Have You Googled Ordo Amoris Yet?

And welcome once again to the American Churchman podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. And as always, we have my co-host, Matthew Pearson with us. Hey, Matthew.

And John, how you doing?

Doing good, doing good. It's a lot colder. We just actually talked about this, the temperature. That's what, you know, as you get older, that's what you talk about. And my wife actually yesterday was like, why are you looking at the weather?

And I'm like, I don't know, I'm aging. But it's warmer in Florida than it is in New York. And I'm just so grateful I'm in New York and not where our other guest today, Seth Brickley is in Wisconsin, where it's only 10 degrees.

Yes.

Do you go ice fishing?

I do, in fact. And we typically like to go when it's about 25 to 30 degrees. If it's this cold, I'm not gonna go out there.

So, I mean, it's thick enough to like dry. I hear stories, you drive out on the ice. I mean, are you at that level or is this just?

Yeah, well, it's funny. I go with our friend, Mark Brooks. He's a big ice fisherman. And we take his four-wheeler out and he's got a portable ice house that we take out. And it's a good time.

Yeah.

Matthew, you have no clue what we're talking about, do you?

If it's 25 to 30 degrees outside, I am not outside. That's all I'll say.

Yeah, but there are, if you guys have seen grumpy old men, there's like villages and fires going out and all kinds of stuff like that. It's a good time.

Yeah, if you have friends to be with. I went when I was younger. I probably went three times, maybe three or four times in my life. And if you don't have friends, it kind of stinks. In my opinion, you just freeze out there on the lake.

But I went with friends once. We threw a football, we played Risk. I mean, it was fun, but we were also hot dogs. Anyway, this isn't about ice fishing. I mean, it could be. But we have a number of things to talk about.

The Goodness of God as a Transcendental Attribute

One main one in particular, which is the Ordo Amoris. And I feel like we've talked about this before last week. In fact, Matthew and I talked about this a little bit, but we have actually two articles at truescript .com.

And it's important for me to mention that Truescript does sponsor this podcast. So if you like what you hear, go to truescript .com, scroll down to the donate tab. We appreciate it. It's a 501C3. We put out great content.

We are hosting great conferences. Seth actually last year, I mean, when we really didn't have any finances, he just opened up his church and said, let's do a conference here. And we had a good time, but we have some bigger stuff coming.

So I need to let everyone know about the next big thing for Truescript. There's gonna be a few conferences, but the next one is in Sullins Grove, Pennsylvania in April. You can go and check out christianityandthefounding .com for more information about that.

And that's all I'll say since I've been plugging it every episode. So with that, Matthew, I'm gonna turn it over to you for our attribute of God this week.

Yes, of course. This week's attribute is, it's one of the big ones because it's one of the three transcendentals and we'll get into sort of what that entails a bit later on, but we'll be going over God's goodness or God as being goodness itself.

So as we always do with these attributes, I'm gonna start off by reading a verse. And so this one will be from Exodus chapter 34, verses five through six, which reads, and the Lord descended in the cloud and stood there with him there and proclaimed the name of the Lord.

And the Lord passed by before him and proclaimed, the Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long suffering and abundant in goodness and truth. So of course, notice that last part there, abundant in goodness and truth.

We've already sort of discussed the attribute of God as truth, so now we're gonna be focusing in on God as goodness. Now, when we're speaking of goodness as being an attribute of God, we first must define what goodness is, like goodness itself is as a transcendental property.

So when I say transcendental property, what I mean is I'm speaking of the three transcendentals. If you're online or somewhat well-read in theology or philosophy, you've probably come across this before that there are these three big transcendentals out there and those three being truth, goodness, and beauty.

And so obviously goodness is one of these. So goodness being a transcendental or transcendentals themselves, these are essentially, and then before I continue, I always have to cite sources. So I am once again, Moller maxing.

So this is great, you should get this. If you're a student of theology or you just like theology itself, this is very helpful, Richard Moller's Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms, because I did not come up with this myself by any means.

So I will be largely taking from that for us to discuss goodness. So goodness as one of the three transcendentals, essentially these are, they're essentially universal predicates of being in general. So they're universal predicates of being.

