Transcript: Episode 0073

“Love: Family, Friends, Tribe, and Nation”

This transcript:
  1. Was machine generated.
  2. Has not been checked for errors.
  3. May not be entirely accurate.
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00:00:37 – 00:00:39:	Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast.

00:00:39 – 00:00:40:	I am Corey J.

00:00:40 – 00:00:41:	Mahler.

00:00:41 – 00:00:43:	And I'm still woe.

00:00:45 – 00:00:51:	On today's Stone Choir, we are continuing what is the second of our three-part series on various facets of love.

00:00:52 – 00:00:57:	Last week, we talked about sacrifice and charity as certain aspects of love.

00:00:58 – 00:01:02:	We made the point in the intro to that episode that these are really all facets of one thing.

00:01:03 – 00:01:06:	And so, there are lots of different words for them, there are different concepts.

00:01:06 – 00:01:10:	And some of those concepts and words vary in different languages.

00:01:10 – 00:01:19:	But our ultimate point is to be talking about love overall, because it's not always the way that we think about love in English.

00:01:19 – 00:01:28:	You might say that you love Stone Choir, but that's not the same way that you love your kid or the same way that you love the state that you live in.

00:01:29 – 00:01:32:	It's okay for that word to be overloaded like that.

00:01:32 – 00:01:36:	And we all instinctively understand that there are different facets when we're using those things.

00:01:37 – 00:01:49:	But by spending a little time discussing the specifics of the individual facets, we can begin to see certain places in our lives where we're failing to live up to some aspect of them.

00:01:49 – 00:02:03:	And ultimately, the reason for doing this three-part series is both to illustrate, especially in the third part next week, which as I mentioned last week when we're doing the episode on marriage, that will be a strictly no kids allowed episode.

00:02:03 – 00:02:10:	And if you already had that conversation screened with your kids and want them to hear it, but we're going to segregate everything about marriage in that.

00:02:10 – 00:02:21:	But marriage itself, when you're talking about even Eros, there's also Agape, and there's a more, the different facets in Greek of what we will call marital love in English.

00:02:22 – 00:02:31:	It's a continuum, there's overlap, there are exclusions in some cases because the way you love your wife isn't the way you love your best friend, isn't the way you love your dog.

00:02:31 – 00:02:32:	That's okay.

00:02:32 – 00:02:42:	And so when we talk about it, we want to shine a light on where it does come into play because that also illustrates when some of those things are absent.

00:02:42 – 00:02:49:	Because ultimately all these are duties from God that we have to these various parts of our life.

00:02:50 – 00:02:55:	We're finite beings, we can only love so much in the context around us.

00:02:56 – 00:02:59:	I can't love you the way I would love my family.

00:02:59 – 00:03:02:	I'm not supposed to, it would be perverted to try.

00:03:03 – 00:03:06:	And that's something that we're being told the opposite in most of the world.

00:03:06 – 00:03:10:	We're all being told, oh, you have to have infinite love for everyone.

00:03:10 – 00:03:11:	Well, that's God's job.

00:03:12 – 00:03:14:	God can do that, we can't.

00:03:15 – 00:03:21:	So when God puts us in a context with neighbors and family, et cetera, that is where we are to manifest that love.

00:03:21 – 00:03:42:	And it includes things like love of neighbor that we'll be getting into some today, that there's a duty that's involved, there are relationships that are involved, and sometimes they're formal relationships, sometimes they're structural, like family, and sometimes they're transient, like the relationship that you have to a neighbor, as in the case of the Good Samaritan.

00:03:43 – 00:03:52:	That was a relationship only insofar as he found a man injured by the side of the road, took care of him, paid his medical bills, took him someplace to be cared for and then left.

00:03:52 – 00:04:01:	That wasn't the sort of relationship that you have with family, but it was a commendable relationship because in the moment the duty that he had was to the man right in front of him.

00:04:02 – 00:04:10:	So there are all these different aspects that as Christians and as men, we have these duties all the time and we don't think about it for the most part.

00:04:11 – 00:04:14:	That becomes a problem when we fail to exercise those duties.

00:04:15 – 00:04:17:	We did the episode on slander, for example.

00:04:18 – 00:04:27:	It is a failure to love whomever you are hearing slander about when you continue to entertain it because their reputation is being eroded in your mind.

00:04:27 – 00:04:38:	Even if you don't believe what's being said, if you will tolerate slander against a man who's not present and his name is being destroyed and you don't speak up for him and say, if you got a problem with this guy, go talk to him.

00:04:38 – 00:04:39:	Don't tell me about it.

00:04:40 – 00:04:43:	The failure to do that is a deficit of love.

00:04:44 – 00:04:52:	And so you don't think about not engaging in something like slander as love or not love, but it's fundamentally always present.

00:04:52 – 00:05:01:	Whenever we fail to do any of these duties to any of our concentric circles of relationships, there's some failure of love there.

00:05:01 – 00:05:07:	As I said last week, ultimately pointing to all these things is not a bunch of la, la, la, we must do this.

00:05:08 – 00:05:22:	Ultimately, this is talking about God's good things being poured out through us in His image, in facets of His image, as imperfect humans were able to demonstrate to each other, and the good works that were prepared for us were for others.

00:05:22 – 00:05:24:	God didn't give me good works to do for myself.

00:05:24 – 00:05:26:	It's not a good work unless I give it away.

00:05:27 – 00:05:35:	And so the love that's involved in that sort of giving, that sort of service is from God, it's for neighborly, it's good stuff.

00:05:35 – 00:05:40:	It's all ultimately about doing and being good in the image of God.

00:05:40 – 00:05:46:	And as Christians with that restored image of God, that is what we're doing in the world.

00:05:47 – 00:05:50:	So today we're going to be talking about six other facets.

00:05:50 – 00:05:55:	This is going to be kind of the biggest collection of the three episodes, but there's all a lot of overlap.

00:05:56 – 00:05:58:	And so these aren't exclusive.

00:05:58 – 00:06:03:	We made the case last week, we're not trying to subdivide this stuff.

00:06:03 – 00:06:10:	Because like I said, sometimes there's a continuum, sometimes like if he's your buddy, what aspect of love is it?

00:06:10 – 00:06:14:	Even though you never say it's love, a man is typically not going to say that he loves another man most of the time.

00:06:15 – 00:06:16:	There's nothing wrong with that.

00:06:16 – 00:06:24:	And it's something that's been destroyed in our culture that now for a man to say that he loves another man in any context, people go, oh, that's gay.

00:06:24 – 00:06:28:	Like, well, it's kind of perverted that we've begun to think that way.

00:06:28 – 00:06:31:	That's not how the Christian mind should work.

00:06:31 – 00:06:33:	You know, there are a lot of other words for these things.

00:06:33 – 00:06:40:	And so as we go through today's examples, just keep in mind that these are not subdivided, these are not exclusive of each other.

00:06:40 – 00:06:48:	These are all just different ways that we as men, and particularly we as Christians, interact with each other as we live our lives in the world.

00:06:50 – 00:07:00:	So as Will mentioned, we're really going over six, not necessarily distinct, but related and overlapping concepts today, types of love.

00:07:02 – 00:07:12:	You could say there's a seventh if you want to include friendship, but friendship is really at one end of the spectrum under one of these types of love.

00:07:13 – 00:07:23:	And so the six types we'll be going over are philia, storge, delectio, amor, pietas and amor paternos.

00:07:24 – 00:07:31:	That last one is important and has sort of faded from our cultural understanding and really from our culture.

00:07:31 – 00:07:34:	And so we'll probably spend a fair amount of time on that one.

00:07:36 – 00:07:45:	But as we've said throughout and as we'll mention additional times in this series, the focus is not the terms themselves.

00:07:45 – 00:07:47:	The focus is not the Greek and the Latin.

00:07:48 – 00:07:51:	We have words for all of these in English.

00:07:51 – 00:07:54:	We just don't have single words for many of them.

00:07:55 – 00:08:00:	And so storge, as mentioned in last week's episode, is familial love.

00:08:01 – 00:08:09:	Philia is brotherly love, and that is the one under which we would place friendship, if we were going to use that as an umbrella term, which it really is.

00:08:10 – 00:08:15:	Delectio and Amor are respectively intellectual and emotional love.

00:08:16 – 00:08:26:	I want to spend a little time on how exactly we're using those terms, because it is distinct to some degree from the historical usage, but not entirely.

00:08:28 – 00:08:33:	We don't have to be entirely in line with how any particular ancient culture used these terms.

00:08:33 – 00:08:44:	And so we're not saying that how the Romans conceived of these was exactly correct, and we're using only those terms, which should be obvious from the fact that we're using both Greek and Latin terms.

00:08:45 – 00:08:50:	To some degree, we are using them in the same sense that they would have been used in the ancient world.

00:08:52 – 00:08:56:	But we're using them with a particular nuance or force to them.

00:08:56 – 00:09:06:	And I want you to think of these two forms of love almost more as an accent or an emphasis for the other forms of love.

00:09:07 – 00:09:09:	They don't really stand alone as it were.

00:09:10 – 00:09:12:	None of these forms stand alone.

00:09:12 – 00:09:19:	They're all interrelated to the point where if you have one, you'll always have one of the others present as well, one or more of the others present.

00:09:21 – 00:09:26:	But again, think of a more as emotional love and delectio as intellectual love.

00:09:28 – 00:09:36:	Because those are two different, two distinct kinds of love, two different emphases that you can place onto the other forms of love.

00:09:37 – 00:09:48:	And so for instance, you could have a friend that would fall under philia, the brotherly love, but you could have a relationship with that friend that is more intellectual than emotional.

00:09:49 – 00:09:53:	And there are some friends where it's more of an emotional relationship than an intellectual one.

00:09:53 – 00:09:58:	And there will be distinctions there between male friendship and female friendship.

00:09:59 – 00:10:03:	There are going to be different nuances for different kinds of relationships.

00:10:03 – 00:10:12:	And so amor, emotional love, and delectio, intellectual love, are a sort of accent on to the other forms of love.

00:10:12 – 00:10:18:	A way that you can help couch those forms with regard to actual human relationships.

00:10:19 – 00:10:23:	And then the third pair would be Piatas and Amor Paternus.

00:10:24 – 00:10:26:	Piatas, of course, we have the term piety.

00:10:28 – 00:10:35:	We are using it in this series in a particular sense that is more in line with the ancient sense than the modern sense.

00:10:35 – 00:10:48:	Because the modern sense really has been collapsed into the religious sense of the ancient term, which is piety with regard to religion, with regard to veneration, worship, things like that.

00:10:49 – 00:10:56:	That's not the extent of the ancient term, and it's not the way, not the exclusive way, in which we are using it in this series.

00:10:57 – 00:11:03:	So I want you to think of pietos, piety, we'll probably just stick with the English term mostly.

00:11:03 – 00:11:11:	I want you to think of it as being more expansive than how you have become accustomed to using it and thinking of it in English.

00:11:12 – 00:11:14:	It is not just with regard to religion.

00:11:14 – 00:11:19:	It is also with regard to those who are above you in the social hierarchy.

00:11:19 – 00:11:25:	It is with regard to those who are higher up the ladder with regard to the government.

00:11:27 – 00:11:37:	Not necessarily with regard to our current form of government, but think of a more appropriate form of government, how the government should be, how things should be run.

00:11:37 – 00:12:02:	And so if we had an aristocracy, the aristocrat with regard to the peasants or whatever you want to call the person at the lowest rung of the ladder, with regard to that man, he would have the paternalistic love with regard to those lower, but the man who is lower down would have piety with regard to those higher.

00:12:03 – 00:12:10:	And of course that leads into the other half of this pair, which is a more paternus, which is paternal or paternalistic love.

00:12:12 – 00:12:14:	Do not think of that as simply being fatherly.

00:12:14 – 00:12:17:	That's why I didn't say fatherly love.

00:12:17 – 00:12:19:	It is paternal or paternalistic love.

00:12:19 – 00:12:22:	Those are equivalent terms for all of our purposes here.

00:12:23 – 00:12:31:	That is the love of the higher for the lower, because there are certain duties that flow from that, and we'll get more into that as the episode proceeds.

00:12:32 – 00:12:41:	But there are duties that you have if you are higher up the social hierarchy, if you are effectively an aristocrat.

00:12:41 – 00:12:50:	We still have that to some degree in our society because we do have largely economic classes today instead of what they used to be.

00:12:50 – 00:13:01:	But nonetheless, if God has blessed you with that station, with a higher station in life, you are to use that in part to the benefit of those beneath you.

00:13:03 – 00:13:12:	As we have mentioned many times before, simply saying that someone is beneath or below or another person is superior or higher is not an assessment of moral worth.

00:13:12 – 00:13:15:	It is simply a reflection of the reality.

00:13:15 – 00:13:20:	If you are king, you are superior to everyone else in your kingdom.

00:13:21 – 00:13:28:	If you are an aristocrat, you are superior to the serfs who are below you in the hierarchy.

00:13:28 – 00:13:35:	And you're going to have various levels of lords and aristocrats and such in a properly organized system.

00:13:35 – 00:13:37:	We won't get into those because the terms don't matter.

00:13:37 – 00:13:42:	A given system is going to use one set versus another system using another set.

00:13:42 – 00:13:53:	The point is the existence of that hierarchy and the duties that are owed up the ladder and down the ladder and the form of love that that takes.

00:13:54 – 00:13:55:	Because all of this should be done in love.

00:13:55 – 00:13:58:	As a Christian, that much should be obvious.

00:13:58 – 00:14:02:	Scripture speaks everywhere of love.

00:14:03 – 00:14:05:	And love is not just a warm feeling.

