Character matters. Without it, we see the devastating effects of a world run amok, as decisions large and small, global and intimate, are made for short-term, personal gain, to ward off fear, or to punish those deemed unworthy.
The church hasn’t been immune to this terrible toll as the number of “nones” and “dones” in the church has increased. Even as we cry out for the Lord to return and restore his kingdom, we want the people around us and those in leadership above us to take a breath, slow down and act in ways that demonstrate moral integrity.
But once people start talking about the nature of character, agreement over what to look for and expect from others and ourselves gets complicated. We tend to know good character when we see it, but ask 100 people what exactly makes for good character, and you will likely get close to 100 different answers. Most of those differences occur because different approaches to character have value. Mostly, Christians and non-Christians alike see it as a disposition, something unique in each of us.
But some see it in terms of behavior, such as acting ethically. Some see it in more specific actions, such as being courageous or acting with humility. Others see it as a set of beliefs or the ability to think critically. Still, others see it as the absence of negative behavior, such as controlling one’s temper. People can also envision character as a future orientation focused on hope or their faith.
Perceptions of character also can go in a very different direction toward self-awareness, where it is described as deep self-knowledge, a process of authenticity or an alignment between beliefs, sense of self and action. These, too, can be further broken down into macro, mezzo and micro ways of thinking about the self.
So, if you do the math of all the different ways of thinking about character, you can see the difficulty in developing shared expectations. And while each of these ideas is important for living the virtuous and flourishing life character promises, none alone gets the job done.
To understand more fully how God calls us to lives of character requires reading the letters of Paul through the lens of character formation and familiarizing ourselves with the associated writings of Aristotle, early church fathers and 21st-century theologians, philosophers and psychologists.
At a much deeper level, we need to understand how the Holy Spirit can guide us through all this while recognizing the gift of free will in choosing what we do and how we relate to others.
The Foundations of Character
We can thank Aristotle for much of our modern understanding of character. He was no pie-in-the-sky thinker—he tended to direct his philosophical writings toward the issues he saw around him. An early empiricist, he was deeply interested in human flourishing and developing citizens who would be prepared to lead their city-states well.
One of his most famous works, The Nicomachean Ethics, attempts to do just that. He saw human flourishing, what he called “eudemonia,” as the outcome of striving toward excellence, which he defined as an alignment between personhood and action. Excellence wasn’t so much about human perfection as it was about wholeness, similar to how we think about authenticity.
As a developmental model, this striving meant a lifetime commitment to developing good habits, which included courage, temperance, friendliness, justice and generosity, among his top 12 virtues necessary for human and community flourishing. As he saw it, we aren’t naturally courageous—it takes practice and the modeling of others. Once a virtue becomes ingrained, we are ready to call it a disposition toward action—a persistent characteristic others will tend to see in us as an example of good character.
But when it comes to virtues, Aristotle thought there could be too much of a good thing. While deficiencies in virtues are clearly undesirable, he saw it as problematic when virtues are in excess of what is necessary to live in eudemonia. For example, too much courage can lead to rashness. Too much truthfulness can lead to boastfulness, and too much righteous indignation can lead to envy. Aristotle called these excesses vices. For Aristotle, there was a sweet spot for virtues between deficiency and excessiveness, which has come to be known through the ages as “the golden mean” of virtues.
Vices are not the opposite of virtues, but instead represent their disordered practice. In the 2021 Christianity Today podcast series The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, Ed Stetzer, editor-in-chief of Outreach magazine, noted that “there’s a body count of young pastors whose ability rose them to prominence before their character was ready for it.” Aristotle might have argued that it wasn’t so much that they turned from virtue to vice as much as their virtues, decoupled from wise choices, morphed into vices.
It’s easy to see the parallels between Aristotle’s reasoning and what we see in Paul’s writings about spiritual development. Both thought people could change over their lifetime, which we see in Paul’s constant encouragement to growth in Christ (see Romans 12, for example). Paul and Aristotle both emphasize not thinking more of ourselves than others and the importance of solid leadership to model good behavior, such as elders who are blameless.
