Show Notes
In this episode of Peaceable and Kind, Derek Vreeland explores one of the greatest needs facing both the church and modern culture: the recovery of character. Reflecting on high-profile failures in business, politics, sports, and even the church, Derek argues that our culture has become increasingly willing to overlook a person’s character so long as they achieve the desired results. Yet the Christian tradition has always understood that who we are matters more than what we accomplish.
Drawing on the wisdom of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Alasdair MacIntyre, Derek introduces the historic Christian tradition of virtue ethics. Rather than focusing primarily on rules, consequences, or personal feelings, virtue asks a deeper question: What kind of person am I becoming? Christian discipleship is not simply about making better decisions but about becoming people whose hearts and habits are being transformed into the likeness of Jesus.
The episode concludes with an invitation to recover the ancient vision of moral formation through the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. By cooperating with the work of the Holy Spirit and practicing habits that cultivate Christlike character, we become the kind of people who instinctively love, forgive, serve, and live as Jesus did.
**Key Takeaways **
Character matters more than image, influence, or success.
Virtue is the historic Christian framework for moral formation.
Christian ethics asks not only, “What should I do?” but “Who am I becoming?”
Aristotle’s vision of human flourishing finds fulfillment in the abundant life Jesus offers.
Habits shape character, and character shapes our instincts.
The Holy Spirit transforms us as we actively participate in practices that cultivate virtue.
Christian discipleship is about formation, not merely information.
**Books Mentioned **
Nicomachean Ethics — Aristotle
Summa Theologiae — Thomas Aquinas
After Virtue — Alasdair MacIntyre
**Scriptures Mentioned **
1 Corinthians 13:13
John 10:10
Galatians 5:22–23
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Transcript
Welcome back to another episode of peaceable and kind. I’m your host, Derek Vreeland. Thank you for joining me for this episode. And if you are new to Peaceable and Kind, welcome. Glad you’ve joined me for this episode. I want to talk about the missing reality of character We’re gonna talk about character and integrity and virtue on this episode. And before we get started, If you haven’t already, would you be so kind as to leave a rating or a review that helps other people find this podcast and I would appreciate it a whole lot. So I want to talk about this quality that has quietly disappeared From both American culture and the American church. I mean, it was something that Christians talked about for centuries. It’s something that the early church had inherited and learned from Scripture. It was developed over the centuries by Some of the best minds of the church. I’m thinking of Aquinas and Augustine. And for a long time it was central to discipleship. And this missing quality is character. I’m wondering what happened to character? There was a time that we valued it. And when I say we, I’m thinking both the American we and the Christian we. Now on this podcast, I’m mostly interested in our Christian identity, but it’s affected our culture. I mean there was a time that character was valued, it was treasured, it was important, things like You know, my word is my bond. If a person said something, you could trust that they would follow through, at least if they were a person of character. So there was a time when character mattered and when leaders in particular displayed a lack of character, they were called out. The the lack of integrity The lack of character was something that would not only draw moral outrage, it would be named and shamed and dispelled And I’m talking culturally and certainly for Christians, uh, but things have changed. When I was in seminary at Oral Roberts University in the late nineteen nineties I worked for WorldCom, which had become the second largest telecommunication company in the world, second only to ATT. It had started, had this very humble beginning, and had grown into this massive telecommunication empire WorldCom’s CEO was Bernie Ebbers. And Ebbers was Canadian who had been immigrated to the U. S. And he was a gym teacher who was a bit of an entrepreneur. He had this idea of starting a reseller. Long distance company. Now, for those of you not born in the 20th century Uh, you know, those of you listening who have were born after the year 2000, I gotta describe to you the late 1900s because Uh back in the day before the internet and cell phones were the thing, um, we depended upon landlines and If you wanted to make a phone call outside of your local area, you had to have a long-distance service. And it sounds ridiculous. It sounds funny in today’s age, but this is this is where we were living in the nineteen nineties. And so there were a lot of