Alex Kocman | Borders, Nations, and the Order of Love: A Christian Conversation about Immigration

The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm Dr. James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now, on to today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey, everybody, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm Dr. James Spencer, and I'm joined today by Alex Kokman. He is the director of communications for the Association of Baptists for World Evangelism, and he's also the co-host of the Missions podcast. And today, we're going to be talking about a little bit about American politics, some of the things that are going on in our world, and how Christians might think well about them, how the Bible informs some of these issues. And so I'm excited to have a conversation. Alex, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me on. It's great to be here, James. Yeah, absolutely. So we've not met before. We've not talked before. So this is going to be a fun exploration for the two of us to kind of have this conversation about politics in America. And I guess maybe where we should start is maybe give your take on, if you can, a short take on the role of the church within the political realm. How do you see those two fitting together? What's the general posture the church might take to the politics of the day? Yeah, that's a great question. And that's where we have to start, because I'm a firm believer that in a lot of ways, as goes the church, so goes the broader culture. There's a lot of ways that theologians and philosophers have approached that over the years. You know, is Christ over culture? Is he under culture? Is he beside it in some way? Is he hermetically sealed off from it, or is it sealed off from him? But I'm a firm believer that, yes, there's a distinction that we have to maintain between institutions. For instance, OK, we're not Muslims who believe that the church and state are all just kind of caught up together in one tangled mess. We're not people who believe that pastors or priests or bishops bear the power of the sword to enforce theological truths. There's distinctions that we make, right? There's the institution of the family. Then there's the institution of the church and, of course, of the state as well. And those things have to be distinguished, but they're all under the Lordship of Christ. And if they're all under the Lordship of Christ, then that means that they have to respond to Christ's direction as the one who's going to hold them accountable, both in terms of the direction that he gives in Scripture, special revelation, and the direction that he gives in natural revelation or natural law, that law, that moral reality that's written on all of our hearts. And we live in a day and age where, unfortunately, a great number of Christians think that either Christ is only directly influencing certain institutions or he's sovereign over all of it, but he's only holding them accountable in certain ways. I look at the text of Scripture, and I see Romans 13, which says that government is a deacon under God's authority. And so, OK, but by what standard then are they to be judged as a deacon whether or not they're faithful in that role? I look at Psalm 2, where kings and rulers and princes are told to not just submit to a general morality, but to kiss the son, to pay homage to the son of God. I look at Psalm 110, seeing that kings and nations are made subject to the Lord Jesus Christ in his resurrection and in his reign from heaven. So I see all of that data laid out, and I think that it builds a powerful case that Christians need to be engaged in the civil sphere, just as we should be engaged in the church and the family spheres as well. Because Christ is expecting something from the state. The state is accountable to him, and all of that is something that we have to care about as believers right now, especially in the times we live in. Yeah, I mean, you mentioned Revelation 13, and there's a sense there where the state is supposed to be upholding the good. Often it's phrased as restraining evil. And in order to do that, there has to be some recognition then of the good. Even if that, you know, we could think about the transcendentals, it's possible for the fallen world and the fallen leaders to recognize something of the good, the true, and the beautiful in the world. But at the same time, there's a limit to what they're going to be able to perceive, and that's why we have special revelation from God to give us the bigger picture. And so there's a sense in which, maybe you agree with this, that the church is to be that continuing prophetic voice pointing beyond the good and the true and the beautiful that the world can recognize and saying, look, there's more there. There's a transcendent God behind this. The triune God is really what these things are gesturing towards. You just can't quite see him. He's revealed himself to us, and we need to recognize this disclosure so that there's a sense in which the authority exercised by nations could be structured underneath the good, the true, the beautiful that we recognize and acknowledge. But ultimately, what we really want, what Christians would proclaim, is, no, all of this sits under the authority of Christ. Yeah, that's right. And I love that you bring in the transcendentals into that. That's right. Yeah, the purpose is to pursue the good, the true, and the beautiful. And I do believe in the spirituality of the church. I think that's been abused in the past to keep the church out of, or at least to keep Christians out of the political sphere. But the church as an institution is primarily to be oriented towards eternal realities. The church shouldn't be a political organism in that sense. The church doesn't bear the power of the sword. The church bears the power of the keys. The keys of the kingdom are given to Peter and to the apostles and to the officers of