Abraham: The Utopia of Migration,Resilience,and the Search for Liberation

The Utopia of Migration

When I first went to Brazil in the early 1990s, I helped with a youth group that was part of a Catholic community ¹⁹ in a town on the outskirts of the city of Belo Horizonte, where I was studying. This community was itself on the margins of this town, at the time well over an hour from the centre of Belo Horizonte by bus. Of the twenty or so young people who participated in the youth group, mainly aged at the time between about fourteen and twenty, none had been born in the community. I mention this as a small anecdotal illustration of the reality of the scope of internal migration in Latin America. Where sixty years ago, the majority of the population still lived in the countryside, now some 87% are living in urban areas. ²⁰ Although the nature of migration has changed in the course of that period, and for obvious reasons it is not progressing at quite the same rate, people are still moving to or between larger areas of population. ²¹

The pull of urban migration has been a significant factor in life in Latin America since roughly the middle of the twentieth century, and has been a shaping feature in the life of the vast majority of Latin Americans. To describe this pull as utopic may seem an exaggeration, at least if by “utopic” we were to understand something unrealistic or unrealisable. Here, however, I will work with the understanding of the Brazilian theologian João Batista Libanio, for whom utopia has a double etymology. It describes the hoped-for good place (eu-topos) at the same time as it critiques its absence (ouk-topos). ²² Thus, there can still be a utopic dream, even if it could be argued that living standards did improve in many parts of Latin America. In Brazil, at least between about 2004 and 2015, there was a significant decrease in the number of those living in absolute poverty, even if the presidential period of Jair Bolsonaro saw an increase again. ²³ The precariousness of rural life, especially in those parts of the continent which are semi-arid, ²⁴ has been replaced by at least a minimal level of very basic life in the city. People may be and often are malnourished, but they are much less likely to die of starvation in a city. Again, anecdotally, in the community where I worked, each time I returned, at least until 2019, more homes were finished, there were better facilities, people had a little more money, and were marginally more satisfied with their lives. And even if in the period between 2019 and 2022 there was a recession in living standards, most people have a better life in the city than they did before. In this sense, if not a promised land, the city is at least an upgrade on rural life.

And yet of course that is not the only side of the story. Violence has grown over the past fifty years or so. This, as Maria Clara Bingemer noted some years ago, is one of the most pressing problems also for liberation theology. ²⁵ Alejandro Ortiz, a Mexican writer, argued in a fairly recent contribution, that in considering “the principal themes that the theology of liberation should be reflecting on because of their vital importance in the life of impoverished peoples, there is no doubt that one of these themes is violence.” ²⁶ Of course, violence was always a theme for liberation theology, but more as something inflicted on and suffered by the poor. However, a number of changes have occurred. This “originary” violence ²⁷ has produced its results, with generations growing up mired in the results of violence inflicted on their parents and on them as children. Social reality is constructed on a base of violence, something that at the time of writing is seen on a daily basis in the United States under its current president and his associates, but also, for example, in Argentina with its own “chainsaw-wielding” president. One of Ortiz’s conclusions, of relevance to this article, is that one of the theological responses to this reality is in supporting pastoral practices of resilience. ²⁸ And one way we can do that, I would suggest, is by reflecting on the story of Abraham, much of whose life is spent confronted by violence and calls to violence.

Alongside the violence and not unrelated to it, most Latin American cities have grown in an unplanned way. Thus infrastructure was and in many places still is lacking, in terms of such basic services as sewage, electricity, clean water, waste disposal, whilst transport and other essential services struggle to catch up with the number of people. ²⁹ Jobs are ill-paid and insecure, ³⁰ and the education system is not able to cope with all the children who need teaching. Long hours and the need to travel to work from distant peripheries means that, even with the will, the chance to maintain or rebuild the relational support networks that helped in the countryside are disappearing.