00:14:05 – 00:14:09:	And so a more emotional love is not just a warm feeling.

00:14:09 – 00:14:09:	There's more to it.

00:14:10 – 00:14:14:	There's a depth to it that isn't encompassed by just a warm feeling.

00:14:15 – 00:14:18:	But there are duties that come along with love as well.

00:14:19 – 00:14:25:	We see this very clearly in the instance of paternal love when it applies specifically to a father.

00:14:25 – 00:14:28:	Because we all know that a father has certain duties.

00:14:29 – 00:14:35:	Now, of course, this is going to be related to agape as well and shtorge, because shtorge is familial love.

00:14:36 – 00:14:44:	But with regard to the father, specifically, you have the paternalistic duties that come along with it, and that is a form of love.

00:14:46 – 00:14:56:	However, to start off the episode, as it were, now that we've laid the foundation, the groundwork for it, we'll start with the pairing of philia and shtorge.

00:14:57 – 00:15:01:	These two are relatively closely related.

00:15:02 – 00:15:06:	In essence, the difference between them is the form of relationship.

00:15:06 – 00:15:09:	So remember that framework that we gave you last week.

00:15:10 – 00:15:12:	Who is doing the love?

00:15:13 – 00:15:17:	To whom is the love being done or to whom is it owed?

00:15:17 – 00:15:20:	And what is the nature and scope of the love?

00:15:24 – 00:15:30:	That essentially is the distinction here, the first two, who and whom.

00:15:31 – 00:15:34:	Really it's whom, but obviously you can change either one and have that change.

00:15:35 – 00:15:40:	The whom has to be related to the who with regard to familial love.

00:15:40 – 00:15:46:	One would think that practically goes without saying, given that the type of love is familial love.

00:15:46 – 00:15:49:	It is the love of one family member for another.

00:15:50 – 00:15:55:	As we mentioned in the last episode, each of these terms for love will be going over in the series.

00:15:57 – 00:16:01:	Really hide underneath them, within them, a spectrum.

00:16:01 – 00:16:09:	And that is the same for familial love, because of course you owe a higher duty to your parents than your third cousins.

00:16:10 – 00:16:15:	Many of these things in this episode and in the series in general are going to be obvious.

00:16:15 – 00:16:19:	You inherently understand this, because God has built this into nature.

00:16:19 – 00:16:21:	He has built it into reality.

00:16:21 – 00:16:23:	This is how you live out your life.

00:16:24 – 00:16:27:	If things do not follow these patterns, then they are disordered.

00:16:29 – 00:16:31:	And our society is incredibly disordered.

00:16:32 – 00:16:43:	With regard to some of these pairs, when it comes to familial love, things inherently are going to be a little more ordered, just because of the way that biology works, quite frankly.

00:16:44 – 00:16:50:	You are most closely related to your siblings, assuming you have the same parents.

00:16:51 – 00:17:01:	You are then most closely related to your parents, and then you start moving outward from there for cousins and whatever degree removed, whatever degree of cousin.

00:17:02 – 00:17:04:	These are concentric circles.

00:17:05 – 00:17:06:	You owe the higher duty.

00:17:06 – 00:17:11:	You owe the stronger form of philia to those who are in the inner circle.

00:17:12 – 00:17:23:	And then as it extends outward, you owe a weaker version, a less demanding version of philia to each of those in those circles.

00:17:25 – 00:17:43:	Now, with regard to familial love, the greatest extent of it is going to be the nation, because a nation, as we have mentioned many times before in many other episodes, properly understood, is just an extended family.

00:17:44 – 00:17:46:	That is what it means to be a nation.

00:17:46 – 00:17:49:	A nation is an extended family.

00:17:49 – 00:17:50:	It is a people of one blood.

00:17:51 – 00:18:00:	And so the most tenuous, as it were, the most extended form of philia is going to be for your nation.

00:18:01 – 00:18:06:	This, of course, overlaps with piety, because piety is also a matter of national love.

00:18:07 – 00:18:11:	You could almost use the term national love for one of the aspects of piety.

00:18:11 – 00:18:21:	You just can't use it for all of piety because it encompasses more things to remind you that that term is being used more expansively than English typically uses it.

00:18:21 – 00:18:23:	Modern English typically uses it.

00:18:23 – 00:18:27:	Many terms have lost some of the scope of their meaning over time.

00:18:29 – 00:18:34:	But that gives you the full spectrum, as it were, of the types of philia.

00:18:34 – 00:18:36:	And of course, they shade one into the other at the edges.

00:18:37 – 00:18:43:	You have your immediate family, to whom you owe the highest duty, the strongest form of philia.

00:18:44 – 00:18:49:	And then you have your nation, which is the most extended form of that.

00:18:50 – 00:18:55:	And then you have, as we've mentioned, philia, which is brotherly love.

00:18:57 – 00:19:05:	This is what you have for your friends, for your acquaintances, for those to whom you are not related.

00:19:05 – 00:19:14:	Now, you can have philia, for those to whom you are related, on top of, as it were, or in addition to, shtorge, in addition to familial love.

00:19:16 – 00:19:17:	But it's not the same.

00:19:18 – 00:19:19:	And we all know this.

00:19:19 – 00:19:24:	The love that you have for a sibling is a different thing from the love you have for a friend.

00:19:24 – 00:19:25:	And that's fine.

00:19:25 – 00:19:26:	That is good order.

00:19:26 – 00:19:28:	That is how God has designed things.

00:19:29 – 00:19:31:	You don't choose your siblings.

00:19:31 – 00:19:33:	You do to some degree choose your friends.

00:19:35 – 00:19:45:	Of course, part of that is just going to be the fact that you are near certain people for extended periods of time, or you work with them, whatever it happens to be.

00:19:46 – 00:19:49:	Felia also is a spectrum.

00:19:50 – 00:19:54:	Brotherly love is a spectrum, much like familial love.

00:19:54 – 00:19:58:	And in English, maybe that gets a little confusing, a little gray, because they sound very similar.

00:19:59 – 00:20:02:	The Greek philia and the English familial love.

00:20:04 – 00:20:08:	That's part of the reason we're distinguishing them as familial love and brotherly love.

00:20:08 – 00:20:16:	And yes, to say something that practically doesn't need to be said, it doesn't just apply for men or between men.

00:20:17 – 00:20:22:	We are using the expansive form of brother or brotherly here.

00:20:23 – 00:20:28:	This is simply the love between those who are unrelated to one another.

00:20:31 – 00:20:33:	I think that the Latin helps here.

00:20:33 – 00:20:40:	Fraternal is the way that works better in English because that's more of a word that we understand.

00:20:40 – 00:20:43:	It comes from the Latin for brother, just like philia in Greek.

00:20:44 – 00:20:58:	We understand the things like fraternal societies, fraternal brotherhoods, which is redundant, but it's an important way of thinking about it because these are based on some sort of commonality.

00:20:58 – 00:21:06:	It's based on opting into something or some common shared bond that isn't necessarily directly familial.

00:21:07 – 00:21:19:	And one of the things that we see with fraternal bonds is that sometimes their formation comes about through specific events in someone's life.

00:21:19 – 00:21:35:	I think one of the most prominent examples of a fraternal bond that's very deep being formed between two men who are not related would be in the circumstance of combat, someone who's been in conflict, armed conflict, where you're physically in danger next to another man.

00:21:35 – 00:21:38:	As Corey said, that combines philia and more.

00:21:38 – 00:21:43:	There's emotional love, there's an emotional bond, and there's a brotherly fraternal bond.

00:21:44 – 00:21:51:	It's figuratively forged in fire by the fact that you are next to a man and you're fighting for his life, and he's fighting for yours.

00:21:51 – 00:22:02:	And that creates what is a lifelong fraternal bond that in many cases is stronger than what you're even necessarily going to feel for your own immediate biological family.

00:22:02 – 00:22:09:	Because as Corey said, you don't opt in to your family members, and you don't necessarily opt in to the man you're in a foxhole with.

00:22:09 – 00:22:24:	But when you're put through that together, no matter what the politics are, no matter what someone who hasn't served, like myself, you know, when I hear the term service, to me it kind of conjures the political sphere.

00:22:24 – 00:22:27:	It conjures things that I have a lot of problems with in one sense.

00:22:27 – 00:22:40:	But on the other sense, I absolutely understand that whatever steps it takes for a man to end up in a foxhole, in United States uniform with another man, in that moment, they're not fighting for me.

00:22:40 – 00:22:43:	They're not fighting for the American flag or for ideals.

00:22:43 – 00:22:45:	They're fighting for their brother next to them.

00:22:46 – 00:22:52:	And that brotherhood is formed, that fraternal bond is formed by the immediate threat that they're both facing.

00:22:52 – 00:23:00:	And so that forms an emotional bond, the bond of amor, of love, and it forms the bond of brotherly love.

00:23:00 – 00:23:05:	It's all those at once, and the crucible is the immediate physical danger.

00:23:05 – 00:23:06:	I haven't been there.

00:23:06 – 00:23:09:	I can put myself there intellectually, and I don't really want to.

00:23:09 – 00:23:10:	I don't need to think about that.

00:23:11 – 00:23:16:	Many of you who are listening have served and have been in those positions, and you have some of those lifelong friendships.

00:23:17 – 00:23:21:	And many of you perhaps lost brothers in those circumstances.

00:23:21 – 00:23:27:	And that loss isn't simply the sort of loss that one feels for, hey, I knew a coworker and he died.

00:23:28 – 00:23:29:	Like, I have coworkers who died.

00:23:29 – 00:23:36:	It's not remotely the same as when you're facing immediate danger together and one man lives and another man dies.

00:23:37 – 00:23:39:	That is a familial loss.

00:23:40 – 00:23:45:	It's a loss of love that has been forged by circumstance.

00:23:47 – 00:24:06:	Again, those brothers are your family and it's created by the fact that you've been together in that circumstance where you're both facing unbelievable hardship and privation and someone who hasn't been there can't understand, which is why something like stolen valor to someone who hasn't served may seem kind of goofy and kind of over the top.

00:24:06 – 00:24:08:	Sometimes it gets made fun of, especially online.

00:24:09 – 00:24:12:	But for someone who's actually done it, you're absolutely going to take it very seriously.

00:24:13 – 00:24:22:	For someone to pretend to have forged those bonds that you fought and you lost people for and you risked for, yeah, you're going to take that personally.

00:24:22 – 00:24:31:	It's going to trigger an emotional response because it's someone pretending to the sort of fraternal bond that I can't know from firsthand experience.

00:24:32 – 00:24:35:	And for someone to pretend to that is despicable.

00:24:35 – 00:24:37:	It's absolutely disgusting.

00:24:37 – 00:24:38:	And it's rightly reviled.

00:24:38 – 00:24:55:	It's rightly received with an emotional response because you're messing with family, not with the biological family, with the sort of family that's been forged through loss and suffering and death in circumstances that someone who hasn't been there cannot understand.

00:24:56 – 00:24:57:	You can think about it.

00:24:57 – 00:24:58:	I don't really want to.

00:24:58 – 00:25:03:	It's not something I think normal men would dwell on, unless someone wants to write fiction or something.

00:25:03 – 00:25:05:	But even then, leave it to somebody who's been there.

00:25:05 – 00:25:06:	He's going to do a better job.

00:25:07 – 00:25:15:	But for the rest of us, it's kind of difficult to understand how closely tied men can be through those circumstances.

00:25:16 – 00:25:22:	And at the other end, you have the sort of brotherly friendship that may just be the guy who helps you move.

00:25:22 – 00:25:30:	I think one of the other good examples of the opposite end of bonding is the guy who's, I need to move across town.

00:25:30 – 00:25:31:	Who's going to show up?

00:25:32 – 00:25:33:	Those guys are your friends.

00:25:33 – 00:25:34:	Those are real friends.

00:25:34 – 00:25:45:	Maybe you have intellectual friends, guys you like to talk to, but the guy who shows up to help you move all day, especially if you're a little older and have a bunch of crap, it's going to take 8, 10 hours to move at all.

00:25:45 – 00:25:46:	That's a real friend.

00:25:47 – 00:25:48:	Even if he's not your closest friend.

00:25:49 – 00:26:01:	That's why I think moving is an interesting example because the guy who shows up to help you move, it's going to show he has a higher degree of character than maybe some of your friends who will talk to you all the time, but they're not going to show up when you need them.

00:26:02 – 00:26:07:	That's also the difference between the delectio, the intellectual love and the emotional love.

00:26:08 – 00:26:19:	The guy who will show up to help you move, even if he never talks to you all that much, has a different kind of bond, and he's willing to just show up and you feed him pizza and beer, but it's not transactional.

00:26:20 – 00:26:22:	You want to keep the guy going so he can help you out.

00:26:23 – 00:26:26:	And there's a sense of brotherhood that's also in something even that small.

00:26:27 – 00:26:28:	It's not superficial.

00:26:28 – 00:26:32:	We all need to move at some point, even if it's just moving out of your parents' house into your own.

00:26:32 – 00:26:33:	Maybe only move once in your life.

00:26:34 – 00:26:38:	We've talked about some of that before, like the ideal case of moving around.

00:26:38 – 00:26:47:	Maybe you move from your parents' house into your own house, a block away or something, and that's where you live the rest of your life in our kind of hypothetical idealized world.

00:26:47 – 00:26:48:	Maybe that's what it would look like.

00:26:50 – 00:26:52:	Even in that case, you still need guys to show up and help you.

00:26:53 – 00:26:57:	And so that's why, as we said earlier, there's absolutely a spectrum here.

00:26:57 – 00:27:03:	You have the fraternal bond of the guy who shows up to give you a hand, knowing that you would do the same for him.

