impl​ement​ation​-memo​-bord​er-en​force​ment-​ brief​-revi​ew. 5. Jennifer Medina, “Trump’s Immigration Order Expands the Defnition of ‘Criminal,’” The New York Times (January 26, 2017). 6. Kristin E. Heyer, Kinship across Borders: A Christian Ethic of Immigration (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2012), 1–2. 7. Walter Ewing, Daniel E. Martínez, and Rubén G. Rumbaut, The Criminalization of Immigration in the United States (American Immigration Council, July 13, 2015), https://www. ameri​canim​migra​tionc​ounci​l.org​/rese​arch/​crimi​naliz​ation​-immi​ grati​on-un​ited-​state​s. 8. Lenni B. Benson, “Immigration Adjudication: The Missing ‘Rule of Law,’” Journal on Migration and Human Security 5, no. 2 (June 2017), 331. 9. See Tanya Golash-Boza, “The Immigration Industrial Complex: Why We Enforce Immigration Policies Destined to Fail,” Sociology Compass 3, no. 2 (February 2009), 295–309, for a genealogy of this idea, which alludes to the confation of national security with immigration law enforcement and “the confuence of public and private sector interests in the criminalization of undocumented migration, immigration law enforcement, and the promotion of ‘anti-illegal’ rhetoric” (295). 10. Muzaffar Chishti and Sarah Pierce, “Trump Administration’s New Indefnite Family Detention Policy: Deterrence not Guaranteed,” Migration Information Source (September 26, 2018), https​://ww​w.mig​ratio​npoli​cy.or​g/art​icle/​trump​-admi​nistr​ation​ -new-​indef​i nite​-fami​ly-de​tenti​on-po​licy.​ 11. “Post-Election Bias Incidents Up to 1,372; New Collaboration with ProPublica,” Southern Poverty Law Center Hatewatch (blog), (February 10, 2017), https​://ww​w.spl​cente​r.org​/hate​watch​/2017​/02/1​0/pos​t-ele​ction​-bias​-inci​dents​-1372​ -new-​ collaboration-propublica. 12. Daniel Cox, Rachel Lienesch, and Robert P. Jones, “Beyond Economics: Fears of Cultural Displacement Pushed the White Working Class to Trump,” PRRI/The Atlantic Report (May 9, 2017), https​://ww​w.prr​i.org​/rese​arch/​white​-work​ing-c​lass-​ attit​udes-​econo​my-tr​ade-i​mmigr​ation​-elec​tion-​donal​d-tru​mp/.

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13. See Robert P. Jones, The End of White Christian America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016) and Jennifer Rubin, “What the End of White Christian America has to do with Trump,” parts 1 and 2, Washington Post (September 16, 18, 2017). 14. William O’Neill, S.J., “Rights of Passage: The Ethics of Forced Displacement,” Journal of Christian Ethics 27, no. 1 (Spring 2007), 113–125. O’Neill cites W. Gunther Plaut, “Jewish Ethics and International Migrations,” International Migration Review: Ethics, Migration and Global Stewardship 30, no. 1 (Spring 1996), 20–21. For a comprehensive discussion of New Testament themes related to migration, see Donald Senior, “‘Beloved Aliens and Exiles’ New Testament Perspectives on Migration,” in Daniel G. Groody and Gioacchino Campese, eds., A Promised Land, A Perilous Journey: Theological Perspectives in Migration (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 20–34. 15. Ched Myers and Matthew Colwell, Our God Is Undocumented (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2012), 15. 16. Pope Pius XII, Exsul Familia (On the Spiritual Care to Migrants) (September 30, 1952), in Rev. Giulivo Tessarolo, ed., The Church’s Magna Charta for Migrants, PSSC (Staten Island, NY: St. Charles Seminary, 1962), introduction. 17. Senior, “Beloved Aliens and Exiles,” 23. 18. William C. Spohn, Go and Do Likewise: Jesus and Ethics (New York, NY: Continuum, 2000), 76. 19. Senior, “Beloved Aliens and Exiles,” 27–28. 20. Ibid., 29. 21. Roberto Goizueta, “To the Poor, the Sick, and the Suffering,” in Anthony Ciorra and Michael W. Higgins, eds., Vatican II: A Universal Call to Holiness (New York: Paulist, 2012), 73. 22. Christopher Vogt, “Liturgy, Discipleship, and Economic Justice,” in Mark Alman, ed., The Almighty and the Dollar: Refections on Economic Justice for All (Winona, MN: Anselm Academic, 2012). 23. John R. Donahue, S.J., “The Bible and Catholic Social Teaching: Will This Engagement Lead to Marriage?” in Kenneth R. Himes, Lisa Sowle Cahill, Charles E. Curran, David Hollenbach, and Thomas A. Shannon, eds., Modern Catholic Social Teaching: Commentaries and Interpretations (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press), 15. 24. Spohn, Go and Do Likewise, 90. 25. Ibid., 91. 26. Ibid. 27. John R. Donahue, The Gospel in Parable: Metaphor, Narrative, and Theology in the Synoptic Gospels (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1988) 133. 28. John J. Hoeffner and Michele R. Pistone, “But the Laborers Are . . . Many? Catholic Social Teaching on Buisness, Labor and Economic Migration,” in Donald Kerwin and Jill Marie Gerschutz, And You Welcomed Me: Migration and Catholic Social Teaching (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books 2009), 74. For an excellent discussion of such connections, see William R. O’Neill, S.J., “Anamnestic Solidarity: Immigration from the Perspective of Restorative Justice” paper delivered at the 2009 Catholic Theological Society of America Halifax, Nova Scotia (June 5, 2009).

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29. Ian Almond, “The Migrant Crisis: Time for an Instability Tax?” Political Theology Today (blog), (September 22, 2015), http:​//www​.poli​tical​theol​ogy.c​om/bl​og/th​ e-mig​rant-​crisi​s-tim​e-for​-an-i​nstab​ility​-tax/​. 30. David Hollenbach, “Borders and Duties to the Displaced: Ethical Perspectives on the Refugee Protection System,” Journal on Migration and Human Security 4 (2016), 153. 31. Ibid., 160. 32. Hollenbach, “A Future Beyond Borders: Re-imagining the Nation State and the Church,” in Agnes Brazal and Maria Teresa Davila, eds., Living With(out) Borders: Catholic Theological Ethics on the Migrations of Peoples (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press, 2016), 232–233. 33. Pope Pius XII, Exsul Familia (On the Spiritual Care to Migrants); Pope John XXIII, Pacem in terris (April 11, 1963), http:​//www​.vati​can.v​a/hol​y_fat​her/j​ohn_x​ xiii/​encyc​lical​s/doc​ument​s/hf_​j-xxi​ii_en​c_110​41963​_pace​m_en.​html;​ Pope Paul VI, Populorum progressio (March 26, 1967), http:​//www​.vati​can.v​a/hol​y_fat​her/p​aul_v​i/ enc​yclic​als/d​ocume​nts/h​f_p-v​i_enc​_2603​1967_​popul​orum_​en.ht​ml; Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et spes, 69, 71 see also Catechism of Catholic Church, 240. 34. See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), chapter 9. 35. Michael J. Himes and Kenneth R. Himes, Fullness of Faith: The Public Signifcance of Theology (New York, NY: Paulist Press, 1993), 46. 36. See Pope John XXIII, Pacem in terris (April 11, 1963), no. 106. All encyclical citations are taken from David J. O’Brien and Thomas A. Shannon, Catholic Social Thought: The Documentary Heritage (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1992), unless otherwise indicated. See also United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and Conferencia del Episcopado Mexicano, “Strangers No Longer: Together on the Journey of Hope” (Washington DC: USCCB, 2003), no. 34–35. 37. National Council of Catholic Bishops, “Economic Justice for All: Pastoral Letter on Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy” (Washington DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 1986), nos. 1, 14. 38. Pope Francis, “Address to the New Non-Resident Ambassadors to the Holy See” (May 16, 2013), available at http:​//www​.vati​can.v​a/hol​y_fat​her/f​rance​sco/s​ peech​es/20​13/ma​y/doc​ument​s/pap​a-fra​ncesc​o_201​30516​_nuov​i-amb​ascia​tori_​en.ht​ ml (accessed June 1, 2013). 39. Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) interviewed 150 women who worked in the US food industry in Arkansas, California, Florida, Iowa, New York, and North Carolina (all without documents at the time or at some point). The interviews were conducted from January to March 2010. See Southern Poverty Law Center, “Injustice on Our Plates: Immigrant Women in the U.S. Food Industry” (Montgomery, AL: SPLC, 2010), 23, 63, https​://ww​w.spl​cente​r.org​/site​s/def​ault/​fles​/d6_l​egacy​_fle​s/ dow​nload​s/pub​licat​ion/I​njust​ice_o​n_Our​_Plat​es.pd​f. 40. Pope John Paul II’s Ecclesia in America “reiterates the rights of migrants and their families and the respect for human dignity ‘even in cases of non-legal immigration.” Ecclesia in America (Washington DC: USCCB, 1999), no. 65. Over recent decades, social encyclicals have enumerated migrant rights to life and a means of

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livelihood; decent housing; education of their children; humane working conditions; public profession of religion; and to have such rights recognized and respected by host of government policies. See 1969 Vatican Instruction on Pastoral Care (no. 7); 1978 Letter to Episcopal Conferences from the Pontifcal Commission for the Pastoral Care of Migrant and Itinerant peoples (no. 3); Pope Paul VI, Octogesima adveniens (no. 17); Pope John XIII, Pacem en terris (no. 106); National Council of Catholic Bishops, Resolution on the Pastoral Concern of the Church for People on the Move (Washington DC: USCC, 1976) and endorsed by Pope Paul VI; and “Strangers No Longer” (no. 38). 41. National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Together a New People, Pastoral Statement on Migration and Refugees (November 8, 1986), 10. 42. For a discussion of how structural and ideological dimensions of social sin interconnect and how both relate to migration, see Kristin E. Heyer, “Social Sin and Immigration: Good Fences make Bad Neighbors,” Theological Studies 71, no. 2 (June 2010), 410–436. 43. Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium (November 24, 2013), 54, http:​//w2.​vatic​ an.va​/cont​ent/f​rance​sco/e​n/apo​st_ex​horta​tions​/docu​ments​/papa​-fran​cesco​_esor​tazio​ ne-ap​_2013​1124_​evang​elii-​gaudi​um.ht​ml. 44. Brian Rowe, “In Powerful Speech San Diego Bishop Challenges Organizers to Disrupt, Rebuild,” National Catholic Reporter (February 19, 2017), available at https​ ://ww​w.ncr​onlin​e.org​/news​/just​ice/p​owerf​ul-sp​eech-​san-d​iego-​bisho​p-cha​lleng​es-or​ ganiz​ers-d​isrup​t-reb​uild.​ 45. David Hollenbach, “The Glory of God and the Global Common Good: Solidarity in a Turbulent World,” CTSA Proceedings 72 (2017), 51–52. 46. Ali Noorani, There Goes the Neighborhood: How Communities Overcome Prejudice and Meet the Challenge of American Immigration (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2017), 23–25. 47. Ibid., 235. 48. Charles Strain, “No More Deaths: Border Enforcement and Moral Devolution,” in Elizabeth Collier and Charles Strain, eds., Religious and Ethical Perspectives on Global Migration (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), 282.

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Chapter 12

Immigration Policy, Democracy, and Ethics

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Joshua Mauldin

On February 17, 2016, during a contentious presidential campaign season in which candidate Donald Trump put the issue of immigration at the center of the national conversation, Pope Francis visited the US-Mexico border in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, just across the Rio Grande River from El Paso, Texas. Before celebrating Mass some eighty yards from the border, Pope Francis ascended a ramp next to the border fence. Waiving to those gathered on the US side of the border, the pope appeared to rise above the barriers and divisions that mark our fallen world. Waving to those gathered on both sides of an international border that had become a political lightning rod, Pope Francis was the physical embodiment of a transcendent faith that acknowledges no boundaries among the human family but seeks to gather all people together as brothers and sisters in the care of God. Pope Francis then celebrated mass at the border in Ciudad Juárez, with a simulcast being held at the Sun Bowl of the University of Texas at El Paso. Dedicated Catholics on both sides of the border took part in the Eucharistic meal, embodying a unity deeper than all the divisions and boundaries human beings devise. The image of Pope Francis at the border is deeply moving on many levels. It points to the Christian hope for a time when our human divisions will be overcome, for a world to come which God is preparing even now. For many, Pope Francis’s witness embodies the Christian tradition’s most profound insights about the debate over immigration. The Christian faith teaches that we are one family, the church, which knows no national boundaries, exhibiting care and hospitality for all. The task of a Christian ethics of migration is thus to share this gospel message of the unity of the human family with all the world. But what does this symbol of unity and the transcending of human divisions mean for the world as it is today, where nation-states still exist, and in 201

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which the important norm of democracy exists only at the level of the nationstate? What does it mean for those who do not share Pope Francis’s Catholic faith? Francis has been an inspiring symbol to many even outside the walls of the church, but it is nonetheless true that the United States is a secular democracy, and not a theocracy. Religion is deeply interwoven in our history and public culture, but that does not entail that a robust Christian conception of society can be put forward as the public policy for a diverse, religiously pluralistic country. In other words, Pope Francis’s witness might inspire us and lead us to rethink our views on national boundaries. But the church’s transcendence of national boundaries hardly entails that those boundaries cease to exist. In an ultimate sphere of the eschaton, perhaps there will be no nations; but in the penultimate world in which we live, nations are not going away any time soon. As a scholar in the feld of Christian social ethics, I am interested in how Christian ethical principles can be brought to bear on normative debates about immigration policy. While I work the feld of Christian social ethics, in this chapter I want to draw a distinction between an “ethics of immigration” and what I will call a “legitimate public policy of immigration.” On the one hand, this is a distinction without a difference, since as I defne the concepts, a “legitimate public policy of immigration” on the part of a nation-state must adhere to moral principles—that is what makes the public policy “legitimate,” by which I mean morally justifable. However, enjoining everyone to be better people is in itself no public policy. Many works in the ethics of migration focus on how individuals or various associations and identity groups in the world ought to treat migrants.1 As Tisha Rajendra notes in her helpful book on the topic, this endeavor includes exploring how certain virtues, such as solidarity, are important for how we treat migrants, in addition to the virtue of justice, according to which we carefully attend to what we owe to whom on the basis of the relationships in which we fnd ourselves. My focus is at a different level, as I want to consider what a just immigration policy on the part of a nation-state would be. Another way to put the point is to say that I am exploring the “political philosophy” of immigration. In doing so, I will focus my attention on the case of advanced liberal democracies, so that the question more precisely is what a just immigration policy on the part of advanced liberal-democratic nation-states would be. This is merely for the sake of simplicity, as the issue would become overly complicated if I were to try to tackle the question in such a way that it would also apply to apply to nonliberal democracies. While I am interested in exploring how Christian moral resources can be brought to bear on this question of immigration policy, I do not think this can be done by asserting that a Christian idea, such as a theological view of the church as a global family, can simply be implemented by a pluralistic

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nation-state in the modern world. Christian theological ideas might bear witness to a world in which our human divisions are overcome, but that witness does not entail that any such reality is true here and now; nor does it entail that attempting to realize such an ideal vision would be a good idea. There is a need for Christian theologians and social ethicists to grapple with the realities of immigration policy without resorting to utopian visions of a global society with no borders or boundaries. My frst methodological principle is thus that we need an immigration policy that deals with the world as it is, rather than as we would like it to be if we were all moral saints. If my frst methodological principle is thus based in a kind of political realism, my second methodological principle, which should be clear by now, is that I am seeking to answer an explicitly normative question. The question is what a liberal-democratic nation-state’s immigration policy should be. Other chapters in this volume provide rich descriptive accounts of the migrant experience, the social context of global migration, as well as of how migration provides cultural (and economic) enrichment to host countries in various ways. These accounts are valuable for helping us to understand what is going on in the world in terms of migration. At least on their face, these accounts are primarily descriptive in nature. While they occasionally express a certain moral outrage at how migrants are treated in the current situation, their goal is not so much to propose a better immigration policy but instead to describe the way things are. All of that is to the good, for an adequate immigration policy has to take account of the actual global context in which migration takes place. Various important issues are often run together in discussions of migration, which are important to separate out and consider separately. First is the simple fact of the movement of peoples, the experiences of migrants as they move around the world and change the cultures of the places they go. Let us call this a “descriptive” account, exemplifed well by the work of the sociologist Saskia Sassen.2 Second, there is an ethical account, which focuses on how migrants are treated, for example whether they experience hostility or hospitality or indifference on the part of the host society. Third, related to this, but distinguishable from it, is the question of how the church and individual people of faith should respond to migrants. Christians are called to love God and to love their neighbor. This gives them certain responsibilities to their neighbor who is a migrant. But it is a separate question whether the government’s national policy regarding immigration should accord with the norms of Christian love of neighbor. We need to discuss not only what the Christians and the church should do in loving the neighbor who is a migrant, but also say something about what the national immigration policy should be of a secular state that includes many people who are not Christians, including those who hold no faith at all.

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We cannot assume without argument that a justifable immigration policy on the part of a modern nation-state will mirror the church’s hospitality to migrants. Many of those with a fairly dismal view of the state will quickly agree, given their belief that the state is at best a distant manager of offcially sponsored violence. The state, on this view, is inherently unjust. But we can go further and ask, should the state even aspire to emulate the church’s witness toward immigrants? On a simple level, the answer is no, since there are many churches in a pluralistic society such as the United States, along with many non-Christian religions. The government must be respectful and even-handed toward all the religions practiced by the people; it cannot merely adopt, say, the immigration proposals of the Episcopal Church while ignoring the recommendations of all other religions. There is a basic sense in which religious persons and groups can decide what their own attitude will be toward immigrants, as well as toward those who hope to immigrate to their country, but they can hardly demand that the nation as a whole adopt their own religiously articulated views of how to respond to immigrants or would-be immigrants.3 At the time of this writing, the United States was experiencing the longest government shutdown in US history, and the impasse was centered on immigration policy. Immigration has been one of the most polarizing issues in an already-polarized environment, not only in the United States but elsewhere in the world, not least in the debates surrounding Brexit in the United Kingdom. This polarization has many bad effects, including one that is not often recognized: polarization causes both sides to become lazy and to fail to come up with any viable policy options. Polarized factions spend all their time denouncing the position of their opponents, such that they never get around to explaining what their own policy would be. President Trump is opposed to “open borders,” but do we know what exactly his alternative to open borders would be, beyond building a wall? The Democrats in the United States are clear that Trump’s immigration policies are wrong, but do we know exactly what their alternative would be, other than that it won’t involve a wall? Christian ethics cannot provide a simple solution to this intractable problem, but it can provide fresh insights for a policy discussion that has reached an impasse. That is the animating assumption of this chapter. DEMOCRATIC LEGITIMACY AND IMMIGRATION POLICY In his book, Strangers in Our Midst: The Political Philosophy of Immigration, David Miller structures his arguments around four political values. While I won’t seek to defend all four of them, or even to discuss all four at

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length, highlighting each of them can help to clarify what I see as missing in much of the discussion about migration in the literature of theology and Christian ethics. These four values are: (1) weak moral cosmopolitanism, (2) national self-determination, (3) fairness, and (4) the idea of an integrated society.4 The latter two, fairness and the idea of an integrated society, have more to do with how immigrants are treated once they are permitted to enter the country. Miller’s points here are very enlightening and important, but for the purposes of this chapter I focus on the question of what a liberal democracy owes not to those already residing within its borders but instead to those who live abroad but would like to immigrate into the country. In some ways, this is the most diffcult question, as it has to do with the grounds on which a country can be said to be under a moral responsibility to enlarge its political community by welcoming outsiders to join it. Thus, for my purposes the frst two values, that is, weak moral cosmopolitanism and national self-determination, are most relevant. Miller’s work is commendable for seeking to balance these values, which can at times be in some tension. For example, some might balk at the reference to “national self-determination” as a value in the discussion of immigration, assuming it is based on a nationalistic belief that nations can adopt whatever immigration policy they please, without regard to the rights of those living outside its borders or living within its borders without legal authorization. However, while national self-determination means for Miller that “Citizens in a democracy have the right to decide upon the future direction of their society,” including its immigration policy, he quickly adds the qualifcation that this self-determination is set “within certain bounds set by the weak cosmopolitan restriction just canvassed.”5 This frst value, weak moral cosmopolitanism, entails not only that immigrants have moral standing, entailing recognition of human rights (especially important in the case of refugees), but also that would-be immigrants’ status as human beings with moral standing “requires us to give reasons if we decide to refuse people’s demands or requests, even when no rights are at stake.”6 The issues surrounding the values of weak moral cosmopolitanism and national self-determination are many and would lead us beyond the scope of this chapter. The element I want to highlight here has to do with the element of democratic legitimacy that is inherent in national self-determination, and which is limited by the value of weak moral cosmopolitanism. This element of democratic legitimacy is important to highlight precisely because it is often ignored in discussions of migration in the theology and Christian ethics literature. There are various reasons for this, such as a commitment to a strong form of moral cosmopolitanism, including the belief that the entire world is the common possession of humankind, which entails that individuals have a human right to immigrate to any country they please. Such a commitment to a

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strong form of moral cosmopolitanism would override the relevance of democratic legitimacy in the question of immigration policy, even for those who are in principle committed to national self-determination. Of course, there are also those who are committed to strong forms of moral cosmopolitanism while also rejecting national self-determination as a principle, such that they have even more reason not to see democratic commitments as relevant to immigration policy. The problem is that it is diffcult to uphold democratic commitments without some sense of national self-determination, at least insofar as we continue to exist in a world that lacks a universal democratically elected world government. But what is involved in a commitment to the value of national selfdetermination? It is important to emphasize that national self-determination does not entail that a nation-state acts exclusively, or even primarily, in its own interest. On the contrary, a nation could democratically determine for itself that it wants to act in the interest of other nations as well as the world as a whole. Increasingly, the global issues we face require that many nations will do so. David Miller explicates the value of national self-determination as follows: “Citizens in a democracy have the right to decide upon the future direction of their society (though within certain bounds set by the weak cosmopolitan restriction just canvassed).”7 This entails that “especially in the case of economic migrants, therefore, national self-determination demands very considerable latitude in choosing an immigration policy that fts with the publicly espoused values of the society in question.”8 But why is this the case? Put simply, democratic forms of government are shaped around the basic principle that government is by the people and for the people. Political accountability is thus central to democratic government, as leaders must be accountable to the citizens on whose behalf and at whose behest they are in power. But this means that there is a question of who is a citizen in the democratic polity. There are countless sets of issues that pertain here, with plenty of room for disagreement regarding how a society should determine citizenship (e.g., whether guest worker programs are inherently unjust, whether the category of legal permanent resident should even exist, as well as vexed questions of amnesty for undocumented immigrants who have been in the country for some time, perhaps even since they were children). But even if we agree for the sake of argument that everyone should be automatically considered a citizen after, say, three months of residence (excluding those merely traveling for business or those who are students—qualifcations that show just how complicated the question of immigration is, and which indicate that citizenship is not always the end goal even for migrants themselves), there remains the question of what a country’s immigration policy should be for those living outside the country who would like to gain admission, whether as a basic

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element of survival on the part of refugees or perhaps merely to move from an adequate but less-than-luxurious lifestyle to a higher standard of living. Much of the Christian ethics literature on migration focuses on the plight of unauthorized or undocumented immigrants, especially in the United States. I will not focus on this issue in the chapter, for a couple of reasons. Strangely enough, the issue of how to treat undocumented immigrants is, for my purposes, simultaneously too simple as well as too complicated. Is it too “simple” in the sense that because undocumented immigrants already live in the United States, perhaps for many years (and in many cases, since childhood), I take it for granted that they deserve different treatment from a person living outside the United States who would like to migrate to the United States but has not done so, and may never do so. I want to take up the more complicated question, however, of what is owed to persons who live outside the country but would like to immigrate, and perhaps have some moral claim to do so (e.g., as refugees feeing persecution). I consider this a more complicated question because it cannot be answered by pointing to the various ways in which our proximity and interdependence with undocumented immigrants gives us certain moral responsibilities which cannot be ignored in fashioning an immigration policy. At the same time, the issue of undocumented immigrants is simultaneously too complex for this treatment. It raises many practical questions regarding what would actually work, in addition to moral questions about what immigration policy should be. For example, let’s say we decide all undocumented immigrants should be granted amnesty immediately and offered a quick path to citizenship. This might be a good idea; and no doubt it is a good idea for those who entered the country as children (the “Dreamers”). But what does this mean for those who enter the country (or overstay visas) illegally after the amnesty is declared? It seems that there are limited options here. Either all unauthorized immigrants are granted amnesty in perpetuity or only those who entered before a certain date. If the latter, one wonders how the problem of undocumented immigrants will not just arise again a few years down the road, as the undocumented population once again grows in numbers. If the former, it would appear we have created a strange policy in which we actually encourage unauthorized immigration, since it automatically leads to amnesty and citizenship, whereas going through the legal channels can take a long time, cost a lot of money, and may end in rejection. At the same time, all of these options appear to result in an ever-more militarized border, since one solution will be to make sure that there simply are no undocumented immigrants (though even this will fail to account for the many who are unauthorized for reason of overstaying visas after legal entry.) All of this is meant to show why the issue of undocumented immigration is beyond the scope of this chapter, since it gets us into the weeds of immigration enforcement. Instead,

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I want to focus on the more basic question of what a just immigration policy would be, even for those who have not yet entered the country to which they hope to immigrate. Let us explore further how these issues relate to the question of democratic political commitments. Let us grant that all those denizens of a country who desire to become citizens have a moral right to become citizens. Even if we grant that assumption, favored by migrant support groups, there remains the question of what a country’s ongoing immigration policy will be. Now, who has the right to determine what that policy will be? The value of national self-determination, as well as a commitment to democracy more broadly, suggests that the citizens of the “host country” are the ones who decide, through the democratic deliberative process. Those holding to a form of strong moral cosmopolitanism might reply that because the world is the common possession of humankind, human beings possess a basic right to immigrate to any country they please, a right which cannot be overridden by the democratic will of any particular nation-state. Joseph Carins, for example, argues that such a basic right to immigrate exists, while countries can only control their borders only for national security purposes. Carins is to be commended for making the case for strong moral cosmopolitanism and the concomitant right to immigrate explicit. For other thinkers, the right to immigrate is either vaguely defended or otherwise smuggled in under the radar. Tisha Rajendra, for example, at one point concedes in her recent book that “it would make little sense to say that everyone has the right to take part in the government of every country in the world.”9 Here she is addressing the question of democratic participation on the part of migrants and is arguing that all immigrants have a right to full citizenship in the country where they reside (regardless of whether they entered with authorization or have legal documentation for continued residency in the country).10 She also notes that migrants have a right to “remain in the territory.”11 That is fne as far as it goes, but Rajendra sidesteps the question of whether migrants have a basic inherent right to enter any territory. Again, let us grant that migrants who are already in the territory have a right to citizenship, regardless of how they entered (i.e., with or without authorization). There still remains the vexing question of whether other would-be migrants currently outside the country have a human right to enter the country. Rajendra is so focused on the plight of undocumented immigrants in the United States that she simply ignores this arguably more diffcult question. But it is on this fundamental question that the issue of democratic commitments is most relevant. Arguing against the moral justifability of guest worker programs, Michael Walzer notes that the question of immigration is fundamentally about voluntarily enlarging the membership of a democratic community; as such, that decision is to be made by the democratic citizens

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themselves. “Democratic citizens, then, have a choice: if they want to bring in new workers, they must be prepared to enlarge their own membership; if they are unwilling to accept new members, they must fnd ways within the limits of the domestic market to get socially necessary work done. And those are their only choices.”12 The citizens of a democratic polity will have a variety of considerations involved in the question of whether to enlarge their membership. There will be the question of whether the welfare scheme they have arranged will be able to support a larger population. There will be the question of whether an aging workforce entails that they need a new infux of working-age adults. There will also be questions of how to induct new members into the welfare scheme, not only in terms of its benefts but also in terms of its responsibilities. Will the new members be willing to stay long enough not only to reap the benefts of the scheme (say, through free education, health care, and retirement benefts) but also to undertake responsibilities for the overall scheme (through paying taxes, contributing to the economy, and through democratic practices such as voting)? Why have democratic commitments not been central to the discussion of immigration, not least in the literature on theology and Christian ethics? One possible reason is the basic cosmopolitan impulse of Christian ethical thought. But a second reason, related to but distinct from the frst, is a focus on economic relationships to the exclusion of political ones. There is often the sense that our relationships and responsibilities to one another are fundamentally economic rather than political; so, I have responsibilities to the person who makes my shoes or my iPhone, and these responsibilities are somehow more fundamental than my relationships to the persons with whom I share membership in a democratic political community. All of these relationships are important, of course, but the purely economic should not be permitted to crowd out the political and democratic. We are not merely “worker-consumers.” We are also citizens, participants in a democratic process. And for better or worse, not everyone in the world is part of one country’s democratic political community, nor do they all even want to be. There is a certain tension between the commitment in liberal democracies to the principle of democracy and a growing cosmopolitan sense that national borders are irrelevant at best and evil at worst. The reason this is a tension is because there is no global system of democracy. That is not to say that such a global democracy is impossible; it is merely to say that as a simple fact we do not currently have a worldwide government, least of all one governed by democratic principles. This means that insofar as we maintain our commitment to democracy, we will be, for the foreseeable future, committed in some way to the system of nation-states. Now, initially this might not seem like I’m saying much, since few people deny that nation-states exist and have

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some forms of political authority. Or conversely, it might seem like I’m saying more than I intend to; as though I am defending some kind of “fortress” view of the nation-state. On the contrary, I am merely bringing to explicit awareness that insofar as we are committed to democratic principles, we are committed in the current global arrangement to the existence of nation-states, which are the highest forms of government at which democratic legitimacy obtains.13 There is a growing tendency to view the nation-state as an arbitrary reality, and thus its boundaries are arbitrary lines that have no justifcation for existing. But what would this mean for our sense that governing powers are legitimate only to the extent that are democratically accountable, that in some way the will of the people can be seen in the government that rules them? Take the debate about open borders. There is an important difference between a nation-state determining democratically that it wishes to create an open-border policy for its own country, on the one hand, and on the other hand to argue that it is a moral imperative (perhaps grounded in universal human rights) that all nation-states have an open borders policy, regardless of whether the citizens of a particular nation-state wish to enact such a policy. On the one hand, we have a generous open borders policy grounded in the will of the people of a nation-state, meaning that the commitment to democratic legitimacy is maintained alongside the commitment to open borders. The second option is different, for here open borders is not grounded democratically but is instead based on a version of what David Miller calls “strong cosmopolitanism.” On this view, it is not only permissible for a state to enact an open borders policy; it is morally required, as a requirement of justice. So, the distinction here is between whether an open borders policy is seen as merely morally permissible or, more controversially, as morally required. In any case, it is much more diffcult to defend the claim that a policy of open borders is morally required. It is not clear how we can hold on to our democratic principles in the world we live in while also affrming the moral requirement of open borders. Any rules establishing a policy of open borders would have to be legislated by some supranational body lacking democratic legitimacy. They would therefore be rules foisted on many countries and people against their will. For some thinkers, that would perhaps be acceptable, as we are talking about a human rights issue, which is not amenable to democratic deliberation. Debates over immigration are caught up in a wider restructuring of the basic concepts of liberal democracy. The rise of populism has revealed how the principles of liberalism and those of democracy can come apart in troubling ways. Victor Orban of Hungary has famously declared that his country is now an “illiberal democracy,” emphasizing democracy but eliminating

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liberalism. Many see similar sentiments among Brexiteers in Britain and with President Trump and his supporters in the United States. Less attention has been given to those who increasingly emphasize liberalism at the expense of democracy. Jason Brennan published a book (just before the election of Donald Trump) called Against Democracy, which argues for the rule of the knowledgeable (epistocracy, he calls it) as opposed to rule by the people.14 In reaction to the rise of populism, there has been a widespread sense of the need to defend liberalism even over against the negative aspects of democracy. Immigration has become a political lightening rod in part because it perfectly highlights this new political restructuring in which it seems more and more possible that liberalism and democracy will become disentangled, perhaps even fueling rival political philosophies. For those with liberal cosmopolitan sensibilities, national borders and immigration restrictions represent everything that is wrong with the nation-state system. Insofar as large numbers of citizens continue to believe that a nation-state should be permitted to control its borders, immigration policies also come to represent all that is wrong with democracy itself, or in any case of democracy in the form of “populism.” For those who are more committed to the nation-state system or at least to their own particular nation, the immigration policies of the cosmopolitan liberals represent everything that is wrong with a situation in which distant elites make decisions for which they cannot be held politically accountable. This phenomenon is perhaps most vividly exemplifed in the resentment of Brexiteers in Britain against the allegedly unaccountable EU bureaucrats in Brussels who have an outsized infuence on their own country. What we see, therefore, is that the debate over immigration policy is inextricable from broader debates over the legitimacy of the nation-state, and the values central to liberal democracy. I have assumed a certain kind of political realism in which we reason from within the world as it is, rather than on the basis of a global utopia. On that basis, I have suggested that we have reason to support the value of national self-determination, since our commitment to principles of democracy is not sustainable beyond the level of the nation-state (or in the case of the EU, beyond the international body of Europe). Insofar as we do not have a global democracy, and insofar as we wish to maintain a commitment to democracy, we have to hold on to a sense of national selfdetermination. On this basis, we can argue that a country might determine for itself to, for example, adopt an open borders immigration policy. But it is very diffcult to argue on this basis that an open borders policy is morally required. One way that this is done, however, is through an appeal to human rights. The next section addresses that topic.

