Revival and Renewal

A Yearly Disappointment

It is estimated that at least fifty percent of people in the US (and that means you too) will be living with new, stringent rules by Friday (New Year’s Day). Statistically, your new rules for life probably sound something like this: eat healthier or lose weight; exercise more; save money or stop spending it so rapidly; learn a new hobby; be less irritable at home; get organized. All wonderful things worth doing.

But do we actually do them? No. In a normal year, fewer than 10 percent of people who make resolutions actually keep them. And this hasn’t been a normal year. This year teaches us, maybe more than ever before, that our resolutions, best intentions, and grand plans are at the whim of forces vastly beyond our control. That try as we might to get healthier this year, our gyms may be shuttered. Try as you might to spend less, to be less irritable, or to get organized, something like a pandemic might well sweep through your resolutions with cruel laughter.

If we think about it, however, I’d say this problem is more than just one of circumstance getting in the way of our best-laid plans. Rather, I think this is a problem rooted in the modern obsession with self-help, with the fundamental belief that I as the individual have the power and the right to change myself all by myself. New Year’s Resolutions are thus the secular version of the sacred vow, made not to a deity but at the altar of the self.

What if there was a better way? What if there was a way to organize our lives around what actually mattered in our daily existence? What if, what we need in 2021 is not more resolutions (no matter how well-intentioned) but rather a turn toward another way of seeing our lives as God’s image-bearers in our day-to-day? The good news is there is such a way: it is the way of virtue.

A Disposition of the Excellent Soul

 “[Jesus our Lord’s] divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us tohis own glory and excellence (aretē),by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire. For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue (aretē)…” (2 Peter 1:3-5a)

In our world, we tend to associate the word virtue with the idea of virtuousness or moral rectitude. To be virtuous is to be in some way morally pure, possibly snobbishly so. We may say “patience is a virtue” or the like, but I’d wager that the concept of virtue rarely stakes a hold of our thinking.

And that’s a shame, for the concept of virtue is integral to the understanding of both the New Testament and the history of Christian thought when it comes to how one should live in the real world. Simply put, “virtue” is a description of the manner of living that becomes a good life, a happy life, a life well lived. Since Aristotle’s day the idea was simple: what matters in life is not so much what one accumulates or achieves, but rather the kind of person one is. Virtue describes those habits or ways of living that are conducive to a good kind of life. Vice, on the other hand, describes those habits our ways of living that describe a bad life. Thus, the basic meaning of the Greek word for virtue, aretē, is a kind of excellence. Virtues are the way to the excellent life.

While not an exclusively Christian idea, virtue finds its Christian source in the continual reminder in Scripture that there are two ways to live: one that leads to life, the other to death (Deuteronomy 30:15; Prov. 3: 13-18; Matthew 7:13-14; etc.). What these authors had in mind was not simply eternal life, but rather the kind of life that represents God’s design for human beings, a life lived in shalom (which is nothing less than designed harmony). Such a life is like “a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither” (Psalm 1:3). “Death,” on the other hand, was not simply the ceasing of physical existence but the idea of self-selected ruin, destruction of one’s legacy, progeny, and witness. (This is the message of the book of Proverbs).

And so, the pursuit of virtue is closely connected with the biblical insistence that we should “get wisdom, and whatever you get, get insight” (Proverbs 4:7), and Peter’s insistence that our relationship with the Excellent Savior should lead us to lives of excellence (2 Pet. 1:5a). Peter is so bold as to say that the person who does not pursue virtue “is so nearsighted that he is blind, having forgotten that he was cleanses from his former sins,” and by pursuing it we “confirm our calling and election” (2 Pet. 1:9-10). The pursuit of virtue is rooted, really, in the insistence that God’s people must act, think, and live in accordance with the way in which God created the world; that by doing so we get to “partake in the divine nature,” that is, to taste the excitement of life the way it was meant to be lived.

The Virtues are dispositions of an excellent soul, a soul primed to life with God and rooted in the life of Christ. For, lest we forget, Christ Jesus is to us not just our eternal salvation, but also our “wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, ‘let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord” (1 Cor. 1:30, emphasis added). The person who pursues virtue in the Bible’s sense of the term is pursuing Christlikeness, a following of Christ’s way of life, in every moment, and that pursuit at the root of their existence, in their soul, their inner being, which is itself being renewed into his image (Eph 4:24).

Seven Virtues; One Source

This pursuit of virtue can, based on what has been said, seem a bit daunting. Where do we start? There are several “virtue and vice” lists in the New Testament, as well as Jesus’ pivotal Sermon on the Mount (which really outline the importance and relevance of the Old Testament Law in the kingdom of God), not to mention the numerous and important passages throughout the Old Testament about the wise, virtuous, and good life. Where to begin?

