Refugees: A New Testament Perspective

Introduction

The question of how Christians are to deal with the issue of refugees has become more meaningful to me as I try to minister in Spain today. This country has become a kind of laboratory for questions related to migration movements and the Christian mission. During the last two decades of the 20th century, migrants came from Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Philippines and Africa. Some of them were refugees fleeing political or religious persecution; others were simply people in search of jobs and a better economic future. However, the Spanish people themselves have had a long record of migration. Felix Gonzalez, the pastor of the First Baptist Church in Madrid, and a very productive Pauline scholar, became a believer when, along with thousands of other Spanish people, he migrated to Germany in the 1960s. Many Evangelical leaders in Spain today had a similar experience back in the 1960s.

Since the 1980s in Spain, the Catholic Church as well as the tiny minority of Protestant churches have had to face the challenge of a massive wave of immigrants whose presence forces churches to go to the roots of their faith in order to find guidelines for their response to the new situation. Here I see a threefold challenge. ¹ The first is the challenge to Christian compassion and sensitivity. The church is challenged to provide funds and volunteers for an organised response to a massive flow of human beings, especially to those that face hunger, homelessness, and marginalisation. There is also the challenge to cooperate with a great number of secular NGOs patterned after the Christian model of volunteer involvement but usually very suspicious about the motivations of Christian churches as they enter the arena of social assistance. This is a challenge of education for discipleship that develops attitudes that derive from the sources of their faith and not from popular prejudices.

The second challenge is the need for the churches to take a prophetic stance in the face of injustices in the way in which society treats immigrants. Perhaps the biggest challenge is the prophetic task of being a mouthpiece for the poor and downtrodden and pronouncing an unpopular prophetic word for a society that at some moments seems to be taken over by panic in face of these waves of foreigners who have come to stay. Churches are to go back to the sources of their own faith but also to an ethical treasure that is part of the Western and European heritage. The new fact, however, is that the erosion of Christian values has brought the absence of a Christian substratum that will make Christian behaviour possible. There is also a militant advance of paganism with an attitude in which there is no room for solidarity or compassion in the face of human need and suffering.

The third challenge is the fact that migration is an avenue for the evangelistic dimension of mission. Migrants are people in transition, people on the move who are experiencing homelessness and the loss of roots and in a new way and on a massive scale. Such people in transition are open to becoming believers, ready to assume a faith in a personal way. Many times in history, missionary Christianity has flourished in the context of migration precisely because of this two-sided condition of the migrant experience. As the two sides of the same coin, one is the painful side of homelessness and uprootedness, but the other side is a new freedom. As a follow-up reality, the presence of these new believers in old communities brings pastoral challenges. The church is forced to become truly missionary and to face the presence of ‘the other’ in its midst.

Migration as the New Testament Context

Migration movements were a significant fact in the narrative of the initial missionary advance of the Christian church in the Book of Acts. They also help us to understand and appreciate better both the theological articulation of the Epistles, as well as the pastoral counsel that they provide. This was my experience in my early missiological reading of the Epistle to the Romans, which was helped immensely by the now classic book by Paul Minear, The Obedience of Faith. ² As a good Evangelical, I had been taught about the rich theological content of the Epistle that the Protestant Reformation had recovered. Minear, however, helped me to grasp the fact that such theological wealth and its pastoral consequences were better understood if the missiological intention of the Epistle was not set aside: it was important to pay special attention to the missionary dynamic that nourished Paul’s purposes in writing it.

The long list of persons to whom Paul sends greetings in chapter 16 of this letter were people that he had evidently met in his trips through the Roman Empire, because he had never visited the church in Rome. In the case of many of these people, we do not know much apart from what the Apostle says in his greetings. However, this long list of names shows that in the first century, within the frame of the Roman Empire, there was a migration movement similar to the one that characterises the 21st century. And in a way this migration of people to Rome, at that point the centre of cultural economic and political power, is like the movement of our times in which people from underdeveloped regions move to rich countries where they might find jobs, security and a future they do not find at home. As historian Justo Gonzalez has commented, ‘When the rivers of wealth flow in one direction, it is only natural for population to flow in the same direction’. ³ Actually the whole New Testament describes how people travelled in those days and how Christian mission took place within the context of that movement of people. In some cases, like the founders of the church in Antioch (Acts 11:19), they were people scattered by religious persecution. In other cases they were voluntary migrants who moved along with a missionary purpose in mind, like Paul himself who describes how he feels driven by the challenge of new fields for his evangelising efforts (Rom.15:19, 23-24).

