By Nicholas Norman-Krause
August 31, 2022
In this final post (see parts I and II here and here), I want to examine the importance of the doctrine of the Trinity to the traditional third dimension of catechetical instruction, in addition to belief and prayer: the moral life. In most catechetical traditions, the primary frame for addressing the Christian moral life is God’s Law, revealed most succinctly in the Decalogue and summarized in Christ’s two-fold commandment of love of God and love of neighbor. These two moments in the history of redemption capture the heart of the biblical tradition’s moral teaching. Thus, it is usual for catechisms to structure instruction on the moral life around the Ten Commandments and Christ’s teachings in relation to them.
One unfortunate, if unintended, consequence of centering moral catechesis on the notion of law, however, is that it can sometimes lead catechists to depict the moral life primarily in terms of obedience to commands or the fulfillment of duties. The great Dominican moral theologian Servais Pinckaers refers to this approach as an “ethics of obligation,” and he sees the vast majority of modern moral theology and moral philosophy, from Kant to utilitarianism, nominalism to the Catholic manualist tradition, to be of this kind. The major problem with an “ethics of obligation,” however, as Pinckaers shows, is that it fails to locate law, duty, and moral commands within a larger picture of human happiness, virtue, and Christian salvation, and thus fails to sufficiently account for some of the most important features of human life. A more complete approach to Christian moral life, then, would be one that addresses moral law and human virtue within a comprehensive vision of human life as ordered to its supernatural end: eternal beatitude and participation in the Triune life of God.
The end of Christian moral life, thus, is the Trinity. But the doctrine of the Trinity is also crucial for understanding the substance of a properly Christian vision of moral life. It is this Trinitarian account of Christian moral life that I want to consider here, in order to show how catechesis can better recover the Trinity for moral thinking.
Moral Life as Participation in the Trinity
In the previous post, I suggested that an “incorporative” approach to the Trinity better frames prayer not primarily as a conversation between a human subject and a divine monad, but rather as a participation in God’s own communion and self-communication. In prayer, God speaks to God in and through the pray-er, who is indwelt by the Spirit, united to Son, and thus joined in love to the Father.
A similar reframing occurs when the Christian moral life is fundamentally conceived in Trinitarian terms. Moral life is not, first and foremost, obedience to a moral law instituted by a distant Lawgiver, but participation in the Triune life by means of deification and sanctification. Law certainly has its place within this Trinitarian moral vision. But, as we will see, law hangs together with other crucial moral concepts within a broader vision of Christian discipleship, of drawing near to the Father, through the Son, by the Holy Spirit.
The Catechism of the Anglican Church in North America captures this critically important Trinitarian shape of Christian moral life in its introduction to the questions on the Decalogue: “The Christian life of holiness is rooted in the gracious union that believers have with the Father, through the Son, and by the Holy Spirit” (90). In his book The Trinity and Our Moral Life according to St. Paul, the French Dominican theologian Ceslaus Spicq shows the Apostle Paul’s moral vision to be similarly shaped in Trinitarian form: “The Father, having taken the initiative in salvation out of love, communicates His grace and life to His children…. Now the will of the Father—the Christian vocation—is that the faithful be true images of the crucified and glorious Christ. The moral life consists then in perfecting this resemblance to the Lord, in being inspired with His thoughts and sentiments, in imitating His virtues, in living in a symbiosis with Him.” Moreover, Spicq continues, “because such an assimilation is impossible for a man left to his own strength, the third person of the Holy Trinity takes over the Christian at the time of his baptism; He enlightens him, guides him, entreats him, and strengthens him in every way…Under the movement of the Holy Spirit, the moral life is a spiritual life in the strictest sense.”
More recently, Ross Hastings has also shown this Trinitarian shape of the New Testament’s moral vision. Moral formation in the New Testament, he writes, is “accomplished in active union with Christ in his death (mortification of the vices) and resurrection (vivification of the graces or virtues). It also has a pneumatological shape or empowerment, in that participation in Christ is enabled by the Spirit” (37).
