Does Land Matter? # 226. 21/04/2026

Welcome, to a long-standing biblical theme, with highly consequential implications for our present world.

Does Land Matter?

Three things have brought the question of ‘land’ to my mind:

The first is of course what we might no longer call the ‘holy land’ – the seemingly intractable conflict between Jews and Palestinians in both claiming rights to the same piece of land.

Secondly, the protests, once focussed in Epping but with earlier and wider objections by people to asylum seekers being housed in their backyard – an unwelcome intrusion into their ‘land’.

Thirdly, and well outside public attention, was a session from the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies featuring members of the Memoria Indigena collective from the central Americas, and their central concern about their rights to belong in and control their ancestral lands.

At first sight the Christian response to all these issues is to declaim ‘What Problem!?’ The quintessential Christian attitude to place was set out in the Epistle to Diognetus, chapter 5, probably written in the mid second century: ‘Inhabiting Greek as well as barbarian cities, according as the lot of each of them has determined, and following the customs of the natives in respect to clothing, food, and the rest of their ordinary conduct, they display to us their wonderful and confessedly striking method of life. They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers’.

In similar vein, the range of Revelation 7:9 is often quoted: worshippers from every tribe, nation, people and language. But it is worth noting categories not referred to: not just ‘colour’, a largely meaningless category in the New Testament, but also ‘land’. Here are the roots of Diognetus’s agnosticism about place. For the new people of God identity is centred around being part of God’s new creation – a new humanity than transcends all earthly distinctions. To this extent baptism dislocates us from our place of origin and gives us a cosmopolitanism whereby ‘every foreign land is . . . native country’. What was once a definable ‘Promised Land’ given to God’s people under the first Covenant, in the new Covenant is now the whole earth into which his people are to go and bring the blessings, the shalom, of his Lordship.

Yet inherent in the very reach of that rather abstract universalism is a necessary localism. His people are to proclaim him in Judea and Samaria, and going on to ‘the ends of the earth’, that is further specific places. So Geography appears. Antioch, Galatia, Illyricum, Spain come onto the agenda. And each of those places carries its own culture, and language, religion, its own systems of government. Luke, in the Acts of the Apostles, is not unconcerned about these local specifics. We know not just about the goddess worshipped in Ephesus but also about the titles of local office holders. We know not just that Lydia was a ‘worshipper of God’ but that she originated from Thyatira. Lesslie Newbigin has pointed out that that the first Christians had just two identifiers – they were ‘church’, called to be God’s people, and they lived in a ‘place’: Colossae, Galatia, Rome or wherever. Furthermore, Christian ministers needed to identify, familiarise with, and then learn to adopt to those identities, to ‘become all things to all people’ (1 Cor 9:22). So Paul’s ministry in the Roman colonia of Philippi (Acts 16:11-40) has a different feel to his ministry in rural Lystra (Acts 16:11-40), with its references to ‘earth and sea and all that is in them’, to ‘rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, and filling you with food and your hearts with joy’. This is a different world from that of the urban Corinthians and Romans, and indeed the seemingly mobile and cosmopolitan world of Diognetus.

As Christianity diffused, both as it increasingly took on a public identity within the Roman empire, and as it became increasingly established in rural communities, so both the heritage of Israel and the ministry of Jesus were fruitful examples. ‘Land’ wasn’t merely a surface you travelled over, it was the source of provision, of work and community, and therefore identity. It is something that you love. Aside from the occasional merchant, Jesus’ parables are so often deeply rooted in the soil. A member of the Memoria Indigena collective, Jocabed, writes: ‘Our main point of reference and inspiration has always been the territory and our lived experiences. . . All of that has inspired my life to continue writing, guided by the deep spirituality that the territory brings’ (italics mine).

Land, then, becomes re-established as something theologically significant in Christian understanding. It is part of what Bonhoeffer referred to as the ‘penultimate’ – that range of expressions of our humanity which have value before God even whilst not being central to our salvation.

If ‘land’ is significant but not ultimate then how much weight might it be given? I can only return here to a recurring theme in these blogs – David Goodhart’s post-Brexit evaluation ‘The Road to Somewhere’. For ‘somewheres’ land and place matter a great deal. It did for Jews in the Old Testament (and still today) including Jesus and his first followers, for rural communities down the centuries, including the Memoria Indigena collective. But for ‘anywheres’ the link to land and place has withered, if not disappeared. Exile alerted the Jews to its potential dispensability. Lydia’s business loosened her ties to home, and Diognetus was probably her heir. In western Europe in the Middle Ages the church’s undermining of familial clan (see Joseph Henrich’s ‘The Weirdest People in the World’) induced social and geographical fluidity, so that for most people in Britain today Goodhart’s somewhere/anywhere polarity is suggestive rather than determinative.

My personal story is illustrative. For the first nine years of my life I was a Somewhere. We lived in a suburban street in Bebington on the Wirral, Cheshire. Cars weren’t yet common so you could play in the street with neighbouring children. For every November 5^th a very large bonfire was built on waste ground at the end of the street (that needed 24-hour protection from being prematurely ignited by the creators of rival bonfires). A street football team was birthed in our empty garage. But at age 9 we moved to live on a bus route in Pinner in the north-western London suburbs. I had to walk half a mile to a local park to find a football game which I could join in with unknown boys. A scholarship meant a one-hour commute to school. Christian conversion meant a 20 minute cycle ride in the opposite direction to a bible class. I was being groomed to be an Anywhere. So, I both warm to the Epistle to Diognetus’ relaxed and flexible attitude to place and land, but also have a nostalgic sympathy with those for whom ‘somewhere’ still matters. Becoming a parish priest meant rooting myself for the bulk of my adult life in an ethnically very different parish but just five miles from the scene of my youth.