these upstart, quote unquote, reseller long distance companies. And what they would do is they would sell you a long distance package and you would pay them. Now they were using other larger telecoms networks. Um, but we were getting calls all the time. Those of you who were living in the nineties, you know we were getting all of this spam, all these spam calls of people wanting you to change your long distance service. Well WorldCom started as one of these small little resellers and became second uh in terms of its uh revenue and size, second only to ATT. So Ebers was heralded at one point as a visionary, but it turned out to be a fraud. Ebers built a technology empire on acquisitions and ambition. WorldCom, while I worked there, was one company in name only. It was a company that was was formed by the acquisition of other telecommunication companies. So when I was hired in 1996, I was trained in three to four different databases. I worked for the wholesale division of the company. And by the end of my time there in 1999, I was trained in 16, maybe 17 different databases because Once WorldCom would acquire a new company, we would simply acquire the their billing system, their maintenance system, their installation system. And so while it was one company in name on the inside, it was just a bunch of different piecemeal organizations. And those of us who worked customer service, we’re just trying to keep all the plates a spinning. So he had built this empire. um with a lot of ambition, but the the financial house of cards, as it were, came crumbling down. Eppers applied pressure to his top financial executives to inflate the accounting records to make the company look like it was more profitable than. it actually was. And it worked for a long time. Now, when I worked there, I did not know this was happening. Um, I didn’t know that Ebers and these top executives were were cooking the books and falsifying profit records. I didn’t know any of this was happening. Now, I did have a co worker who got invited to a large dinner gathering of executives, and he sat at a table near Eber’s and he and he heard him. Making some crass jokes about the appearance of some of the women at the event. Now, men in positions of power making degrading jokes about women. is a red flag of the lack of character. But there was an investigation after I had left the company in 2002. There was a federal investigation And in 2002, WorldCom declared bankruptcy. In 2005, Eppers was convicted of securities fraud and was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison And he ended up uh dying just not not too long ago. Stockholders, uh, which included employees, were all offered stock options. And many of the coworkers I had were depending on their stock options to really expand their retirement portfolios. But after the bankruptcy, they all they lost it all. And the scandal and downfall of WorldCom left many with questions About Bernie Ebbers. Who was this corporate cowboy? Um there at one point there was an article written about Ebers before his fall, and they called him the Telecom Cowboy because he was sort of a a rebel, sort of an outsider, sort of a a renegade. But forever’s he turned out to be all hat, no cows. He he may have had the outward appearance of innovation and courage, but on the inside, he was riddled with the disease of contempt. And I was shocked to learn that the CEO of the company I had worked for could be fundamentally dishonest at his core. And it’s it saddened me really, not just for Bernie Eberers, but for all the people, those good people that I worked with who many of them, this was the beginning of their careers in the telecommunication business, and they all lost. And that makes me sad. But if you think back to the nineties, uh the Bernie Ebers downfall um happened right at the wake of the Bill Clinton scandal in nineteen ninety-seven. President Bill Clinton engaged in an inappropriate sexual relationship with a White House intern and then tried to cover it up. Now again, I was living in the 1990s, living through all the headlines and the news interviews and and all. But this scandal wasn’t simply a personal moral failing, though it was that. Clinton’s conduct was a profound breach of public trust It was an abuse of power. It was yet another failure of an American president to be honest. And what I found most concerning uh uh surrounding the Clinton scandal was the lack of moral outrage Now, Republicans in the House and the Senate emphatically claimed character matters But that plea for integrity was less than bipartisan. I mean, Richard Nixon resigned as president in 1974. in the middle of his own scandal, but Clinton didn’t resign. Rather, in an interview he famously questioned the meaning of the word is. So, as I think back to that time, I wonder why wasn’t there more public pressure for Clinton to resign? I remember catching uh one of those Man on the Street interviews on some late-night talk show during the Clinton scandal, and the person was asked