Truth Unites - J.D. Vance on Ordo Amoris: A Christian Idea?

Episode Date: February 1, 2025

Gavin Ortlund comments on J.D. Vance's remarks about ordo amoris, the ordering of love. See my book The Art of Disagreeing: https://www.amazon.com/Art-Disagreeing-Conversations-disagreement-resolution/dp/1802541403/ Truth Unites exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville. SUPPORT: Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites FOLLOW: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truth.unites/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://truthunites.org/

There's been discussion lately on social media about J.D. Vance's comments about the Ordo Amoris, or the Order of Love. And in this video, I want to make three quick points about this discussion. These are very modest, but hopefully they could be useful. Actually, the third one is the one that's most on my heart. Number one, the Ordo Amoris is a historic Christian principle. A classic affirmation of this can be found in Augustine. He says, you are to pay special regard to those who, by the accidents of time or place or circumstance, are brought into closer connection with you. And when you stop to think about what Augustine is saying here. I think Augustine sometimes is misconstrued as though he's saying that's how it normally is, but there's a higher order or something. I don't think so. I think

that sentence taken at face value is what he's commending. And it does seem, unless you take this in a deliberately bad light, this does seem basically like common sense, you know. It also seems to be biblical. You see in the scripture commandments to provide for our own household and that each household should care for their own before the church does. You also see a special obligation to other relationships, parents, of course, in the Ten Commandments. There's a special obligation to fellow church members in many New Testament passages. We're going to come back to that. That's actually really important. Now, the rationale for ordered love is not that some people are intrinsically more valuable or more worthy of that love than others or something like that. That is not the idea.

Everyone is made in God's image. Everyone deserves our love and service. Rather, it has to do with pragmatic considerations stemming out of our finitude. Basically, different relationships result in different kinds of obligations. Here's how Thomas Aquinas puts it, one's obligation to love a person is proportionate to the gravity of the sin one commits enacting against that love. And then, as you can see here, he flushes this out again with our parents as a special example. Yeah, it's worth saying that this is a pretty common idea and pretty basic throughout the Christian tradition, including among more recent Christians like C.S. Lewis in the abolition of man. Here's a passage from John Calvin, which affirms this, even while he is very clear to sort of qualify it with a statement against

any sort of prejudice for one kind of person versus another. That's actually a helpful quote from Calvin there. Now, I'm going to get to the parable of the Good Samaritan in a second if that's where you're worried about, but I do think there's a real danger of just many Christians today may be failing to appreciate this body of thought and this sort of background context. biblically, historically, and in terms of just rational reflection on how do we best love our neighbor? What does that look like today when there's people on the other side of the world that I have a very different relationship with than the people right next to me and so on and so forth? However, that is not to say that this idea is always agreed upon in terms of how it should be deployed.

So this afternoon, I'm reading through a lot of Thomas Aquinas on how he treats this, and there's things that he says that many of us would disagree with today, like his idea, that we should love our father more than our mother in a certain sense. I love Thomas Aquinas and learn so much from him. If you know me, I'm sort of a Thomist in my doctrine of God. But nonetheless, it's okay to admit he's not perfect and, you know, he's not God and not everything he says is sort of untouchable and so forth. So the basic idea here is very biblical and classical and a Christian idea. Where this starts to get really complicated is when we widen out from the relationships in scripture that are very clear, say our relationship with our biological family,

and then we're extending outwards in concentric circles to relationships where scripture is less clear, maybe along geographical boundaries or national boundaries and so on and so forth. And this leads to a second point, and that is the Ordo Amoris can be easily misused. Now, there is so much we could get into. We could talk so much about this. I'm really going to not get into the more controversial aspects of this discussion. That's not really the purpose of this video. This video is more basic sort of Christian reflection, devotional reflection on this. You know, as I've been searching my own conscience, what does this look like? How do we love our neighbor? It's really complicated to think through some of these questions. It is a little nuance.

Some of the basic things we can say is, number one, God should be first in the order of love. That actually needs to be emphasized. And actually, there's so much to say that we can't assume that. Okay, we love God first. A second thing is the relationship that we have with other Christians, especially those who are members of our local church. There's a special kind of priority upon those, that family of relationships in the New Testament. Another biblical category is care for the sojourner or foreigner in our midst. That one gets controversial because if you just quote verses out of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, it sounds more kind of liberal to modern ears. but it's a very biblical motif.

Now, it's not easy to apply that today. I'm not acting like we just take those verses, and it's easy to see exactly what they would mean for, like contemporary immigration policy and so on and so forth. I'm not going there. That's complicated. But if we want to get a biblical framework for this idea, a Christian framework,

these are things that weren't necessarily reflected in J.D. Vance's comments. His comments came in a certain context. He's talking about, you know, illegal immigrants who have a criminal history and this kind of thing. So he's really looking at one particular problem and sort of reflecting off the cuff. But if we're thinking about this as followers of Jesus and we want to get like good theological categories for what this idea means, these are the kinds of things we need to come in and talk about, like the priority for loving other Christians in your local church, the first priority of God, a principle of care for the sojourner and so on and so forth.

