Why do we human beings invest so much energy in remembering past heroes and events from our history? That question is the essentially what Dr Ian Elmer is exploring in today's commentary. The broad body of his commentary explores the central place taken by Abraham in the three great religions of the Book: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Ian ends his commentary though in a more contemporary setting asking how much of our contemporary faith is related to its roots and how our faith is forged by subsequent developments in knowledge and history. Rich fodder for contemplation in this commentary...

Remembering Abraham...

Abraham is remembered as the founding patriarch of the three religions of revelation — Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In Jewish and Islamic tradition he is literally remembered as the progenitor of the Semitic tribespeople who constituted the forebears of the Jews and Arabs (via their ancestors, Abraham's sons, Isaac and Ishmael). In Christian tradition, he stands as the "father of faith" to whom God promised a spiritual and religious heritage that would span all nations.

Abraham and Isaac by Carravaggio. Click image to enlarge and for source information. A section of this image has been used in the header and footer graphic for today's commentary.

In the Scriptures, however, there is an interesting twist on this act of memorialising that speaks of God "remembering Abraham" (e.g., Ex 2:24; Lev 26:42). For the Divine Being, the memory of Abraham serves to draw forth divine mercy and compassion. Not surprisingly, on the one hand, the leaders of Israel are often quick to remind God of his fondness for Abraham (e.g., Ex 32:13). And, on the other hand, the prophets point to the figure of Abraham, refugee and wanderer, as a sign of hope for a people who suffered exile and foreign occupation (e.g., Is 51:2). In the Christian scriptures, Abraham is offered as the preeminent righteous ancestor whose "faith" won divine favour for himself and his later spiritual progeny (e.g., Rom 4:3, 13; Gal 3:29).

Abraham was many things to many people. The memory of Abraham serves in varying measures to articulate Israelite identity, to motivate the remembering agent to take appropriate actions, to give solace, and to activate social, religious, or political ideals (Hendel, 2005). These memories also serve to hide ambiguities and to create new divisions and oppositions where none were apparent previously. The scriptural memory of Abraham helps us understand the way in which we all use the past to shape the present, and points to possibilities for remembering the past in order to re-member the present.

Ties that Bind...

In ancient Israel, as in many tribal societies, the relationships among individuals and households are organized by the idiom of genealogy. Bloodlines and kinship mark out the boundaries of society, demarcating family and friend or friend and foe. One's rights and responsibilities vis à vis others are determined by the degree of kinship according to the genealogical system. One's first duty was to one's immediate household and, then to the clan, followed by the tribe; relationships outside those three tiers depended on distant blood ties or covenants sealed in blood (e.g., the daughter of one tribal chief given in marriage to another).

Religion too is encoded in this genealogical system. As Karel van der Toorn (1996: 256) notes in his thoughtful study of family religion in the ancient Near East, "patrilineal kinship entails a common religious devotion". All family members worship the god of their "fathers", and the divine beings of the ancient Near East are presented in patriarchal terms. In the patriarchal stories of Genesis 12-55, the family's religious devotion centers on the "God of the Father", that is, the god of the patriarchal bloodline, also called the "God of Abraham" (Gen 31:53, Ps 47:9). If you will pardon the pun; it was a case of "Love me, love my god!"

The God of Abraham is similarly bound to the tribe by ties of blood — not in the familial sense of the divine being giving birth to humankind; but in the ritual sense. God makes a covenant with Abraham, which is sealed through blood sacrifice (Gen 15:9) and a promise from God to protect Abraham's posterity (Gen 15:13-16; cf. 12:2-3).

The God of Abraham, then, is the divine benefactor of Abraham's family, granting blessings and children, healing, guidance and support on their journeys. At key moments the Divine Being even communicates with the Patriarchs directly. This close relationship with the God of the Father is the basis of family religion in ancient Israel, and it persisted in varying forms right throughout the biblical period, including the New Testament period. Even today, Judaism (as well as Christianity and Islam, which are still relatively "tribal") continues to uphold ethnic and familiar connections as closely related to religious affiliation.

The idiom of genealogy relates the past to the present not only in social and religious life but also in the literary structures of the biblical stories. Story is one of the most powerful tools for forging disparate groups into a united tribe or nation. By telling stories about shared ancestors, the group creates a collective past that binds them all together into a single "family".

The narratives of the collective past in Genesis are organized by the genealogical continuum from Adam to the tribes of Israel, in which Abraham is the turning point as the chosen recipient of God's promises. The stories of the Exodus that dominate the pages of the ensuing four books of the Torah — Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy — follow on from God's election of Abraham and his offspring as his "chosen ones".

