They seem to hate the citizens of their own country and care more about people outside their own borders. That is no way to run a society. And I think the profound difference that Donald Trump brings to the leadership of this country is the simple concept, America first. It doesn’t mean you hate anybody else. It means that you have leadership, and President Trump has been very clear about this, that puts the interests of American citizens first. In the same way that the British prime minister should care about Brits and the French should care about the French, we have an American president who cares primarily about Americans, and that’s a very welcome change.

What is President Xi doing? What is the Vladimir Putin doing? Look at that for the Chinese. Putin is looking after the Russians. They’re entitled to do that. Thank God we now have an American president who’s looking after the citizens of his own country. Now J.D. went on to explicitly refer to that concept in the hearing of our loves, Orto Amores. And what I was so fascinated by was how so few contemporary Christians understood that. There were all these comments after the interview, who are you Mr. Vance to claim to order my loves? How dare you define what I’m supposed to love? And it’s so telling on the total failure of contemporary American Christianity that is radicalized, secularized faith that we saw in Despicable Display at the National Cathedral a couple of weeks back.

J.D. is doing more to bring back classical Christianity and its relationship to civilization than any contemporary Christian leader that I can think of over the last two or three decades. So what is he getting at here with this notion of the Orto Amores? It’s actually not very hard, but I’ve got to say it’s one of the most profound, amazing truths imaginable. We have to remember that in the ancient world, everyone all throughout that world believed in something called cosmic piety. And this is the notion that the world was filled with divine meaning and purpose.

And therefore we’re all obligated to conform our lives into a harmonious relationship with that divine meaning and purpose. And so two things were absolutely indispensable to that definition of what it meant to be truly human. We had to know what that divine meaning and purpose is, which meant acquiring wisdom, Sophia in the Greek. And secondly, we had to align our desires and our affections, our loves with that divine meaning and purpose, which meant acquiring virtue, wisdom and virtue. Right knowledge and right desire were the two essential elements of what it meant to be truly human in the ancient Greek and biblical world.

We could see this right away in the Bible. We learn in Genesis that God created a world that is good, tov in the Hebrew, kalos in the Greek. Every time God creates something, he ascribes to that thing an objective value of goodness. And the key here is that goodness has an order to it. It’s got a hierarchy to it. You got to get that. In other words, well, all things are good as God created them. He created an economy of goods, a hierarchy of goods. So you’ll notice in Genesis that when God creates mankind, it’s the first time he uses the phrase, and it was what? Very good.

Note the superlative there. That’s essential. Everything else is good. The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the planets, the animals, all that is good. But when he creates humanity, it’s the first time God says, and it was very good. Now that orderly goodness in the world provides an objective model by which we’re able to order our affection. So this is what Saint Augustine, along with the Greek philosophers, referred to in their definition of virtue. Augustine defined virtue as ordo amoris, the right ordering of our love. So, for example, it’s good to love a baby, and it’s good to love a ham sandwich.

But if both the baby and the ham sandwich were falling off a ledge and I rushed to save the ham sandwich, that’s a bad. Now, why is that a bad? Is it bad because there’s anything inherently bad about the baby or the ham sandwich? No. It’s bad because something has gone wrong with my loves. The order of my loves has been dislodged from the economy of goods as God’s created them. Yes, a ham sandwich is good, but a baby is very good. A baby is infinitely more good than a ham sandwich. And we could see this affectional disordering in the full narrative of Genesis 3.

Notice the ways in which Eve’s inclinations are described here. Notice this. When the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes and that the tree was desirable to make one wise. Note the emphasis on her desires and her affections and her inclinations in relation to wisdom. Eve was attracted to the fruit. The fall came about through disordered loves, affections, inclinations, dislodge from God’s wisdom, from God’s hierarchy of goods. And let’s tie it all together here. What is then the greatest commandment? What did Christ say is the greatest commandment? Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy mind.

That’s the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like unto it, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. What’s the greatest commandment? At the heart of God’s commandments is the divine call to love rightly. And we love rightly by ordering our loves in accordance with God’s economy of goods. And in the Christian world, this was of course fulfilled in the cross. For on the cross, we see love in its ultimate expression. This is why the cross, though an instrument of torture and execution, transforms into an image of beauty because it reveals the true nature of God as infinite love and thereby awakens a comparable love within us and thus transforms into a tree of life.