So why did people migrate, and why do they still do so? The reasons are varied, but they coalesce around the desire for a better life; for more security; for the chance to improve, however the individual understands that, and whatever she or he thinks it includes. ³¹ Here it is worth recalling that resilience, as Gail Theisen-Womersley has argued, is often linked to the ability to imagine otherwise. ³² She insists that this process is a collective one, so that resilience is not purely, or necessarily even primarily, an individual process. In the context of both Abraham and Latin America this is vitally important, for Abraham does not travel alone, and the traumas of migration are not experienced simply on an individual level. Thus the response is also one that is at least collective. In part this is because, as Theisen-Womersley puts it, migration “is motivated by an (often collective, culturally-informed) imagination of a future beyond the here-and-now.” ³³ Or, in the language I have been using, migration includes both a utopic element, and, as the expression “beyond the here-and-now” perhaps suggests, a transcendent, even eschatological, element.

This desired future, at least in a Latin American context, is primarily to be viewed in socio-economic terms, if both the social and economic are understood to carry equal weight. It is not simply base economic reasons—to earn more money—even if of course that is an incentive, especially given that almost half of rural workers live in poverty, with over a fifth still living in absolute poverty. ³⁴ But the social reasons are also important, including the desire for better living conditions, some kind of minimal safety net, better opportunities for children, better access (even if still very limited) to healthcare, and so on. Although the social support networks may often be missing to the extent that they are present in the rural areas, most people tend to migrate to somewhere where they already have relatives or people they know. ³⁵

The question of where religious faith fits in all this is a complex one. ³⁶ In most of Latin America urbanisation has not so far been accompanied, as it was in much of Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, by a huge reduction in the number of people claiming to be Christian, even if the kind of churches people belong to has changed dramatically, especially with the growth of neo-Pentecostal churches. These churches are a classic urban phenomenon, both in terms of their marketing, but also in terms of their adoption of theologies of prosperity, ³⁷ which seek to realise the utopia of migration, so that the dream of moving to a better life in the city can start to come true. But in seeking to make the utopia come true, they create the problems that always occur when attempts are undertaken to realise utopias. In many cases they are exclusive and can only succeed at the expense of the other, and they demand an attachment that destroys freedom. If the short-term trade-off seems worthwhile, the longer-term consequences are more problematic. ³⁸

The Search for Liberation

This brings us to the question of the search for liberation. Although at a purely intuitive level, what liberation theologians mean by liberation is contextually easy to grasp, it has often struggled to articulate this meaning. This was already pointed out by one of the founding fathers of liberation theology, Jose Comblin, in the 1990s. ³⁹ Before I go on to look in somewhat more detail at this question, focusing especially on liberation in an urban setting, which is that of the migrant today, I want to return briefly to the classic division of Isaiah Berlin. In his terms, liberation theologians have been easily able to state the negative liberty that is being sought, the escape from the privations imposed by the action of other human beings: “You lack political liberty or freedom”, says Berlin, “only if you are prevented from attaining a goal by human beings.” ⁴⁰ Thus, liberation theologians could talk of oppression, injustice, exclusion, the denial of freedom of the one by the other, in a systemic way. ⁴¹ But what about the “positive liberty”? For Berlin, this is, fundamentally, the ability to be in charge of one’s own destiny. For liberation theologians, who would support a less individualist approach, it could be seen rather as the freedom to work with others towards the construction of the Kingdom of God. But, what the Kingdom of God actually is in any concrete form always runs the risk of becoming totalitarian, as Libanio realised in his treatment of utopia referred to above. This risk is indicative, as Berlin notes, of a more general problem. He acknowledges that “we recognize that it is possible, and at times justifiable, to coerce men in the name of some goal (let us say, justice or public health) which they would, if they were more enlightened, themselves pursue, but do not, because they are blind or ignorant or corrupt.” But we can then end up believing that we alone know what is good for the other. As Berlin continues:

Once I take this view, I am in a position to ignore the actual wishes of men or societies, to bully, oppress; torture them in the name, and on behalf, of their ‘real’ selves, in the secure knowledge that whatever is the true goal of man (happiness, performance of duty, wisdom, a just society, self-fulfilment) must be identical with his freedom—the free choice of his ‘true,’ albeit often submerged and inarticulate, self. ⁴²

A liberation theology approach may want to argue for a third more dynamic concept of freedom as a search undertaken by a people on a journey, learning together. It is in the journeying that the meaning and presence of freedom is discovered, rather than in predetermined definitions. We will return to this with Abraham at the end of this article.