But here I just want to make one basic point. So even all that is more than I want to get into here. I'm making a basic point in this video and inviting others to think about a with me. And I'll start with this Augustine passage with what I've emboldened here first. He says, all men are to be loved equally. Now that's already quite a striking statement that is more than some might say today. But note the rationale then in the next sentence for why we have an order of love, but since you cannot do good to all. Okay. So the reason we have ordered loves is a practical impossibility of loving everybody. It's not that like, you know, some people are more important. Hortent or something like this. Augustine then flushes out this imaginary scenario that I,

with a part that I underlined on the screen there, and he's basically saying, if you have a lot of resources, like a lot of food or something like that, and you want to give it away, and you can only give it to one person, then basically you're going to draw straws or roll the dice or pick a number to try to figure out, well, who do I give it to? If neither of the two people you can give it to has a greater claim upon you or a greater need, then you're just going to try to find someone to give it to because giving it to one person is better than none. And Augustine is saying, that's how it is with us. Insofar as I'm trying to meet the need of my neighbor rather than someone who lives in Indonesia, it's because by the luck, by the lot of life I happen to live here,

and so there's a practical necessity to meet the needs that I can actually meet, not the ones way far away. And so the simple point I want to underscore is this. The logic of this passage assumes we should try to maximize well-doing in our lives, not restricted. And so I want to put out this basic thought that I've been reflecting upon that's probably healthy for us as followers of Christ to think about. And that is, we need to be careful not to misuse the principle of the order of love so as to fall short in our obligation for a neighbor love. And it is easy to do this. Here's another passage in Thomas that really struck me as I was reading today. He's quoting Augustine approvingly who says, we ought to love our neighbor more than our own body.

Think about that. Do I do that? Do we do this? Do we love our neighbor more than our very flesh? Sometimes in midst of our debates, and I'm going to come back to this again when I talk about the way these discussions happen in the body of Christ, we forget to sort of be, we're defending the truth and we forget to be humbled under the truth. The truth becomes a club to fight the enemy over there, and we forget to think we should be just on our faces in repentance before God for how hard this is and how much we're going to need his grace. So, in other words, we should never think, well, there's an order of love.

My obligations are greater toward my next-door neighbor and my family and my church and so forth. Therefore, I don't really need to worry about making costly sacrifices to care for those who are far away. Or I can just kind of focus on the people that I'm more comfortable with versus those that I'm not. No. And this is where the parable of the Good Samaritan, I think, does come in. Now, there's an old Latin saying that says abuses, uses known tolet, that means abuse does not take away the proper use. The fact that this parable is sometimes employed too ambitiously does not mean we should fail to be humbled and corrected by our Lord's words in this parable. This parable does seem designed to challenge and disrupt our categories of relationships. It does

seem that our Lord is trying to confront an attitude that says, oh, I don't have to care about that person. Because the parable is told to a lawyer who is asking, who is my neighbor, and his motive is to justify himself. And Jesus does say that to be a good neighbor requires us to cross boundaries and basically act contrary to human custom and expectation. And we are very naive if we think our own hearts will never be tempted to forms of prejudice like that. When we understand our Lord's commandments, they leave no room for a smug correction of others. Sometimes there may be a correction and contending for the truth and so forth, but it comes in this larger reality of, look what Christ calls me to and happy thought, look what Christ is done for me. Of course, this is, it takes us

to the heart of the gospel itself, where God extended love when we were not close to him. We were the furthest away. This is the gospel message. You know, Jesus came to die for us when we had done, we had not taken a step toward God. You think of it like this. If you remember, I would is the one who is most distant from heaven, and Jesus came for me. And that's really in your heart. That doesn't mean that you're going to, that being in your heart isn't going to solve all of these conversations today, and it isn't going to remove the need to contend for the truth in this way or that way. Nonetheless, it's going to cause us to approach these conversations with a lot more compassion, which actually is really needed right now. Third point, and this stems out of that,

and that's applying the Ordo Amoris to contemporary geopolitics is complicated. These are Christian principles. Applying them to politics in an increasingly polarized world is very difficult. Augustine and Thomas are not talking about immigration policy per se, particularly in a very complicated 21st century world where technology has changed various things. And so I'm making one simple point from this. It's okay for us to not have all the answers on this stuff. as I watch, and this is my actually the main thing I wanted to say, why I wanted to make this video.

