To deserve the name ‘Christian ethics’, a view needs to be (a) an ethics and (b) Christian. (Another day, another lightbulb moment.) So how (a) does a view get to count as an ethics? At least on the approach most popular in today’s philosophy departments, it’s easy. You just pick your Master Factor, as I have called it elsewhere (Chappell Reference Chappell2009) – utility, or universalisability, or empathy, or alignment with the imagined resolutions of a hypothetical Civil-Society-Founding Continental Congress, or whatever. You then articulate a deductive-inductive system that (so far as possible) reduces everything else to that one Master Factor. You build a systematic moral theory that takes us all the way from axioms about this Master Factor as input, to specific instructions about how to act in all imaginable and indeed unimaginable scenarios as output. And you do so with all possible parsimony. In the words of Chappell (Reference Chappell2012) – no relation – you look for the ‘sole normative primitive’. Finding and operationalising this sole ‘primitive’ is the decisive triumph that enables us to complete our systematic moral theory. And once that’s done, ethics is over.

That – according to most current academic philosophers – is how a view gets to be an ethics. How does a view get to be (b) a Christian ethics? Here a massive tension immediately arises between (a) and (b). It is not that we cannot specify the Master Factor for a distinctively Christian ethics. It is that we can, and that the obvious Master Factor to specify is one that blows the whole idea of a systematic moral theory out of the water.

The Master Factor for a Christian ethics is the Master: the person of Christ, as both narrated example and experienced presence. In the Bible’s four canonical Gospels, Jesus does of course give us discursive ethical teaching – more about it below. But crucially, if you’ll pardon the adverb, that teaching is not his ‘word’, his ‘gospel’, his evangelion or injil, as it is called (in line with an epochal misunderstanding) in Islam. Jesus is not a celestial postman with a Book of Instructions to deliver to us; Jesus’s word is himself. So in orthodox Christian faith, ‘the word of God’ is not a systematic moral theory. It is not – not primarily – a set of writings of any kind at all, not even the written scriptures. Rather, the word that God speaks to us is Jesus, Emmanuel. God’s word is not an arrangement of words, but of living flesh and blood. God’s word is the Logos who became human flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.

This point sheds light on a question that (as I observed in Chappell Reference Chappell, van Ackeren and Archer2017) may not have worried the average churchgoer as much as it should have. Mark 1:14 says, ‘Jesus came into Galilee announcing the gospel of God’ (kerysswn to euangelion tou theou). This prompts the question ‘What gospel was that, then?’ The ‘good news’ that Jesus was already preaching right at the beginning of his ministry can hardly, as yet, have been the Billy-Graham Gospel, the story of how Jesus had died for our sins. In Isaiah 61:1–2, which seems to be where St Mark gets the term euangelion, the prophet says ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has sent me to preach glad tidings to (euangelisesthai) the poor’; in these words Isaiah is announcing himself. Likewise Jesus’s ‘gospel of God’ at Mark 1:14 is a story of self-proclamation. As we see at Luke 4:21, where Jesus reads Isaiah 61:1–2 in the synagogue and comments ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing’, the good news that Jesus brings is himself.

Again and again in the Gospels, people try to pin Jesus down (another phrase to apologise for) and he resists their categorisations. When Jesus turns and asks Andrew and John ‘what they are looking for’ (John 1:38), their question is Rabbei, pou meneis?, ‘Where is your resting-place, where do you come from, where do you stay?’ Jesus only replies erkhesthe kai opsesthe, ‘Come and you will see’. Again and again he leaves his followers flailing in his wake as they try to guess where he is coming from, where he will go next, what he is ‘up to’, what precisely it means to be a disciple of Jesus. Again and again, they guess wrong. If they asked Jesus to help them out by providing them with a nice clear systematic moral theory to banish all their doubts about how to act in particular circumstances, I suspect his answer would be what he says right at the other end of John’s Gospel (John 21:22): ti pros se; su moi akolouthei – ‘What is that to thee? Follow thou me.’

This is the ‘massive tension’ mentioned above. A distinctively Christian ethics can be stated in two words: akolouthei moi, ‘follow me’. Its content is the ‘mind of the Lord’ (1 Cor. 2:16), the example and the inspiration of Christ himself. And so a distinctively Christian ethics is, necessarily, a radically anti-theoretical view. If there is nothing for ethics to be except systematic moral theory, we might say that there cannot even be a Christian ethics.

Fortunately, as Robert Roberts explains in his short but very valuable introductory book on Christian virtue ethics, there is plenty more to Christian ethics than systematic theory (p. 94):

To say that Christian ethics is simply about following Christ is true, but like any exemplarism it has its dangers. It is our nature to abhor a vacuum; if we say that Christian ethics boils down simply to ‘Follow me’, and thereby empty out the Christian ideal of much or all of its discursive content, then it is unsurprising if frauds and charlatans rush to fill that space with their accounts of what, in particular detail, it means to follow Christ; which on their lips typically becomes a matter of following them.

It always takes more than the deadening letter – it takes the life-giving Spirit (2 Cor. 3:6) – to know at each moment which move it would be most Christ-like to make next. ‘Knowing how to go on’ means seeing the next step in a sequence, but (as analytic philosophers know very well) that presupposes knowing both what the sequence is, and what it means to follow it here. So it is always possible – it is almost inevitable – that we will at best misunderstand, perhaps even deliberately distort, what it means to follow Christ’s example. This danger cannot be averted simply by observing, as I did above, that Jesus is to the Christian not only narrated example but also experienced presence. That is true, but experience can and does mislead people just as easily as examples do.