about Clinton’s lewd. and immoral behavior in the White House. And I vividly remember the person being interviewed just shrugging it off. with a passing comment that what the president did in his private life was none of our business. And that shocked me. It shocked me that that Clinton’s approval rating remained high after the scandal broke Um, even though people would say what he did was wrong, they still liked the guy. They just kinda dismissed it And that to me, at least in my lifetime, was this sort of cultural awareness moment. That character really doesn’t matter. That the disconnect between a person’s personal life and private life, or the disconnect between a person’s inner soul and character and qualities that disconnect from from what they do is a problem. And that disconnect continues on today. I mean, we saw the same cultural inconsistency back in 2016. when many of the very same people who once chanted Character Matters during the Clinton scandal supported a presidential candidate whose personal conduct and verbal rhetoric were, how shall I say, more than just morally unsettling. Donald Trump hadn’t had the reputation of a moral exemplar. Nobody would have called him that. He was known as a splashy real estate developer and a hard nosed reality T V personality. And I assumed his political career would have ended before it started. In the wake of the Washington Post’s October 2016 release of the Access Hollywood video On a hot mic, Trump was heard making lewd and offensive comments as he bragged about assaulting women. I really, really thought that would have ended his political career and his political influence. Sadly, it did not. And if you remember, Trump apologized for his comments, chalking it up to quote unquote locker room talk And polls showed that only 40% of registered voters had a worse opinion of then candidate Trump as a result of his comments on the Access Hollywood video. And I mean, whatever you think about his policies, uh that’s that’s up to you. I’m I’m less concerned as a pastor about his political pat platform, I’m much more concerned about how people, particularly Christians can support a person with such abject moral failure and a lack of character The ascendancy of Trump’s political career, in spite of all of the deep character flaws, for me is just another warning sign that character doesn’t matter. Now, I’ve talked about business and politics. I haven’t even talked about Christian leaders whose moral failures have been abhorrent and devastating. So I think we recognize that we’re living in a time where character simply doesn’t matter. Hey friends, I want to pause this episode for just a moment to let you know that Resurrection, eight lessons on how God restores us, the third and final book in the God in the Neighborhood Bible study. Study series is out now. Go to the show notes for ordering information. So what’s the solution? I think what we need is a return of virtue. Now don’t let that word trip you up. I know it’s not a in vogue term in our culture. I mean the only time I hear people use the word virtue is when one person accuses another person of virtue signaling. And I really hate that’s the only time I ever hear or see the word virtue. And it’s truly unfortunate because throughout the history of the church, virtue was really the way that Christian morality and ethics were discussed. And so I think we’ve we’ve we’ve lost that conversation, and I’d like to recover it. Let’s start with uh some some words from the Apostle Paul, 1 Corinthians 13, 13. Very famously, the Apostle Paul writes, Three things will last forever: faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these is love. Faith, hope, and love. St. Thomas Aquinas calls these theological virtues, and he uses the word theological not to talk about virtue in an intellectual way, but he calls them theological because they are the big God virtues They are the virtues that are infused into our souls by God. They’re given to us as a gift to shape us on the inside. And so this entire idea is that virtue, or maybe you can use the word character, because virtue seems archaic. it seems like people are much more willing to to use the language of character, which I’m fine with. Use whatever word you want. I just really want to see a change in how we think about our interior life. So the concept of character, or for ancient Christians, virtue, is all about the kind of people we are becoming. Right? So if faith, hope, and love are virtues, and I believe that they are, then what we mean by that is we are becoming people who are faithful, who are hopeful. and who are loving. The best moral teachers in the church over the centuries have been less concerned with rules And more concerned with the transformation of the human person. Moral formation is more than simply learning right and wrong. It’s about becoming the kind of people who want to do right and avoid wrong. And somehow we have simply lost sight of that. So to return to the virtue tradition I think that we have