Introduction
Over the past several decades, an increasing number of students of ethics have focused greater attention upon the subject of ethical formation. While the discipline of ethics has often been reduced to inquiries into the “what” of human conduct, the heightened concern of the present for many has turned to the “how” and, more poignantly, the “who.” Because ethical acts can be sustained only as an ongoing life story when they issue from ethical being, the re-focus on ethical or spiritual formation is not only appropriate but also essential. Nor can ethical formation be fully considered without contemplating its integration with spiritual formation. As Dallas Willard notes, “Spiritual formation…is the process by which the human spirit or will is given a definite ‘form’ or character. It is a process that happens to everyone. We each become a certain kind of person in the depths of our being, gaining a specific type of character” (Renovation 19-20). Thus, spiritual or character formation may be said to be a part of the bundle of experiences that composes what it means to be human. Stanley Hauerwas has defined “character” as “our deliberate disposition to use a certain range of reasons for our actions rather than others (such a range is usually what is meant by moral vision), for it is by having reasons and forming our actions accordingly that our character is at once revealed and molded” (Vision 59). The formation process is one that continues to emerge in relation to our choices. This ongoing formative impact of choices, both revealing and molding character, is suggested in this article by the phase “ethical formation.”
Another dimension of the formation dialogue that has been the subject of discussion, not only within the renewed contemporary debate but also from the pages of antiquity, is that of virtue. “Virtues are defined as qualities of a person that make that person a good person in community, and that contribute to the good of the community, or to the good that humans are designed for. These are qualities of character. For example, a good person has integrity and seeks justice” (Stassan and Gushee 32). The writings of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and other ancient students of ethics are replete with theoretical deliberations upon the nature of the virtues. However, when attention is turned to the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, what is found is not an “abstract reflection of a philosophical kind on the nature and ground of moral action”; rather, the Scriptures’ focus on virtue and character is expressed by “reflecting the lives of a particular people seeking to display in their attitudes and actions the glory of God” (Gill 63, 64).
This narrative description of ethical formation, then, bears directly upon a proper understanding of the process for the student of ethics. He or she must be a student, a disciple of a person, and the one person to whom the New Testament scriptures point as the focus of attention is Jesus. From this perspective, ethical formation—to be complete or at least to be in progress toward wholeness—must be focused entirely on Jesus. The goal of ethical formation is “an obedience or conformity to Christ that arises out of an inner transformation accomplished through purposive interaction with the grace of God in Christ” (Willard, Renovation 22). This interaction essentially encompasses choices enabled by God’s grace which bring the person into participation with the formation process. Participation in this delivering grace, though, “does not mean any kind of random empowerment. Grace is Christomorphic, not amorphic; it has a specific shape revealed in Christ. Its shape is the shape…of the way of Jesus as seen in the New Testament and as grounded in the Old Testament. The shape of grace is Christ taking form in us. We participate by answering Jesus’ gracious call: Come follow me” (Stassan and Gushee 36). Where, in the account of his personal and historical experience, was Jesus going when he issued this call? According to the Gospel records, he was on his way to Jerusalem, where he would suffer, die, and rise again. He calls those who would follow to join him on this journey by enabling them to make choices that risk exposure to pain and loss of all for the good of others. Ethical formation is journeying toward Jerusalem.
The follower of Christ along that journey is one so formed as he assumes the particular description of Christ—his image. “This formation is the determination of our character through God’s sanctifying work” (Hauerwas, Vision 67). Since formation is indeed God’s work within the follower, Hauerwas observes, “The Christian life so understood is not made up of one isolated ‘loving’ act added to another. Rather, it ought to be the progressive growth of the self into the fuller reality of God’s action in Christ” (Vision 67). So, while ethical formation is demonstrated in the “what” of human conduct, these acts are the natural expression of who is being formed within the follower of Christ along the journey. This is a radical process that Willard describes as a revolution: “The revolution of Jesus is in the first place and continuously a revolution of the human heart or spirit…. [H]is is a revolution of character which proceeds by changing people from the inside through ongoing personal relationship to God in Christ and to one another (Renovation 15).
