Borders and the Bible: Immigration and the Freedom of Movement as a Human Right

 

Recently, and frankly it occurs quite regularly, I have been accused by a cousin of mine of eisegesis or reading into Scripture my own presuppositions, which interestingly is what I accused him of doing with his anachronistic reading of Scripture through a modern western lens. We tend to get caught up in the same circular debates, over and over, to the chagrin of my wife and my Facebook friends who have to wade through the lengthy text-box debates. I have been doing better at detouring the round and rounds, but one particular issue we spar over regularly is immigration. 

Perhaps no other social or political issue captivates me more. My cousin's contention is that borders are in the Bible, so we must have strong and secure borders. With that, my cousin asserts that our focus should be internal or nativist before we can focus on outsiders. He uses rhetorical language that others undocumented immigrants as "invaders" and he often blankets the whole for the sins or crimes of the few. He believes that until a surefire way is found to vet only the righteous, we must exclude most immigrants, save only the intelligentsia who might add to our posterity. I am more affirmative of open borders, though this is not what I am presently seeking politically, because such a view is in the minority.   

This blog article could become a tome should I attempt to exhaustively investigate current economics or even the political philosophy of the Enlightenment, which affirms liberty, including the freedom of movement. I could also add the history of the U.S., which demonstrates that contemporary immigration rhetoric parrots earlier nineteenth-century nativist sentiment. This sentiment was applied against nearly every immigrant group since the 1840s that caused perceived stress to the security of citizens and this led to the first immigration legislation, like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. I could also throw in statistics that undercut much of the rhetoric that feeds nationalist conjecture. And I could also demonstrate how existing legislation actually perpetuates the "illegal" crossings that many people believe walls are sufficient to address. All these areas are vital to the fullest exploration of the topic. Yet my cousin's and my debate often looks at two versions of Christian understanding on immigration, freedom of movement, and borders. This is what I will discuss below. Even here, I won't be exhaustive. 

One of the principle retorts to my theology by my cousin and others is that borders are in the Bible and so borders are inherently God's will and good. I have heard many Protestant pastors proclaim the same thing. But I largely disagree. I could be wrong and my interpretation of Scripture could be way off. Nonetheless, I have attempted due diligence, because when I stand before the "Man," I will be held to account for honoring his will and precepts and not the expediency of a cultural supposition. So, here is my understanding of things.  

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Perhaps the most common verse cited regarding borders is Deuteronomy 32:8, which says, "When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance, when he divided all mankind, he set up boundaries for the peoples [nations] according to the number of the sons of Israel." On the surface, this surely seems like God created borders to divide people into isolates. If we read this without context, we could surely make this assumption. 

The imagery of dividing and separating is linguistically related to planting or sewing seeds. It suggests that the seed taken from one sack -- likely referring the unity of Babel in their corruption -- is scattered on the earth for separate growing. Yet, God remains the single Gardner. How then shall God water and nurture these scattered seeds or nations? He set up regencies. This is what boundaries or borders were. This was not to make nations permanently isolated unto their own rule. First, God remains the ruler. Second, the independent growth of the peoples or nations presuppose an eventual restoration. If languages and peoples were scattered because of the sin at the Tower of Babel, in Christ all things are made new and a reunion is anticipated where the enmity of mankind yields to the corporate Body of Christ. 

So were there borders or not?

Yes, but not as we know them.

First, a nation or ethnos in Greek and goy in Hebrew, basically means a people group. Unlike modern countries, the earliest nations centered on confederacies of families intertwined by marriage and allegiance. It may be helpful to think of Celtic clans as an example. A clan is more than a family, but centers around a singular patriarch or familial progenitor. In the case of the nations in Scripture, these are generally clans descended from or allied with the descendants of Noah's offspring and later Abraham's. When Abraham and his tribe or family was circumcised conventionally in Genesis 17, it included the whole people in his nation. This included Ishmael, who would go on to father another nation, as well as non-relative servants. A nation was not just blood related, but included the entourage surrounding the family too. A nation was not purely a political unit separated by defined lines on a map. In fact, many nations were migratory, which included Abraham's tribe from Ur to Cannan and then on to Egypt, as well as their Hebrew descendants and others who followed Moses in the desert for forty years. A nation does not rely on a defined border. 