00:27:03 – 00:27:07:	And there's a guy in the foxhole that you would give your life for because you know that he would as well.

00:27:08 – 00:27:11:	And sometimes one becomes the other through circumstance.

00:27:11 – 00:27:28:	But you can kind of tell, you know, when it comes to moving day, I can say this because I moved a bunch of times, the guy who will show up to help you move is much more likely to be the guy that you would want with you in a foxhole compared to the guy that you can BS for hours at a time, but he doesn't show up when he needs you.

00:27:29 – 00:27:38:	Because that sort of bond, that friendship, that love of just showing up and being there beside someone, I think is a very real part of philia.

00:27:38 – 00:27:40:	It's just being there beside someone.

00:27:41 – 00:27:42:	It's not an endorsement.

00:27:42 – 00:27:46:	It's not retweets or endorsements where you have to agree with everything that somebody else says.

00:27:47 – 00:27:48:	You're saying, this is my guy.

00:27:48 – 00:27:49:	This is my brother.

00:27:49 – 00:27:52:	I stand with him against whatever he faces.

00:27:52 – 00:27:56:	And maybe all he faces is moving day, or maybe he's facing a foxhole.

00:27:57 – 00:28:02:	Either way, that is a sort of brotherhood that is absolutely a type of love.

00:28:02 – 00:28:09:	And it's one that I don't think we really take nearly as seriously and I don't think we have nearly as much respect for it as we should today.

00:28:11 – 00:28:21:	I think concrete examples really help with understanding sort of the interrelationship, the interconnectedness of some of these forms of love.

00:28:21 – 00:28:24:	And the ones that Wo just gave are some excellent ones.

00:28:25 – 00:28:36:	With regard to familial love and fraternal love, one of the examples of having both of those present would be siblings who actually have a good relationship.

00:28:37 – 00:28:43:	Now regardless of the relationship you have with your sibling, you should always have that familial love.

00:28:43 – 00:28:49:	That is something that exists as a function of the fact that you are related to this person.

00:28:50 – 00:28:52:	And that is of course related to the Fourth Commandment.

00:28:53 – 00:28:55:	That is something that is ordered by God.

00:28:55 – 00:28:56:	You have no say in it.

00:28:57 – 00:29:09:	Now there's going to be a greater or lesser intensity with regard to that form of love due to the sort of relationship you've cultivated with that sibling over time or with that parent over time.

00:29:10 – 00:29:23:	But if you have a proper relationship with your siblings, with your parents, it should be both familial love and with regard to a sibling, the fraternal love, the brotherly love, the friendship sort of love.

00:29:24 – 00:29:33:	Because you should have a friendship with your siblings, not just we're related because we lived in the same house for many years and we have the same parents.

00:29:35 – 00:29:38:	That is part of it because, again, that was ordered by God.

00:29:39 – 00:29:40:	You don't have a say in it.

00:29:40 – 00:29:42:	You have to love your family.

00:29:43 – 00:29:49:	But if things are functioning as they should, then there's other forms of love that develop there.

00:29:50 – 00:29:59:	If you have a very close sibling or you have a very good relationship with your parents, and certainly if your parents have gotten older and now need help, there should be agape there as well.

00:29:59 – 00:30:03:	There should be that self-sacrificing love that we discussed last week.

00:30:04 – 00:30:17:	But as Will mentioned, with regard to close friends in particular, you're going to have that sort of relationship shade more one direction than the other, basically inevitably.

00:30:18 – 00:30:24:	It is going to be more of the emotional kind of love in large part based on how it was formed.

00:30:24 – 00:30:27:	As Will mentioned, if you're in the foxhole, that's going to be a more.

00:30:27 – 00:30:30:	That's going to be that kind of friendship.

00:30:30 – 00:30:43:	There's going to be a certain emotional intensity to it that won't be there if it's a friend you met at university and you just happen to have a lot of interesting discussions with this friend.

00:30:43 – 00:30:44:	You happen to be intellectual peers.

00:30:45 – 00:30:48:	You get along very well in that sort of way.

00:30:48 – 00:30:51:	That's going to shade into delectio, into that intellectual love.

00:30:52 – 00:30:54:	It is a cultivated love.

00:30:54 – 00:31:00:	Both of these are a cultivated love to a certain degree, but you see it more clearly with regard to intellectual love.

00:31:01 – 00:31:09:	That is something that you cultivate over, really over long years, of interacting with this other person.

00:31:10 – 00:31:15:	Of course, you should also interact with your other friends where it's the more emotional relationship, but there is a distinction there.

00:31:15 – 00:31:25:	That's why we have distinguished those with regard to the two terms and why they're important when thinking about the other forms of love.

00:31:27 – 00:31:46:	Now, we've emphasized, to some degree, the interconnectedness, the interrelatedness of the various forms of love we're discussing in this series, but I want to highlight something that will be more important in the next episode, but I want to highlight it here as well because it plays into some of this, into some of the forms of love we're covering today.

00:31:47 – 00:32:01:	The inverse of that interconnectedness of the overlapping is just as important because some of these forms of love can be distinguished by the fact that they are not connected.

00:32:02 – 00:32:06:	Now, there are obvious examples and there are some that are a little less obvious.

00:32:06 – 00:32:16:	The most obvious would be Eros, which we'll be discussing next week primarily, really exclusively, we're just touching on it in these other episodes by way of example.

00:32:18 – 00:32:29:	Eros should not exist with really any of these other loves except for amor and agape, because you should have those for your spouse.

00:32:30 – 00:32:34:	These other forms of love do not touch on Eros.

00:32:35 – 00:32:38:	It is distinct from them, it is disconnected from them.

00:32:38 – 00:32:49:	Now if you wanted to argue there's some form of paternal love with regard to the father and his wife, fine.

00:32:49 – 00:32:56:	It can be connected there in one sense of the paternal or paternalistic love, but it's only that sliver of it.

00:32:56 – 00:32:59:	It's not the fullness of that term and what it encompasses.

00:33:02 – 00:33:08:	But part of the distinction with these terms is that some of them cannot properly go together.

00:33:08 – 00:33:25:	And as we mentioned last week, if a love is disordered with regard to who, whom, or the scope slash nature, it is disordered as mentioned, but if it rises to a certain level of disorder, it is no longer love.

00:33:26 – 00:33:39:	With regard to again Eros, if it is connected to one of these other forms of love where it should not be connected, it is no longer love, because it is sufficiently disordered no longer to be love.

00:33:40 – 00:33:56:	And so for instance, with regard to brotherly love, with regard to fraternal love, if you love your friend in the Eros sense, that is no longer love, that is lust, that is disordered, that is a sin.

00:33:57 – 00:34:05:	And so that disorder rises to the level where it destroys the thing, the good thing, the love that would otherwise be there.

00:34:06 – 00:34:10:	And that is the case with a number of these forms of love.

00:34:10 – 00:34:24:	And so it's important to bear in mind, again, that threefold analysis we mentioned, who is doing the love, to whom is the love being done, as it were, and what is the nature slash scope.

00:34:27 – 00:34:34:	As I mentioned in the intro, there are some cases where the best illustration of this sort of love is in its absence.

00:34:34 – 00:34:45:	And there are a couple places in Scripture where Storge is referenced in the absence of it, in Romans 1.31 and 2 Timothy 3.

00:34:45 – 00:34:55:	I recommend you read all of 2 Timothy 3, particularly because when it talks about this type of love being absent, it is a prophecy of end times.

00:34:55 – 00:35:14:	And we've talked many times about the specific familial form of love as an example of the disordered loves, not in the sense of introducing eros into relationships where it has no place, but in the sense of the absence of a properly ordered love that everyone should naturally have.

00:35:14 – 00:35:16:	That is what the familial love is.

00:35:18 – 00:35:22:	So, Aestorgos, King James has a rare W here.

00:35:22 – 00:35:24:	It translates it without natural affection.

00:35:25 – 00:35:32:	In Romans 131 and 2 Timothy 3.3, most modern translations say unloving, which is absolutely true.

00:35:32 – 00:35:46:	It's not a bad translation, but it's really missing the essence of what is missing because unloving doesn't necessarily describe that the love is a duty that should be present.

00:35:46 – 00:35:55:	When the King James says without natural affection, that is both a correct literal translation and is really capturing the essence of what Storge is.

00:35:56 – 00:35:59:	Familial love is natural affection.

00:36:00 – 00:36:05:	You should have a natural affection for your family that you don't have for your neighbor.

00:36:05 – 00:36:06:	That is godly.

00:36:06 – 00:36:08:	That is not despising neighbor.

00:36:08 – 00:36:09:	It's saying my family is closer.

00:36:10 – 00:36:11:	I love my family more.

00:36:12 – 00:36:15:	I prefer my family over my neighbor.

00:36:15 – 00:36:19:	It is not to the exclusion of doing good works for the neighbor.

00:36:20 – 00:36:25:	It's saying that my family must be taken care of first because god has placed me closer to them.

00:36:25 – 00:36:27:	That is what Storge is.

00:36:27 – 00:36:35:	Familial love is a duty to whom god has most closely situated you, which is why we often bring it up because it does involve race.

00:36:36 – 00:36:39:	Your nation, your race, your clan.

00:36:40 – 00:36:48:	The concentric circles going from the immediate nuclear family all the way out to everyone you're related to by blood in the same place.

00:36:49 – 00:36:53:	By place, I typically mean a country, properly ordered, that's what it used to be.

00:36:53 – 00:36:55:	Everybody in England was English.

00:36:55 – 00:36:56:	That was normal.

00:36:56 – 00:36:57:	That was good.

00:36:57 – 00:37:05:	If somebody was there who wasn't English, either as a merchant or as an invader, and the merchants go home and the evaders, you fight.

00:37:05 – 00:37:07:	And either you kill them or they kill you and they replace you.

00:37:08 – 00:37:22:	And many times throughout history, you find that when the families are displaced, as happened in English history and history in many other places, those who were English 2,000 years ago got replaced by the Saxons who came in.

00:37:22 – 00:37:24:	There was a wholesale replacement.

00:37:24 – 00:37:33:	And then the Franks came in, and there was a replacement, not wholesale, but you have an overwhelming of the blood in a particular place.

00:37:33 – 00:37:36:	And it does form new blood, but it forms it through warfare.

00:37:36 – 00:37:40:	And then the winner is the conqueror, and that's the new family.

00:37:40 – 00:37:45:	So intergenerationally, we're not party to what happened 2,000 years ago.

00:37:46 – 00:37:50:	It's kind of screwed up to have some sort of blood feud with the Picts or something.

00:37:50 – 00:37:52:	Those fights are long gone.

00:37:52 – 00:37:53:	We don't need to worry about that.

00:37:53 – 00:38:06:	It's one of the reasons I don't find guys who get super into history have all that much useful to say about this stuff, because they're more interesting in litigating ancient fights and ancient battles than the one right here in front of us today.

00:38:06 – 00:38:08:	Because today we still have invasions.

00:38:08 – 00:38:12:	We have people coming from foreign lands onto our soil who are not our family.

00:38:13 – 00:38:14:	They're not our blood.

00:38:14 – 00:38:23:	And what we're being told in our churches, in our pulpits, in our newspapers, is that we should be without natural affection.

00:38:23 – 00:38:25:	I shouldn't care about my family.

00:38:26 – 00:38:28:	I should care about someone from Ethiopia.

00:38:28 – 00:38:33:	And I should recognize them as my brother every bit as much as someone who's actually close to me.

00:38:34 – 00:38:36:	God says that's evil.

00:38:36 – 00:38:38:	God says that's a prediction of end times.

00:38:38 – 00:38:56:	And so when we see it, I think we should take 2 Timothy 3 seriously and open our eyes when we see without natural affection being preached as the law, being literally made the law, as it has been since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or 5 was passed.

00:38:57 – 00:39:00:	There are two bad acts in 64 and 65, and I always get them confused.

00:39:00 – 00:39:02:	There's the Immigration Act and Civil Rights Act.

00:39:02 – 00:39:03:	Both were disasters.

00:39:03 – 00:39:05:	Both were serving the same purpose.

00:39:06 – 00:39:11:	They were passed back to back to achieve these ends, to say, no, no, no, you cannot have natural affection anymore.

00:39:12 – 00:39:17:	You need to invert that and prefer the distant and bring them close and replace your own family with them.

00:39:18 – 00:39:23:	There's been a running theme on Stone Choir from the very beginning because most people ignore those parts of scripture.

00:39:24 – 00:39:28:	They're ignoring a direct command from God to have familial love.

00:39:29 – 00:39:38:	When we don't, not only are we sinning against God, not only are we failing our actual duty to love, but we're fulfilling a prophecy at the end times.

00:39:39 – 00:39:42:	And we look around, it's kind of hard to miss it.

00:39:44 – 00:39:52:	The issue of lacking natural affection ties into not necessarily a hierarchy, but a distinction between sins.

00:39:52 – 00:39:56:	And I'll actually return to the issue of hierarchy in a moment here.

00:39:57 – 00:40:06:	But there is a distinction with regard to sin, between the sin that is against nature and the sin that is in line with nature.

00:40:06 – 00:40:08:	I'll skip the Latin because it doesn't matter.

00:40:10 – 00:40:15:	But a sin against nature, all else being held equal, is more wrongful, is a worse sin.

00:40:16 – 00:40:27:	The example that is frequently used and is probably one of the best examples to use is the difference between having an affair and committing sodomy.

00:40:28 – 00:40:41:	Homosexual fornication and all homosexual sex is necessarily fornication, but homosexual fornication is a greater sin, is a worse sin than simple fornication.

00:40:42 – 00:40:47:	I'm not saying simple to minimize the sin, I'm saying simple to distinguish it.

