Matt. 25 and the cult of the individual

The religious wing of the Nazi party is out there furiously doing the dirty work of trying to absolve their government of responsibility for the poor.

Their argument goes, “Yes, Matthew 25 says to take care of the needy. But it’s addressed to individuals, not governments! Demanding that governments use taxes to help the poor is BAD. People can do that on their own.”

A few observations:

1.  Ancient Near East cultures had virtually no concept of the individual. That concept comes from the 18th-century Enlightenment thinkers, and people making this argument are reading the text through an Enlightenment filter. Hardly anything in the Bible is actually addressed to an individual, and none of it was addressed to people who thought of themselves primarily as individuals and only secondarily as group members. That mindset did not exist at the time the text was written.

2.  If you make a rule that says a Bible verse can’t apply to government unless it addresses government directly, you are excluding not just Matthew 25 but virtually the entire New Testament. And that means that governments have no responsibility to acknowledge Christmas or Easter, or the other things you like to whine about — or indeed to give Christians any special consideration whatsoever. (In fact, it’s worse than that: the role of government in both Christmas and Easter, according to the Bible, is to torture and kill people to try to thwart God’s purposes.) To cite another example, the prooftexts that are usually put forth to support anti-abortion arguments have nothing to do with government, so by this logic governments should ignore them.

It is true that only a few scattered verses in the New Testament address members of a government directly. Rather, the New Testament is addressed primarily to people under occupation by a foreign government. Its authors never imagined that Christians would become part of that government, or of any other. The New Testament does indeed fall short as a manual for governments, because governments were never expected to read it. Yet I doubt the proponents of this argument against Matt. 25 would want that same argument used against certain other portions of the Bible, even though that is what consistency would demand. 

3.  The other weakness of this argument is that ignores the many, many verses in the Old Testament that do address governments. These can be found, among other places, in the prophetic writings. It was the job of a prophet to speak truth to power, and the prophets’ books refer to the actions of governments — either the kings of Israel and Judah, or the leaders of the nations who invaded Israel and Judah and took them into exile. So if your claim is that governments can ignore verses that aren’t addressed to them, that claim no longer works when we’re talking about the Old Testament.

And guess what? Old Testament authors frequently wrote about governments’ unjust treatment of the poor. I’m personally retired from prooftexting, so a single quotation will have to do, but trust me, there are more where this came from.

“Woe to those who decree iniquitous decrees,
    and the writers who keep writing oppression,
to turn aside the needy from justice
    and to rob the poor of my people of their right,
that widows may be their spoil,
    and that they may make the fatherless their prey!
What will you do on the day of punishment,
    in the storm which will come from afar?
To whom will you flee for help,
    and where will you leave your wealth?
Nothing remains but to crouch among the prisoners
    or fall among the slain.
For all this his anger is not turned away
    and his hand is stretched out still.”

Mic drop.