The long list of greetings allows us to identify at least five house churches in Rome. The reference to Prisca and Aquila (Rom. 16:3-5) identifies that the first of such groups ‘greet also the church in their house’. Then comes a reference in v. 10 to ‘the family of Aristobulus’, in v. 11 to ‘the family of Narcissus’, in v. 14 several names ‘and the brothers and sisters who are with them’, followed by another group in v. 15 ‘and all the saints who are with them’. Rome was a large city and, just like in modern cities, there were some sections of the city where different ethnic communities would live. We can therefore assume that there were at least five house churches in Rome and that they were made up of people from both Gentile and Jewish backgrounds.

If we pay attention to the data we have about the first couple that Paul mentions in this chapter, we have the key to understanding one of the patterns of the formation of churches in New Testament times. We first meet Aquila and Priscila or Prisca in the narrative of the planting of the church in Corinth. Aquila is described as a Jew from the region of Ponto, who had to leave Rome due to the imperial persecution of Jews (Acts 18:1-4) – a refugee in a certain way. The trade with which Aquila and Priscila supported themselves was a specialised kind of work with leather, for which few tools were necessary, making mobility possible: an ideal trade for a man like Paul himself. ⁴ Acts says that ‘he stayed with them and they worked together’ (18:3), and that after ‘a considerable time’ (v. 18) the trio moved on and landed in Ephesus. At the time in which Romans is written, these two faithful friends and coworkers of Paul are back in Rome and the Apostle praises them as people for whom he ‘and all the churches of the Gentiles’ are thankful (Rom. 16:3). We could say that Prisca and Aquila planted churches in at least three cities of the Empire, and the pattern continues to function in our time: many Evangelical churches in Argentina were planted by British employees of the railway company in the early 20th century; Korean businesspeople have started churches in Brazil and Peru; and Spanish migrants planted Spanish-speaking churches in Germany in the 1960s which are in 2016 attended by Latin American migrants. More recently, young Filipino people have planted churches in the United States, and Ghanaian migrants have done so in the Netherlands.

As we move on in the list of greetings, we have names like Mary (v. 6), Andronicus and Junias (v. 7), as well as Herodion (v. 11), kinspeople of Paul who would evidently have been Jewish. And then we have names such as Phoebe (v. 1), Narcissus (v. 11), Ampliatus (v. 8) and Urbanus (v. 9) which have a Gentile origin. Big cities are melting pots where different races and cultures meet and sometimes the meeting is traumatic. Racism is not characteristic of just some people or cultures. So the acceptance of ‘the other’, the one who is different from us, may not always be an easy step. Times of social or economic crisis bring back the ugly ghost of racism, as in some European countries and cities today and in the political discourse around a presidential candidate in the United States. Racism and the reluctance to accept those who are different from us also affects Christians, and we find the problem throughout the 20 centuries of church history. If we take the whole body of writings of Paul and the book of Acts, we realise that this encounter of cultures and races caused many pastoral problems in the early church, as Minear proposes.

Some of the house churches to which we have referred above were made up of Jewish believers, and others were made up of Gentile believers. Some of them may have been mixed communities where a degree of mutual acceptance and welcoming took place. As there was not always mutual respect and acceptance, the intention of Paul’s letter could well have been a pastoral initiative to encourage them to change, and to receive or accept one another as brothers and sisters in Christ. There is a general exhortation in which the vocabulary has a definite theological connotation and a pastoral intention: ‘Welcome one another, therefore just as Christ has welcomed you for the glory of God’ (Rom. 15:7). By pointing to the way in which Christ receives those who come to him, this exhortation goes to the heart of the Gospel that Paul has developed in the first part of the Epistle. Such mutual acceptance included the disposition to accept cultural differences such as different eating habits and prohibitions that originated in the cultures from which different persons came (Rom. 14:1-6). As FF Bruce comments:

Paul was certainly aware of differences in attitude and practices which might set up tensions if brotherly consideration were not exercised; this is why he urges all the groups so earnestly to give one another the same welcome as they had all received from Christ ‘for the glory of God’ (Rom 15:7). Paul’s missionary strategy as outlined in chapter 15 includes actions and teachings to foster mutual acceptance between Jews and Gentiles, such as the collection that the Gentile churches had gathered by Paul’s initiative in order to help the impoverished Jewish believers in Judea (Rom. 15:25-29). Thus a sense of spiritual unity would be fostered. ⁵

Such mutual acceptance had to be reflected also in the practical ways of hospitality that became a mark of the Christian churches in the first century. The first verses of chapter 16 are a commendation of Phoebe, probably the carrier of the letter to the Romans. She is to be received as a messenger of the Apostle, who is explicit about the social and material needs of this leading woman:

I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a deacon of the church in Cenchrea, so that you may welcome her in the Lord as is fitting for the saints, and help her in whatever she may require from you, for she has been a benefactor of many and of myself as well. (Rom. 16:1-2 NRSV)

The importance of hospitality in the New Testament and in the history of the church was most adequately researched by Dr Christine D Pohl, associate provost and professor of Christian social ethics at Asbury Seminary. She published in 1999 a book which is a valuable classic in my opinion, Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition. ⁶ My observation and study of mission history in several countries has convinced me of the relevance of her findings for a missionary practice that will be shaped by biblical principles that have proved their validity in history.

