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- Author: N. T. Wright
- Full Title: After You Believe
- Category: #books
- Human “character,” in this sense, is the pattern of thinking and acting which runs right through someone, so that wherever you cut into them (as it were), you see the same person through and through. Its opposite would be superficiality: we all know people who present themselves at first glance as honest, cheerful, patient, or whatever, but when you get to know them better you come to realize that they’re only “putting it on,” and that when faced with a crisis, or simply when their guard is down, they’re as dishonest, grouchy, and impatient as the next person.
- Character is transformed by three things. First, you have to aim at the right goal. Second, you have to figure out the steps you need to take to get to that goal. Third, those steps have to become habitual, a matter of second nature.
- people in his church expect him to behave in a particular way (and not to behave in other particular ways), but this is seen, not in terms of character, but in terms of straightforward obligation. In other words, Christians are expected to live by the rules. When they fail, as they will, they are simply to repent and try to do better next time. You either live a Christian life or you don’t. Any suggestion of some kind of moral transformation—a long, slow change of deep, heart-level habits—would be suspect. It would look like “justification by works”—that is, trying to earn one’s way to salvation.
- If the Holy Spirit really has come to live in someone’s heart and life, that person automatically wants to live in accordance with God’s will. It shouldn’t be a matter of moral effort and struggle. After you believe, keeping the rules ought to come easily. (And if it doesn’t, runs the unspoken subtext, you ought to pretend that it does.)
- The aim of the Christian life in the present time—the goal you are meant to be aiming at once you have come to faith, the goal which is within reach even in the present life, anticipating the final life to come—is the life of fully formed, fully flourishing Christian character.
- I know a choir director who took on the running of a village church choir which hadn’t had much help for years. They had struggled valiantly to sing the hymns, to give the congregation a bit of a lead, and on special occasions to try a simple anthem. But, frankly, the results weren’t impressive. When the congregation thanked the singers, it was as much out of sympathy for their apparent hard work as out of any appreciation of a genuinely musical sound. However long they practiced, they didn’t seem to get any better; they were probably merely reinforcing their existing bad habits. So when the new choir director arrived and took them on, gently finding out what they could and couldn’t do, it was in a sense an act of grace. He didn’t tell them they were rubbish, or shout at them to sing in tune. That wouldn’t have done any good. It would have been simply depressing. He accepted them as they were and began to work with them. But the point of doing so was not so that they could carry on as before, only now with someone waving his arms in front of them. The point of his taking them on as they were was so that they could…really learn to sing! And now, remarkably, they can. A friend of mine who went to that church just a few weeks ago reported that the choir had been transformed. Same people, new sound. Now when they practiced they knew what they were doing, and thus they could learn how to sound better.
- But when we accept it—when we welcome the new choir director into our ragged and out-of-tune moral singing—we find a new desire to read the music better, to understand what it’s all about, to sense the harmonies, to feel the shape of the melody, to get the breathing and voice production right…and, bit by bit, to sing in tune.
- it is flawed because the whole worldview driving the scholarship in question screened out the very possibility that there might be a larger truth that the gospels were trying to express but that didn’t fit into the categories the scholars had available. And that larger truth, in which the Sermon on the Mount makes the excellent sense it does, is this: God’s future is arriving in the present, in the person and work of Jesus, and you can practice, right now, the habits of life which will find their goal in that coming future.
- “Happiness” is simply a state of being for a human, as a self-contained unit. You might, in principle, attain it on your own and develop it for your own sake. “Blessedness,” however, is what happens when the creator God is at work both in someone’s life and through that person’s life.
