Hop on over to Thoughts and Confessions of a Girl Who Loves Jesus to see the 286th Christian Carnival. Haven’t read through it to highlight posts yet since this is a busy week.
Month: July 2009
Categories
Embracing Human Conscience
Conscience is important, everyone agrees, but we’re not sure about how important. Those sticky internal motivations are confusing and put us in an epistemological tailspin. If this was an episode of Star Trek, would both be part of the Federation but grumbling about their internal motivations from different sides of the room.
Barring my faulty memory (and if I’m not lazy) I want to post prayers on Monday from all over Church History and then throughout the modern day, and then my own. This one comes from the Didache from very early in Church History, but sometime after most of the books of the New Testament.
My thought model sort of worked. It allowed me to see the driving principles that ran through Israel’s treatment of immigrants while yielding some information about how those principles might be applied today; but it kept catching one snag. Our problem isn’t immigration—it’s illegal immigration.
Because of that, I had to reflect on human laws, authority and a Christian’s responsibility.
Christians love Scriptural commands; it makes things easy. We weigh in on an issue by citing a verse (or five) and we’re done—ding! Next problem?
So it is with immigration. We surf through our New Testament and then pause, sighing thankfully that there is a verse that seems to deal with illegal aliens, or at least strangers: “The stranger that you invited inside, fed, and clothed his nudity…it was me, Jesus. When you rejected that stranger and left him imprisoned; you rejected me, Jesus1.”
Well, we blush; it’s not as good as an explicit command. The passage is totally about interaction at the personal level and it doesn’t offer anything in the way of “thou shall”—especially not on the national level.
Ignoring the other post-worthy problems up above, I think there’s a proper goal in finding what Scripture says in regard to immigration. Surely, not for the purpose of finding a new law (wrongheaded, that), but for the purpose of discovering operating principles.
For that, we need to construct a thought model.