The Goats Were Surprised Too
Matthew 25, the Ordered Love, and the Limits of the Argument from the Sword
I. The Argument, Stated Fairly
There is a Christian case for bounded admission, and it is a good deal better than its opponents allow. It runs in four movements:
Civil authority is divinely warranted and not merely tolerated, so that the regulation of entry and residence falls within an office Scripture describes in theological terms.
The love commanded of Christians is ordered rather than uniform, so that proximity and relation genuinely condition obligation.
The Old Law, which is not shy about the stranger, nevertheless admits him by stages rather than at once.
And the duty of the individual believer toward the man at his door is not the same thing as the duty of the magistrate (or the minister, the politician, the Parliament-seated law-maker, i.e., the State) toward a population, the two operating in distinct spheres with distinct instruments.
I have made versions of this argument myself, and I do not retract them. What follows is an attempt to say, with more precision than polemic usually permits, how much of it holds. My conclusion is that three of the four movements survive scrutiny, that they survive in a weaker form than they are commonly given, and that the fourth — the appeal to Matthew 25 by way of the clause concerning the Lord’s brothers — does not survive at all and should be abandoned by those who make it. I shall argue that the argument is stronger without it.
II. What ‘Romans 13’ Establishes
The locus classicus is not obscure:
Romans 13:4 (NA²⁸)
θεοῦ γὰρ διάκονός ἐστιν σοὶ εἰς τὸ ἀγαθόν. ἐὰν δὲ τὸ κακὸν ποιῇς, φοβοῦ·οὐ γὰρ εἰκῇ τὴν μάχαιραν φορεῖ· θεοῦ γὰρ διάκονός ἐστιν ἔκδικος εἰς ὀργὴν τῷ τὸ κακὸν πράσσοντι.
For he is God’s servant to you, for good. But if you do evil, be afraid; for he does not bear the sword in vain, being God’s servant, an avenger for wrath upon him who practises evil.
Two things in the Greek do real work. The ruler is διάκονος θεοῦ — not a necessary evil endured by the Church but a minister holding a commission, the same noun Paul elsewhere applies to himself and to Christ’s servants. And the sword is borne εἰς ὀργήν, for wrath, which is to say that coercion is not incidental to the office but constitutive of it. From this it follows readily enough that the determination of who stands within a jurisdiction, who may enter it, and who may be required to leave, is not an extraneous addition to civil authority but an ordinary exercise of the very competence Paul is describing. A polity that could not answer the question of its own membership could not perform the function for which the passage commends it.
So much is sound. Two qualifications are owed, and are seldom paid.
The first is that Paul says nothing whatever about admission. The passage establishes a competence and is silent as to its criteria. To move from “the magistrate bears the sword” to “the magistrate may set this or that immigration rule” is an inference from the nature of the office, not an exegesis of the text. The inference is, I think, correct. It is still an inference, and an essay that presents it as though Paul had addressed the matter is doing something other than reading Paul.
The second is a matter of rhetorical situation. Romans 13 is addressed to subjects, not to rulers. Its imperative is ὑποτασσέσθω — let every soul be subject — and its pastoral occasion is a small and suspect community under a pagan power it did not choose and could not influence. Chrysostom reads it so; Augustine reads it so.[1] Paul is telling Christians how to live under authority, not issuing a charter to authority. The passage will bear the weight of a doctrine of legitimate civil competence — the tradition has rightly placed that weight upon it — but the Christian legislator who reaches for it should notice that he is reading a letter addressed to somebody else, and that the letter’s original recipients were themselves, in the relevant sense, strangers in the city.
III. The Old Law and Its Strangers
The Hebrew Scriptures do not know a single category of outsider. The gēr is the resident alien, settled among Israel and brought under the protection of the law; the nokrî and zār stand further off. The distinction matters, because the celebrated commands of welcome attach to the first.
ὡς ὁ αὐτόχθων ἐν ὑμῖν ἔσται ὁ προσήλυτος ὁ προσπορευόμενος πρὸς ὑμᾶς, καὶ ἀγαπήσεις αὐτὸν ὡς σεαυτόν.
The sojourner who comes to you shall be to you as the native-born among you, and you shall love him as yourself.
Leviticus 19:34 (LXX)
Against this stands the exclusionary material of Deuteronomy 23, upon which Aquinas builds his well-known threefold division:
the hospes who passes through,
the advena who settles,
and the hostis who comes as an enemy.
Ammon and Moab are barred to the tenth generation; Edom and Egypt are admitted in the third.[2] Admission, on this reading, was structured and graduated rather than immediate and unconditional — which is precisely the point those of us who argue for bounded welcome are fond of making.
Deuteronomy 23, according to Thomas Aquinas:
the hospes who passes through,
the advena who settles,
and the hostis who comes as an enemy.
It is a fair point. It is also carrying about twice the freight it can bear, in three respects.
First, the exclusions of Deuteronomy 23 concern admission to the qāhāl— the assembly — and not admission to the territory. The Ammonite so excluded is already living in Israel, already protected by Israel’s law, already owed the justice the Torah repeatedly demands for the sojourner. What he is denied is full covenantal participation. Read as a border provision, the text is simply misread; read as a provision about naturalisation and the franchise, it is apposite, and the distinction is not a quibble, because it is exactly the distinction between who may live here and who may vote or be eligible to be elected to public office here.
