Virtue and Character

Galatians is an angry letter. Paul's converts in the Roman province of Galatia, in what is now central Turkey, had been told by other teachers that Gentile believers must be circumcised and keep the law of Moses to belong fully to God's people. Paul answers that they have been justified by faith in Christ, that they received the Spirit by hearing with faith rather than by works of the law (Galatians 3:2), and that to go back to the law as the ground of their standing would be to fall from grace. The obvious objection follows: if believers are not under the law, what will stop them living however they like? Chapter 5 is Paul's answer, and the fruit of the Spirit is at the centre of it.

Paul begins by refusing the false choice. 'For you, brothers, were called to freedom; but do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh. Rather, serve one another in love' (5:13). Then he names the real battle: not law against lawlessness, but flesh against Spirit. 'So I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh' (5:16). Flesh, sarx, in Paul's use here does not mean the body; it means human life organised around itself and its own cravings, apart from God. Then come the two lists. 'The acts of the flesh are obvious', and the list runs through sexual sin, idolatry and sorcery, then a long run of community-wrecking sins: 'hatred, discord, jealousy, and rage; rivalries, divisions, factions, and envy' (5:20-21), then drunkenness and its companions. Against these stands a single fruit with nine aspects.

The difference in grammar is the difference in theology. The acts of the flesh, in Greek erga, works, are plural: separate deeds, each committed on its own, a list that could go on, as Paul's 'and the like' admits. The fruit, karpos, is singular. It is one harvest, grown from one life, and it belongs to the Spirit. A fruit tree does not make its fruit by trying; it bears fruit because of what it is and where it is planted, which is why Jesus says, 'Remain in Me, and I will remain in you. Just as no branch can bear fruit by itself unless it remains in the vine, neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in Me' (John 15:4). And Paul adds the sentence that answers the Galatians' anxiety: 'Against such things there is no law' (5:23). No law forbids love or patience, and no law can manufacture them. The Spirit produces what the law commands.

Notice what is first and what is distinctive. Love heads the list, as it heads Paul's account of what matters most in 1 Corinthians 13:13 and as it summed up the law in Galatians 5:14. The list looks partly like the virtue lists of Greek moral philosophy, which Paul's readers would have recognised, but its centre of gravity is different. Classical lists prized wisdom, courage, moderation and justice, the qualities of a free man fit to rule. Paul's list prizes patience, kindness, gentleness and faithfulness, the qualities of a servant who bears with others. Elsewhere he adds humility (Colossians 3:12), a word that in classical Greek usually described the mean-spirited or the low-born and was rarely praised. Jesus, who called himself 'gentle and humble in heart' (Matthew 11:29), had changed the meaning of greatness, and the fruit of the Spirit is his character growing in his people.

Then Paul gives the two sides of the Christian's part. 'Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires' (5:24), which describes something already done in union with Christ. And 'Since we live by the Spirit, let us walk in step with the Spirit' (5:25), which describes something to be done daily. The verb stoicheo is to keep in line, to walk in rank. The Spirit gives the life and sets the pace, and the believer keeps step. The next verse brings it back to the quarrelling Galatians: 'Let us not become conceited, provoking and envying one another' (5:26). Character, for Paul, is never a private achievement. It is what a church looks like when the Spirit is at work in it.

Alongside the biblical lists, the church has taught for most of its history a framework of seven principal virtues, and a student should know it because so much Christian moral writing assumes it. Four are called the cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance. They come from Greek philosophy, where Plato in the Republic (book 4) described the good city and the good soul by wisdom, courage, moderation and justice. They passed into Jewish writing too: the Wisdom of Solomon, a book from the period between the Testaments that Catholic and Orthodox Christians include in the Old Testament and Protestants place among the Apocrypha, names self-control, prudence, justice and courage as the things wisdom teaches (Wisdom 8:7). The name cardinal, from the Latin cardo, a hinge, is usually traced to Ambrose of Milan in the fourth century: these are the virtues on which the moral life turns.

