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Vocation and the Order of Love

Vocation and the Order of Love

Last updated on: February 13, 2025 at 6:00 am by Gene Veith

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Vocation and the Order of Love 2025-02-10T19:25:23-05:00 Gene Veith

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Yesterday we discussed a theological and ethical concept called the ordo amoris, the order of love. I would like to offer a Lutheran take on the concept by bringing in what the Catholic version lacks: the doctrine of vocation.

To review, Vice President J. D. Vance brought up the topic, describing it this way: “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.”

This provoked some outrage, but First Things editor R. R. Reno explained that the principle that “we are to love those near with a greater fervor than those far away” comes straight from Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas.

In our post, we pointed out that Jesus extends the notion of the neighbor whom we are to love to people “far away” from us, including ethnic outsiders such as Samaritans and Gentiles and going so far as to include our enemies. Furthermore, Aquinas was missing the original sense of the “ordo amoris,” a term coined by Augustine to refer to the “disordered loves” of us sinners, which can be “ordered” by the love of God.

Two other points about that. The Catholic version that creates a hierarchy of loves based on proximity has been used in arguments for Christian nationalism. Actually, though, this view supports not so much nationalism as localism. According to this way of thinking, our primary love should be to our local community, then our state, and only then our nation.

More seriously, for any Christian ordo amoris, the love of God must be paramount. On the principle of “nearness,” God is the closest to us of all things. A non-Christian version of the Thomist hierarchy might maintain that the self, by definition, is the “nearest” entity, so that love of self must rule supreme. But self-love is exactly what Augustine says is disordered. But God knows us better than we know ourselves, and, indeed, is more intimately closer to us than we are to ourselves, given our self-alienation due to sin. But Vance and Reno say nothing about God in their analysis.

And yet even when you put God into the scholastic model, if you put God as #1 in the priority hierarchy of love, you risk falling into the “Corban” syndrome condemned by Jesus:

Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother’; and, ‘Whoever reviles father or mother must surely die.’ But you say, ‘If a man tells his father or his mother, “Whatever you would have gained from me is Corban”’ (that is, given to God) then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother, thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And many such things you do.” (Mark 11: 10-13)

The Pharisees were following their understanding of the ordo amoris: I have given the money to God, to whom I owe my highest love; therefore, I don’t have to give any money to support my parents. Jesus, though, says that this approach to love makes void the word of God, who commands us to love and serve our parents, along with other neighbors whom God also calls us to love and serve. This brings us to the doctrine of vocation.

The love of God is not so much about our love for Him as His love for us (1 John 4:10). And He exercises His love for His creation by working through human beings whom He has called to different tasks and different neighbors according to His purposes.

In his defense of Vance’s statement, Reno cites a character in Charles Dickens’ novel Bleak House, Mrs. Jellyby, who is obsessed with helping children in Africa, while neglecting her own children. It isn’t that she is getting the proximity wrong by loving people far away more than she does the people who are near. Rather, she is violating her vocation. God has called her to be a mother, through whom He has created new human beings and through whom He nourishes and cares for them. Yes, she should love the children in Africa, but God has called her specifically to love and serve the particular children He has given her.

We have multiple vocations in the household, the church, and the state. God so loved the world, and so should we, but He has placed us in specific communities and nations, so we are right to love them. We Americans have a particular responsibility to love our country and our fellow citizens, just as the inhabitants of other countries have that vocation for their own nation.

Workers have a vocation to love and serve their customers. They also have vocations in their family, at church, and in the state. Luther also speaks of the “common order of Christian love,” which consists of the informal relationships we encounter day by day. Each of these brings different neighbors into our lives, at different times and in different ways, and God calls us to love and serve them. When we don’t–when we neglect or mistreat them–we set ourselves in conflict with the love of God which works through us, and we sin in and against our vocations.

Someone who has been placed into high office, such as a Vice President, has, in addition to his vocations in his family and church, a calling to love and serve the nation as a whole by enforcing its laws and exercising his authority, always under the greater authority of God (Romans 13).

For Luther, a neighbor is not an abstract category or grouping of people, as in the scholastic proximity hierarchy. Rather, a neighbor is the individual human being whom we encounter in the course of our everyday lives–in the family, the workplace, the church, the state, the “common order”–whom God has brought into our lives for us to love and serve.

How does bringing vocation into the issue relate to the original question of dealing with illegal immigrants? One could argue that immigration shouldn’t even happen, since we all have a vocation to live our lives in love and service to the country where God has placed us. And yet, God sometimes clearly calls people to leave their homeland and calls them to another homeland. He did that with Abraham and various apostles, and more recently in the history of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod with the Saxon immigrants who left the apostate state church for America, as well as similar migrations for religious reasons. But leaving a country for economic reasons can also be a valid calling for a father trying to make a living for his family. But any new citizenship must be made valid by the laws of the countries involved, which the lawful authorities are obliged by their vocation to enforce.

I would say that if we encounter an illegal immigrant, like any other human being in the common order, we should love him and treat him kindly. If a lawful authority encounters that person, the official should do his duty and enforce our nation’s laws by sending him back to his homeland, while still loving that person as an individual.

We’ll touch on more of that issue tomorrow. But notice how Luther’s doctrine of vocation preserves the “common sense” provisions of the Thomist teaching of proximity, while giving love a much broader scope and–most importantly–making God’s love central.

Photo: Love Your Neighbor: Building adjacent to gas station, Mojave, California, by Ian Abbott via Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

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