Our secular culture purportedly values neighborliness, even as it kills it. Therefore, a vertical understanding of Christian vocation—one which sees it as a priestly task, the daily self-offering in and through Christ, by the power of the Spirit, to the Father—exists only among those who constantly fight upstream. Which is to say, it is incredibly difficult. It can be sustained only through a life of prayer.

Our current economic situation is one of ceaseless disorientation. Workers are separated not only from the means of production but also from the immediate fruits of production. Whereas past generations received tactile wages, such as a farmer and his crop, we are now at the point where even the once-tangible paycheck has been absorbed into the ether of digital technology via direct deposit. Such a situation contributes to the loss of a telos in our vocations, but it does not remove the search thereof. Naturally, the accumulation of possessions follows. We hunger for the meaning of our labor to be concretized, and since our physical labor has been translated into the realm of invisibility, one can be forgiven for wanting to see an object so as to prove that their efforts produced something. Materialism, then, is materialization, or at least the quest for it. It is the exportation of the otherwise-useless green paper, or worse yet, imperceptible paycheck into the realm of reality.
Christian efforts to redirect the objects of spending are surely laudable. Don’t pour your money into selfish pleasure-pursuits, we are told, and rightly so; rather, give the fruits of your labor to the poor, or to efforts of Christian mission. Much that is positive can be said about this. It acknowledges the longing for the materialization of labor and, recognizing the inherent selfishness in the human heart, redirects it toward Jesus Christ. If followed, it will surely provide the Christian with a deeper sense of purpose in his or her vocation, as the fruit of one’s labor now resides, via translation, in the kingdom of God. This much is good and must be carried on. But, as a means of providing orientation within vocation directly, it falls short. For it does not do anything to fix the telos of labor above the transitory payment, a digitized set of numbers in an online bank. It does not attend to the concrete dimensions of the very tasks and services we perform but locates the telos a few steps away from our action. The result: After we have completed our labor, which in and of itself remains basically meaningless, we can draw meaning from the tangible effects of the money we obtain. While surely better than unreflective materialism, this will not suffice in our quest for the guiding purpose of our labor, one that transcends the mere economic output and resides in the action of work itself.
A notion of work as Christian service accomplishes just this. Rather than positing the wages as the ultimate goal of all labor, whether spent on selfish pleasures or selfless donations, defining vocational meaning as Christian service fixes our eyes upon a higher, steadier telos. In short, one’s vocation is the domain in which he or she obeys the two greatest commandments: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself (Matt 23:37-39). Vocation itself is a calling (from the Latin vōcare, “to call, summon”). A job or career is not a mere economic appendage to a pre-existing Christian identity, as if Christians interacted with God somewhere other than the real world which they inhabit. On the contrary, one’s vocation is the stage upon which he or she enacts God’s direction. If these two great commandments from Christ are the compass for Christian pilgrims, our career vocations are the terrain we must travel in order to get there. The practical, daily demands of our vocational tasks are the thicket of woods we must traverse in order to move Northward.
Firstly, therefore, our work is service to our neighbors. If, as we have suggested, the purpose of our labor is not determined by our salary, then it follows that value-measurements must be derived from elsewhere. Contrary to the mindset we instinctually absorb, the dollar amount does not determine the worth of our work. Dollar amounts are transient, and in an economy as large as ours, surely do not represent the palpable concerns of the people who immediately surround us. This means that we must first examine the nature of our action itself, that is, what it is we do. The simple answer to this is that we are serving our neighbors.
Each job provides a service for someone who otherwise would not obtain it. A plumber performs a task that someone else is unable or unwilling to do. A lawyer provides a service that would be impossible if no lawyer existed. A computer programmer does something that non-computer programmers cannot do, for whatever reason. So what? What does this have to do with neighbors? Put simply, neighbors need help, and help comes from other neighbors. If someone is unable to cut down the trees in his backyard, someone who can comes over and does it. If someone is sick and cannot diagnose herself, she goes to someone who can. Neighbors need their neighbors to serve them. Each one’s vocational task offers something to the wider community that is valuable precisely because it is needed by neighbors.
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In light of that picture of humanity, Christian ethics cannot merely concern itself with knowing the right or good thing to do, it must first attend to being or—more starkly—becoming the right or good sort of being, the kind of being who might then do good things. Grace, redemption, and salvation are elemental to Christian distinctiveness. That the good life might be a vision for the sinful enemy of God attests a remarkable break from Greco-Roman ways, where gifts were granted to those innately apt to put them to good use. Yet Paul sings the praise of a God who justifies the ungodly and even dies for his own enemies (Rom 5:3–10).

