Introduction
At the end of last month, I posted a thread of eleven comments on what I was there calling Hell-no-nationalism. It stirred the pot significantly, garnering almost 300K looks, and if we count both eyes, that is almost 600K looks.
There has been a good deal of irrationality in the reactions to it, but it is not my purpose to deal with all of that here today. Just remember . . . November is not that far away now, and when I attack Nazis, I want to do it without any qualifications at all. That is one thing, and not what I am seeking to do here.
So what am I doing now then? There was one issue that came up in the all the reactions that I believe represents a truly honest confusion, and it is actually one that helps set people up for all the darker confusions. And what I am referring to is that there were more than a few people who thought that I was contradicting myself when it came to my 6th and 9th tweets.
An Appointed Tension
Some of you may have just joined us. What were my 6th and 9th tweets. Well, here they are:
“Those who want to “blood-and-soil” everything need to be told that if they do not hate father, mother, wife, children, brothers and sisters (Luke 14:26), they cannot be Christ’s disciple. But if you cannot be Christ’s disciple, then it follows you cannot be a Christian nationalist. You can, however, become a Hell-no-nationalist. The bar is much lower.” 6/11
That aforementioned tweet thread
“In the glow of natural affection, you have a duty to prefer hanging out with your own people (as Augustine would define it) over against hanging out with some random Anglican Nigerian Christian. Be like that bishop in 1 Timothy who manages his own household well.” 9/11
Ibid.
In short, I said that the disciples of Christ need to hate their fathers, mothers, wives, children, brothers and sisters, and if they do not, then they cannot be Christ’s followers, and I also said that Christians should prefer hanging out with their own people, as over against other people. Is this not a contradiction? No, not at all. Not even close.
But mark it well. If there is a contradiction here, it is one that Scripture also contains. Christian men must hate their wives. Christian men must love their wives. More in a minute.
Rightly Ordered Loves
This all goes back to Augustine (as I referenced in #9), and his teaching on the ordo amoris, on rightly ordered loves. If you are interested, I have had occasion to write on this before. And also here.
Here is Lewis on the subject:
“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.”
Lewis, The Abolition of Man
We sin when we love in two different ways. One would be by loving things that we ought not to love at all—such as “the world.” We are to turn away from the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life (1 John 2:15-16). We are told expressly by the apostle John that we are not supposed to love the world, and the verb he uses there is agapao. Agape love is not an essentially holy love—it too is corrupt if it is aimed or directed at the wrong object.
The second kind of sin when we undertake to love is sin in the adverbs. The object of our love is legitimate, but we love it in the wrong way. This is often what happens when our loves are disordered. They are disordered when the love for a legitimate object grows too great, thus displacing another legitimate object of our love that ought to take precedence over it. This can also happen when love for a legitimate object wanes, thus demoting it to a lower position than it ought to occupy.
A Scriptural Assignment
For those who see a flat contradiction in my two statements, I would offer them this. Is there any difference in the alleged contradiction of my statements, and the “contradiction” found in Scripture? Christ said that anyone who didn’t hate his wife couldn’t be a Christian (Luke 14:26), and an apostle of Christ said that we were supposed to love our wives as Christ loved the church and gave Himself for her (Eph. 5:25). So which is it? And how can we tell?
Let me give you a hard case, but simple to understand.
“If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which thou hast not known, thou, nor thy fathers; Namely, of the gods of the people which are round about you, nigh unto thee, or far off from thee, from the one end of the earth even unto the other end of the earth; Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto him; neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him: But thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people. And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die; because he hath sought to thrust thee away from the Lord thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage. And all Israel shall hear, and fear, and shall do no more any such wickedness as this is among you.”Deuteronomy 13:6–11 (KJV)
You are an Israelite, in the time of Moses. If your son, or brother, or daughter, or your dearest friend, or the wife of your bosom, secretly enticed you to worship an idol, what were you supposed to do about it? How were you supposed to react?
You must not conceal it. You must report it. You must testify against that person. And in Jewish law, any witness to a capital crime needed to participate in the execution. You needed to be among those who threw the stones. There were circumstances, in other words, when a godly husband would need to participate in the execution of a wife who had been genuinely dear to him. The word inerrancy is one that evangelicals tend to throw around glibly. But just stare at that passage for a while.
