Christian Scriptural Perspectives on Refugees

Abstract

Christian Scriptural Perspectives on Refugees Peter A. Pettit This exploration must begin with the recollection that my childhood was shaped in part by the very real presence of immigrants—economic refugees. In the late 1950s, my grandparents stepped up as members of a Lutheran congregation that wanted to sponsor a Lutheran refugee family from Germany. A specific family was needed to be the sponsors, and my grandparents volunteered to be that family. Was it because my maternal great‐grandfather had come to America in the late nineteenth century, saying—as my grandmother once told me—“he wouldn't fight in the Kaiser's stupid wars?” I never thought to ask about their motivation. At some point in my preschool years, though, we welcomed a German war veteran and his wife into our extended family. The veteran had been captured on both the Eastern and Western fronts and had spent time in Soviet and American POW camps. Struggling in the difficult post‐war German economy, he and his wife as a young couple chose to seek their future in the United States. Very soon they had a child, adding one more to our extended family. The veteran is now retired from a distinguished career as a professor of German language and culture at a number of colleges up and down the East Coast; his wife died some years ago. But at my grandparents’ dining room table, at Thanksgiving or just on a random Sunday afternoon, they were very much like cousins to us. The idea of kindness and support for the alien first came to me not only as mother's milk in my family; it came also as gospel truth from our church. Grounding that truth in scripture can take a number of different turns. My research has taken me into the literature of the refugee advocacy community and the official documents of the Protestant and Roman Catholic churches as well as my own searching of Christian scripture for relevant themes. There is not a lot of variation among the denominations or the advocacy groups; many of the same materials turn up time and time again. With regard to scriptural sources that address our relationship with refugees, I would suggest that three broad clusters can be identified. These are distinguished from one another by the character of each of the three parties involved in a divinely guided encounter between oneself and a refugee: Our relationship with refugees can be grounded in who we are; it can be grounded in who the other is; and it can be grounded in who God is. Beyond the question of the direct encounter with refugees, we also can explore the scriptural sources relating to the conditions which drive refugees from their homes and create the conditions that they face. We will begin with the direct encounter and its three points of grounding. Encountering refugees on the basis of our identity The first cluster of sources speaks to our character as people of God and the way in which it defines our relationship to those who have been dislocated from their homes. Within this first cluster, we can further discern three sets of sources that characterize the people of God in somewhat different dimensions. For some, we are a people descended from refugees. The International Association for Refugees has compiled a list of nearly thirty biblical characters, plus the collective people Israel, who are in some sense refugees. Many of these come easily to mind from familiar biblical stories, even if the label “refugee” is not one we might choose first to identify the characters: Adam and Eve, Cain, Jacob and his eleven sons, Naomi, and Ruth. Less obvious figures like David and Jeremiah are included. Within the New Testament, Philip and Peter and Aquila and Priscilla are all also identified as refugees at some point, fleeing persecution. Even if it seems a bit of a stretch to include Noah fleeing the flood or Jonah fleeing God's word or the midrashically driven account of the infant Jesus fleeing Herod, there is ample evidence that Christians can be considered, spiritually if not genetically, the descendants of people who needed refuge. A second dimension of this...