Second, the exclusion is punitive and historically particular rather than a general principle of civilisational hygiene. The stated ground is conduct: they did not meet Israel with bread and water on the road out of Egypt, and they hired Balaam against her.[3] Nothing in the passage suggests that a people is to be barred on account of its being a different people. The excluded are excluded for what they did, for how they behaved, for what their attitude, demeanour and thinking were.
Third, and most awkwardly for those who cite him, Aquinas’s scheme terminates in complete incorporation. The third generation of Edomites and Egyptians enters the assembly entirely. A provision routinely quoted as authority for restriction is in fact more generous than the great majority of policies advanced in its name, and any honest use of it must say so. Integration is not an abstract concept, nor is it a negotiable condition.
The stronger patristic and scholastic support for graduated obligation lies elsewhere, in the doctrine of the ordo caritatis…
Augustine argues that since one cannot do good to all, one must attend to those whom time, place, and circumstance bind more closely to oneself, as though by lot;
Aquinas systematises this into an order of charity in which nearness genuinely conditions the degree of what is owed.[4]
This is a real principle and a serious one, and it will not be dislodged by the sentiment that all men are equally our neighbours — which is true as to dignity and false as to duty.
But the doctrine has a clause that its modern citers rarely reproduce. Aquinas holds that the order of charity is overridden by case extremity:
In a case of urgent necessity one ought to relieve the stranger in extreme need before the nearer person in ordinary need, because necessity of that kind makes the sufferer, for that purpose, the nearest.[5]
The ordo is thus not a permanent ranking of persons but an ordinary rule with an emergency inversion built into it. To invoke the order of charity while suppressing its inversion is to quote half a sentence, and the half omitted is the half that governs precisely the cases — flight, famine, war, genocide, persecution and such — which the argument most often has in view. However, the extreme cases are supposed to be genuine, not an unproven excuse to falsely justify entry.
“Charity begins at home” is a cliché, but the political theology behind it is not.
IV. The Seam
We come to the passage that does not yield.
ξένος ἤμην καὶ συνηγάγετέ με.
I was a stranger and you gathered me in.
Matthew 25:35 (NA²⁸)
The standard move by which this is defused is exegetically respectable and should be stated at its best. In verse 40 the Lord identifies himself not with the needy at large but with ἑνὶ τούτων τῶν ἀδελφῶν μου τῶν ἐλαχίστων — one of the least of these my brothers. Elsewhere in Matthew ἀδελφός regularly denotes the disciple; the diminutive vocabulary of μικροί and ἐλάχιστοι belongs to the same field; and the mission discourse has already established that to receive the emissary is to receive the sender. On this reading, the pericope concerns the reception of Christian missionaries by the nations who encounter them, and has nothing directly to say about the destitute in general or about migration in particular.[6] Gundry and Carson defend it with skill, and it is not a piece of special pleading invented for the occasion.
It nonetheless fails, and it fails three times over. The first objection is textual and, to my mind, decisive. Set the two halves of the verdict beside one another.
ἐφ’ ὅσον ἐποιήσατε ἑνὶ τούτων τῶν ἀδελφῶν μου τῶν ἐλαχίστων, ἐμοὶ ἐποιήσατε. ἐφ’ ὅσον οὐκ ἐποιήσατε ἑνὶ τούτων τῶν ἐλαχίστων, οὐδὲ ἐμοὶ ἐποιήσατε.
Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me. — Inasmuch as you did it not to one of the least of these, neither did you do it to me.
Matthew 25:40, 45 (NA²⁸)
The qualifying τῶν ἀδελφῶν μου stands in the blessing and is absent from the condemnation.[7] If the restrictive clause carried the interpretative weight the exclusive reading assigns to it, its disappearance at the precise point where judgement falls would be inexplicable — the evangelist would have dropped the very term that determines who is in view, in the sentence that determines who is damned. The simpler account is that ἀδελφῶν μου is not restrictive at all but affective: the Lord calls the wretched his brothers, and the point of the phrase is the identification rather than the delimitation.
The second objection is one of method, and it bears directly upon the kind of argument this essay is examining. The universal reading is not one option among several in the tradition; it is the tradition. Chrysostom expounds the passage of the poor without hesitation, and Augustine and Gregory follow. Luz’s survey of the history of interpretation shows the exclusive reading to be substantially a modern development.[8] Now an argument that appeals to the Fathers to establish the divine warrant of the magistrate, and then sets the Fathers aside where they prove inconvenient, has not thereby produced a patristic case for bounded admission. It has produced a modern case decorated with patristic citations. One may of course prefer the minority reading on its merits. But having adopted a hermeneutic that overrides patristic consensus on philological grounds, one may not in the next paragraph invoke patristic consensus as authority. The asymmetry is not a debating point; it is a defect in the argument, and I have committed it myself in print.
