Ordered to Love (eBook)

Endorsements

How should Christians prioritize loving their neighbor and loving the world? This has been a perennial challenge, and especially now in a highly mobile and globalized world. Kocman does us all a favor and rightly orders the priorities of Christian love and compassion, without compromising our Christian duty to local relations and Great Commission responsibility to global needs. I highly recommend this clarifying and thought-provoking work.

—E.D. Burns
Executive Director of Training and Development | ABWE
Director of MA in Cultural Apologetics & Missions | Founders Seminary
Professor of Missiology & Spirituality | Asia Biblical Theological Seminary

Rooting horizontal love (the love of neighbor) in vertical love (love from God and to God), Alex Kocman reclaims the historic concept of ordo amoris—with a rich tradition going back to Augustine and Aquinas—to trace the contours of the believer’s responsibilities to the family, the church, the nation, the community, and the world. Passionate to reclaim a balanced, biblical triage of responsibilities in a world dominated by vague notions of love, the author shows what love to God and neighbor looks like in the concrete realities of daily life in a fallen world.

Eye-opening from cover to cover!

—Joel R. Beeke
Chancellor | Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary
Pastor | Heritage Reformed Congregation
Grand Rapids, MI

Genuine love is not randomly disordered and promiscuous, rather it is principally focused and virtuous. Alex Kocman’s profoundly insightful book traces the idea of ordered love from Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas to Calvin, Edwards, and Lewis with practical applications for men and nations, for families and churches. Highly recommended.

—George Grant
Pastor Emeritus | Parish Presbyterian Church
Franklin, TN

Alex Kocman has rendered the church a much-needed service by recovering the Christian doctrine of rightly ordered love. For many evangelicals, the perceived tension between “radical” missionary zeal and the comparatively mundane duties of work, marriage, and parenthood has produced needless guilt and confusion. Ordered to Love confronts this false dichotomy head-on, showing that our natural affections and proximate duties are not obstacles to mission but its essential foundation. Kocman compellingly demonstrates that rightly ordered love of family, church, community, and nation harmonizes with the church’s mission to the nations. With theological clarity and pastoral sensitivity, he offers a timely corrective to the rootless universalism that has impoverished evangelical piety. In place of abstract idealism, he calls for a recovery of Christian affection that is both incarnational and missional—a love that begins in the household and overflows to the ends of the earth.

This book deserves careful reading by all Christians who desire to order their loves according to divine wisdom. May the Lord use it to renew the household, the church, and the nation to their proper place within the gospel mission.

—David Mitzenmacher
Associate Pastor of Administration | Grace Baptist Church
Author | The Law for the Lawless

Can we love those closest to us—our family, church, and nation—without losing missional zeal for the nations? In this compelling book, Alex shows us how by retrieving the ancient wisdom of the ordo amoris—the rightly ordered loves. With clarity and conviction, Alex invites Christians to rediscover how this doctrine can unify God’s people and reinvigorate our shared mission. Contrary to the schemes of the enemy, Christians are called to labor together—each in their unique station where God has placed them. This book gives a powerful and timely call to love well, live faithfully, and glorify Christ through our love for others.

—Joshua P. Howard
Senior Pastor | New Covenant Presbyterian Church
Author, A Primer for Conflict

It is has been said that fools die for lack of sense. In Ordered to Love, Kocman answers a very confused and foolish generation with plenty of sense so that they might not die. This work deals with some of the most contested ground in modern life with reasonableness and biblical clarity.

—J. Chase Davis
Lead Pastor | The Well Church
Author | Offensive Christianity

Ordered to Love hits right where Christians today are most confused. Many have flattened love into a vague affection owed to everyone at the expense of those closest to them, while others, reacting against that, have slipped into cool indifference toward the nations. Alex Kocman helps us recover a biblical order of love that frees us from guilt and gives us clarity to love those nearest and dearest as we ought without losing our call to reach the world. It inoculates believers against the guilt manipulation that weaponizes our faith in the name of a sentimental “brotherhood of man,” grounding us instead in the biblical hierarchy of loves that makes faithful action possible. As host of The Missions Podcast, Kocman has long helped Christians think clearly about global missions; in this work, he helps us recover the moral clarity to love those closest to us without apology or compromise, even as we remain faithful to Christ’s call to the nations.

