In his book Why Christian Character Matters, N. T. Wright says character matters for three basic reasons:
First, character solves the question of “What am I here for?” It defines what we do after we believe and before we reach heaven:
“It’s as though they were standing on one side of a deep, wide river, looking across to the further bank. On this bank you declare your faith. On the opposite bank is the ultimate result—final salvation itself. But what are people supposed to do in the meantime? Simply stand here and wait? Is there no bridge between the two? The bridge in question goes by many names, and we shall discuss them as we move forward. But one of the most obvious names is character.”
Second, character addresses the question of how individuals become capable of knowing and doing right and wrong. Character, not rule-keeping, is the essence of Christian ethics:
“Character—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.”
Third, character is critical because it is what is missing in society. What society needs is not better regulation but better character:
But any banker or mortgage broker can easily hire a smart accountant and lawyer to help them tick all the boxes the government tells them to, and then go around the back of the system and do what they want. What’s the point of that?” “So what’s the answer?” I asked. “Character,” he replied. “Keeping rules is all right as far as it goes, but the real problem in the last generation is that we’ve lost the sense that character matters; that integrity matters. The system is only really healthy when the people who are running it are people you can trust to do the right thing, not because there are rules but because that’s the sort of people they are.”
How about you? Why does Christian character matter?
