I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. | Romans 12:1–2
This Sunday, we talked about the fruit of goodness. One of the points that I made was that there was a disconnect between how we think culturally about moral good, and how we actually live. Our culture wants to say that everyone should be able to do as they please and define good for themselves, but are then offended when people use this freedom. We reject a set standard of morality, but are surprised when the outcome does not align with our internal sense of good. We have this fear of being dogmatic and indoctrinating our children, so many parents do not give firm direction. We have to let them discover themselves, we are told, and this leads to a way of thinking about moral education that does not give them the foundation to pursue goodness.
CS Lewis wrote a whole book on this shift 80 years ago called the Abolition of Man. It is best known for the line about men without chests:
In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
The idea here is that we take away a confident trust in the truth, we stop teaching kids to pursue good, and then we expect them to be able to produce virtue. We act surprised when they are confused and depressed and full of anxiety, when we have removed anything firm for them to stand on. We praise the traits that lead to men without chests (indifference and passivity) and then we are let down when they don’t have the fortitude to fight for the things that matter. We laugh at honor, he says, as an old-fashioned waste of time, and then we get frustrated that our culture produces so many dishonorable people.
Lewis looks to the past to recapture a sense of how to produce virtue and goodness:
St Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind of degree of love which is appropriate to it. Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought. When the age for reflective thought comes, the pupil who has been thus trained in ordinate affections or ‘just sentiments’ will easily find the first principles in Ethics; but to the corrupt man they will never be visible at all and he can make no progress in that science. Plato before him had said the same. The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting and hateful.
In order to produce goodness, an order must be set. There has to be a foundation laid to build a strong ethic upon. In order to create this foundation, a standard of good for a person to conform themselves to must be established. For Christians, this foundation is the Word of God.
In the Bible, God gives us a description of how to order our affections in order to be sanctified to holiness. He reveals His character, most clearly in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and then tells us to imitate this righteousness. In this, He is not just commanding that we be good to prove our value; He is transforming us through the renewal of our mind.
Learning to discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect – teaching our children to do the same – is creating the foundation to be virtuous people. While the world may not agree with our standard or congratulate us for the hard work of submitting our desires to God’s law, we can trust that God will work through this to establish His goodness in the world.