But there is a major difference that Thomas Aquinas would bring to the fore about 16 centuries later. To what end do we care about character—what is its telos? For Aristotle, it was self-sufficiency—reaching eudemonia was man’s perfect and self-sufficient end. Character, defined as such, tempts a taste of the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. As psychologist Martin Seligman puts it so succinctly, in this view of character, there is no alpha and omega, only omega, as the path to virtuous character leads us forward in a positive direction, growing in power, knowledge and goodness, pointing us toward nothing less than God.
This is a jarring statement from Seligman regarding the purposes of character, but one that the church has often accepted in substance. In this view, good character is a repayment to God to be the best people possible for all he has done for us. It sounds compelling, but in practice, it can smack of a works-based sanctification rather than complete surrender. It’s a misunderstanding of vocational calling, where we excitingly tell God all we can do for him based on what we see as our strengths and giftings. If this understanding of character is absorbed, it’s not unusual for pastors to need some spiritual reset when they realize that they were so busy doing the work of God that they stopped depending on him.
Understanding Character 2.0
I like to think of Aristotle’s views as Character 1.0. We are indebted to him for helping us think through how to find meaning in life through human flourishing, but his telos of self-sufficiency does not take us to God’s omega, the meaning of life. Thomas Aquinas, in his magisterial Summa Theologica, was also interested in thinking about how Christians could practice character. But for Aquinas, the purpose was different.
If Aristotle was about self-sufficiency, Aquinas understood that practicing virtues was impossible without the infusion of the Holy Spirit. Rather than self-sufficiency, attempting to develop the good habits of virtue requires a complete dependence on God. If Aristotle’s views were Character 1.0, then Aquinas puts us on the right path to a more complete understanding of character, what I like to call Character 2.0.
What does this 2.0 look like? Before thinking about the nitty-gritty of acting with character, we must consider why it’s important. Let’s look at the five attributes of Character 2.0.
1. Telos of Our Loves
We need to be clear on our telos, or what we think of in terms of the “meaning of life.” It would be easy to go right to the big-ticket items, such as salvation for the lost or God’s deep desire for shalom in his world. But Christian philosopher James K.A. Smith asks us to break it down into bite-size bits and start with a most fundamental question: Day in and day out, what do we want?
In You Are What You Love: The Power of Spiritual Habits, Smith challenges us to think through what motivates us, what have become the unexamined habits of our lives, and the extent to which we have absorbed the consumerist culture around us into our loves, whether it’s shopping, eating, relationships or how we wind up raising our kids with our own worries projected onto them.
Working from a 1.0 orientation without God’s telos, people often see character as thinking through problems wisely or solving ethical dilemmas. On the other hand, Character 2.0 asks us to start with a deeper understanding of what we love. Augustine of Hippo emphasized this in his small but mighty theology primer On Christian Doctrine: “But living a just and holy life requires one to be capable of an objective and impartial evaluation of things: to love things, that is to say, in the right order, so that you do not love what is not to be loved, or fail to love what is to be loved or have a greater love for what should be loved less, or an equal love for things that should be loved less or more, or a lesser or greater love for things that should be loved equally.”
From Augustine’s perspective, being virtuous is not focused on thinking right thoughts—it begins with loving what God loves. In his 1956 book Thoughts in Solitude, Roman Catholic monk Thomas Merton puts this more succinctly: “The things that we love tell us what we are.” Smith echoes this, noting, “The orientation of the heart happens from the bottom up, through the formation of our habits of desire. Learning to love [God] takes practice.”
Practicing virtues so that they become a habit-forming disposition is essential, but first and more importantly, we must develop our habits of love, which in turn shape our desires.
2. Seeing Well by Ordering Our Loves
If the telos of our loves is the first important aspect of Character 2.0, then ordering them so that we are motivated by the appropriate desires is the second step. That seems simple enough. But motivations don’t directly influence our actions.