And don’t change the subject, acting as though I am trying to propose the reintroduction of stoning. My point is a much simpler one. When this scenario actually occurred, back in 1420 B.C., say, and a husband actually obeyed this law, and his wife was executed, with him participating, was that action of his “holy, righteous, and good?” (Rom. 7:12). Back then, was that righteous and good? Are you still staunch in your views of inerrancy?
It does no good simply to set Deuteronomy 13:6-11 out on the table and then set John 8:3-11 alongside it, in order to arbitrarily pick one, rejecting the other. That form of disobedience sets the Word of God against the Word of God, as though such a thing were possible (John 10:35). No, all the teaching of Scripture must be harmonized, and in order for that to happen, the various passages must be ranked, balanced, set in order, and doing so taking into account history, context, comparisons, and relative importance.
Guts and Brains
An aphorism from E.M. Forester highlights this issue very well. He once said, “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” But on hearing this, objections immediately crowd into our minds. What if the country’s cause is righteous, and it is your friend who is actually betraying you? What if he is enticing you to idolatry? Right. But now . . . what if the leaders of Israel are veering off into idolatry, and your friend is resisting?
Exactly so. We need to think through all such issues carefully. Weigh all the variables. Be thinking all the time—like a short stop when there are two outs and a man on second. “If it comes to me, then . . .”
The issue has to do with where the truth lies, and not what side you would like to be on. What is the truth?
Failing the Stress Test
The testing point of rightly ordered loves occurs when God in His providence brings us to a point where we must choose. And whatever choice we make will reveal how we have been ranking things in our hearts. It is the affliction that reveals.
“And thou shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness, to humble thee, and to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldest keep his commandments, or no.”Deuteronomy 8:2 (KJV)
When everything is placid, a man could have all kinds of disorder going on in his heart, and nobody would know. Did he love his car more than his wife? Did he love his reputation more than his job? Did he love his oldest child more than his youngest child? There are many people who go to their grave without any of this internal jumble ever being put to the test. Only God knows the ultimate truth, and He will reveal it in the judgment. He is the one who will sift through the thoughts and intentions of our hearts (Heb. 4:12).
But times of crisis are times in which such things are revealed to us. Crisis declares what we are all about to the world. Say we are standing at an ancient Roman amphitheater, and a man is told that unless he blasphemes Christ, his wife and children will be thrown to the lions. This is a moment of crisis, and such moments are revelatory. He either blasphemes or he doesn’t.
We know how the martyrs ordered their loves. They died rather than surrender their love for Christ. It is an epistemology of blood.
“And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death.”Revelation 12:11 (KJV)
These, Our Dismal Times
The thing that is so concerning about our moment is not the fact that a spirit of resistance to the commies has taken shape. I thank God for that part of it. May it please God to grant more and more of it. And by “commies” I mean those who are bankrupting the country, those who are opening the floodgates at the border, those who have declared war on people for being white, those who are mutilating little boys and girls, and those who want to raise taxes to save us from the weather. You know the drill. All of that.
A lot of that agenda began with disordered loves, and is now ending in deranged malice. We are currently governed by an elite that is drug-addled, mentally-ill, and/or demon-possessed. Things are that bad. But things are that bad because of what was tolerated at the beginning. Those who oppose this kind of madness must not cultivate those attitudes which will simply create their own version of it. Should conservatives look at the achievements of the commies as though it were some kind of a challenge? “You call that a hellhole? We can top that . . .”
So reformation and revival does not consist of going back to a (relatively) saner time, when the consequences of disordered loves were not quite so obvious, in order there to adopt our own set of disordered loves. It is not as though disordered loves can be tamed and harmless, just so long as they are right-wing disordered loves. And judging from the attitudes of some in our right-wing comment threads, a number of our people are not even trying to go back to that relatively saner time. They are wanting to pick up from right where we are now. I am reminded of Tolstoy’s comment when he was asked about the difference between revolutionary violence and reactionary violence. He said it was the difference between cat shit and dog shit, and he didn’t much like the smell of either.
The crisis we are in is revealing that the loves of many on the right are disordered, disjointed, and disheveled. I look at that and it is clear to me that, whatever else they are, such attitudes are not the future. So we must not tolerate evil for the sake of “owning the libs.” We must not coddle disordered loves, and in our own hearts especially.
Christ before all, and He will adjust all the other loves.