Abstract
This chapter discusses theological approaches to migration, including the faith commitments that may or may not be involved. However, Stephan van Erp’s aim is not to add yet another chapter to the theology of migration but to show how theologians engage with social issues like migration in an attempt to give new relevance to theology as an academic discipline, and how they usually fail to achieve this. He argues that contemporary theologians who discuss migration are clearly socially committed, but seem to have forgotten the theological reasons behind their commitment. This could have consequences for the discussion on the position of theology within today’s university, which is challenged ever more frequently despite bold attempts by theologians to increase their relevance. Moreover, it manifests the embarrassment of theologians who are not willing to articulate a specific Christian engagement in Europe’s secular culture.
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Notes
- 1.
It remains to be seen, however, whether theology’s social relevance is indeed reaffirmed when theologians start dealing with social issues. Theologians often seem to think they can warrant the relevance of their work by applying methods they copy from other academic disciplines. In choosing this strategy, theology might risk making itself redundant, instead of establishing its own unique position in an interdisciplinary field of research.
- 2.
See Ed Simons and Lodewijk Winkeler, Het verraad der clercken: Intellectuelen en hun rol in de ontwikkelingen van het Nederlandse katholicisme na 1945 (Baarn: Arbor, 1987).
- 3.
Ibid., 11.
- 4.
See, for example, the—rather divergent—contributions of Ad van Melsen, Edward Schillebeeckx, and Johannes van der Ven in “De identiteit van katholieke wetenschapsmensen,” Annalen van het Thijmgenootschap 68/2 (1980), 93–113, 175–189, and 285–301. See also the leading role of Schillebeeckx in the publication of the report “Katholieke universiteit?,” Annalen van het Thijmgenootschap 59/1 (1971), and particularly in the publication of the collection to complement the report, “Katholieke universiteit? II: Reacties en meningen,” Annalen van het Thijmgenootschap 59/3 (1971), 8–15. See Erik Borgman, Met het oog op goed leven: Cobbenhagen en onze universitaire cultuur (Tilburg: Tilburg University Press, 2011).
- 5.
See, for example, Meredith McGuire, Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). See also Ruard Ganzevoort and Johan Roeland, “Lived Religion: The Practice of Practical Theology,” International Journal of Practical Theology 18 (2014), 91–101.
- 6.
See the report of the Royal Dutch Academy of the Sciences on the future of theology and religious studies in the Netherlands, which claims that confessional theology mainly exists as a training for the ministry, whereas religious studies supposedly serve a much wider social purpose, which also ensures that they are better integrated into the humanities : Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, Klaar om te wenden … De academische bestudering van religie in Nederland: Een verkenning (Amsterdam: KNAV, 2015), 87–88. Incidentally, the report often identifies the ecclesiastical aspects of theology, such as training for the ministry, with doctrine, instead of regarding church work as a lived practice.
- 7.
See Church in an Age of Global Migration: A Moving Body, ed. Susanna Snyder , Joshua Ralston, and Agnes Brazal (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). See also World Council of Churches & United Nations, Europe’s Response to the Refugee Crisis: From Origin to Transit, Reception and Refuge. A Call for Shared Responsibility and Coordinated Action, available at https://www.oikoumene.org/en/resources/documents/wcc-programmes/umer/mission-from-the-margins/migration/europe2019s-response-to-the-refuge-crisis (accessed 05/2017).
- 8.
For reviews of the literature on theology and migration, see Gioacchino Campese, “The Irruption of Migrants: Theology of Migration in the 21st Century,” Theological Studies 73 (2012), 3–32; Gioacchino Campese, “Theologies of Migration: Present and Future Perspectives,” in Migration als Ort der Theologie, ed. Tobias Kessler (Regensburg: Friedrich Pustet, 2014), 167–188 and A Promised Land, A Perilous Journey: Theological Perspectives on Migration, ed. Daniel Groody and Gioacchino Campese (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008).
- 9.
Susanna Snyder , Asylum-seeking, Migration and Church (London: Routledge, 2012), 16. For a comparable approach, see Gemma Cruz, An Intercultural Theology of Migration: Pilgrims in the Wilderness (Leiden: Brill, 2010).
- 10.
The same method is described in Jorge Castillo Guerra, “From the Faith and Life of a Migrant to a Theology of Migration and Intercultural Convivencia,” in Migration as a Sign of the Times, ed. Judith Gruber and Sigrid Rettenbacher (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 107–130. Like Snyder , Castillo Guerra points to a methodological interrelatedness of his approach with liberation theology.
- 11.
See Snyder , Asylum-seeking, Migration and Church, 28–33.
- 12.
See Rowan Williams, “What Does a Good, 21st-century Immigration Policy Look Like?,” New Statesman, December 28, 2016, available at http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2016/12/what-does-good-21st-century-immigration-policy-look (accessed 05/2017).
- 13.
In approaches to migration from the point of view of religious studies, this instrumental role of faith and theology is even more manifest, for example, in Jacqueline Maria Hagan, “Faith for the Journey: Religion as a Resource for Migrants,” in A Promised Land, A Perilous Journey, 3–19.
- 14.
This is a tendency that was already expressed by theologians in the 1980s as a critique of systematic theology by empirical theology.
- 15.
This is a central notion in William Cavanaugh’s theology of migration. See William Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 69–87.
- 16.
See Message of His Holiness Pope Francis for the World Day of Migrants and Refugees 2017, January 15, 2017, available at https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/migration/documents/papa-francesco_20150912_world-migrants-day-2016.html (accessed 10/2017).
- 17.
See Papal Counsel for the Pastoral Care for Migrants and Travelers, Erga Migrantes Caritas Christi—The Love of Christ Towards Migrants, 12 and 13, available at http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/migrants/documents/rc_pc_migrants_doc_20040514_erga-migrantes-caritas-christi_en.html (accessed 05/2017).
- 18.
Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions, 2007), 78–79.
- 19.
See Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things: Essays (London: Virago, 2015), 209–225.
- 20.
See Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, nr. 236: “Grace, which tends to manifest itself tangibly, found unsurpassable expression when God himself became man and gave himself as food for his creatures. The Lord, in the culmination of the mystery of the Incarnation, chose to reach our intimate depths through a fragment of matter. He comes not from above, but from within, he comes that we might find him in this world of ours.”
- 21.
Robinson, The Givenness of Things, 209.
- 22.
See ibid., 212.
- 23.
The video is available at https://en.jrs.net/campaign_detail?PTN=PROMO-20160613074325&TN=PROJECT-20160616075047 (accessed 05/2017).
- 24.
See John Webster, Word and Church: Essays in Christian Dogmatics (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001), 118: “It is not a matter of engaging in a struggle to establish the conditions under which an event of the incarnation might be considered a possible object of confession. The rule for theological (indeed, for all) reasoning is: thought follows reality. The incarnation is that from which theology moves, rather than that towards which it moves.”
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van Erp, S. (2018). Christ, the Stranger: The Theological Relevance of Migration. In: Schmiedel, U., Smith, G. (eds) Religion in the European Refugee Crisis. Religion and Global Migrations. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67961-7_14
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