00:40:48 – 00:40:51:	But that is because the former is against nature.

00:40:52 – 00:40:54:	The latter is in line with nature.

00:40:55 – 00:41:10:	Now it is giving in to our sinful, fallen nature, because with our nature in a perfect state, we would not desire things that are disordered, because again, this is just a disordered form of eros, which we will get into next week in greater depth.

00:41:12 – 00:41:15:	But a sin that is against nature is basically doubly a sin.

00:41:16 – 00:41:22:	Because you have sinned, because it's sin, but then you have sinned additionally, because it is unnatural.

00:41:24 – 00:41:31:	It is unnatural not to have affection for your family members, and so that is a particularly egregious form of sin.

00:41:31 – 00:41:35:	That's one of the reasons that is a sign of the end times.

00:41:36 – 00:41:45:	The sort of humanity, the sort of culture that would not have affection for family, clan, tribe and nation is inhuman.

00:41:47 – 00:41:56:	It is so corrupt, so debased, that it is no longer even acting in accord with nature, which is to say it is worse even than the animals.

00:41:57 – 00:42:09:	Not all animals, of course, because certain animals don't really care about family at all, but the higher animals, the ones that are worth mentioning, the ones that are worth assessing, generally care for their family.

00:42:10 – 00:42:14:	Lions take care of their cubs, even chickens take care of their young.

00:42:14 – 00:42:21:	I know because I just had to go and dismantle several nests in my chicken coop because they were hiding eggs and attempting to hatch them.

00:42:22 – 00:42:31:	Even birds that are not the brightest animals in the face of the planet, in particular chickens, even birds care for their young.

00:42:31 – 00:42:34:	They have an animalistic form of this.

00:42:35 – 00:42:40:	And so a human being who doesn't have natural affection is worse than an animal.

00:42:41 – 00:42:43:	That is horrible sin.

00:42:44 – 00:42:45:	That is abhorrent sin.

00:42:46 – 00:42:50:	And yet that is what our society says that we are supposed to have.

00:42:50 – 00:42:53:	That is what we hear from pulpits in many so-called churches.

00:42:54 – 00:43:02:	And as Will mentioned, it is one of the signs, we're not saying that it's necessarily coming soon, but it is one of the signs of the end times.

00:43:02 – 00:43:08:	Because that is such a debasement of nature, that is such a transgression of moral norms.

00:43:10 – 00:43:12:	That it is virtually unthinkable.

00:43:13 – 00:43:24:	That sort of evil, that sort of wickedness, is something that would have been unthinkable for most human societies throughout most of history, even some of the debased ones.

00:43:25 – 00:43:32:	Now, of course, there are exceptions for those that practiced at least widespread human sacrifice because they often sacrificed their own children.

00:43:33 – 00:43:42:	But by and large, in particular in our context, that was not a thing that happened in European civilization, even European paganism.

00:43:43 – 00:43:50:	That was not a thing that happened, with the exception, of course, of exposure in some of the northern countries, but that wasn't sacrifice.

00:43:50 – 00:43:52:	There is a distinction there.

00:43:52 – 00:43:55:	Both are wicked, but one is worse than the other.

00:43:57 – 00:44:09:	This is something, this astorgos, this lack of natural affection, that even our pagan ancestors, at their worst, did not do.

00:44:11 – 00:44:18:	And so the fact that we have supposed Christians preaching this as a good work is an abomination.

00:44:18 – 00:44:20:	It is something that God hates.

00:44:21 – 00:44:23:	It is something that God will most certainly punish.

00:44:23 – 00:44:26:	In this case, it is one of those things that carries its own punishment with it.

00:44:27 – 00:44:42:	God may punish it additionally, but certainly if you lack the natural sort of familial affection, the natural affection you should have for those of your shared blood, you are going to be punished in a number of ways.

00:44:42 – 00:44:44:	We've gone over those in previous episodes.

00:44:44 – 00:44:46:	You will have lower fertility.

00:44:46 – 00:44:50:	Ultimately, you will have a destruction of your nation, and you will be replaced by others.

00:44:51 – 00:44:53:	That is the ultimate punishment for these things.

00:44:55 – 00:45:05:	I said that I would return to the issue of hierarchy, and the reason that I want to return to the issue of hierarchy is that some will think of these forms of love.

00:45:06 – 00:45:12:	Some will think of the things that we've mentioned and the various examples and want to arrange them hierarchically.

00:45:13 – 00:45:14:	In some cases, that's good.

00:45:15 – 00:45:32:	In some cases, that is in fact natural, because you should have a certain preference for your family over those who are more distantly involved in your life, with whom you have a more distant relationship, a different form of love.

00:45:32 – 00:45:37:	And so yes, you should preference your family over your friends as a general rule.

00:45:37 – 00:45:43:	I'm not saying that's the case at all times, under all circumstances, because it's not.

00:45:44 – 00:45:45:	And that's part of the point.

00:45:46 – 00:45:54:	We cannot give you firm rules of this love always trumps this love, or this relationship always trumps this relationship.

00:45:55 – 00:45:58:	We can say that this relationship generally trumps this one.

00:45:59 – 00:46:01:	We can say that this form of love generally trumps this one.

00:46:02 – 00:46:03:	But only in some cases.

00:46:05 – 00:46:09:	This is a web of interrelated types of love.

00:46:10 – 00:46:13:	They are interrelated, they are interconnected, they overlap.

00:46:13 – 00:46:17:	In many cases where you have one, you will practically necessarily have the others.

00:46:18 – 00:46:22:	In some cases, you will have an exclusive form, but in most cases not.

00:46:24 – 00:46:25:	This requires wisdom.

00:46:26 – 00:46:29:	You are going to have to make these calls yourself.

00:46:29 – 00:46:46:	It is a fact-specific analysis, is what we would generally call it in the legal field, which is to say that it is an analysis that is dependent on the specific facts of the situation itself, as opposed to if you are dealing with an abstraction.

00:46:46 – 00:46:51:	When you are dealing with an abstraction, you can just apply the rules and you are done.

00:46:52 – 00:46:58:	The rules say this, here is the abstraction, the conclusion is easy, not the case with a fact-specific analysis.

00:46:59 – 00:47:02:	You have to make these calls in your own life.

00:47:03 – 00:47:12:	And so there may be a time where you have to aid a friend, perhaps at the expense of a family member to some degree.

00:47:13 – 00:47:20:	There are times when you are going to go out to dinner with friends instead of with a sibling, to give a completely, practically trivial example.

00:47:22 – 00:47:25:	There are no black and white lines for most of this.

00:47:26 – 00:47:29:	We cannot simply tell you if X then Y.

00:47:30 – 00:47:43:	Now, next week, we can certainly do that, because next week is the basically one time where the lines are very clear, in most cases, of what you may and may not do, of what you must and must not do.

00:47:44 – 00:47:51:	But for all of these other forms of love, for the ones we're discussing this week, for the ones we discussed last week, there are gray areas.

00:47:52 – 00:47:54:	You have to run the analysis for yourself.

00:47:54 – 00:47:57:	And so do not try to make these into a hierarchy.

00:47:58 – 00:48:11:	Do not try to say, well, this relationship is phelia and this relationship is shtorge and this relationship is a more, whereas that one's more delectio, and so I have to preference, that's not how this works.

00:48:12 – 00:48:27:	We are outlining the different facets of love so that we can give you basically the full workings of this, so you can have a mental construct of what love is and then make the assessments for yourself.

00:48:28 – 00:48:40:	You don't necessarily break down all of your relationships and start making a table or a chart or a spreadsheet, however it is you want to do it, and saying, well, this one has these aspects and this one has those and then trying to rank people.

00:48:41 – 00:48:42:	That's not human.

00:48:42 – 00:48:43:	That's inhuman.

00:48:43 – 00:48:44:	That's not how this work.

00:48:45 – 00:48:46:	That's not how this works.

00:48:46 – 00:49:03:	Before we started recording, we were discussing philosophy a little bit and we discussed briefly the fact that if you analyze something too much by picking it apart, you wind up with parts that are not the sum, that are not the whole.

00:49:03 – 00:49:13:	There are some things that cannot be picked apart to the point where you can analyze each little discrete element because what you've done is destroyed the thing in the process.

00:49:13 – 00:49:15:	And love is one of those things.

00:49:16 – 00:49:17:	Love is a Gestalt.

00:49:17 – 00:49:18:	Each one of these is.

00:49:19 – 00:49:28:	You have to take them as a totality, as a whole, not as little parts that you can pick apart and analyze separately.

00:49:28 – 00:49:29:	We can look at the facets.

00:49:31 – 00:49:37:	We can analyze the facet itself, sort of examine how it relates to the other ones, how it's connected.

00:49:37 – 00:49:42:	But at the end of the day, if you're looking at the facets of a gem, it's still one gem.

00:49:43 – 00:49:45:	And so all of this is still love.

00:49:46 – 00:49:48:	It's just different facets of love.

00:49:48 – 00:49:50:	And so don't try to pick it apart.

00:49:50 – 00:49:52:	Don't try to make it into a hierarchy.

00:49:53 – 00:49:54:	Don't go down that road.

00:49:54 – 00:49:56:	That's not what this is.

00:49:56 – 00:49:59:	We are not philosophically dissecting love.

00:49:59 – 00:50:02:	Because if you do that, you'll end up with something, but it won't be love.

00:50:04 – 00:50:07:	So just take this as it is, as God created it.

00:50:08 – 00:50:09:	Because this is something God created.

00:50:10 – 00:50:22:	All of these human relationships, the way we relate to other people, whether they're family members or friends or just other members of our nation, very distantly related, all of this was designed by God.

00:50:23 – 00:50:24:	There is a rough hierarchy there.

00:50:25 – 00:50:32:	And we will be discussing hierarchy specifically with regard to the last pair we'll be discussing in this episode.

00:50:33 – 00:50:38:	But generally speaking, it's not a strict hierarchy for most of these forms of love.

00:50:40 – 00:50:44:	It is all interconnected, it's all interrelated, and it has to be treated as such.

00:50:46 – 00:50:52:	And that's an excellent illustration of a disordered form of intellectual love or delectio.

00:50:53 – 00:51:03:	One of the interesting aspects of delectio or intellectual love in particular is that the object of that sort of love is very frequently not another person.

00:51:04 – 00:51:10:	You may have a passion or a love for certain ideas, for debate, for exploration, for history.

00:51:10 – 00:51:16:	You can have intellectual love, intellectual zeal for all sorts of things that aren't people.

00:51:17 – 00:51:18:	And that's fine, that's good.

00:51:18 – 00:51:25:	God created us in part to have that sort of zeal for things in creation.

00:51:25 – 00:51:27:	Some dudes completely geek out on science.

00:51:28 – 00:51:36:	And to a point, that can be very good, because it takes a certain amount of intellectual love to devote your entire life to particle physics.

00:51:37 – 00:51:52:	And while it may be seemingly devoid of any human character, when certain breakthroughs are made in disciplines like that, suddenly new sources of energy are discovered and everyone's electricity potentially gets cheaper.

00:51:52 – 00:52:03:	And so entirely new forms of living and of all sorts of things are made possible by someone having some geeked out love that most people can't possibly understand.

00:52:03 – 00:52:26:	The problem is that the disordered form of intellectual love is very common today, because with the advent of the internet, we've all been segregated so frequently into these little buckets, and especially after COVID, and with an entire generation of kids now being raised in front of screens, actually interacting with humans, for some people, is alien.

00:52:26 – 00:52:33:	If you're below a certain age, like I said last week, I think, making eye contact is actually difficult for some people.

00:52:34 – 00:52:36:	And it's not even some sort of psychological disorder.

00:52:37 – 00:52:38:	It's just a complete lack of experience.

00:52:38 – 00:52:46:	You're used to chatting with someone online, having some sort of intellectual love for someone, but it would never occur to you to go help that guy move.

00:52:46 – 00:52:49:	And I think that's maybe an illustration that works here.

00:52:49 – 00:52:52:	Think about, you know, we're all in DM groups at this point.

00:52:52 – 00:52:53:	You have your people you chat with.

00:52:54 – 00:52:55:	Maybe they're all over the world.

00:52:55 – 00:53:01:	Maybe they're friends from school or that you've just met in some community, and you have an intellectual love for them.

00:53:01 – 00:53:04:	How many of those guys would you show up to help move?

00:53:05 – 00:53:06:	Probably not many in most cases.

00:53:07 – 00:53:14:	I am particularly not good about going and looking for opportunities to help people, but I will always help anyone who asks.

00:53:14 – 00:53:15:	I will always help.

00:53:15 – 00:53:20:	I go over the top to try to help people when they come to me, in part because it happens so rarely.

00:53:21 – 00:53:29:	I don't know if I'm unapproachable or whatever, but I've put myself in a box where I usually rarely get bugged for help, so I'm eager to do it, and I'm doing it.

00:53:29 – 00:53:33:	I really enjoy it, but I go home like, okay, let's do that for a year.

00:53:33 – 00:53:37:	It never occurs to me that I should go look for opportunities, something I'm bad at.

00:53:39 – 00:53:54:	With the disordered intellectual love that so many people have online, the intellectual pursuits, the intellectual love, scratches the itch for having some sort of passion that ends up displacing actual human relationships.

00:53:55 – 00:53:56:	And we see that a lot now.

00:53:56 – 00:54:03:	And people call things like autism, and I've said before, I just find that crap tedious, because it's a cop-out.

00:54:04 – 00:54:10:	There are certain people that have a certain, very specific collection of things that are genuinely autism.

00:54:11 – 00:54:17:	I think it's crappy to just bucket someone who is really into trains and say, oh, that guy is autistic, like whatever.

