Exiles at Home

A Framework for Faithfulness

In one of the most difficult periods of ancient Israel’s history, Babylon conquered the southern kingdom of Judah, burned Jerusalem, and deported the majority of Judah’s population. Thus began the Babylonian exile, a situation in which Jews, displaced from their homeland, were relocated to various areas in the Babylonian Empire. As you might imagine, exile was an extremely disorienting experience that presented a new set of challenges to the Jewish people. Now strangers in foreign lands, they were faced with the dual tasks of surviving in unfamiliar environments and maintaining their Jewish identity. To put that differently, the displaced people of Judah were faced with the challenge of living as faithful Jews in non-Jewish territory. 

In his letter to Christians in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia, the Apostle Peter draws on Judah’s exile experience when he calls his audience exiles (NIV) or resident aliens (NASB) in the opening of 1 Peter. In doing so, the apostle makes exile a controlling theme for understanding Christian life in the world. In the same way that exiled Jews faced the challenge of living faithfully in non-Jewish territory, so also do Christians face the challenge of living faithfully in non-Christian territory. Exile is a powerful theme that helps us understand our distinctiveness from surrounding culture. Yet, the metaphor only goes so far. Whereas the people of Judah were truly displaced from their homeland, the people addressed in Peter’s letter never actually left home. For these folks, naming Christ as Lord has made them exiles and strangers in their hometowns. What gives?

A theologian named Miroslav Volf has approached the sensibilities of Peter’s exile dynamic from a different starting point: the call of Abraham. If you’ll remember the story from Genesis 12:1-3, God called Abraham to “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you.” (NIV) In following God’s call, Abraham was displaced from place, community, and family to become a stranger in a new land. Just as Abraham was called to depart, Volf argues, so also are Christians, a portion of Abraham’s spiritual descendants. Yet, as was the case with Peter’s exile imagery, Christian departure very often isn’t a matter of actually leaving one’s country, people, or family. Thus, Volf advocates for “departure without leaving.” In this scheme, “...when [Christians] have responded to the call of the Gospel they have stepped, as it were, with one foot outside their own culture while with the other remaining firmly planted in it.”¹ This one foot in/on foot out is a wonderful way of understanding our exiled and called out status. Though Volf himself doesn’t use the following language, I think it is fair to think in terms of having one foot in the kingdom of God and the other in one’s home culture. (Volf speaks in terms of God’s promised future rather than the kingdom. In the end, they are pretty much the same thing.) The Christian, then, becomes the embodiment of kingdom life that is appropriate to his or her own cultural space.

The urgent question for Christians of all cultures and especially evangelicals in the United States of America has to do with what all of this actually looks like on the ground. How do we discern what faithfulness looks like when we have one foot in the kingdom and one foot in our home cultures? That’s what I’d like to explore in the coming weeks. For now, let’s just note that we Christians are exiles in our hometowns because we offer Jesus our highest allegiance. If we can start here, with the realization that we have our feet in two worlds, we are primed to think well about faithfulness. To follow Jesus is to both affirm and deny our cultural heritage according to the Lord who has claimed us as his own.

1. Volf, Miroslav. Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (p. 49). Abingdon Press.

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