Working Out What God Works In
Throughout this year, the Octet Collaborative has used this essay space to explore the role of virtue in the life of the university, and in particular to explore how human flourishing within the university depends on the cultivation of all the virtues - intellectual and moral, as an integrated whole, in service to the university’s vocation of forming persons. We’ve had the opportunity to consider virtues including wisdom, humility, gratitude, and patience, as well as the vice of curiosity. In this final essay of the year, I want to sum up a few of the main takeaways we’ve uncovered about the nature of virtue. But first, I want to consider a seeming dilemma that may have occurred to some readers about the entire project of seeking virtue.
In Philippians 2:12-13, the apostle Paul writes,
“Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.”
For Christians who rightly understand salvation to be an act of God’s grace, this verse can give pause. “Work out your own salvation” seems to fly in the face of “by faith, through grace” alone - what is Paul talking about? And if this phrase seems to credit too active a role to the human being in the work of salvation, the end of the passage seems to swing in just the other direction: “it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” This appears to make the person almost entirely passive, with God alone the active agent. So which is it - active or passive? Neither? Somehow both at the same time?
The answer to this question has everything to do with the virtue tradition, which seeks the formation of the Christian to bear more fully the image of God in which she is made. A reader of this tradition may wonder - what is our role in developing virtue? Is it a gift of grace, or all our own work? And then, if virtue is understood as a stable disposition of character that enables us to respond the right way, for the right reason, as though by second nature, how active are we in practicing the virtues once we develop them?
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the resolution to this dilemma is to see that is is, in fact, a false one. To see this, we’ll make use of a tool that Andy Crouch puts to good use in his short but valuable book, Strong and Weak - a 2 x 2 grid.
Think of the false dilemma this way. It suggests that we have to choose between grace and good works, passivity and activity - we might say, between a sort of self-hatred and self-righteousness. In the former case, the prophet Isaiah’s statement that “all our righteousness is as filthy rags” seems to imply that we might as well give up on good works: the best we can do is admit our sinfulness and gratefully receive God’s forgiveness. In the latter, we infer from Jesus’ statements in the Sermon on the Mount that if the law is to be revered, not abolished, and that we really are expected to “be perfect” as our Father in Heaven is perfect, then we had better get to work pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps.
We can illustrate the dilemma with the following picture, depicting self-righteousness and self-hatred as opposite ends of a single spectrum, as though we have to choose between them:
How to resolve it? We can begin with a famous observation that Calvin made at the outset of his Institutes of Christian Religion - that all of our knowledge can be considered either knowledge of God or knowledge of self (and that the two have to work together!). What do the two poles of the dilemma say about God, and about ourselves?
On the left of the diagram, “Self-Righteousness,” we have a small God, relatively uninvolved in our salvation - the creator, perhaps, and the lawgiver, but one who expects human beings to do all the work of saving themselves by our own good works. The other end of the diagram, on the right, “Self-Hatred,” says just the opposite: God is a big savior, and our actions can only be evil.
The key insight is that what makes this a false dilemma is that it puts God and humanity into what Kathryn Tanner calls a competitive and contrastive relationship. It says that if God is a big savior, it must be that we have no role to play in doing anything genuinely good - or conversely, that if we do have a role to play, that role pushes God out of the role of savior altogether. The key mistake made here is that it treats God and humanity as actors within the same plane of salvation, effectively treating God as just another (very powerful) creature. But God is not a creature - God the creator is holy, transcendently other, and He and his creatures do no compete for causal space. What happens if we relax the assumption of the competitive relationship? We get a 2 x 2 grid, where God’s actions and ours aren’t required to vary inversely with one another. Something like this:
Now, instead of a line with two ends, we have four quadrants, and they provide a richer account of what is on offer (and what can be missed) according to the gospel. The false choice still shows up along the diagonal running from the upper left to the lower right, connecting the quadrants corresponding to self-hatred and self-righteousness. There is also a quadrant in the lower left, where God is small and we can only do evil: this leads nowhere but despair because there simply is no salvation. But the quadrant in the upper right now captures the spirit of the New Testament, in which God is a big savior, and his salvation includes our sanctification, equipping us for truly good works that he prepared beforehand (Ephesians 2:8-10). This is where hope and assurance live - and it is where virtue becomes possible.
As Rebecca DeYoung points out in her book on virtue and vice, Glittering Vices, this is exactly the dynamic that we see at work in these words from 2 Peter 1:3-8:
“His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, 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, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
This is the resolution of the false dilemma. Peter would have use believe not only that God as savior and the goodness of our actions can be compatible, but that in fact it is precisely because “His divine power has granted to us all things…” that, “for this very reason,” we ought to “make every effort to supplement [our] faith with virtue…” This is always the way of hope: the better we know the steadfast love and almighty power of God, the more we are free to be who we were made to be, living lives reflective of the humanity of Christ, obedient to the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit.
So then — what are the key takeaways we’ve seen in exploring virtue this year? Let’s consider three.
1. Virtue has a trajectory
Virtues, Jennifer Herdt writes, “are stable dispositions that enable an agent to respond and act well.” To be disposed is naturally to be disposed toward something - and end or a goal. This is why we talk about virtues being teleological in nature. It is what distinguishes virtue from skill: skills can be used for good or bad ends, but virtues are always oriented toward the good. There is no such thing as an excess of virtue; one cannot be too courageous or wise.