But just how are followers who, by God’s grace, are heeding Christ’s gracious call to understand this journey that embodies ethical formation? In this brief reflection upon ethical formation, we will follow the guidance of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In their recent work, Geoffrey B. Kelly and F. Burton Nelson emphasize that Bonhoeffer’s own life choices incarnated the ideas he expressed in his writings (32-35). Even Bonhoeffer himself acknowledged in an early letter from his Tegel prison cell: “I’m learning to practice myself what I have said to other people in sermons and books” (Letters 29). Based on his insights, this article will express a meager effort to apprehend better both the goal of the journey (the image of Christ) and the path of the journey (the imitation of Christ). Finally, by what is humbly suggested as a reasonable extension of Bonhoeffer’s thought, this article will attempt to demonstrate that the pattern for the journey may be found in the imitation of the Apostle Paul as he imitated Christ. In so doing, we shall seek to learn from Bonhoeffer’s responding to Christ’s call as he continued with Jesus and with Paul journeying toward Jerusalem.
The Goal of Formation
Bonhoeffer provides the starting point for our reflection upon ethical formation in these words:
[T]he Holy Scriptures speak of formation in a sense which is at first entirely unfamiliar to us. Their primary concern is not with the forming of a world by means of plans and programmes [sic]. Whenever they speak of forming they are concerned only with one form which has overcome the world, the form of Jesus Christ.
Formation can come only from this form. But here again it is not a question of applying directly to the world the teaching of Christ or what are referred to as Christian principles so that the world might be formed in accordance with these. On the contrary, formation comes only by being drawn into the form of Jesus Christ. It comes only as formation in His likeness, as conformation, with the unique form of His who was made man, crucified and rose again. (Ethics 81-82)
Ordinarily, a journey is begun with a particular destination in mind, if not in view. For Jesus, the destination of his earthly path was found in Jerusalem. Bonhoeffer, our guide, points us to the destination—the one and only destination—of our journey of formation. That destination is Christ as he makes himself known in the narrative of his life, death and resurrection, all of which culminates in Jerusalem.
If life itself may be considered a journey, the ancients taught that only at the end of life could one say that a life has been happy or not (Danaher 67). Although Aristotle and others held this view, they also taught that “it is possible, long before the end of our lives, to participate in our happiness if we know what our end or purpose is and we are moving toward it” (Danaher 67; emphasis added). Aristotle held that happiness was that end—the summa bonum. In his Nicomachean Ethics, he asserted that happiness is something ultimate and self-contained and is the end of action. Danaher, following upon Aristotle’s classical idea, suggests, “Happiness, for the Christian, is teleological in that with our conversion to Christianity comes an awareness that God has a unique plan and purpose for our lives (69). In order to progress along the journey, which is the embodiment of the formation God is working in us, and to “come into the fullness of life that God has for us, we have to be able to see the end and purpose for which we were uniquely created and understand that it alone is our only source of happiness” (Danaher 71).
Thus, the follower along the journey must envision the goal. Hauerwas emphasizes the essential role the vision of the goal plays in formation when he writes, “Man’s capacity for self-determination is dependent on his ability to envision and fix his attention on certain descriptions and to form his actions (and thus his self) in accordance with them” (Vision 58). The “certain descriptions” for the follower as he journeys toward Jerusalem concern Christ himself: “The Christian life has a definite shape as Christ is formed in us (Gal. 4:19); renewal in the image of God (Eph. 4:24; Col. 3:10) has a tangible meaning in the person and example of Christ” (Jones 24). As such, this life is “centered and receives its form in God’s act in Jesus Christ” (Hauerwas, Character 180). In view of this truth, we may further conclude that ethical formation does not have as its goal compliance with a set of defined principles or rules. Rather, the goal reflects Christ’s love through embodied acts. Hauerwas adds support to Bonhoeffer’s point when he concludes: “The Christian life, therefore, is not primarily a task to be accomplished or an ideal to be achieved, but a fact to be lived out—the fact of God’s establishment of his rule in Jesus Christ” (Hauerwas, Character 180).