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HUMAN RIGHTS AND IMMIGRATION POLICY For some who study the political philosophy of migration, the question of democratic legitimacy is considered irrelevant because migration is a human rights issue. As such, it is not amenable to the vagaries of the democratic process. When someone’s basic human rights are at stake, we cannot leave it up to the people to make the right decision regarding immigration policy. In this section, I will defend this basic idea, outlining its basic contours and limits. For while the democratic legitimacy of liberal democracies rests in part on an element on national self-determination, the right of a democratic polity to determine its immigration policy is limited by the moral requirement to respect the human rights of all persons, whether citizen or noncitizen and, perhaps more important, whether living within the borders of a country’s territory or not. Some scholars of migration have argued that there is a basic human right to migrate. Others have not made such an argument explicit, but have implied it by suggesting that nation-states are inherently evil and violent forms of domination and that their borders are “historically arbitrary”15 and thus illegitimate. If the borders of nation-states have no legitimate authority, it seems we have found another route to the claim that there is a human right to migrate, since no nation-state has a right to control the movement of people across illegitimate borders. One of the reasons this issue becomes complex and hotly contested is that there is indeed an established human right of any person to leave their country of origin, or indeed to leave any country where they currently reside. Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaims that in addition to a right to movement within one’s country “everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.” But if a person has the right to leave her own country, doesn’t that entail that she has the right to enter some other country? She cannot leave her country without entering some other country, so the right to leave seems to entail a concomitant right to enter. However, there are nearly 200 countries in the world today, and so while a migrant might have the right to leave and enter one of them, each country might claim that some other country should take responsibility. In other words, while it is the case that some country should accept a migrant, it is not always clear which country bears the responsibility to do so. This question is particularly relevant in the case of refugees, and for the remainder of this section I will bracket the broader question of a general human right to migrate and will focus on the narrower question of the human rights protections pertaining specifcally to refugees. Addressing the question of what is owed to refugees is a more manageable issue, and one which shows more clearly how the democratic legitimacy of a country’s

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immigration policy is balanced against human rights concerns. For as we have seen, maintaining a democratic commitment to national self-determination does not entail that a country has no moral obligations to those currently living beyond its borders. In addressing this topic, I shall insist on a distinction that is sometimes questioned in the ethics and theology literature on migration: the distinction between refugees and economic migrants. This distinction is crucial, as it gets at what states owe to migrants regardless of what the democratic will of their people demands, since it addresses a human rights issue, which cannot be balanced over against other mere interests. Central to the distinction between a refugee and an economic migrant is that the refugee requires “refuge.” The reason there is an emphasis on political refugee in the concept of refugee is that the claim is that the refugee can only fnd refugee by leaving his or her home country.16 That is, there is no other way to rectify the situation than by leaving; which means that some country must take responsibility. Emigration might be necessary because one’s own government is actively seeking to attack or harm the migrant, or because his or her government is allowing other groups in society to do so, giving tacit or explicit permission to other groups to carry out attacks. With economic migrants, the situation is different. Wealthy countries might be obligated to help those living in abject poverty around the world, since living without basic needs being met is to be deprived of one’s human rights. But to help such persons achieve these basic needs and thus to meet their human rights might not require leaving their home country. It might instead involve providing various forms of foreign aid, through money or goods. Economic migrants who are not seeking to leave positions of abject poverty have a still weaker claim to a human rights violation, as they are not seeking refuge from a hostile government, nor seeking to meet their basic economic survival needs, but rather are trying to advance their interest in obtaining wealth or achieving a comfortable or even luxurious lifestyle. This is a perfectly reasonable thing to want, but to include such persons within the category of refugees is to rob the concept of its crucial meaning related to refuge from political hostility and respect for human rights. For a refugee is someone to whom a nation-state owes something unconditionally, irrespective of the interests of its own citizens as they are expressed through the democratic process. The democratic will of the people is not without limits in regard to immigration policy. The example of what is owed to refugees is the most pertinent instance of a limitation on the right of a democratic community to decide for itself whether to enlarge its political community through immigration. It is the responsibility of the global community of nations to provide haven for refugees, including citizenship in the host country if it is likely that their home country will not be restored to safety in the foreseeable future.

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Refugees have a human right to asylum in another country. The problem is, which country has a duty to respond to this human right? Usually the answer has been whichever country on whose doorstep the refugee arrives. That may be the only realistic answer possible in a world in which global cooperation remains diffcult. But as David Miller has argued, a more just solution would be one in which the international community of nations agreed to a plan in which all nations, or at least all advanced liberal democracies, were given a certain yearly quota of refugees. This number could be indexed to the size and wealth of the individual countries. There might also be a special provision for former colonial powers, which bear a special responsibility to their former colonies and to the problems that persist in those societies. This solution could also involve monetary transfers to offset the costs for countries that are willing to take on more refugees, or for whom it would be more convenient (for both refugee and host country) because of proximity to the country the refugees were feeing. This would offset the problem that some countries are disproportionately affected by the refugee crisis for the arbitrary reason of being located nearby countries from which refugees are feeing. There should be some way for other advanced countries to help deal with this issue, even though their distance from the refugees’ home country means that they are not immediately arriving on their doorstep and lodging asylum claims. Finally, while refugees have a human right to leave their country and to fnd refuge in a country that will protect them, this does not entail that they have a human right to live in whatever country they choose. If a refugee enters Italy and lodges a claim for asylum, it means that some country should hear his or her claim; and if valid, some country should provide asylum, most likely the country where he or she entered, which in this case is Italy. But what if the refugee then says that he or she would prefer to live in Canada, because he or she likes cold weather and enjoys ice hockey? Does Canada then have an obligation to take in the refugee, even though Italy is already perfectly willing to do so? Such a situation would be anomalous, since refugees have a right to asylum, not a right to live in the country of their frst preference. Debate will no doubt continue regarding which countries should provide refuge for which refugees. In an ideal world, there would be a fair division of refugees among all of the countries which have the space and resources to accept some number of refugees. Short of that, the countries at whose borders refugees lodge claims for asylum will bear a special responsibility, even if the reasons for that responsibility (physical proximity) are sometimes arbitrary. The international community is under an obligation not to violate the human right of refugees to fnd refuge in another country, and in the absence of an international scheme for sharing this burden the responsibility will fall to the country of the refugees’ frst arrival.

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While we might be able to fnd political common ground across various factions on the question of refugees, the question of what is owed to economic migrants is more open to political disagreement and is thus strongly contested today. In the next and fnal section, we will take up this topic, exploring the broader question of what the citizens of a liberal democracy owe to persons living beyond its borders.

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WHAT WE OWE TO WHOM Looking at the topic of immigration from the perspective of the nationstate helps us bring into clearer focus several of the issues involved in the debate. One consideration is what is owed to migrants as individuals. This is the focus of much of the literature on immigration in theology and Christian ethics. Another consideration is regarding what a liberal democracy’s immigration policy should be. A component of this involves asking what a nation-state owes to its own citizens, as well as to the citizens of the home country from which migrants are coming. Finally, there is the question of what nation-states owe to the global community as a whole. As we have seen, refugees are a special case, because their human rightsbased claim to asylum is something that cannot be balanced against other interests, whether on the part of the host country or the home country. The same cannot be said in the case of economic migrants. When a person’s basic rights are being violated (e.g., she is being violently targeted by her own country) we cannot weigh up her claim to refuge over against other interests, such as the labor needs of her home country or the economic benefts she might bring to the host country. Her human rights claim to refuge is in a sense absolute; her situation is so dire that responding to her claim for asylum does not involve a calculation of mutual interests that might take place, and indeed should take place, with regard to broader questions of the economics of immigration policy. This is why I have insisted on the traditional distinction between refugees and economic migrants. Collapsing this distinction robs us of an important characteristic of the category of refugee that we should not lose. But we still have to ask what is owed to economic migrants, and how a country’s immigration policy should account for this moral responsibility. Millions of persons are currently on the move, crossing international borders not necessarily to escape hostile governments at home but instead to secure a better livelihood, and, in some cases, to leave behind lives of poverty or near poverty. What is owed to these economic migrants, for example, on the part of wealthy countries such as the United States? There are two points I want to highlight in this case, as both are elements that are present in the case of

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economic migrants which are not present in the case of refugees. The frst is that at least for liberal-democratic states, immigration policy for economic migrants will be subject to democratic deliberation of the part of the citizenry. That is part of what it means to live in a liberal democracy in which political rule is by the people and for the people. This is closely related to the second element, which is that a balancing of interests and a consideration of costs and benefts is appropriate in the case of economic migrants, in a way that it is not with refugees. This doesn’t mean that the decision can be made by a set of unaccountable experts who add up the benefts and subtract the costs and tell the citizens what will happen. There will be a wide area of political deliberation in which citizens determine which costs they are willing to bear, and which benefts they would like to enjoy. Different liberal democracies will likely come up with different solutions, even all things being equal (and in the real world, all things will not be equal, since migration patterns will differ across regions of the world.) This deliberative democratic process entails not only asking about the costs and benefts to citizens of the nation-state. It also involves asking about the costs and benefts to would-be migrants themselves, as well as to the countries where the would-be migrants currently live. This last element is often ignored in the literature on the ethics of migration, which tends to focus on the experience of migrants themselves rather than the effects of migration on the countries migrants are leaving. But it is important to also consider what is owed to the inhabitants who do not wish to leave countries that might be negatively affected by the exodus of large numbers of its working population. This is an importation consideration for an immigration policy for economic migrants, since human well-being is at state. In terms of what a nation-state owes to would-be migrants currently still residing in their home country, we might also consider the question of what we owe to migrants who might have mistaken beliefs in thinking that migrating will make their lives better. It is insuffciently acknowledged in the literature on migration that migrants might not always have true beliefs about whether migrating to some chosen country will actually be the best option available, when compared to the set of other possible options, such as choosing a different country to go to or even staying where they are. On the whole we are probably justifed in assuming that would-be migrants know what is best for them, but it also seems likely that the dream of a better life in a new country could also be just that: a dream, a vague picture of the destination, rather than a calculated and justifed belief that going there will make things better—especially once we factor in the arduous and perhaps dangerous journey required to get there. That doesn’t entail that a nation-state should not accept economic migrants; rather, it means that a nation-state’s immigration policy, which can be informed by expert analysis of various country’s living

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standards and political situation (in a way that the beliefs of individuals all around the world might not be), should attend to all of the actual facts on the ground, and consider whether encouraging persons to embark on a possibly dangerous journey across land or sea is actually not a form of compassion but instead itself a kind of cruelty. In the deliberative process of coming up with a just immigration policy, this question of what is owed to would-be migrants themselves should at least be considered. Note that I have spoken here about “would-be migrants.” Much of the literature on the ethics of migration focuses on how to treat those who have already migrated, or are in process of doing so, as they cross various borders or traverse land and sea on their way to an international border. But a nation’s immigration policy is not only directed at how to treat those who have already migrated or are in process of doing so. A country’s immigration policy also has to consider what incentives it creates for “would-be migrants,” for those who are not currently in process of migrating, but who might like to or who would be encouraged or discouraged into doing so by various laws and policies. Consideration of what such an immigration policy entails must look at what its overall effect on human well-being would be, including considering its unintended consequences. These considerations are simply not on the agenda if we focus exclusively on those who are already migrants. A fnal consideration regarding an immigration policy for economic migrants focuses on what we owe to those who remain in the home country from which migrants are emigrating. Of course, it is a basic human right that persons may leave any country, including their home country, so the question is not at all about coercing persons into staying where they are. Instead, the question is the extent to which a country’s immigration policy should factor in the well-being of the home country, including the interests of those who have no intention of leaving and will thus stay behind. It is often acknowledged in the literature on migration that it is usually middle-income individuals who have the means to emigrate from their home country; the poorest populations do not typically have the resources to do so. At frst glance it thus does not appear that migration will do much to alleviate global economic inequality. While those who leave are often able to increase their standard of living, there is a possibility of “brain drain,” where a large portion of the working-age population leaves a country, thereby further weakening its economic situation. This kind of cost-beneft analysis or consideration of various interests is, again, not appropriate in the case of refugees feeing persecution and hostility on the part of their own government. However, when we are speaking of economic migrants, it is appropriate to consider the well-being of all parties involved, including the country from which migrants are emigrating. David Miller gives the example of Haiti, which has seen over 90 percent of its medical professionals, doctors, and nurses leave the country

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to enjoy higher wages abroad, primarily in the United States. That higher standard of living is good for the medical professionals, but what about for those requiring medical care in Haiti? Should the good of the people of Haiti not be considered in deliberation about a just immigration policy? However we answer, it is clear that a country’s immigration policy should consider the interests of all those affected by migration.

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CONCLUSION As noted earlier, the question of what a country’s immigration policy should be is an explicitly normative question. My purpose here is not to convince the reader of a set of policy issues so much as to highlight the kinds of normative decisions that need to be made. We cannot answer it merely by describing the realities of migrant fows, or even telling the stories of migrants who have been harmed by the current system. These descriptive accounts are a necessary but not suffcient component in the development of a just immigration policy. Nor is it suffcient merely to critique the immigration system as it currently stands. Denouncing injustice is important, but social critique should be paired with recommendations about what policies should replace the unjust policies and practices of the current system. Once those are clearly articulated, we can have a debate about what a liberal democracy’s immigration policy should be. At the same time, anyone wanting to do normative work on immigration policy needs to have good empirical data, done with as much value neutrality as possible. The problem is that putatively value-neutral studies of migration often smuggle in normative assumptions, sometimes without acknowledging them and thus without defending them. We need to undertake these various tasks in turn: interpreting and understanding the realities of migration, and deliberating about what justice requires in terms of immigration policy. This volume helpfully brings together scholars working across these various tasks, and I hope my chapter is read in that light. We need to think about the realities of migration, past and present. We need to think about the plight of migrants, their suffering, their reasons for leaving. But thinking about these matters, and having empathy for migrants will not alone provide us with a fully worked out immigration policy for the nation-states where we live. As mentioned above, the problem with immigration debates in the United States today is that both political parties spend so much time ranting about the unjust immigration policies of their opponents that they never get around to proposing a workable immigration policy. As a result, each side is increasingly vulnerable to critique from the other side, since each spends more time criticizing their opponents than dealing with the real policy challenges

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surrounding immigration. Partisan stalemate thus goes on in perpetuity, as each side becomes increasingly justifed in declaring that the other side has no workable solution, without noticing that the same is true of themselves. Both are willing to let the current situation go on indefnitely, hoping to win in the zero-sum game of power politics. What is needed instead is an openly normative argument about what a just immigration policy for a liberal democracy would be. I have sought to outline the basic contours of some of the key elements to be considered in this democratic deliberation. But this is just the beginning of that normative debate which we so desperately need.

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NOTES 1. Two exemplary recent books on the ethics of immigration are by Kristin Heyer, Kinship Across Borders: A Christian Ethic of Immigration (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2012), and Tisha Rajendra, Migrants and Citizens: Justice and Responsibility in the Ethics of Immigration (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2017). 2. See, for example, Saskia Sassen, Guests and Aliens (New York: New Press, 1999) and Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 3. Theological voices have every right to be heard in the public sphere, or at least to speak in the hope of being heard. I am not in favor of demands that theological perspectives be “translated” into secular speech for the purpose of public debate. Nonetheless, I think such a form of translation or at least bracketing is often prudent in public debate, where it is rarely necessary to bring to the fore all the various commitments one holds, but rather only those related to the issue at hand. See Jeffrey Stout, “Survivor of the Nations: A response to Fergusson and Pecknold.” Scottish Journal of Theology, Vol. 59 (2016), 216–217. 4. For a helpful summary, see David Miller, Strangers in Our Midst: The Political Philosophy of Immigration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 154–156. 5. Miller, Strangers in Our Midst, 154. 6. Ibid., 153. 7. Ibid., 154. 8. Ibid., 154. 9. Rajendra, Migrants and Citizens, 17. 10. Ibid., 20–22. 11. Ibid., 18. 12. Michael Walzer, Sphere of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 61. Quoted in Miller, Strangers in Our Midst, 97. 13. The EU is something of an exception; for the purposes of this chapter, we can assume that the EU is itself a kind of nation-state. In any case, even if Europe and the EU exemplify the possibility of a future world without strong national boundaries,

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there remain beyond the bounds of the EU many countries that are not part of the EU. Therefore, the broader point stands that the world remains divided into nation-states. 14. Jason Brennan, Against Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). 15. Rajendra, Migrants and Citizens, 26. 16. See Miller, Strangers in Our Midst, ch. 5.

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Chapter 13

Too Late for Justice? Disappearing Islands, Migration, and Climate Justice

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Seforosa Carroll

It1 is widely recognized that those most at risk in the emerging environmental crisis are not those who belong to countries and cultures which are economically privileged but rather the poor, those without a powerful voice, and the most vulnerable. They are often the least responsible for the effects of climate change and are dependent on those responsible for climate change to own and fulfl their ethical and moral responsibility to the environment. The impact of climate change is anticipated to displace up to 250 million people worldwide by 2050.2 The offce of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that “an annual average of 21.5 million people have been forcibly displaced by weather-related sudden onset hazards—such as foods, storms, wildfres, extreme temperature—each year since 2008.”3 The Internal Displacement Monitoring Center’s (IDMC) 2016 global displacement report recorded 19.2 million new displacements across 113 countries as a result of disasters in 2015.4 According to Saskia Sassen, the “massive loss of habitat” will increasingly drive the need for people to migrate. This has changed the nature and profle of migrants. These are no longer the “migrants in search of a better life who hope to send money and perhaps return to the family left behind. These are people in search of bare life, with no home to return to.”5 This chapter explores the notion of climate justice in relation to climateinduced migration, specifcally climate-induced displacement. Using the experience of the Pacifc, I explore the nexus between climate justice and climate-induced displacement. My core argument is that just as there is a pressing need to address climate-induced migration and displacement, there is also the equally urgent need to ensure that questions of climate justice, 221

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which calls for actions to regulate the climate, keep at the forefront the historic injustices that have caused ecological devastation and forced people and nonhuman species to migrate in the frst place.6 There is also the imperative to include the perspective of those who are affected in the dialogue on climate migration and displacement in ways that affrm their human dignity, identity, and agency. Jione Havea rightfully reminds us of the traps of the politics of climate change, and, more importantly, the need to engage in talanoa or dialogue that is identity-forming and agency-affrming together with those whose lives are affected.7 It is, as Havea states, echoing the words of former US president Barack Obama, enabling people “to feel that they can and to know that they are.”8 This chapter seeks to shed light on the complex and yet necessary relationship between climate justice and climate migration/displacement from the perspective and lived experience of Pacifc Islanders. It draws on key arguments, themes, responses, and thinking on climate migration/displacement and climate justice in the Pacifc. These key themes are undergirded by two recurring ideas. The frst is the ethical and moral responsibilities of the major polluting countries and the ongoing global appeal to remove the causes of climate change. The second is the relational worldview which enables people to practice resilience and self-determination.

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CLIMATE CHANGE AND FORCED AND VOLUNTARY MIGRATION Climate change will continue to cause the migration of people in the form of displacement or forced relocation within and beyond their national borders. Environmental migration is not a new phenomenon since “changing environmental conditions have been migration drivers throughout history.”9 What is new about this “newly perceived form of migration” is “recognizing anthropogenic drivers of climate change which induce migration.”10 As Scott Leckie and others contend, “the global displacement crisis is an outcome of decades of political and ecological displacement by the world’s most polluting nations.”11 Recognizing the role that developed countries have played in relation to anthropogenic climate change, the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth held in Cochabamba on April 22, 2010, the People’s Agreement states: Developed countries, as the main cause of climate change, in assuming their historical responsibility, must recognize and honour their climate debt in all of its dimensions as the basis for a just, effective, and scientifc solution to climate change.12

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There are reasons to address issues of injustice. Sujatha Byravan and Sudhir Chella Rajan convincingly argue that the task of accommodating those who will inevitably be displaced by climate change (“climate exiles”) should be a shared global responsibility. By this they mean that the responsibility of absorbing “climate exiles” should be distributed among polluting countries and proportional to each country’s cumulative emissions of greenhouse gases.13 They contend that to “ignore potential victims until after they become ‘environmental refugees’—is morally indefensible as well as impractical.”14 So far there is no legal acknowledgment of categories of migrants such as “climate refugee,” “ecological refugee,” and “environmental refugee.” The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNCHR) states that the term “climate refugee” is misleading. The legal defnition of a “refugee” is set out in the 1951 Refugee Convention relating to the Status of Refugees. The convention applies it to people feeing war or persecution and who have crossed an international border.15 The diffculty of applying the term “refugee” to migrants displaced by climate change is that the cause is not persecutory. Furthermore, normally the agency of persecution is a state and not a global agency.16 Jane McAdam argues that the international refugee law was devised for a very different context, and is an “inappropriate framework for addressing environmental displacement.”17 Although “human rights law has expanded countries’ protection obligations beyond the ‘refugee’ category, to include people at risk of arbitrary deprivation of life, torture, or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” (known as “complementary law”), it is diffcult to argue a case for forced migration on this basis, particularly when the alleged perpetrator is not a state as such but climate change.18 The principle at stake here is one of causality. Roger Zetter notes that “there are substantial conceptual and empirical problems in identifying cause-effect link, and the extent to which the linkage is direct.”19 He further argues that current laws are largely reactive. They do not deal with root causes but rather consequences.20 Although there is a correlation between climate change and migration, there is still a serious legal gap with regard to those displaced across borders. Yet “existing international frameworks and national policies are yet to make the crucial link between climate change impact on the frequency and intensity of extreme climate events, environmental degradation and human mobility.”21 In 2012, the Nansen Initiative, and the subsequent Protection Agenda and Platform on Disaster Placement set up to implement it, was launched by Norway and Switzerland to address this gap between climate change and migration.22 The Nansen Initiative recognizes that in the context of climate change, climate migration and displacement are likely to increase due to the increasing frequency of natural disasters such as foods, earthquakes, droughts, and cyclones. However, there is a lack of coherent and effective national and

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international cooperation to protect the rights of climate migrants and climate exiles across borders. Rather than developing new legal standards, the Initiative seeks to build consensus among states on the elements of a Protection Agenda addressing the needs of people displaced across borders by natural disasters, including those linked to climate change. The Protection Agenda comprises three pillars: international cooperation and solidarity; standards for the treatment of affected people regarding admission, stay, and status; and operational responses, including funding mechanisms and responsibilities of international humanitarian and development actors.23 The nexus between climate change and migration is highly politicized and problematic. Etienne Piguet and his colleagues argue that knowledge in this feld, that is climate change and migration, is still limited and fragmented. There are “uncertainties surrounding the actual mechanisms at stake, the number of persons affected, and the geographical zones concerned.”24 It is still unclear whether people are moving or will move as a direct result of environmental stressors. Piguet and others argue that there are “continuing debates between those who stress the direct impact of the environment on population fows and those who rather insist on the social, economic and political contexts in which such fows occur.”25 People move for a variety of reasons. Climate change may not be the sole factor affecting decisions to migrate but could act as the tipping point among other factors. Kulcsár maintains that “the task is to fnd those components of migration decision making that are sensitive to climate conditions, keeping in mind that these components carry different weights in different situations and contexts.”26 A further complication in the climate change and migration nexus is the dynamics of voluntary versus involuntary migration. While both voluntary and involuntary migrations are often described as two distinct categories, the line between them is diffcult to draw. As such, the term “climate-induced migration” does not adequately refect the plight of those experiencing climate-induced migration in its varying forms. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) uses the term “environmental migrants” to describe those who move in response to climatic and other environmental triggers. The IOM defnes “environmental migrants” as persons or groups of persons who, for reasons of sudden or progressive changes in the environment that adversely affect their lives or living conditions, are obliged to have to leave their habitual home, or choose to do so, either temporarily or permanently, and who move either within their territory or abroad.27

As Anthony Oliver-Smith has shown, conceptualizations such as these can “suggest that nature is at fault, when in fact humans are deeply implicated in the environmental changes that make life impossible in certain

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circumstances.”28 The concern here, as Fanny Thornton highlights, is that the defnition absolves human beings of responsibility for the dislocation and “therefore no one is in particular is responsible for preventing, resolving, responding, or responding to it.”29 The problem is inherent in the terms “migration” and “migrant.” Not only do the terms defect human responsibility related to anthropogenic climate change and subsequent displacement and migration but they also imply a choice. Voluntary migrants are those who choose to leave their country of origin and often are those who have resources to leave and are usually the frst to leave. Their decision to leave the country of origin is linked to multiple drivers, one of which could be related to climate change. With regard to climate-induced movements, displaced migrants are those who are forced to leave their home or place of residence where a disaster such as a tsunami or an earthquake is the main driver of the movement. The displacement can be for a short period of time or longer or permanent depending on the severity of the damage. Forced migrants are those who need to leave their homes because of the severe deterioration of land and resources due to the sea level rise. The urgency for fight is less than that of displaced migrants and the movement is slower. However, the line between displaced and forced migration is not always clear. Sujatha Byravan and Sudhir Chella Rajan make a helpful suggestion for distinguishing these two categories. They propose two terms, namely “climate migrants” and “climate exiles.” “Climate migrants” include “all those who are displaced because of the effects of climate change.”30 “Climate exiles” form “a special category of climate migrants who will have lost their ability to remain well-functioning members of political societies in their countries, often through no fault of their own.”31 The point of the distinction is that most “climate migrants” are internally displaced people, and/or have the opportunity to return to their countries or regions, whereas “climate exiles” are forced to become permanently stateless. The focus of this chapter is on climate exiles from the Pacifc. CLIMATE CHANGE AND CLIMATE JUSTICE FROM THE PACIFIC The Pacifc, “the liquid continent,” is composed of a number of countries in the world on the forefront of climate change. For those in Tuvalu, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Tokelau, and the Maldives, time is already running out. The rising of the sea level, the “overfowing ocean,” is drowning them out.32 Several coastal communities across the Pacifc have already been relocated due to environmental degradation. In Fiji, for example, up to forty coastal villagers have been relocated inland due to rising sea or river levels.33 In the Solomon Islands, fve islands have already been lost to the rising sea.34 The

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people of the Carteret Islands in Papua New Guinea have already experienced the complexities of resettlement in Bougainville. Within the last four years, Tonga, Vanuatu, Fiji, and Samoa have experienced destructive Categories 4 and 5 cyclones. The effects of El Niño are being experienced in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, and Fiji. Many have died of hunger due to famine. It is estimated that 4.1 million people in the Pacifc are affected and at risk from drought.35 For low-lying atoll countries, external migration looms large as internal relocation is limited. For countries like Kiribati and Tuvalu, migration in the form of forced relocation is an imminent option that they will need to consider. Articulating the devastating impact of what this will mean for Tuvaluans, Rev. Tafue Lusama, former general secretary of the Ekalesia Kelisiano Tuvalu (EKT) in a short video titled Tuvalu: Faith in a Changing Climate, states, “If this small space (Tuvalu) is submerged under water, that is the end, and that is the literal death of a people, of us as a people.”36 Expressing a similar view in a practical way, in 2014, former president of Kiribati Anote Tong purchased a 20-kilometer piece of land in Fiji as a backup measure for his people should the sea level rise claim the country. In 2016, Tong envisaged that the migration of his people was likely to begin by the 2020s.37 Tong’s belief in the importance of planned long-term migration or relocation so that it would ensure and maintain the self-determining agency of the I-Kiribati people is refected through his government’s Migration with Dignity policy.38 Anote Tong envisioned a role for the diaspora in helping to resettle migrants in their new home. Tong’s hope was that through long-term, meritbased migration, “pockets” of I-Kiribati communities would be built up overseas that would help facilitate gradual, transitional migration. This would also be a way for I-Kiribati traditions and culture to be kept alive and also to enable the I-Kiribati people to slowly adapt to the new host culture and way of life. For Tong, this was a practical way of affrming agency and avoiding the pitfalls of being identifed as refugees that would lead to the loss of voice and rights. This would mean that the future of the I-Kiribati community would be determined by them rather than by others.39 This vision can only be realized through the support of receiving countries. There is hope; there is also the need for intentional international dialogue, compassionate listening, and radical hospitality. Tuvalu, on the other hand, adopts a different view. The current prime minister of Tuvalu, Enele Sapoaga, is skeptical of the term Migration with Dignity, stating that there can never be any dignity or human agency in a forced displacement.40 Where would Tuvaluans go and what would happen to their sovereignty? Instead, Sapoaga persists in emphasizing a globalized need “to work urgently on cutting down the causes of climate change.”41 In broad

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practical terms, this means continuing the reduction of carbon emissions and fossil fuel dependency, intentional measures to keep the global temperature at below 1.5 degrees Celsius, and a commitment to a just transition to renewable energy. Sapoaga’s argument can be summarized as climate justice and is foremost on his agenda. Consequently, relocation as a result of displacement will only be considered when all other options are exhausted, and even then, Sapoaga insists, there can be no Plan B for Tuvalu.42 The workshop on climate-induced migration Toku Fenua, Toku Tof (“My Island, My Birthright”) organized by the Tuvalu Association of nongovernmental organizations (TANGO), held in Tuvalu in June 2018, produced an outcome statement reiterating the current Tuvaluan government’s stance that migration will only be considered by Tuvalu as an option of last resort—that is, only after all other options have been exhausted. The workshop emphasized the following key themes: the need to promote and protect traditional knowledge, the implications of climate change on statehood, the economic and noneconomic loss and damage caused by climate change, and the role of the church and international law. Tuvalu’s priority is to safeguard their sovereignty and preserve their home. This is not a response arising out of denial but rather a deep commitment to exhaust all options and alternatives to save Tuvalu. Activities like reclaiming land inundated by the sea level rise and exploring ways to raise Tuvalu higher above the sea level are practical expressions of this commitment. At the foreground looms the imminent loss of home, which calls for a hope-flled commitment on the part of the Tuvaluan people to work to preserve their home. Alongside these activities is the continuing call to polluting countries to own their responsibility and reduce their fossil fuel dependence and carbon emissions and to commit themselves to using renewable energy. THE NEXUS BETWEEN CLIMATE JUSTICE AND MIGRATION/DISPLACEMENT Explorations on how to solve climate-induced migration or displacement and to formulate national and international policy for this purpose should not neglect climate justice. Climate justice is an intrinsic element in policy making to reduce climate-induced migration; it is a practical expression of the acceptance of our responsibility for climate change: “Anthropogenic climate change exacerbates existing environmental, economic, and social vulnerabilities.”43 The interlocking nature of justice, environmental migration, and climate-induced displacement requires that these three factors must be considered together. For the people in the Pacifc there is a need to give equal weight to both. In terms of policy making, and as Oli Brown emphasizes,

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“focusing on the impacts of climate change without factoring in the local context” can lead to policy distortions.44 Climate change does not take place in a vacuum. It is a result of underdevelopment, development policies, inequalities within and between countries, global injustice, and the lack of solidarity between states, human rights, or human security. Policies on the climate change and migration nexus should not neglect to explore the varying factors that make people vulnerable in the frst place. Given this interrelationship, climate-induced migration and displacement cannot be addressed without considering climate justice. In this instance, people are not moving out of choice but because they are forced to. With regard to the communities of low-lying atolls of Tuvalu and Kiribati, it is not their frst choice to leave their islands. They are forced to move because the land is becoming uninhabitable. There is a responsibility on the part of the international community to support countries such as these as they work through their options. The international community can do this in a number of ways—intentionally and effectively reducing their carbon emissions, proactively developing migration policies, anticipating the impact of receiving migrants from these countries, and actively removing the causes of this kind of migration. Engaging climate justice helps to keep a number of important issues in focus. It places at the forefront of discussions on climate change people’s faces, their well-being, dignity, and integrity. It also demands accepting one’s responsibility for climate change. Julia Haggstrom argues that climate justice must be taken as a basis for international policies on migration as this “allows responsibility to be put on those who caused the problem.”45 She writes:

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The climate change justice concept captures the equity aspect by addressing human rights, just development and political expression. With this both future injustice and the on-going mechanisms of power and development inequality is beginning to be redressed.46

Julia Haggstrom explores the role of climate justice in climate migration policy. She acknowledges that climate justice is not yet accepted as entailing a set of legally binding principles for climate migration policies; rather, it still exists as an ideal. But she argues that as a principle, climate justice can be used as a basis for an international treaty on climate migration and sharing responsibility.47 An exclusive focus on climate-induced migration can easily mask the issues of injustice that have caused the forced migration or relocation; it can also overlook the responsibility of the people causing it. It is for this reason the prime minister of Tuvalu, Enele Sapoaga, adamantly insists on the distinction between climate-induced migration and climate-induced displacement.48 Sapoaga argues that migration implies a choice to migrate; he insists

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that this is not the case with Tuvaluans. Tuvaluans do not choose to move; they are forced to do so. Hence, Sapoaga asserts that “forced displacement” is the correct term to describe the plight of Tuvuluans. Sapoaga also argues that a focus on planned migration undermines the human agency and dignity of climate-displaced migrants as well as the urgent need for action on climate change. Sapoaga strongly believes that there can be no Plan B for Tuvalu. In his view, having Plan B would only serve to let the culpable polluting countries off the hook. The climate justice approach reveals how people are affected by climate change not only disproportionately but also differently. Applying the principle of intersectionality highlights those most vulnerable and at risk. The concept of intersectionality was frst proposed by Kimberlé Crenshaw to conceptualize the way the law responded to issues where both gender and race were involved.49 The concept of intersectionality brings to light the different ways inequalities and power imbalances are masked. This concept has been “embraced by climate justice activists as a means to address the many common threads that link environmental abuses to patterns of discrimination by race, gender, sexual orientation and other social factors.”50 Climate change exacerbates poverty and gender inequality. The poor are particularly vulnerable to climate change. Women are doubly marginalized, as they make up 70 percent of the world’s poor. Research has shown that women are particularly vulnerable to climate change and that they, more than men, bear the full brunt of the climate change impact. Women are the caregivers and nurturers of communities. They are predominantly responsible for food production as well as for household water supply and energy for heating and cooking. Women are continually challenged to gain access to the available resources and to develop the needed skills. On the other hand, women are generally recognized to possess a practical understanding and coping skills to adapt to changing environmental realities as well as to contribute to the solution. Unfortunately, the strategies to deal with climate change are still a largely untapped resource. Emily Wilkinson and others recognize that “more information is needed on how men, women, and children are affected by temporary and permanent migration and displacement, including their individual capacities to manage climate risk and mobility.”51 Furthermore, they acknowledge that “because climate change works through push factors and results in involuntary migration, the populations in migration streams are more likely to be resource poor, vulnerable groups, posing considerable national and local policy challenges.”52 Therefore, they conclude, “understanding the composition of and vulnerability of populations as well as their migration networks and potential migration behaviour prior to environmental impact is crucial.”53 Finally, a climate justice approach makes room for the perspectives and participation of the communities directly affected. This entails including

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and engaging the perspectives of those affected on alternatives and models of future migration. In this regard, self-determination is the key. It is necessary for islands like Kiribati and Tuvalu to “review a number of migration and adaptation strategies in order to fnd long term alternatives for their citizens.”54 In their article “The Politics of Environmental Migration and Climate Justice in the Pacifc Region,” Silja Klepp and Johannes Herbeck argue that the epistemic framing of the climate impact on migration in the global North tends to focus on it as either a security threat or a purely humanitarian issue.55 In contrast, the framing of the climate justice and migration nexus in the Pacifc focuses on fostering “global and regional solidarity to assist them in their search for long term adequate solutions for potential climate migrants.”56 It is important for countries in the Pacifc to determine and decide how they themselves respond to migration. It is equally important for the global North to “address sensitive questions of power and to consider different perspectives on, and interpretations of, climate change…. This applies to the debates and research around climate change and migration as well as to discussions and studies of adaptation to anthropogenic climate change.”57 A case in point is Kiribati’s policy of long-term migration known as and refected in their abovementioned Migration with Dignity Policy.