That's like what it is metaphysically. So in the metaphysical sense then, goodness can be defined as a property, as the property of actualization, completion, or perfection of the nature of a thing. So what a thing is, that in its fullness, when it reaches what it's supposed to be or do, that means it is good.

So like to use like, I guess a more like practical example, a stove that gets hot is good because it's fulfilling its end as a stove. What is a stove made to do? It's made to heat up, to get hot. So thus it is good.

So that's why I say that goodness is essentially the property of actualization, completion, or perfection of the nature of a thing. I hope that example kind of helps. So this being said, goodness thus belongs to God in an absolute sense and is identical with the divine essence as are various of the other, all the attributes of God, they're identical with the divine essence.

So God is good in himself and he is the absolute good who grounds all things and is the very standard of goodness, which all created things measure up to. So the reason why that sort of thing is important is because when we say that something is good, we have something in mind by which we're measuring.

Something can be kind of good, really good, very good. Even God, he pronounces all these things good in the creation narrative. And then he says, this is very good. So there's a certain measure by which we measure goodness.

Now, it's not as if there's like a scale and at the top is God and at the bottom is Satan or something. It's not just that God is the top of the scale, but it is that God himself is a scale because he is goodness.

So goodness thus is an attribute of God. He is the very standard of goodness, which all created things are to measure up to. And if the created thing is fulfilling its intended end, it is participating in God as goodness.

So in relation to creatures or created things, God is good in that he is the efficient cause who produces all finite or created goodness. So all good things come from above. All good things stem from God.

He is the standard or exemplary cause of all created good, according to which goodness is created and judged. So not only this, but he is also the final cause or highest good being the ultimate end of all good things.

So all things insofar as they're working towards their purported end, are they're reflecting God because they're doing as God has created them to do. Remember our example of the stove, a stove which gets hot is good because it's doing what a stove is meant to do.

So God's goodness. Now, a lot of these properties can sometimes become abstract and just people will just be like, oh, this is just theological godly cook. This is just Neoplatonic Aristotelian philosophical nonsense.

So what is like the practical like behind this sort of thing? Why do we talk about goodness sense and its relation to being and metaphysics and all that? Well, the reason why we do that is because we see God manifests as goodness in our lives every day and ordinary things of nature, but also in extraordinary things of grace.

So God's goodness is manifest in his goodwill towards creatures. And this can be seen also through his other positive attributes or the affections of God's will. You can see God's goodness in his grace, his mercy, his long suffering, his love and his patience with creatures.

So everything that happens to us for our own good, for our own end, it is a manifestation of God's goodness. When you become good at a craft or when God saves you from salvation. So these little things as being good at a craft versus being saved for salvation.

These are all manifestations of God's goodness just in various ways. And that's why goodness as an attribute matters. And so, as I always say, that would be the attribute of goodness wrapped up in a nutshell.

Pastor Seth Brickley.

Yeah.

Yeah, I did that.

No, I think he pretty much covered it.

Yeah.

I mean, it's one of those things you see in the first chapter of the Bible, right? Genesis one, where the word good, the Hebrew word for good, whatever that is. I can't remember right now, but it shows up over and over again.

And then you get to verse 31 and the Lord looks at his creation and he says, it's very good, right? So the standard is set right from the get-go. Scripture where God is that standard. And we don't really know fully, right?

Because we live in a fallen world, but at that time in history, before the fall, everything was precisely as it was supposed to be, right? And of course you turn to the end of the Bible and you see it restored, right?

In the new Jerusalem where everything once again, is precisely as it's supposed to be, right? But of course, in so many ways, we experienced the goodness of God, like Matthew said, both in nature and in the spiritual side of things, through the grace that we experienced through Jesus Christ, through his sanctifying work in our lives, through the joy of family, right?

To the joy of friendship, to watching a sunset, to ice fishing, right? I mean, there's so many different things we can say, right? About the goodness of God that we can experience. And so, yeah, so, but thank you Matthew for that.

You must be on the path to being a professor. That was impressive.

No, I've thought about it before, but I wanna be a pastor, but maybe one day, I'm not sure. So we'll see.

Well, pastors, I tell you what, pastors need to know their stuff, because I think the pastorate has been watered down, where the way that you're communicating is, I think it's pretty rare. So that's a good thing.

