Abstract
This chapter begins by outlining the views of Stanley Hauerwas who insists that a meaningful (Christian) story is the ontological foundation upon which a person or a community develops self-identity, moral virtues, socio-political institutions, and social ethics. The chapter then moves on to the key discussion of the Wilderness Pilgrimage code strongly backed by Sang Hyun Lee. Lee finds the Abraham story in the Hebrew Bible as the narrative upon and in mimicking which Korean American Christians have constructed their own version of the “pilgrimage-in-the-wilderness” story as the community’s ontological narrative ground. The chapter introduces three style variations of the given code: the Allegorical-Typological Narrative style, the Eschatological-Symbolic Narrative style, and the Illustrative-Utilitarian Narrative style.
[Christians] live each in [their] native land[s] but as though they were not really at home there. They share in all duties as citizens and suffer all hardships as strangers. Every foreign country is a fatherland to them, and every fatherland a foreign land … They dwell on earth but they are citizens of heaven.
Letter to Diognetus, 5 (Joseph Barber Lightfoot, The Apostolic Fathers (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1956), 18.)
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- 1.
Three authors, Gordon McConville, Andrew T. Lincoln, and Steve Motyer, each investigate the pilgrimage as it appears, respectively, in the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and Pauline writings. See Chaps. 2–4 in Explorations in Christian Theology of Pilgrimage, eds. Craig G. Bartholomew and Fred Hughes (Aldershot; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003).
- 2.
Dee Dyas, Pilgrimage in Medieval English Literature, 700-1500 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK; Rochester, NY: D.S. Brewer, 2001), 14.
- 3.
Genesis 3:23.
- 4.
Genesis 4:26b.
- 5.
Isaiah 65:25.
- 6.
Dyas, Pilgrimage, 15–16. Also see “Exile and Pilgrimage,” in A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature, ed. David L. Jeffrey (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992), 254–259. He notes, “The motif of the faithful servant of God as a pilgrim for whom this world is not his final home is deeply rooted in the exilic narratives of Genesis (the calling of Abraham) and Exodus.”
- 7.
Ibid.
- 8.
Dyas, Pilgrimage, 17–18. Jeffrey makes a fine and accurate argument, saying, “Typology based upon Exodus became fundamental to Christian catechism from St. Augustine through to Calvin and the American puritans. The journey out of ‘Egypt’ through the ‘waters of baptism’ and through the desert toward the ‘Promised Land’ becomes a type of Christian’s pilgrimage out of a place of spiritual exile through testing in this world toward a life of faithful obedience to God’s law and eventual entrance into the ‘New Cannan.’” Jeffrey, “Exodus,” in Dictionary, 260. Williams in his reading of the Hebrew Bible recognizes the wilderness as a potential paradise. Williams, Wilderness and Paradise, 18.
- 9.
Ibid.
- 10.
Dyas calls Jesus, described in John, as a “pilgrim-stranger” who “voluntarily entered the world of exile in order to bring about reconciliation between mankind [sic] and God.” Dyas, Pilgrimage, 21. Wayne A. Meeks along with Rudolf Bultmann finds the double motif of “descent and ascent” crucial in understanding the life and theology of Jesus in John. He interprets Jesus in John as an “alien” to the world, because Jesus appears as a temporary and strange resident coming down “from heaven,” which is an unknown place to the worldly people, yet soon leaving for the same place again. For Meeks, Jesus is “the Stranger par excellence,” which in Dyas’s perception of Jesus can be easily translated as the pilgrim. Wayne A. Meeks, “Man from Heaven in Johannine Sectarianism,” Journal of Biblical Literature 91, no. 1 (1972): 44–72.
- 11.
J. Lee writes in a similar pilgrim vein, “We are between this world and that world, just as Jesus did not fully belong either to his homeland or that of the Gentiles.” J. Lee, Korean Preaching, 121.
- 12.
Andrew T. Lincoln, “Pilgrimage and the New Testament,” in Explorations, 37–39. Lincoln emphasizes the eschatological aspect of Jesus’s proclamation and ministry revealed in John which all implies the soon-to-come achievement of Jesus’s pilgrim mission to the whole world.
- 13.
Jeffrey sees a similar motif of strangers and pilgrims on the earth appearing in Hebrews Chaps. 11 and 12. Jeffrey, “Exile and Pilgrimage,” 255. Dyas is more on target on this matter in interpreting Revelation 21:4, 21. Dyas, Pilgrimage, 25–26.
- 14.
Ibid., 25.
- 15.
See Revelation Chaps. 2–4 regarding the commandments and judgments from God over the seven churches in Asia Minor.
- 16.
Judith L. Kovacs, “The Revelation of John,” in The New Interpreter’s Bible One-Volume Commentary, eds. Beverly Roberts Gaventa and David L. Petersen (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2010), 918.
- 17.
Richard Bauckham, “Revelation,” in The Oxford Bible Commentary, eds. John Barton and John Muddiman (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 1288.
- 18.
Luzia Sutter Rehmann, “Revelation,” in Feminist Biblical Interpretation: A Compendium of Critical Commentary on the Books of the Bible and Related Literature, eds. Luise Schottroff and Marie-Theres Wacker (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012), 923.
- 19.
Plato, Phaedo 67, in Plato, The Complete Works, ed. with an introduction and notes by John M. Cooper (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Pub., 1997), 58. Plato says, “We shall be closest to the knowledge as we refrain as much as possible from association with the body.” See also Plato, Laws 12.959, ibid. where he affirms that “the soul has the absolute superiority over the body” and that “the body is just the likeness of myself that I carry around with me.”
- 20.
