Our Witness to the World Depends on Virtue

Christian Holiness in an Age of Crisis

As I’ve argued before, we live under the shadow of a crisis of authority. So the question I want to wrestle with is this: how do Christians, in an age of crisis, commend the Lord we love to the world? I want to suggest that it depends heavily on Christian virtue.

We live in a time with many, many countless competing authorities. Joe Rogan may have on a Christian scholar, but Alex O’Connor may invite talented non-Christian scholars on their podcast to provide counter testimony. How does the laymen decide that Christianity is true?

The apologetic arguments are valuable. I don’t think I’d be a Christian without them myself. But, in truth, most people don’t discover the glory of Jesus that way. And in fact, most people don’t actually come to depend on, say, the medical community because they themselves have confirmed the research upon which some prescription depends. Rather, they come to trust the authority of the medical community because they’ve seen that it works. If a medical doctor told you that “thus and such” treatment would help with a flue, but the medicine either doesn’t help or makes it worse, that doctor starts to lose authority in your eyes.

This is why church hurt and church dysfunction is an actually serious threat to the credibility of the Gospel. The truth is that we have said that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is the cure to our most fundamental problem: the brokenness of the human heart, which leads to decay and death. But if our churches are themselves communities of decay, death, and brokenness, how can we commend the solution by which we allegedly organize our lives?

Holiness as Apologetics

What we need to recover is the notion that virtue empowered by union with Christ is actually part and parcel of our apologetic—our defense of the Gospel. The Gospel’s credibility is manifest in communities that flourish with the joy, love, and light that comes from knowing Jesus Christ and him crucified and risen. The efficacy of the “cure” we proclaim is manifest only as people carry with them a distinctive joy, a distinctive capacity for virtue, a distinctive humility and awareness of their insufficiency and the sufficiency of an excellent Savior.

So as we close the first quarter of the 21st century, here’s a priority my readers and I can adopt together:

RESOLVED: TO LIVE WHOLLY FOR CHRIST BY REPENTING AND CONFESSING OF SIN, ADOPTING PENITENTIAL PRACTICE FOR THE CULTIVATION OF VIRTUE WITH THE EXPECTATION OF GOD’S JOYFUL PRESENCE COLORING OUR LIVES THROUGH SPIRIT-CULTIVATED VIRTUE.

Or, in other words:

RESOLVED: TO REPENT OF SIN, PURSUE CHRIST IN VIRTUE, AND EXPECT FROM OUR FATHER THE JOY OF KNOWING JESUS CHRIST IN THE SPIRIT