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CLIMATE JUSTICE, MIGRATION, AND DISPLACEMENT FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF “DISAPPEARING ISLANDS” Pacifc Islanders feel a deep sense of injustice. They have very little responsibility for the environmental predicament they fnd themselves in. Their foremost concern is to call the polluting countries into account for their actions and to demand that they reduce their emissions, contribute to fnding ways to mitigate the effects of climate change, and pay for their costs. Underlying this overwhelming concern is the hope that if emissions are kept to a safe level, then there is the possibility that Pacifc Island countries may have a longer time and opportunity to save their homes. In addition, there is the question of how to assist future climate exiles to secure their livelihood. Another question is how to frame the policy determining which polluting countries should receive climate exiles.58 Although it is recognized that dialogue about this issue should take place, this has not always been the case. So far, New Zealand is the only exception. In November 2017, it considered creating a climate-change refugee status for people displaced by the rising sea level. How this policy is developed and will be implemented remains to be seen.59

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Migrants are not passive participants. Most people in Pacifc Island countries want the option to be migrants with dignity but a dignity that they themselves defne and determine. They want the ability to move by their own decision and free will. Jane McAdam writes, “When the people of Tuvalu and Kiribati speak of their own possible movement to countries such as Australia and New Zealand, they describe the importance of being seen as active, valued members of a community who can positively contribute to it.”60 Relocation and resettlement are not the frst option for the currently vulnerable “sinking islands.” There are several reasons for this. There is a strong opposition to the label “refugee.” The label is seen as “invoking a sense of helplessness and lack of dignity which contradicts the very strong sense of Pacifc pride.”61 Also, the term “refugee” implies feeing from persecution. For people from Tuvalu and Kiribati, this is not the case. They have no desire to escape from their countries. They see their predicament as the consequence of the actions of other states forcing their migration and not the actions of their own leaders. Their frst and primary response is to do whatever is possible to save their islands. In this sense, relocation elsewhere is seen as giving up and abandoning their home and culture. Under the leadership of former president Anote Tong, the Kiribati government developed the Migration with Dignity policy. The policy was intended to promote migrating through self-determination and visibility. The policy was a long-term strategy of the Kiribati government to secure merit-based migration options to Australia and New Zealand. A limitation of the policy, however, is that it only helps pave the way for those who are ready, willing, and have resources to migrate; it does not reach everyone, especially those with very limited literacy skills or those with largely subsistence livelihoods.62 Another critique of the policy questions whether or not it will result in long-term positive outcomes for both sending and receiving countries. For many in the Pacifc, migration with dignity has come to mean the ability and freedom to choose to leave their homeland with dignity as well as the choice and freedom to stay until the end with dignity. There is a widely held strong view among Pacifc leaders that the Pacifc holds within its hands the solutions to responding to climate change. They welcome support, solidarity, and dialogue from other countries and value their own ability to be active participants in determining their own solutions. CONCLUSION: TOO LATE FOR JUSTICE? The question at the heart of this chapter is whether climate justice is too late for communities in the Pacifc like Kiribati and Tuvalu, which are already experiencing the effects of climate change. The answer is both yes and no. In my view, climate justice is too late for disappearing islands; climate change

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has already done disastrous damage, much of which is irreversible. The loss of national sovereignty, home, land, culture, and identity is unimaginable. No monetary compensation can make up for this loss. On the other hand, redemption can be found in how we now choose to live and how to meet the challenge of future climate-induced migrants and climate exiles Tuvalu and Kiribati are right to remind us that meeting the challenges of climate displacement must be accompanied by the acceptance of the responsibility to address the causes of displacement in the frst place. As Martine Rebetez rightly observes: It is necessary to address the problem as a whole. We must not only take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions—and thus climate change—and the immediate impact of individual climate parameters, but also address the other environmental issues usually associated with them in the event of disasters, including deforestation, soil deterioration, reduced streamfow or mangrove degradation, among many others63

Gulraz Shah Azah asserts that in order to meet the challenge of the millions of people likely to be displaced by climate change, it is imperative that planning by countries begins now.64 Similarly, Leckie and others state:

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As serious a problem as climate displacement is, citizens, governments and the international community working together in a forthright manner, have the resources and skill necessary to secure all human rights, in particular, housing, land and property rights, to everyone affected by climate change65

The key is starting long-term planning now: “Countries everywhere need to begin planning today for the looming spectre of climate displacement; every government should have in place not only adaptation plans of action, but displacement plans of action as well.”66 Leckie and others are confdent that the “ingredients required to solve climate displacement are—for the most part—already in place,” and that “local and national solutions to climate displacement, which are fully consistent with the human rights of those affected, can be found; that is, if political will can be generated to do so.”67 What will be required is “appropriate long-term planning, targeted resource allocations and well-organised popular movements, can together determine what measures are required, where resources can be found, and ultimately, how to achieve them.”68 They believe that now is the opportune time for “governments and civil society the world over to build policies, laws and projects simultaneously mitigate climate change and to ensure that adaptation measures to climate change have at their core the resolution of any displacement that occurs.”69 Clearly, there are still gaps in policy that need to be addressed. However, Emily Wilkinson is confdent that a solution is possible:

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A global compact on migration could fll in the policy gaps on climate-induced migration and displacement. A comprehensive approach would address the need for assistance, protection and durable solutions for those displaced by climate change, manage climate risks for those remaining and support opportunities for voluntary migrants adapting to climate change.70

To a large extent, the eventual migration of people due to climate change will depend on the hospitality of other island nations and beyond to welcome, facilitate, and support the resettlement of these migrants. Relocation or migration in this instance is not as simple as “packing your home on your back.” It involves a number of issues that must be addressed such as the preservation of the identity and culture of a community as well as the role of the church and its pastoral practice. Also, the countries that receive these displaced people will need appropriate preparation, education, and consciousness-raising. Climate-induced migration is a long-term commitment involving all concerned parties. Most of all, what is needed is creative imagination and courage to reimagine home as both people on the move and people who offer hospitality in receiving countries. As well, a suitable policy on migration needs to be formulated before islands become submerged and uninhabitable and before people need to move.

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NOTES 1. The research for this chapter was funded by a grant from the Public and Contextual Theology Research Center (PaCT), Charles Sturt University, Australia. 2. Melita Sunjic, “Top UNHCR Offcial Warns about Displacement from Climate Change,” UNHCR, December 9, 2008, http:​//www​.unhc​r.org​/en-a​u/new​s/lat​ est/2​008/1​2/493​e9bd9​4/top​-unhc​r-off​i cial​-warn​s-dis​place​ment-​clima​te-ch​ange.​html;​ See also Gulrez Shah Azah, “Climate Change Will Displace Millions in Coming Decades: Nations Should Prepare Now to Help Them,” The Conversation, December 18, 2017, https​://th​econv​ersat​ion.c​om/cl​imate​-chan​ge-wi​ll-di​splac​e-mil​lions​-in-c​ oming​-deca​des-n​ation​s-sho​uld-p​repar​e-now​-to-h​elp-t​hem-8​9274.​ 3. Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, “Global Report on Internal Displacement (GRID),” accessed October 22, 2018, http:​//www​.inte​rnal-​displ​aceme​nt.or​ g/glo​balre​port2​016/.​ 4. “Global Report on Internal Displacement (GRID).” 5. Saskia Sassen, “A Massive Loss of Habitat: New Drivers for Migration,” Sociology of Development, Vol. 2, no. 2 (2016): 205. 6. Henry Shue, Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 7. Jione Havea, “The Politics of Climate Change: A Talanoa from Oceania,” International Journal of Public Theology, Vol. 4 (2010): 355. 8. Havea, “The Politics of Climate Change,” 355.

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9. László J. Kulcsár, “The Day after Tomorrow: Migration and Climate Change,” in Routledge International Handbook of Migration Studies, ed. Steven J. Gold and Stephanie J. Nawyn (London, New York: Routledge, 2013), 28. 10. Roger Zetter, “Protecting People Displaced by Climate Change: Some Conceptual Changes,” in Climate Change and Displacement, ed. Jane McAdam (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2012), 131–132. 11. Scott Leckie, Ezekiel Simperingham, and Jordan Bakker, eds., Climate Change and Displacement Reader (New York: Earthscan, 2012), 3. 12. “World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth People’s Agreement,” https://pwccc.wordpress.com/support/ 13. Sujatha Byravan and Sudhir Chella Rajan, “The Ethical Implications of SeaLevel Rise,” 241. 14. Ibid., 242. 15. According to the UN convention defnition, a refugee is defned as someone who “owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it” (Article I, 2 of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees). 16. Jane McAdam notes that “there are diffculties in characterizing ‘climate change’ as ‘persecution.’ ‘Persecution’ entails violations of human rights that are suffciently serious. Even if the impacts of climate change could be characterized as ‘persecution,’ the Refugee Convention requires such persecution to be on account of an individual’s race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership of a particular social group. Persecution alone is not enough.” 17. Jane McAdam, “Refusing ‘Refuge’ in the Pacifc: (De)Constructing ClimateInduced Displacement in International Law,” in Migration and Climate Change, ed. Etienne Piguet, Antoine Pecoud and Paul De Guchteneire (Cambridge: UNESCO Publishing & Cambridge University Press, 2011), 117. 18. See paper by Jane McAdam “Climate Change Displacement and International Law” (Geneva, 2010). 19. Zetter, “Protecting People Displaced by Climate Change,” 138. 20. Ibid., 131–150. 21. See Emily Wilkinson et al., “Climate-Induced Migration and Displacement,” 1. 22. Nansen Initiative, “Towards a Protection Agenda for People Displaced across Borders in the Context of Disasters and the Effects of Climate Change,” The Nansen Initiative, https​://ww​w.nan​senin​itiat​ive.o​rg/se​creta​riat/​. 23. Nansen Initiative, “Towards a Protection Agenda.” 24. Etienne Piguet et al., Migration and Climate Change (Cambridge: UNESCO Publishing and Cambridge University Press. 2011), 1. 25. Piguet et al., Migration and Climate Change, 1. 26. Kulcsár, “The Day after Tomorrow,” 30. 27. International Organization for Migration, Migration, Climate Change and the Environment: Defnitional Issues, https://www.iom.int/defnitional-issues

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28. Anthony Oliver-Smith, cited in Fanny Thornton, Climate Change and People on the Move: International Law and Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 19. 29. Thornton, Climate Change and People on the Move, 19. 30. Sujatha Byravan and Sudhir Chella Rajan, “The Ethical Implications of SeaLevel Rise,” 242. 31. Ibid., 242. 32. Orrin H. Pilkey, Linda Pilkey-Jarvis, and Keith C. Pilkey, Retreat from a Rising Sea: Hard Choices in an Age of Climate Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 33. Loes Witschge, “In Fiji, Villagers Need to Move Due to Climate Change,” Al Jazeera, February 15, 2018, http:​//www​.alja​zeera​.com/​indep​th/fe​ature​s/fj​i-vil​lages​ -move​-due-​clima​te-ch​ange-​18021​31555​19717​.html​; Alister Doyle, “Fiji to Move More than 40 Villagers Inland as Seas Rise,” Reuters, November 17, 2017, https​:// ww​w.reu​ters.​com/a​rticl​e/cli​matec​hange​-acco​rd-f​ji/f​ji-to​-move​-more​-than​-40-v​illag​ es-in​land-​as-se​as-ri​se-id​INKBN​1DH1F​I; “Fiji Villagers Face Relocation as Sea Levels Rise,” ABC News, August 16, 2013, https​://ww​w.abc​.net.​au/ne​ws/20​13-08​-16/f​ iji-v​illag​es-fa​ce-re​locat​ion-a​s-sea​-leve​ls-ri​se/48​91542​. 34. Simon Albert et al., “Interactions Between Sea Level Rise and Wave Exposure on Reef Island Dynamics in the Solomon Islands,” Environmental Research Letters, Vol. 11 (2016). 35. UNICEF USA, “Pacifc Prepares for Strengthening El Niño,” UNICEF USA, September 14, 2015, https​://ww​w.uni​cefus​a.org​/pres​s/rel​eases​/paci​fc-p​repar​es-st​ rengt​henin​g-el-​niño/​27401​. 36. Tuvalu: Faith in a Changing Climate (Australia: Market Lane Media, 2018), https://vimeo.com/239577029 37. Ashley Pashley, “Kiribati President: Climate-induced Migration Is Only Five Years Away,” Climate Home News, February 18, 2016, http:​//www​.clim​atech​angen​ ews.c​om/20​16/02​/18/k​iriba​ti-pr​eside​nt-cl​imate​-indu​ced-m​igrat​ion-i​s-5-y​ears-​away/​. 38. Republic of Kiribati, “Kiribati Climate Change: Relocation,” accessed October 21, 2018, http:​//www​.clim​ate.g​ov.ki​/cate​gory/​actio​n/rel​ocati​on/. 39. In July 2018, the current Kiribati government launched a new climate change policy that now prioritizes “safeguarding the present and future existence of Kiribati.” 40. Personal conversation with the prime minister of Tuvalu on Tuesday October 23, 2018, Offce of the PM, Funafuti, Tuvalu. Carroll , Seforosa, and Enele Sopoaga. 2018. Personal Conversation. 41. Anthony Stewart, “Tuvalu PM Slams Kevin Rudd’s Proposal to Offer Australian Citizenship for Pacifc Resources as Neo-Colonialism,” ABC News, February 18, 2019, https​://ww​w.abc​.net.​au/ne​ws/20​19-02​-18/t​uvalu​-pm-s​lams-​kevin​-rudd​-sugg​ estio​n-as-​neo-c​oloni​alism​/1082​0176 42. Stewart, “Tuvalu PM Slams Kevin Rudd’s Proposal.” 43. Oli Brown, “Climate Change and Forced Migration: Observations, Projections and Implications,” in Climate Change and Displacement Reader, ed. Scott Leckie, Ezekiel Simperingham and Jordan Bakker (New York: Earthscan, 2012), 89. 44. Brown, “Climate Change and Forced Migration,” 89. 45. Julia Haggstrom, “Climate Justice as a Foundation for Climate Migration Policy,” 3.

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46. Ibid., 18. 47. Ibid., 34. 48. Personal conversation with the prime minister of Tuvalu. 49. Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum, Vol. 1989, no. 1, Article 8, 139–167, http:​//chi​cagou​nboun​d.uch​icago​.edu/​uclf/​vol19​89/is​s1/8.​ 50. Brian Tokar, “On the Evolution and Continuing Development of the Climate Justice Movement,” in Routledge Handbook of Climate Justice, ed. Tahseen Jafry (New York: Routledge, 2019), 21. 51. Emily Wilkinson et al., “Climate-Induced Migration and Displacement,” 4. 52. Kulcsár, “The Day after Tomorrow,” 36. 53. Ibid., 36. 54. Silja Klepp and Johannes Herbeck, “The Politics of Environmental Migration,” 55 55. Ibid., 56. 56. Ibid., 55. 57. Ibid., 73. 58. See John R. Campbell and Richard Bedford, “Migration and Climate Change in Oceania,” in People on the Move in a Changing Climate: The Regional Impact of Environmental Climate Change on Migration, ed. Etienne Piguet and Frank Laczko (New York: Springer, 2014), 177–204 for an overview of the factors affecting climate migration in the Pacifc. 59. See the following for the New Zealand government’s developing policy on climate change related to migration and displacement. New Zealand Foreign Affairs and Trade, Our Relationship with the Pacifc, accessed October 1, 2018, https​://ww​ w.mfa​t.gov​t.nz/​en/co​untri​es-an​d-reg​ions/​pacif​i c/. See also Winston Peters, Pacifc Climate Change-related Displacement and Migration: A New Zealand Action Plan (New Zealand Foreign Affairs and Trade, 2018), accessed October 1 2018, https​://ww​ w.mfa​t.gov​t.nz/​asset​s/Upl​oads/​Redac​ted-C​abine​t-Pap​er-Pa​cifc​-clim​ate-m​igrat​ion-2​ -May-​2018.​pdf. 60. McAdam, “Refusing ‘Refuge,’” 116. 61. Ibid., 116. 62. Silja Klepp and Johannes Herbeck, “The Politics of Environmental Migration,” 72. 63. Martine Rebetez, “The Main Climate Forecasts That Might Cause Human Displacements,” in Migration and Climate Change, ed. Etienne Piguet, Antoine Pecoud and Paul De Guchteneire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 45. 64. Azah, “Climate Change.” 65. Leckie et al., Climate Change and Displacement Reader, 4. 66. Ibid., 4. 67. Ibid., 3, 5. 68. Ibid., 3. 69. Ibid., 3. 70. Emily Wilkinson et al., “Climate-Induced Migration and Displacement,” 1.

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Part IV

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PRACTICAL THEOLOGY

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Chapter 14

Liturgy and the Age of Migration Toward a Liturgy without Borders

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Kristine Suna-Koro

Christian theology and liturgy are never ahistorical or acontextual, although both harbor imaginaries and practices that have proven to be intercultural and transcultural.1 Like the Word/Wisdom of God that became fesh (John 1:14) in history and lived among us as a marginal frst-century Jew in the colonized hinterlands of the Roman empire, both theology and worship come to life in the messy vicissitudes of history. In a dazzling variety of ways, theological refection and liturgical imagination are enfeshed in and refective of their common historical matrix of origin—that ever fecund and unpredictable interface through which the Spirit gets entangled with cultural, political, social, economic, and artistic imaginaries as they grapple with the deepest puzzles of life and the gift of God’s grace. Today, in our historical moment, it is impossible to dismiss that by the end of the second decade of the twenty-frst century we indeed live in an “Age of Migration” not only due to historically unprecedented forced migration but also worsening climate change.2 As many chapters in this collection and other theological publications now attest, there is hardly a sound theological endeavor that can afford to ignore the staggering numbers of forcibly displaced persons—68.5 million refugees, internally displaced persons (IDPs), asylum-seekers, and stateless persons which, according to the latest available United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) data, means that in 2017 approximately 44,400 people were forced to fee their homes because of confict, war, and persecution.3 Of course, even these fgures do not include the oftentimes scapegoated millions of economic refugees or the hypocritically categorized “illegal aliens.” The late sociologist Zygmunt Bauman agonizingly described these millions of people as “redundant people” who are produced by the globalized capitalist “modern way of life” yet who are “locally ‘inutile’—excessive and unemployable—due to economic 239

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progress, or locally intolerable—rejected as a result of unrest, conficts and strife caused by socio/political transformations and subsequent power struggles.”4 Among the host societies, including the affuent One-Third-World Western—and nominally/or post/or ambiently Christian—societies, refugees and migrants often are presumed to be “troublesome, annoying, unwanted” and, ultimately, more and more ways are being designed for them to be found “inadmissible.”5 What many don’t care to recognize or conveniently forget is the fact that, as Saskia Sassen aptly summarizes, we are already entering that stage in the age of migration when “even more people will be on the move, not because they are in search of a better life but because they are in search of bare life.”6 Migration is an existential actuality of an astonishing rawness of human vulnerability and victimization. It is a profoundly strenuous experience. It is permeated by a relentless dynamic of displacement and estrangement but also the quest for physical and psychospiritual survival. At the same time, migration can be a potentially revitalizing experience of unrivaled poignancy and renewal. It often enables those who migrate and those who welcome migrants to transcend not only geographical borders but also those of culture, wisdom, and ignorance. Moreover, migration can be nothing less than a sign of resilient vitality that hopes against all hope and somehow miraculously thrives in the ambiguous spaces of borders, legal shadows, cultural hybridity, and enduring fear toward those deemed to be “other” or “otherwise.” In our rapidly polarizing late postmodern/postcolonial world, Christian theological and liturgical imagination requires a self-critical “examination of conscience.” A decade has passed since one of the leading migration theologians, Daniel G. Groody, observed that theology functioned as a “disciplinary refugee” in the growing feld of interdisciplinary migration discourse.7 Not least thanks to Groody himself, migration is increasingly being affrmed as genuine locus theologicus for the twenty-frst century. Migration presents a terrain of existential engagement with the mystery of God and not just a religio-sociological reality that does not constitute a “proper” subject of theological analysis. On top of that, many individual Christians as well as communities of faith wrestle with the challenges of racism, various forms of nationalism, postmodern neo-tribalism, xenophobia, and hostility toward migrants and refugees— in other words, toward those perceived as “others” and therefore seen as threatening and in need of being “banned.” Under these circumstances, what are the theological and ethical implications of worshiping God in and through Christian liturgies who, in the second person of the Trinity, has migrated to the world to redeem, reconcile, and rejuvenate the whole of God’s creation? As a response to these spiritual exigencies, in this chapter I will offer a few sketches of a new and different liturgical imagination of worship and

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Christian discipleship within the context of the current migration crisis. Taking the existential actualities of the “Age of Migration” seriously as a source of theological inquiry calls for a new mode of constructive liturgical theology. Building on—both critically and constructively—some of the most profound insights of the liturgical movement in the twentieth century such as, for example, Virgil Michel’s O.S.B. insistence that there must be an integral and transformative relation between liturgy and social justice,8 it is perhaps time to consider the need for a liturgical political theology that is deeply committed to postcolonial and decolonial ethics. With such future goals in mind, the present chapter will offer some initial suggestions around three foci: God in migration, liturgy in migration, and liturgy as migration. The frst two constitute the wider theological and historical horizon for constructive liturgical imagination today. Hence, I will only summarize the pivotal aspects of such theological and liturgical inquiries here since they are more fully developed elsewhere. Nevertheless, they shape the underlying horizon for the constructive exploration below. The third focus, however, merits a more detailed exploration. It offers one possible constructive avenue for reimagining liturgy through the optics of migration as precisely an incessant migration from the rites of worship to righteous action in the world and back again in a mutually co-constitutive way. GOD ON THE MOVE: CREATION AND INCARNATION AS MIGRATION

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One of the most impactful shifts in theological imagination in the age of migration comes with the emerging understanding of God as God on the Move or Deus Migrator. As Peter C. Phan proposes, the notion of Deus Migrator begins with the creation: God’s creative act can be interpreted as God’s migration out of what is divine into what is not, a movement that bears all the marks of human migration. In creating that which is other than Godself, God crosses the border between Absolute Spirit and fnite matter, migrating from eternity to temporality, from omnipotence into weakness, from self-suffciency (aseity) to utter dependence, from secure omniscience to fearful ignorance, from the total domination of the divine will over all things to the utter subjection of the same will to the unpredictable conditions of human freedom, from life to death. In the creative acts God experiences for the frst time the precarious, marginalized, threatened, and endangered condition of the migrant.9

This reenvisagement of the Triune mystery of God also shapes a distinct theological anthropology. Migrants are not just made “in the image of God” (Gen

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1:26-27) but rather they embody the imago Dei migratoris—“the privileged, visible, and public face of the God who chooses, freely and out of love, to migrate from safety of God’s eternal home to the strange and risky land of the human family.”10 When those made in the imago Dei migratoris are subjected to abuse and sinful treatment, it is also Deus Migrator who is “subjected to the same inhuman and sinful treatment.”11 Furthermore, Phan sees Jesus Christ, the incarnation Logos/Son of Godmade-fesh as yet another migration. From a Christological perspective, Jesus is the “perfect imago Dei Migratoris” and “a migrant and border-crosser at the very roots of his being”12 who, according to the gospel narratives, started his life as a refugee (Matt 2:13-14) and lived the life of homeless and itinerant preacher (Luke 9:58). Eschatologically, Christ identifes himself with the stranger (Matt 25:35) among other marginal people. Ultimately, even Jesus Christ’s resurrection is a migration: from death to new life, crossing the borders of failure, defeat, and destruction. Several others have sounded similar themes. Emphasizing the Trinitarian imaginary of God, Nancy Bedford sees the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity as God taking on “bodily and materially, the condition of a migrant, and is acutely aware of what it means to be a migrant ‘according to the fesh’ (kata sarka).”13 In Christ, she argues, “migrants participate in Christ’s agency as sent and as choosing-to-go.”14 God, in turn, through incarnation “takes into Godself the migrant condition, in order to make a place, a new creation, and a ‘rest’ for all those migrants who hope for a home in God.”15 Bedford also points to Karl Barth’s Christology of reconciliation as another model, if only implicitly, of migratory approach to the incarnation. For Barth, the second person of the Trinity journeys into a “strange land” and into the “far country.”16 She is not alone to highlight such interpretive analogies with Barth’s work. Daniel Groody also conceives of God migrating across the ontological borders of time and eternity through the incarnation of Verbum Dei by emphasizing that “no aspect of a theology of migration is more fundamental, nor more challenging in its implications, then the incarnation.”17 Building on both Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth’s work, Groody argues that recognizing migration at the very core of incarnation means that “for God there are no borders that cannot be crossed, neither within himself nor in the created world.”18 What emerges from these recent theological visions of God as the Deus Migrator is a methodological sensibility that allows the reality of migration constructively engage with and reenvision the full range of theological landscape, including the pivotal and consequential loci theologici such as creation and incarnation. In other words, even though migration may well be, for so many in today’s world, one of history’s darkest places, God nevertheless “can

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reveal hope to all who experience pain, rejections, and alienation” precisely through such condition and through theological and liturgical creativity that emerges from the lived experiences of migrant people. Theological visions that body forth from the experiences of migration and diaspora as well as the discernment of what might be their revelatory signifcance are no longer nibbling on the edges of the whole Christian theological edifce. Rather, they question and challenge the doctrinal inner sanctum of Christian theology to consider new images of God, of God’s salvifc work, and of God’s sacramental presence and transformative agency in the world so that all these images/models become increasingly invested with new layers of meaning uniquely resonating with the kairos of this historical moment while remaining in dialogue with scriptures and tradition. In this sense, migration indeed is being recognized as “one of the central analogies that shapes the entirety of Christian revelation.”19 Yet what is important to remember is that these sources of theology are always already in the process of various kinds of migration. Moreover, the churches themselves—and their liturgies—are in migration.

