A Theology of Place and Displacement a Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Divin
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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO GOD IS HERE: A THEOLOGY OF PLACE AND DISPLACEMENT A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVINITY SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY BY MARY EMILY BRIEHL DUBA CHICAGO, ILLINOIS AUGUST 2018 © 2018 Mary Emily Briehl Duba All rights reserved ii For the children of Baan Phonsawan and the women of Aguada “In the mountains we knew God, in the city we do not know ourselves.” iii CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS V INTRODUCTION 1 1. PLACE: AN OFFERING TO THE THEOLOGICAL IMAGINATION 24 2. CREATION AND THE GOD WHO MAKES ROOM 86 3. INCARNATION AND THE GOD WHO INHABITS 140 4. THE CROSS AND THE DISPLACED GOD 185 5. THE CHURCH AND THE GOD WHO IS HERE 228 CONCLUSION 276 BIBLIOGRAPHY 282 iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am deeply grateful to my dissertation committee—Kevin Hector, Susan Schreiner, and William Schweiker—for their constructive feedback and support. Profound thanks go to Kevin Hector, my advisor, whose insightful engagement with this project at every stage enabled me to refine my own thinking and gave me the courage to write. I would also like to thank the wider circle of teachers who were formative in my theological education: Shannon Craigo-Snell, Jan Holton, Dwight Hopkins, Serene Jones, David Kelsey, Hans-Josef Klauck, Kristen Leslie, Thomas Ogletree, Richard Rosengarten, and Emilie Townes, as well as Dorothy Bass and Jerry Cobb, SJ. I am grateful to my colleagues in the University of Chicago Divinity School’s Theology Reading Group, especially Bryce Rich, Kyle Rader, Russell Johnson, Olivia Bustion, and Jason Cather, who provided thoughtful feedback on early chapters, and to Willa Swenson-Lengyel, whose friendship sustained me through the thick and thin of our doctoral studies. I give thanks for the people of God at Immanuel Lutheran Church of Eau Claire, who surrounded my family and me with community and prayer during the writing of this dissertation, especially my pastor and friend, Jamie Brandt Brieske. I offer my heartfelt thanks to Ellie, Hannah, and Frances, who cared for my daughter with joy and tenderness while I wrote. Additionally, I thank the Louisville Institute for a Dissertation Writing Grant, which funded the final year of writing and set me in a wider community of scholars, as well as the Evangelical Lutheran Church in American for four annual Doctoral Studies Grants, which gave me a concrete sense of support from my home denomination. My parents, Susan Briehl and Martin Wells, have been a constant source of love, encouragement, and prayer. “We will surround you with pride undisguised,” they promised at the v beginning, and they have, most abundantly. My mother’s particular gift for mending split verb phrases and her steadfast accompaniment in the final stretch were immeasurable grace. My sister, Magdalena Briehl Wells, sustained me in this work with gifts of nourishing food, rest days away from the books, and boundless encouragement. She is a room-maker, through and through. My grandmother, Ruth Miles Briehl, once coaxed a chapter along with the promise of celebratory drinks on the deck. Her home is my favorite place. My in-laws—Gail and David Duba—have been unfailing in their support even as graduate education took us far from home. Finally, this project would not have been possible without my husband and friend, Jason Duba, whose love has grounded, sheltered, and freed me for this work. Our daughter, Abigail Claire, was born between Chapters Three and Four. She has made room in us for freshest joy and deepest love, and makes our life together a celebration. vi INTRODUCTION Ours is the age of the displaced person. Edward Said expressed it thus, and statistics gathered by the United Nations confirm it. No age has been without its exiles, but “the difference between earlier exiles and those of our own time is, it bears stressing, scale: our age—with its modern warfare, imperialism, and the quasi-theological ambitions of totalitarian rules—is indeed the age of the refugee, the displaced person, mass immigration.”1 Uprooted by war and violence, an unprecedented 65.6 million people worldwide had fled their homes by the end of 2016.2 Natural disasters— hurricanes, landslides, and earthquakes—have displaced an additional 26.4 million people on average each year since 2008, a number expected to increase in coming years as vulnerable places succumb to the rising tides and temperatures of climate change.3 In our own country, undocumented people are deported daily, displaced to a “home country” which many do not know or consider home. Others live in fear of deportation, trapped in the precarious invisibility of the in-between.4 Whatever 1 Edward Said, "Reflections on Exile," in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University, 2000), 138. 2 This number surpasses the total population of the United Kingdom. UN High Commissioner for Refugees, "Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2016," (Geneva: UNHCR, 2016). 