to pay attention to the ancient Greeks, Augustine and Aquinas, both. Wrote as Christians about the need for virtue, and each in their own way, particularly Aquinas, drew from the ancient Greeks, Aristotle in particular. So for Aristotle, the central moral or ethical question wasn’t, what are the right rules that I should obey? I mean, it wasn’t even, you know, what actions are right and wrong. The larger question for Aristotle was, what kind of person should I become? That question came from what is the goal of human existence? Right? What are we headed towards? And then what kind of people do we need to become in order to reach that goal? So for the Greeks They had a word for the goal of human life. It’s the Greek word eunuchonia, often translated happiness but too often modern English speakers, when they speak of happiness, they mean to say uh pleasurable, joyful, and in the ancient Greek concept of that word, eudaimonia is is not just happiness, but but flourishing. It means living well, living fully. It’s very similar It’s not exact, but it’s very similar to the Hebrew concept of shalom, which is often translated peace Hebrew shalom and Greek eudaimonia are very similar because they both communicate not just the absence of conflict. but the present work of wholeness and harmony and peace For the ancient Hebrews, shalom was well-being in every area of life so that we could live life the way God intended it. And then Jesus comes along in John 1010 and says, I have come that they may have life and have it abundantly. I love the new living translation of John 10. 10. Where it it records Jesus saying, I have come that they might have a rich and satisfying life. This rich and satisfying life, this is a picture of shalom for the ancient Hebrews, or Eudamonia for the ancient Greeks It’s different terminology, but it’s the same destination. It’s the good life. And the ancient Greeks understood that to talk about ethics Starts with a clear definition of what the good life is, and then how do we become the kind of people that can experience that good life And so for well over a thousand years, Christians understood ethics through this lens. Ethics, again, wasn’t just about deciding what is right and what is wrong. what is good, what is bad, but it was about becoming good people. So if you want a good life How do you obtain that? You obtain it by becoming a good person. And isn’t this what we teach our children? I mean We want our kids to tell the truth. We want them to work hard, to do their best, to be kind, to share their toys, and to show respect to one another. But in teaching that, we’re not just teaching them behaviors, right? I think parenting in its best light is we’re trying to form and shape their character. Now when they’re young, we do have to kind of give them the rules. You share your toys with your brother and your sister. That’s the rule. But the ultimate goal as they grow and develop is to share with them the moral reason why. Here is why we share. Because sharing is better than hoarding. That being greedy and keeping everything to yourself, that’s not the good life. The good life is found in sharing. So in having those conversations as our kids grow up, we want to form their character. And somehow adults forget this. I mean, instead of pursuing character and becoming virtuous people, we have settled for moral theories that are incomplete and easily manipulated. Let me give you some examples. Instead of the virtue tradition, what I often see is what I would describe as outcome-based ethics. This is in moral theory is called consequentialism And the idea is simple. The outcome is what matters. So when faced with any moral decision, all that matters is the outcome If the result is good, then the action must be justified. I mean, you’ve probably heard the phrase, the greatest good for the greatest number. That’s utilitarianism. But the problem with that is if you’re only focused on outcomes, you can manipulate things to reach a certain outcome. I mean, imagine a pastor who gets up and tells her congregation on Sunday morning that they had 800 people in attendance. when actually there’s only four hundred people in attendance. And maybe she was justifying that lie by saying, well, I wanted everyone to feel encouraged so that they would give more generously. It sounds positive, but does a lie become good simply because we like the results? Of course not. Another approach that I see, which is similar to consequentialism, is simply practical ethics. The more technical term would be pragmatism. Which I this one I I don’t like any of these, by the way. But this one in particular. This one, pragmatism, very similar to consequentialism, is where the ends justify the means I mean, you can pretty much do whatever as long as it works, right? So parents, thinking about Raising kids. So parents, you know guilt, shame, and fear can motivate your children, right? You make them feel guilty You put the fear of God in them, right? You can go that route. Um and and and