The “Bonfire of the Vanities” is a title historians give to events that unfolded on February 7, 1497, in Florence, Italy. Under the inspiration of Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498), a fiery preacher and moral reformer, people brought thousands of objects of art—luxury items, lewd love poetry, games, and dice—and publicly burned them in a great bonfire. Savonarola sought to reform the lives of the citizens of Florence and rid them of their sensualistic and material cravings.¹John D. Woodbridge and Frank A. James III, From Pre-Reformation to the Present Day, vol. 2 of Church History (Zondervan Academic, 2013), 93–94. If we were to describe our present day situation, we might say that our culture has undertaken a “Bonfire of the Virtues.” Our culture has created a bonfire and continues to toss all sorts of virtues into the fire: patience, wisdom, courage, and humility. The fire rages and the black smoke of malice and anger rises to the heavens. We can understand when the world burns the virtues, but we should be concerned when we see the church joining the riotous celebration. Peruse social media for a few minutes and it will not take long to find the same black smoke emanating from professing Christians.²For an example of how Christians have embraced a worldly ethos especially as it relates to technology vis-à-vis human nature, see Carl R. Trueman, The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity (Sentinel, 2026). Many self-professed Christians engage in the same online rancor that we see coming from other corners of the world: accusations, insults, sarcasm, and invective. To this I can add anecdotal evidence of serious moral failings among ministerial ranks. In the past year I have witnessed church officers who have been removed from their positions because of grievous sins. To say the least, the bonfire of the virtues within and without the church should not be a regrettable but acceptable norm. What, then, does the Council of Nicaea have to do with the present bonfire of the virtues? What has the council to do with the present disconnect between theology and virtue?

We rightly cherish the theological achievements of the Council of Nicaea (325) and its subsequent conciliar explanations and defenses at Constantinople (381), Ephesus (431), and Chalcedon (451). The Nicene Creed has endured for 1700 years and has been echoed or endorsed by various Protestant confessions: the Second Helvetic Confession (1566), Thirty-Nine Articles (1562), Belgic Confession (1561), French Confession (1559), and Westminster Confession (1646), for example.³See James T. Dennison Jr., Reformed Confessions of the 16th and 17th Centuries, 4 vols. (Reformation Heritage, 2008); Second Helvetic, art. 11 (2:827–31); Thirty-Nine Articles, art. 8 (2:757); Belgic Confession, art. 9 (2:429–30); French Confession, art. 6 (2:143); WCF, art. 8 (4:243–45). But have we only looked upon the Nicene creed as a source of theological knowledge? If the creed has stood the test of time and is professed by East and West, Protestant and Roman Catholic, is there something more to the creed?⁴The filioque, of course, is a point of contention between East and West. See A. Edward Siecienski, The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy (Oxford University Press, 2012). I believe there is more to the Nicene Creed. What type of virtues did the theologians of the Nicene era employ? If we value the doctrine of Nicaea so much, should we not ask about the collective character that the fathers of Nicaea possessed and plied? I argue that the Nicene creed required moral and ethical virtues to produce its theological orthodoxy. In simple terms, to be a good theologian requires godliness. Christian character counts. To explore this claim, I pursue two lines of thought. First, we must briefly document the disjunction between wisdom and knowledge. Second, we can examine the ideas of Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–c. 394), one of the defenders of the Nicene Creed, to see how he explained the relationship between doctrine and Christian character.

1. Wisdom Versus Knowledge

“Some things that should not have been forgotten were lost” are words written by J. R. R. Tolkien that aptly describe the situation regarding wisdom and theology as well as the virtuous nature of theology, and conversely the theological nature of virtue.⁵J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (Morrow, 2013), prologue. Ellen Chary has observed: “Sapiential theology waned with modernity. Theology came to be thought of as the intellectual justification of the faith, apart from the practice of the Christian life. The wisdom of God has ceased to function in the church as the foundation of the good life.”⁶Ellen T. Charry, By the Renewing of Your Minds: The Pastoral Function of Christian Doctrine (Oxford University Press, 1997), 5. In other words, in early and pre-modern theology (patristic, medieval, Reformation, and early post-Reformation), theology was chiefly about wisdom, not merely knowledge. A defender of Nicene orthodoxy, Athanasius (ca. 328–373) draws a direct link between purity of heart and right knowledge of God, not merely possessing knowledge about God. God has created all things through Christ and made humans in his image. He has given humans the ability to know him so long as we maintain his image by his grace. If we do this, we can rejoice and converse with God in prayer. We can live a truly idyllic, blessed, and immortal life: “Having no obstacle to the knowledge of the divine, he [the Christian] continuously contemplates by his purity the image of the Father, God the Word, in whose image he was made, and is filled with admiration when he grasps his providence towards the universe.”⁷Athanasius, Contra Gentes and De Incarnatione, trans. Robert W. Thomson (Clarendon, 1971), §2 (p. 7); Charry, By the Renewing of Your Minds, 88. The more we contemplate him, the more we desire God. Athanasius draws a relational dynamic between God and humans from Christ’s Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matt 5:8). In other words, the purer the heart, the clearer the eyes of faith by which we see God. This is a theme that other Nicene fathers promote, as we will see below.