Looking at Abraham further, he left Ur (Mesopotamia) around the time a great ziggurat was being built. These were a type of pyramid. Symbolically, these were towering artificial mountains (because mountains are where God is encountered in the Old Testament) where sacrifices were made. The Tower of Babel was likely one of these. It was man's attempt to not just reach their gods, but by building the holy mountains themselves, they also exerted control. God disrupted this wickedness and showed that he was still God and that the pagan gods had no power greater than his. He scattered the seeds of humanity so that a unified attempt at usurpation would be stayed, and from this he could progressively build a path toward redemption through Abraham and his descendants. This culminated in Jesus Christ and the salvation of the world. Acts 2's tongues of fire and the miracle of hearing languages was the dissolution of the disunity between the nations. It was a healing of Babel's divide. It suggests that in Christ, nations take a back seat. In Christ there is no Jew or Greek, etc. 

But there were borders set by God. The key to understanding things is that the boundaries were set up "according to the number of the sons of Israel" in the NIV. But the use of Israel here is misleading and a bad choice in the NIV, as well as the KJV. Other versions more correctly use "sons of God." The Jewish Masoretic Text gives us "children of Israel" or "sons of Israel." The Masoretic Text is a reinterpretation of earlier Hebrew and Greek Old Testament (the Septuagint) texts by Rabbinic Judaism between the 7th and 11th centuries AD. One reason "Israel" is included here is because the Rabbinic Jews wanted to avoid the appearance of polytheism as well as deference to Christianity's Trinity. "Sons of God" can be seen as suggesting a pantheon as well as tipping the hat toward Christianity, which sees the one God in hypostases or distinct persons within a singularity. Such plurality could mislead purely monotheistic post-Christ Jews, who since 70 AD sought distancing from Christians as being part of the family. 

We know from Second Temple Judaic thought and the Old Testament itself that the term Sons of God was correlated to the heavenly hosts or angel armies. In short, angels had been assigned as regents of each nation. Think national guardian angels. The boundaries or borders then had less to do with absolute geography, which was general and not rigidly measured. It had more to do with the people and the area within their influence. People still had a divine mandate to fill the earth and care for it. Angelic hosts were there to oversee and assist peoples within a specific area of God's reign. This was not setting up nations unto themselves, but rather a relational reality toward God's unified intention for his earth.

Yet, we also know from era literature that 1/3 of the angels fell and so corrupted the nations. Because of this, God created a new nation -- Israel -- to bring about restoration, since the existing nations fell into demonic corruption. The end goal is not more nations but more union in Christ. And the Old Testament is replete with God's ownership of the land despite the nations. Possessing land is not held in perpetuity. For example, Jeremiah 7:5-7 says, "If you really change your ways and your actions and deal with each other justly, if you do not oppress the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow and do not shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not follow other gods to your own harm, then I will let you live in this place, in the land I gave your ancestors for ever and ever." Living in God's land, which is really the whole earth and that means any part of the earth, is conditional. One of the many reasons the Hebrews were taken into captivity by foreigners was because they failed to remember the alien, the foreigner, and the refugee. The Old Testament is replete with Israel's requirement to treat the alien/foreigner correctly in their midst precisely because they too had been aliens and refugees (see Deuteronomy 23 and 24). Treating foreigners with dignity, humanely, and welcoming them was required... Not optional. Perceived security, economic impact, potential criminality, and so forth were not prime considerations, but the humanity in each migrant was. 

Look at Abraham's family migrating to Egypt. They did so because their safety and well being was impacted by a drought. People move for many reasons: poverty, war, climate, oppression, forced relocation and deportation, etc. All these things are reflected in Scripture. People were always on the move and that meant traveling through the lands of the nations (which some interestingly overlapped). Migrants often had to abide by the laws of the land they stayed in, but rarely were people stopped at some imaginary line. Borders defined areas of a nation's residence, not an exclusion zone. The evils some nations inflicted on migrants was and is the result of their sin in allegiance with fallen regents or angels. In Christ, this was cancelled out. In Revelation (4:4, et al.), it is said that 24 elders from God's faithful (the Old Testament patriarchs plus the Apostles) sit on God's divine council, which represents roughly a third of the angelic hosts that rule the nations (measured as 70 or sometimes 72 in Scripture). In short, 1/3 of the angels fell and God's faithful replace them in ruling God's earth and cosmos. In Christ, the nations are not divided unto themselves, but united in principle.