Where, then, do the virtues fit into formation when its goal is properly understood to be the very image of Christ? Hauerwas proves helpful again in this regard: “The Christian life cannot be specified by a set of virtues to be achieved apart from their arising in response to Jesus Christ; nor can it be interpreted solely as a pattern of rules to follow or good acts to do. It is first and foremost adherence to this man, Jesus Christ, as the bringer of God’s order in his person and work” (Character 182; emphasis added). When we fix our attention upon Christ (Heb. 3:1; 12:2; Col. 3:1) and, by the working of his grace, apprehended by the gift of faith, we are enabled to form our choices upon the certain description presented by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. As a natural result of this formation, we will be led to make choices that risk exposure to pain and loss for the good of others.
As noted above, the biblical accounts do not undertake abstract philosophical reflections on the nature of moral action. Instead, they focus on a narrative of God’s redemptive history of His people in the person of Christ. The particular moral demands of the Old Testament Law and Prophets are fulfilled and brought to completion in the life and death of Jesus Christ (Matt. 5:17-18). This relationship between the Old Testament and New Testament—and thus the unity of the biblical ethic as embodied in Christ—is displayed most vividly in the figure of the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53, where “Jesus could have found the most profound emphases of his ethical teaching” (Stassan and Gushee 23).
Viewing Christ in terms of the Suffering Servant causes the follower on the journey to stay his course. The follower is enabled to continue on this path even when the path leads him into the danger of pain and loss. He risks such dangers as he responds to the call of God and so serves the good of others. This perspective is illustrated by Aquinas’s elaboration on Aristotle’s discussion of the virtue of courage: “A brave man behaves well in the face of danger of any other kind of death…thus, may man not fail to attend on a sick friend through fear of deadly infection, or not refuse to undertake a journey with some godly object in view through fear of shipwreck or robbers” (qtd. in Hauerwas and Pinches 159). So, too, the embodiment of the goal of our ethical formation—the image of Christ—displays a life manifesting choices that risked his own pain and suffering to accomplish our redemption. In him, we are newly formed so that we might fulfill the law of Christ—bearing one another’s burdens.
The goal of the journey is set forth not as an aspiration but as the realization by faith of God’s ongoing work in His people. Here, we turn again to Bonhoeffer:
To be conformed to the image of Christ is not an ideal to be striven after. It is not as though we had to imitate him as well as we could. We cannot transform ourselves into his image; it is rather the form of Christ which seeks to be formed in us (Gal 4:19), and to be manifested in us. Christ’s work in us in not finished until he has perfected his own form in us. We must be assimilated to the form of Christ in its entirety, the form of Christ incarnate, crucified and glorified. (Cost 301)
The connection is now made between the image of Christ as the goal of ethical formation and the imitation of Christ as the path of ethical formation. That path will take us, in the here and now, from Bethlehem to Jerusalem.
The Path of Formation
Bonhoeffer, our guide, points to three trail markers along the journey toward Jerusalem—Christ’s incarnation, his crucifixion, and his glorification. God does not merely set us upon the path and then only occasionally come to our aid in the gaps. Rather, as Stassan and Gushee observe, “Bonhoeffer insists Christ is in the center of our lives. When God acts to deliver us, we are thereby empowered…and Christ takes shape in us” (36). As active participants, we must be confessing our absolute dependence upon God’s gracious empowerment to progress us along this path. The follower seeks neither autonomy nor independence, but rather faithfulness to the path that demonstrates the conviction that he belongs to the one he follows. Hauerwas further elaborates on this point when he asserts: “True freedom comes by learning to be appropriately dependent. We do not become free by conforming our actions to the categorical imperative, but by being accepted as disciples and thus learning to imitate the master” (Hauerwas, Community 130-31). The essence of this learning resides in watching the one upon whom we are dependent.
