Posted on 02/05/2025 9:02:20 PM PST by Red Badger
It's 4:45 p.m. on a Friday and I'm coming at ya with a brief primer on what should be basic theology.
JD VANCE: There is a Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world
A lot of the far left has completely inverted that pic.twitter.com/XkoTiKgq3g— Jack Poso 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) January 30, 2025
What JD Vance is referring to is "ordo amoris," or "Ordered Love" in Latin. The TL;DR version is that you have closer affections and duty to certain people, starting with God and working outward toward all of humanity.
Rightly orienting ourselves is essential to understanding how to do the will of our Father in heaven, and as finite creatures, we are not able to dedicate the same amount of time, energy, and resources to everyone in our lives.
But for some reason, this triggered Liberal Christian Twitter (I use that label very loosely).
Because it's almost 5 o'clock, let me give you the Cliff Notes version of why this is dumb: The Parable of the Good Samaritan is not saying you should love people from different religious/ethnic/national groups more than your own family. It is saying that the amount of love you have for your enemies should exceed what the world would consider normal for even a close relative (how much more should you sacrifice for your own family, then?). The same goes for Jesus' command to love your enemy in Matthew 5:43-48. Jesus is calling us to love exponentially more, not to reorder our hierarchy of loves/duties. This makes it all the more astounding when Jesus says that we should love God so much that it seems like we hate our own families in comparison (Luke 14:26). This kind of passionate, obedient love is impossible for us humans to achieve without the help of God Himself.
The two greatest commandments, to love God (Deuteronomy 6:5) and love our neighbor (Leviticus 19:18), are in themselves a hierarchy. During Covid, politicians like Kamala Harris spouted "love thy neighbor" as an excuse to vax up and shut up. But to do so would mean capitulating to lies, and you cannot love God by living by lies. If in "loving" your neighbor, you dishonor and disobey God, then you have utterly failed in every possible way. It is not possible to love others by disobeying God (1 John 4:7-21, 1 Corinthians 13). Another example would be lying to kids about sexuality and gender. This can never be compassion.
Jesus condemned those who sought to abuse this order by giving alms to the temple that should have been used to care for their parents (Matthew 15:5, Mark 7:11-13).
The Apostle Paul says a man who does not provide for his own family has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever (1 Timothy 5:8). He does not say anything approaching this when reminding Christians of their duty to provide for the persecuted church in Jerusalem (1 Corinthians 16:1-4, 2 Corinthians 8:1-9:15, Romans 15:14-32), let alone the wider world.
God asserts in Deuteronomy 6 that parents have a special obligation to talk about His commands with their children regularly and routinely. While Israel was supposed to be a light for all the world, their responsibilities started at home.
Paul spent a large portion of his letters to the first-ever churches explaining the duties of husbands, wives, parents, and children (Ephesians 5 and 6, or 1 Corinthians 7 as examples) - and in order for a man to serve the church as an elder or deacon, he must have his house in order first (1 Timothy 3:1-7, Titus 1:6-9).
This ordering of affections and relationships can be seen in the second chapter of Genesis, when God says that a man will leave his father and mother to be united with his wife, and the two "will become one flesh." A husband or wife is to be placed higher in priority than a mother or father. Out of this flows a natural progression of all other relationships.
Just google “ordo amoris.” Aside from that, the idea that there isn’t a hierarchy of obligations violates basic common sense. Does Rory really think his moral duties to his own children are the same as his duties to a stranger who lives thousands of miles away? Does anyone? https://t.co/otvv5g1wFN— JD Vance (@JDVance) January 30, 2025
Because it is now AFTER 5 o'clock and I have to make dinner for my family, I won't belabor the point.
What I will do is leave you with these quotes from CS Lewis, because that seems to be the fastest way to get people to stop spouting off nonsense.
"Ordo amoris" is not just a theory of Aquinas or Augustine; it's not merely a Catholic doctrine (I am not Catholic).
It is woven into the fabric of the Christian faith.
'St Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind of degree of love which is appropriate to it. Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought. When the age for reflective thought comes, the pupil who has been thus trained in ordinate affections or "just sentiments" will easily find the first principles in Ethics; but to the corrupt man they will never be visible at all and he can make no progress in that science. Plato before him had said the same. The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting and hateful.' - C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
'To love you as I should, I must worship God as Creator. When I have learnt to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now. In so far as I learn to love my earthly dearest at the expense of God and instead of God, I shall be moving towards the state in which I shall not love my earthly dearest at all. When first things are put first, second things are not suppressed but increased.' - Letters of C.S. Lewis
This isn't hard, guys. 🤷♂️
It’s just common sense and the way most people from time immemorial naturally align their priorities.