From the very outset of Exodus we are told that when Pharaoh crushed the Israelites under the yoke of Egyptian slavery, "God remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob", (Ex 2:24), whereupon the Divine Being conceived the great plan of rescue. The act of remembering Abraham and his successors is a turning point in the story, motivating God's salvific actions. Similarly, when God is about to destroy the rebellious Israelites during their worship of the Golden Calf, Moses implores God to "remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel" (Ex 32:13), and God's wrath abates. Of course, the story doesn't end there with the Exodus.

Such stories are not simply about the past. They serve to explain and shape relationships in the present. In the narratives of the Torah, society and history are bound together in the idiom of genealogical reckoning. Each phase of the story is stitched together by genealogical notions telling of "who begat whom". The larger story of a people is framed in an unbroken chain of blood, which carries not just life, but also the very characteristics and personality of the corporate identity (Hendel, 2005). Hence, recent events are read out of these ancestral narratives.

In a later crisis, when the Israelite exiles are dwelling in Babylon, a prophet exhorts the displaced people to "consider Abraham your father and Sarah who bore you", (Is 51:2). The memory of Abraham and Sarah provides a paradigm for the people that illuminate God's decision to comfort the "chosen ones" and lead them back from Mesopotamia to the Promised Land.

It is widely agreed among Old Testament scholars that the Torah reached its final form either during or just after the Babylonian Exile (587-539 B.C.E). Hence, the message that permeates the stories of the Patriarchs is one that would resonate with a people in exile (Boadt, 1984). To wit: the family can continue to depend upon their divine benefactor who has bound the Divine Being to them in a never-ending covenant.

The memories of Abraham and the narratives about him in Genesis are remembered and recounted in the later books of the Bible (as they are also in present-day Jewish, Christian and Islamic liturgies) and, hence, they involve the present in the past and look to the past as a model and warrant for the present. This is an important point to remember — history is not remembered and recounted for its own sake.

Past, Present and Future...

Contrary to what is commonly thought, the remembered past is not merely a glorified projection of the present. The authors of the Torah were not simply projecting their own experience of exile in Babylon back onto Abraham's experience of being a "stranger in a strange land". Rather, such stories evolved over time as a conflation of past and present in which history, folklore, and ethnic self-fashioning are thoroughly entangled. This is true of all biblical narratives, as also our own stories of past ancestors or national heroes, which have present meanings and functions, as well as complex and deeply embedded histories.

An important implication of this sort of genealogical "history telling" is that it is clearly goal oriented, pointed toward a particular future. It is a teleological form of history, consummating in the present of the patriarchal bloodline, and including its future prospects. It is, in anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss's (1966: 257) phrase, a "history-for"; that is, history in "the sense of being biased even when it claims not to be, for it inevitably remains partial — that is, incomplete". In short, it is a history whose "facts" are constituted by the past, present and future interests of a particular community.

In the language of biblical and literary critics, every text has an "implied audience", a specific community who will "hear" and, hopefully, "act upon" the import of the message contained within the text. The implied audience is the great nation promised to Abraham, specifically that nation as it presently resides in exile in Babylon (Brueggemann, 2003: 47). Their present existence, their survival against the odds (i.e., despite their loss of the land of Israel), and their present-day experience of exile and persecution colour the various threads that have been woven together to form the narrative.

Isaac blessing Jacob by Govert Flinck (1638). Click image to enlarge and for source information.

Despite the obvious artifice, however, there remains in the narrative vestigial remnants of alternative histories or "roads not taken". The descent from Abraham to Jacob (Israel) via Isaac is only achieved by subverting the bloodlines. Abraham's son Ishmael and Isaac's son Esau were the first-born and, therefore, according to ancient principle of "primogeniture" bore the historical right to primacy. But matters fell out differently and each had his blood rights usurped by a younger brother.

Nevertheless, as descendants of Abraham, their progeny — the Arabs (Ishmael) and the Edomites (Esau) — coexists uneasily with Israel in this web of kinship, sometimes as friends and allies, more often as enemies and conquerors. Indeed, it is often an appeal to the memory of Abraham and his family that serves to explain the ambiguities of the relationship between Israel and its neighbours.

Similar struggles within the main bloodlines are reflected in the Abraham narratives as well. Problems of inheritance and patrimony, marriage and family relationships, are basic to virtually every story about Abraham. In many ways, Abraham's family was the first dysfunctional family. The biblical authors remember and recount the stories of the Patriarchs with their "warts and all"; conflicts over inheritance and rivalry among siblings and spouses are a fact of life, as in Cain's murder of Abel, the expulsion of Hagar, and the sale of Joseph into slavery (Hendel, 2005).

