Moral Compass Project

Subproject: Law and virtue in the Protestant tradition

Revival of virtue ethics

Since several decades, virtue ethics has been on a revival course. Virtue ethics presupposes a teleological anthropology in which the human being is aimed at the realization of the good life and the common good. What the good is can be known and discovered by our human nature (natural law), or can be found in shared practices and traditions. In its revival, virtue ethics is rearticulated over against modern ethics, which focuses rather on ‘general principles’ that ought to lead to just and right moral actions, regardless of practices or traditions.

Reformation as decline?

How did this broad virtue ethical framework get lost? Scholarship often envisions the Reformation as the starting-point for modern ethics in which the connection between God’s revealed law and the universal recognizability of the good, between commandments and virtues, has been lost (e.g., Alasdair MacIntyre, Brad Gregory). This interpretation is not immune to challenges. Post-Reformation theologians from Protestant scholasticism in particular developed their ethics on the basis of both divine law and the virtues. Natural law, virtues, and the general recognizability of the good are all aspects that can be found in their writings. At the same time, they renewed the tradition, both by modifying classical virtue ethics on the basis of biblical revelation and by adjusting it to meet the needs of their times.

Petrus van Mastricht and Johann Crell

This sub-project conducts in-depth research into two theologians from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the period of Protestant scholasticism: the Reformed theologian Petrus van Mastricht (1630-1706) and the Socinian Johann Crell (1590-1633). The project examines how these two very different Protestant theologians think about virtue and divine law, natural access to the good and sanctified life. Despite all kinds of differences between the two theologians, they appear to design their ethics in great continuity with tradition. They connect divine law and the virtues, assume natural access to the good (natural law) and emphasize the importance of grace in the moral life. Their ethics are therefore not a break with tradition, but rather show continuity with the broad virtue ethical framework, albeit that they simultaneously shape their ethics in relation to the challenges of their own time.

Researchers

Key publications

• Dominique Klamer (Gosewisch), Law, virtue, and Duty in Petrus van Mastricht’s Theoretico-Practica Theologia, in: Petruschka Schaafsma (ed.), The Transcendent Character of the Good: Philosophical and Theological Perspectives, New York: Routledge 2023, 139-156.
• Pieter Vos, Longing for the Good Life: Virtue Ethics After Protestantism, London/New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2020.
• Pieter Vos, Het goede in het gewone leven: Protestantse deugdethiek, Amsterdam: Buijten&Schipperheijn, 2025.
• Maarten Wisse, Reinventing Christian Doctrine: Retrieving the Law-Gospel Distinction, London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2023.