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Churches and Liturgies in Migration Historically speaking, there is a strong argument in favor of acknowledging fully and explicitly that the church—in its variety of denominations and traditions of worship—is indeed “an institutional migrant,” as Phan has argued.20 He maps eight signifcant migratory movements in Christian history beginning with the Jewish diaspora and leading all the way into the twenty-frstcentury “world Christianity.”21 Speaking from a Roman Catholic perspective, Phan proposes that is based on such discernible presence of migration in church history another mark of the church needs to be added. Not only is the church one, holy, catholic, and apostolic, but its nature of pilgrim community deserves to be acknowledged with the ffth mark—migrant.22 In fact, if not for the multiple historical migrations, there would be no church as we know it today. Migration is an intrinsic part of church’s mission, Phan argues, and thus “migrantness is a constitutive mark of the true church” to the extent that “extra migrationem nulla ecclesia”—there is no church outside migration.23 Consequently, it is also true that “extra migrationem nulla salus”—there is no salvation outside migration.24 Writing from a Protestant perspective, Bedford meanwhile highlights another dimension of migration that recalls the signifcance of Lutheran and Reformed insistence on the self-critical need for “continual renewal, something that has traditionally been expressed by the statement ecclesia semper reformanda est (the church is always being reformed).”25 The process of reformation (i.e., being always in need of reformation, repentance, correction of

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the course if necessary, and responding to the signs of the times) entails a certain kind of migration. Church and its theology, Bedford argues, are inescapably contextual and embodied, always on the move, so that the correlate of semper reformanda is a church that is “always evolving”—“ecclesia semper migranda est.”26 Led by the Spirit, “with all its potential and also its limitations,” Protestants can see how the church is always “in migration” and “on a journey in God to God, simultaneously at home and on the way”—therefore, church is “semper reformanda et migranda.”27 And, of course, as the renowned liturgical scholar Teresa Berger points out, there is another dimension of migration without which a sound grasp of liturgical history cannot be obtained. Beginning with the fact that “the gospels themselves stand out as a witness to a linguistic migration, as they capture the words of Jesus in another language from the one he spoke,” it comes as little (though often overlooked) surprise that “liturgical practices and texts also migrated.”28 From the Upper Room all the way into cyberspace, “there is no liturgical development without migratory fows woven into it (even if the most basic fow were only that of time)”; hence, “there is no liturgy that does not already bear traces of migration.”29 The diversity, complexity, and evidence of liturgical migrations is nothing short of overwhelming, Berger observes.30 The optics of migration as a methodological lens offers new ways of rethinking liturgical history and the dynamics of its developments across millennia. Offering a path beyond simplistic constructions of linear development, the optic of migration brings home the historical realities of liturgy as inclusive also of “circular, even random, movements, profound disruptions, unexpected turns, and aporias.”31 Overall, Berger concludes, “there is not something called ‘liturgy’ to which then is added ‘migration.’ The two are always intertwined, at least since the doors of the Upper Room opened.”32 The process of liturgical migrations is usually a process of hybridity. It involves cross-pollinations that can no longer simply be dismissed as “syncretism.” For example, Edward Foley has traced the cross-pollinations between the Jewish meal traditions and the Christian eucharistic rites to elucidate the migration of practices and meanings from one religious and cultural context into others.33 Or, assessing the hybridization of ritual phenomena such as the veneration of the Sol Invictus in the Roman civil religion in relation to the Christian liturgical celebrations of the birth of Jesus, Mark A. Francis observes that such hybridization of Greco-Roman traditions and Christian liturgical events is part of the liturgical history.34 The present scholarly consensus is that early Christian worship, or, really Christian worship during any historical period, was far from being anchored in linguistic, theological, or ritual uniformity. Christianity acquired the status of imperial religion in the fourth century, and, at least in the West, liturgy migrated from

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the Greek into the Latin language, which was shaped “by the values of traditional Roman culture” to intentionally model the “archaic and legalistic Latin prescribed by the old ius divinum in which the pagan sacrifcial prayers had been composed.”35 With the development of imperial orthodoxy also came a distinct liturgical migration into a more clerical and distinctly hierarchical universe. In spaces of worship, images of Christ as shepherd, healer, teacher, and philosopher were gradually lost in migration toward a new imagery that foregrounded the images of Christ as emperor and judge.36 As Francis observes, during the fourth century the Christian rites of worship “gradually transformed what was largely domestic ritual . . . to a more complicated service of worship infuenced by the ceremonial of the imperial court.”37 From the early Aramaic- and Greek-speaking Christian communities to the expansion of Christianity into Western Asia and North Africa and eventually onto the Eurocentric colonializing missions and all the way up to recent multidirectional postmodern (and, in some cases, neocolonial) globalization, rites have never ceased migrating, not only geographically but also linguistically and culturally. Today, as the optic of migration is applied to liturgical histories and constantly evolving liturgical practices, it is becoming increasingly clear that, as HyeRan Kim-Cragg and Stephen Burns discern together with Berger and other voices, “liturgy in terms of texts and traditions . . . has been shaped by migration” so that the historical backbone structure—the ordo of liturgies such as the Eucharist—refers to those historic forms of worship which “have endured migrations from one culture to another, over time.”38 Even with the postcolonial vigilance vis-à-vis hegemonic appropriations of worship as a tool of cultural imperialism and epistemological subjugation, Kim-Cragg and Burns conclude that “liturgy is rarely, if ever, bound to or by a particular local culture, however signifcant complementary ‘contextual’ dynamics might be in the embodied, enacted, patterned events that constitute liturgy in any given place.”39 Even though the constitutive role of migration in liturgical history and across the contemporary terrain of worship traditions is increasingly recognized, tensions remain on the level of power dynamic when it comes to making space for migrant and diasporic voices, histories, experiences, and imaginaries in contemporary communities of worship and their rites. Indeed, the postcolonial/decolonial question of “whose liturgical homeland has been endorsed as normal and whose liturgical homeland is called into question”40 has not at all lost its relevance and its poignancy as diasporic and migratory bodies and souls struggle to inhabit the liturgical “wineskins” of their adopted or temporary homelands and to integrate their hybrid lives and multiple “belongings” into new languages and life forms. I have elaborated on those challenges elsewhere in more detail.41

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Here, suffce it to say that the voices and visions of migrants and refugees as well as ritual symbols rooted in their experiences (and, often, virtually unspeakable ordeals of suffering and displacement) should not only be welcomed into preexisting rites on an occasional ad hoc basis, as a vignette, but invited to (re)shape the rites themselves as well as liturgical spaces and liturgical actions more intentionally and comprehensively. To do it respectfully and without ignorant presumptuousness or patronizing insensitivity, what is needed is the willingness to encounter, engage, and listen: in other words, liturgists and pastoral leaders should pay sustained attention to the present exigencies of migration and displacement embodying a theological and spiritual generosity toward the revelatory character of migrant experiences. Such experiences often unveil nothing less than some of the profoundest dimensions of imago Dei migratoris. Through the Spirit, such experiences also unveil the presence and agency of the crucifed and risen Christ, ever new and ever the same in compassionate solidarity with those crucifed by the affiction and indifference, that enable us all, migrants and hosts, to cross the walls of fear, disgust, and alienation. Some liturgical traditions are more fexible than others when it comes to scripted rites or the ordo of public worship. Yet, as Daniel Groody’s analysis of Pope Francis’ pastoral visit and mass on the island of Lampedusa shows, there is quite enough space for thoughtful integration of migrant experience even in a tightly regulated rite as the Roman Catholic mass. Lampedusa has hosted thousands of rescued migrants in the Mediterranean as well as tended to the remains of (way-too-many) those who did not survive the deadly migration route from North Africa to Europe as well as their rickety boats. In 2013, Pope Francis made Lampedusa the destination of his frst trip out of Rome after his election as the pontiff. The mass, where Francis delivered his hallmark call to realize the perils of the globalization of indifference toward migrants and refugees, featured several carefully chosen and deliberately foregrounded liturgical symbols. Among them were the altar that a local carpenter had “crafted from a migrant boat’s hull, the lectern from ship’s rudders, and the chalice from driftwood of downed vessels.”42 None of these liturgical symbols are accidental or merely sentimental footnotes to the substance of the Eucharist. I concur with Groody—and this is why it is worth quoting him at length—that theological narratives have much potential to contribute to more humane responses to the migration crisis and to counter toxic, xenophobic rhetoric at work in cultures around the world. The liturgy at Lampedusa—and particularly the symbols of cup, table, and ambo—are important precisely because their potential to reshape these operative exclusionary narratives. What is at stake at Lampedusa, then, is not just liturgical ornamentation but how the symbols at the liturgy contribute to transforming the narratives that govern our consciousness

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about refugees and who we become as a result of these narratives. These symbols also help us to get in touch with the deep, spiritual architecture of the imago Dei and its interdependent, relational dimensions.43

At this juncture, it is time to inquire yet further: What else does the optic of migration help us explore in a new and different light? What other deep, spiritual architecture might beneft from being (re)discovered following the vector that Groody draws to align the eucharistic gift and the stark realities of life and death in the age of migration that Lampedusa symbolizes more agonizingly than most other locations? Where might it lead us if we probe the migration that interlocks the liturgy in which the eucharistic gift is received “for one’s own body” with the liturgy that “summons to serve every-body, beginning with the no-bodies?”44 What kind of liturgy and what kind of migration might we be talking about when those who receive the Body of Christ in the bread of life and the cup of salvation with praise and thanksgiving are at the same time sent “to feed the world’s hungers by becoming bread for the world and being a sacrament to the world?”45 These are some of the questions, I suggest, which invite taking a good look at the notion of liturgy itself—particularly from within the lived migratory experience between and betwixt the ambiguities and hybridities of the age of migration. What follows are some initial refections on liturgy through the optic of migration.

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DISCERNING THE HOLY THROUGH MIGRATION Today, countless migrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers are among the most dispossessed and afficted people that walk upon the earth during the time that cannot be described only as an “age of migration” but is also, and rather more ominously, an “age of anger” and resentment.46 As Pankaj Mishra observes, the late postmodernity of neoliberal and neocolonial globalization cannot effectively tackle endemic war and endless economic and social misery while more and more people fnd themselves to be superfuous in economies driven by social Darwinism. As a result, there has been “an exponential rise in tribalist hatred of minorities, the main pathology of scapegoating released by political and economic shocks, even as the world is knit more closely by globalization.”47 In this environment, where walls increasingly embody the imaginary of security, fairness, and fourishing, it is imperative for Christians to look beyond the fearmongering on many continents to realize that the migrant multitude is indeed “the planetary outcasts of the globalizing world.”48 For to truly love God, one must love one’s neighbor (Lev 19:18; Mk 12:30-31; 1 Jn 4:21), even the one who is perceived/portrayed as an outcast—but who must frst be noticed and acknowledged as a neighbor, as a fellow human created according to the same image of God.

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However as omnipresent and essential as migrants are in the lives and for the lifestyles of the late postmodern Occidental societies, in our theologies and liturgies they often remain invisible and inconsequential. Or, as Pope Francis has put it with blunt accuracy, the lives of migrants are overshadowed by the “globalization of indifference,” which relegates them to the status of “pawns on the chessboard of humanity.”49 Christian theology, rooted as it is in the incarnation of the Divine Word/Wisdom who also tasted the predicaments of forced migration (remember Mt 2:13?), seems to be a particularly apt yet oddly under explored avenue for coming to terms, spiritually, ethically, and liturgically, with a historic human challenge of our times. But not only that: the Judeo-Christian imaginary history and its sacramental and revelatory fecundity contrast distinctly and critically with the empty time of Nietzschean resignation. Rather, as Walter Benjamin remarked, every moment of history might be a narrow gate through which the Messiah could enter.50 If so, migration can yield a surprising harvest of spiritual discernment and theological creativity that may well serve as an interface for the transformation of dualistic habits of life and thought that have impoverished and segregated liturgy from life, righteous action from worship, and doxology from service for far too long. The conventional way of understanding liturgy today, despite a variety of confessional nuances, is to equate it with structured, usually scripted, corporate, and public Christian rituals. In a nutshell, “liturgy” is a sort of umbrella term for the sacramental rites and rituals of public worship of the Christian churches. In the so-called non-sacramental traditions, at least according to the conventional Western taxonomy, liturgy can merely describe the order and pattern of common prayer within a community of faith. Liturgy is, depending on where one stands in the theological spectrum, primarily what the assemblies of Christians do when they praise, give thanks, adore, lament, and pray to God (leitourgia—“work of the people”) or what God a priori and absolutely gratuitously does for us and our salvation before we can respond through our “work” or “service” of praise, confession, and thanksgiving. The latter, arguably a bit more “Protestant,” emphasis is illustrated well by Peter Brunner’s summary: Divine Service has two aspects: God speaks to us in his holy Word, and we in turn may speak to him in prayer and praise. [. . .] God serves us. The service is sacramentum. We may serve him. The service is sacrifcium at God’s pleasure. These two phases interpenetrate [. . .] God’s service to us is the basis for our service to God.51

As far as the understanding of liturgy as the “work of the people” is concerned, the ecclesiocentric (egocentric/anthropocentric?) orientation of

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liturgical agency has recently come under critique.52 Lutherans and Roman Catholics alike increasingly feel the need to underscore the theo-ontological primacy of divine agency in liturgy. Thus, the Lutheran Frank Senn deploys the Eastern Orthodox term of choice for sacramental worship—“divine liturgy”—to remind that liturgy is “also the work of God (opus Dei), that in fact it is the work of God’s people only because it is the work of God.”53 From the Roman Catholic perspective, Nathan Mitchell echoes a similar sentiment. “For one thing,” Mitchell argues, “liturgy (opus Dei) is less ‘our work for God’ than God’s work for us.”54 This opus Dei is not something beautiful we do for God, but something beautiful that God does for us and among us. Public worship is neither our work nor our possession [. . .] our work is to feed the hungry, to refresh the thirsty, to clothe the naked, [. . .] to visit the imprisoned; to welcome the stranger; to open our hands and hearts to the vulnerable and the needy.55

Like the Augustinian beauty, ever so ancient and so new, God is circumscribed neither by human doctrinal nor human cultic imagination, nor by the currently established boundaries of ritual performance and effcacy.

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LITURGY WITHOUT BORDERS What is liturgy, then, in the broader—and, I submit, theologically and ethically liberating—sense? How might we, then, view liturgy—as opus Dei, as a theophany of the triune God, and still as a work of God’s people, the body of Christ? In the context of the conversation between migration and liturgical theology, two points carry a particular constructive momentum. First, liturgy is not something that a church simply does in a rather polished, time-honored, and expertly manner. Liturgy is not something that the church assemblies, as it were, “own,” let alone “control.” Liturgy, as above all the word of God, exceeds the human—often all too human—frontiers of ecclesial symbolism, cultural context, and ritual conventions. Second (and this is a less-explicit feature of the critical Zeitgeist) the “reemphasizing the divine agency and initiative”56 opens up a space to discern a third way beyond what seems to be a latent yet utterly unproductive and competitive juxtaposition between “people’s work” and “God’s work.” Namely, precisely as God’s work, liturgy can be reenvisioned as the uniquely dynamic, intricate, and synergistic enactment—the embodied “making real”—of the divine salvation in the history of creation. Within this overarching framework and always as an invited response, all Godward human actions and intentions participate in the divine work—in the cosmic liturgy

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of salvation and sanctifcation. All Godward actions participate in this cosmic liturgy not mechanically by nature but, truly and magnifcently, by grace. In other words, what is really exciting and hopefully fruitful here is not some in vogue jubilant defense of the divine agency over the human agency in an academic quarrel over method. Rather, the quest for the third way is a call to fnally retire or at least demythologize the tug of war between the still popular but wretchedly dualistic construction of the lex orandi (law of prayer)/lex credendi (law of belief) polarity that up until very recently was oblivious of the missing correlate of lex agendi/vivendi (law of action or living). What matters most, I propose, is the prospect of pondering how liturgy could be revivifed by replanting it back where its natural habitat really is—the life of the world in the creative and redemptive process of theosis—instead of merely God-heavy or human-heavy world of ritual. For, as Maxwell Johnson has put it so clearly, the primary purpose of liturgy as opus Dei—“God’s self-giving in trinitarian love”—is “not to permeate our lives with ritual but to permeate them with Christ by means of the Holy Spirit . . . for the salvation and life of the world.”57 Liturgy as the work of God in which all Godward human work participates by grace always migrates across ritual borders, cultural confnes, and doctrinal frontiers, however maddening and frustrating such a migration might be for worship and doctrine in its institutionalized expressions and cultural codifcations. In this sense, liturgy is not simply the rites of worship or a nebulous and ritually expressed “work of the people” as the modern theological convention sometimes seems to imply. Without doubt, liturgy is embodied in worship; it is enacted through rites and performed through ritual symbols—action, gesture, word, sound, touch, image, smell, and taste. But there is always more to liturgy precisely if it is viewed through the optic of migration. Liturgy, I submit, is fgure of a migratory action that uniquely characterizes the work of God that is by nature always a vicarious action toward the creative and salvifc wholeness of God’s creation. As Paul Marshall has clarifed, the etymology of λειτουργία is work (ἔργον) and public (λειτος) originates from the everyday Greek usage designating as λειτουργία any public work or ministering that is done on behalf of some people by others who are appointed and equipped to do so.58 Liturgy is much more than one thing only—but however it may manifest, liturgy is a vicarious action for others by God as well as for and with others by those who claim to be the followers and friends of Christ (Jn 15:14-15). Hence, the “continuity between living and worship is refected in the language of the New Testament which avoids cultic terminology for Christian worship” so that it “can refer to evangelizing, taking up a collection, and even to the duties of state offcials.”59 In fact, in the early Christian understanding of liturgy “there is no longer any distinction in principle between assembly for worship and the service of Christians in the world.”60

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Liturgy is the migration of God to us and our migration (in)to God. The agile and ambiguous ancient notion of λειτουργία is spacious and untamable enough to resist the rationales of binarity and their legalistic taxonomies—not that we weren’t tempted! It releases liturgy from the ritual captivity without, however, stripping it of the ritual vibrancy and symbolic communicative spaces that express it yet do not exhaust the whole salvifc interface of liturgy. Liturgical history is of much constructive help here: the astonishingly manifold liturgical actions referred to in the New Testament and early Christian spiritual practices routinely migrate between the “sacred” and “profane” much to the chagrin of those who ache to pin them down in either ritual or politics alone. Ultimately, liturgy, if perceived precisely as a sacramental migration of the Trinity toward and ever deeper within creation, interfaces with our migration through the Word and Wisdom, and in the empowerment of the transformative Breath of Life toward God. On the one hand, liturgy as such a double migration is roomy enough for God’s self-revelation and self-giving. On the other, it is also roomy enough for all that we can receive, offer, give thanks for, change, and achieve as human beings, whose source of being is divine. In other words, liturgy as migration is spacious enough for the synergy of God and humanity, the synergy of worship and righteous action, as well as the synergy of enchanting ritual symbols and the pregnant sacramental opacity of what Karl Rahner so poignantly called “that mysterious grace which inconspicuously governs our whole life” and “which wills to fnd its victory in the monotony and pain of daily life.”61 In the end, genuine and meaningful praise and prayer must migrate into righteous action or the “liturgy of the neighbor,”62 and then back to the holy hush of contemplation and worship. Liturgy obtains as faithful, meaningful, and genuine only if it relentlessly and omnilaterally migrates: that is, if it crosses the stereotypical and dualistic borders between devotional worship and service to the neighbor, between aesthetics and ethics, between the sheer Godwardness of praise and the salvifc utility of healing action for both vulnerable neighbors and strangers alike. NOTES 1. I use the term “transcultural” with a great deal of caution to suggest that there are intimations and imaginaries of transcendence that do not, by default, operate in a hegemonic way to legitimate the coloniality of power, being, and knowledge. At the same time, I concur with HyeRan Kim-Cragg and Stephen Burns that the notion of “transcultural” can be and has been, “co-opted as a tool of colonialism, given that European liturgies . . . have been supposed to be something like ‘universal norms’ to follow whenever liturgy ‘traveled’ or was ‘transplanted’ to non-European churches. In turn, notions like ‘liturgical integrity’ have readily been employed as code for ‘assimilation,’ forcing non-European worshippers to make necessary compromises to

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‘ft in’ to the dominant cultural liturgical norm at the expense of their own worship practices,” “Liturgy in Migration and Migrants in Liturgy,” in Church in an Age of Global Migration: A Moving Body, ed. Susanna Snyder, Joshua Ralston, and Agnes M. Brazal (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 117–118. 2. Among the frst scholars who attributed the term “age of migration” to the late postmodern and postcolonial era are Stephen Castles, Mark J. Miller, and Hein de Haas who edited The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World, 5th edition (New York: Guildford Press, 2013). 3. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Global Trends, 2017, https​ ://ww​w.unh​cr.or​g/en-​us/f​gures​-at-a​-glan​ce.ht​ml. 4. Zygmunt Bauman, Strangers at Our Door (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), 3. Italics in the original. 5. Ibid., 88. 6. Saskia Sassen, “The Making of Migrations,” Living With(Out) Borders: Catholic Theological Ethics on the Migrations of Peoples, ed. Agnes M. Brazal and Maria Teresa Davila (Maryknoll, NJ: Orbis, 2016), 11. 7. Daniel G. Groody, C.S.C., “Crossing the Divide: Foundations of a Theology of Migration and Refugees,” Theological Studies, Vol. 70, no. 3 (2009): 640–41. 8. Virgil Michel, “The Liturgy as the Basis of Social Regeneration,” Orate Fratres, Vol. 9 (1935); also see Keith F. Pecklers, The Unread Vision: The Liturgical Movement in the United States of America: 1926–1955 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1998). 9. Peter C. Phan, “Deus Migrator—God the Migrant: Migration of Theology and Theology of Migration,” Theological Studies, Vol. 77, no. 4 (2016): 860. 10. Phan, “Deus Migrator—God the Migrant: Migration of Theology and Theology of Migration,” 861. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., 862. 13. Nancy Bedford, “Protestantism in Migration: Ecclesia Semper Migranda,” in Theology of Migration in the Abrahamic Religions, ed. Elaine Padilla and Peter C. Phan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 122. 14. Bedford, “Protestantism in Migration: Ecclesia Semper Migranda.” 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 121. 17. Groody, “Crossing the Divide,” 649. 18. Ibid., 650. 19. Daniel G. Groody, CSC, “Cup of Suffering, Chalice of Salvation: Refugees, Lampedusa, and the Eucharist,” Theological Studies, Vol. 78, no. 4 (2017): 984. 20. Phan, “Deus Migrator,” 847. 21. Ibid. See 849–54. 22. Ibid., 849. 23. Ibid., 854. 24. Ibid. 25. Bedford, “Protestantism in Migration,” 113. 26. Ibid., 126, 114.

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27. Ibid., 127, 126. 28. Teresa Berger, “Introduction,” in Liturgy in Migration: From the Upper Room to Cyberspace, ed. Teresa Berger (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2012), xvi–xvii. 29. Ibid., xxii. 30. Ibid., xxi. 31. Ibid., xxii. 32. Ibid. The essays in Liturgy in Migration provide an excellent selection of scholarship tracing a diverse range of liturgical migrations across various periods of history for further exploration. 33. Edward Foley, From Age to Age: How Christians Have Celebrated the Eucharist, revised and expanded edition (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2008), 28–29. 34. Mark R. Francis, Local Worship, Global Church: Popular Religion and the Liturgy (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2014), 12–14. 35. Ibid., 58, 63. 36. Ibid., 59. 37. Ibid., 69. There was also a liturgical migration into a clerical milieu that still survives in some forms of Western and Eastern Christianity, which profoundly shaped liturgy for centuries to come: “Christian worship under the Christian emperors gradually became the cultus publicus directed by a new class of offcials who assumed many of the prerogatives of the both former pagan pontifces and the civil magistrates of the empire,” ibid. 38. Kim-Cragg and Burns, “Liturgy in Migration,” 119. 39. Ibid., 116. 40. Ibid., 123. 41. See Kristine Suna-Koro, In Counterpoint: Diaspora, Postcoloniality, and Sacramental Theology (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2017), Part I; see also my “Liturgy, Language, and Diaspora: Some Refections on Inclusion as Integration by a Migratory Liturgical Magpie,” in Liturgy with a Difference: Beyond Inclusion in the Liturgical Assembly, ed. Stephen Burns and Bryan Cones (forthcoming in 2019). 42. Groody, “Cup of Suffering, Chalice of Salvation,” 961. 43. Ibid., 975. 44. Ibid., 983. 45. Ibid. Italics in the original. 46. Pankaj Mishra, The Age of Anger: A History of the Present (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux: 2017). 47. Ibid., 329. 48. Hyo-Dong Lee, Spirit, Qi, and the Multitude (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2014), 41. 49. Pope Francis, “Message for World Day of Migrants and Refugees (2014): Migrants and Refugees: Towards a Better World,” September 24, 2013, http:​//www​ .vati​can.v​a/hol​y_fat​her/f​rance​sco/m​essag​es/mi​grati​on/do​cumen​ts/pa​pa-fr​ances​co_20​ 13080​5_wor​ld-mi​grant​s-day​_en.h​tml. 50. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), 264.

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51. Peter Brunner, “Divine Service in the Church,” Primary Sources of Liturgical Theology: A Reader, ed. Dwight W. Vogel (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000), 207. Originally published in English as “Divine Service in the Church,” Scottish Journal of Theology, Vol. 7 (1954), 270–283. The article was based on the lecture Brunner delivered at Lutheran World Federation assembly in Hanover, 1952. It is helpful to keep in mind the dual agencies and directionalities inscribed in the German term Gottesdienst that Brunner is using here. 52. For a concise summary of the critical stance, see Michael Aune, “Liturgy and Theology: Rethinking the Relationship, Part I, Setting the Stage,” Worship, Vol. 81, no. 1 (2007), 46–68 and “Liturgy and Theology: Rethinking the Relationship, Part II, A Different Starting Place,” Worship, Vol. 81, no. 2 (2007), 141–169. 53. Frank C. Senn, The People’s Work: A Social History of the Liturgy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), 6. 54. Nathan D. Mitchell, Meeting Mystery: Liturgy, Worship, Sacraments (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2006), 41. 55. Nathan Mitchell, “The Amen Corner: Being Good and Being Beautiful,” Worship, Vol. 74, no. 6 (2000), 557–558. 56. Aune, “Liturgy and Theology,” Part II, 142. 57. Maxwell E. Johnson, Praying and Believing in Early Christianity: The Interplay Between Christian Worship and Doctrine (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2013), 142. 58. Paul Marshall, “Reconsidering ‘Liturgical Theology’: Is There a Lex Orandi for All Christians?” Studia Liturgica, Vol. 25 (1995):129–151. 59. Edward Foley, From Age to Age: How Christians Have Celebrated the Eucharist. Revised and expanded edition (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2008), 29–30. 60. Ferdinand Hahn, The Worship of Early Church, quoted in Foley, From Age to Age, footnote # 67, on p. 30. 61. Karl Rahner, Meditations on the Sacraments (New York: Crossroad Book, Seabury Press, 1977), xvii. 62. The term is sourced from the thought of Emmanuel Levinas by Jeffrey Bloechl. See his Liturgy of the Neighbor: Emmanuel Levinas and the Religion of Responsibility (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2000).

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Chapter 15

Migration and the Eucharist A Sacramental Vision of Migration

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Daniel G. Groody, CSC

In1 the early morning hours of May 8, 2011, Italian Coast Guard authorities were alerted to the presence of a boat near the island of Lampedusa. Days earlier it had departed from the coast of Libya, and on board were more than 500 refugees. It was the latest in a wave of similar ships that were washing upon this small rock in the middle of the Mediterranean. Pushed by a perfect storm of turbulent social, economic, and political conditions, more than 30,000 forced migrants from North Africa, Asia, and the Middle East had already arrived on its shores since the beginning of that year. When offcials intercepted the vessel, they began escorting it toward the inner harbor, but the weather took a turn for the worse. A quarter mile from the port, the ship’s rudder broke, and they lost control of its steering. The strong undertow near the coastline made it diffcult for the patrol boats to get near it, and it began drifting perilously toward the rocks. As the winds and waves intensifed and water began to flling the boat, it was close to capsizing, and few people in the migrant boat knew how to swim. With little time to spare, authorities quickly enlisted the help of nearby fshermen, police offcers, and other village volunteers. At great risk to themselves, they dove into the waters and attached a rope to the boat’s stern while migrants desperately shimmied their way to the shoreline. The whole village worked tirelessly in the darkness until everyone was safely onshore, including twenty-four pregnant women and a number of children. By the time daylight broke, the rescue workers had saved 528 people. But this joy would be short-lived. In the days that followed, a storm ripped apart the boat, and it sank to the bottom of the sea. When the Coast Guard came to clean up the shoreline and remove the ship’s hull, they found the bodies of three unidentifed men who were thrown into the waters during the crisis and were crushed by the boat. Unfortunately, these men were not isolated 255

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casualties. The previous day, another boat from Libya capsized, and more than 600 people drowned.2 They were added to the growing list of thousands of other migrants who die each year in the open seas.3 Since 2014, the International Organization of Migration has recorded more than 15,000 migrant deaths in the Mediterranean in the Central Mediterranean alone, although the actual number is most certainly higher.4 Shortly after Pope Francis was elected in 2013, he read a related story about refugees whose boat capsized in these waters. Several survivors clung to the fshing nets of a nearby boat, pleading desperately to be saved. But when the fsherman saw them, instead of helping, they severed their nets lose and sent these migrants to their deaths. The plight of these refugees moved the Pope deeply and it reached him, he said, “like a painful thorn in my heart.” In response, he wanted to make “a gesture of closeness” to these refugees and to “challenge our consciences lest this tragedy be repeated.”5 Who would have suspected that Lampedusa would be the site of Pope Francis’ frst, offcial pastoral visit? Or that his proclamation of the gospel message would become so interwoven with the issue of migration? Or that he would celebrate Mass by the ocean harbor using a chalice carved from the driftwood of the May 8 shipwreck? This chapter seeks to explore theological refection from the perspective of Lampedusa, especially as it is “carved out” of the narrative of these migrants, the narrative of Christian faith, and the narrative of Pope Francis’ visit to the Island on July 13, 2013. My aim is not simply to offer more information about migration but a new, theologically infused imagination that seeks to challenge some of the dehumanizing narratives operative around migration today. As the global community deals with the worst refugee crisis since World War II, this chapter will explore the integral connection between the bodies of refugees and the body of Christ. My central argument is that, even as the world ignores and discards refugees as “no-bodies,” the church’s mission is not only to help each refugee discover their dignity as “some-body” but also to reveal that they are in fact connected to “every-body.” THE MIGRATION OF THE “NO-BODIES” Franco Tuccio is a carpenter who lives and works in Lampedua. For many years he went about his daily routine without much interruption. But as sociopolitical and economic conditions worsened in Africa, he began feeling its effects on this isolated island. A turning point in his own refection came in early April 2009, when a ship containing 316 Somali refugees capsized in nearby waters. In the following days, volunteers went to work pulling more

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than 100 corpses from the ocean. Despite the scale of the tragedy, the press— and the world—did not even take note. During those same days, an earthquake occurred in the Abruzzo region of Italy and tragically killed 308 people.6 In response, the media wrote extensive stories, donations poured in from around the world, and a state funeral was held for 205 of the victims.7 The country even observed a national day of mourning. As Tuccio began pulling the corpses from the water, he began to feel the troubling contrast between the attention given to those who died in the center of his country and the ignorance and indifference to those who drown in outer shores. “It appeared like some lives mattered and died a ‘frst class’ death,” he said, “and others died like they were in ‘steerage,’ and no one even seemed to notice.”8 Their presence was so invisible to the public eye, and their lives so seemingly insignifcant, that they seemed to be—in a word—“no-bodies.” Tragically, this voyage of the “no-bodies” is repeated every day around the globe. Today there are more than 68.5 million people who are forcibly uprooted around the world: more than 25.4 million of these are refugees, and over 40 million have been internally displaced within their own country, which is the highest number ever. In 2017, they have been growing at a rate of 44,000 persons per day or 31 people per minute. And contrary to popular perceptions, 85 percent of these people have been hosted not by wealthy nations but by the developing world.9 Though migration is not a new phenomenon, its scale and accelerating pace is unprecedented and one that is likely to become even worse because of climate change. Rising sea levels has already begun to forcibly displace more and more people, and between twenty-fve million and one billion people could be displaced on a temporary or permanent basis by 2050.10 Many experts predict that there will be around 200 million refugees in the coming decades,11 including more than 13 million Americans, who could be climate refugees by 2100.12 Even when the exact numbers are debated, no one questions the fact that more and more people are becoming forcibly displaced now and will be in the years to come: In many ways our own times is aptly described as “the Age of Migration.”13 Because of the deteriorating social, economic, and political conditions in their homelands, people are taking more and more extreme risks to fnd better lives. As a result, more and more people are losing their lives in the process. At present, the Mediterranean has some of the most lethal migration corridors on the planet, and each year thousands drown in the open seas. With the loss of so many lives on ocean routes, the Island of Lampedusa has become a symbol of the global refugee crisis: it reveals something of the vulnerability and desperation of all who are forcibly uprooted and cast into a merciless sea

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of human indifference. Pope Francis came in particular to speak to this indifference and challenge the human conscience. Before Pope Francis visited Lampedusa, most people had never heard of it. It is only eight square miles and is inhabited by a little more than 6,000 people. Given its relatively isolation and insignifcance, why then would Pope Francis choose this relatively unknown island as the destination for his frst pastoral visit outside the Vatican? Jesus’ own mission, particularly his outreach to the “no-bodies” of this world, gives us an important clue as to why Francis decided to go to Lampedusa. One of the central places where Jesus exercised this ministry was the region of Galilee, which was also on the margins of society and far away from the centers of power. It was the place where many of the “no-bodies” of Jesus’ day lived and work. Nonetheless, as Virgil Elizondo argues, these rejected “no bodies” of Galilee (Mt 4:12-17; Mk 1:14-15; Lk 4:14-15) are an integral part of the gospel message,14 making the case that Galilee is not simply as a geographical footnote of the Gospel writers but the physical context that magnifes the gratuitous revelation of God’s mercy (Mt 4:23-25; Mk 1:35-39; Lk 4:42-44).15 When Jesus takes on the condition of a Galilean Jew and even accepts the marginalization such an identity involved, he reveals the lie of the world that any-body is a no-body in this world. Challenging all the social, cultural, and economic categories that classify people as superior or inferior, worthy or unworthy, Jesus welcomes those that the society rejects and inaugurates a new kingdom that begins among the “no-bodies” of the world (1 Cor 1:18-31). As he affrms the essential God-given dignity of every human being, Jesus inverts the warped value structure of the world that dehumanizes people and reveals in its place a new, humanizing vision of his reign (Mt 5:1-12; Lk 6:2026). In this kingdom, the no-bodies who are the last and least in society are the frst to witness the risen Christ and the frst to bring the news of salvation to every-body (Mt 19:16-26; Mk 10:17-27; Lk 4:18-19; 11:37-43; 12:33-34; 14:12-14; 18:18-27; 19:8-10; Jas 2:2-6a). Elizondo notes that, in welcoming all people—particularly those who experience rejection—Jesus rejects the rejection of the world and invites all people to salvation (Mt 28:18-20; Mk 16:15-16; Acts 4:9-12).16 In contrast to the kingdoms of the world that excludes the “no-bodies” from its privileges, Jesus proclaims a new kingdom that extends God’s gratuitous love to every-body. (Lk 4:18). In time, Jesus would commission his disciples to carry on his work and to remember his table fellowship with no-bodies. This became more formally instituted in the ritual practice of the Eucharist (Lk 22:19; 1 Cor 11:24), but its broader spiritual impulse is connected to the memory of Jesus and all he was in solidarity with in his earthly existence.17 In addition to making present

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the body of Jesus, this ritual also creates an opportunity to recall and reintegrate the forgotten and ignored “no-bodies” of society. It does this not only by calling them to mind but also by reconnecting them again with the human community that has ignored, rejected, or excluded them. To re-member the forgotten no-bodies—or to make them members again of the human community—is to live out what Walter Benjamin and William O’Neill call “anamnestic solidarity.”18 Anamnestic solidarity breaks down walls of exclusion, hatred, and alienation that give rise to what Francis calls “the globalization of indifference.”