the church from that point forward, of binding and loosing, of fellowshiping and disfellowshiping those who profess faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and the faith once for all delivered to the saints. And so the church does have a different set of responsibilities. It doesn't bear the sword in the temporal realm. Its responsibilities, word, sacrament, have to do with ordering people for eternity. But there's also something important there that I also think it's important to emphasize that the state, while its domain is the temporal, the natural, the physical, its responsibility is to order those things with an eye towards not just the temporal good of its citizens, but also the eternal good, the spiritual good. It's a good thing when not only the church is being a prophetic voice, as you mentioned, and preaching the gospel to the ends of the earth, which is why our organization exists, but then when that happens, when people in other spheres, including the public sphere, are able to see that and to support that work and speed the gospel on its way. All of that comes into play. When you think about, and maybe, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think I heard you talking about sort of the over-spiritualization of the church's mission. I think we could easily call it that. So everything boils down to, let's say, evangelism. I think, you know, ultimately, we are to be a faithful witness in the world, but many people aren't just, aren't only involved in a vocational missionary journey or evangelistic strategy. Many people are working in healthcare. There's folks who are working, you know, in road construction. There's folks who go into politics. And it seems to me that there's some friction there as we sort of step away from the institutional church or the whole body of Christ and the body of Christ witness and mission to an individual Christian and their role in society, their role, particularly in politics. Sometimes we can get this confused where it's like, well, politics is really a realm of compromise that is incommensurate with what a Christian should do. Or if you're not, you know, serving in the ministry, if this isn't something that you're doing to advance the cause of Christ in a very explicit way, it's not worth doing. And so what I hear you saying, like I say, correct me if I'm wrong, is that there is that value in this sort of participation. We just need to understand that there are going to be limits within any system that we operate. You know, healthcare ministries aren't going to be able to overcome death at every point. You know, politics isn't going to be able to solve the brokenness of the world. Am I, would that be a fair extension, maybe, of what you were talking about? It is. And I agree with you. Those types of, you know, if it's mercy ministry, if it's healthcare ministries, my organization has a number of medical missionaries, or if it's Christians engaging politically, those things aren't ultimately the things that in themselves have the power to affect someone's salvation. The mistake, I think, that we make as evangelicals is to then go and say, because it's not directly tied to my soul's salvation, therefore it doesn't matter. And I want to reject that sort of Gnostic oversimplification or over-spiritualization thing as well. Just because it doesn't directly pertain to my personal salvation or someone else's direct conversion doesn't mean it doesn't have value in the eyes of God. This is something that I think, again, this can be misused. Every paradigm or analogy or metaphor can. But the Christian does exist in two kingdoms, the kingdom of the age to come and also the present kingdom. And we have responsibilities and duties pertaining to both realms under which

There are different stations in life. There are different vocations, as you outlined. I think what the Apostle Paul says in Philippians 1:27 is crucial, that the people of the church of Philippi were to strive together side by side for the faith. In other words, that there's this mutual sort of arm in arm, like men in a shield formation, setting their feet, pressing forward together to advance the gospel, even if not every person in that shield formation is himself an ordained minister of the gospel or sent to the nations abroad. There's still this general striving that we should be doing together as believers. Some of us will directly devote our lives to the spread of the gospel, some more indirectly as prayers or as senders or financial supporters towards the broader mission. But every activity, every endeavor that we undertake has a value in the economy of God and is a part of spreading the kingdom and the fruits of the kingdom, and we can't lose that. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, if we reflect, I believe it's 1 Timothy 4, I think I'm getting this right, where Paul is giving instructions to bond servants and he encourages them not to do certain things. They're to live out their life as bond servants in a certain manner so that the word of God and the teachings of the church are not reviled. And if we just sort of flip that, you could almost say, well, then that means that there's a manner of life that bond servants could live, and I think by extension, all of us could live under the various authorities of this world that we're placed under, that conveys the gospel, that safeguards the gospel, that demonstrates that we are living faithfully and pointing to the God we serve. And then there's a way that we could live that would revile those teachings. And so I think we have sort of this, when you talk about those two kingdoms, you know, we belong to the kingdom of God, we live in the kingdom of man, however we want to think through that, you know, Augustine, City of God, City of Man sort of distinction. I think where we are is ultimately our service is always to our Lord. And we structure our lives such that we are always