Final Reflections...

The memory of Abraham in the Hebrew Bible exerts a variety of powerful claims — some explicit, some implicit — on the ones who remember. In times of crisis, God and Israel are awakened to their mutual obligations and hopes, derived from and modeled after God's relationship with the patriarch.

The stories bear evidence, however, that they were subject to revision, counterclaims, and reinterpretation. The stories chart, not a fixed and static reminiscence, but a living memory that preserves and interprets the story of Abraham in the interests of contemporary communities of Abraham's descendents. In remembering Abraham, Israel "re-membered"; that is, it reestablished and maintained the boundaries of its membership.

What of our own stories? In the civic sphere, we might readily acknowledge the shaping of history to suit the needs of the present age. For example, the story of the Anzacs is treasured by Australians, not because it was a great military victory for the Australian and New Zealand Army Corp; it was, if fact, an absolute route. Rather, it is treasured, remembered, recounted and ritualised in dawn services and town centre marches, because it speaks to who we are today. The so-called "Anzac Spirit" is conjured up every time we want to speak of "Australian values", such as mateship, egalitarianism, and the "fair go" principle.

I wonder if we are willing to be similarly critical in our examination of our more overtly "religious" stories. I am not talking here now so much about our biblical stories; but those of more recent memory that serve to define our "Catholic" identity.

Catholicism has until recently been primarily racial and tribal — it was a religion of a counter culture: being Irish and being Catholic were synonymous. We shared common ancestral stories about the "troubles" in Ireland and persecution in Australia. We had our Episcopal heroes: Mannix in Melbourne; Duhig in Brisbane; Gilroy in Sydney. We voted Labor; and, after "the split", DLP. We held dear the memory of Corpus Christi, St Patrick's Day, and May Day processions; all-night vigils in honour of Mary ... and all the other "bells and smells" of public Catholicism of the past century. But all of that has gone.

We are now living in a very different Australia characterised by ever-widening diversity, multiculturalism and secularism. Some of our past practices linger on; but they are, at least in terms of actual numbers of participants, a pale reflection of the past. One might also wonder if the past was as "golden" as our memory suggests. The weeping sore that is the clergy abuse scandals alone testifies that our telling of the past glory, unlike that of the Abraham stories, has glossed over some of the darker hues in the tapestry of our history.

This observation raises significant questions for the revisionists who would want to return to the "golden age" of Catholicism, with its Latin masses, penny catechisms, novenas, ladies' sodalities and men's societies. Much of the reminiscences of such revisionists of a bygone, larger, more dedicated Catholic Church are little more than a myth.

Statistics do not tell the whole story; and large numbers of participants do not necessarily testify to significant levels of commitment; nor do numbers alone tell us anything about the rationale behind that commitment. How many "Catholics" were baptised into a family that was already only nominally "Catholic" — that is, part of that racial and tribal Catholicism, which drew its life blood from the political and social realities of being Irish-Catholics in Australia?

Perhaps it is time to reinvent or, at least, reinterpret our stories from the past. The utility and flexibility of the Abraham narratives shows how one can rework a good founding story over and over to accommodate changed conditions. What elements of past Australian-Catholic stories can we exhume, elaborate and expand to create a new sense of identity and community? As our brief overview of the Abraham stories testifies, the task of reinventing Australian Catholicism is not a difficult, nor is it a unique, one. As the sociologist, Emile Durkheim (1915: 428), observed, there are "no gospels which are immortal", but there is no "reason for believing that humanity is incapable of inventing new ones".

Bibliography and Further Reading:
Boadt, L. (1984), Reading the Old Testament: An Introduction. New York: Paulist Press.
Brueggemann, W. (2003), An Introduction to the Old Testament: The Canon and Christian Imagination. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press.
Durkheim, E (1915), The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press.
Gottwald, N.K. (1979), The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250—1050 b.c.e. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis.
Hendel, R. (2005), Remembering Abraham - Culture, Memory, and History in the Hebrew Bible. New York: Oxford University Press.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1966), The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Toorn, K. van der (1996), Family Religion in Babylonia, Syria and Israel: Continuity and Change in the Forms of Religious Life. Leiden: Brill.
Photo Credits:
Clicking on the photos used in the body of the commentary will take you to the original source. The image of a Roman Centurion (not Cornelius specifically) is from a stained glass window at Holy Trinity, Marham, Norfolk in the UK according to the source at: www.flickr.com/photos/norfolkodyssey/3727540910/.

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©2010Dr Ian Elmer

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