Virtue Ethics

Introduction

Now I need to unpack this virtue-ethics idea just a little bit more before we turn to the Sermon on the Mount itself. Virtue ethics teaches that in making moral decisions, what we do is, we don’t think about the consequences initially, and we don’t think about the principles necessarily in the first instance, but we consider what a virtuous person would do, consider their virtues, and ask what behaviors such a person would typically exemplify. So we make ethical judgments on the basis of concrete virtue judgments rather than abstract principles such as “maximize the good” or “never treat another person meanly,” etc.

Renaissance of Virtue Ethics

Who Should We Become?

Virtue ethics is the approach that asks, who should we become? It is concerned with these basic questions, these three basic questions: who are we, who ought we to become, and then how do we get there? In other words, again, it focuses on the moral agent and a way of being in the world. A virtues approach deals with the disposition to act in certain ways and to do so reliably—or what we might say, characteristically—over time.

One theologian, Stephen Fowl, says that virtues are those “habits of seeing, feeling, thinking, and acting that, when exercised in the right ways and at the right times, will enhance one’s prospects of both recognizing, moving toward, and attaining one’s proper end.” Virtue ethics understands the old adage actio sequitur esse, “action follows essence.” The point of all this is that it really, again, focuses on the person, the character, the moral agent themselves—and we’re going to have some qualifications to this, but it focuses on the moral agent themselves and their way of being in the world.

Reacting against Kant’s Abstract Ethical Principles

Now I’ve said that most of Christian ethics—and most ethics today—really does focus instead in a deontological world, and the return of virtue ethics in the modern period comes in fact from a dissatisfaction with this dominantly deontological view, and especially the limited role of emotion in ethics that is felt when people look at Kant, Immanuel Kant—his view of ethics. For Kant, emotions are at best instrumentally significant, in that they make us maybe more willing to do the duty we should. Maybe we might be a little bit more cheerful, but that’s far as they go. Also, many are dissatisfied with making ethics about abstract principles, which Kant does as well, because in practice they’re often very difficult to apply. In other words, if you come up with a bunch of ethical principles, you’ll see that it’s really difficult to apply them to other situations that aren’t specific to those principles.

Alasdair MacIntyre

In fact, there’s been really quite a renaissance in a virtue-ethics approach in the last 25 or 30 years. One of the main Christian philosophers—and one of the philosophers that really helped kick-start this renaissance and return to virtue ethics—was a man called Alasdair MacIntyre, in his famous book After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. In the 25, 30 years since then, there’s been a huge renaissance, a huge development of a virtue-ethics approach, that you find is really on the rise.

Again, Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue—he begins this book, in his second edition, with a science fiction scenario in which a cultural catastrophe has occurred such that the institutions supporting science are destroyed and all scientific knowledge is not passed on to subsequent generations except in piecemeal ways. It’s a sort of illustration that he begins with. Eventually, even the catastrophe itself, then—and his science fiction scenario—is forgotten, and no one understands that what bits of science they yet possess lack integrity and depth.

So in other words, the catastrophe itself is forgotten, and the compass—or the network of where all this technology and scientific knowledge came from is forgotten, and all you have now is these fractured notions of science and technology that people naturally try to fit together, but it’s not even in a coherent system, because the basis has been lost. MacIntyre gives this sort of scientific vision—this science-fiction, future-dystopia vision. It’s really disquieting. He gives us an analogy or an allegory of where we find ourselves in our modern, moral understanding. We as individuals have these notions (and you can see this in society) of what’s right and wrong—we have traditions, certain things that are said to be right and wrong—but we no longer have any kind of metanarrative. We no longer have any kind of basis or network to understand why these things are right and why these things are wrong. If you can think about modern society, that’s very much true. It’s lost its Judaeo-Christian understanding, yet there are still these vestiges of things that are supposed to be right and wrong, but no one understands why. You see this happen in political debate a lot.

The alternative that MacIntyre and others are offering to a Kantian approach is to develop a theory that focuses instead on these principles that Kant does, but on virtue evaluation—on evaluating the agent, not merely the agent’s actions. Again, for virtue ethics the claim is that the evaluation of what is virtuous according to the agent has primacy. There are normative concepts that define virtue, but the right action is primarily determined in terms of the virtue of the person performing, characteristically, the right kind of action.