serving him. And occasionally that means serving others in a particular way, living under other authorities that he has set in place for us. Sort of a cascade of sorts. Right. You know, it's true to say we live in two kingdoms, but not that we have two masters. The same master over both realms. I think the mistake we've made as evangelicals is to say that the rules over here don't apply over here. We've sort of bought into the current contemporary liberal consensus or paradigm. We've pretended as though God's rules don't apply in God's world. They only apply in some nether region or the world to come, but not also in the here and now. I love the way that some of the individuals in ABWE's history, the history of our organization about a hundred years ago, lived this out. We were founded by a medical missionary about a hundred years ago in the Philippines who was told by the liberal sort of social justice denomination that had sent him that he should stop focusing on preaching the gospel, seeing the conversion of souls and only devote himself to mercy ministry. His response was not to go to one extreme or the other. He wasn't a believer in only doing soul winning as it were and neglecting the needs of the body. But neither was he about to only focus on his work in the hospital and leave out the gospel and leave out conversion. He left that mission board, founded his own. That's how we got here today. And his commitment was the gospel was going to be the core of everything that he was doing, but that that would be adorned with these deeds of mercy and compassion. And we see the same thing today through medical missionaries who serve us. All the ways that we adorn the gospel through our deed and our word as well, and our acts of mercy and compassion are advancing the gospel so that, as you mentioned from 1 Timothy 6, that the word of God would not be reviled. And usually that's through the ordinary behind the scenes ways of serving. Yeah. Let's switch gears a little bit. We'll think a little bit more deeply. I think we've moved in a nice trajectory here. So as we think about medical missions, as we think about service in politics, those are pretty uncontroversial sort of areas. But there are some controversial areas that Christians need to be thinking through. And one of those that's becoming extremely prominent nowadays is immigration. And so there's a way, I think, that we need to consider how does law function more generally, not simply biblical law, but law of a nation. And then how do Christians operate within that law, respecting both the authority that has been set above, a governing authority that God has instituted, as well as recognizing that we're ultimately not answerable to that authority when that authority runs opposed to the Lord. Is that sort of a fair understanding? So when we think about something like immigration, there's obviously laws that we need to reckon with. So how do you think about the laws related to immigration, just the laws, not necessarily even the particulars, but how does the law function in this realm? Well, it is interesting that what, five years ago, the tables were somewhat turned. And you had progressive Christians saying, no matter what government edict comes down the pipeline for something like a global pandemic, of course, Romans 13 means we have to submit to those edicts. And suddenly now, the tables have been turned somewhat. But the point biblically is true that there is the expectation in Scripture of the rule of law. Romans 13, 1 Peter also addresses this, that the Christian ordinarily submits to the civil magistrate, to lawful civil order, except for when it contradicts the word of God. Obviously, we have the apostles in the book of Acts saying it's better to obey God than men. So whenever the law of God comes into conflict with man's law, the law of God needs to win. But most laws, I would dare say, even our massive U.S. civil code, don't directly contradict the law of God in that sense. The Christian is still expected to live peacefully under the civil order by and large. Of course, Romans 13 also assumes that it is a largely just civil order and leaves the door open for something like civil disobedience when those laws are unjust. So the question right now before us is, is basic border enforcement? And I realize there's conversations about immigration in general, but even just focusing on the tip of the spear of illegal immigration, are laws pertaining to customs and border lawful in the eyes of God? Are they in accord with natural law? And you have in Deuteronomy 19, you have in Deuteronomy, I believe it's 27 as well, and in Proverbs 23, specific statements about property boundaries. Granted, they apply to the individual, but I think they apply to broader groups as well. But you should not move your neighbor's landmark that was set there. The idea of property inheritance, those are critical concepts in the Old Testament, and they're not any less important in the New Testament either. And, of course, we have the Ten Commandments, which give us the command not to steal. Entering, trespassing on another's property, receiving benefits, be they private individual benefits or public benefits, is a form of theft. And so we have a reasonable expectation in Scripture that we shouldn't transgress boundaries that others have set. We shouldn't partake of property that's not our own. And we know that this applies not just to individuals, my yard, my neighbor's yard, but also to tribes, to nations, to people groups as well. Acts 17 tells us that God is sovereign over the locations of peoples and the lands and the boundaries that are given to them. So in that sense, borders matter. They're not an accident of history. They're part of providence. And so with all of that, I think we have every biblical reason to submit to things that just a few years ago, in terms of basic border law, James, that wouldn't have been controversial