From within the patristic period, Augustine of Hippo (354–430) also captures the sapiential character of theology. When we find anything in the Scriptures that pertains to wisdom, the Son of God is in view, argues Augustine. With the image of God in view, therefore, we must seek God’s wisdom in Christ:

We are enlightened by the light, but He is the light that enlightens. And, therefore, this image is an example for us without itself having an example. For He does not imitate anyone who comes before Him in respect to the Father, from whom He is wholly inseparable, since He has the same essence with Him from whom He is. But by our striving we imitate Him who remains and follow Him who stands; when we walk in Him, we tend towards Him, because by His humility He has been made a road for us in time, in order that by His divinity He might be for us a mansion in eternity.⁸Augustine, The Trinity, trans. Stephen McKenna, Fathers of the Church (Catholic University of America Press, 1963), 7.7.2 (pp. 226–27); Charry, By the Renewing of Your Minds, 135.

Augustine appeals to the Nicene truth of the Son’s shared essence with the Father. But he also draws this truth into the Christian life—the goal of theology is mirroring Christ. Christ is both the road and the goal of salvation, a life of sanctity and the goal of conformity to Christ. Wisdom is both the road and destination. Christians are supposed to be wise now and will become wiser as the final outcome of their journey of faith. In other words, being like Christ is not merely for the end of the journey but for every single step along the way to the final destination. For Augustine and Athanasius, theology is about wisdom—about living in a dynamic relationship with the triune God here and now, that is, fearing the Lord.

In the modern age, things have dramatically shifted. The seeds of division between virtue and theology, or wisdom and knowledge, were arguably sown in the late-seventeenth century. Building on the tenets of rationalism, John Locke widened the gap between faith and reason.⁹Charry, By the Renewing of Your Minds, 7. Reason was ascendant and became the foundation in the formation of knowledge. The shift away from wisdom (in the words of Proverbs 9:10, a “fear of the Lord”) was pronounced. Knowledge stood on its own. Immanuel Kant added more fuel to the fire, as he argued that the transcendent God could not be known through revelation in the creation. The noumenal realm was beyond the grasp of humans. The transcendent God was domesticated and became all too this-worldly.¹⁰Charry, By the Renewing of Your Minds, 9. The title of one of Kant’s well-known works is emblematic of the rejection of revelation, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason.¹¹Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and Other Writings, ed. Allen Wood and George di Giovanni, rev. ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2019). With the Kantian turn, theology became utterly mundane as theologians searched for the historical Jesus and dissected the word of God with the scalpel of higher criticism.¹²Michael C. Legaspi, The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies (Oxford University Press, 2011). Or theology became dominated by the subjective under the guise of Friederich Schleiemacher’s “feeling of absolute dependence.”¹³Friederich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, ed. Richard Crouter (Cambridge University Press, 1996). With Schleiermacher participating in the founding of the University of Berlin in 1810, theology became a scientific discipline like any other—released from church, creed, and conviction.¹⁴Thomas Albert Howard, Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University (Oxford University Press, 2006). Adrift on a sea of knowledge apart from the anchor of God’s authoritative revelation, theology was no longer about wisdom and knowing and loving our triune God; it was a respectable scientific discipline like any other. And under such parameters, why does the character of the theologian matter? So long as the mathematician solves problems accurately, what does it matter if he is arrogant? So long as the linguist can correctly parse and translate a verb, is her marital fidelity relevant? Many would answer these questions in the negative given the divide between wisdom and knowledge.

2. Gregory of Nyssa on Transformative Theology

The Nicene fathers looked at the relationship between knowledge and Christian character much differently. In his work On Virginity, Gregory of Nyssa explains that the purpose of his work was to create a desire for a “life of virtue” within his readers.¹⁵Gregory of Nyssa, On Virginity, in Ascetical Works, trans. