In 1982 a Methodist congregation in Detroit made public declaration that its sanctuary would serve as a refuge for resisters of draft registration. It set out the spiritual welcome mat and later commended the practice to sister and brother congregations. In the debate that ensued there was animated discussion about war, civil disobedience, and the portent of a draft. Lacking in the debate was the most forthright suggestion that the whole proposal simply acknowledged the proper theological and historical implication of a Christian sanctuary. The church had merely recommended that sanctuaries be sanctuaries.
The ancient notion that altars, holy sites, and temples be regarded, by their very nature, as places of refuge is not uniquely biblical or Christian. Sanctuary was a more or less formalized practice, for example, in Egypt, Syria, Greece, and Rome. Political fugitives, criminals, debtors, and slaves on the run all passed beyond the pale of revenge and justice by making it into the precincts of a recognized shrine.
A specifically rich history and theology of the practice, however, exists within biblical tradition. Psalm 27 appears to be a sweet song of trust in God elaborated from the refuge and security of the altar:
The Lord is the refuge of my life;
of whom shall I be afraid?
When evildoers assail me,
uttering slanders against me,
my adversaries and foes,
they shall stumble and fall.
Though a host encamp against me,
my heart shall not fear....
One thing I have asked of the Lord,
that will I seek after;
that I may dwell in the house of the Lord
all the days of my life,
to behold the beauty of the Lord,
and to inquire in the temple.
For God will hide me in shelter
in the day of trouble;
and conceal me under cover
of the Lord's tent
setting me high upon a rock....
The main incidents of the claiming of sanctuary in the history of Israel occurred when Adonijah and later Joab sought protection from Solomon by laying hold the horns of the altar (1 Kings 1 and 2). But the most clearly spelled-out tradition of sanctuary is found in the Torah passages concerning the "cities of refuge" (Exodus 21:13-14; Numbers 35:6-28; Deuteronomy 4:41-43; 19:4-13).
The six levitical cities named in Deuteronomy apparently reflect the historical fact that the right of asylum was commonplace at the local altars of Yahweh. When worship was centralized under the deuteronomic reforms, the local shrines continued to function as places of refuge, and the cities were afforded a special vocation in that respect. The residents of these towns were charged with a rigorous task of protection, "lest innocent blood be shed" (Deuteronomy 19:10).
The asylum of the refuge cities was specifically for those accused of manslaughter - killing without intent. By the law and tradition of bloodguilt, the accused were subject to the private justice of vengeance (An eye for an eye...). The sanctuary, in the interest of justice, provided a break in the cycle of vengeance. At the city gate, a limit to the violence of pursuit was established. The killing stopped there.
Perhaps the most ancient instance of sanctuary was that granted to Cain. He was, admittedly, a premeditated murderer. The earth cried out for blood vengeance - and his curse was to be forever a fugitive and wanderer. Nevertheless, in response to Cain's plea God granted mercy and marked a limit to violence. The notorious mark of Cain was not really the public stigma of shame so often represented. It was a mark of protection. He carried upon his very person the refuge of God. He was a walking sanctuary, as it were.
Sanctuary is quite literally a sign and space of nonviolence: check your weapons at the door. Indeed, in the early church, it was the ministry of protection and mediation that by far preceded any public or civil acknowledgment of Christian sanctuary. "The early Christian Church," one historian notes in Sanctuaries and Sanctuary Seekers, "was strongly opposed to the shedding of blood, and ready to do all in its power to prevent violence which might result in bloodshed. Thus, the clergy speedily became intermediaries between criminals and those who desired vengeance, and acted as ambassadors of mercy before the throne of justice." Fugitives were protected, slaves interceded for (think of Paul's letter to Philemon on behalf of Onesimus), and debtors sheltered until a bargain could be made or forgiveness given. In particular the growing recognition of the office of bishop as intercessor paved the road to the sanctuary door.
Certain illustrations of sanctuary incidents in medieval England portray the fugitives at the door or near the altar with daggers in their hands. The historians and scholars are quick to point out, however, that this is a "blemish" on their accuracy, for "everyone in England knew full well that the Church never suffered any sanctuary seeker to approach who bore in their hands or on their person any kind of weapon."
In one of these paintings, the sanctuary seeker at Hexham is sitting on the frith stool, or peace stool, a stone seat often placed near the altar, especially in the designated sanctuaries of England. In the foreground of the picture, with a firm gesture of rebuke, a member of the clergy blocks the way of intruders who have violated the gates, perhaps with weapons of their own.
From the levitical cities of refuge to the heyday of sanctuaries in England, sanctuary nonviolence has not been passive or sedentary, despite being grounded in the altar.
Another notable epoch of active sanctuary nonviolence occurred during the Peace of God movement in 11th-century France, a time of social and political chaos. Petty principalities squabbled over turf, private armies defended and devoured property, the judicial system was all but worthless, and debtors were hounded with a vengeance. The movement preached and prayed and negotiated and compacted peace. And the common reverence for sanctuary often bought time and played a role in these ministrations and restraints.
Sanctuary seeds its nonviolence in history and implies resistance, beginning at the altar. A Methodist congregation recently set upon its front lawn a large sign bearing the international symbol for nuclear-free zone, a region where nuclear weapons are neither built, nor based, nor permitted traverse, nor relied upon for military security.
For a church to declare its building a nuclear-free zone is either redundant or lucid: the weapons are perforce excluded, in fact and in spirit. A geography, very nearly a realm, of nonviolence is suggested and represented: not a bomb shelter, but a sanctuary circle of refusal and rebuke. On this end of our bloody history, the church might yet declare itself the limit of nuclear violence: the arms race stops here.
The sanctuary as sanctuary celebrates the sovereignty of God in history and our lives, marking the limit of civil authority. The long arm of the law stops and knocks at the front door. Because the foundation of every state or political authority has recourse to (more or less) "legitimate" violence, and because they more or less pretend to the sovereignty of God, these issues are not entirely separable.
Although the function, practice, and theology of sanctuary is not to be circumscribed by civil acknowledgment, in the history of the church Christian sanctuary has enjoyed various seasons of legal recognition. It is provoking to reflect that Constantine was probably the first to sanction it early in the fourth century (though initially as a simple delay of pursuit while clergy made intercession). Whatever might be impugned cynically about the depth or reality of Constantine's conversion, whatever might be said (and much ought) about the seduction of the church by the emperor, here was symbol and acknowledgment by the emperor of limit to his own authority.
For all the politics, there's something intriguing in the picture of him leaving his guard outside the door and seating himself (with the permission of the council) on a stool to listen in on the theological debate at Nicea. Not many years prior, under the political rituals of the imperial cult, any statue of the emperor had been the seat of legal sanctuary - even clinging to his picture had been sufficient to afford protection from pursuit and suspension of civil law.
The period and place, however, of greatest exercise of sanctuary privilege was in medieval England, where for several centuries at any given time there were more than a thousand people under protection of the church's peace. The ecclesiastical turf was carefully set forth, and elaborate procedures for the sanctuary seeker obtained.
One of the most interesting corollaries of English sanctuary law was a provision for "abjuration of the realm," whereby a person accused of a felony and admitted to the church might forswear the right of all protection under the king's law and be permitted a strictly limited time to travel on foot to the nearest port and quit the kingdom, never to return except by the king's leave. It was as though every church door stood at the very boundary of the nation-state.
Until recently the notion of sanctuary had fallen into widespread disuse. In the United States particularly the practical theology of sanctuary has been subject to confusion and neglect. The intrusion of civil religion is a prime candidate for cause on this score. Picture the altar of your own local congregation. Is there a flag in the sanctuary? I know of certain young and impetuous pastors who have attempted with great ceremony and as a sort of dramatic sermon illustration to remove the flag from their chancel. The whole affair ends badly in something of an unresolved wrestling match with disgruntled parishioners. The confusion is deeply and emotionally held.
