The Character of Virtue

2 Peter, 2 Peter 1:1-11

Post last updated on December 19, 2025

 Image credit:  Wikimedia Commons

In the Old Testament’s English version, the most obvious consideration of virtue is given to the reader in the three different places where the adjectival form is used to describe a woman of excellent and recommended character. A fourth appearance as an adverb bears the same idea: She is a virtuous woman.¹See Ruth 3:11, Proverbs 12:4, Proverbs 31:10; also, the adverb appears in Proverbs 31:29. In each of the instances, the reader’s initial understanding of virtue is informed by each woman and her actions, featured in the world in which she moves. For instance, Proverbs 31:10 and what follows, leads the reader to consider virtue in a woman’s many activities that are directed toward the good of others, particularly that of her family and neighbors. What we might, accordingly, call virtue’s moral significance is apparent enough in the various modifiers that are also part of the same text—trust, goodness, honor, and praise. There are many virtuous women, we read in Proverbs 31:29, but this woman is better than the others. This acknowledgement of her superlative character requires and declares moral definition and authority that becomes very basis of her excellence. The ethical associations of virtue are obvious in scripture’s presentation, but is there anything more to virtue’s character?

Other than these instances, the word virtue does not appear in the English translation of the Old Testament. What does appear, however, is a variety of other descriptions of people and their actions, each one a rendering of chayil,²חַיִל the same Hebrew word that lies beneath the translation of “virtuous” in the occurrences already cited above. As such, whatever is named as virtue in respect to the women highlighted in a very few instances, possesses additional and related designations in the other places where chayil appears. For example, when the angel says to Gideon, “The LORD is with thee, thou mighty man of valor” (Judges 6:12), chayil is the word used to describe Gideon’s courageous character, named in English as valor. Notably, in its many appearances in the Hebrew scriptures, chayil is often rendered as various qualities of force and strength: Gideon is a mighty man of valor; King Saul’s father, Aphiah, is described as a mighty man of power (1 Samuel 9:1). The word is even made to signify an entire army, such as those of Babylon and Chaldea in 2 Kings 25:5. Strength, wealth, power, virtue: these and other names belong to the English renderings of chayil. This connection is unsurprising, since the English word, virtue, receives meaning that it inherits from its Latin root, highlighting man and his character, especially in respect to valor and strength.³“Virtue” in the Online Etymological Dictionary The relationship of the Hebrew to the English need not be unnecessarily strained nor exaggerated, but the semantic range of chayil —connecting, as it does, the idea of force to moral excellence—helps the reader to understand the emphasis that the Hebrew scriptures give to the ideas that we now summarize in English as virtue.

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This is important, for considerations of virtue are frequently begun by recalling the Greeks. Alasdair MacIntyre, for example, situates the association of the virtues to ethics in Greece, what he calls the “tradition of the virtues.”⁴Stated in MacIntyre’s prologue to the third edition of Alasdair C. MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Third Edition (2007) ed. (University of Notre Dame Press, 1981) Kindle Edition, location 99. His helpful survey begins with the virtue’s conception in the days of Homer. An online entry in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy surveys virtue ethics, reading that ideas about virtue enter various streams of western moral philosophy through the writings of Plato and Aristotle. In the east, Rosalind Hursthouse goes onto write, the influence is seen in the writings of Mencius and Confucius.⁵Hursthouse, Rosalind Hursthouse and Glen Pettigrove, “Virtue Ethics”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL= https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2023/entries/ethics-virtue. The same article concludes by summarizing current trends in scholarship: some, notes Hursthouse, are reassessing ethics in light of Hume, Martineau, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, while “others have turned their attention eastward, exploring Confucian, Buddhist, and Hindu traditions.” These explorations, she adds, “promise to open up new avenues for the development of virtue ethics.”⁶Rosalind Hursthouse and Glen Pettigrove, “Virtue Ethics“ Hursthouse makes no mention of the Old or New Testaments.

The reference to Hursthouse’s survey is not to imply that nothing has been written about virtue and moral reasoning in reflection of scripture’s record; nor is it to bemoan the narrow consideration that is sometimes given the topic; after all, MacIntyre goes to considerable effort to show that several Enlightenment thinkers assumed various Christian values even as they traded the authority of scripture for reason, or said that morality is a work of the passions; and yet, a difficulty remains: even Christian reflection upon virtue has often relied upon the manner in which Aristotle is appropriated for a systematic presentation of metaphysics. For MacIntyre, Thomas Aquinas, in some ways, became a better Aristotelian than Aristotle, himself, for Aquinas had extended and deepened the metaphysical and moral inquiries that first belonged to Aristotle.⁷MacIntyre, After Virtue, location 82.

