Abstract
The person of Abraham embodies the tension of living in-between. In studying the life of Abraham, the focus is often on the theological importance of the patriarch’s missional role as a vehicle of blessing to the nations as expressed in Genesis 12:1–3. In recent years, however, the missiological significance of who Abraham was has begun to emerge. Imbedded in the very identity of Abraham is this sense of hybridity; of multiple belonging; cultural identities wedded together; of the fusion that takes place when you are in-between people groups, languages, and lands. In the case of Abraham, this hybrid identity is magnified as the patriarch leaves his Mesopotamian birthplace and travels to a new land that never fully becomes his own. Throughout the rest of his life, Abraham remains a “wandering Aramean” and a foreigner until his death. As God’s missional blessing through Abraham is fulfilled in Scripture, Abraham’s hybrid identity also embodies God’s missional heart to the nations. In this article, I highlight how the hybridity embedded in Abraham’s person provides insight into contemporary mission theory and praxis.
One of my earliest memories growing up in Australia is of sitting at my grandmother’s kitchen table. Whenever I visited my grandparents’ house, a vast and rotating array of my relatives could be found seated at the table—aunties, uncles, grandparents, and later, my little cousins. We all sat together for hours at a time—eating and talking, talking and eating. During these family gatherings, my grandfather could often be found walking in and out of the room, humming old Spanish ballads to himself, while my grandmother and aunties sat around the table yelling their stories across the table in Spanish and laughing as they drank tea or ate their way through a mountain of steamed prawns piled high on a piece of newspaper.
While I wasn’t aware of it at the time, I was born into an immigrant family. My grandparents, mother, and uncle immigrated from Spain to Australia in 1961 in an effort to find economic relief from the lingering financial recession caused by the Spanish Civil War decades earlier. My grandfather, as was the case for many southern Europeans, was offered free transportation and guaranteed employment if he immigrated with his family to New South Wales, Australia. The promise of a financially secure future motivated his decision, and within a few months my grandfather had begun his first job as an agricultural day laborer in the Illawarra region of New South Wales.
Entering my grandparents’ apartment in Australia was like being teleported back to 1960s Madrid. Their home was always filled with flamenco music and pre-recorded bullfights or soccer games being projected from the television. And, food (comida), so much Spanish food—tortilla de patatas, churros y chocolate, paella, gambas, bacalao. Nevertheless, during my childhood, it didn’t even register that my extended family were culturally distinct. I lived in the industrial town of Wollongong, located 50 miles south of Sydney on the east coast of Australia with a population of approximately 300,000 people. The city was filled with a mixture of Australians and immigrants from Great Britain, Denmark, Malta, Macedonia, Greece, Lebanon, Yugoslavia, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands. At my home church alone, over 50 languages were spoken. As such, my early childhood in Australia was effortlessly multicultural, multilingual, and transnational.
When I moved to the United States in 1990 with my parents and sister, additional multicultural layers were added to my upbringing. Living on Fuller Theological Seminary’s campus in Pasadena, California, my best friends were from India, the Philippines, New Zealand, and the Navajo Nation. Later, when I was called into cross-cultural ministry as an adult, I lived in the Netherlands, Spain, Australia, and Papua New Guinea. In each new country, whether I stayed for a few months or several years, I threw myself into the community, endeavoring to learn the language, culture, and customs of my new neighbors.
If you were to ask me where I was from during these years, I would invariably have said that I didn’t quite belong anywhere. When I was in Australia, I was considered Spanish; in Spain, I was considered American; and in the United States and Papua New Guinea, I was considered Australian. While I lived in this strange limbo of existence—living between nations, languages, and cultures—I discovered a richness of identity, despite and because of this reality of not fully belonging. I was, and I continue to be today, an example of hybridity embodied.
When Dr. Arun Jones invited me to share a plenary address at our ASM gathering, he asked me to talk about my personal story, and how my own hybridity has impacted my theological interpretation of the theme within Scripture. As I prayerfully considered the relationship between my immigrant story and my intellectual pursuits, the interconnections became increasingly apparent. On a personal level, I realized that over the decades I had been consistently drawn to research immigrant stories in Scripture—in particular, the migrant journeys of Hagar, Sarah, and Abraham. I related to their stories, as one immigrant connects to the struggles of another. On a broader missiological level, I observed that hybridity was a consistent theme in Scripture. Not only was hybridity, or multiple-belonging, evident in Abraham’s life, but also in the lives of numerous other prominent individuals, such as Joseph, Moses, Daniel, Ruth, Esther, and Jesus. The prevalence of this biblical motif leads me to ask the questions, Is there a missiological significance to this biblical theme of hybridity? And, if so, what missiological insights does this motif provide into the universal mission of God?
In this article I will highlight how the hybridity embedded within the person of Abraham reflects the sojourning nature of the people of God, and foreshadows the internal transformations that take place within our identity (who we are), our mindset (how we should think), and our behavior (how we should act) through the Spirit of Christ.