Ancient Roots of Virtue Ethics

Virtue ethics, you see, is not—I’ve called it a renaissance, but it’s actually thousands of years old. It finds its apex, really, in ancient Greek philosophy, in none other than the great philosopher Aristotle, who lived in the fourth century BC—particularly in his very famous book that’s still read and translated regularly today, his Nicomachean Ethics. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle sets out and spells out for his son—that sounds similar to Proverbs and the Wisdom literature, and we’ll make that connection later—he sets out to his son the steps toward a good life or, what we often now say in philosophy and ethics, to human flourishing. The good life, or human flourishing, is the life that is the result of moral living, prudential or wise living, and intellectually good living, all together.

Eudaimonia

In Aristotle’s account of virtue, virtue is seen as a quality, a way of being in the world that leads to this key Greek word, eudaimonia, which means, again, something like human well-being or flourishing. For us, a lot of times we again only think of ethics in the sense of the right or wrong thing to do. But in the ancient Greek tradition—and I’ll just tip my hand already and say, I think the Bible has the exact same notion, with some qualifications—the idea of ethics is not, what’s the right or wrong thing to do? The question really ultimately is, what is the “human flourishing” existence? What does human flourishing look like? What is the good life? Now, “good life” is a phrase that has been too co-opted by the American sort of capitalistic dream, so it’s better to talk about human flourishing. But the big question, and—really of every religion, of every philosophy, is, what does it mean to live a good life? Aristotle’s answer is that you can be morally virtuous or viceful; you can be intellectually virtuous and viceful; but that the way toward the good life is to learn over time to live virtuously. Ethics are about an end goal toward human flourishing.

Phronēsis

Practical wisdom—phronēsis is the Greek word that Aristotle reemphasizes is the goal of what it means to be virtuous. You learn to practice over time, in a case-by-case basis, what is the wise thing to do, and that will result in eudaimonia, or human flourishing. The implication for this, as developed by Aristotle, is that you actually can’t do good by accident or just by intuition. That would not be truly virtuous, because virtue comes from deliberately learning over time how to practice out wisdom or practice out virtue. You learn to desire what is good by doing good, and then you learn to train your reason to do good over practice.

For Aristotle, the idea is that the virtuous person is one who is harmoniously whole, their reasoning trained over time. Their emotions and affections—which is the opposite of Kant’s view—are part of it, and their actions are all consistent, or teleios, or whole. So you can’t accidentally be virtuous. It’s a training of your reasoning, your heart, and your actions.

Those things all together will result in phronēsis, practical wisdom that results as the end product of the eudaimonia, the flourishing life. Aristotle taught that a virtuous person is one who exhibits this harmonious psychological whole-person functioning, both desiring and judging. The parts of the soul need to be in harmony. If you do not have a wholeness about you, it is not virtuous.

Conclusion

Now I hope you can already begin to see that this is going to be really a helpful concept as you think about not only the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount but really, all of biblical ethics, and we’ll come back to that in the next one.

Virtue Ethics in the Bible

So I gave a little bit fuller explanation about what a virtue-ethics approach is, talking about Aristotle. Now I want to press into that and just suggest to you—and then make it a stronger argument in a moment here—that there are a lot of hints that the Sermon on the Mount is actually trafficking in the same worldview, the same way of thinking about ethics [as] Aristotle, as I’ve just described, and what we would now describe as a virtue-ethics approach.

Now I could actually talk about the OT ethics as well, and I think I could make a lot of the same arguments there. The whole idea of—just one little hint of that, the whole idea of holiness: I would suggest to you we have come to think of that in the sense of personal piety and—not sinfulness, but I would suggest to you that the root idea of holiness really relates to wholeness as well, even in the OT. But that’s for a further discussion, and we could point you to some resources along those lines.

Hints of Virtue Ethics in the Sermon on the Mount

What I want to do is talk just in general ways (and then, of course, when we’re expositing the Sermon itself, I’ll point this out as well), but I want to just give you six hints that the Sermon on the Mount is to be read in that way and fits into this ancient, really Graeco-Roman—and more than Graeco-Roman, this ancient Greek and really, biblical Hebrew vision of virtue. And then in the next segment, I’ll give you some comparison, to say ways in which it’s not exactly the same as Aristotle’s view—the biblical view—but first to emphasize that I think it’s basically in the same category.