Each of these descriptions of the ways the doctrine of the Trinity fundamentally shapes Christian moral life gets at a central dimension of a properly Christian ethics—namely, that moral life is ordered to, and constituted by, participation in the Trinity. Highlighting this in moral catechesis has significant benefits: it identifies the importance of spirituality, prayer, sacraments, Scripture, and Christian friendship in the moral life; it centers moral reflection primarily on matters of character rather than on abstract ethical problems, commands, or duties; it shows how the pursuit of holiness is intimately united to Christian discipleship; and, finally, it frames moral life not in negative terms of prohibition, or even positive terms of obligation, but as an imitation of, and participation in, the dynamic life of Christ by the Holy Spirit.
Thus, we might define Christian moral life in something like the following way: Christian moral life is being conformed to the image of the Son, by the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit, in order to fulfill the will of the Father.
Within this Trinitarian account of moral life, we are also able to see three crucial aspects of moral life, each of which we may attribute to the principal, though not exclusive, work of a particular person of the Trinity: The Father’s will, or law; the Son’s righteous character, or virtue; and the Spirit’s supernatural aid, or the gifts of the Spirit.
These three aspects of Christian moral life—law, virtue, and gifts—were also three of the central principles of the work of perhaps the greatest moralist of the Christian theological tradition: St. Thomas Aquinas. As Thomas understood it, human moral action is directed by both an “extrinsic” or exterior principle—namely, law—and an “intrinsic” or interior principle—what he called habitus, and which, when directed toward the good, is called virtue. And finally, because the true end of moral life is eternal beatitude—an enjoyment of the transcendent good of friendship with the Triune God—moral life ultimately needs the supernatural aid of the Holy Spirit. Thomas identified this with the infused virtues (both natural and theological), and, perhaps most importantly, the gifts of the Holy Spirit.
Law, Virtue, and Gifts
Appreciating the Trinitarian shape of Christian moral life, I am suggesting, broadens the scope of moral thinking beyond simply obligation or obedience to law and reframes moral life within the full scope of Christian salvation. In catechetical instruction on the moral life, then, this more robust Trinitarian vision helps direct attention to virtue, the work of the Holy Spirit, character, and spiritual life, in addition to the usual focus on moral law. Here, I want to offer some thoughts on law, virtue, and the gifts of the Spirit, in order to show how moral catechesis centered on the Decalogue might take Trinitarian shape.
Law
First, law. One helpful pedagogical strategy for approaching moral law, and the Decalogue in particular, is to spend a moment delineating both the nature of law and the various kinds of law (here, I am relying on Aquinas’s detailed treatment of law in questions 90–108 in the Prima Secundae of his Summa Theologiae). Regarding law’s nature, it is particularly helpful to show that law is not fundamentally a negative restriction of human will, arbitrarily imposed upon it, but rather is a principle of reason that directs human action to its ultimate good. Discussion of this positive dimension of law is also a helpful place to consider other important related notions, such as freedom, the common good, etc.
Regarding the kinds of law, it is useful to distinguish, as Aquinas and others do, between several types of law and explain their interrelatedness. There is the eternal law, which we might simply think of as God’s eternal wisdom, which orders creation to the divine will. There is natural law, which is the participation human creatures have in the eternal law by way of their reason. And finally, there is divine law, the revealed will of God in the Old Law, especially the Decalogue, and the New Law of Christ, by which we are ordered and directed toward our supernatural end of beatitude.
This delineation of the types of law can be especially helpful for catechesis structured around the Decalogue and the life and teachings of Jesus. Aquinas, along with Luther, Calvin, and others, sees the Decalogue as an authoritative revelation and summary of the natural law. Appreciating this aspect of the Decalogue as both revealed and natural law, helps situate its commands within the doctrine of creation, and thus as containing precepts for ordering human creatures toward their flourishing. In other words, by seeing the Decalogue as expressive of the Creator’s will for human happiness, one can approach the commandments not fundamentally as arbitrary prohibitions but as precepts ordered to the good life.
Moreover, when seen in Trinitarian terms, law takes on an even deeper theological dimension. Moral law is, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it, “fatherly instruction, God’s pedagogy” (§1950), and this wisdom of the Father is embodied in the life of the Incarnate Son, who fulfills the will of the Father. The Son’s humanity is defined by his coming to do the will of the Father (John 6:38; 14:31; 15:10). His obedience to the Father’s will is also, though, the basis of his giving a New Law, which is the perfection of the Old Law in charity and received in faith. Christ’s New Law of love is the gracious work of the Holy Spirit, who writes God’s law on our hearts (Jer. 31:33). Even in law, then, we are brought into the economy of the Holy Trinity.