Throughout the ages of church history, many students of the master have attempted to articulate the how. One in particular, Gerard Groote, the fourteenth-century founder of the Brethren of the Common Life, penned what has become a classic. His work, entitled The Following of Christ, is nearly always attributed to his student and editor, Thomas à Kempis, who revised Groote’s book under the title, The Imitation of Christ (Malaise xi -xii). Groote expressed the meaning of following Jesus in his incarnation—an essential act of which was his laying aside the riches of glory and becoming poor for the sake of his own by pouring himself into the form of a servant (Phil. 2:5-8)—when he wrote: “Yet no one is richer than such a man; no one more powerful; no one more free than he who can leave himself and all things, and set himself in the lowest place” (105). Groote then described following Christ in his crucifixion: “He has gone before you carrying His cross, and has died for you on the cross, that you also might carry your cross and desire to die on the cross” (106). For Groote, the focal point in imitating Christ in his death was the willingness to suffer for Christ: “Nothing is more pleasing to God…than willingly to suffer for Christ. And if you could choose, you should prefer rather to suffer adversities for Christ than to be comforted with many consolations, for thereby you would be more like unto Christ and all the saints” (112).
What was lacking, however, in Groote and in many similar attempts to explain the how was a clearer understanding of the purpose for such imitation. To Groote, there was a “salutary” effect for the follower. This notion contributed to a great misunderstanding of God’s work in the follower. The follower does not share in the sufferings of Christ to secure his own salvation or even to “work it out.” Rather, imitation of Christ in his death reflects through the follower the redemptive work of Christ to and for others.
Not only is it critical that we properly understand the purpose of the imitation, we must also understand where its power lies. In the incarnation, Jesus submitted himself in dependence upon the Person of the Holy Spirit. His life on earth was marked by “the power to surrender His life in weakness. Only the Spirit’s abiding presence with Jesus [made] this kind of life possible. The Spirit’s presence is not for the purpose of making Jesus into a superman but for sustenance and diligence along the road which leads to the cross (Slane 147). The path, thus, is “the way of renunciation” (Hauerwas, Peaceable 80) by kenosis—an emptying of ourselves as followers of the one who poured himself into the form of a servant in dependence upon the Spirit (Phil. 2:5-8). “If we will empty ourselves, we may become full with the fullness of Him who fills heaven and earth. We must become more than simply aware of our emptiness. The hungry starves, the thirsty perish, when they do not eat and drink…. Spiritual anorexia is as deadly as spiritual pride which does not know its need. Like Jesus, we must follow the path of spiritual reliance (Hynson 50). The follower thus consciously empties himself of self-reliance and intentionally depends upon another.
Alongside kenosis and becoming absolutely dependent upon His life within each individual disciple, the follower further experiences the imitation of Christ in his incarnation by apprehending, living in, and teaching the reality of Christ’s presence in His people—His body. Willard captures this communal facet of incarnation imitation when he notes that “we teach the reality of Jesus risen, his actual existence now as a person who is present among his people…. So the continuing incarnation of the divine Son in his gathered people must fill our minds if we are to love him and his Father adequately and thus live on the rock of hearing and doing (Divine 335-36; emphasis added). Imitation of Christ in his incarnation is not merely an initial stage along the path. It encompasses the entire journey and is intricately intertwined with imitation of Christ in his sufferings and death for others.
The total path of formation is thus characterized by both a conscious emptying out of self-reliance and an intentional taking up the burdens of others. “By being partakers of Christ incarnate, we are partakers in the whole humanity which he bore. We now know that we have been taken up and borne in the humanity of Jesus, and therefore, that new nature we now enjoy means that we too must bear the sins and sorrows of others” (Bonhoeffer, Cost 302). The sufferings we share are sufferings that come not by self-infliction or aggravation but as part and parcel of our purposeful choice to bear the burdens of others (Gal. 6:2). Marvin Meyer observes this truth in his discussion of discipleship as it is portrayed in Mark’s gospel account (Mk. 8:34-35): “Mark’s theology and Christology are closely connected to following Jesus and living the life of discipleship—suffering discipleship” (233). Even as Christ came not be served but to serve and give his life as a ransom for many (Mk. 10:45), his followers actively participate in the imitation of his crucifixion by taking up their own cross and dying—not only a renunciatory and self-emptying death, but also a death for others. In this way, the followers along the journey toward Jerusalem reflect the love of Jesus in obedience to his new commandment to love others as he has loved (John 13:15, 34-35; Gal. 6:2). Such following will always involve risking pain and loss to serve the good of others. “Christ’s death reveals that God’s commitment to redeem creation will not be stopped, even if it means placing Himself at risk, pursuing suffering and death to the extraordinary length of the cross (Slane 150).