For this reason at least, Christian virtue ethics needs discursive teaching as well as the narrated example and the experienced presence of Christ. It needs grounding in reflection on the notions of human nature and human flourishing: this is the focus of Roberts’s long first chapter, about Aristotle and neo-Aristotelianism. (This is as close as Roberts gets in this book to addressing meta-ethical questions about truth in ethics; but then, one short book can’t do everything. The questions of meta-ethics get a chapter in Roberts Reference Roberts2025.)

Again, Christian virtue ethics needs the Bible; though another question that Roberts does not explicitly address is the question what it means to speak as he does of ‘biblical ethics’, of ‘the biblical tradition’, ‘the biblical vision’, ‘the biblical understanding’. Before we can specify what it means to live according to ‘what the Bible says’, we need an account of what it is for the Bible to say anything at all. The Bible, after all, is a whole library of different books; it is not even entirely settled which books. And these books contain many things, for example two or possibly three different histories of how a divine law was given in the desert to a nomadic people perhaps 3,000 years ago, and some rather untidily edited anthologies of pastoral letters written 2,000 years ago, by a man awaiting execution in Rome, to people he had never met on the other side of the Roman Empire. Why think that any of these books address us, even indirectly? I don’t mean that this question can’t be answered; what I myself say above about the Gospels implies that I think it can. I do mean that the question needs to be faced up to somewhere; though I grant you, not necessarily within the confines of a short introductory book.

A Christian virtue ethics even needs rules, as emphasised in Roberts’ Chapter 4, ‘Virtues and the law of God’: ‘Rules are unavoidable’ (p. 64). But as Roberts argues, ethical teaching can be discursive without taking the form of a systematic moral theory and will be all the better for not taking that form. At times, indeed, Roberts is overtly hostile to the moral philosophers’ systematising ideal; on page 172, for example, he describes systematised virtue ethics of the Hursthouse-Swanton kind as ‘more a project in conceptual engineering than in therapeutic moral psychology’, as ‘mostly for seminar discussions, for philosophy professors and their young captives [his word; does Professor Roberts see his own students as captives?], rather than for the building up of souls’. Now I am hardly the right person to go in to bat for systematic moral theory, but I don’t actually see why a project shouldn’t be both ‘conceptual engineering’ and also ‘therapeutic moral psychology’. In fact, that seems to me quite a fruitful way of thinking about Hursthouse, Swanton, and in particular Nussbaum.

Instead of being a systematic moral theory, Christian virtue ethics can start, instead, from reflection on what Roberts interestingly calls the notion of a ‘moral outlook’ (cp. Chappell Reference Chappell2009). We might expect this notion to lead us towards a focus on the values out there, rather than on the virtues in here – a focus on the goods in the world rather than on the virtues that respond to those goods. I take it from Roberts’s rejection of the exclusivity of systematic moral theory – his rejection of what I have elsewhere called ‘the curse of the definite article’ (Chappell Reference Chappell2014: 2; Reference Chappell2022: 68), the idea that basic questions in ethics can typically have only one correct answer – that Roberts would not oppose someone who wanted, as I do, to talk about our experience of values in the world. Still, as he explains the notion of a moral outlook, its focus remains internal character, not external goodness in the world. (Robert Roberts has commented to me in a personal communication that ‘virtue ethics is focused on the virtues, the psychology of the agent, but I do emphasize that there is more to ethics than the agent; in Christian ethics there is the new social order, the order of shalom, which the Christian virtues make us fit to enjoy and contribute to’.)

At pages 47–51 he gives us two polar-opposite descriptions of moral outlooks in his sense, the Thrasymachean ‘Robbiebud’ and the Franciscan ‘Donniejohn’. The point of these examples is to prompt reflection and criticism of their two outlooks, and to suggest to us ways in which we might grow out of the Thrasymachean, and nurture the Franciscan, in ourselves. In Part Two of the book (Chs. 6–11), Roberts takes further this approach of describing and reflecting on examples, by exploring no fewer than seventeen ‘of the virtue concepts that shape the Christian mind and heart’. Roberts’s seventeen ‘virtue concepts’ are faith, hope, love (Ch. 6), grateful generosity and forgivingness (Ch. 7), courage, self-control, and patience (Ch. 8), compassion, gentleness, and kindness (Ch. 9), truthfulness, justice, and loyalty (Ch. 10), and joy, wisdom, and humility (Ch. 11). Since any virtue is a way of seeing the world, to look at these virtues is to look at parts of outlooks; and to put these virtues together is to combine them in an overall Christian moral outlook that is, if you like, complete. It is always a work in progress, certainly in this life and probably in the world to come too. But it is or can be complete, in a way, though a quite different way from the way a theory might be complete. What such ethical reflections give us is not so much a finished logical system as a coherent character.

A virtue theory that goes in this direction remains an exemplarism, because what it does is set up the particular virtues as modes of being, examples or aspects of how to be, on which we may reflect and from which we may learn. (For more of my recent thoughts about exemplarism cp. Chappell, Reference Chappellforthcoming.) But it is no longer the blank exemplarism of akolouthei moi plus nothing else. It has become an exemplarism with helpfully detailed and contextualised discursive content: content of rather the narrative kind that Jesus’s parables illustrate, or again the various lists of virtues, fruits, and gifts of the Spirit that we find catalogued in St Paul’s epistles. (Or in the Secunda Secundae of Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, the deepest and wisest reflection on the dispositions of the Christian character ever written. Perhaps Aquinas, or a pointer to him at least, could be added to the second edition?)

In the very last words of Roberts’s last chapter (p. 173):

Roberts’s book is short and perfectly suited to teaching undergraduates. It is also rich and learned. I warmly recommend it to all those who want to think more closely and more deeply about the distinctive content of a Christian virtue ethics.