it it’ll work, but I’m telling you, if you use guilt, shame, and fear to motivate your children Yeah, it’ll work. You can get them to do what you want, but you’re destroying them on the inside. I mean, just because something works doesn’t mean it’s good. When I was a teenager, we were super involved in the youth group that was our social outlet. My wife and I met as teenagers in the church youth group. And we were all kind of in the same social circle. And after youth group one night we were making plans to go play tennis. There are tennis courts, which just got redone by the way. um that are public courts that are right in front of Central High School where my wife and I went and uh my older two boys graduated from. My my youngest son is going to be a junior at that same high school. Well they have these tennis courts And they have lights, like stadium lights for the courts, where you can just push a button and you can play tennis well into the night. So we’re making plans after Youth Group. Go play tennis. Well, our youth pastor had said, uh, hey, uh, was wondering if some of you could stay after youth group and help move tables and chairs, which it just seems like all youth pastors at some point in their life get stuck moving tables and chairs. I mean, I don’t know if you’ve really been in ministry if you haven’t moved tables and chairs, because I’ve done it Dozens of times. So we wanted to go play tennis. He wanted us to stay. And I said, well, you know, we’re gonna go play tennis, so I don’t know if we’ll be able to do that today. And he said to me, well, it’s a good thing Jesus wasn’t thinking about tennis when he was dying on the cross for your sins. Oh man. Now, now the goal was to make us feel guilty enough to do what he wanted us to do. And and it and it worked. I mean, we we of course said yes, we’ll help you move tables and chairs. But listen, manipulation Guilt, it works, but it’s not the way of Jesus. The way of Jesus is the way of invitation, not manipulation. Jesus doesn’t need emotional tricks Just because it works doesn’t mean that it’s right. Another popular moral theory, where people don’t necessarily know the technical terms, Um, but the technical term is motivism, uh which was used by Alistair McIntyre in his very influential book, After Virtue. And it’s the idea that morality or ethics is determined by individual personal feelings, right? So it’s expressed in the old uh Sheryl Crow song. If it makes you happy, it can’t be that bad. If it makes you happy, then why the hell are you so sad? So I see lots of people whose ethical vision is formed by simply how they feel. And what they want to feel is happy. And we’re not talking happiness in the Greek sense of eudaimonia, but happy in the very personal sense of of pleasure and and a sense of of joy individually And the problem with determining morality by feelings is some things might make you happy, but are actually destructive. I mean, sometimes what would make me happy is to verbally eviscerate my enemies with a rhetorical punch in the face. Or have you ever had the experience of road rage When you’re on the road and someone cuts you off and you start imagining that the volume button on your radio is a missile launcher. Like sometimes that would really, really make me happy. Right? But it’s not gonna make Jesus happy. It’s it’s actually gonna be destructive. So so uh happiness Cannot be our guide for ethics. And then there is modernity’s response and rejection of the virtue tradition Modernity gave us principle-based ethics. That is just determine the irreducible universal principles. Because we’re smart enough Um, you know, principles like honesty is always the best policy. I mean, most people would nod their head. And Yes, that as a principle. Yeah, sorta. But what if you’re Cory Tinboom, hiding Jewish families from the Nazis and the Gestapo knock on your door and they ask, Are there any Jews in this house? I don’t think your principle, honesty is the best policy, is going to help you in that moment. What will help you, and what helped Corey and her family as they were hiding Jewish families, was they had become people of mercy and compassion. They were virtuous people. So they knew I mean they didn’t they didn’t have to think about it. Their instinct was to protect Jewish families from the Nazis, not because they knew the principle, but because their hearts had been formed. So, in place of all of these very poor forms of ethics There is the virtue tradition. Virtues are good habits Habits that shape us. Now there is skill involved There are things that we do. There are things that we do based on our vision of the future, our understanding of God’s future. But virtue is first and foremost about our character, about what happens within us. So virtues are good habits because habits shape us, right? You you know that. Think about any skill. How does someone become a gifted musician, right? How do they become great at piano or guitar or whatever instrument they play? They become a gifted