Emphasizing Internal Qualities

First hint that the Sermon on the Mount is a virtue-ethics approach is that the Sermon on the Mount, we’ll see, really puts a lot of emphasis on internal qualities rather than putting a lot of emphasis on certain principles of what are to be done. You think of the Beatitudes; you think of the Antitheses—so, the Beatitudes in the first part of the Sermon on the Mount; the Antitheses that really focus on, “You’ve heard it said this …” but then Jesus goes on to talk about the heart level of functioning of those ethics. The key metaphor that’s all throughout Matthew (including in the Sermon on the Mount), the idea of the good and evil tree that bear fruit—that emphasis on internal qualities (as you can see) of the moral agent is very different than the Kantian deontological view, and really, it fits very much in the virtue-ethics view.

Aiming for Ideals

Second hint is that the Sermon on the Mount really aims for ideals. There [is] strong, high language in the Beatitudes and all the way through. Matthew 5:48, we’ll see, is really important in this: “Be teleios,” be whole. As we’ll see, it’s usually mistranslated as “perfect,” and we’ll talk about that when we get there, but “Be teleios”—be whole—“as your heavenly Father is whole.” “Be more righteous than the scribes and Pharisees,” in Matt 5:17–21, and at the same time, Matthew recognizes—and Jesus recognizes—human limitations. But the point is, a virtue-ethics approach is one that is always painting a moral vision, painting a high ideal to be pursued, rather than focusing on, “Here’s the right thing to do. Here’s the wrong thing to do.”

Learning Virtue

A third hint that the Sermon on the Mount should be read in a virtue-ethics context is, there’s such a strong connection with learning virtue—that is, acting as the prudent person does, like Aristotle talks—with Jesus as the master, teacher, and guide. In other words, He knows them, and then He models the—He knows these virtues, and He models them Himself. He wants His disciples to share in all of His life. He is the ultimate example of a virtuous and prudent—or phronēsis—one. He is the model and the paradigm. This actually relates to stuff I’ve written about and taught other places as well, concerning the modeling aspect of the Gospels as biographies. Really specifically here, one of the things that comes out is that every one of the virtues that Jesus commends in the Beatitudes—and really, all of the Sermon on the Mount—you can find other places in Matthew, where Matthew very carefully shows that Jesus does those very things. Now that—you may say, “Well, hey. That’s just great”—but that exactly is the point. This ties into, very strongly, an Aristotelian virtue-ethics view that the way you learn virtue is through models. It’s by considering virtuous people and seeing what they do, and what that looks like in terms of virtue, and then learning to model after them, and applying it in your own situation. And the Gospels overall are all about that, and Matthew—particularly how the Sermon on the Mount works out [with] Jesus as a moral exemplar—is very strong in that as well. So that’s a third hint.

Effecting Virtue

A fourth hint is that we see how important the narrative is—and this relates to the third one—for affecting or effecting virtue. In other words, the Gospels, as Stanley Hauerwas says, are effective history. They’re not only to be read and heard. They actually transform us. And so the idea is that the way the Gospels read—and this is part of the power of narrative and story—the way the Gospels read is that they are intending to affect and transform us, and that very much fits into a virtue-ethics approach, rather than a set of principles (here are the right things to do; here are the wrong things to do).

Being the Right Kind of Person

A fifth thing is that the Sermon is concerned not only with doing, but of course being the right kind of person. And this is something we’re going to see—as we go through the Sermon—a lot is that there’s this strong emphasis on not just doing pious things, but having a heart that is the right kind of heart. This is such a dominant theme. You think of chapter 6 and the emphasis on what personal piety looks like in the areas of almsgiving, prayer, and fasting. Jesus doesn’t—He’s not emphasizing, “Do more spiritual things, be more spiritually disciplined.” He’s saying, “You Pharisees fast and pray and give a lot of alms, but your failure is that you’re not the right kind of person. You’re not doing it from the heart. You’re not emphasizing the character of the person. You’re emphasizing the actions, which is the beginning—and is the essence—of hypocrisy.”

Seeking Blessedness and Wholeness

And the sixth hint, then, is the whole idea of blessedness and wholeness, and this is something that I’ve been working on even very recently. Blessedness—that’s how the Sermon on the Mount begins: this makarios, this key idea that begins the macarisms, or the Beatitudes, and we’ll talk about this more when we get to the actual text. Blessedness and wholeness, I would suggest to you, are two key ideas throughout all the Sermon, and those two ideas are at the core of a virtue-ethics approach. That’s the point. The idea of—both of those words are frequent in Aristotle and the whole virtue-ethics tradition: the idea of blessedness, meaning, what does the human flourishing life look like? Right?—and also wholeness, the idea of being psychologically whole and a singular, harmonious person, not being disjointed. We’ll see that those are both key ideas in the Sermon, and I just want to tell you those are key ideas in the virtue-ethics tradition as well.

