Discernment, Part 8: The Theological Virtues in a Free Society
The Theological Virtues are three: Faith, Hope, and Charity. These are only available to Christian believers and serve as the glue that holds the fabric of a free society together. The Founders of our nation understood this, and it was for this reason that they penned the First Amendment of our Constitution. They knew that the free exercise and the spread of true religion was essential to the moral restraint of the citizenry and compassion toward the poor and the needy. In the words of James Madison, "We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all our political institutions upon our capacity to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God." Let's take a close look at the Christian Virtues.
FAITH is reasoned belief in things that cannot be known with absolute certainty. No one should believe in anything despite the evidence. Faith is not a blind, irrational leap, but a rational step in response to evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. In addition, faith is active, not passive. We lead a life of questions, engaged in a Socratic endeavor in search of truth. Instead of overwhelming us by dropping all knowledge of him at once into our heads, God hides himself and expects us to grow in our intellectual and spiritual capacities as we continue in search of him.
Our religious experience can be tested for its truthfulness. Paul addresses this in 1 Corinthians 15:17 when he claims that "if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile." Paul assumes that one's faith is anchored in a historical fact that can be tested. At the same time, our religious experience is itself a part of reasoned belief. Paul attests to this in Romans 8:16, "The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God." Faith is an issue of the whole soul, a mind permitting a heart to act in the world. Intellect must never be disconnected from passion, and passion must always influence intellect to act rationally.
HOPE is illuminated in the differences between the Greek story of Pandora and the notion of Christian transformation. The last thing that came out of Pandora's box was "hope." But the Greeks understood hope to be a vice, not a virtue. It is what the gods put in the box to keep people from killing themselves so the gods could keep being entertained and worshiped by them. In pagan Greek theology, hope was a cheat, a fraud, a torment because there really was nothing to hope for. It was Christianity that invented the fairy tale that always ends happily ever after.
Hope is based on reason but goes beyond reason. It promises that if you scratch the surface of the universe that maggots won't come out. As the culture becomes increasingly secular, fairy tales are disappearing. In a secular world, if someone is happy, we want them to "get real" rather than believe them. We almost expect people to invent problems in order to call them authentic. Hope is simply impossible without faith in Christ, and, because of this, hope is a uniquely Christian virtue. Except for Christianity, happiness is an illusion. On the other hand, in Christ, we will all live happily ever after.
CHARITY is seeing the other as an all knowing, all good, and all loving God does. In charity, we replicate the action of the members of the Trinity in their cycle of love. It is the end product of becoming ethically like the Divine. It is the ultimate incarnation of all of the other virtues moving winsomely and lovingly into the world to change it for the better. It looks at the Incarnate One as its model and seeks to build a culture of forgiveness not fear. It understands that the love of God is received as wrath by the sinner, because God loves on his terms not ours, yet it seeks with broken heart to reconcile the sinner to God, acting as his ambassador to the lost. It renounces worldly goals and devotes itself completely to healing the sick, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, rescuing the abused, comforting the grieving, and offering living hope to the dying.
Now consider a society within which these virtues are not free to operate. Could such a society be called free? Imagine a nation that did not trust true religion or believe in such a thing as religious knowledge, a nation that marginalized religion as a matter of personal opinion, myth, and folklore. Imagine a nation aggressively in pursuit of secularism, a society that recognized naturalistic science as the only source of truth and knowledge and human beings as nothing more than bundles of physical stuff instead of persons created in the image of God, as means to an end rather than ends in themselves.
Consider a government that rejected the notion that rights and liberty were given by God and proceeded to govern based on the belief that government, rather than protecting God given rights and liberty, was itself the source of rights and liberty, choosing which groups of persons were entitled to these rights and liberties and which were not. Suppose that finally such a government, eschewing all dependence on God and respect for his people, decided who was worthy to live and who to die.
As William Penn simply stated, "If we are not governed by God, then we will be ruled by tyrants." A nation governed by God in the hearts of people is exactly what our Founders had envisioned. May God once again revive our nation through the intelligent and passionate claims of his people in the public square. May the Church, the family, and the government reoccupy their legitimate spheres in our society. May the virtues once again be formed in our souls.
FAITH is reasoned belief in things that cannot be known with absolute certainty. No one should believe in anything despite the evidence. Faith is not a blind, irrational leap, but a rational step in response to evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. In addition, faith is active, not passive. We lead a life of questions, engaged in a Socratic endeavor in search of truth. Instead of overwhelming us by dropping all knowledge of him at once into our heads, God hides himself and expects us to grow in our intellectual and spiritual capacities as we continue in search of him.
Our religious experience can be tested for its truthfulness. Paul addresses this in 1 Corinthians 15:17 when he claims that "if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile." Paul assumes that one's faith is anchored in a historical fact that can be tested. At the same time, our religious experience is itself a part of reasoned belief. Paul attests to this in Romans 8:16, "The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God." Faith is an issue of the whole soul, a mind permitting a heart to act in the world. Intellect must never be disconnected from passion, and passion must always influence intellect to act rationally.
