(Photo by Derick McKinney on Unsplash)
Recently, Vice President JD Vance came under scrutiny for arguing that we ought to love those proximally closest to us before we love those who are farther away. (In this particular case, Vance was arguing that the US government should prioritize Americans over Foreigners) In other words, Vance was arguing that we have to have a hierarchy or order of love; some people rank higher than others in terms of our given affection.
This “ordering of loves” is sometimes referred to by the Latin phrase ordo amoris or ordinans amores. The idea behind this phrase is that we must prioritize how to express love. We are finite and limited creatures, meaning that we don’t have an infinite or unlimited capacity for love. We can’t love everyone at the exact same time or in the exact same way.
Some of the critiques against the VP, mostly from the so-called “Christian Left,” were that ordering of loves is not a Christian concept. My goal here is not so much to focus on Vance, though his particular application of this idea is also worth exploring. Rather, I mainly aim to briefly argue that ordering of loves is both necessary and deeply in line with historic Christian thinking.
Aren’t we supposed to Love Everyone?
One of the critiques leveled at Vance, particularly on social media, was that the Bible, particularly the direct teachings of Christ, suggests that we should love everyone equally. And, if we are supposed to love everyone equally, doesn’t it make sense to say that we can’t have a hierarchy or order for our love?
Well, maybe. The answer is a bit more complicated than that.
In thinking through this concept of Ordo Amoris, we have two competing concepts: First is that God loves the world and second, humans are finite and limited things.
God can love everyone with little difficulty: he is infinite, unlimited, and love itself. God knows all people concretely and individually in a way that simply isn’t possible for us as humans. Thus, God’s loving is on a wholly different scale than human loving.
Humans are finite. We need a lot of help just to survive, let alone devote time and energy to others. Additionally, we are very spatially limited. We are typically bound to a particular geographical location, and we rarely travel far and wide. Further, if there are seven billion people in the world, it would be impossible for us to meet every other person. We can’t know every other human, let alone love them. And, if that is true, does the Bible actually call us to love everyone?
I would say the answer is both a “yes” and a “no.” We are called to love everyone we encounter, but this does not mean that love can be universally applied. We can only love individual people, never an abstract group. And, in loving individuals, we must pick and choose who gets our priority and when.
Nothing in the teachings of Jesus, nor the Bible as a whole, nor the Christian Tradition suggests that we, as individual humans, have the obligation to love all people at the same time and in the same way. It simply is not possible to love all people “the same” in anything other than the abstract.
Love requires a concrete, personal connection. Loving “people” generally is so abstract that it is difficult to even know what it means to say such a thing. For example, I cannot really love anyone in Ethiopia. Why? Because I don’t know a single soul in Ethiopia. I might be able to love imaginary Ethiopians or love the people who live there in an abstract way, but I can’t love any individual Ethiopian.
This does not mean that I can therefore wish evil on Ethiopia or that I must be opposed to the Ethiopian people in some way. It is just to say that I can’t really love them, either. When it comes to who gets my time, affection, money, energy, etc, I must focus on people with whom I can actually have a real connection.
The Finitude of Loving
The reason why I think the above is obvious is because we know it to be true. Think about your own life for a moment. Do you actively love everyone you come across? Probably not!
Perhaps you try to be loving to the people around you, but what does it mean to be “loving?” To me, it seems that when we say we are “being loving,” we can mean one of two things: Either A) We are actually actively loving someone, or B) We say “loving” to mean “being kind.” My sense is that we usually mean the second definition more often than the first.
Being kind to others is often good, but it isn’t really loving. What is the difference? 1 John 4:10 reads, “Love consists in this: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” Likewise, John 15:13 says, “No one has greater love than this: to lay down his life for his friends.” True love involves a commitment to sacrifice. It is simply not true or possible to sacrificially love all people at the same time.
One primary way we show love is by dedicating time (ie, sacrificing our time) to others. Time is the one resource we can never have more of. No matter what I do, my time is limited. Thus, when I give a person time, I am giving them a portion of my most limited resource. No matter what else may be true, I am limited in showing love because I only have so much time to give.
Additionally, my time has obligations placed on it. I need money to provide for basic needs and I have to sleep. These things take the majority of my time, which means any additional time I have to dedicate to another is a limited portion of my already limited time.
To demonstrate finitude of time, let’s say I work 8 hours a day and sleep 8 hours, leaving me with 8 hours of “free time.” How should I spend this remaining 8 hours a day? What portion of it should I spend loving other people? What portion of it should I spend taking care of myself?
Hopefully, you can see that the calculus is already getting complicated. In order to love others, I must take care of myself. In my 8 hours of free time, I have to eat and take care of my home. I also need to exercise, pay my bills, mow my yard…other normal life things. Let’s say that at the end of the day, this leaves me about 2-3 hours of unaccounted-for “free time.”
Now what do I do? Well, I have a wife and children. I could choose to spend my time serving others, or I could choose to love my family well. Unless I want to run myself ragged, I cannot possibly do both in my remaining time.
Of course, this is one anecdotal example. Hopefully, though, the point is clear: no matter who you are, you must order your time which means you must order your loves. In my example, I choose to give my love and attention to my family rather than others. For others, the situational equation might be different, but the end result is the same, you can only give so much to so many. At some point, you will have to choose who to give your love to.