Maybe it's not quite as rare in Presbyterian circles. I don't know.

Yeah, that could be it too.

More rare, but I was gonna say, when people, kids, especially growing up in the church, when they leave the church, and obviously not all kids do, but the ones who rebel, oftentimes it seems to come down to this attribute, saying, questioning it, saying God's not really good, and therefore I'm justified in my sin.

Obviously other attributes can also be questioned, but I think for me, that's the one I see questioned the most and whenever there's a trial, that's the one that I know often my own heart wants to work through again and really confirm God.

And then of course, it's like the psalmist. It's like when David so often was running away from people, and it seems like so many of the psalms are him starting out with this bad thing's happening. God, are you still there?

Are you still good? And then by the end saying, oh yes, God's good. So yeah, it's a blessed attribute, but without it, I think you really don't have Christianity. And there are other religions that have deities that aren't necessarily good, but Christianity is not one of them.

Christianity posits a God who's always perfect and

Yeah, praise God.

So absolutely.

Yeah, and not only that, but he's not just, like I said earlier, he's not just the top God at the totem who's like the good on the scale, but he is the scale. So that really just sets a standard. It not only makes us think how we can be good through living lives of holiness, but it makes us sort of have on contemplation of God himself.

And it's just, it's something that's also really nice about this attribute is just that, I said a whole lot. Okay, I did. But people just, what I said can be understood just intuitively in the most simple way.

You just point to something, you say, good. You don't need to say what I said. You just intuitively know what something good is. And then you just say, but God, he is goodness itself. And that's just something beautiful, I think.

So it's nice.

It also solves Euthyphro's dilemma where the question of, and atheists will still point this out and say, well, is God good because he meets a standard that's external to himself of goodness? Or is goodness the nature that it is?

Does goodness exist because it is reflective of a divine will of some kind? And the answer to the dilemma is that, is what Matthew said. God is goodness, that's part of nature. So it's actually kind of a nonsensical question.

He's the standard of goodness. He doesn't exist outside the standard or judge an external standard, like he is the standard. So that's the only way it makes any sense. Otherwise, I mean, you really don't have a standard of goodness.

Without that, I don't see any possible turning.

Yeah.

Yeah, and evil is the absence of goodness. And Satan is fully evil because he woefully falls short of the standard in the worst possible way, right? And yeah, so thank you for sharing that.

Yeah, all right.

Ordo Amoris and the Order of Loves

Well, let's talk a little bit about the Ordo Amoris. So there are two articles I will just point people to if they're interested at truthscript .com. And I should probably pull them up just so I know.

One of them is called, What in the World is the Ordo Amoris? And the other one, and that was by Nathan Rush. And the other one is by Richard Henry. And it said, have you Googled, the title is Have You Googled Ordo Amoris Yet?

Which is also the title of this particular podcast. So I'll pull those up just so people can see what I'm looking at here. We don't normally do, when there's new items, at least, when you have something that's trending, we don't do two articles, we do one, usually.

We did two on this. And I think there was others considering doing an article themselves, because it was such a big deal. And maybe that's the first thing to say about this is when J .D. Vance told, I think it was Sean Hannity, that, and he didn't say Ordo Amoris, I don't think, to Sean Hannity.

He just explained the concept behind it, that there's this Christian principle that we favor those who are in closest proximity to us. And then when he was called to the carpet online by, I think it was a liberal journalist, he said, just go Google Ordo Amoris.

So it's kind of a surreal thing that the vice president of the United States knew what the Ordo Amoris was, the order of loves. And it is a Christian principle, and that he was willing to go out there publicly and defend it and use it to justify Trump's immigration policies.

So I'll start there and just maybe bask in the amazing thing that this is. I wasn't expecting us to get into Christian doctrine and justify the policies of Trump under that, but here we are, and I think it's a great thing.

So just any thoughts on that moment itself? Pastor Brickley, maybe?

Yeah, it's pretty remarkable. I mean, just Trump's, this is his 15th day in office, and to see all the policies he's put forth that not only agree with common sense, but actually agree with scripture as well, right?

And so when Vance said this, I think a lot of us get shocked when he says something like this because it's the political realm. You don't usually hear stuff like this, but it's pretty remarkable what's happened under the Trump administration and all the policies he's pushed forth.