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THE MIGRATION TO BECOMING “SOME-BODY” The Mass at Lampedusa then is situated against the backdrop of Jesus’ ministry in Galilee to the no-bodies of the world. Francis’ visit was no doubt an expression of compassion for the migrants of the Mediterranean, whose social location has much in common with frst-century Galileans. But he is doing more than expressing empathy in their struggles: he is also confronting the systems that create the conditions that force people to migrate in the frst place. He does this fully realizing that the migration of peoples is not the central problem: it is rather the symptom of far deeper issues that cause people to move in the frst place. Throughout his pontifcate, Francis has denounced those forces that work against the development of every human being. In Evangelii Gaudium, he would later speak about the importance of saying “no to an economy of exclusion” (no. 53-54), “no to the new idolatry of money” (no. 55-56), “no to a fnancial system which rules rather than serves” (no. 57-58), and “no to the inequality which spawns violence” (no. 59-60).19 In a similar spirit, the United States Bishops Conference argued that the frst right of migrants is to fnd work in their homeland. When poverty, injustice, religious intolerance, armed conficts make this impossible, they have a right to move elsewhere in search of more dignifed lives.20 Convinced that all life is profoundly interconnected, Francis’ gestures of solidarity give expression to the truth that when anybody is treated as a no-body—and denied the opportunities to become some-body—everybody loses. The market fundamentalism of the current economic system largely ignores the human costs of the current system, but we do so to our peril. Because the waves of chaos have never been as turbulent as they are today, the prospects of sinking on the icebergs of greed, ignorance, and indifference have never been more of a threat to the entire human community.21 In this time of titanic change, it is as if a few passengers on our global ship have frst-class suites on the upper deck, while the vast majority of the

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earth’s inhabitants are slaving away in the steam room as the vessel moves forward. The planet’s wealthiest eighty individuals collectively have as much as one-half of the world’s population, and the richest 1 percent has as much as the remaining 99 percent combined. At the same time, two-thirds of the global village lives in poverty, and more than a billion people live on less than US$1.25 a day.22 The structural systems and the dominant ideologies that create and legitimate such inequity directly contribute to human displacement and migration because they create a society where the wealthy are enriched at the expense of other people’s well-being.23 Consequently, they force many people to take desperate measures to fnd better lives. “This makes me grieve,” Francis would later say, “because I think that these persons are victims of a global socio-economic system.”24 Francis’s homily at Lampedusa makes mention of the biblical fgure of King Herod the Great, whose unbridled pursuit of power and pleasure caused him to lose sight of his life’s purpose and destiny. When his own disordered passions steered him off course, he sank to the depths of inhumanity (Mt 2:1-18). “Herod sowed death,” Francis said, “to protect his own comfort, his own soap bubble,” even when the price entailed doing violence to others, slaughtering the innocent, and eliminating any who threatened his power. Such practices—like those of other leaders today such as Syria and other part of the world—directly contribute to forced displacement. Such displacement was part of Jesus’ own life from the beginning as the holy family as one migrant family forced to fee because of disordered policies of a crazed king (Mt 2:13-23). But Herod was not an isolated “human shipwreck” in biblical times—or our own. He names something that every human being is vulnerable to, whether they are migrating or not. Francis summoned every-body to make an examination of conscience and to pray for “the Lord to remove the part of Herod that lurks in our hearts…and of all those who in anonymity make social and economic decisions which open the door to tragic situations like this.”25 He realizes that the structures, values, and systems of our world make all people vulnerable to drowning in a sea of luxury, comfort, and consumerism. Gregory of Nyssa gave expression of this in the fourth century, and his words are no less true today than centuries ago: Do not throw yourself into the sea of unbridled consumption. Unbearable is the shipwreck that will overwhelm you, for not only would you be torn by rocks hidden below water, but you would rush headlong into the dark depths from which no one having fallen has ever escaped.26

To offer an alternative vision, Francis spoke not only through his words but also through gestures, symbols, and rituals. And his message began a plea for

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mercy. Calling the world to repentance for the world’s inhospitality, inaction, and injustice, Francis wore purple vestments for the Eucharist at Lampedusa. He also used prayers from the Mass for the Forgiveness of Sins, praying in particular for “forgiveness for those who are pleased with themselves, who are closed in on their own well-being in a way that leads to the anesthesia of the heart.”27 In the context of a world where more than 40,000 migrants who have died since the year 2000,28 Francis said:

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Today no one in our world feels responsible; we have lost a sense of responsibility for our brothers and sisters. We have fallen into the hypocrisy of the priest and the Levite whom Jesus described in the parable of the Good Samaritan: we see our brother half dead on the side of the road, and perhaps we say to ourselves: “poor soul . . . !”, and then go on our way. It’s not our responsibility, and with that we feel reassured, assuaged. The culture of comfort, which makes us think only of ourselves, makes us insensitive to the cries of other people, makes us live in soap bubbles which, however lovely, are insubstantial; they offer a feeting and empty illusion which results in indifference to others; indeed, it even leads to the globalization of indifference. . . . Has any one of us wept for these persons who were on the [refugee] boat? For the young mothers carrying their babies? For these men who were looking for a means of supporting their families? We are a society which has forgotten how to weep, how to experience compassion—“suffering with” others: the globalization of indifference has taken from us the ability to weep!29

He brings out that when we lose the ability to lament, we have lost something of our own humanity. The indifference to the plight of migrants in not just the result of the current sociopolitical and economic order. It is also rooted in the disorders of the human heart which results in the “othering” of people, which ruptures the bonds of human communion. This means that he not only celebrates the ritual of the Eucharist but his message itself is profoundly Eucharistic: he wants to move people from the “othering” the no-bodies in order to unite them with every-body. Above all, he wants to invite all people to move toward union with God and become reconciled to him. In other words, Francis is seeking from a narrative of otherness to a vision of one-ness. The Eucharist offers a particularly unique space to highlight our interconnectedness because it is rooted in the biblical story of the Passover (Exodus 1-24). As the Hebrews story of the passover speaks about moving from bondage to freedom, so too does the Eucharist call people to “pass over” into a different way of being in the world. This means conversation, which begins by living out of a different narrative, one where people can discover that the migrant is no longer “the other” but a brother and a sister who is bound together with one’s own journey in a common destiny. Undergoing such a passover is essential to integral human liberation: “I especially ask Christians

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in communities throughout the world to offer a radiant and attractive witness of fraternal communion,” Francis says in Evangelii Gaudum. After all, he continues, “we are all in the same boat and headed to the same port!”30

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THE CONNECTION TO “EVERY-BODY” Though Pope Francis spontaneous decision to come to Lampedusa came as a welcomed gesture to those who lived there, it gave them very little time to prepare for his visit. How would they assist Francis to articulate the gospel message from a social location so marked and wounded by the global migration crisis? Two of the people charged with planning the events surrounding his visit were Fr. Stefano Natasi, the local pastor at San Gerlando Catholic Church in Lampedusa, and Franco Tuccio, a local carpenter on the island. For some time, this faith community had been struggling to bring the world’s attention to the plight of refugees. When the Arab Spring created much sociopolitical turmoil and unrest, thousands of refugees began fooding the Mediterranean in late 2010. As more and more arrived in Lampedusa, they often lacked basic provision of food, shelter, and clothing. As more and more bodies began washing upon the shoreline of Lampedusa, people like Tuccio felt more and more helpless. It became so bad that “every day I came to my workshop,” Tuccio said, “I couldn’t even work.”31 Unable to verbalize what he experienced, he eventually would carve with his hands what he could not speak with mouth. He frst sought to rescue the “no-bodies” from their anonymity and insignifcance by making crosses carved from the remnant, knotty driftwood of their boats. He knew that the grain of their wood contained the stories of those who lived, hoped, and died on these boats. These narratives were inseparably intertwined with the stories of Christ and the wood of the cross. They were also intertwined with the stories of the disciples, who knew intimately the challenges of perilous journeys on turbulent waters and stormy seas (Mk 4: 35-41; Mt 8:23-27; Lk 8:22-25). As Tuccio started making these driftwood crosses, he “saw the life of a person,” he said, “which brought me to tears. And with each cross I created I felt like I helped restore their dignity, like I helped save the life of a person;”32 they had become some-body once again. Making a cross for the forgotten “no-bodies” in some small way brought them back to life. This process helped him make a stronger connection among the no-bodies of this world, his own body, every-body, and the body of Christ. Tuccio built on this experience when he prepared for the pope’s visit. He crafted the altar from a migrant, Tunisian boat, a pulpit from the rudders of two other boats, and he placed a ship’s wheel in the middle. Through these

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artistic creations and sacramental vessels, he sought to connect the migrant journey with the Christian mystery. “When I made the lectern,” he said, “the rudder triggered in my mind the image of a suffering people starting a journey at sea in search of freedom and a Promised Land.”33 The most important thing he crafted, however, was the chalice that was hewn from the boat mentioned in the beginning of the chapter. If Lampedusa has become the symbolic center of the global refugee crisis, the refugeedriftwood chalice would become the symbolic center of the pope’s message at Lampedusa. “From the time I made it, there was something powerful about this chalice,” Tuccio said. “It was the most important thing I did for the pope’s visit.”34 It not only gives witness to the One who was crucifed more than 2,000 years ago on the wood of the cross, but it also gives voice to those being crucifed today on the wooden boats of the Mediterranean. The rich and complex symbolism of this chalice presents an inescapable invitation to theologize. Even if its meaning can never be fully articulated, it speaks the need for deeper understanding of Christian faith in an age of migration. Above all, what I want to highlight in this chapter—especially through this chalice—is the inseparable relationship between the bodies of refugees and the body of Christ. As we look at the contemporary refugee crisis in light of the biblical narrative, our theological refection emerges from a dialectical journey of two carpenters: one from Middle East and the other from the Mediterranean; one from 2,000 years ago and the other from today. Both speak about passing over from the borders of this world to God’s kingdom. All of these come into focus in the Pope’s mass at Lampedusa and his celebration at the Eucharist with the chalice made from the driftwood of a refugee boat. The transformation of the wood that once held the no-bodies of this world into the vessel that now holds blood of Christ became for Tuccio a way of participating in the resurrection. In his words: When I was making the stem of the chalice, I used a piece of wood that had a nail in it. I had to remove the nail in order to carve the stem. When I saw the hole, I imagined a hand with a hole in it. Later on, as I put the nail back in the stem, it formed a cross. The symbolism moved me deeply. I realized that the cross which is a symbol of death supported the cup which is a symbol of life.35

This cup invites all into a space of transformative encounter, into the divinehuman borderlands of the Eucharistic celebration, where God embraces all who suffer on this earthly sojourn, takes all people into his heart, and invites all people to share in the banquet, where those who were considered nobodies in this world are honored and welcomed to a special place in God’s kingdom (Is 25:6; Mt 14:19; 26:26-29).

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In many different ways, this chalice gives expression to the way that Christ’s death on the cross reveals the way that God plunges into the stormy waters of the human condition and holds within himself the suffering of the world. Through the resurrection he discloses that this suffering will not sink us in a fnal way and that fear and death will not drown all who hope in him. As Christ unites his own with no-bodies of the world, he transforms all that is alien to him and making it part of his divine life. To receive the Eucharist is to taste his promised banquet and pledge to accompany all on the journey through the ocean of this world to eternity. The Eucharist, then, presents an ongoing opportunity to remember the life and message of Jesus and to make that message our own. As we make that connection to our own life and times, the words of St. Augustine—who lived Lampedusa on the African coast near Lampedusa—are particularly illuminating. He makes the connection between the saving wood of the cross and our migration to eternal life. Naming our identity as migrants in the here and now, he sees the cross as the driftwood that saves us from perishing in the ocean of this world in order to lead us back to our true home. In his Tractate on the beginning of the Gospel of John, he says:

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There is no means of passing to the fatherland unless borne by the wood…He walked in the sea to show that there is a way in the sea. But you who are not able in any way yourself to walk in the sea, be carried in a ship, be carried by the wood: believe in the crucifed One, and you shall arrive there.36

As if commenting on the liturgy at Lampedusa and the driftwood chalice, he adds, “The Lord is my chosen portion and cup. Let us possess Him, and let Him possess us: let Him possess us as Lord; let us possess Him as salvation . . . that they may cling to the wood and cross the sea.”37 The chalice then not only reveals God’s migration to the human race in the incarnation but also his promise to bring us back to our homeland in the world to come. The mission of the church, in response, is to follow Christ by living as he did. Because the church itself is a migrant in this world, the way back to the homeland, however, is inextricably intertwined with helping all, particularly all those on the move today. The nourishment of the Eucharist is therefore meant not only as a gift for one’s own body but also as a summons to serve every-body, beginning with the no-bodies. This has radical implications for a church seeking to clarify its mission in the context of a global refugee crisis. It is not an easy task, nor without its challenges and diffculties. As hosting communities consider the risks of hospitality in welcoming refugees into their midst, we too might feel tempted to let the cup pass from our lips (Lk 22:42). Refusing to drink from it, however, would also keep us from discovering the salvation it offers as well. The cup is a constant reminder that

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if the globalization of indifference is to be transformed into a globalization of solidarity, then one must not let this cup pass in a way that anesthetizes oneself from its pain; the cup of suffering tenderizes the heart and helps us feel again in accord with God’s heart by feeling with and tending to the pain of another (Ez 36:26-27). Calling the church to see the refugee crisis as a summons to mission, he has urged parishes, convents, and religious communities in Europe to offer housing and hospitality to refugee families needing shelter. He has asked the bishops to “express the Gospel in concrete terms and take in a family of refugees”38 and to make room for Christ by making room in their communities for refugees. “Empty convents are not for the church to transform into hotels and make money from them,” he said, “Empty convents are not ours, they are for the fesh of Christ: refugees.”39 Putting his own words into practice, he opened the doors of the Vatican to two refugee families, and he said that they can stay “as long as the Lord wants.”40 Because migration shapes the entirety of Christian revelation, he sees the church’s mission to migrants in inextricably intertwined with its own identity as a pilgrim people, who journey in hope of a promised homeland.41 He states that God has revealed himself in relationship, in history, and on the road. “Ours is not a ‘lab faith,’ he says, “but a ‘journey faith.’”42 His gestures at Lampedusa and many others elsewhere testify to the many ways Francis gives expression to the integral relationship between the God who migrated to the human race and took on a human body, the migration of the no-bodies of today, and the return migration of every-body to God.

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CONCLUSION: THE BODY OF REFUGEES AND THE BODY OF CHRIST Shortly after landing on Lampedusa on July 8, 2013, Pope Francis said, “I hope people understand the meaning of this gesture.”43 Even though it was a gesture that scandalized and confused some, it inspired many others. This article has been an effort to unpack the theological signifcance of Pope Francis’ visit to Lampedusa, the Eucharist he celebrated, and the chalice he raised in memory of those who perished and the Lord who rose from the dead. It has also been an opportunity to articulate a theology of migration by refecting more on who “they” are, who God is, and who we are in our common journey together. At the same time, the message here is not only about crossing over the waters of the Mediterranean but about passing over to a new way of thinking about migrants and migration. As we have looked at these topics in light of the narratives of the Scriptures, the Eucharist, and the Pope’s visit to Lampedusa, we have also been confronted with the operative narratives around migrants

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and refugees in our own society. They invite us not only to understand the process of passing over from one country to another but of passing over from what Susanna Snyder calls “an ecology of fear” to “an ecology of faith.”44 As we have explored the ways that theological narratives challenge some of the dehumanizing rhetoric around migration, we have discovered ways that the symbols at Lampedusa and their connection to faith narratives can reshape these operative narratives in more life-giving ways. The Liturgy of the Eucharist reveals an alternative narrative, one that reminds us of the centrality of relationships, our solidarity with the “no-bodies” of the world, and our call to communion with God and one another.

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NOTES 1. This chapter is drawn in part from a previously published essay in Theological Studies. See Daniel G. Groody, “Cup of Suffering, Chalice of Salvation: Refugees, Lampedusa, and the Eucharist,” Theological Studies, Vol. 78, no. 4 (December 2017). 2. “African Migrants Rescued off Italian Island,” Al Jazeera, May 8, 2011, accessed January 5, 2019, https​://ww​w.alj​azeer​a.com​/news​/euro​pe/20​11/05​/2011​ 58454​55723​288.h​tml. 3. The International Organization of Migration estimates more than 60,000 documented migrant deaths globally since the year 1996, although the actual numbers are most certainly higher. See Tara Brian and Frank Laczko, eds., Fatal Journeys: Tracking Lives Lost during Migration (Geneva: International Organization for Migration, 2014), 11. For the latest global statistics on migrant deaths, see “Tracks Deaths of Migrants, including Refugees,” Missing Migrants Project, http://missingmigrants. iom.int/; and International Organization of Migration, “The Central Mediterranean Route: Migrant Fatalities,” Migration Policy Practice, 2017, accessed January 29, 2019, https​://mi​ssing​migra​nts.i​om.in​t/sit​es/de​fault​/fle​s/c-m​ed-fa​talit​ies-b​rief​ng-ju​ ly-20​17.pd​f. 4. “Tracks Deaths of Migrants, including Refugees;” See also, “The Central Mediterranean Route: Migrant Fatalities.” 5. Pope Francis, “Visit to Lampedusa: Homily of Holy Father Francis” (speech, Visit Lampedusa, Arena Sports Camp, Lampedusa), July 8, 2013, accessed January 29, 2019, http:​//w2.​vatic​an.va​/cont​ent/f​rance​sco/e​n/hom​ilies​/2013​/docu​ments​/papa​ -fran​cesco​_2013​0708_​omeli​a-lam​pedus​a.htm​l. 6. David Alexander and Michele Magni, “Mortality in the L’aquila (Central Italy) Earthquake of April 6, 2009: A Study in Victimization,” Currents, Vol. 5 (January 7, 2013), accessed January 30, 2019, http:​//cur​rents​.plos​.org/​disas​ters/​artic​le/di​ s-12-​0009-​morta​lity-​in-th​e-laq​uila-​centr​al-it​aly-e​arthq​uake-​of-6-​april​-2009​/. 7. Rachel Donadio, “Thousands Mourn Quake Victims at Funeral Mass,” The New York Times, April 10, 2009, accessed January 30, 2019, http:​//mob​ile.n​ytime​ s.com​/2009​/04/1​1/wor​ld/eu​rope/​11ita​ly.ht​ml.

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8. Franco Tuccio, personal interview with Daniel Groody, Lampedusa, Italy, October 25, 2015. 9. UNHCR, “Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2017,” accessed January 30, 2019, https://www.unhcr.org/globaltrends2017/. 10. International Organization of Migration, “Migration and Climate Change,” accessed January 30, 2019, https​://ww​w.iom​.int/​migra​tion-​and-c​limat​e-cha​nge-0​. 11. United Nations Development Program, Fighting Climate Change: Human Solidarity in a Divided World, Human Development Report 2007/8 (Geneva: United Nations Development Program, 2007), accessed January 30, 2019, https​://ww​w.iis​ d.org​/pdf/​2008/​clima​te_fo​rced_​migra​tion.​pdf, 2. 12. Tia Ghose, “13 Million Could Become Climate Refugees: Top Countries Affected,” Live Science, March 14, 2016, accessed January 30, 2019, http:​//www​.live​ scien​ce.co​m/540​42-cl​imate​-chan​ge-co​uld-f​orce-​coast​al-re​treat​.html​. 13. Stephen Castles and Mark J. Miller, The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World, 5th edition (New York: Guilford Press, 2013). 14. Virgilio P. Elizondo, Galilean Journey: The Mexican-American Promise, 1st edition (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1983). 15. Elizondo, Galilean Journey, 92. 16. Ibid., 70. 17. For more on this topic, especially as it emerges in the thought of Gustavo Gutiérrez, see Daniel G. Groody, Globalization, Spirituality, and Justice: Navigating a Path to Peace, rev ed (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2015), 207–208. 18. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Refections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 253ff; cf. Thomas McCarthy, Ideals and Illusions: On Reconstruction and De-construction in Contemporary Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 205–210. See also William O’Neill, “No Longer Strangers (Ephesians 2:19): The Ethics of Migration,” Word and World, Vol. 29, no. 3 (2009): 227–233, and William O’Neill, “And You Welcomed Me,” Political Theology, Vol. 15, no. 1 (2014): 88–99. 19. For an English translation of Evangelii Gaudium, see The Joy of the Gospel (Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2013). 20. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Strangers No Longer: Together on the Journey of Hope: A Pastoral Letter Concerning Migration (Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2003), no. 28, 33. 21. Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, May 24, 2015, accessed January 30, 2019, http:​ //w2.​vatic​an.va​/cont​ent/f​rance​sco/e​n/enc​yclic​als/d​ocume​nts/p​apa-f​rance​sco_2​01505​ 24_en​cicli​ca-la​udato​-si.h​tml. 22. Today, 70 percent of the global population survives on US$10 a day, 31 percent struggle to live on US$2 a day, and 17 percent live on US$1.25 a day. For more on these statistics and their sources, see Groody, Globalization, Spirituality, and Justice, 3–19. 23. For more on structural sin and the dominant ideologies that legitimate it, see Kristin E. Heyer, Kinship across Borders: A Christian Ethic of Immigration (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2012), 35–60.

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24. Pope Francis, “Translation of Pope’s 80 Minute Plane Interview,” question 16, Catholic Voices Comment, August 4, 2013, accessed January 30, 2019, http:​//cvc​ ommen​t.org​/2013​/08/0​4/ful​l-eng​lish-​trans​cript​-of-t​he-po​pes-8​0-min​ute-2​1-que​stion​ -inte​rview​-aboa​rd-th​e-pap​al-pl​ane/.​ 25. Pope Francis, “Visit to Lampedusa.” 26. Gregory of Nyssa, On Loving the Poor, PG 46, 465–466. 27. Pope Francis, “Pope on Lampedusa: ‘the globalization of indifference,’” Vatican Radio (August 7, 2013), accessed January 30, 2019, http:​//en.​radio​vatic​ana.v​a/ sto​rico/​2013/​07/08​/pope​_on_l​amped​usa_”​the_g​lobal​izati​on_of​_indi​ffere​nce”/​en1-7​ 08541​. 28. International Organization for Migration, Fatal Journeys: Tracking Lives Lost During Migration. 29. Pope Francis, “Homily at Lampedusa.” 30. Evangelii Gaudium, no. 99. 31. Franco Tuccio, personal interview with Daniel Groody, Lampedusa, Italy, October 25, 2015. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. St. Augustine, Tractate 2, accessed January 31, 2019, see http:​//www​.newa​ dvent​.org/​fathe​rs/17​01002​.htm.​ 37. Ibid. Note: the psalm translation in this text is slightly different, “The Lord is the portion of mine inheritance, and of my cup.” The version cited in the article is from the NRSV. 38. “Pope Francis Calls on Parishes to House Refugee Families, Says Vatican Will Do Same,” NBC News, accessed January 30, 2019, http:​//www​.nbcn​ews.c​om/ st​oryli​ne/eu​ropes​-bord​er-cr​isis/​pope-​franc​is-ca​lls-p​arish​es-ho​use-r​efuge​e-fam​ilies​ -says​-vati​can-w​ill-n​42256​1. 39. Pope Francis, “Empty Convents Are of No Use to the Church: Let the Refugees in,” Vatican Insider, September 10, 2013, accessed January 30, 2019, http:​//vat​ icani​nside​r.las​tampa​.it/e​n/the​-vati​can/d​etail​/arti​colo/​27751​/. 40. John L. Allen, Jr., “Pope Warns Religious Orders: Take in Refugees, or Pay Property Taxes,” Crux, September 14, 2015, accessed January 30, 2019, http:​//www​ .crux​now.c​om/ch​urch/​2015/​09/14​/pope​-warn​s-rel​igiou​s-ord​ers-t​ake-i​n-ref​ugees​-or-p​ ay-ta​xes-o​n-you​r-pro​perty​/. 41. Lumen Gentium, nos. 7, 21, 48, 50. 42. Antonio Spadaro, “Wake Up the World: Conversation with Pope Francis about the Religious Life,” La Civiltà Cattolica, accessed January 30, 2019, http:​//www​.laci​ vilta​catto​lica.​it/ar​ticol​i_dow​nload​/extr​a/Wak​e_up_​the_w​orld.​pdf. 43. Cindy Wooden, “Pope on Lampedusa: ‘I hope people understand,’” in Catholic News Service (July 9, 2013), accessed January 30, 2019, https​://cn​sblog​.word​press​ .com/​2013/​07/09​/pope​-on-l​amped​usa-i​-hope​-peop​le-un​derst​and/.​ 44. Susanna Snyder, Asylum-Seeking, Migration and Church (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), 139 ff. See also, Susanna Snyder, Joshua Ralston, and Agnes M. Brazal, Church in an Age of Global Migration: A Moving Body: Pathways for Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015).

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Chapter 16

Permanence and Impermanence Architecture and Migration

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Karla Cavarra Britton

The complicated relationship between architecture and migration is integral to human history. Implied in the defnition of architecture as the art of constructing and designing buildings is the idea of dwelling and place, and the anchoring of human beings in time and space, and even the idea of “home.” Yet the condition of migration and displacement, the movement of peoples away from their habitat and place of origin, is at the root of our human condition—more so now than ever. The relationship of architecture to migration might therefore be said to turn on the tension between permanence and impermanence, rootedness and displacement. Recent migration fows in particular have vast territorial, spatial, and, therefore, architectural implications. As the sociologist Saskia Sassen notes in her essay, “A Massive Loss of Habitat,” the expanded geography of instability today is due not only to extreme violence but also to a multidecade history of international development policies which have left much land dead and have expelled whole communities from their place of origin.1 These patterns are refected in massive land grabs and the poisoning of water and land due to such activities as mining. As Sassen argues, these are factors (often ignored) for migration patterns including families and minors immigrating from Central America (specifcally Honduras, Salvador, and Guatemala); Rohingyas feeing from Myanmar; and the migration to Europe of peoples from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, as well as several African countries such as Somalia and Eritrea. This chapter seeks to provide an overview of some of the ways that architects today have sought to mitigate the effects of these patterns of displacement and instability in human communities. It also addresses the ways that some twentieth-century theologians have looked to architecture and the arts as inspiration for wrestling with the human predicament of displacement. 269

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While scholarly attention has been given to the increasing number and variety of patterns of migration today, there has been relatively little subsequent focus given—especially in theological circles—to the spatial implications and buildings (both permanent and temporary) where displaced peoples now gather. Yet the theme of migration has drawn increasing attention from architects and urbanists seeking to meet the growing range of challenges related to human settlement. Recognizing that it is important to address the architectural and urban consequences of migration, this chapter examines these concerns through four major themes, raising questions related to each along the way: (1) architecture that addresses the needs of transient immigrant communities escaping war or natural disaster; (2) expressions of humanitarian architectural interventions that go beyond an immediate crisis; (3) examples of more permanent contemporary sacred architecture that are representative of the religious identities of immigrant communities; and (4) the theological implications of architecture in relation to migration and displacement. Each of these issues has given rise to distinctive architectural responses that are addressed here in terms of their spatial and symbolic signifcance.

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SHELTER AND THE REFUGEE CAMP: “THE MARGINS OF THE WORLD” Some members of the international architectural community have made recent patterns of migration and displacement a notable focus of their work. Some of these responses have been through attention to the issue in exhibitions and books. For instance, the United Nations High Commission on Refugees’ Shelter and Settlement Section published a comprehensive catalogue of shelter designs drawn from around the globe. The catalogue provides detailed accounts of the design and construction of emergency, transitional, and durable shelter “solutions” sensitive to different geographic, climatic, and cultural conditions.2 The Coral Gables Museum mounted an exhibition on the topic entitled “Sheltering Survivors” (curated by Mitra Naseh, 2018), accompanied by a conference sponsored by the Architecture, Culture and Spirituality Forum on “Displacement and Architecture.” Similarly, New York’s Museum of Modern Art held the exhibition, “Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter” (curated by Sean Anderson, 2016). Both exhibitions featured examples of a variety of global transitional shelters that respond in different ways to the humanitarian crises of human migration. These shelters offer what is intended as a temporary refuge to those who have become displaced, who hope to either return some day to the home they were forced to leave or fnd a new home in some other, perhaps very foreign country (see fgure 16.1).

