The past few years have been trying times for human constructions. Despite technological advances in design and engineering, recent high-profile failures have shown that progress is neither linear nor guaranteed. In 2019, New Orleans witnessed the collapse of the unfinished Hard Rock Hotel on the edge of the French Quarter, killing three workmen whose bodies lay unrecovered in the rubble for months. In another story that swiftly became national news, in 2021 the Surfside condominium in Miami collapsed in the middle of the night as its occupants were sleeping, killing 98 people, many elderly. Then, in perhaps the most dramatic recent event of all, the entire world stood transfixed at the disappearance and implosion of the OceanGate Titan submersible this past June, a tragedy that claimed all five lives on board.
The list goes on. In some cases, failures such as these are attributable to faulty materials — the collapse of the Florida International University bridge in 2018, for instance — but in others, the failures run much deeper: They stem not so much from poor design as from builders and developers eager to cut corners.
Lawsuits brought against the Hard Rock developer allege that the hotel used smaller, insufficient steel beams to support its enormous slabs of concrete, saving costs but putting the entire structure at risk. Similarly, a postmortem analysis of the Titan submersible highlights not simply the use of untested materials in extreme contexts, but claims by OceanGate’s founder, Stockton Rush, that safety concerns stood in the way of innovation, and that “you’re remembered for the rules you break.”
Rush got his wish; sadly, the four other souls on board the Titan suffered the consequences of his hubris as well.
All these disasters are costly, and in many cases tragic: Not only are millions or billions of dollars lost, but so are human lives. Perhaps the greatest tragedy is that year over year, the lessons go unlearned. Companies still prioritize profit over people, and managers still inflate their own egos and bank accounts at the expense of those whom they lead. What, we might ask, has led to these disasters and others? What has led to these crises of the built environment that have caused such grief and sorrow? And what, most importantly, is the solution?
The answer, it seems, has something to do with a material more mysterious and costly than any carbon fiber or concrete base. It has to do with character. In other words, the makeup not of bricks and mortar, but of the human heart.
Character: A Brief Sketch
In his recent book “The Character Gap: How Good Are We?” (Oxford University Press, 2017), philosopher Christian B. Miller offers a wide-ranging investigation into philosophical and religious traditions to learn how character is formed, how it operates, and what it produces. Miller notes that cultures across time and place have sought to identify specific qualities that make up good and bad character. Recognizing that most discussions of character tend to lead to lists of virtues and vices, Miller argues that compassion, generosity, endurance (steadfastness or loyalty), and self-control tend to compose the virtues, whereas greed, anger, lust, intemperance (including gluttony), and excess pride tend to populate the vices.
Religious or not, anyone reading this list of virtues will likely feel some insecurity at not living up to these standards, even as they (hopefully) feel some regret as they assess their vices. Part of our journey as moral actors, Miller suggests, comes from taking stock of the person we currently are — achieved, perhaps, with the help of a trusted friend or counselor — and the person we would like to be: more compassionate, more patient, more generous. Our character is always growing in one direction or another, and in his investigation Miller seeks to help us measure and close this gap between the present self and future self. In this respect, one might think of it as a kind of secular sanctification.
D.L. Moody once famously observed that “character is what you are in the dark.” Indeed, one of the ideals common to all traditions, Miller notes, is integrity, the sense that a person’s public life is in harmony with their private one. Though that gap may exist between our present and future selves, integrity ensures consistency between who we are around others and who we are when we are alone. This standard is what informs the disappointment that comes not when a building collapses but when a prominent public figure is found in scandal: we feel betrayed at the revelation of their secret life. Naïvely or not, we still hold our role models to be the same person both on the field and at home — otherwise, how could they deserve our respect?
The lesson is that outward behavior will never suffice for true virtue, and that one’s internal motivations for action are just as essential to consider as those actions themselves. In this respect, Miller’s analysis echoes the reminders we find across Scripture (e.g., 1 Chronicles 28, Jeremiah 17, Romans 8) that the Lord assesses far more than just our deeds. Perhaps the single most prescient reminder comes in 1 Samuel 16 just prior to the boy David’s anointing as king of Israel. God explicitly warns Samuel about Eliab, one of David’s brothers: “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For the Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.”