Conclusion

So the point is that—I would suggest to you it appears that the Sermon on the Mount, in fact, along with all biblical ethics, corresponds largely with this Aristotelian virtue-ethics view, with some caveats that I’ll give you in the next segment. That is, that it’s not just about a duty. It’s not just about the right or wrong things to do. It’s not just about principles to be done, but that God sees and cares about us being a certain kind of person. He cares about our disposition. He cares about us being motivated at the heart level about doing what’s right, and that—once you say it that way, I hope you can see that that’s consistent all throughout the Bible.

You think of the OT prophets. They never said, “Hey, God gave you this law. Don’t worry if you don’t do it from the heart, just make sure you obey it.” That’s not how the prophets say. What do the prophets say, all throughout the OT? They’re constantly saying, “Go back to God’s Word—His law, His instruction, His covenantal instruction—and don’t just obey it externally. Obey it from the heart, because God sees and cares about the heart. God sees and cares about your disposition. Who cares about your fasts and feasts, if you’re not actually doing heart work of compassion and compassionate justice toward others?”

And I want to suggest to you, that’s exactly what we’re going to see. There’s a huge continuity in the Sermon on the Mount between all this biblical ethics, that in another way actually corresponds and traffics in the very same language of a Greek, Aristotelian virtue-ethics approach.

Jesus and Aristotle: Comparisons

Focus on Character of the Moral Agent

So, I’ve been trying to set up and make an argument that the way to read the Sermon on the Mount—and really, all of biblical ethics—is to understand it in the same way that a virtue-ethics idea functions, both for Aristotle and for modern virtue ethicists today, and that is to focus on the character of the moral agent, to focus on us being a certain way in the world, to focus on our hearts and our consistency between our reasoning and our hearts and our actions—that that’s what God cares about, and always has. It’s amazing that that’s how other ancient people, like the Aristotelian tradition, also spoke and talked about virtue. But that raises the question, then—am I just saying that Jesus is Aristotelian, that He was just following Aristotle and got it from there?

Aristotle and Common Grace

Just so you know, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that the Aristotelian tradition is actually a common-grace refraction or manifestation of the true biblical understanding of ethics. And the big point for us is that it challenges us, especially if we hold to a sort of—knowing it or not—a deontological view. It really challenges us. I think this is a huge issue. So I think—of course Jesus is before Aristotle, in terms of eternity, and God’s vision is before Aristotle as well, but Aristotle, in common grace, understands this partially. But it is a partial understanding, and there are some key ways in which a Christian virtue-ethic understanding is different, in fact, from an Aristotelian one. I just want to point out several of these, and they’ll be, I think, very instructive, in this sense.

Jesus and Aristotle: Contrasts

Crucifixion versus Heroic Death

Aristotle, for example, would be repulsed, I think, by the crucifixion of Jesus and its centrality in Christianity. In fact, Aristotle would look down on this. For Aristotle, the virtuous man may certainly die as a hero, but the idea of the weakness and suffering and nakedness and shame of Jesus, and Christians reveling in that and focusing on that as much as the Christian tradition rightly has, would be completely anathema to Aristotle. That’s a significant difference.

Mercy versus Justice

Sort of related to that, the Aristotelian tradition—and Aristotle himself—would certainly look down on a virtue ethic that focuses on mercy, especially associating mercifulness with God, because for Aristotle, the greatest virtue is justice. That is something that some Christians would say is the greatest virtue as well, or some—particularly political Christians of a certain bent. But I would suggest to you that from a biblical ethics standpoint, the greatest virtue is love, and love for neighbor looks like mercy.

In fact, constitutive of the kingdom of God and Christian ethics is mercy and compassion toward others, because that’s the second greatest commandment—and really, the first greatest commandment when it comes to interpersonal relationships between humans. As Paul says, “Love one another, and thus fulfill the law of Christ.” It means it’s that central, in that sense. So there’s a pretty significant difference there, with Aristotle, in that he would not value mercy. He would think that’s a sign of weakness. He would value justice instead.

Universal versus Educated Elite

Another important way in which Jesus’ virtue—not maybe as weighty as that one, but in which His virtue approach would contrast with the typical Graeco-Roman one (especially the Roman Stoic version of virtue, which is what they hold to often as well) is that often in the Graeco-Roman tradition—and this is true of Aristotle as well—the whole idea of being a virtuous person, frankly, was something for educated men. It wasn’t really part of the peasant classes, the plebeian classes, or women or children.

