Everyone seems to be talking about virtue lately—there’s been an uptick in books on the subject in the last two years. The need for spiritual formation and the development of virtue as a part of our Christian character has become a common topic of conversation among professors and pastors, readers and writers. Scholars and church leaders talk of recovering the classical virtues, argue about virtue ethics, and debate what we should retrieve or reject from the virtue tradition.
Why this resurgence of virtue talk? I think it’s a response to the fluidity that marks our present culture, a world where nothing seems solid. We feel we’re succumbing to a sea of superficiality—our lives marked by a retreat from community into the endless scroll, a loss of substance in our civil discourse, and the spectacle of ever-crazier political figures. Denominations and churches show signs of fracture, with various leaders diverging on what this moment calls for.
What Is a Human For?
Beneath this cultural chaos lies the question of human purpose. Young people flounder without an aim—a goal—any kind of cultural consensus on what it means to be human and what the human is for. We’re told we must become our best selves to reach our full potential. And we’re told that no one can determine for us what that potential is or the best path to get there.
Left to ourselves, in a society that has torn down every staircase to character and maturity, we have no avenue for ascent. We walk in circles.
The fallout from this loss of coherence and meaning pervades our society. Everyone is for “human flourishing,” except that few agree on what flourishing is, because it’s not acceptable to acknowledge some universal rule or standard for humanity. The problem is, without some kind of universal understanding of who we are and where we’re going, everyone is left to their own devices (and vices).
Three new books lift up the classical Christian virtues as a solution to this malaise. All three come from sharp evangelical thinkers. All three ground their projects in grace, so as to receive the best of the classical tradition (Aristotle, for example) without sliding into mere self-improvement. All three emphasize the importance of cultivating habits and practices, so as to develop a virtuous disposition. And all three seek to lay before the reader a vision of goodness directed toward glory.
Alan Noble: To Live Well
We begin with Alan Noble’s To Live Well: Practical Wisdom for Moving Through Chaotic Times, one of the best books of the year. Noble devotes a chapter to each of the four classic virtues (prudence, temperance, justice, and courage) and then the three Christian ones (faith, hope, and love).
To Live Well is clearly Reformational in its outlook, even when Noble draws from the Catholic scholar and philosopher Josef Pieper, who explored the seven virtues in two acclaimed books. “We pursue these habits, not to become righteous before God,” Noble writes, “but because we have Christ’s imputed righteousness and are adopted children of God. The Holy Spirit enables us to practice these virtues so that we might bring glory to God as we were created to do.” Only a robust understanding of God’s grace will motivate us to pursue the virtues as people who often strive and fail, yet seek to rest in God’s mercy.
Teleology—the goal—for human life and meaning is the missing piece in our societal puzzle. Noble writes about becoming “who God created us to be,” which is the way we become “fully human.” The virtues are necessary for human excellence, defined as God’s creational design, a process of love by which the Holy Spirit sanctifies us.
Noble teaches at Oklahoma Baptist University, so it’s not surprising this book is accessible and relevant for college students and other young adults. My favorite chapter deals with the classical virtue of prudence, which he defines as “(1) seeing the reality of a situation, (2) recognizing and desiring what is good, (3) deliberating, (4) making a judgment, and (5) resolutely acting on that judgment.”
He then applies this formula to career options, school choices, seeking out a spouse, and more. (I received an early copy of this book for review, and the moment I finished this chapter, I printed it out and gave it to my college-aged kids. It’s stellar.)
The unity for all the virtues is love. “We cultivate our love by looking to the source of all love, God,” Noble writes. “By dwelling in his Word, by meditating on his works of love. By being grateful for his acts of love in our lives. And by choosing to love him and our neighbor daily through our attention and our sacrifices with the help of the Holy Spirit.”
Matthew Arbo: The Pursuit of Character
The second book is Matthew Arbo’s The Pursuit of Character: Recovering the Virtues. Like Noble, Arbo identifies the malaise we experience in a world without universal standards of human excellence. “There exists a Good for all human life,” he declares. There is such a thing as living up to or falling short of the glory humans are made for.
“A life that turns out well is made possible by acquiring virtue,” he writes, “and acquiring virtue is made possible for us by God.” Virtues are “the excellences of soul that we all can acquire to assist in striving toward and someday attaining that Good.”
Arbo believes human flourishing is impossible apart from the virtues. And the way to develop these excellencies of soul is through habitual practices—not alone but in community and through close friendships. Like Noble, he devotes space to all seven virtues.
Here’s how he describes prudence: “An excellence of practical judgment that draws upon and integrates intellectual faculties of reason, imagination, memory, desire, and volition. It aids in living well within reality. It can be squandered or accrued, abandoned or brought to maturity.”
What I appreciate most about Arbo’s contribution is how carefully he distinguishes the Christian version of these virtues from the various traditions—Aristotle, or the Stoics, and so on. The Pursuit of Character is more academic than To Live Well, but it remains highly relevant and broadly accessible, with much food for thought and wisdom to consider. (A side note: A better editor might have strengthened this book, as there are a couple of lengthy digressions, and a large section of one paragraph gets repeated just a few pages later.)
Lanier and Montgomery: Every Perfect Gift
The third book is Every Perfect Gift: Classical Virtues for Christian Formation by Joseph Lanier and Travis Montgomery. These authors speak of virtues as “the design and destiny of humanity.” Their work is less for the uninitiated and more for the teacher, preacher, or scholar tasked with Christian formation. They advocate for the seven virtues as a time-tested paradigm for education and growth.
Like Arbo, Lanier and Montgomery differentiate between Paul’s vision of sanctification and that of Plato and Aristotle. They’re after “Christian formation from start to finish—God’s grace perfecting nature,” not self-justification.
But they go further. Mere habituation of the cardinal virtues is insufficient for Christian formation, they say. We must begin with the theological virtues. If we don’t, the classical virtues will get twisted into “splendid vices.”
That’s why Lanier and Montgomery arrange their book differently. Here, the Christian virtues don’t come as the capstone and climax; they’re the starting point. Faith comes first, “the habit of the soul in which we believe in God by grace and grow.” Next is hope, where “we expect God’s promise and endure in prayer.” Then, love: “We befriend God and then others for good.” They define prudence, the mother of virtues, as “well-ordered reason in well-ordered action. Prudence distinguishes according to the order of love so that one is empowered to be good and to act well in daily affairs.”
Rearranging the virtues so that faith, hope, and love come first is a structural choice that sets this book apart from the other two, yet there’s more agreement than disagreement when it comes to the substance of how these four scholars see virtue and Christian formation.
Christian formation needs the classical Christian virtues because they direct us to God himself and the works of God—chiefly, the design and destiny of humanity. As we order all our loves by him in the theological virtues, he lovingly puts our souls in order in the cardinal virtues. We have sought throughout this book to express an approach to Christian formation that is conformed to divine revelation and transformed by divine grace.
I’m thankful for these men and their contributions to such an important topic. Looking over the three books, I’d recommend Noble’s as the most accessible, Arbo’s as a step higher for a thoughtful reader who desires growth in virtue, and Lanier and Montgomery’s for practitioners of formation.
All three are excellent and relevant for this cultural moment, where perhaps more than ever, we need the church to be a beacon of virtue in a world of vice.
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