- How does the ultimate promised future correspond to the present practices and habits Jesus insists upon? In two contrasting ways. On the one hand, there is a direct correspondence, where the future state is exactly anticipated in the present habits of life: humility, meekness, mercy, purity, peacemaking. When the final kingdom arrives, we won’t stop being humble, meek, and pure. (“That’s enough of that! Now we can be what we’ve always wanted—namely, proud, arrogant, and impure!”) No: these qualities will shine through all the more powerfully. On the other hand, there is the equal-and-opposite correspondence which demonstrates the tension between that inbreaking future and the way things still are in the present. Consider the mourners, the persecuted, those who are hungry for justice. When the final kingdom arrives, mourners will be comforted, justice-hunger will be satisfied, and persecution will stop. (“Peacemaking” belongs perhaps in both categories, since the attitude of heart that directs peacemaking corresponds directly to the peace of God’s new world, but the need for actual peacemaking between warring parties will disappear when God’s peace fills heaven and earth, as in the vision of Isaiah 11.) These two types of correspondence obviously go closely together.
- What Jesus is saying, rather, is, “Now that I’m here, God’s new world is coming to birth; and, once you realize that, you’ll see that these are the habits of heart which anticipate that new world here and now.”
- Yes, there will be a time when God’s people will serve and love him, and live out the genuine humanness of which the ancient Law had spoken, “naturally” and from the heart. But this will be a God-given “second nature,” a new way of being human. And you can begin to practice this now, difficult though it will be, because Jesus is here, inaugurating God’s kingdom. It won’t happen “automatically,” precisely because God wants you to be, as we might put it, humans rather than puppets. You will have to think about it, to struggle with it, to pray for grace and strength; but it is at least now within reach. You
- he says, in effect, “Follow me, and authenticity will begin to happen.” The authenticity that really matters is living in accordance with the genuine human being God is calling you to become. What the ancient Law really wanted—genuine human life, reflecting God’s glory into the world—will start to appear.
- And we note that in each case the “perfection” in question consists not of a long list of hard moral commands dutifully obeyed but of a character formed by overflowing generous love.
- what counts is the formation, in the present time, of a character that properly anticipates the promised future state,
- the styles of life Paul is commending point toward, and actually anticipate aspects of, the eventual renewal of humanity.
- The point of virtue, as we have seen, is that eventually, as a person’s character becomes more fully formed, such things may indeed begin to “come naturally.” But the steps it takes to get to that point involve hard decisions and hard actions, choices that run counter to the expectations, aspirations, desires, and instincts with which every human being comes equipped.
- the virtues which Paul encourages the Colossians to develop are the virtues of community: mutual kindness, truth-telling, forgiveness, acceptance across traditional barriers of race, culture, and class.
- it is of the very essence of this kind of community that we are not clones of one another. All Christians are to exhibit the Christian virtues, but each one is called to a different set of tasks.
- this doesn’t happen automatically. Community is vital, but all members must make it their own. It’s no good hoping that because you’ve been converted, because you attend church, because you say your prayers, because you have Christian friends, you are going to discover that the qualities of kindness, gentleness, humility, and the rest just happen, without any effort on your part.
- sooner or later, preferably sooner, each individual Christian must make the key choices to “put on” the things which genuinely anticipate, in the present, the life we are promised in the future, the life we have already been given in Christ. And, having made those key choices, each Christian must acquire the habit of making them over and over again.
- For someone developing a virtue ethic, on the other hand, the hard thinking has already been done some time before a particular crisis or challenge presents itself. The character has been formed by conscious choice and habit. Whether or not there is time for thought, the emergency will be met and dealt with.
- His version of the saying seems to be: Give people a command for a particular situation, and you help them to live appropriately for a day; teach them to think Christianly about behavior, and they will be able to navigate by themselves into areas where you hadn’t given any specific instructions. But what Paul does, again and again, is to give initial guidelines, especially in areas where the outworking of Christian virtue will lead people into behavior patterns that will look surprising to them, and perhaps shocking to their neighbors.
- Paul is no doubt well aware that however much he may want the virtues and the fruit to be chosen, developed, and put into practice by every single Christian and by the church as a whole, there are going to be many cases where one cannot simply wait for that to happen. One cannot, in the meantime, leave people with no guidelines as to where the virtues ought to be leading, any more than you can leave new converts without clear indications of which styles of behavior will in fact cohere with “being in Christ” and which won’t.