Instead, the Graeco-Roman Aristotelian tradition is, you know, Aristotle saying, how do we make a great society? What does the good life look like? What does the human flourishing look like? Well, for the philosophers and the senators and the leaders of society, this is the end goal. They are the apex of society, and this is what their good life can look like.

And so of course a Christian virtue approach—and Jesus’ own teaching—is not going to have that kind of distinction, that kind of narrowness. It is a vision—it’s a moral vision for all people, and that’s a pretty significant difference as well: men and women, male and female, children, adults, etc.

Humility versus Strength

Another way in which the Christian ethical tradition, understood in a virtue way, contrasts with the Graeco-Roman virtue ethics, or general—several of these that are related are pointed out by the theologian Dan Treier, in his book Virtue and the Voice of God. He notes several ways, too, related to what I’m saying here also—that, for example, Christian ethics have a central focus on humility. This relates to the mercy sort of thing. But certainly, at the core of Christian ethics is a pervasive humility.

That’s not a Greek virtue. We tend to think of it as, yeah, everybody loves somebody who’s humble, but in the ancient world, humility was not valued. Strength, the justice, people fawning over you for your greatness—that’s what is seen as sort of the apex, in many ways, of the virtuous life, and that’s very, very different than the central focus on humility that not only Christianity teaches, but of course Jesus was the ultimate model of. He is the suffering servant. He is the one who is of no repute in the world’s eyes. He is an example of the bruised reed and the smoldering wick that the world would want to snuff out, that He is, in fact—revels in His weakness and His lambness, in that sense. So, the centrality of humility is a very significant difference. Different End Goals

Also, Christian ethics have a very different telos, or end goal, from Graeco-Roman virtue ethics. Again, Graeco-Roman virtue ethics are going to focus on the good life, generally, with the individual acting heroically in different circumstances. And of course I would say that Christianity also has a vision of the good life, certainly, and human flourishing, and we’ll come back to that in the Beatitudes. But the telos, or end goal, of phronēsis—of practical wisdom worked out—is, in fact, living in relationship with God and living in relationships of love and peace with others.

So again, it sounds like a small difference, but it ultimately is very significant that the Graeco-Roman tradition is going to say, “If you’re a virtuous person, the result is going to be your flourishing, and you’re sort of a hero of society, and you’ve arrived.” For Christianity the application of this is, “If you’re a virtuous person, you will live in communion with God in your brokenness and suffering, and in loving, peaceful relationships with others.” That’s a pretty significant difference, at the end of the day.

Animation by the Holy Spirit

Christian ethics also, Dan Treier points out, in contrast to Graeco-Roman ethics, are animated by the Holy Spirit. And you just think about what a great emphasis there is, in the NT, on the role of the Spirit in new covenant living and in growing in knowledge and wisdom. Just to start thinking about the text, this would be a worthwhile study to do: the connections between the words “knowledge” and “wisdom” and the Spirit’s work in the Epistles. I think you’ll find a lot of connection there. And that, in some ways, actually is partially in contrast to Torah.

I think there’s mostly continuity between OT ethics and NT ethics. But there is, we might say, kind of a ramping up of the internality of Jesus’ teachings and His virtue ethics that are given by and worked out in us by the power of the Spirit. That’s a lot more explicit and emphatic in the NT’s teaching, relative to the OT.

Scripture-Saturated versus Secular

Also, Christian ethics, in contrast to Graeco-Roman ethics, are Scripture-saturated and guided through a study of Scripture and learning the wisdom and will of God, where of course Aristotle is not going to emphasize that sort of religious element of it as we do.

Conclusion

So, those are just some of the ways. There are probably more. This is something that I’ve tried to ponder for a while. What are the differences? Once I came to sort of see how crucial a virtue-ethics approach—and how helpful, actually, Aristotle is for us reading … As you continue to wrestle with that, it’s important also to make note of these distinctions, because we don’t want to just sort of buy into a completely Nichomachean Ethics way and lose the Christian element of it. So, those are some of the ways. So to conclude this sort of virtue-ethics introduction: Before we go on to some other things, I just want to ask the question, how does this kind of virtue-ethics reading that I’m suggesting—that probably is still cogitating for you—how does that really affect our reading of the Bible, and really, our Christian living? Well, let me just give you a couple of brief points, and then we’ll sort of explore this more as we go through the actual text of the Sermon.