Perhaps in another context the dangerous idolatry, the political implications of our theological confusion might be more plainly evident. Eberhart Bethge reports that after Hitler seized power in January 1933, the altar of Magdeburg Cathedral, like many other churches in Germany, was surrounded with swastika flags. From the pulpit, the dean of the cathedral explained:
In short, it has come to be the symbol of German hope. Whoever reviles this symbol of ours is reviling our Germany. The swastika flags 'round the altar radiate hope - hope that the day is at last about to dawn.
It was an invasion - the precursor of many to come.
But not every sanctuary door and altar was so easily accessible to the spirit of power. On perhaps the same Sunday morning Dietrich Bonhoeffer preached a different word:
The Church has only one altar, the altar of the Almighty...before which all creatures must kneel.... He who seeks anything other than this must keep away; he cannot join us in the house of God.
In France, the village of Le Chambon became a city of refuge for Jews fleeing the Nazi persecution. Its central figure was Andre Pascal Trocme, the town's Protestant minister. He pastored the little village into a community of compassion - a refuge where genuine hospitality was resistance.
Le Chambon was the very incarnation of sanctuary. Its residents took risks and suffered loss, and some of them died - all as a matter of course, as though it were simply in the nature of things and part of what it meant to be human.
The suggestion that sanctuary is not finally a place or a building made with hands but embodied in a person or a people is not new. In fact it is recognizably biblical. In John's gospel when Jesus drives the moneychangers out of the temple, he engages in the following remarkable exchange with the authorities:
"What sign have you to show us for doing this?"
"Destroy this temple [naos - sanctuary or dwelling place - all the same in Greek] and in three days I will raise it up."
"It has taken forty-six years to build this temple and you're going to raise it up in three days?"
But he spoke of the temple of his body
(John 2:18-21).
It is said that at the crucifixion of Jesus the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. Our comprehension of that sign may now be altered.
In the New Jerusalem envisioned in the 21st chapter of Revelation, where the sovereignty of God is finally vindicated in the whole of creation, it is made explicitly clear that there is no temple as such, for the temple is the Lamb.
Paul more than once admonishes the congregation at Corinth to remember that they are the temple of the Lord. And to the Ephesians he writes:
So then you are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the chief cornerstone, in whom the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built into it for a dwelling place for God in the Spirit
(Ephesians 2:18-22).
In certain churchly circles these passages about the bodily temple are read in conjunction with whether you smoke cigarettes or drink or have sex or even eat too much. That's not an entirely fatuous reading, but it misses the bulk of the point. It is about community and has wide political implications with respect to the sovereignty of God and the limits of violence and civil authority.
Sanctuary is not a question of fortress mentality, of thick walls and heavy oak doors that power may lock tight. It is a matter of truth and faithfulness. The deepest meaning of sanctuary is revealed in Jesus' death and resurrection. Even in death Jesus takes his refuge only in faithfulness and truth, revealing both radical nonviolence and the sovereignty of God, and becoming our refuge.
In the 1980s, there was a growing sanctuary movement in the United States wherein Christians and congregations comprehended politics and the truth of their lives. Christians opened their hearts and church doors to fugitives from Central America.
An increasingly organized underground railroad connected places of hospitality for these "illegal aliens," and that network became linked with emerging self-declared sanctuaries. This public disobedience was a risk for the refugees as well as for the congregations - in fact more so. Most were from El Salvador and Guatemala and fled at great risk from the greater risks of disappearance, torture, and political murder. If caught, they faced deportation and likely death in their homelands.
In the sixth chapter of Revelation is an image and a question. The image is of the martyrs, the souls of the faithful dead, crouching under the altar. They seem to be granted sanctuary in death. And they appear to be granted also a clearer view of history from that vantage point.
A question is upon their lips, and it has been suggested that the question is a form of their faith. What they ask is more plaintive than the sweet song of trust composed in Psalm 27, but not surely to be uttered apart from it. They pray: "O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before thou wilt judge and vindicate our blood upon the earth?"
How long indeed?
Bill Wylie-Kellermann was a Methodist pastor in Detroit, Michigan when this article appeared. He is a Sojourners contributing editor.
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