Psychology has a significant body of research showing that we tend to perceive what we expect to see around us, which only then shapes our actions in response. For example, if we think we are traveling through a crime-infested area, we are likelier to hear far-off sirens and perceive strangers as threatening. If we are in a setting where we feel at home, we are less likely to pick up on sounds that are out of the ordinary or remember the faces of strangers who pass us by.
While that is a simplistic yet to-the-point description of paying attention to what we seek, we can expand that analogy to the news we read, the friends we associate with, the political beliefs we hold, and the way we worship. It’s not so much that we act on the world around us as it is that we actively seek to create our world based on how we have ordered our desires. Character 2.0 asks us to step back from automatically seeking what we desire to reorder our loves to see the world through God’s eyes.
Augustine helped me to understand this further through the virtue of hope. Like the other virtues, hope has a golden mean with vices on each side. If we are deficient in hope, we are complacent, believing nothing in our world needs to change. On the other end is the vice of despair. People see plenty of need, but their habits are also disordered, and relying on their self-sufficiency, they have nowhere to turn for hope. Ordering our loves to see the world as God does requires hope that is neither complacent nor despairing.
3. Loving Others Well
Aquinas wrote extensively about the centrality of love for character. One of his most famous quotes, also from the Summa Theologica, is “To love is to will the good of the other.” For Aquinas, love is not a disposition or passion, but an act of will.
This is also true of the other virtues. They don’t reside in us as personality traits. We develop habits of the virtues so that we are disposed to act with them as we see the need. We aren’t courageous so much as we act with courage. We aren’t humble people as much as we act with humility. We are ethical foremost because we act ethically.
4. The Good of the Other
Acting with character strengthens our social bonds. We love well by loving others. Being honest requires communicating with someone in an honest manner. When I act humbly, I put the interests of others before my own. When I am trustworthy, it’s because others trust me.
Former UCLA basketball coach John Wooden said, “The true test of a man’s character is what he does when no one is watching.” There is truth to this, too. When our loves are ordered, and our habits become dispositions, we are more likely to resist sinful pressures from others. But character is not so much what I do when no one is looking as it is what we do for others in their presence. We limit character’s impact when we only value it as a personal attribute.
The practice of Character 2.0 is a different approach to spiritual formation, moving us away from a spirituality that is all in our heads, what Smith calls “brains on a stick,” to an embodied form of spirituality. Imagine how differently we would view spiritual formation if we expanded it beyond thinking rightly about God to include ordering our loves and acting rightly for the right reasons. Imagine spiritual formation being inseparable from acting with character towards others.
Extending this relational side of character to our communities, we would see its necessity for the healthy functioning of the church. Paul paints a picture of this beloved community as he begins to wind down his letter to the Romans in 12:9–18, by depicting the interplay between individual spiritual formation and serving others.
5. Life Together
The fifth and final attribute of Character 2.0 is combining the individual attributes of character with a more expansive set of shared expectations for life together. If churches took their own character seriously, they might begin to think of pastoral vocational calling as a joint endeavor between pastors and their church.
Church boards and lay leaders would act virtuously to ensure its pastoral leadership flourishes, creating sustainable expectations for pastors and their families. Lead pastors would not sacrifice a healthy staff culture for the immediate needs of the church. Christian institutions with integrity would have a robust disposition to act consistently and coherently in a praiseworthy and trustworthy manner. Their missions would be both outwardly focused while demonstrating concern for their internal workings. No one would be expected to sacrifice their own character and flourishing to promote the well-being of a Christian institution.
If the goal of Character 1.0 is to make ourselves like God, then the goal of Character 2.0 is to love him. It asks us to free ourselves from the alpha of our disordered loves to work in accordance with the omega of God. It asks us to love well, to practice virtues for spiritual formation, to serve others and to strengthen relational bonds. This approach to character is a commitment to act rightly for the right things for the right reasons. It expands beyond individuals to relationships and encompasses the loves and practices of our churches.
And after almost 25 centuries of discussion and debate, character still matters because it still and always has mattered to God.