Yeah, but yeah, there's these two Latin words, right, I'm not a Roman Catholic, so I don't really know Latin hardly at all, but yeah, these two Latin words, right, order of love. And John, honestly, through your influence, I really, it caused me to dive deeper into this because you talked about this really before anybody I knew talked about this.

And I know you've talked about how the Christian church has really been lacking in this area of understanding this. And I think it's showing how much the church has been lacking from the fact that a lot of people are outraged by this sentiment, right?

And it's the woke crowd who's been outraged by it. But yeah, there's the biblical history of it, of course. We go, you go right, Exodus 20, 12, "'Honor your father and your mother, "'that your days may be long in the land "'of the Lord your God is giving you.'".

So you see this preference of love, right, toward your parents. And it goes the other way around too, right? Children to their parents. Ephesians 6, verses one through four, "'Children, obey your parents in the Lord, "'for this is right.'".

And then verse four says, "'Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, "'but bring them up in the discipline "'and instruction of the Lord.'". Right, so what Vance is communicating is this familial love that we're supposed to have, where we have this priority to our family, right?

And then of course he extends it beyond that, right, to our nation before immigrants who are coming in.

Yeah, yeah, I think going the Bible route is good on this. And I just have to point out though, before someone said, Ordo Amoris was the name of my band in college. I have to say, the podcast is not about your band in college.

I apologize if you were hoping for that, but I haven't seen it in my searching on the web for Ordo Amoris. So anyway, and Kim, I should probably just address this real quick too. Do I hear chickens or kids?

I hope it's not too loud. That's my daughter in the other room. So she's growling or something, I don't know, but

No, it's okay.

The practice of Ordo Amoris, I love her. I'm just gonna let her keep doing it.

That's great, amen.

So the Bible route I think is really important on this because, let me give you a little story here. This is a true story. This happened last year. I was sitting down with someone who I was having a hard conversation with about loving people, right?

And I'm sure you've had these conversations, Seth, about with your own congregants and so forth, about like, where's your priority? You have a family, you have people you're responsible for. Well, this individual told me that he already had a church family and that that was more important to him than his natural family.

And I was a little blown away, but I brought up this term. I said, this is not in keeping with Christianity. We believe in the Ordo Amoris. And because I had been writing on it, there's a chapter of my book on it.

Although I didn't use the term, I should have, since J .D. Vance is mainstreaming it now. I thought the Latin would be too confusing, but apparently not. So he wanted to justify it with scriptures. Like, well, tell me we're in the Bible.

And I'm just like stunned almost because I'm like, this is throughout scripture. So you could go so many places. And one of the things Nathan Rush does in the article that on True Script is he points out from the very beginning, Cain and Abel, you have this element already emerging of this love.

It was especially egregious for Cain to do what he did to his brother, violated the sacred trust of Noah. And who is Noah trying to help, essentially? It's his family first, right? He's supposed to be preaching and getting others to come, but it's his family who ends up coming on the boat with him.

And you ask for it throughout scripture, and there's so much about the nation of Israel, starting with Abraham, and he's the father of many nations, and it's his son, it's this ancestral connection that's important, that must be maintained, and this land must be maintained within these families and these tribes.

And you get to the New Testament, as you rightly pointed out, Seth, and you have the commands for parents to children and children to parents. You have even Jesus on the cross. He's often, you know, Jesus is often looked upon as this revolutionary figure by the left, who decided that it was more important to look at spiritual siblings, or spiritual, you know, other Christians as your family instead of your natural family.

And yet, Jesus is up there on the cross, figuring out how to take care of his own mother.

When he did. Hmm.

Remarkable. These are just part and parcel to who we are as humans, and it's so represented in the Bible all over the place. Paul's yearning for his natural, you know, kinship according to the flesh, his natural family in the Jewish people is one of these examples.

So anyway, I think this is very biblically rooted, and it's on so many pages. I mean, you just can't get away from it. It's in every book, practically, of the Bible, you have these principles. So I was stunned when someone just wanted, thought this was philosophical, and this isn't rooted in scripture.