3 Weather-events and other environmental disasters most often displace people internally, that is, within the borders of their home country. Since internally displaced persons (IDPs) do not cross an international border, they are difficult to count and not eligible for the same protections as refugees. See, Michelle Yonetani, "Global Estimates 2015: People Displaced by Disasters," (Geneva: Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, 2015). 4 An undocumented migrant from Mexico describes living in the United States without documents as the life of one “already detained” in Deborah Boehm, Returned: Going and Coming in an Age of Deportation (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), 149, 31. 1 the cause of one’s displacement, little in the human experience matches the existential desperation of having no where to go.5 The human relationship to place is changing, even for those who have never known such radical displacement. Contemporary life is characterized by hypermobility between increasingly homogenous places.6 Communication technologies enable connection irrespective of physical location, such that neither education nor commerce, neither work nor worship necessarily depend on bodily presence in shared places.7 These displaced and highly mobile ways of life fuel our ecological crisis. Separated from meaningful, reciprocal relationships with places, we commoditize sands and soils, fracturing plains and removing mountaintops. Within us swells the existential concern that this planet may soon be no place for us. Displacement raises existential questions—questions about human personhood, meaning, suffering, and belonging—to which the church is called to give account. What role does place play in human experience, meaning-making, and identity? Who is the human person uprooted from place or left to inhabit places stripped or destroyed? Displacement also raises distinctly theological questions about how God relates to the world. We speak liturgically of God’s presence in creation and in the church, but what can such words mean in such a world as we inhabit—a world divided by borders 5 Psychologist Paul Tournier writes about this existential anxiety as it manifests itself in the common and recurrent dream that “a seat cannot be found.” Paul Tournier, A Place for You: Psychology and Religion, trans. Edwin Hudson (London: SCM Press, 1969), 10. 6 The term “hypermobility” describes the increased mobility—both frequency of travel and speed of travel—made possible by late modernity’s combination of globalization, relatively inexpensive fossil fuels, and technology. It should be acknowledged that the ease, speed, and freedom of movement this term describes is still a privilege belonging to the global few. On hypermobility, see, Alastair Bonnett, The Geography of Nostalgia: Global and Local Perspectives on Modernity and Loss (New York: Routledge, 2016), 13. 7 Even seminaries are turning to online education, and current reports indicate that “being there” in one’s own ministerial context and congregational community can bear more fruit than “being there” in the classroom: Sharon L. Miller and Christian Scharen, "Being There: Online Distance Theological Education," Auburn Studies No. 23 (Fall 2017). 2 and secured by barbed wire? How ought we to speak of God’s revelatory and redemptive activity in the ruins of war and the toxic waste of capitalism? To respond to such questions, the Christian church needs well-developed conceptual resources for thinking theologically about place and displacement. Presently, however, Christian theology lacks such resources. The absence of attention to place in Christian theology—and in modern, western thought more generally—has been well-documented.8 On the whole, the arguments go, modern thought and Christian theology have subordinated place to history, creation to redemption.9 In this temporal paradigm, creation is viewed as the theater of salvation history, Christ as the center of history, and redemption as completed in the fullness of time. The conceptual emphasis on time and history has been so thoroughgoing that the spatial dimension of creaturely life has been largely forgotten. Even if the situation is not as dire as these declension narratives depict it (eg. “the demise of place”), it is certainly the case that conceptual resources for thinking theologically about place and its role in human life are underdeveloped.10 In the last two decades, theologians have begun to address the lacuna of theological reflection on place. Spurred, in part, by ecological concerns and the speed of globalization, place has 8 For the preeminent account of the absence (even the “demise” and “suppression”) of place in modern western thought, see Edward Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Nearly every other philosophical history of place draws on Casey’s account, which is widely adopted in the field of place studies, though it is not without critique. (See, for example, Thomas Brockelman, "Lost in Place? On the Virtues and Vices of Edward Casey's Anti-Modernism," Humanitas XVI, no.