00:54:18 – 00:54:20:	That's a classic example of it, but who cares?

00:54:21 – 00:54:24:	If somebody really has an intellectual love for something, that's great.

00:54:24 – 00:54:34:	It does not exclude them from being able to also have a more, to also have an emotional love for people, to have brotherly love, to be the guy that would show up to help someone move.

00:54:35 – 00:54:53:	And so the disordered form of delectio in particular manifests itself as somebody who just only ever reads books and only ever listens to podcasts and only ever argues on the internet and never actually experiences human interaction and not in a human scale or a human way.

00:54:53 – 00:55:00:	And you end up missing out, and you don't even necessarily realize it because you're engaging in love all the time, but it's not the whole thing.

00:55:01 – 00:55:05:	You get so narrowly focused on that one facet, like Corey was saying, you miss the whole picture.

00:55:06 – 00:55:08:	There's a lot more there than God has given us.

00:55:08 – 00:55:14:	And at some point, you have become sinful by becoming without natural affection.

00:55:15 – 00:55:21:	Even if it's just through ignorance and disuse of the idea that, you know, I have family, I should check and see how my neighbor is doing.

00:55:22 – 00:55:28:	That's stuff that we easily get bad at because we get tunnel vision on doing the one thing that we're really enjoying.

00:55:29 – 00:55:33:	So, all loves can potentially be disordered in different ways.

00:55:33 – 00:55:47:	But I think one of the chief ones that we see today, frankly, even now in the younger generation, even beyond what we're going to get into next week where you have disordered romantic affections, a lot of people can't even get to that point.

00:55:47 – 00:55:52:	They can't even have a disordered romantic affection because they have disordered intellectual affections.

00:55:53 – 00:55:55:	And there's this displacement.

00:55:55 – 00:56:04:	Like you said, it scratches the itch in some ways, but it also leaves you empty because you're missing an entire part of the human experience that God has created for us.

00:56:04 – 00:56:06:	And He's created order for all these things.

00:56:06 – 00:56:12:	These don't fit in discreet boxes, but it's part of the menu of a healthy human life.

00:56:13 – 00:56:23:	And when we withdraw from life by whatever degree, sometimes we're going to, in a disordered fashion, chase the one thing that's most accessible because it's easy for us.

00:56:24 – 00:56:28:	And sometimes we just need to remind ourselves, you know what the thing that's easiest for me?

00:56:28 – 00:56:35:	Maybe not only is it not doing everything I need to do, but it's costing me the opportunity to go do some of the other things that I should be doing.

00:56:36 – 00:56:43:	And so one of the reasons for pointing this out is that for individuals, for some of you listening, maybe that's a personal check.

00:56:43 – 00:56:44:	You're like, yeah, you're right.

00:56:44 – 00:56:51:	I spend eight hours a day reading books and zero hours a day doing anything else.

00:56:51 – 00:56:52:	That's not a personality.

00:56:53 – 00:56:56:	At some point, your intellectual love can actually harm you.

00:56:57 – 00:57:09:	I think a good example that will resonate with a certain percentage of our audience with regard to the overlap of emotional and intellectual love would be hiking and camping.

00:57:11 – 00:57:18:	Because first and foremost, if you're someone who's an avid hiker or camper, there's going to be a love of the outdoors of the natural world.

00:57:19 – 00:57:21:	And that is more of an emotional love.

00:57:22 – 00:57:26:	But to that, you can add that intellectual love.

00:57:27 – 00:57:37:	You can add the love of zoology or geology, hydrology, dendrology, botany really, if you want to use the more expansive term.

00:57:37 – 00:57:52:	You can add the various specific forms of intellectual curiosity and love of the natural world and its constituent parts on top of and in addition to that emotional love that you have for the natural world.

00:57:54 – 00:57:59:	And I think that's just going to be one of the examples that will be the easiest to grasp for most people.

00:58:01 – 00:58:09:	Because if you go for a hike, you're doing it obviously in part for exercise, but also because you have that love of the natural world.

00:58:09 – 00:58:15:	You go out and look at God's magnificent creation, which everyone should do with some frequency.

00:58:16 – 00:58:18:	It is not good to be indoors all the time, for instance.

00:58:19 – 00:58:25:	As Wo was saying, too many screens, too much time staring at things like that these days.

00:58:26 – 00:58:29:	It's important to go out and experience the actual world.

00:58:30 – 00:58:36:	If you go out for that hike or for that camping trip, you're doing it to experience God's creation.

00:58:36 – 00:58:50:	Because you have an appropriate, a naturally ordered love of it, you have that emotional attachment to what God has created, in part, yes, of course, to His glory, but for us.

00:58:51 – 00:58:53:	He gave it to us to be stewards of it.

00:58:54 – 00:58:57:	And so it is a gift to us from God.

00:58:57 – 00:59:00:	We should love it, we should enjoy it, we should care for it.

00:59:01 – 00:59:03:	A topic for another episode at some point.

00:59:04 – 00:59:12:	But you can add to that the intellectual love, because you can take up a hobby of learning about the plants in your region.

00:59:12 – 00:59:27:	That's an intellectual pursuit, that's an intellectual love of that, or learning about the geology of your region, or any of the other things that can fall under that very broad umbrella of the natural world.

00:59:29 – 00:59:38:	And so I want to make sure that we've been clear that this isn't a firm distinction, it's not a bright line between an emotional love and an intellectual love.

00:59:39 – 00:59:46:	Both of those aspects can be present with regard to pretty much any other form of love.

00:59:47 – 00:59:55:	You can have an emotional friendship with another person and also have an intellectual aspect to it.

00:59:56 – 01:00:01:	Or you can have the reverse where it's mostly intellectual with maybe some emotional aspect.

01:00:02 – 01:00:10:	The different relationships are going to emphasize one over the other just naturally, because that's how it works.

01:00:10 – 01:00:13:	That's how the relationship developed over time.

01:00:14 – 01:00:17:	One form of love is going to be emphasized over the other.

01:00:18 – 01:00:20:	Sometimes it will be extreme, sometimes it will be minimal.

01:00:22 – 01:00:24:	That's the reality of human relationships.

01:00:25 – 01:00:35:	And so just bear in mind that those are aspects of love, they're facets of love, they're types of love, but they can both be present at the same time.

01:00:35 – 01:00:37:	It's not one to the exclusion of another.

01:00:37 – 01:00:47:	It's not if you have emotions for this person, you can't also appreciate the person intellectually, or if you have a primarily intellectual relationship, you can't have any passion, any emotion in it.

01:00:49 – 01:00:53:	Again, it would be inhuman to think that these have to be completely discreet.

01:00:55 – 01:01:06:	So the last pair that we're going to talk about are the definition that Corey gave earlier of piety, which is effectively a duty upward and paternalism, which is a duty downward.

01:01:07 – 01:01:28:	One of the episodes that we did just over a year ago on Scripture and slavery, I think is really a part of this argument that we're making to conclude this episode, because the master-slave relationship is in a way the purest form of the paternal and piety relationship that we're talking about here.

01:01:29 – 01:01:30:	There's a duty.

01:01:30 – 01:01:32:	The slave has a duty to his master.

01:01:33 – 01:01:34:	It is a type of love.

01:01:35 – 01:01:42:	That's something that God literally commands to slaves, that they are to love and obey their masters, even their bad masters.

01:01:42 – 01:01:47:	God specifically says, if your master beats you, you can't disobey him.

01:01:48 – 01:01:49:	You still have to obey him.

01:01:49 – 01:01:57:	And that your love and obedience to a faithless and wicked master will demonstrate God's love in that household.

01:01:58 – 01:02:20:	Now, obviously, God condemns that sort of treatment, but it's still acknowledged that even when there is a disordered failure to have paternal love in a hierarchical relationship, those who are in the lower inferior position still have not only a duty of love upward, but they have a duty to demonstrate God's love in doing it.

01:02:21 – 01:02:33:	And that's why I think it's really a great illustration of the point that we're making here, is that these facets of love, including those in inferior and superior social positions, are part of it.

01:02:34 – 01:02:43:	It's not some weird first century fluke, and it's not some wicked institution, as we've been told for the last 150 odd years.

01:02:44 – 01:02:48:	It is a part of human society.

01:02:48 – 01:02:50:	And it doesn't have to be called slavery.

01:02:51 – 01:02:53:	This sort of hierarchy is always natural.

01:02:53 – 01:02:56:	There are always men who are superior and inferior.

01:02:57 – 01:03:01:	In the episode we did a few weeks ago on leadership, we talked about that at some length.

01:03:01 – 01:03:03:	Some men are naturally superior.

01:03:04 – 01:03:10:	And the worst thing that you can do as a civilization is to try to tear the man down who's superior and say, no, you're just like everybody else.

01:03:10 – 01:03:11:	Or you know what, you've had your turn.

01:03:12 – 01:03:16:	Let's take someone inferior and put them in charge, as though they're going to do nearly as well.

01:03:17 – 01:03:24:	When you talk about things like superior and inferior, everybody freaks out because it's the most anti-egalitarian way to describe anything.

01:03:24 – 01:03:26:	We're basically forbidden to think that way.

01:03:27 – 01:03:28:	God doesn't.

01:03:28 – 01:03:30:	God talks about it all the time.

01:03:30 – 01:03:35:	It's very clear that there are superior and inferiors in many types of relationships, not in all.

01:03:36 – 01:03:37:	That's why we have these other facets of love.

01:03:38 – 01:03:40:	There's no superior in a brotherly relationship.

01:03:41 – 01:03:44:	There's not even really a superior in the sort of agape love relationship.

01:03:45 – 01:03:48:	There's a giver and a receiver and there's some disproportionality.

01:03:48 – 01:03:58:	But it's not structural in terms of power dynamics to use the kind of the Marxist framework that unfortunately we all understand.

01:03:59 – 01:04:01:	There are frequently power relationships.

01:04:01 – 01:04:04:	And what God says is not tear them down.

01:04:04 – 01:04:07:	What God says is paternalism is good.

01:04:07 – 01:04:22:	He says that the house father has a duty to everyone under his roof, not only his wife and his kids, but any slaves, any servants, whatever, whoever is beneath, whoever is under his authority, is his responsibility to God.

01:04:23 – 01:04:34:	Which is the other point that we make in the slavery episode that's crucial to understanding the duty up and the duty down loves, is that ultimately we all have a duty upward to God.

01:04:35 – 01:04:47:	Whether it's a king, whether it's a slave owner, everyone who thinks he's on top of somebody because he's superior socially and in whatever other fashion, is always inferior to God.

01:04:47 – 01:04:53:	And fundamentally, any attack on the paradigm of superior and inferior is always an attack on God.

01:04:53 – 01:04:57:	It's always ultimately that attack on God's headship.

01:04:57 – 01:04:59:	It will be cloaked in all these other ways.

01:04:59 – 01:05:09:	But whether it's slavery or feminism or any other flavor that you want to pick that we've all seen blow up in the last two centuries, it's always an attack on God.

01:05:09 – 01:05:18:	Because God uses leadership, he uses headship as his means in the world, in society, in our lives, of preserving good.

01:05:19 – 01:05:24:	And when those things are torn down, we see unlimited evil immediately in the wake.

01:05:24 – 01:05:35:	Made the case many times, the Black Lives Matter mantra included destroying the nuclear family, destroying hetero normativity, destroying the patriarchy.

01:05:36 – 01:05:38:	What does that have to do with Black Lives Mattering?

01:05:39 – 01:05:43:	Absolutely nothing, if you think that they were honest, but they were liars.

01:05:43 – 01:05:44:	They were satanic.

01:05:44 – 01:05:49:	What they were doing was they were destroying all of the properly ordered loves.

01:05:50 – 01:05:53:	It was fundamentally an attack on every facet of love.

01:05:53 – 01:05:54:	That's what BLM was.

01:05:54 – 01:06:02:	It was a satanic, demonic inversion of godly love, which is why it was such a polarizing issue, because it was spiritual.

01:06:03 – 01:06:04:	It wasn't political.

01:06:04 – 01:06:07:	It wasn't about ideas where you could have different opinions.

01:06:07 – 01:06:09:	It was good versus evil.

01:06:09 – 01:06:21:	And it's always cloaked in terms that are going to sucker people, because as soon as you start talking about, oh, well, you need to love this group and that group, someone who has been trained, well, yes, of course I need to love, is going to buy a hook line and sinker.

01:06:22 – 01:06:27:	They're going to love the taste of the Jesus butter, and they're not going to pay any attention to the fact that that's not love at all.

01:06:27 – 01:06:35:	It is not love of my neighbor to let black people burn down neighborhoods and destroy communities and kill police.

01:06:35 – 01:06:36:	That's not love.

01:06:37 – 01:06:39:	There's nothing remotely like love there.

01:06:39 – 01:06:42:	And so just because somebody slaps the word on it doesn't make it love.

01:06:43 – 01:06:53:	When you look at these various facets that we're discussing over these couple weeks, it becomes clear that when you look at what love actually is, what God has created, there's no room for any of that crap.

01:06:54 – 01:07:04:	And there's no possibility, once you understand what love is, to ever be hoodwinked by somebody saying that something like Black Lives Matter is anything other than the demonic invocation.

01:07:04 – 01:07:06:	Because everything surrounding it was evil.

01:07:06 – 01:07:08:	It was all fundamentally evil.

01:07:08 – 01:07:09:	That's not love.

01:07:09 – 01:07:10:	It's never love.

01:07:11 – 01:07:25:	And there's another reason that we're doing this particular series is because love is one of the most deadly words that's ever used in the English language in this century, because it's used to deceive when it's doing the least loving things possible.