If anybody can, if anybody out there, tell me in the comments. Sometimes I put out videos and I'm like, are they listening? I don't know, because they're talking about other stuff in the comments. I get it. I do the same thing. But tell me if you think I'm off base with this. I mean, I really see this. The way we have disagreements, here's what in the body of Christ is really unfortunate right now.

We are just tearing each other's heads off too much. And I understand there are some really toxic voices out there in different camps that need to be corrected, but social media is amplifying those voices, and it is causing us to think, it trains us to think, the people on the other side are evil. They're the problem, and if I can just destroy their position, then we win. And there is a place for contending against false ideas and so forth, but the way it's happening on social media right now has some real toxic elements to it. And too often the body of Christ, we just get sucked right into the way the algorithms are using us and appealing to our outrage and so on and so forth. Our responsibility of loving our neighbor

is probably not going to be well served if our whole energy and our whole thought process is, look how dumb and evil the people are on the other side who disagree with me. Maybe there is evil out there, but one thing I've been thinking about, maybe we just need to ignore. How do we do this? How do we ignore the bad faith voices more and focus on the good faith voices. That's so hard to do. It's hard to ignore people, and you can't always. Again, it's complicated because you may be a pastor and there's people in your church who are influenced by this very toxic person out there, and so you may realize I need to speak to this, you know, that happens. Nonetheless, in the ordinary course of things, are there ways we can try to have disagreements in a more healthy way in the body of Christ?

This is, you know, here's what happens. A storm comes up. Some clip just goes, shooting out and it goes viral and everybody's commenting on it. And then it's like piranhas just going in. And the net result is a lot more heat than light. And I'm not trying to, I understand, I'm not trying to minimize the importance of the issue. I'm not trying to say we shouldn't argue for the truth and so on and so forth. But just the way it plays out on social media is not healthy right now. So we've got to work at this. So that's just an ongoing thing. We've got to figure this out. we have got to figure out as the church how to have disagreements and how to talk through contemporary issues in a way where we're not, we're not playing into the worst tendencies of human nature that

social media is making money off of. I wrote a book. It's coming out this month. It's called The The Art of Disagreying. I don't mean to make it the final point of this video, but I'll just say this because I do think. So this is what it looks like. Good book company, did a great job. I kind of like this simple cover. I don't know if you can see it at all. The subtitle, here is how to keep calm and stay friends in hard conversations. It's a humbling book to write. I don't do this perfectly. I've definitely made mistakes, but I'm trying. But it's a short, practical book. You can read it into one sitting. And it comes, I didn't write this book because I thought, oh, I really am intellectually curious about this. I wrote this book because I am

deeply burdened that the way we conduct disagreements is damaging our witness as Christians. Not because we don't have enough courage and vigor and content. I think we need more argumentation. I think we need debates and arguments and, you know, long discussions with people we don't agree with where we don't back down. So I am not saying we just need to be nicer. But the way we're doing it, especially the role of social media, I think we can all recognize there's some real downsides right now. And I'm really concerned about that. So I wrote this book, it's got four quick chapters and then a conclusion. And it's just trying to give some practical advice, laying a gospel-centered framework, and then trying to give practical advice on how to go about this.

things I'm learning, things God is teaching me. I hope it could be helpful to people out there. Beyond that, I'm just mentioning it because it's on my heart. Beyond that, I think this is an ongoing thing we need to think about. How do we have disagreements in a way where the onlookers, the non-Christian onlooker, isn't turned off from the gospel by the way we treat each other? And though that is complicated, I think one simple thing is we need more love amidst disagreement. We need more, less trying to humiliate the other side. I'm sad to say this is actually controversial. I say these things on Twitter and I'll get people coming at me and attacking me and so forth. And that's the way the world is. That's part of the thing right now. It's actually controversial to quote these basic New Testament

principles about showing kindness and showing grace to other people. Go figure, you know. And I can maybe understand, you know, trying to think sympathetically about that. There's probably people out there who have seen that appeal misused. Again, the abuse does not take away the proper use. We've got to figure out how to show love amidst disagreement. Can I just say that again? All the things I talk about, all the theology, you know, I'm going to put out a video on, like, Reformed versus Lutheran views of Christology. It gets very nuanced. All of that is like much less important than this, that we talk to each other with love in our hearts. We wish well upon their soul. The idea of loving other people is something that actually,

it actually gets controversial, unfortunately. It shouldn't be, but it does. So we've got to figure out a way to, when these issues come up like this, talk it through and have love in our hearts for people where we disagree. That's so simple, but I'm going to keep saying it because I think it actually is incredibly important for our witness right now as Christians. And it's not that we shouldn't, again, it's not that we don't contend vigorously for truth. It's in the way we do it. We wish well upon the other person, and we show Christ-like behavior. Anyway, turning into a preacher here, but those are just things that are really important in my heart. What do you think?

Let me know in the comments. I will read them carefully on this one. Thanks for watching, everybody.