Throughout western Christian history, theologians and devout writers explored and further developed the pilgrim idea, among them St. Augustine, Dante, and John Bunyan. Bruria Bitton-Ashkelony recognizes the theme of pilgrimage as one of the fundamental spiritual constructs in Augustine’s faith. Especially, he finds in Augustine the perception of Christian life as the lifetime spiritual (not physical) pilgrimage under the gracious guidance of the omnipresent God. Bruria Bitton-Ashkelony, Encountering the Sacred: The Debate on Christian Pilgrimage in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 120–121. For a detailed discussion of the pilgrim/pilgrimage idea found in Dante and Bunyan, see “Exile and Pilgrimage,” in A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature, ed. David L. Jeffrey (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992), 257; Valentine Cunningham, “Getting There, Getting Where? Bunyan’s Hazardous Pilgrim Way,” The Glass 26 (Spring 2014): 3–17, respectively.
- 21.
Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 36–52.
- 22.
Ibid., 27.
- 23.
Stephen Crites, “The Narrative Quality of Experience,” in Why Narrative? Readings in Narrative Theology, ed. Stanley Hauerwas and L. Gregory Jones (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989), 65–88.
- 24.
S. Lee, “Pilgrimage and Home in the Wilderness of Marginality: Symbols and Context in Asian American Theology,” in Korean Americans and Their Religions, 61.
- 25.
Ibid., 61–64. Asian American scholars find that the theological motif of pilgrimage or life as spiritual journey is shared extensively among most Asian American ethnic groups. For detailed discussion, see Paul M. Nagano, “A Japanese American Pilgrimage: Theological Reflections,” in Journeys at the Margin: Toward an Autobiographical Theology in American-Asian Perspective, eds. Peter C. Phan and Jung Young Lee (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999), 63–79; David Ng, ed., People on the Way: Asian North Americans Discovering Christ, Culture, and Community (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 1996), xv–xxix; and Man Singh Das, “Sojourners in the Land of the Free: History of Southern Asian United Methodist Churches,” and Wilbur W. Y. Choy, “Strangers Called to Mission,” in Churches Aflame: Asian Americans and United Methodism, ed. Artemio R Guillermo (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1991), 19–34, 65–89.
- 26.
Byung-sup Bahn, Jil-Geu-Reut-Gat-Un-Na-Eh-Ge-Do (Even for Me an Earthen Vessel) (Seoul, Korea: Yang-Suh-Kak, 1988), 97.
- 27.
E. Kim, Preaching, 158.
- 28.
S. Lee, From a Liminal Place, 63–87.
- 29.
Ibid., 64.
- 30.
John S. McClure, The Four Codes of Preaching: Rhetorical Strategies (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 42. 20–24. According to McClure, this use of Scripture has the purpose of “bring[ing] over.” “Scripture,” he continues, “is encoded as original facts, which the sermon is involved in translating (bringing over) into the present … The [preacher] is more synchronic than diachronic in attitude, seeking out substitutions or equivalencies for words, characters, and ideas that might translate them from the biblical text into the sermonic text.”
- 31.
Sang Hyun Lee, “Called to be Pilgrim: Toward a Theology within a Korean Immigrant Context,” in The Korean Immigrant in America, eds. B. Kim and S. Lee (Montclair, NJ: ACKS, 1980), 37.
- 32.
Rev. Seuk Chan Goh’s sermon, “Let Your Blessings Flow” (my translation), was delivered on January 1, 2012, with the Scripture reading of Genesis 12:1–3, http://www.sarang.com/srtv_sermon/550/?lan=ko&page=7&divpage=1&sn=off&ss=on&sc=on&list_style=webzine&clicked=1&select_arrange=headnum&desc=asc (accessed April 20, 2014).
- 33.
Rev. Sohei Kowta’s sermon, “Abraham, the Migration Leader,” in The Sunday Before Collection, GTU 97-5-02. Eds. Allan A. Hunter and Gurney Binford. Graduate Theological Union Archives, Berkeley, CA, 38.
- 34.
Eunjoo Mary Kim, Preaching in an Age of Globalization (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 125.
- 35.
McClure, The Four Codes, 25.
- 36.
John Bunyan and Craig John Lovik, The Pilgrim’s Progress: From This World to That Which Is to Come (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2009).
- 37.
Kim, Preaching the Presence, 157.
- 38.
Rev. Kenzon Tajima’s sermon, “New Pilgrims,” in The Sunday Before Collection, 41.
- 39.
Ted A. Smith, The New Measures: A Theological History of Democratic Practice (New York: Cambridge Press, 2007), 233.
- 40.
Rev. Goh, “Let Your Blessings Flow”.
- 41.
Rev. Kekapa P.K. Lee’s sermon, “To Have Faith Means to Live a Radically Different Way,” was delivered on August 11, 2013, with the Scripture reading of Hebrews 11:1–3, 8–16; Luke 12:32–40 at the First Chinese Church of Christ in Hawaii, http://www.firstchinese.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Sermon_130811.pdf (accessed September 25, 2015).
- 42.
McClure, The Four Codes, 42.
- 43.
S. Lee, From a Liminal Place, 7–11.
- 44.
Ibid., 122.
- 45.
Rev. Jung Young Lee’s sermon, “Our Thanksgiving Day,” (unpublished) quoted in his book, Korean Preaching, 119.
- 46.
S. Lee, “Pilgrimage and Home.”
- 47.
J. Lee recognizes that for Koreans, the Bible as a sole authority of faith “symbolizes Christian identity.” J. Lee, Korean Preaching, 57. For more detailed information on this topic, see the Foundational Context of the Code of the Diasporic Mission Code in the next chapter.
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Yang, S. (2016). The Wilderness Pilgrimage Code. In: Evangelical Pilgrims from the East. Asian Christianity in the Diaspora. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41564-2_2
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