This “collective resilience” to the reality of suffering and violence is experienced most frequently today in urban settings, and so now I reflect briefly on the importance of liberation in an urban setting. Despite the fact that it came into being in a time of mass urbanisation, early liberation theology was still more focused on rural questions. A good example of this is in what is now a classic introduction to liberation theology by Leonardo Boff and his brother Clodovis. In expanding on the methodology of liberation theology, the example they choose concerns landless rural workers. ⁴³ This is not to downplay the importance of the problem of rural exclusion, nor to criticise the two authors, but it is to point to the perhaps unequal weight given to the problem of land in a context that was already then becoming heavily urban.

Above I briefly outlined the social reality of urban life in Latin America. To this outline might be added the importance of social media, especially in Brazil, which has one of the highest uses of these networks in the world and has a very high percentage of the population connected to the internet. ⁴⁴ It may be that, in Brazil at least, the term “social media” is not a complete contradiction in terms. Nevertheless, there are signs of a gradual breakdown in social relations and a growing individualisation, which manifests itself in, for example, the growing rate of domestic violence, but also even in the more dynamic nature of urban life, as noted in a recent contribution by a Brazilian theologian Celso Pinto Carias, addressing the issue of the urban world and liberation. ⁴⁵ The response to this must be one that looks, as Carias argues, for liberation in this urban world. Carias proposes what might be termed typical liberation theology approaches, the formation of base communities in different forms (small groups, bible circles, etc.), as one way of working against the breakdown of communities of support. ⁴⁶ It will also require more work on what Juan Luis Segundo called the liberation of theology, from its own history and mode of seeing the world. For Segundo, that this is necessarily ideological is not the problem, but the problem lies in what kind of ideology it supports. ⁴⁷

The reality of liberation for migrants will also be an important element in the ongoing development of liberation theology. Partly because the language of internal migration was not used so much in the past, ⁴⁸ it is only relatively recently that liberation theologians have started to address issues of migration. In an article from 2023, two Brazilian scholars point to the fact that “migration and poverty are constant elements in the formation of the people of Israel.” ⁴⁹ In this sense, the original liberation theology appeal to the story of the Exodus is still relevant, as is the experience of oppression and foreign occupation, leading to poverty, in Judaea and Galilee in the time of Jesus. The authors also quote Marileda Baggio and Luiz Carlos Susin, who write that “today, one of the massive faces of the poor is the migrant and thus all around the world, not just in Latin America or the Americas, this faithfulness to Jesus, to his gospel and to the Kingdom he announced is the preferential option or the priority of the migrant.” ⁵⁰ This preferential option is for migrants who are forced, in the language we saw used about Reginaldo, to go out from their land, with the threat “of dislocation, separation from family, discrimination in the new country, cultural and linguistic barriers and the being made to feel worthless by public authorities”. ⁵¹ And this is a theological problem, because it is a denial of what the human being has been created to be and to become. Liberation theology will speak out against this dehumanisation.

I have now briefly presented the reality of migration and the search for liberation from the perspective of Latin America and with some reference to Latin American liberation theology. Now I want to turn to read the story of Abraham with some of the questions about the utopic nature of migration and the search for liberation and resilience in mind.

Abraham the Migrant

The complex and multi-layered story of Abraham allows for many readings and I certainly do not want to claim that the one I offer here is the only one. But the scriptures are not simply an instruction manual to which we return when all other solutions fail. They can also serve as a challenging dialogue partner, calling us to reflect on our own reality, recognising that for all the obvious contextual differences, the questions that we ask and the problems that we face are united across the centuries and millennia. It is in this spirit that I engage with the story of Abraham, not as an exegete or biblical scholar, but as a Christian theologian with an interest in and commitment to the approach of liberation theology.