The need for a welcoming attitude in the churches is experienced today especially in those countries that have a great number of immigrants. It is a great challenge especially to churches in Europe and North America, but also to churches in big cities in every country. The experience of being welcome for persons displaced from the rural areas is one of the explanations for the amazing growth of popular churches in the big cities of Latin America. In many cases, the embrace that the migrant receives in church becomes a symbol of and a prelude to the experience of being received by Jesus Christ and finding salvation in Him.

There is another point in the way in which Paul uses these greetings to build up mutual acceptance and a stronger, more faithful, church in Rome. In the outline of his mission strategy that we have already mentioned (15:22-24), as well as in the first chapter of this Epistle (1:8-13), Paul refers to his intention to visit Rome in order to minister there, but only as a stop on his way to Spain, the new goal that he has set for his missionary service. From his missionary practice of having a local church as a base for his missionary trips, as he did in Antioch (Acts 13:1-3; 14:26-28) and probably also in Ephesus (Acts 18:22–19:20), now it seems that he would like Rome to be the base for his westward mission towards Spain. However, for that to happen he envisages a strong church as a base, one that has developed to be a true fellowship for Jews and Gentiles, united by their common faith in Jesus Christ. For that purpose, he has written the letter expounding the wealth of revelation that is the Gospel of Jesus Christ that he preaches, and now as he closes his letter he uses his greetings to do a spot of what we today call ‘networking’. He sends Phoebe as a personal messenger and commends Prisca and Aquila, of whose gifts he knows well, and refers to that long list of migrants who live in Rome, so that the house churches in the capital of the Empire may develop a sense of unity in plurality and mutual acceptance to the glory of God. Only that kind of Church would be able to become a base for Paul’s mission to Spain.

Churches Not homogeneous Units in the New Testament

Only a fellowship marked by this spirit of acceptance of other sisters and brothers, beyond cultural and ethnic barriers, could be considered worthy of the name of church. It could well be that the word ‘church’ is not mentioned in the salutation of Romans because until the house churches that existed there came to accept one another they did not have the kind of fellowship that is essential for a church to exist. The unity of the church, which is a frequent theme in Paul’s writings, was necessary as an expression of the universality of the Gospel and its transforming power that brought reconciliation with God and amongst humans. That concern on the part of the apostle may also explain the strong words against those who had a sectarian and divisive spirit (Rom. 16:17-20).

The need to pay special attention to the New Testament teaching about this aspect of the nature of the church was the subject of an ongoing debate within the Lausanne movement in the 1980s. Latin American New Testament scholar Rene Padilla articulated a strong criticism of the missionary methodology of the church as a ‘homogeneous unit’ that was proposed by missiologists of the church growth movement such as Donald McGavran and Peter Wagner. On the basis that people like to become Christians without crossing ethnic or social barriers, these missiologists proposed that a more efficient and rapid church planting should be carried out through churches that would be ethnically or socially ‘homogeneous units’. In this way, the observation of a sociological pattern of behaviour would become the determinant factor in a missiological strategy. Padilla’s criticism was based on the teaching of the New Testament, especially of the Apostle Paul, about the nature of the church:

Throughout the entire New Testament the oneness of the people of God as a oneness that transcends all outward distinctions is taken for granted. The thought is that with the coming of Jesus Christ all the barriers that divide humankind have been broken down and a new humanity is now taking shape in and through the church. God’s purpose in Jesus Christ includes the oneness of the human race, and that oneness becomes visible in the church. ⁷

Padilla expounds the teaching of the letters to the Ephesians (1:13-14) and the Colossians (3:11) about the new humanity brought into being by Jesus Christ:

God’s purpose is to bring the universe ‘into a unity in Christ’ (Eph 1:10). That purpose is yet to be consummated. But already in anticipation of the end, a new humanity has been created in Jesus Christ, and those who are incorporated in him form a unity wherein all divisions that separate people in the old humanity are done away with. The original unity of the human race is thus restored; God’s purpose of unity in Jesus Christ is thus made historically visible. ⁸

He also demonstrates how apostolic practice in evangelism, as well as in pastoral work, in the New Testament shows the application of this view of the church as a new creation and its significance for the contemporary situation. In the apostolic teaching and practice, there was a breaking down of the barriers between Jew and Gentile, between slave and free and between female and male. Today the church must be an expression of the breaking down of the barriers between white and black, between rich and poor and between male and female.