Each is worth defining exactly. Prudence, in the old sense, is not caution but practical wisdom, Aristotle's phronesis: the ability to see what a situation actually requires and to choose well within it. It came to be called the charioteer of the virtues, auriga virtutum, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church still calls it (paragraph 1806), and Aquinas held that none of the moral virtues can exist without it, because without it the others do not know where to go. Justice is the settled will to give each person what is due to them, to God, to neighbour and to the community. Fortitude, or courage, is steadiness in the face of danger and difficulty, including the long endurance that refuses to give up doing right. Temperance is the right ordering of desire and pleasure, so that appetites for food, drink, comfort, money and sex serve a person rather than ruling him. Notice how directly each bears on moral questions in your setting: prudence on how to answer a bribe-seeking official without either lying or needlessly endangering your family, justice on the wage you pay your worker, fortitude on refusing to join an ethnic grievance, temperance on drink and on money.

The other three are the theological virtues: faith, hope and love, which Paul names together in 1 Corinthians 13:13 and 1 Thessalonians 1:3. They are called theological because their object is God himself and because, in the classic account, they are given by God rather than acquired by practice. Augustine, in book 19 of the City of God, argued that the virtues of those who do not refer their lives to God are, for all their appearance, more truly vices than virtues, because they are ordered to the wrong end, to human glory rather than to God. Aquinas, in the Summa, took a more generous line towards acquired natural virtue, while holding that only the infused virtues of faith, hope and charity, together with infused moral virtues given with them, direct a person to eternal life. He called charity the form of all the virtues (II-II, question 23, article 8), meaning that love for God is what gives every other virtue its final shape and direction.

There is an older list of vices too. Evagrius of Pontus, a monk of the Egyptian desert in the late fourth century, described eight evil thoughts that trouble the soul; John Cassian carried the scheme to the West; and Gregory the Great, in his Moralia on Job around the end of the sixth century, arranged them as seven capital vices with pride at their root: vainglory, envy, anger, sloth or sadness, avarice, gluttony and lust. These became known as the seven deadly sins. Capital means head: these are the vices from which others spring. Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung's Glittering Vices (2009) is an accessible modern study. The value of the list is diagnostic. A pastor who meets a church fight over money is usually looking at avarice and envy, not a misunderstanding about accounting.

It is worth saying plainly how the biblical lists and the classical framework relate, because Christians disagree. Many Catholic and Orthodox writers, and some Protestants, see the cardinal virtues as natural goods that grace heals and raises, so that the framework is a true description of human excellence which scripture deepens. Many Protestant writers prefer to work from the biblical lists alone, fearing that the classical framework imports a picture of the good life that is too self-sufficient. Both agree that the fruit of the Spirit and the theological virtues cannot be produced by human effort alone, and that love governs everything.

The great insight of the virtue tradition is that character is formed by repeated action. Aristotle argued in the second book of the Nicomachean Ethics that the moral virtues are not given by nature but acquired by practice, as a person becomes a builder by building and a harpist by playing the harp: we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts. The word for the resulting settled state was hexis in Greek, habitus in Latin, from which English gets habit. A habit in this sense is not a mindless routine. It is a stable readiness to act in a certain way, so that what was once hard becomes, in a sense, second nature.

Scripture uses the same pattern, and the same vocabulary. Paul tells Timothy to 'train yourself for godliness', using the verb gymnazo, from which English gets gymnasium, and he adds that physical training is of limited value but godliness 'is valuable in every way' (1 Timothy 4:7-8). Hebrews 5:14, which the next lesson will study, says the mature have their senses trained by constant use, and the word for constant use is hexis itself. Romans 5:3-4 describes suffering producing perseverance, and perseverance producing character, dokime, the quality of something that has been tested and proved. And Paul quotes a line usually traced to the Greek playwright Menander to warn the Corinthians that bad company corrupts good character (1 Corinthians 15:33): habits are formed among people, for good or ill.

