Geotheology

Reflections on the Lectionary for June 11th

Abram and Sarai set off for Canaan, by Crispijn van de Passe, ca 1700-1750. Held at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Public domain, taken from Wikimedia.

There’s a story that stretches through most of the Hebrew Bible: the story of God’s liberating works of deliverance on behalf of Israel. This story pops up nearly everywhere: in Israel’s bondage in Egypt and the liberation of the exodus, in conflicts with regional superpowers (like Babylon and Assyria) and their impacts on everyday people, in the struggle to establish rules for a just and functional society, in the twists and turns of royal machinations, and in songs and sayings celebrating and lamenting all of those things. Almost at every turn, the Hebrew Bible is telling its story as a chronicle of God’s saving work, always pointing toward justice and freedom. Or, at least, that’s what we like to think.

The reality is a lot more complicated. The bible is never only doing one thing, and it’s never pointing in only one direction; it’s an archive of hundreds of years and uncounted people’s experiences of the world, and so it nearly always holds multiple perspectives at once. (This is why you should always be suspicious of anyone who claims that “the bible says” anything, because chances are good that it does not really say that, and/or that it also says the opposite, and anyway “the bible” is not the stable and univocal thing that we might assume it is). If the bible tells a story of justice and liberation, it’s a good bet that it also carries a counter-story that undermines that same justice and liberation. If it holds up a hero, chances are good that it also tells us about that hero’s flaws. If the bible follows one protagonist, it always pays to look around and see whose story isn’t being told, who is footing the bill for the protagonist’s glory, and which alternative stories are simply not part of the narrative.

A great example of this comes in this week’s lectionary reading from Genesis 12:1-9, which might seem like a straightforward tale about God’s patronage and providence, but begins to become more complicated as soon as you look more closely:

Now the Lord said to Abram, "Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed."

So Abram went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. Abram took his wife Sarai and his brother's son Lot, and all the possessions that they had gathered, and the persons whom they had acquired in Haran; and they set forth to go to the land of Canaan. When they had come to the land of Canaan,

Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. Then the Lord appeared to Abram, and said, "To your offspring I will give this land." So he built there an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him. From there he moved on to the hill country on the east of Bethel, and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east; and there he built an altar to the Lord and invoked the name of the Lord. And Abram journeyed on by stages toward the Negeb.

Here we meet one of the great heroes of ancient Israel, Abraham (called Abram in this passage), and his wife Sarah (Sarai) and their nephew Lot. In this story, Abram experiences God’s call, as a command to leave home and to make a journey to a new land. As part of this call, God promises to make a great nation out of Abram, to bless him and Sarai, to multiply their descendants, and to give to them the land to which they were traveling.

Sounds great, right? The rest of the Hebrew Bible certainly thinks so; Abram and Sarai go on to see God’s promise fulfilled. They produce descendants, give rise to the nation of Israel, and come to occupy the land of Canaan, either by settling there and intermingling with the Canaanites, or by obliterating the Canaanites in a war of conquest, depending on which biblical account you follow. The descendants of Abraham and Sarah go on to establish a monarchy under David and his heirs, and to rule the medium-sized kingdom of Israel, and then later the somewhat-smaller kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The rest of the Hebrew Bible follows this story in one way or another, taking readers along for the ups and downs of things. The patronage of God and the ways God intervenes in history to further the interests of Abram and Sarai and their family is the through-line of the whole story—both the cause and the effect of Israel’s story about itself.

But no story is ever that simple, and if you look closely at the passage quoted above, you’ll see what I mean. The first clue comes in 12:5, in which “Abram took his wife Sarai and his brother’s son Lot, and all the possessions that they had gathered, and the persons whom they had acquired in Haran; and they set forth to go to the land of Canaan.” What do they mean, “the persons they had acquired in Haran?”

There is a cottage industry online, if you do a little googling, of people trying to explain away the obvious meaning of this passage. Some claim that Abram and Sarai would not have owned slaves, since they were righteous followers of God. (This perspective ignores, essentially, the entirety of the biblical text, which presumes and even defends the practice of slavery from start to finish). Others claim that if Abram and Sarai owned slaves, then that form of slavery must not have been very harsh or oppressive, given the later legal materials that seem to offer some protections to slaves. (That perspective actually comes out of 19^th-century American abolitionist arguments, which sought to portray biblical slavery as less severe than American slavery was—often going so far as to claim that it was voluntary and benevolent—as a way to highlight the horrors of the American system. While it might have been an effective rhetorical strategy in the 1800s, it has left a lot of incorrect “knowledge” about ancient practices of slavery, which, yes, were horrific). Some even say that the “souls” (as other translations put it) that they “acquired” were followers or disciples of Abram, not slaves. But this is all special pleading, meant to protect the image and reputation of heroic figures. The meaning of the text seems plain enough to me: that Abram and Sarai took their household with them, which would have included not only relatives like Lot but also a cadre of people they had enslaved.

So from the beginning, this story of God’s calling seems to be a story of God’s calling for some, but not all. That’s true on even a surface level, of course—God calls Abram and Sarai to Canaan, not does not call everyone, and the calling of one family implies the not-calling of all the other ones. But there’s something more specific and insidious about the idea that God might have called that one family, promising great things to its descendants, and at the same time left in place a system of exploitation and oppression for other people and families that were tied to the one God chose.

A similar story unfolds in other places in the passage. In 12:1, God promises to lead Abram and Sarai to “the land that I will show you,” and in 12:7, when they had arrived in Canaan, God tells Abram that “to your offspring I will give this land.” Only a verse earlier we are told that “in that time the Canaanites were in the land,” so it was not some empty place. It was a promised land to Abram and Sarai and their descendants and their God, but it was a homeland to the Canaanites, and a foreign deity had just given it away.

Quite a few scholars have noted the similarities between the story of Israel’s conquest of Canaan and the story of the European conquest of North America. Early European settlers noticed the similarities too; they often thought of themselves as being on a holy and divinely-sanctioned mission to settle the New World, and they thought of the people who were already settled there as savages, uncivilized people, and peoples who ought to be converted, subdued, or destroyed, in a way that’s parallel to the way the bible describes the Canaanites and Israel’s conquest of them. The Doctrine of Discovery is a blanket term for a whole host of ideas and legal structures that authorized this way of thinking; you can see it in action in the 1452 papal bull Dum Diversas, which Pope Nicholas the fifth issued to allow Europeans to “reduce…to perpetual servitude” the native people they encountered in their explorations, and in the 1493 bull by Pope Alexander the sixth, Inter Caetera, which ceded newly discovered lands to various European powers—as if the church had the innate right to do so. These and many other legal, religious, and social structures authorized the conquest of the Americas, and scholars like Robert Warrior and my former colleague Tink Tinker have noted the similarities in religious rhetoric that the settler colonialism of Europeans shared with that of Abram and his heirs. (Tinker’s book Missionary Conquest is a good account of the latter end of this effort, and it will make any Christian rethink their own histories and vocabularies of mission work).

Warrior’s work in particular has been helpful in shifting the way I think about the story of Israel as one of liberation. On the one hand, the story of Israel’s relationship with God is a story of liberation. The exodus story in particular is about God intervening in history on behalf of a chosen people. Many people, African-Americans among them, see this as a paradigmatic story about how God is a justice-seeking advocate for oppressed peoples everywhere. The exodus from Egypt has come to stand in for journeys to freedom for many different people in many different contexts, including the American civil rights movement. That’s how I have usually read the story, since a lot of my formation and education has come in institutions that have been informed by that movement. But Warrior (along with others) asks us to think about the story from the perspective of the Canaanites, whose land was stolen from them and who were decimated as a people in the process—at least if we believe the biblical narratives. Sure, the bible offers reasons for why this is ok—God decreed it, for starters, and also the text is careful to tell us a lot of times how wicked the Canaanites were—but from our perspective in the 21^st century where we believe, at least in the abstract, that stealing land and killing people is wrong, the biblical narrative about Canaan is hard to defend. When viewed from the perspective of the Canaanites, the events described in books like Joshua can be understood as genocide. Warrior, who is a Native American scholar, draws the obvious parallel. The genocidal actions against Canaanites were used as an excuse for the genocidal actions against Native Americans, and in both cases the bible was there to authorize and theologize the violence.

Where does that leave us with this passage from Genesis? It’s complicated. Passages like this one have reverberated in times and places well beyond ancient Canaan, up to and including the so-called “New World” and the European settlement of it. And of course, passages like this one continue to be a part of an ongoing territorial dispute in Palestine, where divine claims to land stand alongside ancestral claims, military claims, and squatters’ claims, producing new cycles of violence and dispossession. In the United States, Christians tend to think of this kind of promise of a new land as a grand and glorious thing, because we understand ourselves as part of just such a grant of divinely-given land. We see Manifest Destiny in a passage like this one, even if we don’t mean to, and we tend to aggrandize this kind of theological claim because we ourselves have benefitted from it. But less often do we stop and consider the effects of this way of thinking.

It's common to think of land as political; we talk about geopolitics all the time. But land is also theological. What would a geotheology look like? What would it mean to try to think theologically about land in a just and equitable way? How would we go about putting right our relationships with land and the peoples who belong to those lands? Those are very large and complex questions, and they might seem impossibly daunting. But the bible itself puts them front and center, and if you’re a Christian of European descent living in North America, your own history puts those questions front and center too. We can’t undo the past, but we can work to live differently in the future. If God can call Abram and Sarai to a new and faraway land, then God can also call us to better relationships with land and people. Our sacred texts might ensconce injustice into theology, but that doesn’t mean we are bound to perpetuate that injustice forever. Perhaps if we listen, we can discern a new and different call, not to possess someone else’s land, but to imagine what a just geotheology might lead us to change about ourselves, our relationship to land, and our relationships to people.