at all. Of course, we have a process. Let's go through the process. Let's do so lawfully. The fact that that's controversial now, and even as we record, we're seeing riots in LA and potential stirrings in other major cities in the US, rejecting the entire concept of national sovereignty and advocating for something like open borders, is just proof of how far we've gone in a few short years. But those concepts biblically aren't difficult to prove. They're in the text of Scripture. And I think it's critically important for us as believers, and maybe we'll talk more about this, but I think it's important for us to be able to define not just what the borders of a nation are, but what is a nation and what is a people. That's really the question that's underneath so much of this. And that's critical for us if we're going to, I don't know, make disciples of the nations, which is one of the things Scripture commands us to do. We can't do that unless we know what a nation is, what a country is, what a people is. Those things can't just be dismissed. We can't just see them as abstract ideas or completely nebulous. We can't sort of dump all of humanity into this one sort of...

This boiling mass of individuals and when we do that, we lose what Scripture says about nations. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian-owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 94878 to receive your free Retirement Defense Guide or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. Yeah, and I think it's important just to note that even if we couldn't find a specific corollary between an Old Testament law and a law in the United States, which I'm sure there's a lot of those that we could find, I think the overall trajectory of law is to say what we're trying to do is we're trying to create an orderly society and we're trying to restrain evil to the extent that we can. I have always been taken with Jesus' response to the question about divorce. Why did Moses allow divorce? And his response there is, it was because of the hardness of your heart that Moses allowed you to divorce. But I say to you, from the beginning it wasn't so. And so we see then the law isn't even trying to enact an ideal there. It's not trying to take us back to this pristine moment where everything was perfect. It's saying, no, there needs to be a stopgap here. Y'all are going to go way beyond the pale if I let you. And so this law is intended to sort of pull that back and allow for a release valve for a sinful people who don't really know how to, who can't help themselves but to do something wrong. And so we're just going to contain that wrongness, right? And create a space for something less bad to happen in a moment. And so I think we just have to be realistic about what these laws are. And to your point, then that gets into what is a nation, what is a people? How do we even think about that? Because I think when we look back in ancient times, what we usually, what we can find are more ethnically organized entities. Now we don't really see that, particularly in the United States. We don't have that. So why don't we just go into what is a nation, what is a people? How should we think about that aspect of this? And how does it even connect to then this issue of immigration and border policy? Yeah, it's critically important. It's the question underneath of the current border policy. Right now we have armed foreign nationals in the streets waving the flags of other countries. And we'll do a little bit of a thought experiment now. So what is a nation? If you were to listen to sound bites from the past several presidents and other prominent politicians, educators, media personalities, you'll find that what's most common is this notion of a creedal nation or of a propositional nation, which is that America is an idea. I could easily throw together a montage several minutes long of leaders saying that America is an idea. What is that idea? Well, usually what's expressed is some matrix of personal libertarian free will, self-determination, freedom of conscience, those sorts of things. But if I could get the armed foreign nationals in a place like LA, for instance, to admit in a vacuum to espouse those same principles, does that make them Americans? That's the point at which this idea of America as a nation breaks down. Now, you said something that I think is helpful. We don't, particularly in the US, see nations formed exclusively along ethnic lines, maybe like we would historically, or even like you would see, for instance, in a place like Japan. Japan is a really easy to identify example of a nation state that's formed purely along ethnic lines. The US has never quite been that. I would argue there is an ethnic core. There is a core to the US that's Anglo-Protestant, but it's not that nation or ethnos is not a part of what something like the US is. Of course, the US is more now. I would argue it's closer to an empire than a nation in that classical sense, much like Rome. But there's still a core within that. And what's layered on top of that is ideas. So yes, America has these unique creeds or ideas that are a part of its founding, but who has ideas? Well, people have ideas. And it's part of the reason that we've seen so many of our failed foreign experiments as a nation, our attempts to build democracy abroad in the developing world have failed so miserably because we've taken these ideas out of the seedbed of our culture, of our people, of the Christian soil and of Christendom that they grew in, and we've simply attempted to drop them onto people living in the Middle East and in South Asia, and we've expected them to take root and they simply don't. And so what is a nation? Interestingly, this for me was a missiological and a theological question long before it was a political question. Now it's both, and I think that's important. Missiologists have said for years now that a nation, Greek root