Virtue
Second, virtue. Christ’s fulfillment of the Old Law in charity, and the vocation of the Christian to follow Christ’s New Law, written on our hearts by the Spirit, leads us to look at the ways Christians, in discipleship, are to be transfigured by the Spirit into the image of Christ. As he reveals in the Sermon on the Mount, this is much more than a matter of external actions, but involves a transformation of character, disposition, and desire. In short, moral life entails the formation of the whole person into the likeness of Christ.
Traditionally, the moral concept that captures this kind of formation in character is virtue. Virtues are, as Aristotle put it, stable dispositions of character that order a person toward the good. They are habits cultivated over time to enable actions that are done well, in the right circumstances, and for the right reasons.
But understood in distinctly Trinitarian terms, virtues are dispositions formed in us by the Holy Spirit so that we may imitate and embody the righteousness of Christ. The effect of Christian virtue is that we come to have what St. Paul calls the “mind of Christ” (1 Cor. 2:16), which is to say, as the ACNA catechism puts it, that “the goal of our life in Christ is that we become like Christ—not only in our actions, but also in our thoughts and attitudes” (90). More fundamental to our acting like Jesus—our “imitation of Christ”—is the vocation of being conformed to Jesus. The virtues—and, in particular, the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity—mark the ways we come to share in the character of Christ, by the Holy Spirit.
Gifts
Finally, the gifts of the Holy Spirit. It has already been made clear that the Christian moral life, as a life of law and virtue, as a life ordered to fulfilling the will of the Father by being conformed to the Son, is fundamentally rooted in grace. Certainly, natural law and natural virtue can direct a person to a certain kind of goodness, what Aquinas calls “imperfect happiness” or felicitas (ST I-II.4.5). Ultimately, however, in order to reach their final end of perfect happiness, eternal beatitude, Christians need grace. Grace underlies and empowers the entirety of the Christian moral life.
One aspect of the doctrine of grace that has direct implications for moral life, yet which is almost entirely neglected in Christian ethics, regards the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Traditionally understood to include wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord, the gifts perfect the virtues and order a person to her supernatural end. While in many ways they resemble the infused virtues, dispositions given by God in grace, the gifts are importantly different from the infused virtues in this respect: while the virtues are habits that enable us to act under the impetus of reason, the gifts operate under the direct impetus of the Holy Spirit. The gifts, as Aquinas puts it, cause us “to be disposed to be moved by God” (ST I-II.68.1). They make us docile to God’s action in and through us (ST I-II.68.2). In so doing, Aquinas notes, we come to possess a kind of divine instinctus, a connatural or instinctive knowledge of the Holy Spirit by which we discern the good that is to be done almost by a kind of “sensing” rather than rational knowing (ST I-II.68.1).
The gifts, writes Aquinas, are necessary for our salvation because they order us to that which is beyond reason—namely, participation in divine providence and the economy of redemption. The gifts dispose us to act when reason reaches its limits and when God desires to act in us. Thus, the gifts are essential for moral maturity, for they are necessary for life in Christ, lived “in the Spirit.”
Though they played an indispensable role in reflection on the moral life for some ancient and medieval thinkers like Aquinas, attention to the gifts of the Holy Spirit is almost entirely absent in modern and contemporary moral theology. A consequence of this, as Charles Bouchard has shown, is an unfortunate detaching of moral reflection from spiritual, ascetical, and mystical theology. By recovering a focus on the gifts in the context of moral catechesis, we might begin to mend this severance, re-embedding the moral life within the spiritual life of discipleship, prayer, and sacrament.
To conclude, my hope is that catechesis on the moral life, informed by the doctrine of the Trinity and taking seriously the Trinitarian shape of the moral life, might be a space for Christian moral reflection to recover some of these neglected aspects of moral theology. That is, by recovering the Trinitarian nature of moral life, we might better see the relation of divine and natural law to the doctrine of creation and human flourishing, the Christological nature of Christian virtue, and the important place of the gifts of the Holy Spirit in moral formation. By centering the doctrine of the Trinity in moral catechesis, we show forth the dynamic movement of moral life as participation in God, not just by believing and praying, but actually living in the Trinity.
Rev. Dr. Nicholas Norman-Krause is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University and an assisting priest at Christ Church Waco. He serves as a research fellow for the IRCC.