How, then, might this framework play out as regards the ‘land’ issues that I mentioned at the start of this blog?

1. Land and Commitment.

Peoples’ commitment to place is a resource for human well-being that we should not discount, a theme emphasised by Iain McGilchrist in a recent interview. (Even if dislocation from land can be a cause of people finding lasting security in Jesus Christ, as in the experience recounted by a refugee Sri Lankan Tamil convert: ‘I was just lost. In the asphalt jungle. I was walking along the streets, even at 12 midnight I was on the streets. . .Most of the people who have found Christ tell me the same story’. Told to the theologian/anthropologist Albert W Jebanesan in ‘The Changing of the Gods: the process and experience of religious conversion among Tamil refugees in London’, p 109).

The experiences recounted by the Memoria Indigena collective are a very strong and universally widespread example of the power that locality can have for people. The weakness of such a mentality amongst westerners intensifies the ethical issue of social justice over their right to untroubled occupation of ancestral land, especially if set against the encroaching demands for rare metals and other much sought after commodities.

In the West there can also be insensitivity to peoples experience of loss when that sense of mutual belonging is lost, most acutely if there is no longer a common language to even share basic conversations. During Covid I enviously watched television clips of streets full of people banging pots to celebrate our health workers, contrasting it with the very sparse turn-out on our ethnically very mixed street.

2. Land and Openness.

Today the anywhere-dominated theological commentariat often make much of Abraham’s wandering as an inspiration for flexible, mobile discipleship. They make less of Abraham’s common desire to be settled. Consequently, they can be unsympathetic to those for whom belonging in a settled community with shared social mores and language is significant to their well-being. It is easy to take the moral high ground in criticising those who have objected to asylum seekers being housed in their vicinity, the more so because of the distorted and inflammatory ‘protect our daughters’ misinformation provided by the press to stoke the flames. But there is also a lack of imagination from critics in failing to identify the losses felt when a once familiar neighbourhood can no longer provide the sense of home that nurtures a person’s sense of well-being. Those whose historical sense has majored on the misuse of power to provide material benefit can be blind to the very this-worldly costs for whom immigration has meant job competition, lowered wages, or constricted housing and health supply. In this respect the Bishop of Kirkstall, Arun Arora’s initiative in enabling protesters and migrants to hear each other’s voices is a very constructive step.

Despite the unfair distribution of the costs of asylum support, the call to share land and place with those in need is a moral obligation that ought not to be refused. The fact that ‘the earth is the Lord’s’ and that land is the gift of his generosity gives an obligation to be generous to those without a homeland.

3. Land and Division.

Conflicts over possession of land are age old, universal and with bloody and very painful consequences. But the current crisis between Israel and Palestine, and their respective champions, is unique in its intractability and destructiveness. For Christians the Jewish claim to divine right to the land, despite having widespread evangelical support, needs setting aside. The coming of the Messiah through whom all nations will be blessed confirms that God is not restoring the kingdom to Israel, but rather extending his people to the ends of the earth (Acts1:6-8). Rather we have competing but asymmetric and essentially incomparable claims to the land ‘between the river and the sea’. For Palestinians there is simply the right to long established possession of the land with a Jewish minority. For the Jews, the need for to consolidate a safe place of their own after centuries of uncertainty, displacement and then attempted genocide. The basis of the two claims, then, are in a different register. Arguably, the Jews had an existential need. But the powers of the world, who had an element of complicity in the Jewish plight, solved the matter by making hitherto Palestinian land into predominantly Jewish territory, with indigenous people often being expropriated.

Accord could only be possible if those who made the settlement then continued to enforce it for long enough for a necessarily unsatisfactory status quo to become widely acceptable. Instead, the conflict has fermented, with the only possible arbitrator - the United Nations - being hampered by American and British obduracy, so that on both sides the initiative has gone to the extremes. The result is that Israel’s prosperity and military power, protected by the United States with Britain in tow, is allowing Israel both to enlarge its territory, and to exact increasingly inhumane and devastating revenge on those who refuse to accept domination by Israel as a fait accompli.

Without American and British withdrawal of political and military support for Israel, which could freeze the conflict and then allow for considered negotiation of co-existence, the only other alternative is increasingly wide ranging, violent and potentially unending attempts by Israel to staunch the ever-renewing streams of Palestinian grievance and desire to reciprocate some form of revenge.

Land, then, like other gifts of God is a good which becomes a curse when it becomes an idol. Held loosely – content to be sojourners in our own country because our home and our identity is with God – then land can be a succour and a strength. Held intractably it becomes a source of conflict and intense suffering

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Reflecting on Scripture - Luke 13:28- 30.

²⁸ There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, and you yourselves thrown out. ²⁹ Then people will come from east and west, from north and south, and will eat in the kingdom of God. ³⁰ Indeed, some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last.’

Inclusive or Exclusive? Christianity has swung between the two emphases. At times it has been rigid and vigilant, even harsh, in its boundary keeping. Currently, in keeping with the spirit of the age, it is seeking to be open, affirming, generous.

In this passage both are expressed. Jesus gives serious warning about those who will not be able to enter through the ‘narrow door’ of salvation (v 24); those who have mistaken familiarity for faith. Yet he is wonderfully inclusive in the diversity of those who will enjoy participation in the kingdom feast. It will be a geographically (and presumably culturally) comprehensive celebration in gathering from all points of the compass, and socially comprehensive in gathering those whose status is regarded by the world as the ‘least’.

Praise God for the ways in which we see this including taking place in our own times; cry out to God to set right the ways in which that inclusiveness is still limited.