The Wisdom of Ordered Loves

A call to retrieve a fruitful concept

Do you remember your first obsession? Mine was collecting baseball cards. As a boy, I had thousands of cards. I would spend all my money on them and all my time organizing them and memorizing the details on their backs. During this phase of my life, I never missed out on an opportunity to accompany my mother on a shopping trip. I hated waiting for her to shop, but the potential for a new pack of cards kept me going. If she didn’t reward me with a new pack of cards, I would pitch a fit.

I’m 44 now and still have those cards. I’ve passed many of them down to my three boys and still relish ripping open a fresh pack occasionally. But imagine a scenario with me. Imagine that, at the age of 44, my relationship with baseball cards remains the same as it was when I was a boy throwing a tantrum at the Piggly Wiggly. Imagine I still spend every dime on new cards and, rather than spend time with my wife and kids, I devote every waking moment to organizing and studying them.

If that was true, I hope that someone who cares about me would confront me. If I still harbored an eight-year-old’s relationship to baseball cards as a 44-year-old married man with five kids, I hope that my pastors, friends, and family would rebuke me. I hope they would tell me that my loves are disordered.

Theologians used to talk about the priority of ordered loves, and it’s a concept we should resurrect for the contemporary church. Rather than oversimplifying life’s activities merely as allowed or forbidden, we should train ourselves to think more deeply about what we love and to what degree.

C. S. Lewis defined ordered loves as “the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind of degree of love which is appropriate to it.” Augustine wrote, “A just and holy life requires one to . . . love things . . . in the right order, so that you do not love what is not to be loved, or fail to love what is to be loved, or have a greater love for what should be loved less, or an equal love for things that should be loved less or more, or a lesser or greater love for things that should be loved equally.”

We use the language of love to describe our relationship with all kinds of things. We say things like “I love tacos” or “I love books” or “I love sunsets.” We also tell our spouses that we love them and our grandparents that we love them. Since we don’t have different words for love in English, we rely on context to communicate what kind of love we’re talking about. There’s nothing wrong with loving tacos or dogs as long as it’s clear that that kind of love has a lesser quality than the kind we give to wife and grandmother.

As I’ve been preaching through Proverbs, I believe that the book equates the life of wisdom with a life of ordered loves. According to Proverbs, the wise person is a person who loves all things in proper proportion, beginning with the love of God. Proverbs is bookended with the proclamation that “the fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge/wisdom” (1:7; 9:10). To fear God is to know, honor, trust, and love God. Fear captures the kind of love appropriate to God. While we struggle to imagine a positive use of fear, the Bible doesn’t share our difficulty: “But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared” (Psalm 130:4).

The fear of God is the magnetic North for our lives. When our relationship with him is right, our relationships with other aspects of his creation line up as a result. When we find ultimate satisfaction in the love of Christ, we no longer need satisfaction from things incapable of providing it. We can then love freely without demanding fulfillment. I can only love my wife appropriately when I don’t expect her to satisfy me ultimately. Since Christ satisfies me, I can love her appropriately. I can give to her from the abundance of God’s love for me.

Consider Proverbs 4:23: “Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life.” The heart in Proverbs represents the control center of a person. A person’s heart is where you find their innermost desires or loves. To keep the heart is to guard or protect it. The requirement of vigilance insinuates the need for constant attention. To call us to keep the heart is to call us to order our loves. We need to make sure we are loving everything in right proportion, for the order of our loves will determine the kind of life we live.