True Virtue, Christian Love, and Ethical Theory

Scripture focus

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

1 Corinthians 13:1 KJV

At a glance

Summary of the chapter

Edwards's ethics grows out of his larger vision of reality as inherently relational and dispositional. Rather than picturing the world as a collection of static substances, he saw all being — divine and created — as a network of tendencies moving toward union. Human beings, made for relationship because they bear God's own relational image, are drawn by their very nature to reach outward. Ethics, for Edwards, is not first a set of rules but a description of how a rightly ordered being naturally behaves.

Within that framework, Edwards distinguished 'true virtue' from virtue that only looks like it. Natural conscience, self-love, and even a warm benevolence toward other people can produce actions that resemble goodness, yet remain, at bottom, forms of self-regard. True virtue, by contrast, is love to 'Being in general' — a disposition that, because it loves existence itself in its fullness, must chiefly consist in love to God, the being in whom all other being is contained and upheld. Love for particular people follows from, and is corrected by, this prior love for God.

This ethical vision has a Trinitarian foundation. The love that flows between the Father and the Son becomes, through the Spirit, the pattern and power of every genuinely virtuous human affection. Christian moral practice is therefore not evidence added onto conversion; for Edwards it is the very substance of what conversion produces.

Key points

• Edwards treats being itself as dispositional and relational, so that ethics describes the direction a rightly-ordered nature takes rather than a set of external rules.
• He distinguishes 'true virtue' from merely natural virtue: kindness rooted only in self-love or affection for like-minded people falls short of true benevolence.
• True virtue is defined as love to 'Being in general,' which — because God is the sum and foundation of all being — must center chiefly on love to God.
• Edwards grounds this ethic in the Trinity: human love participates in the eternal love between the Father and the Son.
• For Edwards, holy practice is not a result added to genuine faith but is constitutive of it — a converted heart necessarily acts.

A line worth remembering

Created being, for Edwards, is not only disposition but relational.

McClymond & McDermott The Theology of Jonathan Edwards, ch. 33

Related Scripture

• 1 John 4:19
• Matthew 22:37-39
• 1 Corinthians 13:4-7
• Romans 5:5

For reflection and discussion

1. Where in your own life might affection that looks like love actually be rooted more in self-interest than in love for God?
2. How does grounding ethics in love for God, rather than merely love for people, change what counts as 'virtuous' behavior?
3. In what sense might holy living be less something you add to faith and more something faith simply produces?