There's nothing, there's no principle there. But I think that maybe what this comes down to, why someone would even ask that question is we've eroded this for so many years. And this is one of the working thesis I have in one of my chapters is, I think that through really a number of things in modernity, but Darwinian evolution being one of the main ones, we have separated love and duty.

And this was one of the objections I saw to this is that love and duty are two distinct things. And we've separated them so much that someone can violate their own duties in the name of love now. I'm gonna have an affair because I love this person and not my wife, right?

Well, that's like, that's nonsensical. To a pre-modern person, that would be just, that's lust, that's like, but now we're actually calling that love. We're framing that differently. And so I think that's a key thing.

You look at this, even in like arranged marriages and stuff, there's an old courtship book and it even talked about sacrificing. I wanna get the word right here. Sacrifice, love where duty ordains it.

And the sense there meaning that like if you have a passion for someone, that you have a duty to marry someone else. And back then it was for the survival of your family and that kind of thing. You have to do what's right.

And I know that this is crazy to modern people. Like we just think this is nuts because you should be able to choose freely. And that choice is where you exercise your love. So I'm gonna quit talking and just say that I, maybe throw that out there.

Like, do you think that because we've separated love and duty so much, that's why what JD Vance said is maybe so offensive? Maybe start with you, Matthew.

Yeah, I definitely think that plays a role. And I actually had a little Twitter thread on this the other day. Cause I started off with like a pretty like basic tweet. I'll just read like my first little tweet.

I just said, Ordo Amoris is just common sense and those who dispute it still live by the principles outlined by it, a happy inconsistency, frankly. And then I sort of, John, I kind of said what you had basically said, where people have this separation of love and duty where they think that love is confined to your feelings, to the affections essentially, which is ridiculous because look, I'm an unmarried man.

So I don't know what it's like to be married, but I can imagine there are times where you may not particularly, if you may be going back and forth or whatever, you may not particularly like your wife in that moment or maybe any other family member, but you have a duty to love them.

And so like there's a whole thing where it's like, some people you don't really like, but you still love and that's grounded in duty. And the same thing happens even in our spiritual lives, where if you're ever in a season of spiritual depression or something like that, you may not be feeling all the same things for God as you may have felt at one moment, but you still ought to pray.

You still ought to read your Bible. You still ought to go to church because that is duty. And then part of getting out of that rut is sort of asking God to cultivate your affections. But yeah, it's quite ridiculous to separate duty from love because love is a duty because what is a duty?

It's something that is due to someone. It's your duty. And that's a part of justice. It is just to love those who you ought to love. It is just to honor your father and mother. It is just to love your wife.

These are topics of justice. You wanna talk about a gospel centered justice or whatever. Well, order a morse, there you go. That's what I would say. It's clear in scripture as well, especially when you look at, I don't know, the Apostle Paul, kind of like you were talking about, John, it's not just like an abstract philosophical notion.

The Apostle Paul in 1 Timothy 5 .8 literally says, but if any provide not for his own, especially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith and is worse than an infidel. I think some translations render it as a heretic actually.

King James says infidel. And then like Paul in Romans 9, where he's talking about his kinsmen according to the flesh, the Israelites. He said, for I could wish that myself were cursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh.

And then Matthew Henry, I know that everybody uses Matthew Henry, but it's for good reason because Matthew Henry is great. I love his commentary on there because he says, I just haven't pulled up. He says, Paul was a Hebrew of the Hebrews.

We ought to be in a special manner concerned for the spiritual good of our relations, our brethren and kinsmen. To them, we lie under special engagements and we have more opportunity of doing good to them and concerning them and our usefulness to them, we must in a special manner give account.

So I think that a lot of this is just plainly obvious. Like, of course, like everyone will, in some sense, maybe affirm like, oh, there's an Ordo Amoris of you and your immediate family, but they don't really want to extend it because they may be scared.

I don't know if they may be scared of being called a racist or something like that. But it's like, these things are not only natural to us, like we know it's true. It's thoroughly biblical, what the apostle Paul says in both 1st Timothy and in Romans.

I think it's crystal clear and that a lot of what drives people away from this is, like you said, John, divorcing duty from love, but then also there's fear of being called the wrong thing. So I think that's a lot of what's behind this sort of thing.

Yes.