Christians do not have unique possession of the ethical, of what is good and right. The Greeks wrote of the good life; today many different guilds work carefully to police the professional ethics of their respective fields. And plenty of other ancient or contemporary settings witness to the seemingly global concern for knowing the good, doing the good, and even for being good. That being so, we do well to seriously ask what Christians have to say that is unique, which is singular, and that warrants the modifier Christian ethics.
This question may seem incapable of a singular or coherent answer. Christians vary regarding their ethical commitments and even their theoretical understandings of the good life. To be sure, Roman Catholics frequently do disagree with charismatics or with Lutherans here. It’s also important to say, however, that there are disagreements between virtue ethicists and those committed to divine command ethics, categories which cut across rather than run alongside denominational fault lines. Indeed, Christian disagreement regarding ethics may only seem to compound as we add new methodological approaches to the historical pedigree of our still-proliferating church traditions. In the face of these divisions among Christians, can we give a coherent answer regarding what makes for Christian ethics?
And yet Christian ethics does offer some common concerns that set it apart from other approaches and that provide it a noteworthy sense of coherence. Much catholic unity can be perceived in this arena of theology.
In the following, we’ll seek to appreciate the myriad ways that Christian ethics distinguishes itself among various ethical approaches: in other words, we’ll discover what makes Christian ethics Christian. In so doing, we’ll consider the definition of the good, the knowledge of the good, the good person, the process of becoming good, what sort of goods are involved, how virtue and command relate to the good life, and finally, to what end the good is done.
What Is the Good?
Christian ethics finds fullest expression in the works of Jesus and the preaching of his commissioned apostles, and yet it is rooted in the prophetic witness of the law and prophets of Israel. In other words, both the Old and the New Testaments speak into Christian ethics.
The language of “the good” does not appear very often in Scripture, though confession of divine goodness appears often (as in Ps 145). But paired terms do appear in telling ways. The Bible, in both testaments, speaks of the “right” or “righteous,” which can be rendered as the “just.” (English splits language of justice and righteousness, but the biblical languages did not have this divide.) Psalm 11:7 says,
The Lord is righteous. He loves righteous deeds.
The upright will behold his face.
The register may be that of judicial rectitude rather than goodness, but the conceptual logic remains telling. “God is this, and therefore God loves this—and therefore those marked by this are the ones who will see God most intimately.” Divine character defines godly will, which then gives shape to the nature of rightness here and goodness elsewhere.
Goodness or the good is not a mere whim. It is not an arbitrary nominalist choice. It is not the sum total of aggregated social mores. The good marks God’s own being and character, which then defines the character of those who will be with him. Herein Christian ethics offers a robustly theological rooting to the nature of the good.
How Is the Good Known?
If the good is defined by God’s own character, then the question arises: How on earth might one know what is, in fact, good? God’s own character is not a simple thing; it is not available at one’s whim or caprice. And it is, therefore, no easy reference point for us to plot the good. God is spirit; he is elusive, transcendent. God is fire, wind, spirit. To know the good as knowing the moral implication of this one is to know mystery itself. Katherine Sonderegger has insisted on just this point.
Divine mystery is not a sign of our failure in knowledge, but rather our success. It is because we know truly and properly—because we obey in faith the First Commandment—that God is mystery. His metaphysical predicate of Oneness, when known, yields mystery.1
Sonderegger presses home repeatedly that mystery is an intellectual achievement flowing from divine presence, not a limit owing to divine absence.2 The mysterious God is known—and, with him, so is the incomprehensible character of goodness. God reveals goodness—the ethical—by his powerful mercy. And how do we know it now? We turn to God’s holy word, wherein divine instruction has been granted.
The whole counsel of God’s word conveys the totality of the good. Here the sufficiency of God’s word relates to the wisdom needed to live ethically. We see this especially in one of the most well-known passages attesting the nature of Holy Scripture. Second Timothy 3:16–17 not only attests the word of God to be “breathed out by God” or “inspired by God” (3:16), but also to be useful to equip and teach “so that the man or woman of God might be equipped for every good deed” (3:17). The logic of this passage is this: all Scripture forms one for all good works. This implies a threat: if we tend to anything less than the totality of Scripture, we ought to expect to be readied for only some good works.
The totality of Scripture is custom-designed to conform us, to prepare us, for all the challenges and temptations ahead. We see that principle in play when Jesus himself faced temptation. The threats were varied: food for survival, authority to summon the divine, riches galore. Jesus could have simply rebuked the tempter. He was divine, after all. But in each instance, he modeled the way that holy Scripture formatively prepares one for every good deed in that he responded to each inviting offer with a scriptural quotation drawn from the Old Testament.
Who Does the Good?
Christian ethics also distinguishes itself in its characterization of the agent of the good life. Good persons do good things. Agere sequitur esse or “action follows being.” Metaphysics form morals, for good or ill. So Christian ethics refuses to jump past the subject of the good life simply to consider the good or evil action. We must always begin with description of the subject of the ethical life.
Christianity redescribes the nature of the human. Humans are good, created by God himself. They are “very good” by his design and play a uniquely charted role in his cosmic order. Humans are evil, fallen into sin in Adam. They are contemptible and accursed, having let loose death and corruption since that primal sin in the garden. Christian thought conveys a textured picture, then, of humans as moral agents marked by great privilege and responsibility on the one hand, and yet marked by tragedy and limitation on the other.
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Having a biblical view of justification should also produce overwhelming thanksgiving. Knowing that justification by faith is apart from works, that justification is a gift of God, and that we are pardoned, declared righteous, and adopted into the family of God should generate within us a heart of eternal thankfulness. This thankfulness then translates into a life of consistent worship of the God, who, in His infinite wisdom, devised a way that depraved sinners might be accepted in the Beloved.