The story of Abraham—the story of the Bible, we might say—begins with his conviction that God is commanding him to move on from where he is, to go out. Abraham has lived a relatively settled life in a fairly circumscribed setting, “Ur of the Chaldees.” ⁵² It was a fertile area, with plenty of food to live on and to provide pasture for the flocks. In this respect, at least, Abraham is not specifically an economic migrant, like many of those in Latin America, or one forced to flee because of the threat of violence, the experience of many who undertake forced migration today. But just because it is God who has told him to leave does not make it any easier. Indeed, we are told of the complexity of the operation: “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” (Gen. 12:5). ⁵³ Like many other migrants, Abraham leaves a certain security behind to head off into the unknown.

The emphasis on Abraham’s status as a migrant is found in the description of him through the use of the root gwr, which in its substantive form gēr refers to the “resident alien,” ⁵⁴ the other who has made their home in another land. So, for example, already in Gen 12:10, we are told that Abraham goes down to sojourn (lägûr) in Egypt, or as the Septuagint translates it, paroikēsai, to live as a stranger, on the margins. He is, in other words, an alien, someone who does not “belong.” And with that not belonging and the fear and uncertainty that goes along with it there are signs that Abraham, however rich he may be, is not entirely free, either outwardly or inwardly. ⁵⁵ This can be inferred from the way in which he hands Sarah over to Pharaoh. Cultural explanations for why this was a justifiable decision ⁵⁶ may have basis in fact, but they do not and perhaps should not satisfy. Not for the first, and definitely not for the last time, a man sacrifices a woman for his own good.

And yet, if we take Abraham seriously as a migrant, we can at least try to understand the position in which he finds himself. ⁵⁷ If he is killed, Sarah will still end up as a concubine of the Pharaoh, with no hope of escape. Abraham, the man of wealth and power, discovers that his previous life is largely irrelevant in his situation as a migrant, dependent on others. As commentators have pointed out, he ends the story with a deep sense of shame for what he has done. ⁵⁸ Here, and in chapter 14, Abraham, who is to be the one who brings blessings to the nations (Gen 12:3), is the migrant who needs to be himself blessed by the other. ⁵⁹

The action of the Pharaoh in response to the illness visited on him and his household following Abraham’s deception is one of the first echoes of the story of Moses and the return of Israel to the land given to Abraham. ⁶⁰ The search for the land that the Lord will give is not as straightforward as the early command seems to imply. To use Libanio’s language cited above, the hoped-for place (eu-topos) is always in this sense u-topic, (ouktopos), no place, since the journey must continue. Moreover, to find a place, and especially an urban place, is always in the story of Abraham to find an ambiguous place, where horror, fear and terror are as much present as hope and security. An example of this is found in the story—or stories— of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Here again we encounter a story of abuse. Lot would rather sacrifice his daughters than his guests (Gen 19:8). But the people of Sodom are reported as rejecting the offer, since Lot is one who has come to dwell as a foreigner in the land (Gen 19:9) and, the story implies, has no rights to decide what should happen and who the crowd should be able to rape. The migrant, as noted above in the section on liberation theology, does not possess the same rights as the local, and sexual abuse is a permanent threat to any migrant, woman or man. ⁶¹ This story, ⁶² that of Pharaoh and Sarah, and the similar story of Sarah and Abimelech (Gen 20), all bring out the insecurity, the fear, ⁶³ the vulnerability of the migrant.

So we can see first with Abraham what it means to be a migrant and notice that he is not so distant from those who migrate today in Latin America. All that one possessed before, material goods, but also cultural belonging and familiarity, rootedness, is at least endangered. ⁶⁴ There is the permanent threat of abuse—physical, sexual, psychological. Trade-offs have to be made, sacrifices that themselves are abusive and destructive, in the hope of warding off even greater abuse and destruction. And yet people migrate; people risk everything as our news sources remind us almost daily. One way of reading the reasons for this is the utopic dimension of migration, as the move to a better place (eu-topos), where the problems of the present will fade away. ⁶⁵ Abraham, following the instructions of the Lord, is the migrant who spends most of the narrative on the move, looking for the fulfilment of the promise.

