Vocation, Virtue, and Vice

By Brent Waters

Although vocational proficiencies are important in pursuing our callings, they are not enough. There is also the question of character. Being skillful is not the same as being good. This is where virtue plays a crucial role. . . . For the purpose of this book, a virtue may be understood as a practice that habituates the good of loving God and neighbor. It is through routine and repetitious acts that we fulfill our various callings and vocations in a good and faithful manner and thereby become good and faithful (i.e., virtuous) people.

Christian moral theology and philosophy have traditionally affirmed the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and love (taken from 1 Cor. 13) and the four cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. Additionally, there are other classic virtues, such as courage and fidelity, that are compatible with and have been incorporated within traditional Christian thought and practice. Each of these virtues denotes a quality of excellence that humans should seek to practice and habituate. How do good habits become virtues? Repetitious practice: doing the same good act, with the assistance of God’s grace and guidance of the Spirit, over and over again so they become part of our second nature. We become habitually faithful people, for instance, by constantly performing acts of faith. Paying attention to the requisite virtues that instantiate the good is also attending to one’s soul.

Speaking of virtue, however, requires that we also say something about vice. Again, for the purpose of this book, a vice may be understood as actions or habitual behaviors that prevent one from being virtuous. A vice diminishes or prevents virtuous behavior most often through either excess or deficiency. The vices corresponding to the virtue of courage, for example, are rashness and cowardice. To perpetually practice or surrender to vice makes one a vicious person. In many respects, vice is similar to sin, as reflected in the Christian tradition’s enumeration of the seven deadly sins: pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed, and sloth.

The virtues are both instrumentally and intrinsically crucial in pursuing one’s callings and vocations. The virtues are instrumentally valuable because attending to the good of one’s own soul also makes one more attentive to the people one is called to serve. As Gilbert Meilaender contends, “Doing what is right requires being good.” For example, adept ministers, physicians, and military officers promote the good of those they serve through example and conduct beyond their respective professional proficiencies. A life of virtue is also inherently good, for it requires introspection and self-transcendence. This is a fading art in late modernity, in which it is often assumed that performance is all that matters. Yet ministers, doctors, and military personnel who are judged to be excellent solely on the basis of the performance of their duties are not necessarily good human beings. Virtue forces us to constantly revisit the question, What is an excellent human being, the kind of creature God created us to be?

— Brent Waters is the Jerre and Mary Joy Stead Professor of Christian Social Ethics at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, where he also directs the Jerre L. and Mary Joy Stead Center for Ethics and Values. He has written, edited, or contributed to many books.

Content taken from Common Callings and Ordinary Virtues by Brent Waters ©2022. Used by permission of Baker Publishing www.bakerpublishinggroup.com.

“Brent Waters is one of the most insightful theologians I know, and his new book Common Callings and Ordinary Virtues is no exception to what we've come to expect from him—sound theology, relevant to important aspects of real life. This time Waters brings his theological acumen to bear on the so-called mundane aspects of everyday life. He shows the formative power of the ‘dailyness’ of life to shape us and enable us to become more Christlike. I highly recommend this work, in which Waters’s characteristic insight is applied to an area of life that we might not have thought very deeply about in the past, though we surely will now.”

— Scott Rae, dean of faculty and professor of Christian ethics, Talbot School of Theology

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