The Reformer John Calvin (1509–64) ardently declared the doctrine of justification by faith alone to be “the principle hinge by which [the Christian] religion is supported” (Institutes 3.11.1). Known as the material principle of the sixteenth-century Reformation, the doctrine of justification by faith alone was at the epicenter of the battle to bring needed reform to the church. This biblical doctrine is central to preserving an accurate understanding of the gospel even as we find it so clearly taught in Paul’s letters to the churches of Rome and Galatia.

As we approach the Bible’s teaching on justification, it is vital that we comprehend the finer points of the doctrine. To put it bluntly, if we get justification wrong, we get the gospel wrong. Thankfully, we have a rich and faithful heritage of believers who have courageously upheld Scripture’s teaching on justification by faith alone. The Westminster Shorter Catechism presents a clear and succinct definition of justification:
Justification is an act of God’s free grace, wherein he pardoneth all our sins, and accepteth us as righteous in his sight, only for the righteousness of God imputed to us, and received by faith alone (WSC 33).
In other words, justification is a legal act by God, based on the imputation of the righteousness of Christ, by means of our faith (granted as a gift from God).
However, the practical nature of the doctrine of justification is often overlooked and dismissed. Sometimes doctrine can become so heavy with terms and concepts that we miss just how applicable doctrine really is. While there may be more that can be applied from an informed understanding, there are no less than four practical applications of the doctrine of justification by faith alone.

The first practical application of the doctrine of justification by faith alone is assurance. Frankly, there will be days when we simply won’t feel justified, when we won’t feel like a Christian. We will have off days, down days, shaky days, sinful days, days on which the question haunts our minds, “Am I even a Christian?” The doctrine of justification by faith alone proclaims loudly, through the fog of doubt, that we have been born again and are “in Christ” (Gal. 2:20). Christ has completed His redemptive work, satisfied the justice of God the Father, and sealed us with His Holy Spirit. Justification assures us that there is never a need for re-justification. Rather, God justifies us by His grace. Before the courtroom of heaven, God has declared us, depraved sinners, to be “justified and righteous.” Paul declares, “Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom. 5:1). The doctrine of justification gives us the assurance to know that “[He is] just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus” (3:26).

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