Character matters. I suspect everyone agrees on that much. We say when appointing pastors that character is the thing that matters most—whether we follow through on that is a good question, of course—and we say the same thing about what matters in the Christian life.
It’s vitally important. Jesus wants us to grow up into maturity and to do us good, which means us growing into Christlike character. Yahweh’s mission in the cosmos is to make images of the Son; he’s committed to doing that by shaping our character into Jesus’.
We could probably argue about whether we all agree what that looks like, though all of us would be saying something like “it’s what God says it is in the Bible.” We could produce a list of attributes after some wrangling, I imagine. The reality is, though, that we don’t get our image of what good character looks like from a list.
We learn what character looks like from story—which is one of the reasons we’ve been given so many narratives as the word of God. We read these stories to find out how we should live. If you’re a regular reader of nuakh you’ll realise I tend to push back on what I’d call moralistic readings of the Bible’s stories, so that might be a surprising admission.
The thing is we should read the Bible Christologically: as though it’s all about Jesus. And then we should attempt to live like Jesus, which will mean like many of these characters. The order matters, I think if we try and ‘be David’ then we’re doing it wrong. If we realise that we’re not David, Christ is, and he rescues us, then we’re closer. But we can go a step further and realise that after we’re rescued, we’re filled with the Spirit and can in fact take on giants in the footsteps of Christ. That sounds a lot like the starting point, but it’s fundamentally different in disposition: we act like those who Christ has won; we still live in the goodness of the daily grace of God.
What this starts to expose is, to quote James K. A. Smith, it’s the story we’re a character in that determines what character is. The narratives we inhabit and live by and towards will dictate what we think good character looks like, because it will look like what a protagonist of those stories looks like.
One of our challenges in our ‘secular age’ is that, to riff on Charles Taylor, we’re cross-pressured by the weight of competing narratives. Christians are deeply affected by the gospel’s contours, especially as we re-enact it weekly at church, but we’re also (all of us: me included) being catechised by a set of stories that animate and occupy the world in which we live. The stories that our friends and colleagues and neighbours live, and the stories we’re sold overtly (by advertising) and implicitly (by the liturgies and architectures of daily life), colonise our minds and infect our thinking.
These metaphors are deliberate: colonising, infecting, occupying is how counter-narratives take hold within a culture. They affect our sense of what it means to be of ‘good character.’
Which is to say two things:
Firstly, that we should carefully examine ourselves and our assumptions. Some of our sense of what good Christian character looks like will be heavily influenced by the world around us. Some of it won’t be. That’s not to claim that some people have been ‘corrupted’ by the world and so their image of Christian character is too tolerant, or too aggressive, or whatever it might be. It’s to claim that the acquisition of narratives along which our sense of ‘character’ grows is, by its nature, conflicted. All of us will have absorbed a story that isn’t wholly true; we need to find those places where that’s happened.
Secondly, we need to do something about that. This step is easy to describe though, as it’s the same whatever the first story we’ve breathed in with the air happens to be. We need to consciously reflect on how those stories are affecting us and get about the work of restor(y)ing ourselves to the patterns of the Bible. Thankfully that restor(y)ing happens through the things we’re doing already: hearing the word read and preached, eating the Lord’s Supper, gathering with Christians to worship and pray. The key that makes it work differently, I would submit, is shedding any practices that are constructing in us an alternative sense of the world and consciously entering into the truthful story in Christian worship.
These aren’t things that you weren’t trying to do already, I’m sure. They are some of the apparatus of being a follower of Jesus. All I’m doing is suggesting that your view of the world and your way of being in the world are more shaped by the story you live than you probably realise.
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