01:07:25 – 01:07:32:	When we are told that we are to despise and be without natural affection, we're told to do it in the name of love.

01:07:32 – 01:07:36:	We're told that that is the only way to be loving, is to live without natural affection.

01:07:36 – 01:07:38:	Or told that point blank.

01:07:39 – 01:07:43:	You have to know what love actually is to be able to see that they're not talking about love at all.

01:07:44 – 01:07:53:	And so the master slave relationship, the political relationship between actual superiors and inferiors, and I'm not talking about Congress here.

01:07:53 – 01:07:56:	I'm not talking about the form of government that we have.

01:07:56 – 01:07:59:	I'm talking about in the leadership sense from that episode.

01:08:00 – 01:08:10:	The actual hierarchies that emerge, where some men naturally lead and most men naturally follow, that is a hierarchy that in some cases is paternal.

01:08:11 – 01:08:15:	I was a fairly senior manager at Apple for over a decade.

01:08:16 – 01:08:19:	Much of my job was fundamentally paternal.

01:08:19 – 01:08:26:	It was shielding the guys underneath me from the problems above me so that they didn't know about it, they didn't have to deal with it.

01:08:26 – 01:08:29:	I fought battles so that they could do their jobs.

01:08:30 – 01:08:31:	That was paternalistic.

01:08:31 – 01:08:33:	It's not portrayed in that sense.

01:08:33 – 01:08:36:	I didn't really even think of it in that sense, but that's fundamentally what it is.

01:08:36 – 01:08:39:	That's a duty that a father has over his household.

01:08:39 – 01:08:44:	The father has to worry about things so that the wife and the children never have to think about them.

01:08:44 – 01:08:50:	They can relax because the father is doing some sort of battle against the world to protect them.

01:08:50 – 01:08:58:	And when we let these things play out the way God commands, society is structured in such a way that there aren't nearly as many battles.

01:08:58 – 01:09:13:	The reason we have so many battles waging simultaneously today against us is because so many of these different facets of love have been inverted and torn down and used as weapons against us in what will be the final destruction of our society if we let it keep going.

01:09:14 – 01:09:16:	We don't have another three generations to clean this stuff up.

01:09:17 – 01:09:25:	If we love our future generations, if we love our kids and our grandkids, we have to stop the evil today that's being done in the name of love.

01:09:27 – 01:09:37:	For paternalistic love and in the other direction, piety, there are a handful of different areas in which this shows up most saliently.

01:09:37 – 01:09:49:	We'll mention some of them, but just to sort of list them, you have the social, the political, the national, which is really related to the two I just mentioned, and then the familial.

01:09:50 – 01:09:54:	Much of this flows from the family and from the nature of the family.

01:09:55 – 01:10:02:	And so the most immediate example with which everyone should be familiar would be a father for his family.

01:10:04 – 01:10:07:	That is the fundamental nature of this sort of love.

01:10:08 – 01:10:15:	It is of course agape, because it is a self-sacrificing love, but it has a different aspect to it.

01:10:17 – 01:10:26:	Not in the sense that we use in the modern world paternalistic as a pejorative, which I recommend that everyone stop doing that, because it is not a pejorative.

01:10:27 – 01:10:33:	It is a term that we should have to describe something that is fundamentally important to human nature and to human society.

01:10:34 – 01:10:39:	But paternalism, paternalistic love, is care for the lesser.

01:10:42 – 01:10:54:	The first instance again is family, because the father cares for his wife, who is inferior to him in that relationship, and in most other ways typically, not least of all strength.

01:10:54 – 01:10:59:	God has sort of built that into the system and made some of that hierarchy undeniably obvious.

01:11:00 – 01:11:04:	Children also are inferior to the father of the household.

01:11:05 – 01:11:07:	Just naturally, that is the way God has built the system.

01:11:07 – 01:11:09:	There is a hierarchy there.

01:11:09 – 01:11:10:	There is a higher and a lower.

01:11:11 – 01:11:13:	The father is to have paternalistic love.

01:11:13 – 01:11:15:	The children are to have piety.

01:11:16 – 01:11:17:	They are to respect him.

01:11:17 – 01:11:18:	They are to honor him.

01:11:19 – 01:11:22:	The Fourth Commandment, of course, is in play here, very obviously.

01:11:24 – 01:11:36:	I would read a short section of scripture with regard to husbands and wives, not to get into that topic specifically this week, because next week we will be covering marriage.

01:11:37 – 01:11:43:	But it is relevant here because it touches on both paternalistic love and piety.

01:11:43 – 01:11:45:	And so from 1 Peter.

01:11:46 – 01:11:58:	Likewise, wives be subject to your own husbands, so that even if some do not obey the word, they may be won without a word by the conduct of their wives, when they see your respectful and pure conduct.

01:11:58 – 01:12:05:	Do not let your adorning be external, the braiding of hair and the putting on of gold jewelry, or the clothing you wear.

01:12:05 – 01:12:14:	But let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart, with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God's sight is very precious.

01:12:15 – 01:12:24:	For this is how the holy women who hoped in God used to adorn themselves, by submitting to their own husbands, as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him Lord.

01:12:25 – 01:12:30:	And you are her children, if you do good and do not fear anything that is frightening.

01:12:31 – 01:12:43:	Likewise husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel, since they are heirs with you of the grace of life, so that your prayers may not be hindered.

01:12:46 – 01:12:59:	In this passage, we very clearly see both in the first section, primarily, piety of the wife toward her husband, but then we also see the paternalistic love of the husband for his wife.

01:13:00 – 01:13:06:	Both of these aspects are vitally important to a marriage, and we will get into that next week.

01:13:07 – 01:13:13:	But part of that you can see, here, holy women, you can sub in the word pious there.

01:13:13 – 01:13:15:	They mean roughly the same thing.

01:13:15 – 01:13:31:	And that is what we are talking about here, because of course the terms impious or impious, whichever way you prefer to pronounce that, and pious are the adjectives describing this sort of love or the lack of this sort of love.

01:13:32 – 01:13:38:	Those who have a proper piety with regard to those who are superior are pious.

01:13:38 – 01:13:40:	Those who lack it are impious.

01:13:41 – 01:13:41:	That's wicked.

01:13:42 – 01:13:42:	That is a sin.

01:13:43 – 01:13:45:	That is something you should not have.

01:13:47 – 01:13:56:	To briefly address a tangentially related issue, because I know that some listeners, particularly perhaps some of our female listeners, will have this in mind.

01:13:57 – 01:14:05:	Well, what happens when you have an abusive master in the master-slave relationship or an abusive husband in the relationship of a husband and wife?

01:14:06 – 01:14:12:	The answer to that is that generally speaking, there is still that duty to love and obey.

01:14:12 – 01:14:15:	However, it comes with a very important caveat.

01:14:16 – 01:14:21:	God has placed others in higher offices to deal with those problems.

01:14:22 – 01:14:37:	This has been the case in every society, because it is partly the duty of, depending on your system, either the local aristocrat or the king, to deal with abusive slave masters and abusive husbands.

01:14:38 – 01:14:43:	That is an issue for those higher up the chain, higher in the hierarchy, to address.

01:14:44 – 01:14:45:	And it should be addressed.

01:14:46 – 01:14:47:	It is properly addressed.

01:14:49 – 01:14:53:	A master who beats his slaves should be punished.

01:14:53 – 01:14:57:	That's not to say you can't punish your slaves with corporal punishment.

01:14:57 – 01:15:02:	That is permitted in scripture, explicitly permitted in scripture, and so a Christian cannot say that is sin.

01:15:02 – 01:15:12:	But if you beat your slaves without reason, or you are excessive in how you punish them, those who are above you, your masters, should punish you.

01:15:13 – 01:15:17:	Typically, in part, by taking away your slaves so you can no longer abuse them.

01:15:17 – 01:15:19:	The same is true with regard to husbands and wives.

01:15:19 – 01:15:28:	Those higher up the hierarchy have a duty to ensure the husbands are acting appropriately with regard to what has been entrusted to their care.

01:15:30 – 01:15:36:	Yes, to some degree, your home is supposed to be a castle, is supposed to be inviolate, and you are supposed to be master of the house.

01:15:37 – 01:15:47:	But that comes with duties, and you answer to those who are superior, just as those who are superior answer to those up the chain, and eventually there is a man who answers only to God.

01:15:48 – 01:15:53:	You probably shouldn't envy that man, because answering only to God should be terrifying.

01:15:54 – 01:16:00:	But that is part of this, because that really shades into the social and the political.

01:16:02 – 01:16:25:	You could consider the political a subset of the social if you would consider the social to be an expansive term, but to distinguish them for the purpose of describing both sorts of hierarchy that I mean, with regard to piety and paternalistic love, the social hierarchy would be those who are simply higher in society.

01:16:25 – 01:16:31:	So, an aristocrat, not simply in the political sense, but just in the social sense.

01:16:32 – 01:16:44:	Because those who are, for instance, wealthier, have certain duties, there's a certain form of paternalism, of paternalistic love they should show for others, for those who are lower in the hierarchy.

01:16:44 – 01:16:52:	God has entrusted you with more, you are to do more with your goods, with your resources, with the things entrusted to you.

01:16:53 – 01:16:57:	God's gifts come with duties, that is simply the nature of it.

01:16:57 – 01:17:01:	Don't think of it as being, oh, it's a burden and I have to do x, y.

01:17:01 – 01:17:04:	No, think of it as God has given you a gift, use it.

01:17:05 – 01:17:13:	You have the privilege of doing good, you have the privilege of being a blessing in the lives of others, because God has given you the ability to do so.

01:17:14 – 01:17:15:	That is a great privilege.

01:17:15 – 01:17:20:	It is a duty as well, but you should see it as a good thing, you should do it joyfully.

01:17:20 – 01:17:23:	Of course, Scripture, God loves a joyful giver.

01:17:24 – 01:17:28:	The political meanwhile, is the strictly political.

01:17:28 – 01:17:34:	So those who report to the king, those who report to those who report to the king, etc.

01:17:34 – 01:17:35:	down that chain.

01:17:35 – 01:17:39:	That is the strictly political, that is the hierarchy that runs the nation.

01:17:39 – 01:17:46:	It is almost militaristic in terms of the strictness of the hierarchy of who reports to whom.

01:17:47 – 01:17:51:	And of course, the military is probably the best example of a strict reporting hierarchy.

01:17:53 – 01:18:02:	There's a little difference there in how that functions with regard to piety and paternalism because it's the military.

01:18:03 – 01:18:05:	But it is a good example of a strict hierarchy.

01:18:05 – 01:18:17:	Politics is probably the closest that we come in a properly organized system where you still have a very clear sense of the piety owed those higher and the paternalistic love owed those lower.

01:18:18 – 01:18:25:	Because the king, first and foremost, is in the office of the father of the nation.

01:18:26 – 01:18:40:	Not in the sense of perhaps capital F and the rest of the relevant letters capital for that title, because that would be assigned to the man who was seen as founding the nation, so perhaps Bismarck for Germany.

01:18:41 – 01:18:42:	Every nation has their example.

01:18:43 – 01:18:47:	Israel being, Old Testament Israel at least, being Israel conveniently.

01:18:48 – 01:18:57:	But the office of the king, of the man who holds the highest office in the land, is first and foremost and fundamentally that of a father.

01:18:57 – 01:18:59:	He is the father of his nation.

01:18:59 – 01:19:06:	He has a paternalistic duty to all of those under him, and those under him owe him piety in turn.

01:19:06 – 01:19:22:	That is why historically, the church as part of her liturgy has prayed for the king, has prayed for the health of those who rule over the nation, because that is piety that is owed to those in those offices.

01:19:23 – 01:19:26:	Those offices are created by God.

01:19:26 – 01:19:32:	Those men are placed into those offices or at least permitted to hold those offices by God.

01:19:33 – 01:19:46:	And part of our duty as subjects is to be pious toward them, and their duty in turn is to be paternalistic with regard to the nation, to seek the good of those who are under them, which fundamentally is what this is.

01:19:47 – 01:19:48:	It is important to remember that.

01:19:48 – 01:19:52:	This shades into agape even though it is distinct from it.

01:19:53 – 01:19:58:	Paternalistic love is a love that seeks the good of the lesser.

01:19:59 – 01:20:08:	It is a love that seeks the good of the inferior, a love that seeks the good of those who are placed under the one who is exercising, who is pursuing that kind of love.

01:20:09 – 01:20:14:	It comes with a certain sort of control depending on the office.

01:20:14 – 01:20:19:	It comes with authority, which agape doesn't really do that.

01:20:19 – 01:20:26:	Agape is not necessarily between peers, but it is not a relationship with regard to authority and submission.

01:20:28 – 01:20:30:	Paternalism is, piety is.

01:20:33 – 01:20:43:	To some degree, it's helpful that this is called piety in English, because we fundamentally understand piety in the religious context.

01:20:46 – 01:20:56:	But that gives us a true sense of this sort of love, of the inferior for the superior, because we are supposed to have piety with regard to God.

01:20:58 – 01:21:15:	And God does indeed have a paternalistic love with regard to us, because he is the one who provides us our daily bread, he is the one who provides us air to breathe and water to drink and sunlight and everything else that is good in our lives, he provides for us because he is our loving father.

01:21:16 – 01:21:19:	That is paternalistic love on the part of God toward us.

01:21:20 – 01:21:28:	Our duty is to show piety back to him, is to show that form of love back to God and other forms of love as well.

01:21:28 – 01:21:37:	But in this specific case, we are to be pious with regard to the superior, the ultimate superior, God himself.

01:21:39 – 01:21:44:	And that gives us the anti-type, of which all of these other relationships are types.