Summaries of virtue, then, often assume the Greek mind and method, even when these are supplemented by medieval reflections. The question of why and how this has happened is beyond the scope of this article, but it need not be needlessly complicated. Plato and Aristotle stood out among the Greeks, proposing a realist conception of the world. So then, Aristotle, for instance, assumed certain things about the virtues that medieval thinkers found true and useful. Connected to this history is the fact that a Greek metaphysical vocabulary, fragmented into a variety of meanings in the classical world, would eventually come into the contact with readers of the Greek New Testament. Both helpful reflection and improper synthesis was, therefore, predictable. “Aristotelianism of the later Middle Ages,” it has been noted, “was characterized not so much by a common system of ideas as by a common source of material, a common terminology, a common set of definitions and problems, and a common method of discussing these problems.”⁸Paul Oskar Kristeller and Michael Mooney, Renaissance Thought and Its Sources (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 32. as quoted in Matthew Barrett, The Reformation as Renewal: Retrieving the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Academic, 2023), 122. Even so, this has tended to an ongoing Christian reflection upon virtue by a Greek vocabulary and logic, as if the Greeks were the peg upon which was hung truth’s tapestry; but we need not think that the Hebrew prophets were unaware of virtue as a fact and feature of reality except by their contact with the nations; nor should we assume that their New Testament successors were merely reflecting upon Greek ideas, as if whatever is included in the New Testament and happens to also touch upon some philosophical proposal is always reflection and “appropriation” of Greek philosophical grammar and definition. In fact, we should expect occasional overlap of ideas, given that scripture is revelation and that men are, in one way or another, in constant and unavoidable reflection upon what God has, in fact, already revealed. Indeed, the Old Testament’s frequent references and descriptions of human strength and action are unfolded in an account of history as revelation.

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What else, then, might be said about the Bible’s presentation of virtue? For one, the explicit references to virtue in the New Testament reflect the same range of meaning that is observed in the Old Testament’s translations of chayil. Those reference begin in the gospels, where virtue references something intrinsic to the Lord himself. Just so, this is where the difficulty arises in seeking to concisely define virtue, for we cannot easily distinguish power and strength apart from the person; we much more easily observe, understand, and describe power’s effect upon objects; and yet, clearly, the gospel accounts makes virtue originate, reside, and rest in our Lord, himself, before we see virtue proceed from him and bring about a change in others.

The first relevant scene, found in Luke’s gospel, is described this way: A crowd of people gathers on a plain in Galilee, having traveled there from near and far. It assembles to hear the Savior, but some also seek to be healed of their infirmities (Luke 6:17-19). This virtue—some aspect of Jesus’ nature—moves from within the Lord to the sick, lame, and possessed; so that, receiving his virtue, they are also healed. His was a power sufficient for their any and every ailment. But the events of that day do more than prompt us to a consideration of virtue as a generic power, for it is associated with Jesus, such that the virtue is also connected to his unique identity as the son of God. How might we take account of a power in the incarnate Son without also taking account of a power’s relation to God himself? In fact, we cannot.

Also telling is that Jesus’ virtue effects various powers and qualities that his audience lack in themselves. Mark 5:25-30 and Luke 8:43-46, alike, tell of a different occasion when a woman, sick with some kind of plague—specifically, some disease of her blood—approaches the Lord from behind. She desires to touch him so that she might be healed. Here, too, Jesus’ virtue makes the sick woman whole (Mark 5:28, Luke 8:46); however, a detail is added in this case that is not part of the account in Galilee: This woman’s faith had made her whole (Luke 8:48). Her faith, we then understand, was the cause of the woman’s contact with Jesus, but Jesus’ himself was the cause of her healing and subsequent wholeness. Her deficiency is supplied by Jesus’ virtue.

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These two cases give us additional insight into virtue’s essential character, which is, perhaps, only vaguely understood in reviewing the Old Testament’s many and varied references to strength and power. Most obviously, we hereby discover virtue to be something quite more than the moral qualities to which the word may and does sometimes refer in common speech; in fact, virtue is something that lies behind and beneath action and its quality. Virtue, we might say, belongs more to life and its flower than it does to the will and its achievements, even while the decisions and acts of a man remain his own. Even so, our first encounter with virtue in the New Testament regards it as something that belongs to the very character and capacity of the son of God before it is ever recognized in other men and their character. Virtue, we learn, proceeds from Jesus in his interactions with other men and women, effecting various changes in them.

Again, we most easily describe virtue in the effects of Jesus’ virtue upon his audience. The various changes are recognizable, summarized in the gospels this way: The sick are made whole. In other words, at no point do these people, receiving from Jesus, become something essentially different than what they were before; in fact—and this is very important—they become spectacularly more of what they already are. The point, then, is that the virtue that Jesus possesses in himself moves outwardly and is noted in its effects upon the men and women who stand in virtue’s reception. Jesus is who he is, and they more fully become what they already were. This situation seems to get to the very description of virtue as a vital power that, originating in God, becomes the means by which man receives into his being the very qualities of life that become, sustain, and perfect him as man. It then should also be said that, in virtue’s several disseminations, men and women are made to possesses these qualities as individual persons.

