What’s the right way to act? What is good and just and worthwhile to pursue? What will give meaning to life? What will enable us to flourish? These are the questions of ethics.
One way to look at this is from the perspective of norms. Norms tell us what people ought to do. This includes things like, “obey the government”; “do not kill”; “honor God”; and so on.
Virtue ethics looks at ethics from the standpoint of the person. It looks at character and character traits or virtues should be present in people. These include wisdom, justice, love, patience, etc.
The question is, which of these characteristics deserve the most attention and the most focus? What characteristics are most important to human prosperity and functioning?
Elizabeth Agnew Cochran suggests that Protestants have a unique contribution to this discussion. Protestant theology teaches that human beings were created good but are now fallen into a state of sin and are guilty before God. Jesus is God’s solution to this problem. He is a substitutionary sacrifice for the human race. He suffers the punishment of sin on behalf of sinful humans, the just for the unjust. Because of Jesus, God offers grace and forgiveness to all as a gift to be received and accepted by faith. This faith takes hold of God’s gift for forgiveness and also transformation. This transformation manifests itself in love for God and our neighbor. Thus, the most important virtue is faith that works through a second virtue, love.
Cochran suggests that this Protestant framework provides a unique and compelling framework for virtue ethics. Here is her summation:
This Protestant ethic envisions virtuous character as embodied in faith. Faith discerns God’s benevolent oversight of the world, both in reflecting on God’s radical self-revelation in the incarnate Jesus Christ and in recognizing the ways in which God encounters individual human beings. Faith is fully embodied as this discernment is coupled with consent to God, an extended and dispositional stance of trust in God’s providential goodness and love for the created order. In turn, faith places us in a relationship with God that informs a more complete understanding of our own place in the universe, and as we feel and show gratitude and love for God, we simultaneously grow in love for our neighbors, recognizing that all created beings share a relation because of our common relation to God. This love guides and orders our understanding of the value of other possible goods so that we can determine when to embrace particular emotions and when to resist them (Cochran, Protestant Virtue and Stoic Ethics,, 195-196).
This summation demonstrates how a Protestant virtue ethic provides a perspective on character that is far-reaching. The “faith working through love” framework is not merely “religious,” it provides an all-encompassing standpoint from which to engage with all of life.
Cochran is not the only one to notice this connection between faith and love in a Protestant virtue ethic. Reinhold Niebuhr describes it in his book The Nature and Destiny of Man. He notes that human anxiety keeps us from engaging others with love. He says, “Without freedom from anxiety man is so enmeshed in the vicious circle of egocentricity, so concerned about himself, that he cannot release himself for the adventure of love” (2.272). Instead, he is preoccupied with his own security, safety, and fulfillment.
So, what is the solution? Faith in God. Niebuhr explains:
Anxiety is the internal description of the state of temptation. It must not be identified with sin because there is always the ideal possibility that faith would purge anxiety of the tendency toward sinful self-assertion. The ideal possibility is that faith in the ultimate security of God’s love would overcome all immediate insecurities of nature and history (Ibid., 1.182–183).
In other words, faith in God’s care of us overcomes our anxiety. Knowing that God will take care of us and provide us, we are freed from concern over these things. This frees us up to love. Niebuhr explains this in the context of Christ’s atonement.
Christ as ‘power’ and as ‘grace’ can be mediated to the individual only if the truth of the Atonement is appropriated inwardly. In that case the alternate moods of despair and false hope are overcome and the individual is actually freed to live a life of serenity and creativity (Ibid., 2.57–58).
Like Cochran, Niebuhr emphasizes that faith in Christ specifically and in God’s providential care more generally can impel us to a perspective that opens us up to “the adventure of love.”
As we think about how to flourish in the world, we need to think about the type of people we are. We need to think about not only the norms we must follow but the characteristics that we need to develop. As Cochran and Niebuhr illustrate, the Protestant faith offers tremendous potential to give us a vision of a people who are rooted in a faith that gives us a strength to move forward to engage all people and all of reality with a love that is born of faith. It also provides a perspective with which Protestants can engage with other visions of virtue ethics without abandoning their convictions as we seek to gain better insight into how to live well in this world.