Who is my Neighbor?
Christ gives some fairly explicit commands on who we are to love. Mark 12 tells us that the great commandments are, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. The second is, Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other command greater than these.”
This brings up the natural question of, “Who is my neighbor?” As I’ve watched this discussion unfold on social media, usually, the person arguing against ordo amoris brings up the Parable of the Good Samaritan. (Luke 10) See? The argument goes, Jesus gave us a story about loving everyone equally.
The Good Samaritan, though, demonstrates my point quite clearly. Jesus brings up this story when a Pharisaical Scribe attempts to wiggle out from Jesus’s teaching by “lawyering” his way out of helping people he doesn’t want to. By technically defining neighbor, this scribe hopes to circumvent helping those he wishes to avoid.
The Parable, though, doesn’t tell us that we should love everyone in the abstract. Rather, it tells us to love people concretely. The point of the story is that the Samaritan helped the person he could. The Samaritan displayed love to a real human being right in front of him. The Samaritan had the opportunity, resources, and time to help the wounded man on the side of the road.
Notice that the Samaritan didn’t help all “the poor” in Jerusalem. He helped one man that he could actually help. The Samaritan’s “neighbor” was a real, living person in front of him, not an abstract concept.
Jesus’ teaching about the Good Samaritan gives us two pieces of information to work with: first that all people are abstractly our neighbors. In other words, I cannot categorically point to any particular person as “not my neighbor.” Christ has commanded that I love every real person I come into contact with, regardless of who they are or where they are from.
Second, this parable notes that I have an obligation to help those that I can help. As noted above, I can’t help everybody but I can help somebody. I can’t solve world hunger, but I can potentially help the guy down the street.
The Concentric Circles of Love
This brings us to the practical reality of loving others: we must make choices because we, individually, only have so much time. While the Church writ large might be able to “go into all the world,” we, individually, cannot.
We also have to trust that in God’s sovereignty, He will bring the people into our lives that we are supposed to love and in what order. Because I do not have the capacity to love all people, I must trust that God will be the one to help me order my loves. I call this God-ordained ordering the “Concentric Circles of Love.”
The first circle of love is those to whom I have a direct moral obligation to love. I do not have a choice not to love these folks. No matter where I go, they will always count as my neighbor. The people in this circle should be most obvious: my direct family. Because I am married with children, I must use my time to love my wife and children. The Bible explicitly tells me I am to love my wife and that I must teach the statutes of the Lord to my children, which is itself a form of love. If I do nothing else, I must love my wife and kids.
The second circle is my local church. A good chunk of the Apostle Paul’s letters is his exhortation to love our fellow believers. The Church is our global family in Christ and the local church is the local iteration of my Christian family. Just like I love my natural family, I must also love my Christian family.
From there, my remaining love can go to my local community and whatever needs it might have. My local church gathering together allows us to magnify this love through team effort. Even at this level, my love is starting to turn from the concrete into abstraction. It is abstract to love “my local community,” unless I am able to build relationships with real people. Still, through the efforts of the local body of Christ, we may be able to show the love of Christ to our communities through acts of service.
After this, my love becomes abstraction, but it must still be ordered. In my particular case, the Lord has ordained that I live in Florida, USA. This means I have an abstract obligation to my fellow Floridians and then an obligation to my fellow Americans. After that, I have only the vaguest of obligations to my fellow humans. I cannot really concretely love anyone outside of my local community, let alone a foreign country. If I encounter a foreigner in my local context, I can, of course, choose to love them, but I cannot love anyone that I don’t know.
The Difference of Nations
The final bit worth discussing is what to do with nations loving others. Nations are governmental bodies ordained by God for the purpose of bringing justice to their people. (Romans 13) Further, we see in the imprecatory Psalms of David that God has inspired songs of praise dedicated to one people calling disaster upon another people.
God’s Word never contradicts itself, which means Christ’s teaching on loving one’s neighbor and David's calling destruction upon his enemies are a harmonious teaching. How can this be?
Perhaps I will give a longer answer to this in another post. My short answer to this conundrum is this: Christ is teaching to the individual, while David is speaking on behalf of a nation. If you doubt this distinction, remember that God called Israel, through Joshua, to exterminate the Canaanites, from the people down to the animals. Clearly, God can allow a nation to operate in a way that an individual cannot.
Conclusion
The ordering of loves is not just a Christian concept, it is a necessary implication of human finitude. I am called to demonstrate the love of Christ, but I have very real limitations on my personal abilities to do so. I do not get to choose who to love; God is the one who has ordained which individuals will come into my life. Further, God has given me explicit commands to care for my wife and family in a way that is different from how I care for others. The Concentric Circles of Love gives me a tool on how to prioritize my time when it comes to caring for and loving others.
Finally, nations are not people. The vice president has the responsibility to prioritize those under his purview from those who are not. Our leaders have been given the task of caring for Americans. While American individuals may be called by God to care for individual foreigners, our government is not under the same mandate.
We must all prioritize and order our loves rightly. Let us pray that we can do so wisely.
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