JD Vance and Ordo Amoris
Anglican Brat
Shipmate
in Purgatory
https://baptistnews.com/article/theologians-push-back-on-jd-vances-view-of-ordered-love/
I don't know the relevant passages from Augustine and Aquinas, but my hazy recollection is that Augustine taught about loving God for God's sake, and not using created things as a substitute for God. I thought that is what Ordo Amoris meant.
Oh I gather this is irrelevant for Protestants since Augustine and Aquinas is not scripture.
I don't know the relevant passages from Augustine and Aquinas, but my hazy recollection is that Augustine taught about loving God for God's sake, and not using created things as a substitute for God. I thought that is what Ordo Amoris meant.
Oh I gather this is irrelevant for Protestants since Augustine and Aquinas is not scripture.
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I also am under the impression that Shillbilly Vance is employing what is actually a straight-up Nazi hermeneutic. No joke.
There are some gaps in this order:
How about love of enemies
or Love of the environment
or responsibility to the future
or the less fortunate
or those more fortunate?
Oh I mean whether or not the concept of Ordo Amortis makes sense from a Protestant perspective since it is not found in scripture I don't think.
My understanding is that a Protestant hermentutic would take Augustine and Aquinas' theology into consideration if it engages with a concept found in Scripture such as predestination and the Eucharist.
Surely the concepts of love, family, and country are all found in Scripture, so this ought to be fair game.
What gets me about...our vice president...is that he seems to work on a scarcity mentality, and so when he sees a set of rings, the immediate reaction is "OK, so what can we cut? How can we make the pie smaller so my priorities get a larger share of it?"
And this, I think, is an occupational hazard of the whole practice of circle-making in the first place, and I think there are Christians both in Scripture and out explaining that that's not a good thing to do. You have to start from the outside, if there must be one at all.
@Gramps49 if you are concerned about another Shipmate’s post breaching the rules, please message a host, rather than hosting yourself. It doesn’t do to have too many referees/umpires on the pitch.
BroJames, Purgatory Host
And what is a straight-up Nazi hermeneutic? Any socially conservative, i.e. restrained, diminishingly concentric, realistic, natural, reactionary one? They are within the Nazi superset? I'm not aware of any mainstream, normal, conservative religious hermeneutic that says that one should walk on by the abandoned victims of lawlessness. Or even a Nazi one. Or, like Jesus, were you just using hyperbole?
Yes, he converted in 2019 after meeting Peter Thiel - who then coincidentally bank-rolled much of his subsequent political career.
Noted, and apologies.
Nazi theology said that "our people" come first in all things, before "those people." That's the beginning of it. They really emphasized "my family, my country, my people" first.
I could look up sources if I got the time, I have a lot of Bonhoeffer lying around, but that's my recollection from seminary. I'm not trying to be pejorative in this case, I'm just recollecting what I learned in seminary. I had one professor who took the topic very seriously and spent an entire senior class on Bonhoeffer.
I think what makes the slider go from "conservative" to "reactionary" to "Nazi" is how much you start cutting off the outer rings entirely. And yes, I know conservatives who don't go as far as that, but I also know ones who make public choices that will implicitly do the same thing while avoiding the responsibility by saying it's all their private decision.
In my sight, a lot of charity is done on public work and privatizing all of that is in effect the same thing as strangling it. This is an uncomfortable political conversation.
Jesus I think, in the Good Samaritan parable, the "he who does not hate his family" challenge and his "who is my mother and my brothers?" question challenges us to question that quiet assumption. The needs of a person we do not know are equally important as those of someone we do know or who is close to us. It's a call to open up rather than to close in.
Pinning down to a set of rules about who we should care about is somewhat missing the point, I think.
Then he was wrong. Completely, genetically, relationally, morally wrong. I have a duty to protect my wife, my home, my neighbours, and my work premises, the pre-school children on them, the music teacher, the women of the church, neighbourhood kids who play football in the car park, from the needy, whose needs are infinitely greater. Who cannot be helped at all.
Duty and perception of need are two very different things though. I don't think Jesus is telling us to fail in duties to those close to us, but not to fall victim to thinking that that makes those needs objectively greater, and the other needs not our concern at all.
- myself
- my spouse
- my family, children and parents
- my godchildren and extended family
- my friends and coworkers
are all actual people, that you know as flesh and blood.However worthy as aspirations
are not such. They are not people one has any human relationship with. They are ideas, abstracts. Even the less and more fortunate only pass from one category to another when one meets someone that fits either description.
The two tricky ones are God, and one's enemies that Jesus commands us to love, but for different reasons. For me, God is definitely in the first category, an actual person I have a relationship with, even though I can't see him. However, from the way some people speak of God, it's often clear that they see him as in the second category, an idea, like 'my nation' but demanding a greater commitment just because he's right and obviously bigger.
Enemies are more difficult. Those that wish me targetted, personal ill are in the first category. Those are categories, even if individuals I've never met and are unaware of me are in the second category.
I mentioned on another thread seeing a White House Bible study (Trump first presidential era) which basically excluded the government from any responsibilities to meet the needs of the poor and the suffering. The view appeared to be that government did not exist to meet any gaps left by family kindness or church kindness. Gap filling was seen as socialist.
My gut feel is that Vance’s views come from a similar territory, seeking to emphasise personal, family and church responsibility for immediate local needs. “But let’s not take that too far”.
It’s a troubling view of the practical limits to conpassion.
We can be as concerned as we like, we can't do a thing about them, apart from serve tea and sympathy in our immense, helpless privilege.
I've done quite a lot for strangers over the years, myself. I'm not tied into a need to 'finish' the job, and I don't judge the results in any kind of utilitarian way, so it's all cool with me (apart from needing to do more, but OK). And quite a few needy folks who ended up friends are now safely dead, so that's a job done I guess.
I think this is all bob on, Karl. It amazes me that we are now defending this kind of Jesus-101 from people who seem (in my limited vision) to have popped up very recently and are attempting to redefine it / Him. I spent my whole life dealing with people (humanists) who liked all the Jesus-stuff but wanted to get there without the Man. Now we have people who want the Man (well, the Name) but not the stuff. It's pretty disorientating.
Heh. That cracks me up (the bit about them being safely dead, I mean) because that's actually something I think too when one of our people, um, crosses the finish line--"Well, that's one more safely home, thank God for it!" because I no longer have to worry about them the way I have been doing for ten or twenty years.
We had one recently who did an unexpected turn-around and mended family estrangements that had been going on for maybe 40, 50 years or more before she died. And who would have predicted it, that knew her ten years previously? So glad to see her finish well.
Yes, and I'm not a sola scriptura person but completely agree.
Besides @Anglican Brat, aren't Anglicans Protestants? 😉
Yes, yes, I know, some of them claim not to be.
But more seriously, in my experience even the most avowedly chapter and verse Protestants will inevitably find themselves dealing with concepts that aren't specifically 'named' or laid out in scripture. We all do, whichever Christian tradition we inhabit.
The key, I'd suggest, is for us all to think scripturally - which means the Beatitudes, which means loving our neighbour as ourselves, which means all sorts of other things and more.
The goal is 'theosis.' The goal is Christ. How we treat others is inextricably tied into that.
I'm glad to hear that. I heard this morning a friend of mine E_ from church died this week. I will miss him - we was joking the previous week about my visit to my Dad, saying he wouldn't mind visiting his Dad (he was well in his 80s). And I still feel bad about S_, who I feel like I managed to drop because the rest of the group was dead or moved on, and who I think is now dead himself. Somewhere recently on here I said I was not totally down with RC prayers for the dead, but I'd like to pray for S_ because I could have done more for him. That's not really altruistic, is it, more an apology. Hey ho. But back on thread - he and I were strangers, and we spent 20+ years getting to know each other and doing each other a bit of good now and then. I'm glad for it.
This is because you're someone for whom the problem is not to try to do more than you can manage. They're people for whom the problem is not to do more than the minimum they can get away with.
Re feeling guilty about people who I've fallen out of touch with and think I should have done more for (but they're doubtless dead now)--my son's godfather. Oh, there are extenuating circumstances, but they don't extenuate enough, if you know what I mean. And I basically asked the Lord if he'd pass on my apologies for fucking up.
That was from a time when good neighbouring really meant something.
But, for Christians that's not an option Jesus left us. When asked "what's the minimum requirement for how many times I should forgive?" he produced a number so large that no one would be able to keep count. When occupying Roman soldiers could force someone to carry their pack a mile, he told people to carry it a mile further. When asked who is the neighbour we should love, he told a story that makes it clear that's anyone who's in need of help regardless of who they are or how inconvenient or dangerous loving that person is. There is no point at which we have done enough.
