The Stran-“ger” in Our Midst

Paper given at Theopolis Conversations, Tokyo, March 2026

My British fellow-countrymen have never before been quite so aware of the limits of hospitality. The leadership of their national church, meanwhile, insists that there should be none. Hospitality is, after all, a foundational tenet of the Christian faith.

70% of Britons consulted in a YouGov poll in December 2024 considered immigration over the last decade too high. Yet their bishops have consistently fought attempts to tighten migration control. In the face of the 2025 grooming gang scandals, with the honourable exception of the Bishop of Blackburn, the bishops were at best silent about the systematic abuse of young white, working-class girls, and at worst defensive. The Bishop of Manchester tried to deflect the blame from any “particular ethnic, cultural, or religious group,” while the Bishop of Oxford leapt at the chance to call out Islamophobia in the wake of the revelations.

“Hospitality” is frequently used to exhort the abolition of borders, as typified in this response from Anglican and Roman Catholic bishops to protests last September outside an asylum hotel:

“We cherish our city’s long history of hospitality to strangers, refugees and asylum seekers… We are called to build bridges, not walls.”

The bishops are right to emphasise the Christian duty of hospitality, grounded in the dominical imperative towards love of neighbour and even enemy. However, they have failed to speak out for the mostly poor, working-class victims not only of crime, but also of displacement from their ancestral homes as a result of uncontrolled migration. Their prioritisation of the stranger over their more immediate neighbours smacks of a functional Marcionism, in which they eclipse the subtleties of the Old Testament for the sake of earning cultural capital from those whose admiration they prize. An advocate of hospitality to strangers might start with Leviticus 19:33–34:

“You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

However, the treatment of strangers is more nuanced in the Torah than unconditional, open-armed acceptance. To protect the vulnerable, sometimes walls are needed. What can be missed in translation, including the KJV and RSV, is that the Torah uses different words for different kinds of stranger. The ESV translation here preserves the distinction, indicating the “sojourner”: in Hebrew, ger. Other terms translated “stranger” include the nokri, the visiting foreigner; the toshav, a temporary settler; and the zar, the unauthorised stranger. These different levels of stranger each entails different obligations both towards and from their host community.

Among these, ger (sojourner) and nokri (foreigner) are the most theologically and legally significant. The sojourner is the kind of stranger who appears alongside the “widow and orphan” — i.e., those who have lost the protection of their kin. They are long-term residents among the Israelites who seek permanent refuge among them, with the highest level of obligation under the Law. According to Leviticus, they are to make burnt offerings (17:8–9), are prohibited from eating blood (17:12–13), are subject to covenantal sexual ethics (18:26) and criminal law, in which there is one standard for native and sojourner alike (24:16, 22). If they return to sacrificing children to Molech, they will be executed (20:2). In return for keeping the limited laws which pertain to them, they gain economic and personal security.

The nokri, on the other hand, is not a resident, but a temporary visitor, present on business. The rules for nokrim, expressed mostly in Deuteronomy, are less extensive and less binding. They do not participate in the cultic life of Israel. They do not enjoy the annual sabbatical relief of debts (15:3); they can be charged interest (23:20); they can be sold non-kosher carcasses of animals (14:21); they cannot be set as kings over the Israelites (17:15). Their relationship with Israel is of a lower order of trust than that of the gerim.

Deuteronomy 10:18–19 proclaims God’s love for the stranger, and commands Israel to love the stranger among them too. But this injunction names the ger, not the nokri. Hence Deuteronomy 23:3–8 makes careful distinctions about who is to be admitted to the assembly and when. Edomites and Egyptians can be admitted after three generations (there is some reciprocity in the Egyptian case, given that Israel were gerim in Egypt) but Ammonites and Moabites are permanently excluded. Scripture elsewhere shows that even the nokri, such as the Moabitess Ruth (in 2.10 she expresses incredulity that Boaz could show favour to a nokri like her), could be accepted as ger after the proper conditions were met. These precise definitions may be contested. Even so, the Torah demonstrates a bounded hierarchy of hospitality rather than a universal and unconditional welcome.

This stratification of hospitality reveals the deeper symbolic order of the cosmos. The architecture of the Temple, cascading hierarchically from the Holy of Holies, through the Holy Place, to the Outer Court, and then the world outside, maps cosmically onto heaven, the angelic firmament, the ordered land and the chaotic sea. This structure is echoed in Israel’s relationship to the wider world. The Holy of Holies is the place of God’s presence, the Holy Place is the Temple or Tabernacle itself, the Israelites are the land-dwellers ordered by the Law enacted in the Temple cultus, and the gentiles are the surging ocean which they must tame by bringing it closer to the centre. In this schema, the nokrim are those who remain in the chaos zone outside the camp, the ger those who have taken their first steps onto dry land, shepherded by Israel towards the sacred precincts of the Outer Court.