The third objection concerns πάντα τὰ ἔθνη in verse 32. If ἔθνη denotes nations as corporate entities, then the judgement described is corporate, and the pericope addresses polities as such — which would be fatal to the claim that it speaks only to private conscience. If, with most commentators, ἔθνη denotes all humanity assembled individually, the individual reading stands.[9] But then a difficulty of consistency arises for the two-spheres argument, which wants Scripture to address the polity in Romans 13 and only the individual in Matthew 25. That distinction may be defensible. What it cannot be is assumed, and I have not seen it defended by anyone who relies on it.
V. What Survives
The wreckage is less extensive than it may appear, and the structure that remains is sounder for having been tested:
The State/magistrate’s competence over admission survives entire. It rests not on a text about migration — there is none — but on the nature of an office that Scripture describes in theological terms and that cannot be exercised at all by a body unable to determine its own membership.
The ordered character of love survives, with its emergency inversion attached, and yields a genuine principle: obligations are graduated, the near have a real priority, and a government is not required to treat the claims of the whole world as identical to the claims of those committed to its care.
The graduated admission of the Old Law survives as a model — of naturalisation rather than of exclusion, and one that ends in full incorporation.
What does not survive is the attempt to remove Matthew 25 from the field. The two-spheres distinction is true, but it is not hermetic, and it cannot be made to do the work of a discharge. The magistrate, the minister, the politician, the law-maker, are not a disembodied competence; (s)he is a Human, and (s)he stands under the judgement the pericope describes along with everyone else. A Christian polity’s law is not a morally sealed compartment in which the criterion of the last judgement has no application. What Matthew 25 constrains is not the existence of the border but the disposition of those who administer it.
The resulting position is narrower than the polemical version and, I think, more defensible. A state may bound admission. It may not bound it indifferently. Romans 13 grants the competence; Matthew 25 governs the manner of its exercise.
Concretely: a policy may be restrictive and remain perfectly Christian; it may not be restrictive and cold. Every refusal must be able to give an account of itself before the one who says ξένος ἤμην, and “we were within our rights” is an account of a kind, but not obviously the kind that will be asked for.
The practical counsel follows:
Those who argue for bounded admission on Christian grounds should abandon the appeal to the clause about the Lord’s brothers. It is their weakest link; it rests on a modern minority reading; the text withdraws the clause at the decisive moment; and its use costs them the patristic warrant they need elsewhere in the same argument.
The case is stronger without it, because it can then say plainly what is true:
YES, the passage speaks of the stranger universally and makes his reception a criterion of judgement;
YES, the magistrate (or the minister, the politician, the Parliament-seated law-maker) may nevertheless regulate entry, status quo, application, method, etc;
YES, on grounds of office and of ordered charity rather than of exegetical evasion, is why those two things are compatible.
VI. Coda
One feature of the pericope is regularly noticed and rarely pressed. Both parties are astonished. The righteous ask κύριε, πότε σε εἴδομεν; and so, in almost the same words, do the condemned. Neither group had been keeping score. Neither had recognised what it was doing at the time it did it.
This is the detail that ought to give pause to anyone who writes about admission for a living, the present author included. The warning of Matthew 25 is not principally directed at the man who consciously turns the stranger away; that man at least knows a stranger was there. It is directed at those who did not notice. And nothing is so efficient at producing that particular failure of notice as the work of policy, in which the stranger appears as a category, a flow, a projection, a figure in a table — never as a man at a door, and so never as an occasion of the judgement in question.
The distinction between the two swords is true. It is also, for a certain kind of Christian writer, the most convenient truth available: it permits him to discharge in the abstract an obligation he has not met in the concrete, and to feel rigorous while doing it. I do not offer this as an argument against the distinction, which I continue to hold. I offer it as the reason the goats were surprised.
[1] John Chrysostom, In epistulam ad Romanos homilia 23, PG 60; Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos 124.7, CCSL 40. Both read the passage as instruction to Christians living under an authority they neither constituted nor controlled.
[2] Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I-II, q. 105, a. 3, ad 1, Editio Leonina, vol. 7 (Rome: Typographia Polyglotta, 1892); cf. Deuteronomy 23:4–9 MT (23:3–8 in most English versions).
[3] Deuteronomy 23:5 MT (23:4 EVV).
[4] Augustine, De doctrina christiana I.28.29, CCSL 32; Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae II-II, q. 26, aa. 6–8, Editio Leonina, vol. 8 (Rome: Typographia Polyglotta, 1895).
[5] Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae II-II, q. 31, a. 3, ad 1, Editio Leonina, vol. 8.
[6] Robert H. Gundry, Matthew: A Commentary on His Literary and Theological Art (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), on 25:31–46; cf. Matthew 10:40–42, 12:48–50, 18:6, 28:10.
[7] Nestle-Aland, Novum Testamentum Graece, 28th rev. ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2012), at Matthew 25:45; the omission is not a matter of contested attestation.
[8] Ulrich Luz, Matthew 21–28, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), on 25:31–46, with the Wirkungsgeschichte; John Chrysostom, In Matthaeum homilia 79, PG 58.
[9] W. D. Davies and Dale C. Allison, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel According to Saint Matthew, ICC, vol. 3 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), on 25:32; cf. Matthew 28:19.