This is why the church has always given its people practices, and why Protestant writers have recovered the language in recent decades. Richard Foster's Celebration of Discipline (1978) and Dallas Willard's The Spirit of the Disciplines (1988) argued that prayer, fasting, solitude, study, service, confession and worship are not ways of earning God's favour but means by which a person places himself where the Spirit can form him. Willard's illustration was the athlete: no one can play a great game simply by trying hard on the day; he must train in ways that make the game possible. The philosopher James K. A. Smith, in You Are What You Love (2016), pressed a further point: the practices that shape us most are not the ones we choose in private but the repeated rituals of a culture, the market, the screen and the shopping centre as well as the church, which train our desires before we have thought about them.

Habits run in both directions, and in many settings the most powerful moral formation is towards vice. A young civil servant who accepts a small payment to speed a file through, and then another, will within a few years find that he no longer notices he is doing it. A pastor who flatters a wealthy member once will find it easier the second time. A congregation that tells ethnic jokes about another tribe is training its children in contempt long before any of them faces a decision about violence. The virtue tradition explains why corruption is so hard to uproot: it is not mainly a series of bad decisions but a set of habits, sustained by a community, that make the bad decision feel normal. The remedy has to be at the same level: new habits, sustained by a different community.

Two cautions keep this teaching honest. First, a habit can be good without being Christian virtue, if it is done for the wrong reason; Jesus warns against practising righteousness to be seen by others (Matthew 6:1). The aim is not to become a person who does the right things, but a person who loves God and neighbour and therefore does them. Second, the Spirit is not bound by habit. People are sometimes changed suddenly, as Zacchaeus was (Luke 19:8), and the gospel has always included the claim that the worst of habits can be broken by grace. Habit describes how God usually works, not the limit of what he can do.

There is a serious objection to everything in the last two sections, and it comes from the heart of the Reformation. In September 1517, some weeks before he posted the Ninety-five Theses, Martin Luther wrote a Disputation against Scholastic Theology in which he attacked the place Aristotle's ethics had come to hold in the theology of the universities. He called almost the whole of Aristotle's Ethics the worst enemy of grace, and he denied that a person becomes righteous by doing righteous deeds; rather, he said, a person who has been made righteous does righteous deeds. His target was precisely the principle of section 3: we become just by doing just acts. If that principle governs the relation between a person and God, Luther argued, the gospel has been turned into a programme of self-improvement, and justification by faith has been lost.

The worry deserves to be stated at full strength, because it is not merely historical. A church that teaches virtue and character without teaching grace will produce two kinds of members: the proud, who believe their discipline has made them better than others, and the despairing, who have tried and failed and conclude that God has given up on them. Moralism is a constant danger in preaching, and the language of virtue can make it sound respectable. Many Lutheran theologians in particular remain wary of virtue ethics for this reason, holding that the Christian life is better described as a daily return to baptism, dying and rising with Christ, than as a gradual ascent of character.

The replies come from several directions, and each takes the worry seriously. Aquinas, though he was not the main target of the 1517 disputation, which was aimed chiefly at Gabriel Biel and the late medieval school behind him, held that the virtues which direct a person to God are infused by grace, not acquired by effort, and that no one can merit the first grace of justification. Calvin, who agreed with Luther on justification, devoted much of the third book of the Institutes to sanctification, the real transformation of the believer through union with Christ and the work of the Spirit, and insisted that justification and sanctification can be distinguished but never separated. John Wesley taught that the Spirit's work aims at holiness of heart and life, and that growth in love is the normal path of the Christian. Orthodox theology speaks of synergy, the cooperation of human freedom with divine grace in the long process of theosis, and finds in that no threat to grace because the whole process is God's gift. And N. T. Wright, in After You Believe (2010, published in Britain as Virtue Reborn), argued that the New Testament itself teaches a transformed character as the Spirit's work, a second nature formed in the believer, and that Protestants who fear this have misread Paul.