Where does the willingness and readiness to expose oneself to such risk of pain and loss come from? It is no less than the direct natural outgrowth of the power of Christ’s resurrection (Phil. 3:10). This is the follower’s imitation of Christ in his glorification. To paraphrase the twentieth-century missionary martyr Jim Elliott, he is no fool who risks losing what he cannot keep when he has already been given what he can never lose. Bonhoeffer returns us once again to fixing our eyes on Jesus:
If we contemplate the image of the glorified Christ, we shall be made like unto it, just as by contemplating the image of Christ crucified we are conformed to his death. We shall be drown into his image, and identified with his form, and become a reflection of him. That reflection of his glory will shine forth in us even in this life, even as we share his agony and bear his cross. (Cost 303)
Thus, the entire journey is a path of incarnation, death, and resurrection. Even as Christ’s glory was “set aside” in his incarnation and he came in lowliness, he manifested the glory of God, not in outward splendor, but in that very lowliness with which he lived for others and suffered for them.
Thus far, Bonhoeffer has guided us along the path of formation—the imitation of Christ in his humiliation, crucifixion, and glorification. Willard offers one of the most insightful depictions of this journey toward Jerusalem by a contemporary student of the master when he states:
The assumption of Jesus’ program for his people on earth was that they would live their lives as his students and co-laborers. They would find him so admirable in every respect—wise, beautiful, powerful, and good—that they would constantly seek to be in his presence and be guided, instructed and helped by him in every aspect of their lives…. In his presence our inner life will be transformed, and we will become the kind of people for whom his course of action is the natural (and supernatural) course of action. (Divine 273)
Having considered the goal of formation in the image of Christ and the path of formation in the imitation of Christ, we have sought to understand better the who and the how of ethical formation. By turning our gaze to Paul’s imitation of Christ, at his invitation (1 Cor. 11:1), we may better learn and thereby be enabled to more closely follow the pattern of ethical formation.
The Pattern of Formation
In his recently published tome on the Apostle Paul, Donald H. Akenson makes a definitive statement about Paul’s formation: “He shaped himself as a continually evolving offering-in-progress to his God, and his letters are the record of that performance. We are justified in reading the record of Saul’s life as the first recorded instance of a life given over to the Imitation of Christ” (228). Paul himself not only invited such a reading of his life, but also exhorts his students to an active following of him as he imitated Christ (1 Cor. 11:1). F.F. Bruce observes the context of Paul’s exhortation to imitation this way:
Paul’s personal strength of will was not accompanied, as it is in so many, by impatience with lesser mortals. While he himself had a robust and emancipated conscience, he had warm sympathy with those whose conscience was immature and unenlightened, and would go to almost any length of self-denial in consideration for his weaker brethren. He deplored the inability or unwillingness of other strong-minded Christians to show them such consideration, and it was pre-eminently in this regard that he pressed his own example on them, urging them to imitate him as he for his part imitated Christ. (461)
Paul practiced the “art” of bearing the burdens of the weak (Gal. 6:2). Thus, we may look at Paul’s life through the three-dimensional prism presented by Bonhoeffer and thereby seek to discern the pattern of formation through Paul’s imitation of the incarnation, crucifixion, and glorification of Christ.
Paul’s imitation of the incarnation may be seen as his leaving his “natural” status (Phil. 3:4-6) and counting “everything as loss” (Phil 3:7-8) so that in emptying himself he might find his fullness in Christ (Phil 3:9). He imitated Christ in his crucifixion by identifying with his death (Gal. 2:20), by his willing fellowship in the sufferings of Christ for others (Phil. 1:12, 20-21, 29-30; 3:10) to the extent even of bearing on his body the marks of Jesus (Gal. 6:17), and ultimately by his own physical death. (Phil 2:17; 2 Tim. 4:6-7) It is most noteworthy that when Paul was confronted with a prophetic word foretelling his own sufferings and death, he, like Jesus before him, set his face toward continuing on his journey to Jerusalem (Acts 20:22-24; cf. Luke 9:21-27, 43-45, 53; 13:22). Finally, Paul imitated Christ in his glorification by reflecting the image of Christ as he was motivated and empowered by the sure hope of the resurrection (2 Cor. 4:7-12; Phil. 3:10-11). In every respect we may examine Paul’s formation and find that it consistently enabled him to make choices that risked pain and loss for the good of others.