Oh good...a Bible thread. I’ll share something I’ve been struggling with that maybe someone here more enlightened than myself could help me with. When G-d helped Moses free the Israelites from Pharaohs control, Numbers 1:46 says that there were 603,550 military aged men over 20. So extrapolate that out and add, say, three more each for younger children, women, elderly etc and you get...something like 2Million total population. G-d did all kinds of miracles to save those people. Seven plagues, Column of cloud by day, pillar of fire by night, water from a rock, manah from heaven to eat, swarms of birds to eat, Ten Commandments, parting the Red Sea.....you get my point. Now G-d was present in all his might, real for all to see and for Moses to talk to G-d “face to face as a man talks with another man” in the tent of meeting (Ex 33:11). But then a bit later on in history between 1939-1945...G-d allowed the Nazi’s to brutally torture and murder over SIX MILLION of the very same people. Where was G-d then? I’d really like to know. Thank you.
That’s exactly the verse I was thinking of posting.
Genesis 15:13-14Then the Lord said to Abram, “Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years. But I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions.
And shortly after the Holocaust, God restored the land of Israel to the Jews and they had their ancient homeland back.
I would hazard a guess that it did provide a number of the Jews motivation to emigrate to Israel, given the chance, which is also fulfilling Bible prophecy.
But who knows the purpose for that kind of horrific persecution and suffering?
first, God is Sovereign over His Creation. He has the Right and Authority to do anything he wants with it and us. second, at times in history, God executes judgement on humanity due our intransigent disobedience of his Law (which is called sin). this includes us Gentiles and His chosen people, the Jews. for example. God destroyed all of humanity (and His terrestrial Creation) in the flood which Noah, his family and certain breeding animals on the Arc survived through Noah’s Faith in God.
in this case, the Jews were guilty of the sin of rejecting Father God’s only begotten Son, Christ Jesus, and also of their continuing return to idolatry, which God really hates. perhaps for this and His own reasons which we don’t completely understand, after all He is God whom we can never fully understand, he put them out of the land (’for many days’ this time), and dispersed them among the nations of the world around 70 AD when Jerusalem was mostly destroyed by Rome as punishment for yet another Jewish rebellion. imho, the Romans where just as brutal and merciless to the Jews in that action as the Nazis were. you can read the history yourself. indeed, all earthly empires seem to take turns trying to wipe out the Jews....
but anyway, since then, they have continued in their wayward, idolatrous ways and thus have continued to suffer greatly as a People. nevertheless, the Lord has not allowed them to be destroyed completely. he has preserved an ethnic remnant of Jews throughout many of the nations of the world, including in Israel, to this day.
mercifully for the Jewish People/Nation, the Bible prophesizes the gathering of Jews back in Judea, and Jesus’ return in the Millennial Kingdom where he will take dominion with them over all the nations of the earth and restore them and the temple, and a form of sacrifice in Israel proper.
hope that helps you a bit, of course you’ve got to get into the Word for yourself. this is just my ‘cliff notes’ version for you.
Zechariah 13
The Shepherd Struck, the Sheep Scattered
7 “Awake, sword, against my shepherd,
against the man who is close to me!”
declares the Lord Almighty.
“Strike the shepherd,
and the sheep will be scattered,
and I will turn my hand against the little ones.
8 In the whole land,” declares the Lord,
“two-thirds will be struck down and perish;
yet one-third will be left in it.
9 This third I will put into the fire;
I will refine them like silver
and test them like gold.
They will call on my name
and I will answer them;
I will say, ‘They are my people,’
and they will say, ‘The Lord is our God.’”
The saying “charity begins at home” used to be familiar to most people.
I have no doubt some of the Jews in Egypt wondered where He was for 400 year, too.
As far as God not showing up like he did in the past.....
Have you not read the news recently? And are you unaware of how President Trump’s life was spared in Butler, and what he’s now accomplishing?
When God parted the Red Sea, the Jews had to be stuck between the sea and pharaoh’s army all night before it parted.
God’s great miracles of deliverance don’t come without dire circumstances that people need to be delivered from.
It’s when it’s life and death that the big noticeable miracles happen. The Red Sea, Daniel in the lion’s den, the four friends in the fiery furnace, Peter being released from prison facing execution the next day, and the list goes on.
And those events cover close to 6,000 years of history. So it wasn’t like God did it ALL the time even then. He did it occasionally.
And He still works today in other less noticeable ways. They’re just not as obvious and dramatic, because the situations we need to be delivered from aren’t as desperate.
“Liberal Christians” No such thing. They are Godless liberal progressives who see Christianity as just another tool to further the communist revolution.
They are the same idiots who say “My brother ‘s keeper” to justify stealing tax dollars to give to their pet welfare programs and “turn the other cheap” to justify liberal violence and oppression of Christian’s.
I love you. means a lot of things in the vernacular.
but when a Christian says that in the context of the Bible, they mean:
I serve you.
once you understand that, you understand why there is so much confusion. for example, the Robinsons on this site are demonstrating Christian ‘love’ for *all* of us by providing this internet site.
even the article above gets something like ‘affection’ conflated with Christian love. in the Greek were talking about ‘agape.’ a better english word is ‘charity.’
GMTA.😊
I was thinking the same thing. Unfortunately, it has been increasingly easier to shell out a few bucks for those unfortunates far, far away (virtue signaling or salve for the conscience) than those closer to us. In fact, most people find the most difficulty practicing charity among their own flesh and blood.
That’s because they’re heretics.
This is what happens when you dumb everything down.
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