there, ethnos, from which you get ethnic, but then you get other words and ideas that come out of that as well. It's not just one thing. It's a constellation of factors. Everything from ethnicity, but also language, culture, a sense of group identity or solidarity, heritage, religion is layered on top of that. I would argue that another piece of the puzzle is governance. Part of self-conception of a people as one people is, are they together under the same polity or are they dispersed abroad? Of course, there's such thing as diaspora nations, but they don't last long with a very few exceptions, people groups that have been dispersed abroad. So there's examples of nations that maybe have four out of those five. That's why it's a little bit tricky to pin down, but it's not entirely nebulous either. What is a nation? Well, I know it when I see it. And that's the important thing here is I think because of our history of racial tension in this country, certainly the horrors and atrocities of the 20th century, so many of us are afraid of a classical or of a traditional understanding of what a nation is. But I would argue that when Christ, for instance, so if we're going to speak to Christians, here's something all Christians should care about. Christ commissions us to go to the nations to make disciples of every nation group, which missiologists usually understand as every ethno-linguistic people group, which is pretty similar to the definition that I just articulated. It's not just economic zones that need to be discipled and taught to follow Christ, nor is it just propositions or creeds that need to be taught. That doesn't even make sense. It's distinct peoples. So if we know what a people is, then we can discharge that commission. If we don't know what a people is anymore, if we fail to distinguish between groups of people, then I think not only are we going to be sort of washed away with the globalist sort of technocracy that wants to see a pretty homogenous, easily controlled population, but then I think the real consequence for us as Christians as well is that we won't be able to discharge the mandate to disciple our nation and all the nations to teach them to obey everything that Christ has commanded. So there's a lot at stake here in this question, James. It's interesting. I mean, when you really think about it, and I agree that nations are multifaceted. Obviously, nothing we could say in just a simple sentence can really nail down everything that a nation actually is. But I think there is an aspect of a nation that it is a zone of sovereignty. In other words, it's a bounded zone of sovereignty. And that allows for a certain degree of world order that allows bounded entities to exercise a certain degree of sovereignty within those borders. And so without that, if everything just collapses, as you said, if it goes into globalism and there are no more borders and you can go wherever you want and do whatever you want and be whoever you want, there's no controls on any of that. It just becomes this sort of homogenous mess where you can envision, how do you even go about even something as simple as, well, who has rights to conduct business in one area or another? I've worked in higher education for a long time. We have what's called a state authorization procedure. And the idea is that entities have to go through the state in order to establish a new educational entity in part because the state already has structures that do that. And so you want to

To make sure that those entities are protected because the people within that state are paying for that. They want to make sure that it's operating well. And so the representatives of the state are supposed to control new entrants into that market to a degree. And so if you just didn't have any of these boundaries, what happens? There's really no controls and it sort of devolves into something that is extremely disordered. And so I think it's really important to understand that. Now, it doesn't mean that how that bears on the specific order issues and immigration that is taking place now, what we're sort of seeing is a trajectory toward that sort of chaotic order, right, a dismissal of certain aspects of the sovereignty of the state, sovereignty of the nation, a dismissal of those things, a frustration over the enforcement of those things. But we're also seeing a church, I think, in the midst of this that is struggling to understand, how do we integrate our desire for order and our right place under an authority with the commission and compassion to go out and be the hands and feet of Jesus, which is not an uncommon struggle. I mean, we could talk gospel and social gospel, you know, like that tension has been around. And so how do you think about specifically, how would you counsel a church that's sort of in this situation? Maybe we're drawing too strong of political lines on this, but the reality is the church does have a witnessing function that still needs to be prominent while also balancing our appropriate submission to authority. That's right. And there's biblical principles to help us balance those things. There's both a commission to make disciples of all the nations. Then we see in the eschaton that every nation and people and tribe are gathered in eternity, worshiping the lamb, Revelation 5, 9, 7, 9. So there's something worth keeping. There's something that's redeemable about the distinctness of each nation and people. So whatever we make of the command to go, the command to be about the spread of the gospel and to be compassionate and on this mission of love in the world, whatever we make of that, we shouldn't conclude that it's this deracinating homogenizing sort of thing that erases the distinctions between peoples. Actually, this is something that missionaries and there's differences of opinion within missiology about how this should be treated, but it's the thing that missionaries are taught by and large is that