—Josh Daws
Writer, Podcast Host

Every week we are exhorted in our gatherings to scatter faithfully and live missionally—but many of us leave wondering where to begin? Should we go to the nations or our neighborhood? To the random stranger or the proximate relationship? Alex Kocman gives a masterclass on the ordo amoris—the order of love–showing from Scripture and church history that rightly ordered affections cause the joy of our salvation to burst forth in concentric circles, from our homes to the ends of the earth.

—Billy Bean
Pastor of Missions | Christ Covenant
Executive Director | Terminus Network

In a divided evangelical landscape, where some prioritize hearth and home and others chase the horizons of global missions, Alex Kocman offers a much needed bridge in Ordered to Love. Drawing from Scripture’s timeless wisdom, the insights of Augustine, Aquinas, and Lewis, and his own journey from missionary zeal to family life, Kocman recovers the doctrine of ordo amoris—rightly ordered love—as the key to harmonious Christian discipleship. As a former military officer and attorney defending religious liberties, I especially appreciate how this framework affirms the duty to love one’s nation amid broader global callings. This book isn’t mere theory; it’s a practical call to love God first, then spouse, family, church, nation, and world, without pitting these spheres against one another. Timely, thoughtful, and transformative, it’s essential reading for believers seeking to glorify God from the dinner table to the ends of the earth.

—R. Davis Younts
Lt. Col. (Ret.) United States Air Force

It was Spurgeon who, when asked how he reconciled two seemingly conflicting truths, replied, “I never reconcile friends. Friends don’t need reconciling.” Many in our day, it seems, pit missional zeal and political stewardship against one another. Politics, they claim, is a distraction from the church’s mission. Or, as still others argue, missions detracts from the urgency of domestic troubles. In this timely primer, Kocman argues that evangelicals must reject this false choice because both politics and missions are rooted in the duty of Christian love. This book will not answer all of your questions. And it may give you some answers you disagree with. But it will force you to grapple with the tensions underlying Christian faithfulness. Whether in the home, the pew, the polling box, or at the ends of the earth, rightly ordered love should animate every Christian endeavor. And what love joins together, let not man put asunder.

—Caleb Morell
Assistant Pastor | Capitol Hill Baptist Church
Washington, DC

The question of the ordo amoris, the right ordering of loves, has traditionally been a topic for theological discussion, though in practice it’s something we deal with every day. It was catapulted into the news when it was cited by J.D. Vance in a discussion of our responsibilities (or lack thereof) to migrants and the rejection of Vance’s interpretation by Pope Francis. Given the importance of the ordo amoris for everything from American politics to ideas about evangelism and global missions, clarity on this point is essential. And this is where Alex Kocman’s book comes in. He gives us a thorough examination of the subject, with conclusions supported from Scripture, history, and theology. The book is thus a welcome addition to the discussions of our responsibilities to our families, communities, and the wider world.

—Dr. Glenn Sunshine
Senior Fellow | Colson Center for Christian Worldview

Alex Kocman offers a clear recovery of the Christian order of love, grounding his insights in Scripture, historic theology, and real world experience, showing how ordered love strengthens both local responsibility and global discipleship without setting them in tension. This book provides needed clarity for Christians seeking steadiness in an age of confusion.

—Tyler Cox
Contributor to American Reformer, Christ Over All, and the Center for Baptist Leadership

Of all people, Christians should be able to rightly order their loves. As Jesus’s Great Commandment calls us to love God above everything in creation and to love one’s neighbor as oneself, we have the beginnings of what has been called the Ordo Amoris. Still, for lack of teaching, lack of emphasis, and a proliferation of sentimental, therapeutic views of love, many Christians are confused by what it means to love their neighbor and why proximity, family, and even nationality might play a role in forming our loves. Thankfully, Alex Kocman is not confused and his book, Ordered to Love, outlines a well-formulated introduction to an old doctrine—the Christian doctrine of ordered loves. At a time when preferring one’s nation is wrongly rejected by some as xenophobic and over-amplified by others so that it becomes sinful partiality, we need clear definitions and biblical direction for ordering our loves. And to this end, Alex has provided such a book. So, take up, read, and learn from him, as he retrieves the best of church history and biblical ethics and applies them to our modern world for the task of discipling all nations.

David Schrock
Pastor | Occoquan Bible Church
Author | The Business of Is-Ness
Woodbridge, VA