01:21:46 – 01:21:47:	That is what they are.

01:21:47 – 01:21:57:	Think of that when you think of this sort of relationship, because the father of the household is supposed to be the type of God in his household.

01:21:57 – 01:21:59:	That is the role he has.

01:21:59 – 01:22:01:	That is the office that he holds.

01:22:02 – 01:22:11:	And the same is true of the king with regard to his nation, the aristocrat with regard to his territory, the manager with regard to his employees.

01:22:11 – 01:22:15:	All of these relationships are types of that.

01:22:16 – 01:22:18:	They are not necessarily the fullness of it.

01:22:18 – 01:22:21:	They may emphasize different aspects in different ways.

01:22:21 – 01:22:24:	The father, of course, is the fullest sense of it.

01:22:24 – 01:22:25:	And the king would be...

01:22:27 – 01:22:34:	In some ways, the king is even a fuller sense than the father because the king wields more ultimate power with regard to punishment, which God does.

01:22:35 – 01:22:38:	But it flows fundamentally first and foremost from the family.

01:22:38 – 01:22:41:	That is the unit that makes up the nation and everything else.

01:22:42 – 01:22:45:	And so that is a type of this office.

01:22:46 – 01:22:49:	It is a type of that love, of this relationship.

01:22:50 – 01:23:01:	The father owing the paternalistic love to those under him, those under him owing piety to him, being a type of what we owe to God and God doesn't owe to us, but what God gives to us.

01:23:02 – 01:23:10:	In a sense, perhaps you could say God owes it to us, but only insofar as God has bound himself with promises in his word.

01:23:11 – 01:23:13:	Because of course, no man can bind God.

01:23:14 – 01:23:19:	But God can bind himself because God can make a promise and God does not lie.

01:23:19 – 01:23:24:	As I've mentioned before, it's incoherent to say it that way, but it is sufficient for our purposes.

01:23:25 – 01:23:26:	God does not lie.

01:23:26 – 01:23:27:	God cannot lie.

01:23:28 – 01:23:31:	And so when God promises, he is binding himself.

01:23:33 – 01:23:36:	He is essentially establishing a duty.

01:23:36 – 01:23:39:	He is saying, this is owed because I have promised it.

01:23:40 – 01:23:49:	And so we can compare it to the relationship that a father has with his family, to the relationship that a king has with his country, because there are duties there.

01:23:49 – 01:23:53:	There are things owed to those under those individuals, under those offices.

01:23:54 – 01:24:00:	In the same way, because God has bound himself, he owes certain things to us in that specific sense.

01:24:03 – 01:24:12:	In the negative case of piety and paternalism, I think is the one that is the most directly under assault today writ large.

01:24:13 – 01:24:19:	It used to be that the idea of noblesse oblige was just a part of Western civilizations.

01:24:19 – 01:24:25:	Those who were in these superior positions had an inherent moral obligation to those beneath them.

01:24:25 – 01:24:31:	Even if they looked down on them, even if they thought, you know, those dirty peasants, I got to do something for them.

01:24:31 – 01:24:35:	Those in the superior position understand that they still had a duty to do it.

01:24:35 – 01:24:47:	It was a type of love that wasn't necessarily a pure manifestation of agape, although in practice, it would often take the form of charity, as we talked about last week.

01:24:48 – 01:24:52:	But what we have today is a despising of all hierarchy.

01:24:53 – 01:25:02:	And what's interesting is that the term that's synonymous with piety in the New Testament is usually translated as ungodly or ungodliness.

01:25:02 – 01:25:04:	And that's absolutely the case.

01:25:04 – 01:25:12:	If you are impious in the sense that we're talking about here, today, it is an ungodliness, because it's fundamentally rebellion against God.

01:25:12 – 01:25:20:	When God speaks to slaves, telling them to obey their slave masters, He's talking about them obeying as though they were obeying Christ.

01:25:21 – 01:25:23:	He gives the same command to wives and the children.

01:25:24 – 01:25:26:	Obey your husband as though you're obeying Christ, because you are.

01:25:27 – 01:25:34:	Because whoever God has put in the superior position is in the stead of Christ for the purpose of that office.

01:25:34 – 01:25:42:	Whatever they have, whatever power that they have, an authority that they have, it is for those beneath them to do good and not to do evil.

01:25:43 – 01:25:53:	And there are many other places in Scripture where the admonitions to those in those positions is that they will have the greater amount to answer for to God if they fail to do what they're called to do.

01:25:54 – 01:25:57:	A slave doesn't have much to answer for except piety.

01:25:57 – 01:25:59:	All the slave has to do is what he's told.

01:25:59 – 01:26:09:	In a way that is a kind of freedom that someone who's much further up the ladder doesn't have, because the man who has far more authority has far more obligations.

01:26:10 – 01:26:12:	He's obligated up and down.

01:26:12 – 01:26:15:	The man at the very bottom is only obligated upwards.

01:26:15 – 01:26:20:	And so his piety is the fulfillment of all of his moral duties for this type of love.

01:26:21 – 01:26:31:	Whereas someone who's in the middle, who's up at the very top of these sorts of hierarchies, the paternalistic hierarchy, has far more to lose if he gets it wrong.

01:26:31 – 01:26:33:	He has far more ways to fail.

01:26:33 – 01:26:40:	And yet what we see in society today is tearing that down, saying all men are created equal, that no one is superior.

01:26:40 – 01:26:45:	To even use that term, superior and inferior, will get you excommunicated from churches today.

01:26:46 – 01:26:47:	Isn't that fascinating?

01:26:47 – 01:26:49:	That's not scriptural.

01:26:49 – 01:26:52:	It's wicked, and it's what's happening in our churches.

01:26:52 – 01:27:00:	Because despising, being ungodly, being impious, is exactly what the world has trained everyone to do.

01:27:00 – 01:27:04:	And if you talk like that, if you talk like an egalitarian, you'll fit in everywhere.

01:27:05 – 01:27:07:	No one's going to yell at you if you talk like an egalitarian.

01:27:08 – 01:27:18:	You will be patted on the head, you're going to sit right in the middle, and everyone's going to like you, and you're going to just be the perfect example of everybody being like everybody else.

01:27:18 – 01:27:19:	Why?

01:27:19 – 01:27:20:	Because everybody says exactly the same crap.

01:27:21 – 01:27:29:	Even though it's lies, even though it's burning down the world, when you do what the new global religion says to do, you're going to have an easy life.

01:27:30 – 01:27:41:	And the guy who comes along and says, well, actually, there are those who are placed in superior positions by God, and they have a duty to God to be paternalistic, and those who are beneath them have a duty of piety to those above them.

01:27:42 – 01:27:43:	That's the guy who's going to get shot.

01:27:43 – 01:27:45:	That's the guy who's going to get excommunicated.

01:27:45 – 01:27:49:	That's the guy who's going to be a target, because that is what God says to do.

01:27:49 – 01:27:58:	The order that we're talking about when we're looking at the inversion of this love is the order that we're seeing in the world today, which is fundamental disorder at every level.

01:27:58 – 01:28:08:	That's part of the reason for the leadership episode is to just kind of begin to get guys thinking about what would proper leadership look like in any generic situation.

01:28:08 – 01:28:12:	It wasn't specific guidance for being a father or a husband or a political leader or anything.

01:28:12 – 01:28:18:	It's like, what are the principles undergirding when men lead and other men follow?

01:28:18 – 01:28:23:	And clearly one of those is that some men are inherently superior in some ways.

01:28:24 – 01:28:27:	And in some ways, at some point, you just got to pick a guy and back him.

01:28:28 – 01:28:36:	Whether he deserves to be in a superior position, if he's the guy who is promoted above you, it's his problem now, it's not your problem.

01:28:36 – 01:28:41:	Your problem, your duty is one of piety, and his is one of paternalism.

01:28:41 – 01:28:42:	And then that's the end of it.

01:28:42 – 01:28:44:	Do you fulfill those duties?

01:28:44 – 01:28:49:	Whether he deserves to be in the position or not, once it's his, the question is, can he live up to it?

01:28:49 – 01:29:03:	And sometimes the best thing that we can do is we're in some ways kind of starting from scratch here is just picking a guy and going and setting expectations and hoping and supporting those to live up to those expectations.

01:29:04 – 01:29:05:	That's piety too.

01:29:05 – 01:29:12:	Like this is my guy, I'm going to back his play, I'm going to support him because he's responsible for everything that happens.

01:29:13 – 01:29:17:	I was responsible as a manager for everything that my guys did.

01:29:17 – 01:29:19:	That was a myth of the 20th century over the weekend.

01:29:20 – 01:29:23:	We'll put a link in the show notes if you want to hear me talk about stuff totally unrelated to this.

01:29:24 – 01:29:35:	I talked a bit about management at Apple and one of the things that I didn't understand until I was a manager was that when you're in the middle like that, your job is your guy's job.

01:29:36 – 01:29:38:	My job was their work output.

01:29:38 – 01:29:41:	I was responsible for everything that they did.

01:29:41 – 01:29:43:	They weren't responsible for what I did.

01:29:43 – 01:29:48:	They had only a pious duty to deliver what expectations I set.

01:29:48 – 01:29:54:	And I was accountable upstream for their duty to do what they had to do or when they failed to do it.

01:29:55 – 01:30:03:	If something went wrong, my management chain didn't yell at my guys, they yelled at me even though I hadn't done anything wrong because I did do something wrong.

01:30:03 – 01:30:10:	My guys did something wrong which meant that I did something wrong because either I let it happen or I didn't know about it, I was responsible.

01:30:10 – 01:30:11:	That's how accountability works.

01:30:12 – 01:30:17:	And so the person who's in the superior position has a lot more going on.

01:30:18 – 01:30:22:	And when someone's in that position, the duty of piety is like help the guy.

01:30:23 – 01:30:29:	And the duty that he has to those beneath him is to be paternalistic, to look out for and to protect and help in whatever way you can.

01:30:30 – 01:30:40:	And the value of understanding these hierarchies and understanding that there's a scriptural and there's a spiritual aspect to the structure of the thing is that this isn't man-made.

01:30:41 – 01:30:46:	God gave this stuff to us because God designed the universe this way.

01:30:47 – 01:30:52:	And the rebellion that we see against the design of the universe is ultimately impiety.

01:30:52 – 01:30:55:	It's ultimately ungodliness and rebellion against the Creator.

01:30:56 – 01:30:59:	Which again, is why BLM had that laundry list.

01:30:59 – 01:31:06:	BLM's impious laundry list of rebellion against all hierarchy was because Satan knows what he's doing with that stuff.

01:31:07 – 01:31:08:	He knows how to burn everything down.

01:31:09 – 01:31:13:	And it's by going after this stuff that the world says, yeah, that's evil, that's wrong.

01:31:14 – 01:31:16:	You can't say the one group is better than another group.

01:31:17 – 01:31:18:	What could possibly be worse than that?

01:31:20 – 01:31:21:	No one cares if it's true.

01:31:21 – 01:31:24:	If you say, well, here's proof, they get even madder.

01:31:24 – 01:31:29:	Because now you're committing even more sins against the new global religion.

01:31:29 – 01:31:46:	Like, well, if being honest in saying the truth is a sin, then you need to sin as hard and as loudly as you can because you have a duty, we all have a duty, of piety, up the stream, to God, ultimately, and to tell the truth even when others are lying.

01:31:47 – 01:32:12:	So, one of the reasons, you know, we, Corey and I, in the past, have gone after pastors a lot is not hatred or despising or a lack of respect for what that office should be, but it's an acknowledgement that those men who were put in positions to do these things have failed, almost universally have failed to do the things that God told them to do and that we, as parishioners, need them to do.

01:32:13 – 01:32:16:	Christian men need the spiritual leaders to be leading.

01:32:17 – 01:32:29:	And when they quit showing up or when they start shooting us in the back, when they cease to have their piety to God, we are still on the hook as Christian men with our pious duty to God.

01:32:29 – 01:32:45:	And if the paternalistic duty, whether it's in a political or a religious context, if they're failing to look out for their flocks or their neighborhoods or their nations, the duty devolves to effectively lesser magistrate.

01:32:45 – 01:32:49:	He who is in the lesser role still has to put up or shut up.

01:32:50 – 01:32:51:	This stuff has to get done.

01:32:51 – 01:32:54:	There was the impetus for creating Stone Choir.

01:32:54 – 01:32:57:	Stones crying out because the men were silent.

01:32:57 – 01:33:05:	Sometimes duty is going to look a little bit strange when the duties upstream have been failed by those who were put in positions to do them.

01:33:07 – 01:33:14:	So just keep in mind that a lot of what we see in the world is inversion of these things even when it's being done in their name.

01:33:15 – 01:33:21:	Egalitarianism is sold as the most loving thing ever, saying everyone's exactly the same, we love them all exactly the same.

01:33:21 – 01:33:22:	That's BS.

01:33:23 – 01:33:23:	It's horse crap.

01:33:23 – 01:33:27:	It's completely false and it's impossible and it's a lie.

01:33:28 – 01:33:38:	But as long as they rigorously scream and shout and enforce it just by hysterics and not with reality, people will either go along or they'll rebel.

01:33:39 – 01:33:44:	And then when you rebel against evil leadership, it looks like impiety.

01:33:44 – 01:34:02:	And that's the reason to talk about these things in a kind of structured fashion like this, is that when you understand what the actual definition of a pious duty upward is, you understand that the pious duty upward is not to put up with lies that are going to destroy your family and your nation, it's to protect it.

01:34:03 – 01:34:09:	And if you have to protect it from those who are in what should be paternalistic positions, then that's what you have to do.

01:34:10 – 01:34:13:	Because ultimately we all answer to God for our own actions.