The Liberation of Abraham

For the first generation of liberation theologians, as already noted, one of the defining biblical motifs was the story of the Exodus as a story of God’s liberating action on behalf of the poor, who cried out in anguish against the injustices of slavery and exploitation. ⁶⁶ I have already noted how Abraham’s story prefigures in some ways that of Moses and the people on their journey, which suggests that Abraham’s story also needs to be read as a story of liberation. And as with the Exodus, it is a story of learning what it means to be free, a lesson that is learned only by numerous failures and fallings away.

Part of this journey is a growth in the understanding of what it is to be just or righteous. With Sarah and Pharaoh, Abraham gets it wrong and acts unrighteously, unjustly. Expelled from Egypt he returns “to the place where his tent had been at the beginning” (Gen 13:3). In returning to the place of his setting out, Abraham is enabled to act justly this time with Lot, dividing the pasturage in an equitable manner, giving place to his nephew, rather than demanding his own rights and exerting his own seniority. The journey is further aided by the encounter with Melchizedek, the Righteous King. Only by yielding some of his own freedom—the “tithe” which he pays to Melchizedek—can he hope to come to understand what it is to be truly free. It is surely no coincidence that, only a few verses later, Abraham accepts the Lord’s word, as he accepted Melchizedek’s blessing, ⁶⁷ and, in doing so, the Lord “reckoned it to him as righteousness” (Gen 15:6). ⁶⁸ But again this is not the end of the story, and Abraham needs constantly to be recalled to the path of righteousness.

Abraham is presented not only as righteous but also as a kind of paradigmatic incarnation of what it is to be faithful. It could be argued that, at least on the surface, this is often somewhat odd. He frequently does not trust in God. The decision to pass Sarah off as his sister, referred to already, is one example; his reaction to the announcement of the birth of a son is another. Indeed, one author, Franz Hinkelammert (1931–1923), a German-born economist and liberation theologian, ⁶⁹ to whom I now turn, has suggested that it is precisely the obeying of God’s second command, not to kill Isaac, that displays Abraham’s faith, and not his first response of willingness to do what he takes to be the will of God. ⁷⁰ Hinkelammert admits that this reading only works if we ignore Gen 22:12 (“you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me”) and Gen 22:16, where much the same is repeated. But, asks Hinkelammert, are these phrases part of the original story, or can we see them as additions to change the meaning of the story? ⁷¹

Hinkelammert is among the very few liberation theologians who devotes any specific attention to the story of Abraham. He is convinced that the story of Abraham and Isaac is one of liberation, about Abraham’s coming to see that he can be free, that he can rise above the demands of the laws and customs of his time. ⁷² Previously, Abraham, the migrant, has been searching for the way to be a blessing. Sometimes he comes closer, sometimes he ends up further away. With the intention of sacrificing Isaac, he makes yet another journey, and the end of this journey is finally liberation and ultimately blessing. As Hinkelammert reads it, Abraham realises or is made to realise that he does not need to kill Isaac, and that only by refusing to accept the demands of society to kill his son will he be able to hand him over to God, and in handing him over to God, blessing will come down on those who come after him.

One possible way of understanding what is going on is to recall the name of Isaac, which is traditionally rendered as “he laughs.” Though this refers primarily to Abraham and Sarah’s reactions to the announcement that they are going to have a son, it also says something about the nature of liberation. Freedom is, among other things, the decision to laugh in the face of destruction and hatred and oppression. Sacrificing one’s son is not a laughing matter, though, and it is only when the ram is spotted caught by its horns in a bush that humour returns (for a sheep caught in a bush is somewhat comical, at least from the outside—what the sheep thinks may of course be different). To become free, Abraham has to learn to laugh, to laugh at the demands of a culture or even a God who says that he must kill his son, to laugh with joy when he understands that God wants life, not death. Hinkelammert summarises his argument about the nature of Abraham’s faith as follows:

The faith of Abraham, with his freedom to refuse to kill his son in fulfilment of the law, represents a hope beyond anything humanly feasible. It cannot be institutionalised. For this reason the priestly power appears which inverts it in order to be able to legitimate itself. The problem of power continues being the same today. In order to institutionalise the hope of freedom, it has to be inverted and then reinverted. ⁷³

Abraham’s journey to liberation is a threat to the established order, since it is a refusal to accept the power of the institution to destroy the lives of that institution’s members. It is also a story of the resilience that the migrant is forced to display. Abraham’s journey with Isaac can be seen as a story of pilgrimage, but it is also reminiscent of Abraham’s journey as a migrant. By re-entering that journey, he is forced to confront both his worst fears and his own powerlessness. But this time, he can go beyond his mistakes, and learn to be truly faithful.