First, I will examine the sociocultural hybridity reflected in the patriarch Abraham. Second, I will briefly expound upon the continued motif of Abraham’s hybridity in Scripture. Lastly, I will suggest several missiological implications of the biblical motif as it relates to our understanding of God, ourselves, and the global church.
Sociocultural hybridity in Abraham
Abraham embodies the tension of living in-between. In studying the life of Abraham, the focus is often on the theological importance of the patriarch’s missional role as a vehicle of blessing to the nations as expressed in Genesis 12:1–3. However, Abraham’s sociocultural background is also significant. Imbedded in the very identity of Abraham is this sense of hybridity; of multiple belonging; cultural identities wedded together; of the fusion that takes place when you are in-between people groups, languages, and lands. In the case of Abraham, this hybrid identity is magnified as the patriarch leaves his Mesopotamian birthplace and travels to a new land that never fully becomes his own. Throughout the rest of his life, Abraham remains a “wandering Aramean” and is considered a foreigner until his death.
Abraham’s sociocultural hybridity was multifaceted. Called by God from upper Mesopotamia to the land of Canaan, Abraham left one corner of the world and entered another. This new region was linguistically, religiously, socioculturally, and politically distinct from his homeland. Even if Abraham had desired to assimilate to the cultural customs of his new neighbors, he would have been met by the dilemma of which culture he would adopt—that of the Canaanites, Perizzites, Hittites, Amorites, Philistines, or Egyptians—all people groups whom Abraham encountered and engaged with while sojourning through the land. The biblical text indicates instead that while Abraham fought alongside, made alliances with, bought land from, and cut covenants with a varied array of local residents, Abraham always remained a cultural outsider; a foreigner in the land.
While Abraham didn’t fully adopt the customs of his new homeland, he was also no longer the same man that he was prior to his encounter with God in Genesis 12. In deciding to follow Yahweh, Abraham rejected the two primary social structures that had previously provided him and his household with spiritual and physical support. First, in choosing Yahweh, Abraham rejected his religious upbringing and any reliance that he may have had on the Sumerian deities, who were said to promise their followers protection, fertility, and prosperity. Second, Abraham left behind his socioeconomic support system—his extended family—upon whom he would have relied for physical, economic, social, and emotional support. These two decisions—and departures—permanently transformed Abraham’s life and person. In transferring his loyalty from the Sumerian religious system to Yahweh and in leaving his family, Abraham’s day-to-day reality shifted. Abraham’s religious and social allegiances permanently changed. Abraham was now dependent solely upon his God and the hospitality of the strangers that he met on his journeys.
Abraham’s identity as a foreigner—an alien in the land—is a detail that is reiterated throughout the Genesis narrative, and also one that is later reemphasized by authors in the New Testament. The Genesis narrative repeatedly identifies “Abram, the Hebrew” (Gen. 14:13), as a stranger, foreigner, and a temporary sojourner in the land. The Book of Hebrews later echoes this fact when the author writes, “By faith [Abraham] made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise” (Heb. 11:9). Echoes of this theme of sojourning can also be found in God’s conversations with the people of Israel when God reminds them of their own history of residing as aliens in the land of Egypt (Ex. 22:21; Lev. 19:34; Deut. 10:19; 23:7). As such, this seemingly minor detail about Abraham actually reflects a larger theological motif in the metanarrative of Scripture.
Abraham’s hybridity in Scripture
However, the question remains: Is the hybridity of Abraham missiologically significant? Or, is it simply the biographical data of one person?
The answer, I believe, can be found in the fact that the biblical motif of hybridity continues outside of the Abrahamic narrative and is evident in the lives of many of the most prominent leaders and individuals in the history of Israel—Joseph, Moses, Daniel, Esther, Ruth, and Jesus, among many others. A quick survey of these individuals’ lives accentuates the motif of multiple-belonging, and again raises the question, Is this coincidence, or is this theologically significant?
As space here is limited, I won’t provide an analysis of hybridity within these individuals’ lives. Instead, I will highlight the sociocultural hybridity of one key person—Abraham—as an example of the launching platform of the theme in Scripture.
Why did God choose Abraham?
So, why did God choose the immigrant Abraham? Why did God ask Abraham to leave his family—his people—to live as a nomadic stranger in a land that was not his own? In reflecting on the metanarrative of Scripture, a number of answers emerge. First, God chose a man from the nations to be a blessing to the nations. Second, God created an environment in which Abraham was able to, and was invited to, depend exclusively on God for all his needs. Third, God modeled the true nature of his chosen people in the person of Abraham, their forerunner—a people who were clothed in an earthly tent, and who longed for their true eternal home (2 Cor. 5:1).