01:34:14 – 01:34:21:	And someone at the very bottom still has duties, even if it means leapfrogging over someone who has failed to do them.

01:34:21 – 01:34:23:	And that was part of the reason for the leadership episode.

01:34:23 – 01:34:27:	Not everybody is equipped for it, but there are going to be guys that are lower.

01:34:27 – 01:34:28:	They need to say, you know what?

01:34:28 – 01:34:29:	This isn't getting done.

01:34:29 – 01:34:30:	I need to step up.

01:34:31 – 01:34:32:	I need to do it.

01:34:32 – 01:34:33:	That's not usurpation.

01:34:33 – 01:34:34:	It's filling a void.

01:34:35 – 01:34:43:	There's a void of love that is not occurring because the men who are tasked by God to do it have done the opposite.

01:34:44 – 01:34:54:	The inverse case is often the most instructive case, whether it's the inversion of familial love, the inversion of paternalistic or pietistic love.

01:34:54 – 01:34:58:	It's always about either doing what God said to do or doing the opposite.

01:34:59 – 01:35:02:	And when you run these things backwards, you only get backwards results.

01:35:03 – 01:35:20:	This is one of those episodes, as is somewhat often the case, where we could have made a 20-hour episode if we had gone over all of the places in Scripture or even just a significant number of the places in Scripture where these issues are mentioned.

01:35:21 – 01:35:35:	Even just going over all of the instances where love is explicitly mentioned, not just implied, not just addressed tangentially or as a concept, but explicitly mentioned, quite frankly probably would have taken much longer than 20 hours.

01:35:37 – 01:35:46:	And so it may seem like we didn't use that many citations to Scripture, but as we've mentioned, that's not always the point of this podcast.

01:35:46 – 01:35:54:	It's not always the point of being a Christian, because there are certain things that God has simply made evident in nature to all men.

01:35:55 – 01:36:05:	And that is one of the reasons that lacking that natural affinity for family is so abhorrent, because it is contra naturum, it is against nature.

01:36:06 – 01:36:09:	It is something that is alien, even to the lower animals.

01:36:11 – 01:36:22:	And so you don't need a citation to Scripture to know that you are supposed to love your parents, that you are supposed to love your siblings, that you are supposed to love your nieces and nephews and your cousins.

01:36:25 – 01:36:32:	Some of these things are simply obvious, and yet Scripture does actually address them as well.

01:36:33 – 01:36:35:	God doubles down, as it were.

01:36:35 – 01:36:39:	He wrote it in his first book, his greatest book, which is to say, Creation.

01:36:39 – 01:36:46:	And I know that some people object when I say that, and I'll continue to say it, in part against the people who object.

01:36:47 – 01:36:54:	But when God appeals to something in order to show his greatness, he doesn't appeal to his word.

01:36:55 – 01:36:56:	He appeals to Creation.

01:36:57 – 01:37:04:	And so if you have a problem with saying Creation is the greater book, feel free, as Job, to take it up with God.

01:37:05 – 01:37:06:	See how that goes for you.

01:37:08 – 01:37:11:	But God doubles down and he mentions it in Scripture as well.

01:37:12 – 01:37:19:	And so to read from another section we have from Colossians 3, Wives submit to your husbands as is fitting in the Lord.

01:37:19 – 01:37:22:	Husbands love your wives, and do not be harsh with them.

01:37:23 – 01:37:27:	Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord.

01:37:28 – 01:37:31:	Fathers do not provoke your children, lest they become discouraged.

01:37:32 – 01:37:42:	Slaves, obey in everything those who are your earthly masters, not by way of eye service as people pleasers, but with sincerity of heart, fearing the Lord.

01:37:43 – 01:37:52:	Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward.

01:37:52 – 01:38:00:	You are serving the Lord Christ, for the wrongdoer will be paid back for the wrong he has done, and there is no partiality.

01:38:01 – 01:38:07:	Masters, treat your slaves justly and fairly, knowing that you also have a master in heaven.

01:38:09 – 01:38:27:	We can see many of the forms of love that we have discussed so far, and some that we will discuss next week, in just this passage, and we see in particular many references to piety and to the duties owed in reverse to that paternalistic love.

01:38:28 – 01:38:38:	Slaves are to be pious with regard to their masters, and it doesn't matter what office the master holds, because you may be a slave with regard to social order.

01:38:38 – 01:38:42:	You may be a literal slave working on a plantation somewhere.

01:38:44 – 01:38:51:	You are to be pious with regard to your masters, and it says that you are not just to do it for a show.

01:38:51 – 01:38:57:	You are to do it as if you are serving the Lord Christ directly, because ultimately that is what you're doing.

01:38:58 – 01:39:04:	Just as with good works, good works are rendered to neighbor in praise of God.

01:39:05 – 01:39:11:	God doesn't need your good works, God doesn't need your service, God doesn't need slaves, and yet we are slaves of God.

01:39:12 – 01:39:22:	And so all of these duties, all of these things that we owe and we render to others, ultimately we are rendering them to God, because we are doing what He has told us to do.

01:39:23 – 01:39:25:	We are obeying the structure that He has created.

01:39:27 – 01:39:38:	To some degree, it is a place for everything and for everyone and everything and everyone in his place, because all of life is structured, because God has built a universe that is ordered.

01:39:39 – 01:39:41:	There is a hierarchy in everything.

01:39:42 – 01:39:48:	And so it is important in particular to think of the strict hierarchies that we mentioned.

01:39:49 – 01:39:52:	So in the political sphere, there is a strict hierarchy.

01:39:54 – 01:40:01:	Sometimes it's important to recognize that strict hierarchy, because as Woe said, sometimes those higher up the hierarchy fail in their duties.

01:40:02 – 01:40:04:	And so it falls to those lower down the chain.

01:40:05 – 01:40:12:	The Magneberg Confession, we've referenced a number of times, we'll eventually do an episode on that, undoubtedly tying into Romans 13.

01:40:14 – 01:40:28:	But there are times where the lesser magistrate, where the man further down that chain, further down the hierarchy, has to perform the duties of an office that is higher than he would naturally have.

01:40:29 – 01:40:32:	Because those who hold that office have failed.

01:40:33 – 01:40:36:	That happens in the political sphere, it happens in the social sphere.

01:40:37 – 01:40:45:	Unfortunately, sometimes that sort of thing happens in families as well, where perhaps the oldest son has to step up because the father has failed in his duties.

01:40:47 – 01:40:48:	That's not the ideal.

01:40:48 – 01:40:54:	That makes for a very messy world when that sort of thing happens, regardless of the sphere in which it happens.

01:40:55 – 01:40:57:	And yet it is the reality of living in a fallen world.

01:40:59 – 01:41:10:	In a properly ordered world, every man higher up the chain would have paternalistic love for everyone under him, and everyone under him would be pious with regard to him.

01:41:11 – 01:41:13:	That's simply not how we find the world.

01:41:16 – 01:41:22:	Certain violations rise to the level where it is incumbent on us as Christian men to act.

01:41:23 – 01:41:25:	Others we can let slide.

01:41:26 – 01:41:27:	It is a judgment call.

01:41:28 – 01:41:39:	This is again a matter of wisdom, and we will get more into that when we eventually do an episode on, as I promised and as we've said, the Magdeburg Confession in Romans 13, because those are very closely related.

01:41:40 – 01:41:42:	That's a topic for that particular episode.

01:41:44 – 01:42:09:	But at a very basic level, what we are covering in this episode and in this series, and this is, I guess, sort of a conclusion for the mini version of the series because certain of our audience will not listen to the third one because it is going to be explicitly on marriage and so is not suitable for certain listeners and perhaps others will not want to listen to that.

01:42:12 – 01:42:18:	But to a very real degree and in a very real sense, much of this is simple.

01:42:18 – 01:42:21:	It is very easily understood and it comes naturally.

01:42:22 – 01:42:30:	If you simply jettison the false teaching, the propaganda, the programming that the world would like you to hear and obey.

01:42:32 – 01:42:35:	Because God gave you a natural affection for your parents.

01:42:36 – 01:42:38:	God gave you a natural affection for your siblings.

01:42:39 – 01:42:47:	God gave you a natural affection for your neighbor, for your friends, even for those with whom you just work.

01:42:48 – 01:42:55:	You should try to develop a friendship there if you can because we shouldn't be spending our lives every day with complete strangers.

01:42:55 – 01:42:56:	That's unnatural.

01:42:57 – 01:43:03:	That's antithetical to the way that God designed human beings to exist among other human beings.

01:43:05 – 01:43:13:	But all of these affections, all of these loves, you get them for free just by being a human being because God built them into your nature.

01:43:14 – 01:43:17:	And so you love your family because they're your family.

01:43:18 – 01:43:20:	You love your friends because they're your friends.

01:43:20 – 01:43:22:	You love your neighbor because he is your neighbor.

01:43:22 – 01:43:34:	You love your nation because it is your nation, because they are of the same blood as you, because they are your extended family, because God has given you that, because it is a blessing from God.

01:43:34 – 01:43:37:	And so you love it because that comes naturally.

01:43:38 – 01:43:39:	Yes, you can cultivate it.

01:43:39 – 01:43:52:	It isn't necessarily just the emotional love, which we can call patriotism, but we can call the intellectual aspect patriotism as well, because you can fall in love with the history of your country, with the accomplishments of your people.

01:43:54 – 01:43:56:	But these things come naturally.

01:43:56 – 01:44:02:	They are part of simply being a human being who is not acting contrary to nature.

01:44:02 – 01:44:13:	As Woe said and as we've emphasized in this episode and others, the modern world wants you to act in ways that are totally antithetical to what it means to be a human being.

01:44:14 – 01:44:30:	They want you to be an abomination, to be something that is so contrary to nature, so contrary to God's design that you would be unrecognizable to any of your ancestors, and you are certainly not what God wants you to be.

01:44:31 – 01:44:35:	What God wants you to be is in line with the nature he created.

01:44:36 – 01:44:42:	Yes, our nature is fallen, and we have certain desires that are sinful.

01:44:43 – 01:44:47:	And yes, desire itself can be sinful, concupiscence.

01:44:49 – 01:44:56:	We do have disorder as part of living in a fallen world, but our nature is not replaced by original sin.

01:44:57 – 01:45:00:	Our nature is not corrupted to the point where nothing good remains.

01:45:01 – 01:45:02:	Everything is tainted.

01:45:03 – 01:45:04:	That is true.

01:45:04 – 01:45:06:	We are thoroughly sinful.

01:45:07 – 01:45:14:	But even in our fallen state, our nature itself as a creature of God is good.

01:45:15 – 01:45:29:	And so if we act in accord with the good parts of that nature, with what remains of the good nature that God created, we get all of these things for free because they simply flow from that nature.

01:45:30 – 01:45:34:	Yes, you have to suppress the desire for the woman who is not your wife.

01:45:34 – 01:45:41:	You have to suppress holding on to a grudge with regard to your siblings or your parents or your friends.

01:45:41 – 01:45:42:	You have to forgive.

01:45:43 – 01:45:45:	We know that from scripture, from many places.

01:45:47 – 01:45:52:	But these loves flow naturally because they are part of your nature.

01:45:52 – 01:45:54:	They are built into you by God.

01:45:56 – 01:45:59:	No man naturally hates his parents.

01:46:00 – 01:46:03:	No man naturally hates his brothers and sisters.

01:46:03 – 01:46:05:	No man naturally hates his neighbor.

01:46:05 – 01:46:07:	No man naturally hates his nation.

01:46:08 – 01:46:10:	All of that is unnatural.

01:46:10 – 01:46:23:	All of that has been programmed into many of us in this society by our wicked rulers, by those who control our society and are in service of Satan.

01:46:24 – 01:46:25:	They want to destroy.

01:46:25 – 01:46:26:	They want to subvert.

01:46:26 – 01:46:33:	They want you to have utterly unnatural, abhorrent desires and preferences.

01:46:37 – 01:46:42:	It is not that difficult to jettison those things because they are unnatural.

01:46:44 – 01:46:53:	All you have to do to have these loves, to have things that are rightly ordered, is act in accord with the good nature that God has given you.

01:46:54 – 01:47:14:	And with regard to the perversions in our nature, with regard to the sinful desires, God has given us Scripture, and if we spend time in His Word, we will recognize all of these things in our fallen nature that are from sin, that are from original sin, that are from the devil, that are not from God.

01:47:15 – 01:47:19:	And so all that remains if you jettison those things is the good.

01:47:23 – 01:47:26:	And ultimately, that's what this is.

01:47:26 – 01:47:33:	Love is the good because the attributes of God, as we have mentioned before, are interchangeable, as it were.

01:47:34 – 01:47:38:	They are identical because God is not composed of parts.

01:47:38 – 01:47:44:	And so the good, the beautiful, the true, love, all of these things are God's nature.

01:47:44 – 01:47:45:	They flow from God.

01:47:46 – 01:47:47:	And so love is good.

01:47:48 – 01:47:49:	And good is love.

01:47:51 – 01:48:04:	And if you have that focus on the good parts, on the natural parts in the full sense of nature, in the sense that God created it, then these are not challenges.

01:48:04 – 01:48:06:	These are not hard things.

01:48:06 – 01:48:15:	There may be work involved, because of course there's work in building any human relationship, and we'll get into that more next week in the marriage episode, because marriage is hard work.

01:48:17 – 01:48:19:	But at the same time, it comes naturally.

01:48:19 – 01:48:21:	All of these forms of love come naturally.

01:48:25 – 01:48:31:	And so really in sum, this episode and the full series on love is quite simple.

01:48:32 – 01:48:37:	Love your family, love your nation, love your neighbor, and love God.