Flat White

What Christ joins together, Christian Nationalism appears to keep asunder

Getty Images

How are we going to have a good conversation about immigration that makes sense of our distinct Australian history?

The past few months have seen something of a groundswell of real concern that Australia might soon be reaching a tipping point that we can’t return from. I’m originally from the UK with family roots in Central Europe. It’s not hard to see the trajectory that Australia is on when almost exactly the same script is being played out for us on the other side of the world – they’re just a few scenes further into the play.

How can it be that the same Western Europe that gave birth to modern Australia is now seemingly abandoning all those things that made it so great in the first place?

Even more interestingly for me as an Anglican minister, how have we ended up drifting so far from our culturally Christian roots? Can those same foundations help us now as we seek an answer to the vexed question of immigration?

Rev. Dr. Michael Jensen’s recent piece Strangers together: Immigration and the Christian imagination on the ABC Ethics and Religion site is one attempt to provide an answer. Michael sets out a Christian view of welcoming the stranger noting carefully at the beginning that this is really a conversation about who we think we are and, crucially, whether the stranger can become part of us – or will who we imagine that we are cease to be? It’s exactly the right question to ask but his answer is missing a key ingredient.

As I read carefully through Jensen’s piece, I couldn’t help note that something was lacking; a confidence to assert and (dare I say it) proselytise for the goodness of what has been created here in Australia. There is much of what Michael writes that I wholeheartedly agree with. The difference in my own position is one of small degrees – the application and outworking of some of his observations – but like all small variances there can be a massive difference at the end of the path. As Michael notes towards the end of his piece, we are heirs, not architects, of grace. Yet we have had the privilege of taking part in building its legacy even as we receive its gifts and I fear that in Michael’s piece there is an underselling of what has been constructed using that architecture and a consequent lessening of the impetus to preserve it. And preserving it is what this debate is all about.

Reading the Story in Detail

Jensen’s account of the Biblical meta-narrative – Creation, Fall, and then a dispersal of the nations – is exactly the right place to start. He is also correct to locate Israel’s welcome of the stranger as the first model we have of acceptance in the face of immigration. But he has passed over one important aspect of the Hebrews’ acceptance of the sojourner and stranger.

We might call it theo-cultural assimilation.

Yes, the Torah insisted on a generous hospitality but at the same time it was always clear who was inside the camp and who was not. For the stranger to belong they had to become part of the religious life of Israel. If they want to celebrate the Passover, writes Moses, they should do it properly. The repeated phrase ‘there shall be one law for you for the native and for the stranger who sojourns amongst you’ rings out loud throughout all these many instructions. Ruth’s story (that Jensen rightly notes is a paradigm of such inclusion into the life of Israel) proclaims this boldly as Ruth declares ‘your people shall be my people and your God my God’ (Ruth 1:16). She then becomes a very important Jewish character in a very Jewish story, even if she never lost her Moabite accent. The foreigner was truly a test of Israel’s faithfulness; not just in welcoming them but in incorporating them fully into what was only ever presented as the better way to live together.

The Old Testament is full of warnings to not allow the foreign visitor to pull Israel away from her holy vocation of being a particular chosen nation with the consequent duty of proclaiming God’s goodness to the rest of the world (Exo. 19:5-6), the same goodness that was lived out in every aspect of their common life.

The Shift to the Secular?

Of course, Israel was a theocracy at a particular moment in time with the clock inevitably counting down to something else. That something else came with the arrival of Jesus. Now, the New Testament declares, Christians are to live out spiritual realities that the physical story of ancient Israel always pointed to. Again, I have no disagreement with Jensen’s argument at this point. We stand facing the same direction in so much. The church itself lives out the fulfilment of the model we see in BC Israel and promised more starkly through the prophets: Gentiles streaming into Israel, longing to be part of what God has done here. But the Israel in view is no longer a strip of land in the Middle East; it is the fulfilment of the promise that that land represented. It is a gathering of people from all over the world drawn together by a gospel that is, as the Apostle Paul puts it, ‘first to the Jews and also to the Greek’ (Rom. 1:16). The same gathering is seen in the visionary language of Revelation as the Apostle John’s breath is taken away by ‘a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages’ ( Rev. 7:9) even as they still constitute twelve tribes (Rev. 7:4-8).

This is the eschatological arc of history that the Scriptures reveal to us. A single humanity that half develops, half fractures, into distinct people groups and nations that are finally wonderfully brought together again not by a One World Government but under the uniting headship of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is what Jensen rightly labels ‘reconciled diversity’. It is a profound view of the future that breaks into the present. The end of all things being lived out in the now.

One of the great joys of pastoral ministry is being involved in churches where this future reality is experienced in the present. Our congregations in the heart of Western Sydney are made up of people from so many of those nations, tribes, and peoples and languages. Yet in their diversity there is a remarkable unity around a common way of living together. Just as there was unity in ancient Israel, even if the marker of that unity is now not outward adherence to the Mosaic law but a living trust in Jesus.

A New Relationship with the State