It is this last reason that I would like to draw attention to—“God modeled the true nature of his chosen people in the person of Abraham”—the immigrant, the foreigner, the outsider, the nomad. Just as the gospel message was foretold to Abraham (Gal. 3:8), so the sojourning nature of God’s people is also imbedded in the person and life of Abraham. Abraham reflects the pilgrim-nature of God’s people. In addition, Abraham also embodies an internal shift of identity that takes place within God’s followers when they become new creations through Christ. When Abraham follows Yahweh, he begins a spiritual journey that forever changes his identity and that reorients his life toward God’s eternal kingdom. While outwardly Abraham looked to be the same man, inwardly his allegiance, loyalty, trust, and fidelity had shifted from his dependence upon his old support structures, both religious and familial, to a full and complete dependence upon God.
As such, Abraham exemplifies in his person the multifaceted spiritual reality—that is evidenced in part through the nation of Israel and then later more fully in the early church—that God’s people are spiritual pilgrims on earth, who are made into a new creation through Christ and who are adopted into the covenant and as such become citizens of a new kingdom (Eph. 2:18–19).
Missiological implications
In the early 2000s, I had the opportunity to travel to Spain with my grandparents. Both of my grandparents came from large families, so our itinerary consisted of traveling around Spain visiting family—my great-grandmother (who was still alive), and my grandparents’ siblings, nieces, and nephews. During these visits, we would regularly find ourselves around my Spanish relatives’ kitchen tables. The familiar steamed prawns would make an appearance, as did paella, cocido, and bacalao. And, while the food and language were all familiar, I was surprised to observe that my grandparents were quite different from their siblings. While my grandparents had continued to surround themselves with Spanish food, language, news, and sports in Australia, my grandparents had changed. In moving to Australia, they had diverged from the cultural trajectory of their siblings and their families in Spain. Were they Spanish? Yes, they were clearly still Spanish. Were they Australian? Yes, they were also Australian. However, they weren’t like the Spaniards that had chosen to remain in Spain, nor were they similar to the natural-born citizens of Australia, who had never lived abroad. My grandparents’ sociocultural identity had shifted. During their extensive stay in a foreign land, their cultural makeup, worldview orientation, and their values and beliefs had been reoriented. They now embodied a new identity—the hybrid identity of an immigrant.
In reflecting on my grandparents’ hybridity as well as that of Abraham, there are several insights that can be gleaned. In particular, their sense of hybridity affected their lives on multiple levels—it influenced who they were (their identity), how they thought (their mindset), and how they acted (their external behavior). In considering the missiological implications of Abraham’s hybridity, I would like to expand upon these three categories and highlight what the motif of hybridity embedded in the person of Abraham reveals about our identity, mindset, and external behavior as followers of Christ.
First, identity—in Abraham’s hybridity our new identity in Christ is revealed.
Hybridity in Scripture is not simply a reflection of multiple-belonging; it is representative of a deeper transformation—you are not who you were, you are different, you are new. Like Abraham, upon encountering God, we embark upon a spiritual journey in which our worldview, values, and beliefs are recalibrated. Upon accepting Christ as our savior, we enter into the covenantal promises given to Abraham and become citizens of a new realm, the Kingdom of God. We become a new creation and are given a new identity in Christ.
Second, mindset—like Abraham, as spiritual pilgrims our mindset is transformed.
In Abraham’s life story, we observe a progressive shift within the patriarch away from a dependence upon earthly security and toward a dependence upon divine relationship. Likewise, in following Christ, our physical and spiritual allegiances permanently change. Our focus expands beyond our earthly surroundings and fixes on the eternal.
Lastly, behavior—as reflected in the Abrahamic narrative, due to our new mindset and identity in Christ, our behavior changes.
As Abraham journeys with God, his actions increasingly align with the will and guidance of God. While Abraham initially acts independently from God (remember Abraham’s deception of the Egyptian pharaoh in Gen. 12:10–20), over time the patriarch’s behavior falls into step with God. The climax of Abraham’s faith and obedience occurs toward the end of his life in Genesis 22:1–19 when Abraham obeys God’s command and offers his son Isaac to God as a sacrifice. This monumental act of obedience and trust in God’s covenantal promises (Gen. 15:18–21) stands in stark contrast with Abraham’s lack of faith at the beginning of the narrative. It is safe to say that Abraham is not the same person that he was when he was called by God in Harran. We should not be the same people that we were when we were first called by God to follow Christ as our Lord and Savior.
Conclusion
The hybridity embedded within the person of Abraham reflects the missiological reality that we, the followers of Christ, are a pilgrim people, whose identity, mindset, and behavior are meant to be in alignment with the Kingdom of Christ. Like my grandparents, myself, and Abraham, we are all immigrants; spiritual pilgrims following the Living God. As such we are not meant to be stagnant, or fixated solely on the things of this world. Instead, we are invited to be transformed (heart, soul, and mind) through the power of the Holy Spirit while journeying with Christ.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