when you go and preach the gospel and plant a church in an unreached people group, you want to plant ideally as indigenous a church community as possible. You don't simply want to impose one set of traditions. You want to expose them to the Christian tradition for sure, but you want them to continue to adapt and contextualize their style of dress, their musical mannerisms, the other things about their culture that are not in contradiction to the law of God, but that are an expression of their uniqueness as God has ordained it so that those treasures can be brought, as it were, into the new Jerusalem. So we recognize that in the realm of missions, but then when you layer on the political on top of this, it gets complicated or confusing for people for whatever reason. So to answer your question, it's actually the topic of a book project that I'm working on right now that I'm expecting, Lord willing, to come out in January with Founders Ministries. But what I find to be helpful in navigating this, in other words, to maybe re-ask your question, how do I love the nation and the nations and not let one eclipse or overtake the other? Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian-owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 94878 to receive your free Retirement Defense Guide or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. J.D. Vance got in a lot of trouble at the beginning of the year for citing the Ordo Amoris, the order of loves, as a tool for understanding this. People thought he was misusing this theological construct to support a nationalistic border policy. But I don't think that his use of that was wrong. I think recovering the order of loves here is critical, and it's critical on two fronts. I see two fronts in the church. One group of people who want to be, and you see this in the rhetoric and in the marketing, all about missions, all about the world, all about the nations and the far off and the needy and the stranger and the marginalized. And that's one impulse that does come from certain texts. And then there's another impulse that's a right impulse that comes from other texts that says, let's focus on our locality. Let's be faithful in the small things. Let's focus on healthy marriages, healthy families, healthy family worship and discipleship, healthy local church context as well. And then we'll trust the Lord for the rest of it. Those, again, both come from texts of Scripture, and they're valid and they have their place. The order of loves gives us a paradigm for both of that. On the one hand, to those who love or profess loyalty only to these things that seem abstract and remote and removed, there's a couple of correctives that it provides. Number one, it reminds them, put first things first. For instance, if you're not faithfully managing your own household, you shouldn't be holding church office, Paul says to Timothy. That applies to our missions efforts as well. If you're not being faithful locally, you have nothing that you need to do globally until you've got that solved first. Secondly, it's a reminder that wherever you go, there you are. So if you're someone who can't stand your locality and you long for this faraway place where you can have an impact for Jesus, just recognize that once you get there, that's your locality. So you have to learn how to love flesh and blood neighbors that are around you and not just be drawn to sort of idealistic abstractions about what impact for the kingdom looks like. Over here, the other corrective for those who maybe only want to focus on those inner rings of moral proximity is to also say, yeah, but what is the overflow of if I am loving my family rightly, my church rightly, my neighbors rightly? Can there be something left in the overflow of that? Shouldn't that spill out to greater and greater spheres as the Lord would give opportunity? That's number one. And then number two is recognizing that the center of the order of loves isn't just love for your family or for your own people. It's love for God, right? Loving God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, Deuteronomy 6, 4, etc. If that's the case, if I'm primarily motivated by the love of God, well, can I not then, when I see a faraway pagan lost in idolatry, look at India and the gross pagan idolatry that persists there to this day. Can I not, out of a desire to love some faraway abstraction on the back of a brochure and something that's not real, but out of my very real love for God, can I not feel a sort of zeal that that person would stop trading the glory of God for idols and carved images? And can I not, out of zeal and love for the Lord, be drawn even to these people who are far away and removed compared to my own family and church members and neighbors? So I think the order of loves gives the correctives to both sides of that equation. And we need to go back to that biblically. There is a way in which love is to be ordered, and we should start with first things first, think locally, love our own nation and love our own people, and be on guard that we don't stop there and that we're faithful to let the overflow of our love spill out into greater and greater spheres of influence. It's interesting. I mean, I remember J.D. Vance's comments. I think as I, and I don't recall them specifically, but as I thought through how he was using the order of Amoris, I think the crux of the issue for me was that any use of the order of Amoris that doesn't have God on top, the triune God on top, is always going to be fraught with misdirected desire. So in other words, we can create something that is wholesome and good, like a family, and we can make a fetish of that so that it becomes the animating focus of our lives and who we are emerges from our place in a family as opposed to emerging from discipleship. And so I think my issue with his evasion of the order of Amoris was it was too generic. In other words, we can't order...