The flow of refugees will put to the test the willingness of Christian churches today to become that kind of church envisaged by the apostle Paul and by Jesus himself. This will require acceptance of the diaconic, discipling and pastoral practices that the presence of refugees will bring, rather than the passive acceptance of sociological trends towards turning churches into homogeneous units.

Between exclusion and embrace

Croatian theologian Miroslav Volf has helped us to understand theologically the nature of the contemporary dilemma faced by Evangelical churches. On 10–16 April 1991, INFEMIT organised its fourth theological consultation in Osijek, Yugoslavia, with the theme ‘Freedom and justice in the relationship between church and state’. We were hosted by Dr Peter Kuzmič, Rector of the Evangelical Theological Seminary, and Dr Miroslav Volf, one of its professors. A few weeks later, Yugoslavia disintegrated as a country, and a cruel and bloody ethnic and religious war brought images of violence and destruction to the news around the world. Peter Kuzmič’s biographer says that under his leadership:

the Protestant churches of the quickly disintegrating Yugoslavia continued to practice brotherhood and unity; although in their case, the uniting force would be brotherhood in Christ and not the state. While the Orthodox priests blessed the Serbian soldiers going to war, starting in the summer of 1991, and the Catholic priests blessed the Croatian soldiers, Peter Kuzmič organized several reconciliation meetings for the Yugoslav Protestants in Hungary, a country bordering both Croatia and Serbia, and therefore a close, safe and convenient place to meet during war time. ⁹

Miroslav Volf’s theology reflects the burning questions posed by this disintegration of his country and the cruelty of ethnic conflict and a bloody war between Croatians, Serbs and Slavs. He became immersed in a theological reflection about the way in which humans work out their identities by coming to terms with the presence of ‘other’ human beings and defining themselves by an exclusion mechanism. In contrast to that, the Gospel story and the significance of the cross make it possible to practice ‘embrace’ instead of ‘exclusion’. In explaining the intention of his best-known book, Volf says:

A genuinely Christian reflection on social issues must be rooted in the self-giving love of the divine Trinity as manifested on the cross of Christ; all the central themes of such reflection will have to be thought through from the perspective of the self-giving love of God. This book seeks to explicate what divine self-donation may mean for the construction of identity and for the relationship with the other under the condition of enmity. ¹⁰

Commenting on the words of Paul in Romans 15:7, ‘Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you’, Volf says:

To describe the process of ‘welcoming’ I employed the metaphor of embrace’. The metaphor seems well suited to bring together the three interrelated themes that are central to my proposal: (1) the mutuality of self-giving love in the Trinity (the doctrine of God), (2) the outstretched arms of Christ on the cross for the ‘godless’ (the doctrine of Christ), (3) the open arms of the ‘father’ receiving the ‘prodigal’ (the doctrine of salvation). ¹¹

In explaining his theological method, Volf describes his use of biblical texts in relation to the main theological theme of ‘the self-donation and reception of the other’. He makes it very clear that:

At the center of the New Testament lies the narrative of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ understood as an act of obedience toward God and an expression of self-giving love for his followers as well as the model for the followers to imitate. This narrative, in turn, is intelligible only as a part of the larger narrative of God’s dealings with humanity recorded in the whole of Christian Scripture. ¹²

So Volf combines reflection on a theme drawn from the overarching narrative, embrace, with detailed analysis of selected texts that give light on issues such as exclusion, repentance, forgiveness, justice, truth and peace.

In many aspects of Christian life and witness today, the teaching of the Epistle to the Romans is extremely relevant. If churches in Europe deal with the issue of migrants with an attitude that reflects the embrace of Christ rather than the exclusion of a frightened society, there may be better bases for a new evangelisation of Europe. If churches in North America take seriously the teaching of this Epistle they may become the kind of prophetic community that will deliver the church from embracing a cheap form of civil religion. If new migrant churches in these parts of the world hear Paul in Romans, they will find ways to connect with the long-established churches that may be in need of revival and a new missionary spirit. The same oneness in Christ is necessary to announce the Gospel in those parts of the world where churches are growing such as Latin America, Africa and some parts of Asia, where enthusiasm and vitality must be matched by a striving towards maturity that will allow a faithful testimony in all areas of life. As societies in crisis deal with the issues of refugees and immigration following policies of exclusion, Christians are called on to show an alternative response, namely the embrace that reflects the embrace from God who has received them in Christ.