Whether in the confirmation of man in general, or in the refurbishment of a man’s experience as an individual, the gospels show virtue proceeding from the Lord himself into the arena of a fallen world, renewing deficiencies in human nature and extending individual experience into the future. On display, then, are the interactions that lie between a creator to creatures, now reenacted as redemption, the work of the savior in the world. Receiving some contact with Jesus’ virtue there is a revival of strength and capacity in each man to whom it is given. There is also, in each one, a simultaneous recognition of Jesus as the source of their new strength. These simultaneous occurrences—the awareness of new strength and its origin in Jesus of Nazareth—create a new condition for moral and ethical responsibility. Strength received is strength possessed, but strength received is yet borrowed. Their lives will now be marked by new potential—and the unavoidable acknowledgement of the future that did not exist in the same way before.

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Paul only once mentions virtue. The word appears in Philippians 4:8, where we read of Paul exhorting his readers to the use of excellent things.⁹Paul mentions virtue, exhorting his readers unto the contemplation of excellent things, understood as a summary of the short sequence of qualities that are attached to the word: truth, honesty, justice, purity, loveliness—that which invites affection and is properly desirable, and reputation (whatever is of “good report”). These several virtues, assembled together, make for the more general distinction of excellence, which Paul names as virtue. It then belongs to Peter to round out the New Testament references to virtue. God, writes Peter, “hath called us to glory and virtue” (2 Peter 1:3). Here, Peter highlights virtue as one aspect of the believer’s end, something that yet remains before him as an anticipation. We might more easily observe the place that Peter situates virtue when the several clauses in 2 Peter 1:3-4 are distinguished but associated in a kind of map:

   According as his divine power

             hath given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness,

                       through the knowledge of him

                                 that hath called us to glory and virtue:

   Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises:

             that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature,

                       having escaped the corruption

                                 that is in the world through lust.

Virtue, Peter thus explains, succeeds God’s initial gift of life (noted in the first part of verse 3), and is discovered in response to God’s “call”—the future to which a believer is summoned the moment that he is made to possess new life. God’s “divine power,” then, has its initial effects in life and godliness, but glory is made virtue’s accompanying expectation. This is how this section of Peter’s epistle reads: What begins and proceeds by the power of God finds its promised fulfillment in glory. Together, glory and virtue belong to the believer’s ultimate prospect. Alternatively, we might say that what the believer yet lacks in some degree—named in glory and virtue, he already possesses in their initial deposits and descriptions as life and godliness. The four words—life, godliness, glory and virtue—exist in Peter’s epistle as two related pairs that describe the beginning and end of the believer’s essential character—his being, as it comes under the influence and stewardship of man’s creator as redeemer. The transformation is in time and belongs to the believer’s experience.

It is, of course, important to note that the divine power, mentioned in 2 Peter 1:3, proceeds from God’s own being. God, himself, is confirmed as the cause of whatever belongs to life and godliness in man (2 Peter 1:4); God is also the cause of man’s ultimate glory and virtue. In the eventual possession of the latter, the believer (we might say) is made whole. In this way, the mention of Jesus’ virtue, first highlighted in the gospels, is directly pertinent to Peter’s presentation. The significance, here in Peter’s epistle, is not seen in the healing of sick and diseased bodies, as it is in Mark and Luke; it is highlighted in the fulfillment of redemption. In first escaping the corruption of the world, which once entered by lust in the garden of Eden (cf. 2 Peter 1:4), the believer is increasingly brought into the knowledge and experience of God, who is love. Lust is, accordingly, exchanged for love, and the forgiveness and forgetting of our sins is augmented by the knowledge of God. By the movement of life to glory and godliness to virtue, we may understand the arc of Christian experience, the change from his provisional being as a man to his fuller participation in God’s creation as a man.

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Put simply, Peter’s description in 2 Peter 1:3-8 makes for a traceable account of the Christian life. It helps us understand how faith remains an enduring feature of the Christian identity, just as it was prerequisite to the woman’s health in Luke 8:43-46. Faith is highlighted—not merely for the fact that faith is commanded to men, but for reason that only faith may take account of God’s ongoing work. And this is just the point: There is no proper understanding of life and its true character unless it accounts and responds to the way that God upholds all of creation by his perpetual activity (cf. Hebrews 1:3).

In this respect, faith is a kind of sight, scanning the horizon for what has already been given for his consideration in the promises of scripture (2 Peter 3:4). We might put it this way: A man need not be overly circumspect to turn his head at the rustle of leaves behind him; his attention is awakened by the mere sound and shadows of movement. And yet, were we to consider awareness, not from the prospect of a moment’s reflex, but in the deliberation of faith, how might our analogy differ? How might we direct our attention to the future ahead despite the rustle of leaves behind? Peter explains this possibility in the believer’s awareness of God’s promises. The believer need not be distracted by the many and different motions that surround him; he is routinely reawakened by the promises that reveal and predict the course of God’s work in him in the days to come. Faith, properly conceived, remains reflective but not reactionary. The Spirit’s work in the believer remains positive toward a good end, even when other aspects of God’s creation still await judgment. By God’s promises, the believer is made to acknowledge and then reacknowledge the unfolding character of his life unto glory and virtue. The Spirit brings to fruition what Christ has already purchased on the cross.

Another, forthcoming post is planned as the conclusion of this first article.