The difficulty arises when someone tries to maintain both the political position of doing the minimum and the Christian position of doing the maximum. At some point something needs to give, and if that's the Christian position as being impractical within a secular government then we should be honest and say that, I don't see anything wrong with saying "I try to love all who are in need, but as part of a secular government I can't force that on people who do not share the Christian faith and so as a government minister I'm only able to establish policies that do the minimum".
Excellent. I have one guy who is the closest if friends over 16 years.
Needing to do more? And failing to? I doubt it. You could have, should have done more? I doubt it. Apart from in hindsight.
Your kids come first. Second. Third. They trump everyone. Even your beloved partner. Sibs. Parents. Grandparents. In that ordo amoris. There is no 'higher' morality. No 'better' way. Give me a scenario in which sacrificing one of those relationships to spend time on a needy stranger, or even best friend, is the right thing to do.
There is nothing relevant in Jesus' hyperbole, nothing analogous to modern life.
I think that's one really good reason to make it a public decision with public resources. Governments, if they are run well, have the time and space to work out that kind of thing. And - in my admittedly somewhat biased experience - they do a better job of it. For day to day support, social welfare programs are hard to beat. That's why they're so entrenched once they're established. They work.
And for people I know who do keep that kind of triage-knowledge on hand, the social welfare agencies are the go-to places for a lot of needs. And they know what they're doing. In well organized city, these are routine, because poverty is routine. It doesn't need to be a catastrophe just because it's an emergency. Maybe that's a Chicago thing.
As a private person, I do what I can where I can, and I try. It might have been you, years ago, who mentioned the habit of carrying small bills and just giving them out at request without asking questions. I live in a big city, so it's a repeatedly ethical dilemma and because I'm not living that close to the line, that answer satisfies me for now. I can't solve anyone, but I can help anyone, and I can tell you that the people I help are appreciative. A lot of homeless people recognize me by face now. A few free dollars can do that.
And yeah, the whole thing makes me itch too. I think I resolved by saying I'd do what I could privately, within my means, and I'll always stand up for a robust social welfare state. If someone else wants to knock that down, well, they're the ones doing evil in my sight. I won't participate.
Surely any soldier with children, any striker with children, any political prisoner with children must have reached a different conclusion?
Nothing I've done in politics, in my eyes, qualifies as hard.
Far as the Overton window is concerned, I've always thought one of the profound joys of being a Christian is not being invested in such things. If there's work to be done, you just show up and do the work. There's always work, there's always something to live for.
And seriously, I don't think what I do is all that hard. I know a lot of people whose lives are a lot harder.
Not round here. Not for a long while. And they weren't being obviously Christ like in those. They were engaged in dubious battle, far more real, more complex than mere theoretical Christian dilemmas.
It's hard to make a difference with privilege.
IQ seems to be a favoured topic for the far right. I think it's because calling themselves übermenschen is too obvious these days.
Übermensch
/ˈuːbəˌmɛnʃ/
noun
plural noun: Übermenschen
the ideal superior man of the future who could rise above conventional Christian morality to create and impose his own values, originally described by Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883–5).
Yes exactly, the obsession with IQ and/or in Trump's words, his 'genius' is about them claiming to be superior.
I think Alan almost nailed it above with the post that ends like this.
JD Vance is saying something different. He's saying it's Christian to love the ones closest to me and if I get to rest than that's a bonus. You may argue that Vance is being pragmatic, you may argue that Vance is right about human nature here but it is a complete inversion of Jesus' specific teaching. Stewart's thread very effectively and humbly deconstructs this. Vance can claim his position is right and practical but it is not Christian.
And as I said above, I think Vance is also trying to fold this into his world view of his group being superior. I don't think it quite White Supremacism in the simplest sense, I think it's more White-Rich-People are supreme.
AFZ
Yes indeed. Theology or political philosophy written from a position of White Rich Privilege is likely either to be condescending or indifferent to poverty. That isn’t certain of course but the risk is always there.
Those living with the security of old money tend to be less indifferent than the nouveau riche, who may see that people can and should bring themselves up by their own bootstraps.
What does Divine Love look like? Can you give me a real world example? Not a story book example. And even then. In the story book, what is there to follow? In the real world? How can we transcend our time?