Ultimately, the story of Abraham is, then, one of liberation of the migrant who seeks security in another land, who undergoes trials and tribulations, and who is finally forced to choose what matters most to him. For all the obvious exegetical weaknesses of Hinkelammert’s argument, his reading urges us to look at the story afresh, as the story of the triumph of life over death, of a God who refuses to accept destruction as gift: “I desire steadfast love [mercy] not sacrifice”, Hosea will say, followed by Matthew. ⁷⁴

Conclusion

In this paper, I have argued that the story of Abraham, largely ignored by liberation theologians, can nevertheless serve as a helpful point of reference for attempts to include the story of migrants and their resilience within the framework and perspective of Latin American theologies of liberation. The contexts, the challenges, the starting points, even the motivations, of Abraham and migrants in Latin America are clearly different. For the migrant, liberation resides in the acceptance of life and the rejection of death, however powerful death may be in any given situation. For Abraham, it lies in a decision to be faithful, which takes him to the edge of reason. And yet both go through experiences that can be traumatic. Abraham comes out the other end, radically changed, and so do the migrants. And the faithfulness is not simply that of Abraham, but much more importantly that of God. God makes covenant after covenant with Abraham, sticking by him despite his often apparently appalling behaviour; his willingness to sacrifice his wife and his son; his treatment of his concubine and his son Ishmael; the way in which his nephew is happy to let his daughters be raped. All of this behaviour is, at least as baldly stated, wrong and unacceptable, and yet God remains faithful to Abraham, seeing in him something more. God is just; God is righteous; God is faithful. In recognising this, the migrant can also find hope and consolation. It does not make the suffering worthwhile or justified; nor does it excuse the evil, individual and systemic, that is so often visited upon the migrant. But it does say that this is not the final act of the story; that the justice, the righteousness, the faithfulness of God remain, and refuse to go away.

Here is the hope for both liberation theologians and migrants. Resilience is possible, and it is possible especially for people of faith. Stories such as that of Abraham are an encouragement on that journey. This has to be more than an exemplary story, though. When we read the Scriptures, we always read a completed story. But for Abraham, the story is not completed till his death; he lives through the fear, the uncertainty, the loss, the need to make impossible choices, the call to follow faithfully when it makes no sense. The story of Reginaldo at the beginning of this article reminds us that there is no simple return. Reginaldo returns home, but he is changed by his experiences too, just as Abraham is.

Following these stories with migrants who move back and forth, especially internally, as a way of coping with the oppression and poverty that has always fuelled liberation theologians’ response allows God to be seen at work in their lives too, as a source of life and resilience. They go out in search of the eu-topos, the good place, but they live always also in the critique of the ouk-topos, the no-place. Their movement is an expression itself of dislocation, of the dangers of journeying in a world that rejects them. The profound transformation that Abraham undergoes in Chapter 14 of Genesis, with the encounters with the kings and their wars, is one that is common to many migrants.

Liberation theology will ask incessantly where the manifestations of the God of life are in this setting. It is not enough to rely on individual change, but in accepting the blessing of Melchizedek, the king of righteousness, there is a systemic change, a decision to stand on the side of justice and righteousness. It is not always perfect, but it is an underlying change in Abraham’s way of relating to the world which transcends particular acts. The act of journeying as a migrant is an attempt also to introduce systemic change, to proclaim the possibility of living together, of finding a better world, of maintaining hope, of challenging death. Accompanied by his son, Isaac, Abraham reminds us that in the end, and in all sorts of almost impossible situations, God ultimately desires to bring out of us not tears but laughter.