To a higher power and have our loves rightly ordered. We have to order to the triune God in order for our loves to be ordered. And so that was sort of my issue with it, but I think the way you're explaining it, I'm 100% with. I think that there is something that Christians specifically need to recapture about the order of Morris, and I think if we take it from that perspective, we're 100% right. I think using the order of Morris to try to guide non-Christians is sort of like trying to do faith integration with non-Christians. There's no faith to integrate. Yeah, yeah. I think that's largely correct, and I agree with that. you know, if I had the opportunity to talk to J.D. Vance, I would certainly hope, I mean, as a Roman Catholic would put God at the top of the hierarchy of loves. But the point does stand, you're right. So for the entire idea of the order of loves in Augustine and in Thomas and in others is that it starts with God. Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee, Augustine writes. And so, yeah, the idea of, okay, yeah, I think for the broader pagan unbelieving world, I think it is good and proper. You should not hate your own people. You should love your own people, and you should feel an affinity towards them, not to the exclusion of foreigners, but you should meet your obligations to your people before thinking how might you serve those who are outside of your direct sphere of influence abroad. That's good and proper, but you're absolutely right. If we don't put God at the absolute center or highest point on that hierarchy of loves, then we're really just kicking the ball further down the field. You could, and I'm wary of doing this because I know people get their panties all in a wad when the conversation goes this direction, but you could look to the 20th century to national movements then, nationalistic movements then, and realize, okay, nationalism, as far as what we just described, without placing God, say, over the state or over the people or the race, goes wildly off the rails. And, of course, you know, a hundred plus million dead. We see that. And we see that in many different ways throughout the 20th century as well. But that doesn't mean, you're right, that we throw away a biblical heuristic. And I think the order of loves is a helpful one. That's right. I do too. And I think that ultimately what we're struggling with when we think about what Christians should do versus what everyone else can do, and that's almost the way I would phrase it, is that everyone else can love their neighbor. Everyone else can have, you know, demonstrate a kind heart and goodness to those who are in need. Right? But that emerges from a, it doesn't emerge from discipleship. It doesn't emerge from a life lived under the authority of Christ. It comes from somewhere else. And as that becomes a locating focus, I think we see in part what we're already seeing in our society. We're seeing this bifurcation where we have to look at it and go, okay, we have immigrants in our midst, and our compassion leads us to say, you know, let's throw the laws out the window. These people should just be here and they should be able to participate in the good life. And there's something appropriate that we can identify in that. But at the same time, the problem with that is, is that because it's oriented only to people, it has sort of a short-term trajectory to it. It isn't, it isn't thinking through the whole of the cosmos and ordering itself to the triune God, the governing authorities that he set in place, seeking to honor them because we honor God. Like that hierarchy we've been talking about throughout this whole episode is, it seems to me, necessary if we're going to navigate some of the challenges we're having right now as Christians. Right. Yeah. And part of what you're doing there is you're distinguishing not only spheres of authority, say church and state, you're also distinguishing sets of duties that individual believers have. I have a set of duties as a citizen. I have a set of duties as a church member. Those are, those are distinct and hopefully not contradictory, but nevertheless, they are distinguishable from one another. So we can recognize we need law and order. We need the rule of law. We need to recognize that, that nations need to maintain their distinctness, that we don't want them to sort of all dissolve into this global soup while we can also recognize God does providentially use even chaotic circumstances for the advance of the gospel among all of these peoples. A quick example would be, I love what our organization ABWE has done through something that it calls the Afghan initiative. I mean, just think of the chaos of the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the consequence