The insider trading, the affair, the doping — so often these revelations occur not simply because the person got caught, but because they refused to turn away from their wrongdoing voluntarily, before it was too late. So long as our desires themselves remain unchanged, we will never truly experience sincere, lasting growth in our character. Lists of qualities — as well-intentioned and noble as they may be — are only a limited tool for moral instruction. They will never speak to us except to shame us, to remind us how far we have yet to travel and how much we have yet to attain.
If, however, we understand ourselves as part of a larger story — a story with real stakes, with real participants, with a real beginning and ending — suddenly our actions and our motivations take on radically new meaning.
The Struggle over Sin
Most thinkers hold that character is built from a complex mixture of each person’s role models, life experiences, and reactions to their culture. This is true, but it is not the whole truth. Instead, while recognizing these influences, the Christian faith proclaims an entirely different paradigm.
According to the biblical vision of history, mankind is born into a conflict, into the middle of a grander story wherein powerful forces are at work to shape our character. Since the moment of the Fall, we have been locked into a struggle where we either look to our Creator for our identity and well-being or we look to ourselves. Adam and Eve’s choice in the Garden was not simply the choice to disobey God’s will. Rather, feeding not just on the forbidden fruit but on the lie the serpent fed them, it was the choice to regard themselves as the ultimate arbiter of human action.
According to the biblical vision of history, mankind is born into a conflict, into the middle of a grander story wherein powerful forces are at work to shape our character.
At the heart of this story is the question of whether we even believe in sin. Absent any such larger narrative in which to understand it, bad character is ultimately just a collection of repeated bad behaviors which may (or may not) be treatable in therapeutic contexts. Treatable bad character is a mechanical flaw to be fixed, and if untreatable, it is to be quarantined away in prisons or asylums, as no remedy for it is available. (The notion of “depraved-heart murder” in American criminal law, for instance, does not explain a violent person’s actions, only categorizes them away.) If, in a materialist, random universe, no larger unifying account of mankind’s moral journey exists, then all we have are the particular actions of particular people, which may or may not be considered praiseworthy depending on the moral context. Relativism ultimately reigns, despite our longing for rescue from it.
Not convinced? Consider the fact that historically, moral traits fall in and out of fashion. Humility, for instance, which many today regard as a “good” attribute — gratitude for one’s gifts, recognition of one’s origins, and admission of one’s limitations — is a remarkably late addition to the list. Theologian Glen Scrivener has argued in “The Air We Breathe” that the ancient world valued strength and courage above all, and regarded humility as a misguided affectation at best and a pitiable weakness at worst. Why would anyone so glorious as a Roman centurion or senator associate with the frail, dirty, disease-ridden poor? Should not the plebes instead look up to their betters? Even in the modern world, humility and meekness remain suspect in certain sectors, especially the financial markets: As Arwa Mahdawi wrote in the The Guardian in April, the Forbes “30 Under 30” lists of the last few years have included a startling number of entrepreneurs later jailed for fraud.
Such lists of virtues remain shifting, then, and unstable, even when they appeal to objective claims of morality. Granted, the #MeToo movement drew much of its strength from calling out the hidden sins of powerful people (in this case, mostly men) and emboldening victims to share their experiences of abuse, in order to seek justice and healing and to change the injustices in media, politics, and the arts at a systemic level. But here lies the rub: So often the secular worldview recruits the concept of sin while refusing to give it that name, because to do so invites uncomfortable reflection on where sin comes from, its origins, its aims, and its desire for us — namely, our destruction. In a sermon titled “The Weakness of God’s Servants,” Francis Schaeffer once argued:
Sin is sin, and we must not call it less than sin. It is not an act of love to explain sin away as psychological determinism or sociological conditioning, for it is real and must be dealt with. Men need a Savior. Therefore, Christians in our generation must resist relativistic and deterministic thinking. If men are going to find a real solution to the problem of who they are, they must come to terms with the fact that they need a Savior because they are sinners in the presence of a holy God. Sin is serious business.