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Figure 16.1  Refugee Shelters in the Dadaab Camp, Northern Kenya, 2011. Source: Pete Lewis/Department for International Development, creativecommons.org

Related to the concern for humanitarian shelter, the refugee camp is a settlement type that has also become an area of interest for study and action by architects and urbanists. As informal settlements, these camps elicit the fascination of those who are interested in both how to improve the living conditions of displaced peoples and those who are drawn to the ways that people live, dwell, worship, and enjoy themselves in the very unstable world of the refugee camp. Manuel Herz’s study From Camp to City: Refugee Camps of the Western Sahara focuses on both themes.3 As an architect of the Jewish Community Center and Synagogue in Mainz, Germany, his buildings have addressed the theme of worship in the city. He has extended this interest in gathering and worship to his study of the refugee camp as a city. In a fundamental sense, the camp is an unrealized form of urban dwelling. In many ways, it is a placeless world, which provides a ready laboratory for the rethinking of issues of formality and informality in planning; the transitory and the permanent; and the human need to defne adaptability and places of identity, ritual, and tradition. The camp also represents a type of confnement—months, years, or whole lifecycles spent waiting, often in transit or living on the fringes of cities. It thereby represents—in some ways like the synagogue in Mainz—both the physical and moral wounds of its inhabitants. In spite of what is assumed to be the transitory nature of refugee camps, the average length of time for a stay is seventeen years. The Kakuma Refugee

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Camp, for example, which was originally established in 1991 in the semiarid desert of Kenya and meant to house 8,000 refugees feeing the civil war in Sudan, is among the largest refugee settlements in the world, now with 190,000 inhabitants from eight countries. In my own experience teaching at the Yale School of Architecture, the complexity of such a community was a compelling subject for students’ analysis and investigation. It became the focus, for example, of the research of a student named Chi Zhang, involving her in months of living in the camp, recording oral histories with the refugees she encountered, and documenting their music and gatherings for worship. Based on her research, she has designed a community center for Kakuma that is currently under construction. In Chi’s experience, Kakuma pushes into new realms not addressed by the offcial guidelines presented in the 600-page UNHCR Handbook for Emergencies. Chi’s work instead emphasizes a more nuanced reading of the realities of refugee camps, stressing its quasi-permanent rather than “emergency” status. Her work focuses on how crucial it is for architects to address the impact on the inhabitants of living long-term in the camp. Her argument is that architecture can have a real effect on the lifeworld of the camp; architecture is not something distant but fully instrumental in defning the lives of the Kakuma “citizens.” As the French anthropologist Michel Agier reminds us, refugee camps and their inhabitants are emblematic of a human condition that is shaped and fxed on the margins of the world—one of its most tenacious foundations being our own ignorance of it.4 While political and geopolitical studies reveal the games of power and territory that fuel and provoke the massive transfers of populations, the camps reveal another dimension: the existential context that all inhabitants of this strange “country” share through the experience of exodus of a new kind of wandering life. The camp embodies the tangible consequences of the destruction of land, houses, and towns ravaged by war, as well as the broken trajectories of lives. As Agier writes, “By grasping human identity at the sites of its denial, we inquire more directly into its foundations: this is the revolt of life in contact with death; it is what they call in Colombia a peace built in the midst of war, a home that is imagined throughout the exodus.”5 Expanding upon this spiritual concern—which extends beyond the shelter of a refugee camp—Chad Greenlee and Lucas Boyd, two other students at the Yale School of Architecture, addressed the need for places of worship in refugee camps. Through their project “Pop-Up Places of Worship,” they asked questions about the more intangible challenges accompanying camp life, such as the psychological and sense of spiritual displacement caused by actual physical migration. They proposed a series of pop-up projects that would address the need for identity and worship even in very temporary environments. Their designs for churches, mosques, and a synagogue can

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be rapidly assembled through a simple kit of building parts. The organizing premise of the project was that worship space should be treated as equally as fundamental to human existence as shelter itself. It was based on the conviction that worship spaces have a real effect in shaping people’s experience of the world, even migrants, and that gathering and ritual is still very much a part of communal life even in very informal, transient settlements. For Greenlee and Boyd, the religious space provides a moment in which the rituals of disrupted and broken lives may in some sense “resume.” Such places of worship may not necessarily defne a basic human survival need, yet worship is a fundamental aspect of many peoples’ lives and is therefore necessary to spatially locate and maintain places of meaning. In the students’ words, their proposed worship spaces speak of the collective, for “to worship is synonymous with being human.” While a pop-up religious space may seem like small gesture, it presents a provision for a right to worship even within the disturbed context of exodus. It represents an ongoing commitment to the sense of community and to identifying and sustaining cultural traditions within the camp.6 Assuming a condition of highly limited resources, the idea of the pop-up is based on reduction, economy, and the notion of temporality. It challenges the idea that religious buildings need to be monumental and permanent. In the words of Greenlee and Boyd, “the architecture of religion is inherently excessive.” What is necessary here is above all the symbolic or “iconographic.” In distilling what such a space might be, they were guided by two key questions directly related to the migrant experience of having to leave much behind, while still trying to hang on to a core identity: “What are the critical formal pieces that connect a religious structure to a particular faith tradition? How many elements of a religious structure can be removed and still have the building retain its symbolic meaning?” HUMANITARIAN AND SACRED ARCHITECTURE Is there nevertheless a need for a sacred architecture among immigrant communities that speaks more of permanence and rootedness—something that moves beyond the temporary shelter or shed of the refugee camp? Indeed, throughout history, sacred architecture has been closely linked to the lives of migrating peoples. Whether these are churches, mosques, synagogues, kivas, or temples, religious structures serve as centerpieces around which immigrant communities assemble, cultural traditions are reinforced, and rituals are celebrated. Sacred architecture in this sense has always been closely tied to the search for meaning and belonging. Human beings are spatial creatures, and seeking places of spiritual dwelling—beyond that of bodily shelter—is a

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clear means of understanding our place in the world. No wonder, then, that displacement lies at the very core of our human narratives. The Abrahamic religious tradition is rife with stories of displacement, from the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden, to Noah and the food, to the exodus of the Israelites out of Egypt. Similarly, the Suf tradition represented by the poetry of Rumi describes the devastating pain of being separated from one’s original place. Indeed, the profound sense of human desolation caused by displacement is captured throughout the ages in the arts, music, writing, and poetry of religious, spiritual, and cultural traditions around the globe. In the summer of 2016, the Chilean Pritzker Prize winner Alejandro Aravena pressed architects to transcend “business as usual” to address the relationship between architecture and humanitarian needs such as housing shortages, the effects of migration, and environmental change. Aravena claimed that universities are failing to train architects in how to address an imminent global housing crisis. Poverty, population growth, natural disasters, and war are combining to create demand for more than a billion homes. Yet architects are unable to overcome the challenges posed by politics, economics, and building codes to deliver viable solutions. “It would be great, with more than one million architects in the world,” speculated Aravena in an interview published by the online architecture magazine Dezeen, “that more solutions and more proposals try to address the issue.”7 As he says, he has always seen scarcity as a flter against the arbitrary and has tried to design architecture according to this principle. The Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, also a Pritzker Prize winner, has also been internationally recognized for his humanitarian architecture, including high-quality, low-cost shelters for victims of disasters around the world. Most well known is his “paper church,” completed in only fve weeks for the victims of the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan. Following the design of this paper church, he constructed the “Cardboard Cathedral” in Christchurch, New Zealand, as a temporary replacement for the city’s former Anglican cathedral, which was destroyed by the earthquake that struck the city in 2011 (see fgure 16.2). The cathedral, which has a lifespan of ffty years, can seat up to 700 people, and includes elements of the destroyed cathedral. As Ban said in an interview in 2014, “When I was a student everyone was working for big developers to make big buildings. And now there are many students and younger architects who are asking to join my team, to open programs in disaster areas.”8 In a related vein, the submission by the Vatican for the 2018 Venice Biennale provided a set of ten temporary chapels designed by renowned architects, including Norman Foster and Eduardo Souto de Moura. Collectively these chapels formed a kind of pilgrimage site, intentionally temporary yet strategically sited—in some sense, representative of the transitoriness that

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Figure 16.2  Shigeru Ban, Cardboard Cathedral, Interior, Christchurch, New Zealand, 2013. Source: Tony Hisgett, creativecommons.org

characterizes this age of migration. Located in the woods that cover the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, the chapels were intended to offer new interpretations of Gunnar Asplund’s 1920 Chapel at the Woodland Cemetery in Stockholm. They were an expression of a spiritual grounding for what the Vatican described as an experience that is “not only religious but secular.”9 They were intended to remind us of the signifcance of places that provide moments of orientation and meditation in a very fragmented and disjointed world. Then,

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after the Biennale, the chapels themselves became migratory, being relocated to sites around the globe. Spaces of worship can also serve to highlight the complexity and layers of migrations and “land grabs.” Nearby where I currently teach, for example, is the Chapel of the Good Shepherd in Fort Defance, Arizona, built in 1954 on the Navajo Reservation by the renowned Southwestern architect John Gaw Meem (1894–1983), just north of Window Rock, the Navajo Nation’s capital. The chapel was triumphally built as a “Cathedral for the Navajo.” Yet the building provides a telling case today for the ways in which worship spaces can memorialize the pain of displacement for communities. For many contemporary Navajos, the chapel is a reminder not only of the colonial takeover by the “dominant civilization,” but also of the forced migration in the 300mile “Long Walk” of 1864, in which Kit Carson and the military outpost of Fort Defance played a key role. The expulsion of the Navajo was part of the US Military’s campaign to subdue them, and resulted in their genocidal relocation to Fort Sumner in southeastern New Mexico.10 The chapel, ironically located on Kit Carson Drive, is part of a mission of the Episcopal Church that was originally founded after the people’s negotiated return in 1868, when the policy of subjugation modulated into one of assimilation. It is therefore a reminder of both displacement and return in an episode that is still deeply engrained in the popular imagination.

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MIGRATION AND SACRED ARCHITECTURE: THE CITY, THE SUBURB, AND ALONG THE BORDER As Diana Eck’s “Pluralism Project” at Harvard University has amply documented, every major city in North America shows evidence of the increasing pluralism of the religious landscape. While many immigrant groups meet for worship in temporary spaces such as storefronts, there are also examples of large-scale and permanent religious buildings being constructed by immigrant faith communities across North America. By way of example, the city of Toronto, one of the most culturally diverse cities in the world, has exuberant built expressions from migrant communities of various religious traditions—including buildings by the Ismaili community; the three Fung Loy Kok Taoist Tai Chi Places of Worship; and the prominent Shri Swaminarayan Mandir Temple of the Bochasanwasi Shri Akshar Purushottam (BAPS) community. The 2015 Taoist Wong Dai Sin Temple is built in a residential suburb of Toronto by the prominent Canadian architectural frm Shim and Sutcliffe, and uses a dramatic cantilevered and suspended structure to address metaphorically the idea of balance and inner spiritual development nurtured through the ancient physical practice of tai chi.

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The Toronto mandir is part of a global network of major BAPS temples, including others in Houston and Atlanta. A monumental sister building was built in 2014, located in Robbinsville Township, New Jersey (see fgure 16.3). In this densely developed state, the ornate stone mandir serves a growing local Hindu population, including both religious and communal needs. Constructed largely by volunteer labor in accordance with the minute specifcations of the Hindu Shilpa Shastra’s ancient architectural texts, the mandir is richly decorated with hand-carved marble depicting elephants, peacocks, and celebrated Hindu devotees. Within the mandir there is devotional worship throughout the day, including the bathing and offering of food and garments to the deities. The mandir presents a powerful representation of a migrant presence which challenges any simple political understanding of migration or religious pluralism today. Indeed, the Robbinsville mandir self-consciously serves as an open hand to the people of New Jersey by presenting an invitation to outsiders to experience a very different aesthetic and faith tradition, and by offering community service. Another telling example of a prominent worship space built by immigrants is the New York Korean Presbyterian Church, constructed in the gritty urban landscape of factories and warehouses in Sunnyside Queens (1999). Converting a former 1930s laundry factory, the Los Angeles–based architect Greg Lynn transformed it into a church building which is easily seen from the train along the Long

Figure 16.3  Shri Swaminarayan Mandir Hindu Temple, Robbinsville, New Jersey, 2014. Source: Sanjev Ragaram, creativecommons.org

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Island Railroad and which has a worship space that seats more people than New York City’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Yet the question arises of whether buildings such as the Robbinsville mandir, which replicates an aesthetic that in so many ways is foreign to its environment, or the New York Korean Church, which is so self-consciously ethnic, have the effect of isolating its immigrant community, or of helping to foster a shared understanding of values and civic virtues. Buildings such as these are not only places intended for the faithful, but are also prominent symbols in the public sphere. From worship spaces in refugee camps, to “sanctuary churches,” immigration shapes the spaces human beings occupy. Immigration, too, transforms vast territories including the landscape of the US-Mexico border from the Pacifc Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. An intriguing example of an architectural response to this kind of socially transformative displacement is the current plan for an “Iglesia,” or mixed-use megaform, along the Mexican/US border in Juarez, Mexico. Designed in 2015 by the Swiss frm Herzog and De Meuron, the project (sometimes known as “El Punto”) is located at the intersection of the international border of the Rio Grande and the north-south axis of the old Camino Real. This placement puts it squarely along the pattern of migration from Central America into the United States, placing it in the context of the continual movement of peoples back and forth along the path of the Camino, which has been a dominant factor in the region for centuries. The Iglesia is to comprise a central church, a clergy dormitory, a clearing house and shelter for migrants, a conference center, a music academy, outdoor movie screens, and trade workshops for young people. In keeping with the traditions of the medieval builders’ lodges, these workshops are to play a central role in the construction of the Iglesia itself, and the grounds are to be lined with sales stalls belonging to the workshops, creating the favor of a kind of bazaar. The site thereby embraces the highly charged atmosphere of the borderlands, and it led the architects to imagine it as a last stop for immigrants on their way to the United States. The El Punto project brings to the fore issues of how religious, cultural, and social identities are impacted by the buildings through which they are physically represented. Nowhere are these questions more complex than in relation to immigrant communities. Architecture can thereby highlight the role that migration can play in shaping both the cultural and the religious landscape. It can add critical content and specifcity to discussions of the transformation of our cities and neighborhoods, and the theme of migration can in turn have a direct impact on the contemporary practice of sacred architecture. Migration can serve as a stimulant for architectural design, and the resulting architecture likewise has the potential to reinforce and extend our ideas about what migration and the diaspora of peoples is all about.

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RETURN MIGRATION AND MODERN SACRED FORM Modern global sacred architecture is especially revealing of the porous rather than closed system of religious ideas and their representation: the dissemination of architectural ideas is rarely unidirectional. Even before the rise of air travel and information technologies, the global circulation of ideas and images shaped local adaptations of religious architecture. Methodologically, these issues have been helpfully summarized by the architectural historian Jean-Louis Cohen in what he calls the “carousel of hegemonies” with respect to the ways in which architectural forms represent particularly complex patterns of cultural horizontalities.11 His point is that contrary to the oftenassumed unidirectionality of infuences from colonizer to colonized, the patterns of infuence fow in both directions, and radiate outward. So trying to decipher the languages represented in the design of a modern religious building implies reading history with an awareness of a more nuanced and infected set of relationships. This challenge is, for instance, especially pronounced in examples taken from the French presence in North Africa. One instance is the general plan of the 1913 Cathedral of Oran—initially entrusted to Albert Ballu, an Algerian-based architect, and then to Auguste Perret, whose Paris-based architectural frm specialized in reinforced concrete. The building was thereby both informed by structural systems that were once perfected by Mamuk architecture and then adapted to modern European building technology. In turn, the Cathedral of Oran’s forms were later to inform Perret’s redefnition of the typology of church architecture in France, and through him religious work by a Czech architect in Japan, as well as a Portuguese civil engineer in Mozambique. Highlighting this “carousel” phenomenon is the choice of the 2018 Pritzker Prize winner, Bakrishna Doshi (now age 90), who uses Western infuences derived from the great examples of the modernist architects Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn to develop a visual idiom cognizant of his native India. Another of India’s architectural luminaries, Charles Correa, similarly designed buildings which also echo this cultural hybridity, as, for example, in the 1995 church he built in Parumala in South India, the main center of worship for the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church. Built to accommodate 2,000 worshipers inside its walls and more than 3,000 outside, the form of the church is derived from the tripartite structure of Coptic and Syrian traditions, and the rituals themselves are completely indigenous. These two Indian architects refect how complex and multidirectional the infuence of forms and ideas is between cultures, even in a colonial context. The American religious historian Albert Raboteau points us in turn toward the ways in which the hybridity of cultural and religious infuences is represented by the experience of the “Great Migration” of African Americans in

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North America from rural to urban communities, and from south to north. By way of example, Raboteau underscored the roles that urban and rural churches played in the mid-twentieth century in instilling in the African American community a sense of place, as well as civic life, and an experience of rootedness.12 One thinks of such prominent churches as the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, or the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. In a similar vein to Raboteau’s work, the chapel at Tuskegee University in Alabama by the American modernist architect Paul Rudolph (1969) is exemplary of how a more modern sacred building can become a centerpiece for learning and provide a system of communication for the narrative of the migration experience. Tuskegee, one of the traditionally all-black colleges, was founded by Booker T. Washington in 1881. The modern chapel sits on a prominent point on the campus and is simultaneously a preaching hall for the spoken word and an auditorium for the singing of gospel music, especially by the famed Golden Voices university choir. The building celebrates the Word, both spoken and sung, as it has been experienced as liberational in African American culture. The place of this chapel in the African American history and identity of the university is unmistakably reinforced by a mural painted on a wall in the garden-level meeting rooms, created by the artist Edmund Pryce. The mural depicts various biblical scenes associated with the migration and liberation of enslaved peoples, such as the Exodus of the Israelites out of Egypt, woven together with images from African mythology. Set squarely in the middle of this narrative history is the profle of the Tuskegee Chapel itself, here functioning as an emblem of the aspiration toward freedom and prosperity that is at the heart of the university’s identity. The Tuskegee chapel and its symbolic role within a narrative of black migration in America is in many ways in a different vein from that of the global migration patterns that have emerged over the last fve to seven years. Yet, the example of the Tuskegee chapel is also illustrative, in that it points to the ways in which built form can establish a larger context for the narratives of migration: metaphorically speaking, architecture can distill or make visible in unexpected ways the deeper meaning of migration narratives. CONCLUSION: THEOLOGY, MIGRATION, AND ARCHITECTURE During the spring of 2018, theological discussions at the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, New Jersey, focused on the potential of the discipline of theology to open up contemporary discussions regarding migration. In concepts such as Jesus migrator, for example, theology was positioned as an area of study that can increase social awareness of the plight of the other and introduce religiously motivated ideas into the public debate on appropriate

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responses to the phenomenon of human migration. Theology, understood in this way, is a progressive force for refection and critical thinking which asks new kinds of questions and proposes new ways of understanding relationships between peoples—the host and the migrant in particular. Raising the relationship between migration and architecture in this context contributes to the theological discussion by addressing more of the cultural implications related to the patterns of migrating peoples today—the artistic, architectural, and spatial implications. This attention to art and architecture inevitably calls to the fore a reciprocal understanding of migration by showing how our built environments are impacted by—and beneft from—the fow of peoples from various faith traditions. For example, as an immigrant to the United States escaping Nazi Germany, the reformed theologian Paul Tillich focused on architecture and the arts as a means of giving meaning to his own sense of displacement. To him, displacement meant not only a search for home but also an opportunity for intellectual growth. This theme was evident especially in his writings and public addresses made at the Museum of Modern Art (New York) in the 1960s.13 Contemporary art and architecture provided for Tillich an entrée into spiritual dimensions of human expression that were otherwise inaccessible even through prayer or scripture. Architecture and art, he said, have the capacity to break the surface of reality. The expressionist capacity of art and architecture “pierces [reality] to the ground; it reshapes it; reorders the elements in order more powerfully to express meaning.” In this way, architecture has the possibility of being an expression of “ultimate concern,” which is precisely the category through which Tillich expresses humanity’s fundamental relationship with God. Tillich drew inspiration for his theology of culture from one of his intellectual mentors, Rudolf Otto, best known for his 1917 work of religious phenomenology, Das Heilege (The Idea of the Holy).14 The arts—music, poetry, and literature—occupied a comparatively important position in Otto’s analysis of the holy. He deliberately appealed to the beautiful and to aesthetic judgment as means through which the “numinous” is expressed. Otto drew examples of the sublime from varied sources such as Chinese landscape painting of the Sung dynasty; the poetry of Goethe; fairy tales, ghost stories, and haunted places; Bach’s B Minor Mass; Mendelssohn’s musical setting of the Psalms; and the spiritual sentiments of John Ruskin. Of all the arts, however, architecture stood out for Otto as particularly important to his idea of the numinous. For architecture, he maintained, is where the numinous frst appears and is realized. Later in life, in a revealing statement to the German theologian and biblical scholar Carola Barth, Otto underscored this deep appreciation for architecture’s power to manifest the numinous, admitting that on sleepless nights he would sometimes rise in order to design works of sacred architecture to engage his mind.15

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More recently, the philosopher Karsten Harries has reminded us that the relationship between architecture and displacement underscores humanity’s sense of having been torn from an original embeddedness—not only in place but also in community. As Harries quotes from the poet Novalis: “Where are we really going? Always home.” Think of the biblical story of the fall, a story of displacement that has its secular analogue in Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, which insists on our essential homelessness.16 Harries goes on to ask, “Do we not all dream at times, as Gaston Bachelard thought, of an oneiric house, a home that promises physical and spiritual shelter, a more natural life?” For Harries the orientation provided by our bodies and histories is challenged ever more insistently by an ever-increasing mobility which impacts our spiritual mobility. As Harries argues:

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Such mobility is inseparable from our freedom, which resists frm placement. The freedom of thought has from the very beginning generated a desire to overcome distance, to trade place for open space. From the very beginning human beings have sought greater mobility. This led to wheels, sails, wings. We demand a freer access to things than our place-bound body allows us. And ever more effectively technology has allowed us to meet that demand. We want to understand things as they really are, not subject to the limits imposed by particular place-bound perspectives. The freedom of thought and a certain selfdisplacement go together.17

It is not surprising, therefore, that the study of architecture and the study of theology have often been closely aligned. The idea of God and our spatial self-understanding in the world come together in the expansion of human experience beyond the knowable and material; the patterning of cosmological understandings in three-dimensional terms; the evocation of mystery through the construction of ineffable spaces; and even the biblical emphasis on the centrality of altars, temples, and the heavenly city in the human community—and the continuing presence of these ideal building types in our lived imagination today. And so in this era of global migration, we are left with questions such as these: What is the relationship between the permanence of place and home, and the transitory nature of mobility and homelessness? How are these two poles of permanence and impermanence related to one another architecturally, theologically, and socially? How do the architectural concepts of dwelling and placemaking give us tools with which to respond to the migration crisis, in both physical and spiritual terms? And related to that, if displacement is at the core of the human condition, what points of commonality and solidarity—rather than indifference and resistance—might we create in the constructed environment with those who are most obviously displaced in our day from country and home?

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NOTES 1. Saskia Sassen, “A Massive Loss of Habitat: New Drivers for Migration,” Sociology of Development, Vol. 2, no. 1 (Summer 2016). 2. UNHCR, Shelter Design Catalogue (January 2016), https​ ://cm​ s.eme​ rgenc​ y.unh​cr.or​g/doc​ument​s/119​82/57​181/S​helte​r+Des​ign+C​atalo​gue+J​anuar​y+201​6/a89​ 1fdb2​-4ef9​-42d9​-bf0f​-c120​02b36​52e 3. Manuel Herz, From Camp to City: Refugee Camps of the Western Sahara (Zürich: Lars Muller Publishers, 2012). 4. See Mark Agier, On the Margins of the World (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), frst published in French as Aux Bords du Monde, Les Réfugiés (Paris, France: Flammarion, 2005). 5. Agier, On the Margins of the World, 5. 6. First developed as a research project in Karla Britton’s “Religion and Modern Architecture” seminar at the Yale School of Architecture (2016), the project was later published by ArchDaily; Jan Doroteo, “Yale Students Propose a Series of PopUp Religious Buildings to Sustain Culture in Refugee Camps,” Arch Daily, June 10, 2016, https​://ww​w.arc​hdail​y.com​/7890​47/ya​le-st​udent​s-pro​pose-​a-ser​ies-o​f-pop​-up-r​ eligi​ous-b​uildi​ngs-t​o-sus​tain-​cultu​re-in​-refu​gee-c​amps.​ 7. Alejandro Aravena, “Architects ‘are Never Taught the Right Thing’ Says 2016 Pritzker Laureate Alejandro Aravena,” interview by Anne Winston, Dezeen, January 13, 2016, https​://ww​w.dez​een.c​om/20​16/01​/13/a​lejan​dro-a​raven​a-int​ervie​w-pri​tzker​ -priz​e-lau​reate​-2016​-soci​al-in​creme​ntal-​housi​ng-ch​ilean​-arch​itect​/. 8. Shigeru Ban, “Architectural Culture Is ‘moving in Two Directions’ Says Shigeru Ban,” interview by Marcus Flairs, Dezeen, April 12, 2014, https​://ww​w.dez​ een.c​om/20​14/04​/12/a​rchit​ectur​al-cu​lture​-is-m​oving​-in-t​wo-di​recti​ons-s​ays-s​higer​ u-ban​-inte​rview​-mila​n-201​4/. 9. Roy Stott, “10 Chapels in a Venice Forest Comprise The Vatican’s First Ever Biennale Contribution,” Arch Daily, May 25, 2018, https​://ww​w.arc​hdail​y.com​/8951​ 27/10​-chap​els-i​n-a-v​enice​-fore​st-co​mpris​e-the​-vati​cans-​frst​-ever​-bien​nale-​contr​ ibuti​on. 10. For a useful overview of Navajo history, see Peter Iverson and Monty Roessel, Diné: A History of the Navajos (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002). 11. Jean-Louis Cohen, The Future of Architecture: Since 1889 (London: Phaidon, 2012). 12. James Grossman and Albert Raboteau, “Black Migration, Religion, and Civic Life,” in Immigration and Religion in America: Comparative and Historical Perspectives, ed. Richard Alba and Albert Raboteau (New York: NYU Press, 2008). 13. Paul Tillich, On Art and Architecture, ed. John Dillenberger and Jane Dillenberger (New York: Crossroad, 1989), especially “Theology and Architecture” (1955). 14. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 6th edition, trans. John W. Harvey (London: Oxford University Press, 1931). See especially the section, “Means by Which the Numinous Is Realized in Art” in the chapter, Means of Expression of the Numinous.

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15. Carola Barth, “Johannes Hessen und Rudolf Ottos ‘Religiöser Menschheitsbund,’” in Veritati, ed. Willy Falkenhand (Munich: Ernst Reinhardt Verlag, 1949), 179. I am indebted to Ulrich Rosenhagen for calling my attention to this comment. 16. Karsten Harries, “Displacement and Architecture,” keynote address at “Displacement and Architecture,” the 2018 Annual Conference of the Architecture, Culture and Spirituality Forum, University of Miami, May 24, 2018. 17. Karsten Harries, “Displacement and Architecture.”

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Chapter 17

Migration, Religious Education, and Global Learning Kathrin Winkler

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RELIGION IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE OF IMMIGRANT SOCIETIES In the context of migration processes, receiving countries are confronted with a vast variety of ethnic and religious traditions. Western societies are currently facing urgent challenges presented by this new and diverse population. Issues such as enculturation, integration, and participation into the host communities are at the forefront of public debates. The immigration of peoples of the Islamic, Christian, or Yazidi faiths in recent decades up to and including the current movement of refugees calls for serious debate and reorientation in Western secular societies. People who have overcome international barriers bring their attitudes, their convictions, and their religion with them, challenging host countries with questions of how secularization relates to religion and where the boundaries between state and religion should be set.1 Religion appears to be on retreat in Western societies and yet features more signifcantly in public discourse as a result of the phenomenon of transnational migration. This causes religion itself to go through a process of change which also changes Western societies. This takes place in the context of a secular self-perception that is not without confict and compromise.2 It is interesting to note here that the ethnic, cultural, linguistic, social, and political confict situations triggered by the transnational migration movements have been under investigation for quite some time, whereas the religious dimensions of migration and their effect on society, religious communities and education systems have been relatively little explored.3

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TRANSFORMATION PROCESSES BY RELIGION AND MIGRATION

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In regard to church congregations and other religious communities, these developments mean that the social challenges can be viewed as opportunities for theological insights and provide new opportunities in the process of integration. Understanding migration as a locus theologicus is a step to understanding that much of religious traditions is the fruit of comprehensive migration phenomena. Therefore, displacement and migration represent a special structural and substantive task which not only affects religious communities externally but to a large degree questions, changes, and transforms their internal structure. The driving force behind this religious transformation process can be understood as the contextual modalities resulting from the conditions and requirements in the host country. Religious communities are challenged to step out of their familiar settings and cross social borders. They must deal with homelessness, rootlessness, and experiencing home and have to discover community in a new way. Accordingly, religious congregations can be understood as places and spaces for intercultural and interreligious engagement, which get responsibilities for human rights and justice and resist against racism and xenophobia. The stimuli for change emerge here as much from intrareligious and interreligious requirements and developments as from those arising from civil society and politics.4 In the following pages, I focus on the relationship between migration and religion—in all its thoroughly ambivalent facets—that (religious) education to date has paid little attention to. In the process, we will take a look at theological and pedagogical approaches, which provide perspectives for building a post-migrant identity by religious education and pastoral practice.

SIGNIFICANCE OF RELIGION IN THE INTEGRATION PROCESS Religious and Cultural Identity As people cross international borders, whatever the driving force behind their movement, they also carry with them their faith, their beliefs, and their religion.5 Empirical studies show that religion is an essential reference point for migrant families and their children. Consequently, it is important to research the religiousness of refugees and their religious needs or attitudes. However, Western host countries appear as largely secularized societies in which religious practice is private and people are indifferent toward religious

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questions in the public sphere.6 Current surveys also show that many agents and teachers in refugee or immigrant support programs avoid religious topics or feel incompetent to deal with religious questions, especially from young migrants.7 In this regard, the fndings of migration research make clear that for people who have experienced voluntary or forced migration, the question of personal identity arises with greater intensity. We can almost speak of a need for self-positioning in which religion or religious faith plays one decisive role.8 Almost all the studies currently available come to the unanimous conclusion that people who have migrated to Western societies demonstrate a signifcantly greater degree of religious affliation compared with the population of the host country.9 Religious identity and practices are, on average, more relevant to daily life for immigrants, particularly for those coming from Muslim countries, and these appear to remain stable from one generation to the next.10 Recent studies of children and young people indicate that a high degree of religious faith can be identifed not only in young people of the Muslim faith but also in young immigrants of other faiths or other Christian denominations.11 Families who have experienced migration fnd themselves in a diffcult life situation. They live under pressure to conform culturally and, whether they are Muslims or Orthodox Christians, they fnd themselves in the position of a religious minority. In such a critical situation, the following developments of religious faith and the functions of this religious faith for the life situation and the integration and education process for immigrants can be ascertained: The signifcance of religion can increase, particularly as a result of the “Diaspora effect,” or it can diminish or become private in the light of new life plans within the context of the society of the host country. Viewed from a functional perspective, religion can prove to be a benefcial resource for coping with integration and life generally or it can develop into a life-impairing risk factor that inhibits integration.12 Religion as a Resource in the Migration Process There is empirical evidence to suggest that if religion as a resource is part of the migration process, then religion provides helpful strategies for coping with life and achieving psychological stability. According to Hirschman, actively practicing religion constitutes a kind of inner refuge for migrants that reinforces their sense of belonging.13 In this context, Keval speaks of religion as a “portable home,”a resource that can go with migrants throughout the migration process as a resource for life.14 At the same time, religious practice enables migrants to reconnect with their culture of origin and their own previous identity.15 This knowledge

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corresponds to the general fndings of religious psychology, according to which religious faith can provide generally helpful coping strategies for coping with life. In order to put critical life experiences such as migration and displacement into some sort of context and develop a sense of coherence, the practice of a religious faith appears to be a supporting factor on arrival in the host country.16 Religious communities can take on a stabilizing role by providing immigrants in a strange environment with opportunities for stability and for increasing their sense of identity. Such bonding within the religious community can be understood in this context as an ability to establish long-term, stable links to people and groups that has been developed within this environment. This internal integration is an obvious beneft for the host society as long it leads to bridging and not to partitioning and isolation, and as long as it enables people to move beyond the boundaries of their own community and establish relationships and social contacts outside it. In Europe, this can be observed in mosques, synagogues, and churches, both in young Muslims of Turkish or Arab origin and in Jewish or Christian young people from Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).17 National and international studies of the potential safety factors for the psychological well-being of refugees have shown that religious faith can be seen as a potential safety factor. Religious communities which act as centers of religious practice and affliation provide help in orientation through fnancial as well as through psychosocial support.18 In light of these empirical fndings, the question must be asked as to the extent to which these fndings have an effect on school as well as nonformal educational processes and the signifcance to the integration process of the role played by religious education. Special signifcance must frst and foremost be attributed here to the aspect of interreligious and intercultural communication and formation of competence in the cooperation between religious communities and educational institutions. Religion as a Risk Factor However, religion or religious faith can have not only a stabilizing effect but also a negative infuence on the integration process. If it takes on liferestricting, extreme, or radicalized characteristics religion can be assessed as a risk factor. From the religio-psychological perspective, it can be said that negative concepts of God (punitive-controlling, unpredictable, cynical) can lead to marked psychological and medical disorders.19 Similarly, psychological destabilization due to extrinsic religious faith learned in the course of socialization or through negative coping is to be expected, which manifests itself in symptoms of depression or anxiety disorders. The effects

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of these attitudes can be exacerbated in the host country under the conditions of migration and displacement and can lead to unstable personality structures in the integration process.20 In the same way, there is a risk of negative effects in the context of migration and displacement if the support by religious communities turns into social pressure and membership leads to social isolation. The fndings of migration research show that contact with one’s own cultural or religious origin group can be characterized by religious conficts which either originate in the country of origin or which intensify in the host country.21 Religious communities can exercise particularly strong social pressures and controls on women, which can escalate in the host country. From the perspective of displaced people, a further risk factor in connection with religious allegiance is evident in the form of their experience of discrimination in the host country. Numerous studies attest to a clear anti-Muslim attitude in a signifcant proportion of Western populations. The international study carried out by the Pew Research Center indicates that 50 percent of the European population have an anti-Muslim attitude.22 The 2013 and 2017 religion monitor concluded that, in contrast to Christianity and Buddhism which tend to be viewed as enriching, Islam is viewed by the majority as a threat.23 In critical circumstances, the resulting gulf between inhabitants of host countries and Muslim immigrants can lead to the radicalization of cultural and/or religious identity, which is usually accompanied by the denigration of out-groups and the enhancement of in-groups, restriction of the former social environment, and orientation to a so-called clear group ideology that functions as a social support system. The understanding of the radicalization process as a multifactorial, nonlinear and multimodal process in youths and young people provides a signifcant point of access in this context. Research into extremism frequently cites personal crisis situations or disruptions to education or career, an accumulation of individual problems, precarious familial environments, experience of social discrimination and the search for a point of reference and personal identity in diffcult times as triggers for radicalization processes. At the same time, not only individual but also group-related power factors and ideological claims to totality are refected in the radicalization process. “Consequently, instances of radicalization are primarily related to imagined communities, networks, group processes and narrative constructions with religious connotations.”24 All these different triggers for radicalization processes cannot be understood in isolation but demonstrate through their amalgamation that they should always be interpreted in the context of the specifc life story of young people in association with ideologized communities and against the background of developments in global politics and society.25

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Particularly in insecure phases of life such as those triggered by experiences of migration or displacement, radical groupings appear attractive because they seize on and exploit the unmet emotional needs of young people by offering them stability, identity, and orientation while at the same time shaping their propaganda to target their age group. It is also clear in this regard that ideology, religion, and politics have a subordinate role in the frst instance and that the extremist milieu functions at frst more as a social than an idealistic support system. It also appears to be the case that those who are prepared to use violence and who have fundamentalist tendencies frequently have a background of social diffculties and individual patterns of behavior that may be closely related to religious orientation. It is important to bear in mind that: “Although it transpires that religion is one of the most important factors in the radicalization process, many felds of activity engaged in prevention and de-radicalization do not engage in a comprehensive examination of the role of religion. Such an examination is necessary, however, in order to be able to include the effect of this specifc theology on individuals in prevention programs. Religious sources which serve as a basis for the legitimacy of violence must be critically scrutinized regarding their impact at the present time.”26 What Western contexts lack with regard to prevention measures are robust empirical research programs capable of countering this multicausal phenomenon, particularly in the educational context.27

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Current Conflicts with Islam and Anti-Semitism A further phenomenon that has attracted increased attention in the wake of the food of refugees into Europe, especially into Germany in 2015/2016, is an anti-Semitic attitude in young refugees from predominantly Arab and North African countries. In 2017 and 2018, there were instances of anti-Semitism, particularly in schools but also in urban spaces, raising the question of possible religious motivation.28 Current studies indicate that the extent to which these anti-Semitic attitudes can actually be attributed to religious affliation or to political socialization in the countries of origin is unclear. What is known is that anti-Semitism is widespread and has a substantial presence in countries which are characteristically Islamic. It is frequently a normal component of socialization in the home, the school and the media. “The confict in the Middle East plays a particularly signifcant role in the legitimization of Israel-related anti-Semitism, although classic anti-Semitic stereotypes and conspiracy theories also have their place.”29 At the same time, the fndings reveal major differences between refugees from different countries each of which has a different manifestation of anti-Semitic socialization. They also underline the role played by collective religious, national and ethnic identities. Other studies also make it clear that

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anti-Semitic attitudes, which are frequently not coherent, represent an unmistakable problem area in some groups of refugees.30 “It is, however, clear that the indiscriminate labelling of refugees as people who hold anti-Semitic views is unreasonable and counterproductive.”31 This represents an educational challenge, which must make it a priority to communicate to immigrant societies values that are critical of anti-Semitism.32 It can be summarized as follows: Anti-Semitism in immigrant societies has many faces. Especially among Muslim youths, anti-Semitic narratives are not very coherent and feed on screeds and conspiracy theories. Pedagogical deconstruction of anti-Semitic statements can only succeed if it takes up the students’ stories holistically and refects critically on their contexts (political conficts, historical connections). In the European context, this must include knowledge of Nazi fascism and the Shoah.

