Book Review: Christian Character Formation: Lutheran Studies of the Law, Anthropology, Worship, and Virtue by Grobien Gifford

The twentieth-century turn to virtue ethics continues to set the agenda for much contemporary moral theology. Even traditions not usually associated with a focus on the virtues are being reread or rejigged in alignment with an understanding of moral agency revolving around habit, virtue, and formation. Gifford Grobien’s Christian Character Formation: Lutheran Studies of the Law, Anthropology, Worship, and Virtue, the latest contribution to the Oxford Studies in Theological Ethics (newly edited by Nigel Biggar), is one of several recent attempts to provide a Lutheran approach to virtue formation. Grobien insists that his is not “a work of Lutheran moral theology, nor an apology for it. It is, rather, a Lutheran contribution to the discourse on ethical formation” (xii). Nonetheless, what this amounts to in practice is a study grounded in Lutheran texts, questions, and concepts, with an eye toward ecumenical convergences and ready to receive insights from Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and other Protestant traditions. Whether or not this approach is judged to be restricting all depends on the degree to which Lutheran concerns can be understood to represent genuinely Christian concerns. Grobien suggests that the Lutheran “preoccupation” with the distinction between law and gospel, even if not shared by other traditions, can at least prove fruitful for non-Lutherans who “recognize that tensions raised by the ‘law-gospel question’ are not simply to be ignored or avoided” (9). The central question Grobien poses is how one speaks of “ethical formation within a theological framework ordered around the principle of justification by grace alone through faith alone” (1). A significant line of criticism has maintained that these two elements are incompatible, especially when justification is interpreted along Lutheran lines (as opposed to Reformed). Grobien’s aim is not simply to demonstrate their compatibility, which in this context would be a Lutheran apologetic, but instead to draw out the promise and power of Book Review