HOPE is illuminated in the differences between the Greek story of Pandora and the notion of Christian transformation. The last thing that came out of Pandora's box was "hope." But the Greeks understood hope to be a vice, not a virtue. It is what the gods put in the box to keep people from killing themselves so the gods could keep being entertained and worshiped by them. In pagan Greek theology, hope was a cheat, a fraud, a torment because there really was nothing to hope for. It was Christianity that invented the fairy tale that always ends happily ever after.
Hope is based on reason but goes beyond reason. It promises that if you scratch the surface of the universe that maggots won't come out. As the culture becomes increasingly secular, fairy tales are disappearing. In a secular world, if someone is happy, we want them to "get real" rather than believe them. We almost expect people to invent problems in order to call them authentic. Hope is simply impossible without faith in Christ, and, because of this, hope is a uniquely Christian virtue. Except for Christianity, happiness is an illusion. On the other hand, in Christ, we will all live happily ever after.
CHARITY is seeing the other as an all knowing, all good, and all loving God does. In charity, we replicate the action of the members of the Trinity in their cycle of love. It is the end product of becoming ethically like the Divine. It is the ultimate incarnation of all of the other virtues moving winsomely and lovingly into the world to change it for the better. It looks at the Incarnate One as its model and seeks to build a culture of forgiveness not fear. It understands that the love of God is received as wrath by the sinner, because God loves on his terms not ours, yet it seeks with broken heart to reconcile the sinner to God, acting as his ambassador to the lost. It renounces worldly goals and devotes itself completely to healing the sick, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, rescuing the abused, comforting the grieving, and offering living hope to the dying.
Now consider a society within which these virtues are not free to operate. Could such a society be called free? Imagine a nation that did not trust true religion or believe in such a thing as religious knowledge, a nation that marginalized religion as a matter of personal opinion, myth, and folklore. Imagine a nation aggressively in pursuit of secularism, a society that recognized naturalistic science as the only source of truth and knowledge and human beings as nothing more than bundles of physical stuff instead of persons created in the image of God, as means to an end rather than ends in themselves.
Consider a government that rejected the notion that rights and liberty were given by God and proceeded to govern based on the belief that government, rather than protecting God given rights and liberty, was itself the source of rights and liberty, choosing which groups of persons were entitled to these rights and liberties and which were not. Suppose that finally such a government, eschewing all dependence on God and respect for his people, decided who was worthy to live and who to die.
As William Penn simply stated, "If we are not governed by God, then we will be ruled by tyrants." A nation governed by God in the hearts of people is exactly what our Founders had envisioned. May God once again revive our nation through the intelligent and passionate claims of his people in the public square. May the Church, the family, and the government reoccupy their legitimate spheres in our society. May the virtues once again be formed in our souls.
My thanks to Dr. John Mark Reynolds at Biola University whose lectures in the summer of 2006 had a substantial influence on the content of this essay.
Blessings,
Arnie Gentile
Visit the Christian Apologetics Bookshop.
Posted by Arnie Gentile at 4/4/2010 8:12 PM 
Categories: Cultural Apologetics
Tags: virtue Christian Apologetics ethics Christianity. faith Constitution Church secularism charity hope
Categories: Cultural Apologetics
Tags: virtue Christian Apologetics ethics Christianity. faith Constitution Church secularism charity hope
Thanks for the nice thoughts. Good quote from Penn--I'll remember that one. Appreciate it.
Pastor Adam Barton
Akron, Ohio
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The fuller discussion of Pandora's Box was fascinating - thank you.
Your statement "God hides himself and expects us to grow in our intellectual and spiritual capacities as we continue in search of him" troubles me as a stand-alone assertion. It does not fully represent the situation (any more than the tail or the trunk totally represent the essence of the elephant). Psalm 8 comes to mind first, but the whole testimony of scripture, the law, the prophets, and the very INCARNATION do not support the idea that God is engaged in cosmic peek-a-boo or hide-and-seek. God WITH us is the heart of the Christian message!
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Perhaps I could have said it better, but my intent was to capture the notion illustrated in the fact that Moses had to climb a mountain just to catch a glimpse of God's hind parts. Even the Incarnation is both a revelation and a concealment of God. Psalm 8 argues that God cares about us, but does not really address the issue of God's revelatory process. Many psalms complain greatly about God's distance and hiddenness and our inability to fully grasp him. And God seems to be intentionally distancing and/or hiding himself in these moments in order to test our faith and to enable us to build bigger spiritual muscles as we groan after him and thereby grow in our knowledge of him. He is not playing hide and seek...he is dead serious about it. Not until his return will we "see him as he is" 1 John 3:2. And "Everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure" (1 John 3:3), that is, the more we submit to the disciplines necessary to draw closer to him and learn of him in this life, the more we will already be like him when he appears. In this life, we move from glory to glory in response to his tranforming work and in pursuit of greater depth of relationship (2 Cor 3:18).
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