So, borders meant something different than our modern sense of nations as countries with absolute lines of demarcation. To say that borders are biblical is not wrong, but to say this justify modern borders is a conflation. It is an anachronism to read boundaries and borders in the Bible as God ordained lines to perpetuate a divide. Rather, borders were descriptors of lands clans resided in under the regency of God's angels, of which 1/3 is replaced by faithful patriarchs and Apostles (therefore the Church) in governing God's whole earth. It is OK to have a border, but it's about a division of divine labor and not reason to exclude. 

Why? 

Genesis 1:26-28 says,

      Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

Our purpose of being human entails migration, to fill the earth and subdue it... This is to partner with God in ordering the chaos as co-regents with him. Sadly, we botched things up. When humanity overstepped and was expelled from the Garden of Eden, exile meant wandering. This was more true for Cain after he killed his brother Abel in Genesis 4. Cain was then exiled further from Eden, set to wander the earth as his curse. Exile is correlated with death. Though Cain did not physically die immediately after the first murder in human history, his exile was a type of death, which afforded him a chance to repent. Instead, Cain built a city and this city -- a nation if you will -- became corrupted. 

Often large concentrations of people in cities and states become corrupted. This suggests that self-rule as a nation apart from godly rule is yielding to the fallen regents/angels. Cities and states are not inherently bad, but they run the risk of concentrating sin. A modern nation state is the macro of city-hood, so I contend that excluding the foreigner for perceived internal self-preservation is potentially abhorrent as a concentrated form of hubris. We call this nationalism or nativism. It excludes based on the selfish identity of its grouped members. It is my opinion that nativism reflects concentrated sin and is no different than when nations and city-states failed in Scripture. After all, the earth is God's and all that is in it, including the people he called to populate it. 

Being made in God's image is to be an icon of God and God is not divided, though he is ordered. Having designated regencies within his Kingdom is a matter or order and not division. No nation, state, or city -- especially in light of Christ's present and coming rule -- possesses absolute sovereignty in light of humanity's common image and iconography. By divine right, people possess an inalienable right to move according to Genesis 1. This includes every example of people migrating for need in Scripture, such as Abraham's nomadic transference from location to location as provision warranted it. In light of this, how can we exclude humans from any part of the earth given them, especially if their mobility is predicated on need and emergency? 

So what of the U.S. and its obligation to care for its economic well-being, security from terrorism and criminal elements, and the risks of aliens misusing the welfare state? 

These are real issues. Yet, I do think these have become tropes of disregard and half truths related to these issues are inflated for effect. I could cite economists like George Mason University's economist Bryan Caplan as a leading proponent of open borders, John Locke as acknowledging movement as a right, early U.S. history as having porous borders and immigrants as critical for our industrial revolution, and so many other migrant affirming sources. Again, this is not that work. But, with regard to immigrant peoples' humanity, we must start there before rationalizing our fears and apprehensions. Immigrants are people and people are made in God's image. If we are to honor God, as seen in his commands in Scripture, it includes caring for all people, especially the marginalized who have no inheritance -- widows, orphans, and aliens. God is their inheritance and this means co-regency with him over his earth. America is not some special exclusion zone.  

What about the risks. Yes there are risks. I risk death each time I start my truck and drive down the highway. Risk is endemic to life. Nonetheless, migrants are people and this should be the starting place. It is not about the "what ifs" with people, but the "who's image" are we honoring in our neighbors who seek to become part of us. Once we recognize God in the immigrant, we can then move toward the pragmatic questions. Sure, we can vet, patrol the borders against crime and terrorism, and generally secure things, but we ought not exclude people for merely being transitory -- that is contrary to my understanding of God's intentions in Holy Scripture. I'll leave it at that.