Friday, January 12, 2018

Jonathan Pennington and the Quote of the Day and a Question

As I was listening to Jonathan Pennington's On Script interview, I was struck by a comment he made about living a virtuous life. At the 36:03 mark, Pennington states:
There's a place for duty on the way to virtue. That is, if virtue is the whole person where you're reasoning your affections and your actions are aligned with each other that's what virtue is. It's harmony, it's teleiosity. If that's what virtue is, there's still a place for doing on the way to get there, and the reason is..., as we do, we become. Habituation matters. The choices we make and the habits we align ourselves with form us to be a certain kind of person.
As I was pondering this soundbite, I thought of the Kingdom of God, or in Matthean terms, the Kingdom of Heaven, and how this notion of virtue may relate to inaugurated eschatology, i.e., the already not yet dynamic that the Kingdom presents. Could it be that Jesus' Sermon on the Mount and all of its ethical demands contain a dimension of this already not yet duty that we are to practice on the way to living a virtuous life in light of the already yet coming Kingdom?

Just a thought I was pondering concerning Jonathan's insightful comment.

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