that that had not only for the Muslims that are there, but also for the underground persecuted church that was there. We were able to come into contact with some underground church leaders who were fleeing the Taliban. The Taliban basically had put a price on their heads. They were able to leave the refugee camp that they were in in another middle Eastern country, a refugee camp that was about to be shutting down, come to the U S legally with legitimate work to do. But part of that work through ABWE was to be missionaries to reach Muslim Afghan migrants who were here in certain pockets throughout the U S where there happened to be large numbers of Afghan immigrants. And we've seen baptisms in churches planted among Afghan migrants using those who've come here legally, who are believers to disciple those who we don't know if they're here legally or illegally, and they're certainly not all believers yet. And so God can use, he can draw it. I think as some have said, a straight line with a, with a crooked stick. We see that there and we can't deny that that's happening. And I can praise and applaud that and support that effort without also then saying, there's no such thing as an American and we should all become, you know, Farsi speaking or Punjabi speaking as a country. And we should jettison our constitutional order and replace it with something like Sharia law. We can recognize no nations and ideas aren't interchangeable in that way. The most beautiful thing that could happen out of this is a movement of Afghans coming to faith in Christ, going back to Afghanistan someday and taking it for Jesus. And then to see a beautiful Afghan Christianity emerge out of its own soil in an authentic indigenous way. So that's the goal. That's what God is doing in history. And, and it requires us to make lots of distinctions and to live in that tension between the desire to be open and compassionate and also the desire to preserve what is good and true and beautiful. But I'll just say briefly, James, that I like the way that Rusty Reno frames this in his book, Return of the Strong Gods, that we need to not just think in terms of an open society, you know, that language going back to Karl Popper and others, you know, Soros famously now, but also a love society. And it's not, it's not so much saying like, well, we've been open, you know, ever since the close of the second world war, we've been open. Now we need to be closed and, and insular. It's not so much that as to say, openness, fine, but love is important. So if I'm open to the point of failing to love, I'm too open or I'm open in the wrong way. But the alternative is not to be closed. It's to love that which is lovely. If I'm in my neighborhood and I want to invite my neighbors over, if I invite everybody all at once, I'm not going to be able to love any of them well. My house will be overrun. We won't have enough food. But if I love my neighbors in an appropriate way based on the capacity that I have to show genuine hospitality, then genuine good can come from that. And the same is true of nations. And the same is true of us as believers attempting to be about our master's work among the nations. James. My bad. I hit the audio button. I hit the mute button. That's my fault. Hey, I love that answer. I think we could go on with this all day. Yes, it's very, very timely. I think that's an amazing place to end though. I think you're absolutely right. And that there are just, we are living a life in tension. And so if people wanted to go deeper on some of your ideas on this, where would they find you? I appreciate that. Yeah. Well, pray for the book as it's underway. And Lord willing, Founders Press will have that in the new year. Until then, I've written a smattering of articles on this topic, one for the Center for Baptist Leaders, but most of the writing on this topic has been at ABWE. So abwe.org. We've ventured a little bit into this also on the missions podcast, not maybe as much as I'd like to, but I think we've dipped our toe in that water. We've had good conversations, for instance, with Vishal Magawadi about what is a nation, a little bit different from the typical missiologist's take that you'll hear today. So abwe.org, also missionspodcast.com, or you can just follow me on X at AJ Kochman, K-O-C-M-A-N. I'd love to reach out. Awesome. We'll get all that in the show notes, everybody. And Alex, I just appreciate a great conversation about this, man. It was good meeting you and good having a conversation with you. So thanks for being here. You as well. Thanks for your time. All right, everybody, that's it for today. We will catch you on the next episode of Thinking Christian. Take care, everyone. I just want

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