Ruth’s journey from Moab to Bethlehem is a paradigm of this movement from the outside in, from nokri to ger status. But it is a movement through stages which must be carefully guarded – sometimes by force of arms – if the movement is to make any sense. Israel is not called to tear the Temple veil, knock down the walls, break open the entrance to the Holy of Holies, but to guard them. This is precisely so that the gentiles can be oriented towards the sanctuary. A sanctuary without walls is no sanctuary at all.

When Christ does tear the veil and break down the walls of the physical Temple, He does so not to erase the distinction, but to embody the Temple spiritually in His people. Pearls are still not to be thrown to swine. The ward of Baptism remains against those who would defile the sanctuary by unwarranted entry and eating. Even among the baptised, there remain levels of Eucharistic participation. The unrepentant sinner may hear the Word of God in the congregation, but has no right to the altar until He has made peace with God and neighbour and received absolution. The Holy of Holies is open to all, but not without conditions. A hierarchy of welcome and obligation remains and is embodied in the Eucharistic cultus, otherwise called the Church.

This same structure of ordered, bounded hospitality extends into the wider Christian tradition. “Benedictine hospitality” is sometimes cited as a reason for opening borders. St Benedict says that all guests should be received as Christ (Rule 53). But even here, there is a distinction in the hospitality offered, with special care given to the poor and pilgrims. All guests must live within the Rule of the community when they stay. Any who wish to stay permanently are subjected to rigorous and extended discernment, their entry to the community resting ultimately on the Abbot’s decision. Benedictine hospitality presupposes an enclosed community with a specific order. Without walls, the community’s ministry of hospitality comes to an end.

This Benedictine sensibility is inherited in the parochial system of the Church of England, and the Rule enshrined in the Book of Common Prayer. Though I lament the dissolution of the monasteries, the Reformers intended to give the entire people the monks’ calendrical pattern of biblical reading, prayer, feasting and fasting which would bound and govern their common life together. The effect was to make every parish a secular monastery, with the parish priest as abbot. He would bear the power of excommunication as a means of protecting the community from moral and criminal disorder, all the while exhorting all those in his geographical jurisdiction, locals and sojourners alike, to participation at the Lord’s table according to their proper state.

The protracted death of the parish system in England is not only a product of the Church’s centralising managerial tendencies, though that is part of it. It is the symptom of a far more wide-reaching collapse of the parish as a cohesive unit of society, by which cultus, moral expectations and mutual obligations were bound, including obligations to the memory of the dead. It was a small enough unit that strangers could be recognised easily and cohesion maintained. The uniting cultus of Christian participation enabled the particularity and givenness of these places. This has been sacrificed for a utilitarian systematisation which treats people as interchangeable units rather than as persons in relationship with God and one another. Economic migration has displaced entire communities to such an extent in some parts of the country that there are no Christians left in the parishes where their ancestors worshipped and are buried. Those who have been displaced are almost exclusively the white, working-class poor. “Home” for them is now wherever local government says it should be.

I do not suggest that we return to an idealised parish system which probably never really existed as intended. However, our bishops need to recognise that ordered, local communities of persons bound by relationships of mutual responsibility are prerequisite to the hierarchy of love by which the Church is called to draw all people, including migrants, towards God. Ultimately, the failure to make any distinction between people is not a Benedictine recognition that every stranger bears the image of Christ. It is a rejection of the particularity of that image, and so of Christ himself, who was born not an everyman, but an actual man, of a woman, in a painstakingly bounded community. It is a rejection, by extension, of the hierarchical Body of which He is Head, which like any Body is bounded, and in which each member plays its proper part, and none can be severed without costing the whole. We are served instead a primordial soup in which the head, arms and legs are melted into a chaotic fluidity, no member differentiable from another. The bounded body is replaced by a shoggoth.

Hospitality remains a Christian imperative. There are many goods to immigration and many good immigrants. I aspire to be one such in Japan. However, a biblical response to immigration cannot be content with reciting a litany of kindly shibboleths about bridges, solidarity and diversity. Both temple and table are guarded jealously because it is only through them that God gives the communion fundamental to a coherent community. Communities in the plural can exist concentrically around the altar, but only so long as the altar remains at the centre. Their relationship to the cultus which the altar embodies will vary according to their particular commitments, but where no such relation is articulated or even envisaged, only chaos can ensue. Inclusion literally means “enclosing,” and you cannot include unless there is something in which to be included. In short, the reciprocity of Christian cultus needs to be restored in order for post-Christian societies to return to the internal cohesion they need in order to offer any kind of hospitality at all.

The effect of weaponising hospitality has ultimately made such hospitality impossible to practise, because the Eucharistic communities which could bear the weight of the stranger no longer exist. The English people see what their bishops cannot: without love of neighbour, the love of stranger is impossible.

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