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PEDAGOGICAL AND THEOLOGICAL APPROACHES FOR RELIGIOUS EDUCATION AND PASTORAL PRACTICE TRAUMATIZATION, RESILIENCE, AND “SAFE SPACES” The fate of children and youth who fed to Western host countries in recent years is intimately bound up with their experiences—in some cases, lasting years—with war, persecution, and displacement. The resulting physical and mental burdens can produce very different outcomes that depend on the individualized interactions between incident, risk, and safety factors. It also means that fight experiences need not automatically lead to severe mental problems. Children’s responses to these exposures vary by personality and degree of stress: they range from acting out and developmental problems that can worsen into posttraumatic stress disorders—or they may display a remarkable stability in coping with a traumatic life history.33 So that these children may survive in the host country, heal their wounds, and learn to use its resources, supporting them in overcoming what they suffered and strengthening their resilience factors assumes decisive importance. The results of current studies point out that especially younger children are affected less by the direct effects of war and displacement than by the trauma of suddenly losing trusted caregivers. Forced migration often only gain drastic importance when family bonds are dissolved and the children’s attachment to their close relatives is shaken. It is important for educational staff to realize that one of their key tasks is to gently reconstruct the destroyed relationship dimension between the child and its surroundings. Of special importance in this is establishing a “pedagogy of the safe place” that literally or fguratively create “safe spaces” in which children with fight trauma can accumulate positive experiences and feel inwardly and outwardly

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secure. In making safe spaces in the literal sense available, the frst priority must be on providing refugee children with a sense of external safety. Because the practice of deporting students right out of schools and educational services in Western societies is becoming ever more standard in the context of rejected asylum procedures. Practice crisis intervention programs for educational work are absolutely essential, as are agreements with political leaders to put a stop to such practices. Complementing this, the aim of creating safe spaces in the fgurative sense, above all, means forming relationships that fulfll the basic human need for attachment and emotional security. A stable system of attachments frst of all lets refugee children cope with the loss of trust and sets the stage for new experiences along with new learning. Safe, reliable relationships hence must be regarded as an essential part of the support process; especially in working with traumatized students they should be understood as the crucial foundation for successful educational activity.34 The traumatic effects of the frightful experience of forced migration frequently lead to a breakdown in the internal dialogue of refugee children with themselves, their environment, and life per se. Reconstructing this wrecked dialogue therefore takes on an existential importance. In “Safe Dialogues” with educational staff sensitized to trauma, children can succeed in overcoming their inner and outer distance and striking up an offered dialogue. Professional staff, as soon as traumatized children start to communicate verbally, must also be prepared to absorb harrowing stories and apply key aspects of “narrative therapy.”35 It means avoiding a retraumatization by retelling when it comes to traumatizing accounts by children. Instead of asking “How did that make you feel?” it is better to ask, “What did you do when you were so frightened?” or “What helped you at that moment?”. This orientation to their own actions alters their self-image and lets them experience themselves as clever and courageous and no longer as powerless and frightened. It is possible to radically strengthen the child’s self-image through this changed self-interpretation stemming from a different way of telling their own story. In this context, positive religious experiences represent an important protective factor. In crisis-ridden, stressful life situation, religion may be experienced as “an island in a foreign land.” Through internalized tradition and rituals, it can help one to stabilize psychologically and develop a sense of coherence. In the “narrative therapy” framework, these resiliencepromoting resources can be tapped and function as a bulwark against a deluge of negative emotions. Educational institutions like kindergarten, schools, youth social work and pastoral work that integrate these aspects in a religionsensitive way in “safe dialogues” help young refugees get over fight and migration experiences and cultivate a stable identity.

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Deconstruction, “Shifted Affiliation,” and Narrations From the preceding perspective, it is necessary to consider attributions and discriminating structures in the host society. The clash of different cultural and religious traditions, together with their global structural links in the migration process, call for critical refection from both an educational and theological point of view. Postcolonial perspectives facilitate the deconstruction of discriminatory and oppressive structures in relation to religion and migration and to disclose asymmetric relationships between dominant and minority cultures in the host country. Hidden factors such as interests, power infuences, cultural, religious, or gender-specifc attributions and stereotyping can be decoded as part of a “hermeneutic of suspicion,”36 and their effects can be revealed in a critique of ideology. In the Western context, this also includes the deconstruction of dichotomies arising from the integration processes such as Christian-Muslim, WesternEastern, civilized-primitive, advanced-regressive, democratic-undemocratic, enlightened-unenlightened, and emancipated-patriarchal.37 They arise in connection with the foods of refugees from predominantly Islamic countries of origin and become a serious problem of identity, particularly for children and young people. Religion in regard to Islam often becomes stylized in both formal and informal educational contexts as a key differentiating category that accompanies national/ethnic/cultural attributions. In working with children and young people in educational systems, attitudes can become ingrained that construe Muslim children and young people who have experience of being immigrants as being “the Other” in contrast to the Western “We,” thus branding the antithesis of mainstream society as irreconcilable. In connection with gender attributes, young male Muslims are characterized as patriarchal and identifed as having violent tendencies, while young female Muslims are described as subjugated and reactionary. The effects on young migrants manifest themselves in their essentialization as Muslims and, as a consequence, in multiple disadvantages and discrimination in both formal and informal education systems.38 As social recognition represents a key requirement in the identity and integration process, the problems of discrimination, marginalization, and educational disadvantage in children and young people with an immigrant background are particularly serious. Yildiz points out that construed differences make a signifcant contribution to the allocation and establishment of an ethno-religious identity and young people from immigrant backgrounds are forced into a rigid pattern of ethno-national classifcation.39 At the same time, hybrid patterns of living are to be expected under the conditions of globalized everyday life, and these will fout imputed differences and develop multiple identities from multiple realities.40 This repositioning

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of identity happens primarily with second- or third-generation young people who have no personal experience of migration but who bring with them a background of migration out of personal knowledge and collective memory. They develop post-migration identities, which present as hybrid patterns of living and which express themselves in “shifted affliations.”41 “This entails cultural overlaps, border areas and intermediate spaces, cross-overs and simultaneous affliations. In addition to this, the reality of life of post-migrant groups indicates that they know how to deal creatively and subversively with the ethnic sorting allocated to them. In this way they create cosmopolitan everyday practices that transcend ethnic and national boundaries, and which are defned equally by both local and global circumstances”42 Thus, young migrants generate what in postcolonial theory is referred to as “Third Space”: A negotiating space in which it is possible to reappropriate meaning in the zone that holds in tension identity and difference and where alternative ways of thinking can be developed.43 The postcolonial refections just examined subsequently challenges theological positioning. From a theological perspective, various orientations occur under the conditions of globalization and migration which may contribute to shaping the relationship between religion, migration, and education in the public arena. For stakeholders in religious education as part of community or church youth and children’s work as well as in the school context, this provides an aid to orientation when dealing with religious and cultural plurality. Postcolonial theologies play a part in sustaining diversity and in calling for and practicing a change of perspective. This includes the examination of one’s own implicit values and theological prerequisites for a way of thinking. It also includes becoming aware of processes of religious identity stereotyping and essentialization. At the same time, they shed light on the transformation of religious traditions in the context of migration, minority, and marginalization.44 They support engagement with political, economic, cultural and religious interconnections, dependencies, and power structures that have developed as a result of colonial attitudes and which affect the migration process up to and including the present day. From a Christian perspective, this also includes questioning how one should speak about God and humankind, how the relationship between the various religions can be shaped, and which subconscious power structures within them need to be decolonized. In the context of migration, postcolonial theologians point out how religious reasoning strategies reinforce a Western Eurocentric viewpoint, who is excluded from the discourse just from the beginning, which memories are reinforced, and which knowledge is suppressed or forgotten.45 The points of reference for religious educational processes in schools, communities, and church congregations lie frst and foremost in the fact that they raise awareness of exclusive mechanisms and make marginalization

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immediately apparent. Under the conditions of migration and globalization, this also includes the recognition that changes in perspective cannot simply be “learned” but must unfold narratively and must be negotiated discursively. “Freedom of expression is an individual right; the right to narrate, if you will, is an enunciative right – the dialogic right to address and be addressed, to signify and be interpreted, to speak and to be heard, to make a sign and to know that it will receive respectful attention.”46 In an extension of this, more recent approaches to Contextual Theology place important emphasis on giving a voice to people of all ages who have experience of migration. In the feld of tension between the local and the global, Contextual Theology sees sociopolitical, religious, cultural, and economic contingencies as the formational context of narrative theology. Through its location in the specifc sociocultural environment, it conceives the present time as a place in which theology evolves and where answers can be found to contemporary questions. This includes the urgent need to give a voice to people’s experiences of migration and to connect the ambivalence of these experiences to the aspiration of the Christian faith. “The Stories of these lives are often not recorded in history books written by victors but must be retrieved from the forgotten and oppressed past to form the ‘dangerous memory’ (Johann Baptist Metz) by which the stimulus for social transformation may be nourished and sustained. (…) Through stories, the narrator acknowledges her or his inescapable social, political, and economic location and implicitly affrms the validity of his or her experience.”47 Biographical narratives revealed in the context of migration experiences are consequently not only to be interpreted contextually but frst and foremost interculturally. Intercultural theology(ies) view their strategic objective as revealing in them the interdenominational, intercultural, and interreligious dimensions of the Christian faith and making them fruitful for thinking and acting.48 In accordance with Homi Bhaba’s concept of translation, both cultural and religious hybridities and differences are considered, and symbols or social constructs are revalued and renegotiated. This process of transformation can result in conscious reinterpretations of symbols and ideas which do not correspond to the “original” cultural context. They point out that cultures and the religions within them do not represent closed systems but generate new meanings and interpretations along their borders and edges. Arising from this within a migration society is the task of negotiating religious identity in the tension feld between the local and the global. The particular signifcance of this for approaches to intercultural theology(ies) is to refect on religious plurality from a Christian perspective and to rethink mutual recognition between one religion and another.49 The necessary theological consideration as to whether and to what extent religions can establish a relationship without their dialogue inevitably breaking down due to their own claims to

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truth should be adopted as a precondition of interreligious communication in schools, communities, and church congregations. It will become apparent from such efforts that each perception of one’s own religion and other religions is both a contextual and a perspective-based impression which may alter and differentiate itself through dialogue. Whatever answers are revealed by interreligious discourse, a decisive question arises that goes beyond claims to truth: Which civil society responsibilities should religious communities take on in migration societies? Approaches made by Public Theology(ies) therefore enquire about the responsibility of actors and institutions in relation to socioethnic questions in the context of globalization and migration processes. They look at both local and global developments from the perspective of the theological tradition of positive religions and introduce them into public discourse about a fair civil society.50 In addition, demands come up as to the role of churches in the integration processes for immigrants. What are the possible forms of coexistence and the common rules governing them? What is the function of Christian values such as solidarity, human dignity, and justice for public engagement?51 Socialphilosophical approaches ask whether and to what extent religion is a source of value orientation and common good for democratic societies and institutions. Is it possible to achieve a so-called overlapping consensus between different religious and worldview communities?52 Rawls explains that an overlapping consensus on principles of justice can occur despite considerable differences in citizens’ conceptions of justice. What does this mean for the religious and worldview communities to agree to freedom, equality, and human rights from their own perspective? In what manner could these circumstances be meaningful for educational processes in formal and nonformal education? According to Charles Taylor, these considerations should be focused on common values like community spirit, charity, and solidarity, which can be identifed, for example, in Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. These guaranteed rights correspond with an obligation that individuals have to give back to the communities in which they live. At school and in youth work, children and young people can learn how to take responsibility for these commitments. Taylor argues that religious and worldview communities could support democratic societies in building politics of recognition. He believes these cultural and social institutions, through multiculturalism, should be engaging in a dialogue within the public sphere.53 LEARNING FROM THE GLOBAL FOR THE LOCAL In a synopsis of these gained theological considerations and empirical fndings, it can be frst stated that in both social and media discourse, migration

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is viewed less as a learning opportunity and more as a problem generator, in fact, as a cause of social problems and conficts. This is not solely the result of the Western history of immigration and immigration policy which has allocated to the majority of immigrants the position of an economically disadvantaged, under qualifed demographic group, which is excluded from political representation. This perspective is in fact much more contingent upon institutionalized perspectives and schools of thought, founded upon the persistent and infuential concept that in an ideal case societies should very largely be homogeneous national communities with a common history, language, and culture. Social, cultural, and religious differences between population groups are considered to be the main disruptive elements or hazards which it is acceptable to fend off. The incomers in this context are seen as apparently homogeneous social groups which are differentiated from majority host society; for example, in the current European context this means that the demarcation line drawn around the “Islam” category appears to be particularly dominant. Consequently, migration processes present immense interreligious and intercultural learning challenges to formal and informal education that need to be examined under a strong spotlight: Against the backdrop of migration and a globalized religious landscape, the tense coexistence of different religions is currently the focus of attention as they encounter each other in immigrant communities in varied but invariably specifc constellations, enriching as well as obstructing each other. This situation is revealing its particularly explosive nature specifcally in the feld of education. For in no other setting is a clearer image of society revealed than in educational systems or in children and youth work, so that we can indeed speak of a microcosm of society and a type of melting pot for the correlation of culture and religion, provoked by migration and globalization. As an educational reaction to this developmental truth of global society and changed learning requirements in the wake of globalization, the concept of Global Learning makes use of both the objective and subjective sides of globalization to think about the transformation of worldviews, lifestyles, and concepts of (religious) meaning in both the local and the global sense and to develop solutions for living together.54 The cultural and religious dimensions of globalization go hand in hand in this and highlight the fact that in the wake of globalization, religions in particular are asking questions afresh about the meaning and purpose of life and where the world is heading. The objective for Global Learning that arises from an awareness of these requirements is to introduce children and young people to the increased refexive demands of global society, and to enable them to shape their lives within the contradictions and ambivalences associated with this without having to resort to populist simplifcations.55

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It should therefore be the task of any educational theory and practice to create space for meaning and possibility in order to encourage this potential for development to unfold in children and young people. Both formal educational spaces, such as schools, and informal learning spaces such as offcial, organizational, or church/religious children’s and youth groups contribute to the creation of these spaces that sit between the boundaries of reality and possibility. As well as facilitating formal opportunities for learning, their prime function is to provide informal educational processes in which social allegiance through community in peer groups can be experienced and social integration through engaging with a variety of democratic values and norms can be learned.

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NOTES 1. Peter Beyer, Religions in Global Society (New York, NY: Routledge, 2006). 2. Thomas Faist, Margit Fauser, and Eveline Reisenauer, Transnational Migrations (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013). 3. Julia M. Permoser, “Beyond Critique: Religion in European Migrations Studies,” The Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion and the Public Sphere (blog), February 18, 2014, https​://ti​f.ssr​c.org​/2014​/02/1​8/rel​igion​-in-e​urope​an-mi​grati​on-st​udies​/. 4. Alexander-Kenneth Nagel, “Bedeutung Und Wandel Von Religion Im Migrationskontext,” in Transformation Religiöser Symbole Und Religiöser Kommunikation in Der Diaspora: Sozialpsychologische Und Religionssoziologische Annäherungen an Das Diskursfeld Islam in Deutschland, ed. Rauf Ceylan and Haci-Halil Uslucan (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2018). 5. Pewforum, “The Religious Affliation of International Migrants,” Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project, March 8, 2012, http:​//www​.pewf​ orum.​org/2​012/0​3/08/​relig​ious-​migra​tion-​exec/​. 6. Sturla J. Stålsett, “Fearing the Faith of Others? Government, Religion, and Integration in Norway,” in Religion in the European Refugee Crisis, ed. Graeme Smith and Ulrich Schmiedel (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 7. Frank Van Tubergen and Jórunn Í. Sindradóttir, “The Religiosity of Immigrants in Europe: A Cross-National Study,” Journal for the Scientifc Study of Religion, Vol. 50, no. 2 (2011). 8. Henry Goldschmidt and Elizabeth A. McAlister, Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004); Karen Isaksen Leonard et al., Immigrant Faiths: Transforming Religious Life in America (Lanham, MD: Alta Mira Press, 2005). 9. Dirk Halm and Martina Sauer, Muslime in Europa Integriert Aber Nicht Akzeptiert? (Gütersloh: BertelsmannStiftung, 2017). 10. Frank Kalter et al., “Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Survey in Four European Countries,” 2016, http://www.cils4.eu/.

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11. Mathias Albert, Klaus Hurrelmann, and Gudrun Quenzel, Jugend 2015. 17. Shell Jugendstudie (Frankfurt Am Main: Fischer Verlag, 2015). 12. Charles Hirschman, “The Role of Religion in the Origins and Adaptation of Immigrant Groups in the United States,” International Migration Review, Vol. 38, no. 3 (2004); Helen Rose Ebaugh and Janet Saltzman Chafetz, “Structural Adaptations in Immigrant Congregations,” Sociology of Religion, Vol. 61, no. 2 (2000). 13. Hirschman, “The Role of Religion.” 14. Susanna Keval, “Nichts Bleibt Wie Es War. Wie Verändert Sich Durch Migration Der Blick Auf Religion,” in Religion, Migration Und Gesellschaft, ed. Mechthild M. Jansen and Helga Nagel (Bad Homburg: Verlag Für Akademische Schriften, 2010). 15. Kenneth I. Pargament et al., “The Religious Dimension of Coping: Advances and Practice,” in Handbook of Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, ed. Raymond F. Paloutzian and Crystal L. Park (New York, NY: Guildford Press, 2013). 16. Heinz Streib and Constantin Klein, eds., Xenosophia and Religion: Biographical and Statistical Paths for a Culture of Welcome (New York, NY: Springer Books, 2018); Kevin S. Masters, Stephanie A. Hooker, “Religion, Spirituality and Health,” in Handbook of Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, ed. Raymond F. Paloutzian and Crystal L. Park ( New York: The Guildford Press, 2013), 519–539. 17. Antes Peter, “Funktion Und Rolle Von Religion in Der Gesellschaft. Eine Religionswissenschaftliche Perspektive,” in Xenosophia and Religion. Biographical and Statistical Paths for a Culture of Welcome, ed. Heinz Streib and Constantin Klein (New York, NY: Springer Books, 2018). 18. Meryam Schouler-Ocak, ed., Trauma and Migration. Cultural Factors in the Diagnosis and Treatment of Traumatized Immigrants (New York, NY: Springer Books, 2015). 19. Crystal Park, Jeanne M. Slattery, “Religion, Spirituality, and Mental Health,” in Handbook of Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, ed. F. Raymond and Crystal L. Park (London/New York, The Guildford Press, 2013), 540–559. 20. Laura Simich and Lisa Andermann, eds., Refuge and Resilience: Promoting Resilience and Mental Health among Resettled Refugees and Forced Migrants (New York, NY: Springer Books, 2014). 21. David W. Haines, Safe Haven?: A History of Refugees in America (Sterling, VA: Kumarian Press, 2010). 22. “Unfavorable Views of Jews and Muslims on the Increase in Europe,” Pew Research Center, Washington, DC, 2008, https​://ww​w.pew​resea​rch.o​rg/wp​-cont​ent/ u​pload​s/sit​es/2/​2008/​09/Pe​w-200​8-Pew​-Glob​al-At​titud​es-Re​port-​3-Sep​tembe​r-17-​ 2pm.p​df. 23. Dirk Halm and Martina Sauer, Muslime in Europa Integriert Aber Nicht Akzeptiert? Religionsmonitor (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2017); Detlef Pollack and Olaf Müller, Verstehen, Was Verbindet: Religiosität Und Zusammenhalt, Religionsmonitor (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2013). 24. Michail Logvinov, Salafsmus, Radikalisierung Und Terroristische Gewalt: Erklärungsansätze – Befunde – Kritik (Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden, 2017).

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25. Farhad Khosrokhavar, Radicalisation (Paris: Éditions De La Maison Des Sciences De L’homme, 2014). 26. Ednan Aslan, Evrim E. Akkılıç, and Maximilian Hämmerle, Islamistische Radikalisierung: Biografsche Verläufe Im Kontext Der Religiösen Sozialisation Und Des Radikalen Milieu (Wiesbaden: Springer Verlag, 2018). 27. Marc Sageman, Misunderstanding Terrorism (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Marc Sageman, Turning to Political Violence: The Emergence of Terrorism (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). 28. AJC, Salafsmus Und Antisemitismus an Berliner Schulen: Erfahrungsberichte Aus Dem Schulalltag (Berlin: American Jewish Commitee, 2017). 29. UEA of the German Parliament, Bericht Des Unabhängigen Expertenkreises Antisemitismus (Berlin: Deutscher Bundestag, 2017), http:​//dip​21.bu​ndest​ag.de​/dip2​ 1/btd​/18/1​19/18​11970​.pdf 30. Jürgen Mansel and Viktoria Spaiser, Ausgrenzungsdynamiken: In Welchen Lebenslagen Jugendliche Fremdgruppen Abwerten (Weinheim: Beltz Verlag, 2013); Günther Jikeli, Antisemitismus Und Diskriminierungswahrnehmungen Junger Muslime in Europa, Ergebnisse Einer Studie Unter Jungen Muslimischen Männern (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2012). 31. Michael Kiefer, Antisemitismus Und Migration (Berlin: Aktion Courage E.V., 2018), www.s​chule​-ohne​-rass​ismus​.org/​flea​dmin/​Benut​zeror​dner/​PDF/P​ublik​ation​ en__a​ls_pd​f_/SO​RSMC-​Baust​ein5-​LoRes​-Web.​pdf 32. Meron Mendel and Astrid Messerschmidt, eds., Fragiler Konsens. Antisemitismuskritische Bildung in Der Migrationsgesellschaft(Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2017). 33. Chandi Fernando and Michel Ferrari, eds., Handbook of Resilience in Children of War (New York: Springer, 2013). 34. UNHCR, Teaching About Refugees: Guidance on Working with Refugee Children Struggling with Stress and Trauma (Geneva: UNHCR, 2017), https://www. unhcr.org/59d346de4.pdf. Alex S. Venet, “The How and Why of Trauma-Informed Teaching,” Edutopia, August 3, 2018, https​://ww​w.edu​topia​.org/​artic​le/ho​w-and​-why-​traum​a-inf​ormed​ -teac​hing.​ 35. “Narrative Exposure Therapy (NET),” American Psychological Association, July 31, 2017, https​://ww​w.apa​.org/​ptsd-​guide​line/​treat​ments​/narr​ative​-expo​sure-​ thera​py. 36. Paul Ricoeur developed his critical hermeneutic subsequent to the hermeneutic of suspicion by Nietzsche, Freud and Marx. 37. Castro Varela María Do Mar and Nikita Dhawan, Postkoloniale Theorie: Eine Kritische Einführung (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2015). 38. Iman Attia, Die “Westliche Kultur” Und Ihr Anderes: Zur Dekonstruktion Von Orientalismus Und Antimuslimischem Rassismus (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2009). 39. Erol Yildiz, “Postmigrantische Verortungspraktiken: Ethnische Mythen Irritieren,” in Migrationsforschung Als Kritik?: Spielräume Kritischer Migrationsforschung,

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ed. Paul Mecheril, Oscar Thomas-Olalde, Claus Melter, Susanne Arens, and Elisabeth Romaner (Wiesbaden: Springer Verlag, 2013). 40. Iyall Keri E. Smith and Patricia Leavy, Hybrid Identities: Theoretical and Empirical Examinations (Boston, MA: Brill, 2008). 41. Sabine Strasser, Bewegte Zugehörigkeiten: Nationale Spannungen, Transnationale Praktiken Und Transversale Politik (Wien: Turia & Kant Verlag, 2012). 42. Yildiz, “Postmigrantische Verortungspraktiken: Ethnische Mythen Irritieren,” 144. 43. Homi Bhabha, Nation and Narration (New York, NY: Routledge, 1990); Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York, NY: Routledge, 1994). 44. Melinda A. McGarrah Sharp, Misunderstanding Stories: Toward a Postcolonial Pastoral Theology (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2013). 45. Paul S. Chung, Postcolonial Public Theology: Faith, Scientifc Rationality, and Prophetic Dialogue (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2016); Jenny Daggers, Postcolonial Theology of Religions: Particularity and Pluralism in World Christianity (New York, NY: Routledge, 2013). 46. Homi Bhabha, “The Right to Narrate,” Harvard Design Magazine (2014), 184 47. Peter C. Phan, “The Experience of Migration as Source of Intercultural Theology,” in Contemporary Issues of Migration and Theology, ed. Elaine Padilla and Peter C. Phan (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 192. 48. Judith Gruber, Intercultural Theology: Exploring World Christianity after the Cultural Turn (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018). 49. Peter C. Phan and Jonathan Ray, eds., Understanding Religious Pluralism: Perspectives from Religious Studies and Theology (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2014); Peter C. Phan, The Joy of Religious Pluralism: A Personal Journey(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2017). 50. Sebastian C. H. Kim, Theology in the Public Sphere (London: SCM Press, 2011); Elaine Graham, Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Public Theology in a PostSecular Age (London: SCM Press, 2013). 51. Max L. Stackhouse, “Civil Religion, Political Theology and Public Theology. What the Difference?” in Christian in Public: Aims, Methodologies and Issues in Public Theology, ed. Len Hansen (Stellenbosch: Sun Press, 2007). 52. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2005). 53. Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). 54. William Gaudelli, Global Citizenship Education: Everyday Transcendence (New York, NY: Routledge, 2016). 55. Jennifer D. Klein, The Global Education Guidebook: Humanizing K-12 Classrooms Worldwide through Equitable Partnerships (Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press, a Division of Solution Tree, 2017).