This, as we saw earlier this year, is what marks the difference between curiosity and studiousness. Counterintuitive as it sounds in our day and age, curiosity - a desire for knowledge for the sake of knowledge, for no other purpose - was considered to be a vice. Studiousness, on the other hand, desires knowledge ordered to the end of deeper relationship with the God of all truth, knowledge that thinks his thoughts after him and equips the knower to love God and neighbor more effectively.
What is it that gives us our end? The virtue tradition points to the ordering of our loves, with God appropriate occupying the top spot in the hierarchy, and all other created gifts being ordered to him as the giver. Augustine writes,
“The person who lives a just and holy life is one who is… a person who has ordered his love, so that he does not love what it is wrong to love, or fail to love what should be loved, or love too much what should be loved less (or love too little what should be loved more), or love two things equally if one of them should be loved either less or more than the other, or love things either more or less if they should be loved equally.” (On Christian Doctrine, 21)
And in one of his most famous writings, he compares love to the weight of an object, moving it to its proper end:
“In your gift we find our rest. There are you our joy. Our rest is our peace. … A body by its weight tends to move towards its proper place. The weight’s movement is not necessarily downward, but to its appropriate position: fire tends to move upwards, a stone downwards. … Things which are not in their intended position are restless. Once they are in their ordered position, they are at rest. My weight is my love. Wherever I am carried, my love is carrying me. By your gift we are set on fire and carried upwards.” (Confessions, 278-279)
Virtue is, first and foremost, an expression of this movement of love. But for Christians, virtue and love are both more than mere emotion, even affection: they permeate all aspects of our lives, from our desire and imagination to the actions we take in the world and among our neighbors, every days. And this brings us to our second takeaway.
2. Virtue is concrete
Virtue is not something which an individual simply has in an abstract sense; it necessarily finds its expression in concrete practices, actions, responses. The wise person is simply the person who acts wisely in situations that call for wisdom. There is no part of our lives, no any part of our selves - mind, strength, heart, and soul - that is untouched by virtue.
Jesus made very clear this connection between inner and outer, often drawing on the image of a tree and the fruit that it produces (Matthew 7:17-19; Matthew 12:33-35). It is from images like this that the virtue tradition speaks of virtue operating “like second nature.” The virtuous person is the one whose character has developed to generate the right response, in the right way and the right reason, as if by instinct. Our culture, largely through its unconscious debts to Immanuel Kant, tends to think that it is more admirable to do the right thing that we don’t want to do by sheer force of will, gritting our teeth and doing our duty. But for the virtue tradition, the whole point is to become the sort of person who desires to do the right thing, and for whom it actually becomes a delight.
William Cowper’s poem “Love Constraining to Obedience” captures this well:
No strength of nature can suffice
To serve the Lord aright:
And what she has she misapplies,
For want of clearer light.
How long beneath the Law I lay
In bondage and distress;
I toiled the precept to obey,
But toiled without success.
Then, to abstain from outward sin
Was more than I could do;
Now, if I feel its power within,
I feel I hate it too.
Then all my servile works were done
A righteousness to raise;
Now, freely chosen in the Son,
I freely choose His ways.
‘What shall I do,’ was then the word,
‘That I may worthier grow?’
‘What shall I render to the Lord?’
Is my inquiry now.
To see the law by Christ fulfilled
And hear His pardoning voice,
Changes a slave into a child,
And duty into choice.
3. Virtue is communal
The virtue tradition typically locates virtue in the individual - persons are virtuous, or they are not. But the development of virtue requires community (and this is what we have in mind when we refer to a virtuous society: one that is ordered toward developing virtue in its members). We learn virtue by imitating the virtuous. We are sustained in enduring the trials necessary to developing virtue by others devoted to the same project in us and in themselves. Simply put, no one develops in virtue alone; we need exemplars and fellow-travelers along the way.
What society can promote virtue? Christians, of course, look first to the Church, and rightly so. It is the Church that has received the gift of the Holy Spirit, through whom God’s love is poured into our hearts, moving us toward virtue in our pursuit of deeper union with him, by means of such ordinary things as his word, his sacraments, and prayer. It is in the context of the body of Christ that we behold Christ, and in so doing “are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.” (2 Corinthians 3:18) But even within the Church, we are called to look beyond ourselves - to “seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” (Jeremiah 29:7) Thomas Aquinas was of the opinion that even a city not centered on love of God could nonetheless be ordered to secondary, but nonetheless truly good, civil virtues. These would include justice, peace, civil discourse, hospitality, wisdom, awe, wonder, beauty - many of the very things that the Octet Collaborative seeks to promote within the MIT community and, through MIT, around the world. As Christians, we recognize all of these as gifts from God, and not only hope but actively seek to bring it about that all who pursue them will see beyond them to the one who has given them all. In the meantime, we consider it our calling and our great privilege to contribute to the development of MIT as a community that can promote virtue in all its members - students, faculty, staff, and alumni across the globe.
We are grateful to God and for the generosity of many, many partners who have made this work possible in the four years since Octet launched, and look with joy and anticipation to what’s yet to come.