Well, this is where we should really listen to those who’ve gone before us. Early in the Christian tradition the Church Fathers (especially pastors such as Ambrose and Augustine), thought long and hard on how to understand and apply all the varied ethical injunctions of Scripture. They started with Jesus’ insistence on the “greatest commandment(s)” to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength,” and to similarly love “your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:30-31). And they also remembered Paul’s insistence that love was primary, that it was itself the greatest virtue of all (1 Cor. 13, esp. v.13).

And then their minds started to make connections, especially Augustine’s. In the Greek and Roman world, there were already people espousing four virtues: the virtue of prudence (or wisdom), justice, fortitude (or courage), and temperance (or moderation). Most everyone who cared to live a good life agreed that these four virtuese were an integral part, and this included Augustine, Ambrose, and many of the Church fathers. But if these four virtues were integral to the good life, what was their basis and essence? “As to virtue leading us to a happy life,” Augustine writes, “I hold virtue to be nothing less than perfect love for God.” (Of the Morals of the Church, xv). These four virtues, then, were encapsulations of “four forms of love…temperance is love giving itself entirely to that which is loved; fortitude is love readily bearing all for the sake of the loved object; justice is love serving only the loved object, and therefore ruling rightly; prudence is love distinguishing with wisdom between what hinders it and what helps it.”

To the church these four virtues, or forms of love, were quickly identified as the “Cardinal Virtues.” These were the four virtues that seemed to enclose a basic definition of the good or happy life; without them, both individuals and societies suffered. They were basic to life itself as designed by God:

Prudence: The disposition to order and direct one’s life to Christlikeness in everyday existence, distinguishing between those things which help it and those which hinder it.

Justice: The disposition to look to one’s relationships in light of God’s demand for equity, fidelity, and honesty as the truly happy way to live.

Fortitude: The disposition to recognize the costliness of living Christlike lives and yet choose to do so for the love of God.

Temperance: The disposition to remember the goodness of God’s created world and how he created us to interact with it, refusing to dishonor it or ourselves by abuse or exploitation. 

But as these early Church thinkers and pastors read the New Testament, they realized that these four virtues were not sufficient in describing how the Christian should live. There were also those three qualities which Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13 “abide” or “endure”: Faith, hope, and love. These three virtues, known as the “Theological Virtues,” were the specifically Christian way in which a follower of Jesus was to live and walk:

Faith: the disposition to view and order all of life in light of the truth which has been divinely revealed, both in the Scriptures as a whole and principally in light of Christ’s appearing. The summary of “faith” is the Apostle’s Creed. Faith believes that what God has said about the world, his work, and us is true.

Hope: the disposition to view and order all of life in light of the goodness of that which God had revealed shall come to pass and our place in it. The summary of “hope” is the Lord’s Prayer. While faith believes that what God has said is true, hope rests in that what God has said is and will be good for them.

Love: the chief of all the virtues, love is the disposition to order one’s life around the reality that the good life is about perfecting the love of God and neighbor. The summary of “love” is the Ten Commandments. Love could be said to be the essence and hallmark of all the virtues, the driving force behind all our action. Love describes our motive.

The Habits of Daily Life

The basic command of the new Testament for our daily lives is to “put on Christ” (Rom 13:14; Eph. 4:24; Col. 3:10), that is, to live in the reality of our redemption by embodying the disposition of Christ. Our inner lives are to reflect his inner life, our souls his soul. The Seven Virtues help us as we reflect on our day-to-day existence to be about this work, of participating with the Spirit to produce in us a Christlike soul. Paul calls this work a “straining” toward the goal of conforming to the image of Christ (Philippians 3:12-16).

These seven qualities are thus best thought of as habits of the soul as it is turned toward Christ. Rather than them simply being moral injunctions, they become to us contemplative guides to how we think about our days and act in obedience to Scripture’s commands. They remind us that Scripture’s commands to us are for our good, that there is a way in which God has ordered our souls and the world around us, and that as we walk in that way, we find ourselves “blessed,” or, rather, “happy.”

So, each of the Seven Virtues compel us to this work of contemplation. While our current age could be described as a rampage against reflection, the Christian moral vision is one which compels us to reflect upon our daily lives, to have space for the quieting of our minds and hearts so that we might engage with the world, not in frantic busyness, but in calm, consistent Christlikeness. This time is historically known as leisure, as the separating of ourselves from the work-is-life mentality to actually think about ourselves, our relationship to God, and how we ought to interact with the world.

The call to grow in virtue in 2021 is really, then, the call to sit and think, using these seven guides, about how you could grow in Christlikeness this coming year. I’ve attached a detailed guide to the Seven Virtues, including Scripture passages for meditation. You can find it by clicking here. May you spend some time thinking, asking the hard questions, and be helped to find a path toward Christlikeness this coming year.