So how does this ordered love work itself out in terms of family and church and nation and the like? Well, there’s another key classical term here that you might want to write down. It’s indispensable for how rightly ordered loves are lived out. And that’s the ancient Greek term paideia. It’s spelled P-A-I-D-E-I-A. Paideia. It actually literally means child. So we use it today when we take our kids, for example, to the pediatrician. We’re literally taking them to a paideia tradition. But in the ancient world a few centuries before Christ, paideia became synonymous with the Latin term cultura, from which we derive culture, meaning paideia referred to those values, customs, traditions that we pass down to our children.

And what’s so interesting here is that Saint Paul in his letter to the Ephesians, chapter 6, he commands Ephesian fathers to raise their children, what he calls the paideia du kireu, the paideia of the Lord. In other words, the church was tasked with raising children of the church in a distinctively Christian culture. And what that meant, as we learned throughout Paul’s letters, is that Christians were to transform their own cultures, their Greek, their Jewish, their Roman cultures into unique paideutic expressions of the Christian gospel. And that’s so key. From Saint Paul onwards, the church fulfills its mission to spread the gospel, the good news of the Christian gospel, not by denying culture or despising culture.

Those were the Gnostics. They were heretics. The church fulfills its mission to spread the good news of the Christian gospel, not despising culture, but rather through culture, through its transformation, through its transfiguration. That’s exactly how it worked out in the ancient world. That’s how it worked out historically. Paul’s command was for churches to cultivate a distinctively Christian paideia that would transfigure the whole of the Greco-Roman world. And to fully, fully close the loop here, the classical conceptual paideia centered on cultivating two values. And I bet you can guess what those two values were that paideia was all about cultivating.

What are the two central values that paideia was supposed to cultivate in each child? Wisdom and virtue. Knowing rightly and loving rightly. And so this is why when you see particularly Eastern Orthodox theologies in church and state today, today in the modern world, they’re the most ancient, part of this archaeo-future world that’s rising. Those theologies center on what scholars call civilizational nationalism. So that’s where we have Russian Orthodoxy, Greek Orthodoxy, Serbian, Roman, Bulgarian, Armenian Orthodoxy. The church’s political theology is one of civilizational nationalism. In other words, the church fosters a transformative vision of the culture in which that church is embedded.

So wherever the church finds itself, it’s called to create a distinctively Christian paideia from that culture. And that always involves a redeemed vision of state and politics. So there’s no hard separation between church and state here. There’s an institutional separation between church and state. The church is not the state, the state’s not the church. There’s an institutional separation but not a cultural one. That’s key. The church fosters and enacts a transformative vision of culture. And then the idea here is that’s like a home base to take that transformative vision and reach out to more and more nations.

A Christian civilization is formed when more and more nations join this like-minded paideia of cultures. So an international fellowship, a Christian civilization is created of like-minded nations grounded in a common ethic of wisdom and virtue of knowing rightly and loving rightly. So it’s never a matter of not loving the foreigner or the migrant or other countries. They’re swept into this vision as well. But through the love of one’s own culture and nation, which is the diametric opposite of what’s advocated by the left, which is to unreservedly love the migrant while hating and despising one’s own culture.

That’s what we saw, by the way, at that National Cathedral fiasco a couple of weeks back. The Christian vision involves love all the way through while the secular liberal vision involves the love of one and the hate of the other. So the Christian mission is never at the expense of either one’s own culture or populations outside that culture. The Christian mission is realized through the love-filled transformation of both. And the more cultures that you can transform, the more vast a Christian civilization becomes. That in effect is the classical Christian theology of Ordo Amoris and how it relates to a theology of nation and civilization.

Ordo Amoris is cultivated in and through a distinctively Christian pidea which cultivates a rightly ordered love that transforms your own national culture, which then extends out with the same love to reach other nations and the more national cultures that are transformed a distinctively Christian civilization arises and then in turn redeems the world. It transfigures the cosmos. That is the Ordo Amoris and no one in modern political memory articulated that profound vision more faithfully than our very own vice president himself. [tr:trw].

See more of Dr. Steve Turley on their Public Channel and the MPN Dr. Steve Turley channel.