Serious business indeed. Were this the end of the story, we might give in to despair. In contending with the effects of sin in our lives, the damage we cause and the pain we feel, we might find the means to manage the suffering and to apply a temporary bandage here and there — but never truly to overcome it. Yet the hope of the Christian narrative is that though we have been born into a conflict that is larger than ourselves, the end of its story is not ours to write. Rather, we live in the aftermath of a victory over sin that enables even those of us with the most broken or repellent characters to find healing, peace, and restoration. In the shadow of the cross, the reality of grace illuminates our path forward more than anything we could imagine.
In short, Christians believe that the Author of our story entered our story, both to rescue us from our sin and to offer us new life, until He returns to write its final chapter once and for all. And the implications for our character could not be greater.
To Be Remade
Where does that new life come from? Consider again the parable of the two houses in Matthew 7. The surface lesson is obvious enough. Build a house upon an unstable layer of sand, and the waves will wash it away, but build a house on bedrock and it will withstand even the strongest storms. But as with all of Jesus’ parables, deeper insights always lie beneath. Here Jesus is inviting us to consider not just the foundation of our homes, but who in fact is building them — whether we are allowing our own limited intellects and desires to govern our creations, or whether we are allowing wisdom itself, Wisdom Himself, to shape us. No matter how accomplished they are, human hands will only achieve imperfect results in design — whether they are of carbon fiber or of moral fiber. Only if we return to our perfect Designer can we be made perfect.
That the Author of human history should instruct our character through yet more stories should come as no surprise. The surprise of this particular parable, though, is that as we, its hearers, meditate upon it, Jesus actively begins His work of remaking us. The architect moves into the house He built, to rebuild it floor by floor: as we dwell upon the foundations of our character, revisiting our actions and our motivations in fresh ways, Jesus draws up a new blueprint, one in which He himself serves as the groundwork. Again, here lies the sorrow of these recent disasters, whose failures were located not in their design but in the sinful hearts of their designers. Had those builders recognized their sins of greed and pride and turned away from them, these tragedies likely could have been averted.
One might think the goal of a perfected character is out of reach, but the beauty of the gospel is that the invitation is right in front of us, waiting for us to accept it. In one of his last exhortations, Peter urged his disciples to look not to what was temporal but what was eternal for their growth:
[God’s] divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him [Christ] who called us to His own glory and excellence, by which He has granted to us His precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire. For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love (2 Peter 1:3-7).
One might encounter this list and disregard it just as we have so many others, but let us not be so hasty. Recognizing the very real struggle against sin in which we still live, Peter here counsels us first to remember the eternal promises that God has made to us, and second, to shape our character not according to custom or fashion but to a far more powerful force: love. Both in allowing God’s love to remake us from the inside out, and in showing it to others even at great cost, our character grows more and more like our Maker’s.
The process is neither immediate nor painless, nor will it be smooth at every point, but those aspects of our sanctification were never promised to us to begin with. Rather, what is promised is God’s very own presence as we grow, as we become “partakers of the divine nature” through Word and sacrament, encounters that heal, encourage, and equip us more than any worldly ideal ever could, even those encounters that lead to refinement through discipline and loving chastisement (Hebrews 12:6) — chastisement for which the mature heart gives thanks. Aspire as we might to an abstraction, we cannot have a personal relationship with one. But aspire to the qualities embodied in God’s own heart — as seen in Jesus, and as Paul describes in the fruits of the Spirit (Galatians 4) — and we can grow into those as a vine grows into a trellis, bearing new beauty and new fruit in equal measure.
What is the end result? In “After You Believe,” N.T. Wright has argued that as we return to our Maker to be remade by His own hand, every atom of our makeup is given new life and new purpose. “Character,” he writes, “the transforming, shaping, and marking of a life and its habits — will generate the sort of behavior that rules might have pointed toward but which a ‘rule-keeping’ mentality can never achieve. And it will produce the sort of life which will in fact be true to itself — though the ‘self’ to which it will at last be true is the redeemed self, the transformed self, not the merely ‘discovered’ self of popular thought.”
Everything that is made can be unmade; if nothing else, the lessons of the last few years have made this painfully clear. But it is also true that everything that is made can be remade, if only we are willing to let our Maker do so. The question then becomes: Can we find anything more deserving of thanksgiving than this?
Benjamin Morris is Mississippi native who now lives and writes in New Orleans.