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Index

Ackroyd, Peter, 58, 67n20 Africa, 3, 5, 15, 22, 47, 65, 90, 91, 94–96, 256 African Americans, 12, 13, 90, 95–96, 279, 280 Africans includes North Africans, xiii, 53, 62, 90, 95 Agamben, Giorgio, 21, 31n7, 31n9 Age of Migration, 89, 91 Agier, Manuel, 272, 283nn4–5 Ahn, John, xii, 38, 49n27, 66n1, 66nn3– 5, 67nn11–12, 67n15, 67nn17–19, 68n26, 68n28, 126nn22–23 America. See United States of America Ames, Frank Ritchel, 67n12, 126n23 anti-Semitism, xviii, 290–91 Aquinas, Thoms, 103, 121, 124n8, 171, 242 Aravena, Alejandro, 274, 283n7 Arendt, Hannah, 184n30, 193, 199n34, 253n50, 267n18 Aristotle, 119–20 art, 94, 255, 269–70, 274, 281 Asad, Talal, 30–31n19 Asia, 9, 10, 15, 80, 94, 255 Asia Minor, 79–82, 93, 117 Asian(s), 9, 10, 79–80 Assmann, Jan, 36, 48n asylum, ix, 69, 71–72, 173, 181, 185, 214–15, 292

asylum-seeker(s), x, xv, 5, 89, 71, 136, 239, 247 Augustine, of Hippo, 124n1, 153–55, 157, 164n6, 165n11, 264, 268n36 Azah, Gulrez Shah, 232, 233n2, 236n64 Bakker, Jordan, 234n11, 235n43 Balentine, Samuel, 66n1, 149nn15–16 Baptist(s), 8, 91, 196, 280 Barth, Carola, 281, 284n15 Barthes, Roland, 21, 31n6, 31n8 Bauman, Zygmunt, 166n31, 179, 184n28, 239, 252n4 Bayly, C. A., 4, 17n2 Bedford, Nancy, 242–44, 252n14, 252n25 Bellah, Robert, 11, 13, 17n1, 18n13 Benjamin, Walter, 248, 253n50, 259, 267n18 Berg, Daniel, 91, 97n5 Berger, Teresa, 244–45, 253n28 Bhabh, Homi, 295, 301n43, 301n46 Bible (both Testaments), 38, 47, 69, 91, 95, 103–4, 106, 112, 119, 152, 156, 158, 171, 180 Black(s), x, 9–10, 13, 90, 280 Boda, Mark. J., 66n3, 67n12, 126n23 border patrol, 185, 187 border(s), xv–xvii, 16, 38, 55, 71, 73, 75, 83–84, 101, 105, 112, 123, 133, 327

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135–36, 138–41, 151, 173, 177, 185–86, 188–89, 192, 194–96, 201, 203–5, 207–15, 217, 223–24, 239– 42, 250–51, 263, 278, 286, 294–95 Brazal, Agnes M., 165n17, 199n32, 252n1, 252n6, 268n44 Brennan, Jason, 211, 220n14 Brexit, 7, 204 Britton, Karla, xviii, 283n6 Brown, Oli, 227, 235nn43–44 Brueggemann, Walter, 33, 47n2 Brunner, Peter, 248, 254n51 Burlacioiu, Ciprian, xiii, 97n6 Burns, Stephen, 245, 251n1, 253n38, 253n41 Bush, George W., Jr., 10, 11, 12 Butler, Judith, 162, 166n32 Byravan, Sujatha, 223, 225, 234n13, 235n30 California, 9, 186 Calvin, John, xiv, 130, 141, 146–47, 150nm18–20, 164n7 Campese, Gioacchino, 84n2, 84n8 157, 165n16, 165n19, 166n28, 198n14 capitalism, 4, 16–17 Carroll R., M. Daniel, 38, 48n26, 84n5 Carroll, Robert P., 43, 49nn29–30, 58 Casanova, Jose, vii, xi, 17nn4–5, 18n6, 18nn10–11, 18n 14,18n22, 18n24, 98n8 Castles, Stephen, xixn3, 164n1, 252n2, 267n13 Catholic Church, x–xi, 11, 16–17, 19– 24, 29–30, 90, 94, 169–71, 174, 262 Catholic(s) (persons), xi, 6–8, 10, 13, 15, 17, 22–25, 30, 174, 201, 243, 249 Catholicism, 19, 21–22, 24, 30, 153, 174 Central America, xv, 38, 185, 269, 278 Central Asia, 89, 94 child, children, x, xviii, 27–28, 40, 53, 55, 57–58, 61, 71–73, 105, 109, 116, 122, 132–35, 175, 179, 181, 185–86,

188, 196, 206, 207, 229, 255, 286–87, 291–94, 296–98 Childs, Brevard, 52, 66n5 Chin, Moses, 81, 85n14, 86n28, 86n30, 86n33 Christian(s) (people), xi, xiii, xiv–xv, 6, 12, 15, 36, 38, 69–70, 73, 75–77, 80–84, 89–90, 93–94, 102, 105, 135, 146–47, 152, 155, 158, 163, 181, 189, 191, 203, 240, 247, 261, 287–88 Christianity, ix, xi, xiii–xix, 5, 8–9, 11, 15, 20, 80, 88–97, 118, 151–52, 157–58, 169, 171, 243–45, 289, 296 Christology, 129–33, 136–37, 147, 242 Church (in a historical, preReformation, ecumenical sense), xiii, xiv–xv, xvii–xviii, 8, 11–12, 22, 24, 29–30, 38 church history, x, xii, 87–88 citizen(s), 6, 81, 101, 106, 123, 138, 146, 158, 177, 179, 186–87, 189, 191, 194–95, 208–9, 205–6, 209–13, 215–16, 230, 232, 272, 296 citizenship, 14, 29, 61, 63, 106, 179, 181, 187, 193–94, 206–8, 213 climate change, xvi. See also global warming, 47, 136, 177, 192, 221–33, 239, 257 climate justice, xvi, 221–22, 225, 227–31 Cohen, Jean-Louis, 279, 283n11 Collier, Elizabeth W., 183n14, 200n48 Crenshaw, Kimberlé, 229, 236n49 Daube, David, 34, 47n4 Davies, Philip R., 37, 48n21 Davila, Maria Teresa, 199n32, 252n De Certeau, Michel, 23, 31n De Haas, Hein, xix, 164n, 252n6 de Wind, Josh, xixn3, 17n3 democracy, 14, 187, 201–2, 205–6, 208–11, 215–16, 218–19 deportation(s), xii, 59, 111–12, 176, 186, 194

Christian Theology in the Age of Migration : Implications for World Christianity, edited by Peter C. Phan, Lexington Books, 2020.

Index

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diaspora, xiii, 33–34, 45, 54–55, 57, 59–60, 64–65, 70, 75, 77, 89–95, 97, 103, 111–14, 117–18, 189, 226, 243, 278, 287 displaced person/peoples use for DIDP, IDP, x, xviii, 55, 57, 63, 101, 171, 180, 190–91, 225, 229, 233, 239, 270–71, 289 displacement(s), xvi, xviii, 55–57, 59, 70, 72, 88, 175–77, 188–90, 192, 221–23, 225–30, 232–33, 240, 246, 260, 269–70, 272, 274, 276, 278, 281–82, 286, 288–91 Dreamers, 175–76, 207 earthquake, 33, 176, 223, 225, 257, 274 East Asia, 5, 89, 91 ecclesiology, xiv–xv, 151–57, 159–63 Eck, Diana L., 18n7, 276 Egypt, xii–xiii, 33–35, 38–46, 51, 56–57, 59–65, 71–73, 103, 106–14, 116–17, 121, 132–33, 135–37, 190, 274, 280 Eichenbaum, Jacob, 37, 48n22 Elizondo, Virgilio P., 258, 267nn14–15 Estelle, Bryan, 35, 43, 48nn7–8, 49n31, 49n40 ethics, x, ix, xv–xvii, 22–23, 35, 38, 124, 156, 169–70, 173, 177–78, 180, 189, 193–94, 201–2, 204–5, 207, 209, 213, 215–17, 241, 251 Eucharist, xvii, 186, 201, 244–47, 255, 258, 261, 263–66 Europe (including Eastern and Western Europe), ix, xiii, 3–8, 11, 14–15, 17, 20, 22–24, 59, 91–92, 94, 151, 163, 194, 211, 246, 265, 269, 288, 290 European Union, xi, 5–7, 14 exile(s), xii–xii, xvi, 34, 38–39, 43–46, 51, 58–60, 65, 72, 80, 92, 103, 108, 111–12, 115–16, 142–44, 223–25, 230, 232 Faist, Thomas, xixn3, 298n2 famine, 5, 52, 106, 176, 226

329

Fauser, Margit, xixn3, 298n2 Finkelstein, Israel, 67n13, 112 Flannery, Austin, 18n25, 182n3 Foley, Edward, 244, 253n33, 254nn59– 60 France, 7, 21 Francis, Mark R., 244, 253n34 Francis, Pope, xi, xv, xvii, 8, 16–17, 193–95, 199n38, 200n43, 201–2, 246, 248, 253n49, 256, 258, 262–63, 265, 266n5, 267n21, 268nn24–25, 268n27, 268n29, 268nn38–39, 268n42 Garden of Eden, xii, 60, 65 Germany, viii, 10, 6, 169, 271, 281, 290 Gerschutz, Jill Marie, 127n30, 183n14, 198n28 Giliomee, Herman B., 47, 49nn38–39 Gillingham, Susan, 43, 49n33, 49n35 global warming, 16, 177. See also climate change globalization, 3–5, 7, 16–17, 194, 245–48, 259, 261, 265, 294–97 Gospel(s), xii, 62, 70–79, 83, 118, 129–32, 136–39, 149, 152, 190, 201, 242, 244, 256, 258, 262, 264–65 Grabbe, Lester, 49n, 67n Gregory, of Nyssa, 261, 268n26 Groody, Daniel G., vii, x–xi, xvii–xiii, 84n2, 84n8, 127n30, 182n14, 184n28, 198n14, 240, 242, 246–47, 252n7, 252n17, 252n19, 253n42, 266n1, 267n8, 267n17, 267n22 Guchteneire, Paul De, 234n17, 236n63 Gunkel, Hermann, 52, 125n11 Haas, Hein de, 164n1, 252n2 Habermas, Jurgen, 159, 166n26, Haggstrom, Julia, 228, 235n45 Hahn, Ferdinand, 148n2, 254n60 Haight, Roger, 164nn6–7, 164n10, 165n11 Halbwachs, Maurice, 35–36, 48nn13–14 Halm, Dirk, 298n9, 299n23

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Hauerwas, Stanley, 155, 165n12 Havea, Jione, 222, 233nn7–8 Healy, Nicholas, 154, 164nn8–9 heaven, xiii, 74–75, 81–82, 86n, 122, 130, 141, 147, 152, 155 Hebrew Bible, xii, 33–38, 43, 46, 51, 56, 59, 63, 74, 80, 103, 113, 117, 119, 132, 134–36, 141–42, 145–47, 180 Hebrew Scriptures. See Hebrew Bible Hendel, Ronald, 35–36, 48n Herbeck, Johannes, 230, 236n54, 236n62 Hertig, Paul, 84n7, 149n12 Herz, Manuel, 271, 283n3 Heyer, Kristin E., vii, x–xi, xv, 162, 166n33, 183n14, 197n6, 200n42, 219n1, 267n23 Hirschman, Charles, 17n3, 287, 299nn12–13 Hispanic(s), 10, 14, 38 Hoeffner, John J., 183n18, 198n28 Hoffmeier, James K., 37–38, 48nn24–25 Hollenbach, David, x, 192, 198n23, 199n30, 199n32, 200n45 Holy Spirit, xiii–xiv, 77–78, 83, 91, 102, 119–21, 129, 132, 148, 250 homeland(s), xvi, 53, 55, 60, 72, 76, 80–81, 115, 121, 135, 137–38, 143, 176, 193, 231, 245, 257, 259, 264–65 human rights, x, xv, 15, 123, 169–73, 174, 177–79, 181, 185, 187, 189, 193–95, 205, 210–13, 215, 223, 228, 232, 286, 296 Huntington, Samuel P., 13–14, 18n23 ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), 186–88 illegal, xiv, 5, 124, 178, 191, 239 illegal immigrant. See immigrant immigrant(s), xv, xiii, 4–9, 12–14, 16–17, 23, 37–38, 72, 74, 91, 106, 112, 176–77, 180, 185–89, 191–96, 204–8, 270, 273, 276–78, 281, 287–89, 291, 293, 296–97

indigenous, viii, 20, 279 Ingold, Tim, 21, 31n10 Islam, x–xi, xviii, 5, 7, 13–14, 18, 89, 289–90, 293, 296–98 Israelite(s), xii, 33, 36, 38–41, 43, 56, 60, 71, 103, 106–12, 114, 136, 142, 144, 274 Jerusalem, 39, 41–42, 44, 55–56, 64–66, 70, 72–74, 76–79, 82–83, 112–19, 132, 139, 144–45, 152 Jesuits use for Society of Jesus, 20, 186 Jesus Christ, xii, xiv, 15, 69–79, 81–83, 118–21, 129–41, 144–48, 152–53, 155–57, 161, 163, 190–91, 242, 244, 258–61, 264, 280 Jews, 10, 12, 36, 45, 69–70, 75–78, 83, 89, 105, 113–18, 132–34, 138, 140–41 Joas, Hans, 17n1, 171, 182n6 John Paul II, Pope use for JPII, 193, 199n40, 320 John the Baptist (biblical fgure), 70, 72, 129, 144, 149n9 Jones, Robert P., 188, 197n12, 198n13 Judaism, 33, 35–36, 76, 114, 117–18, 296 Judeo-Christian, 10–12, 248 Kerwin, Donald M., 127n30, 183n14, 184n33, 197n2, 198n28 Keval, Susanna, 287, 299n14 Kim, Sebastian C.H., 166n27, 301n50 Kim-Cragg, HyeRan, 245, 251n1, 253n38 Klepp, Silja, 230, 236n54, 236n62 Koschorke, Klaus, 89, 97n1, 97n3, 97n5 Kulcsár, Laszlo J., 224, 234n9, 234n26, 236n52 Laczko, Frank, 236n58, 266n3 Lagon, Mark P., 178, 183n20 Lampedusa, xvii, 194, 246–47, 255–66 Latin America, xiii, 15, 20–23, 29, 90–92, 94, 96–97

Christian Theology in the Age of Migration : Implications for World Christianity, edited by Peter C. Phan, Lexington Books, 2020.

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Leckie, Scott, 222, 232, 234n11, 235n43, 236n65 Leuchter, Mark, 67n12, 126n23 Liturgy, xvii, 94, 239, 241, 244–51, 264, 266. See also Mass Luhmann, Niklas, 52, 66n6 Macquarrie, John, 102, 124n5 Marshall, Paul, 250, 254n58 Mary (biblical fgure), 94, 245–46, 255, 279 Mass, xvii, 194, 201, 246, 256, 259, 261, 263, 281. See also liturgy mass migration(s), xi, 4, 53, 63, 107–9, 111, 169 Massey, Douglas, 37, 48n23 Mayblin, Maya, 30, 31n20 Mbenga, Bernard, 47, 49nn38–39 McAdam, Jane, 223, 231, 234n10, 234nn16–18, 236n60 media, 4, 16, 257, 290, 296 Medieval history. See Middle Ages Mediterranean, 15, 66, 78, 117, 195, 246, 255–57, 259, 262–63, 265 Messiah, 69–73, 75–76, 78, 83, 129–31, 136, 145–46, 248 Mexican(s), 11, 13, 25, 28–29 Mexico, x–xi, 26, 28–29, 185–86, 192, 201, 278 Michel, Virgil, 241, 252n Middle Ages use for Medieval history, xiii, 89, 94 Miller, David, 204–6, 210, 214, 217, 219nn4–5, 219n12, 220n16 Miller, Mark J., xixn3, 164n1, 252n2, 267n13 minorities, 8, 10, 13, 188, 247 Mishra, Pankaj, 247, 253n46 missionary, missionaries, xiii, 5, 20–21, 24, 29, 73, 77–80, 89–91, 94–96, 186 Mitchell, Nathan D., 249, 254nn54–55 Moral majoity, 10, 13 Murphy, Roland E., 49n36, 124n6 Muslim(s), ix, xiii, 6–7, 13–14, 105, 158–59, 196, 287–89, 291, 293

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Myers, Ched, 126n25, 198n15 Napolitani, Valentina, vii, x–xi, 30n1, 31n11, 31n15 native(s), 5–6, 90, 94, 96, 106, 109, 121, 123, 135, 137–38, 140, 279 New Jersey, ix, 9, 277, 280 New Testament, xii–xiv, 35, 54, 62, 69, 75, 77, 80–81, 83–84, 89, 125, 130– 32, 135, 141, 144–45, 190, 250–51 New York, 9, 151–52, 160, 163, 174, 270, 277–78, 281 Nguyễn, vănThanh, vii, xi–xiii, 84nn6–7, 86n23, 86n25, 86n34, 149n12 non-Christians, xiv, 76, 96, 155, 158, 163 North Africa, 94, 245–46, 255, 279 Noth, Martin, 47n1, 52, 125n11 nun(s) use for religious sisters, 11, 22, 25–29, 186 Obama, Barack 8, 12–13, 18n21, 186, 222 Old Testament. See Hebrew Bible Oliver-Smith, Anthony, 224, 235n28 O'Neill, William, 198n14, 198n28, 259, 267n18 Orthodox Churches includes Syrian Orthodox Church, Russian Orthodox Church, Greek Orthodox Church, 91–92, 153, 249, 279, 287 Otto, Rudolf, 281, 283n14, 284n15 Pacem in Terris, 182n10, 199n33, 199n36, 200n40 Padilla, Elaine, 165n13, 252n13, 301n47 Paul, the Apostle, 15, 62, 78–79, 81, 89, 105, 138 Pecoud, Antoine, 234n17, 236n63 Phan, Peter C., xiii–xiv, 81, 84n2, 86n24, 86n28, 86n33, 129, 131, 137, 148n5, 156, 165n13, 241–43, 252nn9–10, 252n13, 252n20, 301n47, 301n49

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Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 171, 182n5 Piguet, Etienne, 224, 234n17, 234nn24–25, 236n58, 236n63 Pilch, John J., 124n6, 125n14 Pistone, Michele R., 183n18, 198n28 Pius XII, Pope, 198n16, 199n33 pluralism, 6, 8, 10, 55, 276–77 politics, 161–62, 173, 190, 219, 222, 230, 251, 274, 286, 289–90 poverty, 21, 176, 194, 213, 215, 229, 259–60, 274 priest(s), xi, xiv, 22, 25–30, 61, 64, 91–92, 110–11, 115, 118, 130–34, 141–42, 144–48, 191, 261 Prior, John M., 84n7, 149n12 Protestant(s), xiii, 6, 8, 10–11, 13, 90–91, 94, 146, 188, 243–44, 248 Raboteau, Albert J., x, 279–80, 283n12 race(s), 11, 13–14, 36, 58, 83–84, 229, 264–65 Rad, Gerhard von, 40, 49n28 Rahner, Karl, 124n3, 126n27, 251, 254n61 Rajan, Sudhir Chella, 223, 225, 234n13, 235n30, Rajendra, Tisha, 202, 208, 219n9, 220n15 Ralston, Joshua, 157, 165n17, 165n20, 252n1, 268n44 Rawls, John, 296, 301n52 Rebetez, Martine, 232, 236n63 refugee(s), ix–xii, xiv, xvi–xvii, 5, 15–17, 33, 42, 57, 71–73, 82, 83, 92, 101, 107, 112, 130, 133–36, 147, 151–52, 156–57, 159, 161, 163–64, 169, 171, 173–74, 176, 178–80, 185–86, 190, 192, 196, 205, 207, 212–17, 221, 223, 226, 230–31, 239–40, 242, 246–47, 255–57, 261–66, 270–73, 286–88, 290–93 Regan, Ronald, 10–11 religion(s), vii, x, xi, xiv, xviii–xix, 3, 5–6, 8–17, 19, 46–47, 88, 90, 94–96,

114, 117, 146, 160, 163, 200, 202, 204, 244, 273, 285–97 religious pluralism, 6, 10, 277 religious sister. See nun(s) Roman Catholics. See Catholic(s) Roman Empire, xiii, 70, 76, 78, 84, 93–94, 239 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 10–11, 18n12 Russia, 7, 91–92 Sassen, Saskia, x, 67n25, 165n15, 203, 219n2, 221, 233n5, 240, 252n6, 269, 283n1 Sauer, Martina, 298n9, 299n23 Schmiedel, Ulrich, xiv, 164n4, 165n22, 298n6 Scripture (Hebrew Bible and/or New Testament), 102, 180, 189–90, 243, 265, 281 Second Vatican Council use for Vatican II, 16, 171 Senior, Donald, 84n8, 85n20, 190, 198n14, 198n17, 198n19 Senn, Frank C., 249, 254n53 Seters, John Van, 60, 67n23, 125n11 settlements, 3, 270–73 Shannon, Thomas, 198n23, 199n36 Shershow, Scott Cutler, 172, 182n7 Shigeru, Ban, 274–75, 283n8 Simperingham, Ezekiel, 234n11, 235n43 sin(s), 15, 25, 44, 57, 65, 73, 122, 135, 138, 144–45, 147, 193–95, 261 slavery, xiii, 35–36, 39–41, 43, 107–9, 133, 135, 141 Smith, Graeme, 165n22, 298n6 Snyder, Susanna, 158, 165n17, 165n21, 183n14, 252n1, 266, 268n44 social justice, xv, 143, 147, 192, 241 Society of Jesus. See Jesuits solidarity, xiii, xv–xvi, 84, 104, 121, 162, 181, 195–96, 202, 224, 230–31, 246, 258–59, 265–66, 282, 296 South Africa, vii, x, 47, 91, 96, 169 Soviet Union use for USSR, 5, 92

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Spohn, William C., 191, 198n18, 198n24 Stålsett, Sturla J., 165n24, 298n6 Strain, Charles R., 183n14, 200n48 Suna-Koro, Kristine, vii, x, xvii, 253n41 Syria, x, xviii, 83, 169, 173, 247, 269–70, 272–74, 276, 278–82

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Tanakh. See Hebrew Bible Tanner, Norman P., 124n9, 127n28, 148n3 Taylor, Charles, 166n26, 296, 301n53 Temporary Protected Status, 176, 185 Texas, 9, 188, 196, 201 theological anthropology, xv, 170, 241 Thompson, Thomas L., 58, 125n11 Thornton, Fanny, 225, 235nn28–29 Thornton, John K., 90, 97n2 Tillich, Paul, 281, 283n13 traffcking, 175, 178 Trainor, Michael F., 71, 84nn3–4 Troeltsch, Ernst, 152, 164n4 Tuccio, Franco, xvii–xviii, 256–57, 262–63, 267n8, 268n31 Trump, Donald, ix, xv, 7–8, 13–14, 185, 187–88, 196–98, 201, 204, 211, 308, 313, 316, 321 Turkey, ix, 5, 7, 14, 105 Tveit, Olav Fykse, xiv, 160–62, 166nn29–30 Tweed, Thomas A., 23, 31n13 undocumented immigrants. See immigrants United Nations, x, 156, 160, 169, 223, 278, 281 United States of America, x–xi, xvi, 4–5, 7–9, 11–15, 38, 90–92, 94, 174, 176, 185–88, 192, 194, 202, 204, 207–8, 211, 215, 218, 280

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USSR. See Soviet Union Vatican II. See Second Vatican Council Vietnam, 9–10, 192 violence, x, 5, 29–30, 118, 175, 204, 259–60, 269, 290 Volf, Miroslav, 36, 48nn19–20 voluntary migration, 64, 177, 222, 224, 287 Walls, Andrew, 90, 97n3 war(s), ix, 5–6, 8, 10, 14, 25–26, 29, 69–70, 82, 91–92, 117–18, 169–71, 175, 177, 192, 239, 247, 250, 256, 270, 272, 272, 291 Wellhausen, Julius, 52, 108, 125n11, 144, 149n14 Western Europe, 4–6, 20, 22–23–24, 92 Wijngaards, Johannes, 34, 48n6, 48n10 Wilkinson, Emily, 229, 232, 234n21, 236n51, 236n70 Wilson, Robert R., 52, 66n5 women, woman, 13, 23, 25, 28–30, 59, 62, 72, 75–74, 78–79, 88, 106, 109, 115, 133, 140, 144, 178, 186, 191, 194, 196, 229, 255, 289 World Council of Churches, xiv–xv, 160–61, 163 World War II, 9, 6, 14, 91–92, 171, 256 Wyller, Trygve, 18n14, 166n24, 166n30, 166n xenophobia, 148, 195, 240, 286 Yerushalmi, Yosef H., 35–36, 48n15 Yildiz, Erol, 293, 301n39, 301n42 Younger, K. Lawson, Jr., 47, 49n41 Zakovitch, Yair, 34–35, 47n5, 48n11 Zetter, Roger, 223, 234n10, 234n19

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About the Editor and Contributors

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Peter C. Phan, an immigrant from Vietnam to the United States, is the inaugural holder of the Ignacio Ellacuría Chair of Catholic Social Thought at Georgetown University. He has earned three doctorates and has received four honorary doctorates. He has authored and edited more than 40 books and published over 300 essays and book chapters. He is completing a book-length manuscript on the Christian theology of migration (Oxford University Press) and a manuscript on Asian Christian theologies (Wiley-Blackwell). (pcp5@ georgetown.edu) John Ahn is associate professor of Hebrew Bible at Howard University School of Divinity. He is trained in ancient Near Eastern and religious studies. He is interested in social and historical reconstructions of the sixth and ffth centuries BCE, employing classic and recent social theories, including cultural memory, trauma, and generational consciousness to better understand the text’s historical, social, literary (rewriting), and cultural developments of ancient Judah/Israel with ancient and contemporary actualizations. Dr. Ahn is a recognized scholar in the study of the forced and return migrations periods, more commonly known as the exile and return. ([email protected]) William A. Barbieri Jr. teaches in the Religion and Culture and Moral Theology/Ethics programs in the School of Theology and Religious Studies and directs the Peace and Justice Studies Program at the Catholic University of America. He is also a fellow of the Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies and of the Center for the Study of Culture and Values. In addition to his monographs Ethics of Citizenship: Immigration and Group Rights in Germany (Duke University Press, 1998) and Constitutive Justice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), he has edited From Just War to Modern Peace Ethics 335

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About the Editor and Contributors

(with Heinz-Gerhard Justenhoven; De Gruyter, 2012) and At the Limits of the Secular: Refections on Faith and Public Life (Eerdmans 2104). He has also published articles in the areas of human rights, comparative ethics, peace studies, Catholic social teaching, and German studies. ([email protected]) Hendrik Bosman is an emeritus professor in Old Testament at the Stellenbosch University whose research interest focuses on exegetical, theological, and ethical issues relevant in African contexts. Themes that have recently triggered his interest are the theological interpretation of the book of Exodus as narratives concerning origin and migration that infuence the ongoing negotiation of identity by religious communities, as well as the infuence of nineteenth-century imperialism on migrations in Southern Africa. hlb1@sun. ac.za

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Karla Cavarra Britton is professor of Art History at Diné College, the tribal college of the Navajo Nation, located in Tsaile, Arizona. She has previously taught at the Yale School of Architecture, the University of New Mexico, and was director in Paris of Columbia University’s New York/Paris Program. Following studies in comparative literature at Columbia University, she completed her doctorate in architecture from Harvard University. Her work specializes in modern and contemporary architecture and urbanism with an emphasis on sacred architecture and landscapes. Her recent focus is on indigenous design, arts, and planning. She is working on a study of migration, sacred form, and modern architecture for the Brill series in Arts and Religion. Among her publications are the monograph Auguste Perret (Phaidon Press, 2001), and she edited Constructing the Ineffable: Contemporary Sacred Architecture (Yale School of Architecture, 2010). kmbritton@ dinecollege.edu Ciprian Burlacioiu is lecturer in Church History and World Christianity at the University of Munich, Germany. He holds a PhD from the Faculty for Orthodox Theology in Bucharest, Romania. His past work engaged with transatlantic links between the United States and Africa in the early twentieth century, with one focus on nonmissionary Christian networks through the spread of secular and religious journals. Currently, he works on a larger project on migration, involving case studies from different historical periods, different branches of Christianity, and exploring the way these were exposed over time to the reality of migration and diaspora. ([email protected]) Reverend Seforosa Carroll, a woman of many talents and gifts, is a mother, church minister, theologian, social activist, and academic. Dr. Carroll is a research fellow with the Contextual and Public Theology Research Centre

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and a visiting lecturer at the School of Theology (North Parramatta Campus), Charles Sturt University. Seforosa does research in religious pluralism, migration, gender, and cultural studies. Her current research project at the Centre of Theological Inquiry, Princeton, is on religion and migration, specifcally climate-induced migration and the role of faith in the Pacifc. (sefc@ bigpond.com) José Casanova is one of the world’s top scholars in the sociology of religion. He is a professor in the Department of Sociology and Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Georgetown University and senior fellow at the Berkley Center, where his work focuses on globalization, religions, and secularization. Casanova’s most recent research has focused primarily on two areas: globalization and religion, and the dynamics of transnational religion, migration, and increasing ethno-religious and cultural diversity. (jvc26@ georgetown.edu)

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Daniel G. Groody, CSC is an associate professor of Theology and Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame and the director of the Global Leadership Program within the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, where he is also a faculty fellow. He is a Catholic priest, a Holy Cross religious, and an award-winning professor, author, and flm producer. Drawing on years of work on international migration and refugee issues, Groody has worked with the US Congress, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, the World Council of Churches, the Vatican, and the United Nations on issues of theology, globalization, migration, and refugees. ([email protected]) Kristin E. Heyer is Professor of Theology at Boston College. She has a B.A. degree from Brown University and holds a Ph.D. in Theological Ethics from Boston College in 2003. Her books include Kinship Across Borders: A Christian Ethic of Immigration (2012) and Prophetic and Public: The Social Witness of U.S. Catholicism (2006), which won the College Theology Society’s “Best Book Award.” She has also published the coedited volumes Conscience and Catholicism: Rights, Responsibilities and Institutional Responses (2015) and Catholics and Politics: Dynamic Tensions between Faith and Power (2008). Her articles have appeared in Theological Studies, The Journal of Catholic Social Thought, The Journal of Peace and Justice Studies, Political Theology, and America. Dr. Heyer serves on the board of Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church and she is an editor for Georgetown University Press’ Moral Traditions series. ([email protected]) Kanan Kitani is a professor of Theology at Graduate School of Theology. Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan. She holds a doctorate in Theology from

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About the Editor and Contributors

Doshisha University with a dissertation on freedom of speech and religious censorship. Her research interests include global migration, world Christianity, ecumenism, and Asian Christianity, on which she has published widely. Dr. Kitani has been an active member of the Christian Conference of Asia, the World Council of Churches, and the Congress of Asian Theologians. She has done postdoctoral research at the University of Jena, Germany, and at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. ([email protected]) Joshua Mauldin is associate director at the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, New Jersey. From 2014 to 2015, he was a junior research fellow in a program on Law and Religious Freedom at CTI. In 2014, he received a research grant from Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD) for archival research in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. Joshua holds a Ph.D. in Religious Ethics from Southern Methodist University, and his research interests include law and religion, religious freedom, and religion in China. ([email protected])

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Valentina Napolitano is professor of Anthropology and Connaught scholar, at the University of Toronto. In her work Migrant Hearts and the Atlantic Return: Transnationalism and the Roman Catholic Church (Fordham University Press, 2016), she examines Latin American contemporary migration to Rome in the context of Catholic Church’s historical desires and anxieties around conversion since the period of colonization and how, against an Eurocentric notion of Catholic identity, the Americas are now reorienting Europe. Napolitano’s expertise focuses on Critical Catholic Studies, Anthropology of Traces, Anthropology and Theology, Affects, Migration and Borderlands, and Gendered Subjectivities. ([email protected]) vănThanh Nguyễn, S.V.D., is professor of New Testament Studies and holder of the Bishop Francis Xavier Ford, M.M., Chair of Catholic Missiology at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, Illinois. He is the author of Peter and Cornelius: A Story of Conversion and Mission (2012) and Stories of Early Christianity (2013), and coeditor of God’s People on the Move: Biblical and Global Perspectives on Migration and Mission (2014) and Missionary Discipleship in ‘Glocal’ Contexts (2018). He has contributed numerous peer-reviewed articles and chapters in books. He also writes, speaks, and directs retreats for a general audience. ([email protected]) Ulrich Schmeidel is lecturer in Theology, Politics and Ethics at the School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh, specializing in political and public theology. He also serves as deputy director of the Centre for Theology and Public Issues, where he is responsible for the research strand on politics. Prior

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to his appointment at Edinburgh, Ulrich was Lecturer in Systematic Theology at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in Munich, Germany. He completed his doctorate in theology at the University of Oxford, after studying theology, sociology, and hermeneutics. In addition to political and public theology, Ulrich has worked and written on theology, anthropology, ecclesiology, and the history of theology, particularly with regard to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is the author of Elasticized Ecclesiology: The Concept of Community after Ernst Troeltsch (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) as well as the coeditor of Religion in the European Refugee Crisis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Religious Experience Revisited: Expressing the Inexpressible? (Brill, 2017), and Dynamics of Difference: Christianity and Alterity (Bloomsbury, 2016). ([email protected]) Reverend Kristine Suna-Koro is an associate professor of Theology at Xavier University, Cincinnati, Ohio, United States. She is a Latvian-American diasporic theologian working at the intersection of postcolonialism, liturgical, and sacramental studies as well as migration and diaspora discourses and pastor in the Latvian Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. At Xavier University, she teaches in felds of modern historical theology, theology of migration, liturgical-sacramental studies, pastoral theology, as well as diversity studies. She is the author of In Counterpoint: Diaspora, Postcoloniality, and Sacramental Theology (Pickwick, 2017) as well as of numerous articles and book chapters on sacramentality and liturgy, constructive postcolonial theology, diasporic imagination, theological aesthetics, and theology of migration. She currently serves as the cochair of Religion, Borders, and Immigration Seminar at the American Academy of Religion and as the Delegate for Membership of the North American Academy of Liturgy Her recent scholarly activities include participation in the Center of Theological Inquiry, Princeton, New Jersey, Global Concerns—Religion and Migration inquiry with a presentation on liturgy, migration, and justice as well as lecture on postcolonial sacramentality at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and keynote presentation at the European Society of Women in Theological Research (ESWTR). ([email protected]) Kathrin Winkler is a Lutheran pastor and a professor for religious studies and religious education at the Lutheran University in Nuremberg/Germany. Her research focus is on signifcance of religion in Western immigrant societies including the following topics: religion, identity, and otherness in postmigrant societies, religion as a resource of value orientation and common good, religious education as a prevention measures for extremism and religious radicalization, religious communities and religious networks of migrants as civil actors, and the relevance of religion in the public sphere.

Christian Theology in the Age of Migration : Implications for World Christianity, edited by Peter C. Phan, Lexington Books, 2020.

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About the Editor and Contributors

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Methodologically, she works with social research methods especially qualitative social research methods and hermeneutical procedures. Currently, she is working on a research project, in which she presents compiled results about religion, culture, and migration at schools. In 2018, she was a research fellow on “Religion and Migration” at the Center of Theological Inquiry, Princeton University. ([email protected])

Christian Theology in the Age of Migration : Implications for World Christianity, edited by Peter C. Phan, Lexington Books, 2020.