The American Church & Disordered Love

JD Vance's spin on "ordo amoris" obliterates actual Christian teaching

I haven't been sharing a whole lot of stuff that's too theologically nerdy lately. If you’ve followed my pages on Instagram and Threads, you may have noticed this. I’ve been accused of getting “too political” quite often over the last few weeks.

“I followed you for memes and theology. Stop with the stupid politics.”

I receive DMs and comments somewhere along these lines a few times a week these days. Always ignored is the fact that I’m almost never putting out partisan points, but merely nonpartisan corrections of lies coming from politicians and being parroted wholesale by Christ’s Bride in the US.

So yea, I’ve been talking a little less about “nerdy theology” in this season. Let me explain why.

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Ordering Our Theology

All of the theology in the world, all of the intellectual knowledge of God and Scripture and hermeneutics and big fancy Greek words that the "theologically-minded" throw around and debate (often with minimal real-world implications)...None of that matters if we don't have literally the most basic elements of Christianity active in our lives.

Who gives a crap about the Greek word "kephalē" and how a different understanding of that can change how you understand Scripture's words on women if Christian men aren't loving women properly either way?

Who cares if I tell you the grammatical structure of John 3:16 indicates it should be read more as "God loved the world in this way" rather than "God loved the world sooo much" (although elements of both are in the text) if Christ's Church doesn't share His love for the people of the world in the first place?

Why should we spend any time discussing what we think proper eschatology or soteriology or *insert-other-ology-here* is if we aren't following the greatest and second greatest commandments: to love God and love others.

“Are you infralapsarian or supralapsarian?"

Dude, I don't care either way if you're not loving-your-neighbor-ian.

It doesn't matter if I tell you interesting details about the Priest and the Levite and the historical contention between the Samaritans and the Jews in Jesus' time if you read the story of The Good Samaritan and miss what VP Vance missed recently.

Disordered Loves

The entire point Jesus makes that "your neighbor is not defined by national identity or other markers, but simply by proximity" is skipped when Vance and millions others argue:

“As an American leader, but also just as an American citizen, your compassion belongs first to your fellow citizens. That doesn’t mean you hate people from outside of your own borders, but there’s this old-school [concept]—and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way—that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then, after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.”

What the VP is referring to there is Augustine's theology of ordo amoris (order of love), but he's absolutely butchering it (and missing Jesus' own definition of neighbor).

Augustine places love for God first, love for family (both physically and the household of God) second, and then love for neighbor third. But "neighbor" is just a matter of proximity. Our neighbors are those who we happen to encounter. To them, we display love.

After all, Jesus told the parable of The Good Samaritan in Luke 10 after being challenged with the question, “Well who is my neighbor?” His response gave an example of someone who was neighbor neither by shared community, nation, or really any kind of earthly bond whatsoever.

Instead, the neighbors in the story are a random Samaritan and a random Jew, brought into “neighborhood” through a chance encounter.

Theology Professor Stephen Pope put it well when he wrote in America Magazine:

“Mr. Vance and his supporters hold that we should first love our families and then love our neighbors. They seem to be thinking of “neighbors” in a literal sense, as particular people who live in our vicinity. Their narrow usage does not comport with Jesus’ own expansion of the term to include not just the “near ones” living in our “neighborhood” but all human beings. Jesus considered all the following as neighbors: widows and orphans, the poor, sick and disabled, social outcasts and, yes, alien workers.”

The Pope himself responded to Vance’s statement with, “[T]he true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan’ (cf. Lk 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”

Neither Augustine, nor Scripture, argue a need to love one's own community or citizenry before others. In fact, much of the New Testament is spent countering this exact idea, as favoritism for one's own ethnic/national groups was a common problem.

We’re told in Acts 6:1 that, “In those days, as the disciples were increasing in number, there arose a complaint by the Hellenistic Jews against the Hebraic Jews that their widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution.”

Literally the entire reason we get deacons in the Church after this is in correction to the human tendency to follow VP Vance’s “order of love” over God’s own order of love.

VP Vance’s order of love is not ordered. It is disordered.

What is Ordo Amoris Scripturally?

The idea argued by both Scripture, Augustine, and Aquinas after him is a matter of proximity.

Love those around you. Love those you encounter in the everyday.

Show preference for the household of God, yes, because they are your family. Your nation is not. Then also, as able, extend acts of charity beyond your immediate vicinity as well. Your true Kingdom is Heaven, not the USA (or any other earthly boundary).

By the way, this means in terms of ordo amoris, Christians in, say, Gaza come before non-Christian fellow citizens of the USA. Try making that statement from a MAGA stage.

When the churches of Macedonia and Achaia sent aid to the church of Jerusalem as the latter struggled through a famine, that was ordo amoris in action.

Many local churches could take a lesson from Augustine's order of loves in that sense and begin to better ensure the needs of their local body (and the global Body in general) are consistently met.

A Critical Caveat

Even still, Aquinas clarifies in his Summa Theologica with his idea of “ordo caritatis” (order of charity) that this prioritization still cannot be universally applied and comes with caveats based on urgency.

“And yet this may vary according to the various requirements of time, place, or matter in hand: Because in certain cases one ought, for instance, to succor a stranger, in extreme necessity, rather than one’s own father, if he is not in such urgent need.”

If “the poor will always be with us,” we certainly can’t used “ordo amoris” as some excuse to indefinitely and infinitely be tasked strictly with getting our own house in order, never providing charity to those beyond our immediate vicinity or body of Faith. That’s just silly.

And you know what, most of us using the excuse of "order of love" aren't even loving those around us meaningfully. 🤷🏼‍♂️

We Need to Get Back to the Basics

Excuse my rant, but this is my point: No level of secondary or tertiary theological knowledge matters if the vast majority of Christ's Church doesn't even know how to love their neighbor

Who cares what your head knowledge is if you’re supporting excuses as to why you don't need to practice love for your neighbor if they don’t share your nationality?

Who cares about your theological insights if you argue that Scripture says to prioritize shared national identity over care for others, and actually entirely neglects to mention the Scriptural elevation of Christian identity itself?

If we as the Church are becoming known for spreading lies, engaging in paranoia, fighting others, and mindlessly supporting people twisting Scripture, there's much more basic work to be done.

So yea, I will definitely touch on fun nerdy theology from time-to-time still (I actually released a video on a nerdy overlooked detail of Joseph's story today), but I also want to help the Church to get back to basics.

It's clear to me that most of the church in the US is in need of milk, not meat.

Once we start loving our neighbors (and understanding that the Nicaraguan migrant down the street IS our neighbor), we can spend more time in the meaty stuff.

P.S.

This rant was inspired by Chapter 2 of @swordandpencil's new book, Room for Good Things to Run Wild, in which he describes how growing up in the Church and having all of the intellectual Christian answers was found wanting in his life.

Christianity had to be something more than head knowledge. It had to be lived. Deeply. Transformationally.

"Sure, we learned more, lots of knowledge packed into our heads, but how many changed hearts?"

That certainly is the question.

Btw, here’s that Joseph video if you want to see it.