While Paul’s imitation is recounted throughout the pages of all his epistles as well as Luke’s account in Acts, one of the most potent pictures of his reflection of the form of Jesus is found in the little letter to his friend Philemon. In it, we read of Paul willingly taking on the debt, the burden of the renegade slave Onesimus, so that Onesimus might be reconciled to his master Philemon and welcomed back in fellowship with Philemon’s household no longer as a slave but as a “beloved brother” (Philemon 10, 15-19). Such is the imitation of Christ that we, as followers of him and of Paul, are called to pattern by grace-enabled choices and so reflect Christ in our lives in the here and now.
Akenson offers an explanation for Paul’s progress along this path that suggests a helpful conception of the formation process: “Saul’s imitation of Christ worked so well for him because the contours of his life could be made similar to those of Yeshua of Nazareth (particularly in his developing a mission to the Gentiles similar to that of Yeshua to the Judaists), and also because the two men shared common points of orientation” (251). Moreover, in the pattern of formation displayed in Paul’s imitation of Christ, we see the ongoing significance of Christ’s humiliation, sufferings, death, and resurrection in bringing his followers into an experience of genuine happiness in the here and now. N.T. Wright, another of the Pauline scholars of our day, elaborates this point:
Throughout Paul’s writings, genuine holiness is seen in terms of dying and rising with Christ…. The death and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah are not, for Paul, merely events in the past, however climatic. They are the foundation of his, and the church’s, daily existence. “Sharing the sufferings of Christ, in order to share his glory also”; that is the keynote of what Paul means by holiness. Genuine happiness does not come cheap. (145)
Paul’s imitation of Christ in his humiliation, sufferings, and death serves as a pattern for the imitation God by his grace will work in his people, even today, as he through Christ’s Body reflects his image. N.T. Wright provides further insight into the Paul’s imitation of the glorification of Christ: “The doctrine of the image of God in his human creatures was never the belief simply that humans were meant to reflect God back to God. They were meant to reflect God out into the world” (148). Paul’s ultimate imitation of Christ reflected the form of Jesus life, death, and resurrection. Indeed, as we have been endeavoring to extend the ideas of Bonhoeffer about the image and imitation of Christ, we may also assert that Bonhoeffer’s own life, as well as his words, provides a twentieth-century pattern of choices that embodied an imitation of Paul as he so followed Christ.
Conclusion
Ethical formation is thus a process and a journey. It is a process because it entails the work of God from beginning to end. He is the one who begins a good work within us, and he is the one who brings that process of formation to its fulfillment—its telos. It is a journey because the follower of Christ is called in concrete ways to do just that—follow. To follow, one must take very real, practical, disciplined steps. Such steps through stages of incarnation, sufferings, death, and resurrection are enabled by the grace of God. As both a process worked out in and through us by God and a journey along which the follower progresses, by His grace, the one being so formed will experience the incarnation’s humiliation, the pain of sharing in Christ’s suffering and death—not to redeem others, but to reflect to others the reality of the person of Christ being formed within the follower.
As this process and journey finds completion, the follower will exhibit, in its fullest meaning, the resurrection’s glorification of God. As Bonhoeffer notes:
Because Christ really lives his life in us, we too can “walk even as he walked” (1 John 2:6), “do as he has done” (John 13:15), “love as he has loved” (Eph. 5:2; John 13:34; 15:12), “forgive as he forgave” (Col. 3:13), “have this mind, which was also in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 2:5), and therefore we are able to follow the example he left us (1 Pet. 2:21), lay down our lives for the brethren as he did. (1 John 3:16). (Cost 304)
This is the ethical formation Bonhoeffer not only expounded in his writings but also embodied in his life as he chose to risk pain and loss of his possessions, happiness, and freedom—ultimately the loss of life for the good of others. In so doing, Bonhoeffer, with the one he followed, continued on his journey toward Jerusalem. Those who would follow Christ are called to the same destination in their formation.
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