Yeah, I think some people also, I think I saw a comment that said something like, well, this is like outside of Christianity, it's the platonic origins or something. And I mean, I have a quote from Libby, a Roman historian who said that the true patriotism is founded upon the respect for family and love of the soil.

So, I mean, obviously some of these ideas do, this is something in natural revelation. This is broader than just the Christian tradition because it's just like the gender binary, right? Every society has

It's obvious. Like it's intuitive to everyone.

Right.

Right.

Did you have something there?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jesus ties the two together. He says, if you love me, you will do what I command. Matthew mentioned marriage. I look back at my marriage. So I've been married for a little over 10 years now. And I look back at the early days and there was a lot of feelings, right?

And some would say, well, you loved your wife more back then but one thing we communicate to each other a lot is that through the adversity of life, through the duties of life, through the mundane times of life, we love each other more today than we did when we first met, when that romantic experience.

It's as wonderful as it was, and it was wonderful. But just the nitty gritty of life in the midst of that, that's where love is tested and it is duty. And yes, I do have a strong affection for my wife, right?

But I show that affection for her by doing it, right? By fulfilling the responsibilities that the Lord has given a husband to fulfill.

You also, I mean, what are the things I thought about you? Cause I was like, oh, Seth's going to be on the podcast. We're talking about Ordo Amoris. I don't know of anyone else who's literally written a song about their hometown.

And you're very much a localist as far as your affections. You'll live and die in your hometown and you don't really have any interest in going anywhere else.

Yeah, yeah.

And I can share this with the music legend, John Harris here who by the way, congrats on your new album.

Thanks, thanks.

I've already heard, it's really good. I want to listen to it. But yeah, so there's a sea shanty song called Cornwall My Home. And so they would go out to see, the crew mates would sing this song and I love the song.

And I decided I want to rewrite this to my home, which is Eureka. We're just north of St. Croix Falls in St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin. And so Eureka My Home. And it's something we actually, every single year we have a harvest service because we do live in a, there's some farming in our community in November.

And during this harvest service, we sing some unique songs that we normally wouldn't sing on a Sunday morning. And so I was able to sing this with Mark Brooks at our harvest service. But, and I don't, some people, some would say, well, that's kind of out of place for church, but we're celebrating the area we live in.

You know, the place that God has placed us, right? And, you know, Acts 17, he's put us in a specific location for a specific time. And every area has their own beauty. You know, John, you in New York, Matthew, you in Florida, me in Wisconsin, every area has their own beauty and we should celebrate that.

And it does, but on every area I found always, or the people who live in these areas, always values the people around them and the local area. Sometimes people can live in, and New York is notorious for this, but people can live in that area and not know their neighbors and not care to know their neighbors and just be individuals in the global market.

And that's fine in their minds. Maybe they don't know anything else. What I saw when I went to your town is that there is a strong community sense and people do treat each other more like neighbors and they are proud to be from the same area and they wanna make sure that it looks nice and it's protected from threats.

And, you know, even churches, I mean, when we went to the conference, I was meeting people from all these different churches who just, it doesn't happen everywhere I go. I mean, like they showed up and didn't think of anything of it.

Like it wasn't a competition. So I'm not saying that, you know, obviously there's centers everywhere, right? But to have an area that the people actually prefer one another and take loving their neighbor seriously is a wonderful thing to have.

Yeah.

And I think people used to know that more. That used to be more common in our country. And I think it's finished. And maybe that's another reason why people have a hard time when JD Vance says something like this, because maybe they don't know that in their own lives or maybe that is to them the symbol of a bigoted past or something.

But when you see it in action, it's a beautiful thing, I think.

Yeah.

And sadly, the church in America has taken their cues from the world, right? We see this over and over again, you know, and Isaiah 520 talks about, you know, darkness is light and light is darkness and sweet is bitter and bitter is sweet.

Everything's backwards, isn't it? It's just wild to see this. And I think this is a great example of a verse like that.

It's flipped.

We should care more about the immigrant than we should about our own family. More about the immigrant than someone in our church family. It's all backwards.

Yeah.

Yeah.

How many people saying that you should care for the immigrant are doing tangible things, really? I mean, it's sacrificing of themselves versus getting government money and they rely on that gravy train for their own ministry's livelihood or something.