musician through practice. How does someone become an outstanding athlete? They practice. What about a gifted writer or a skilled electrician? How do they become good at what they do? They practice. We’re talking about practice, man. You talk about practice. And practices are repeated habits. That’s what we do when we practice. So imagine. Someone practicing the piano, right? They’re learning to master the piano. A really efficient and good and celebrated pianist is one who has spent hours and hours and years and years playing the same thing over and over Habits shape what we do. And the early Christians, they knew that. They understood that. They understood what the ancient Greeks had taught that we’re formed by the things that we do over and over. So if you want to become more like Jesus, then you need habits like Jesus. You need the habits of doing the Jesus kind of things. So for example, patience is a habit. Kindness is a habit. Generosity is a habit. So think about patience. How do you grow in the virtue of patience? You grow in patience by doing patient things. So if, like me, you don’t consider yourself a patient person, I got an idea for you. Next time you’re at the grocery store, I want you to skip The self-checkout line, and I want you to find a cashier who has the longest line of people waiting for them. And I want you to stand in that line, And I want you to keep your phone in your pocket. Just stand there. I have tried to do this at times. It’s hard for me because my instinct is to go self-check out, get out as fast as possible. But because I want to grow in patience, sometimes I’ll go stand in line and wait. If you want to become a patient person, you do patient things. And then you you grow in that virtue. Now, often we’ll call them character traits, but early Christians called them virtues. So Thomas Aquinas, for example, he said virtue is an ordered disposition of the soul. And I really like that. But let me give you what would be my working definition of virtue or character. And following Aquinas’ lead, I define virtue this way. Virtue is a settled quality of our heart and mind that instinctively leads us to live the good life Jesus calls us to. And the key word there is instinctively, right? Not pretending, not forcing. This isn’t behavior management. It’s transformation We don’t grit our teeth and force kindness. Instead, we become kind. You don’t fake patience. You become a patient person And of course, you do that by the habit of patience. Now when when I start talking about virtue and how the practice of these good habits form us, how they make us good. Some people say, well, wait a second, doesn’t Jesus make us good? I mean, isn’t that what is Death and life and resurrection is all about. And yeah, absolutely. Jesus forgives us our sins. Jesus sets us right. Jesus gives us the Holy Spirit. And it is the Holy Spirit. That’s within us conforming us into the image of Jesus. It is the Holy Spirit that is producing these character traits, these virtues It’s the Holy Spirit producing love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and goodness and gentleness and faithfulness and self-control. All of that is true. The Spirit transforms us from the inside out, but the Spirit also invites our participation. We practice what the Spirit is producing. We repeatedly choose forgiveness, choose generosity, choose patience, choose humility. Over time, those choices, those habits reshape our instincts. Virtue trains our hearts and minds so that we want what God wants And this is in cooperation with the work of the Holy Spirit. And in answering the question, where did character go? I think we need a response that helps us understand how we get it back. And I think This is how we do it. I mean, we’ve spent decades emphasizing information, but what we need is formation We’ve emphasized making good decisions, but we we need to be becoming disciples of Jesus. Right, we’ve we’ve emphasized believing. We need to emphasize becoming. And I believe that the virtue tradition offers us that. So let me leave you with some questions. Who are you becoming? What kind of person are you? At least, who do you think you are? How would people close to you describe you? And not simply what you do or what you believe or what church you attend, but what kind of person Are you becoming? Are you becoming a person who naturally forgives like Jesus? Are you becoming the person who serves like Jesus? As you think about those questions, understand that this is an invitation. Not just to know Jesus, but to become like him. And I think as we participate with the Holy Spirit in becoming more like Jesus, we will be people of character and integrity. And so when people say, whatever happened to character, They can point to followers of Jesus and say, these are the people in which character is still alive. Well, that’s all that I have for you on this episode. Thank you again for joining me. Go in peace and be kind.
This transcript was generated with AI and may contain errors.