Underneath these replies is a shared point, and it is one Luther would have accepted. The order matters. Grace comes first: the believer is accepted by God in Christ, freely, before any change in character. Then, and because of that, the Spirit begins to change him, and he cooperates with the Spirit by practices that put him in the way of grace. Paul holds both together in one sentence: 'continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God who works in you to will and to act on behalf of His good purpose' (Philippians 2:12-13). Peter does the same. 'His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness' (2 Peter 1:3), and so, 'For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith virtue' (2 Peter 1:5). Many Lutherans answer in turn that they accept this order, and that their wariness is about where the believer's attention goes: talk of growth in character, however carefully framed, tends to turn the eyes from Christ to oneself, which is why they prefer to speak of the daily return to baptism. Where Christians still differ is on how much the believer contributes, whether merit has any place, and how far sanctification can progress in this life. Those differences are real and the traditions have argued them for five hundred years. What none of them teaches is that effort earns acceptance, or that grace makes effort unnecessary.

No one becomes good alone. Children learn honesty, or dishonesty, at home, long before they can reason about it. Apprentices learn a trade by watching a master, and Paul presents himself the same way: 'Join one another in following my example, brothers, and carefully observe those who walk according to the pattern we set for you' (Philippians 3:17). Titus is told that older women are to be teachers of good who 'can train the young women' (Titus 2:3-4). The writer to the Hebrews tells his readers to 'consider how to spur one another on to love and good deeds' and not to neglect meeting together (Hebrews 10:24-25). Character in the New Testament is formed inside a body of people who worship, eat, pray, correct and forgive together, as the first believers did when 'They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer' (Acts 2:42).

Many African students will recognise this immediately, and may find it more natural than Western readers do. The Kenyan theologian John Mbiti, in African Religions and Philosophy (1969), summarised the traditional African understanding of the person in a phrase that has become famous: I am, because we are. The Nguni saying umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, a person is a person through other persons, expresses the idea known as ubuntu, which Archbishop Desmond Tutu drew on throughout his work and in No Future Without Forgiveness (1999), his account of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. These traditions see what the individualism of much modern ethics missed: that a person's character is held and shaped by a community, and that a person cut off from others is not more free but less human.

In the West, the same insight came back into Christian ethics through the work already mentioned in lesson 2. Alasdair MacIntyre argued that virtues are learned in practices sustained by communities with shared traditions. Stanley Hauerwas argued that the church's first ethical task is to be a community of character, formed by the story of Jesus, whose common life shows the world what that story means. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who led an underground seminary for the Confessing Church at Finkenwalde, wrote Life Together (1939) out of that experience: a short and demanding book on how Christians live in community, with daily prayer, confession to one another, and the bearing of one another's burdens.

But communities form vices as well as virtues, and an honest lesson must say so. Romans 12:2 warns against being conformed to this world, and a church can conform its members to the worst habits of its society as easily as to the best. A community can teach its children that loyalty to the clan outranks truth, that a leader's wrongdoing must be hidden to protect the church's name, or that people of another tribe or class are not quite neighbours. Ubuntu at its best is a profound account of shared humanity; at its worst, any community ethic can become pressure to conform to a group's sin. The test is the same one Paul applied to the Galatians: is this community producing the fruit of the Spirit, or the acts of the flesh, and especially the discord, rivalries, factions and envy that break it apart? A church that wants to form good people must first be willing to examine what it is actually forming.

This lesson does not settle how much the church should seek to shape the wider society and how much it should simply be itself; Christians divide on that, and module 5 of this track sets out the positions. What all sides agree on is that a church which does not form its own members in Christlike character has nothing to offer anyone else.

Open your casebook to your working case and head a new page Character. So far you have asked what should be done. Now ask who must be formed.

First, write down the virtues your case requires. Use both lists from this lesson: the fruit of the Spirit and the cardinal virtues. Which of them would a person need in order to act well here? For each one, write a single line saying where in the situation it is needed: patience with whom, courage in front of what, temperance about which desire, justice towards which person.

Second, write down the vices your case tempts. Use the acts of the flesh from Galatians 5:19-21 and the seven capital vices. Be honest about which of them are at work in you, not only in others. Then write what habit, among the people involved, is keeping the problem in place: a practice repeated so often that it no longer feels like a choice.

Third, write one practice that would form the opposite habit, something a person or a church could do weekly rather than once. And last, think about who in your church community has the character this case needs, and write what that person does, describing the role or the pattern of life rather than writing a name. The capstone will ask you not only what should be done in your case, but who must become what for it to be done well, and what the church can do to help them.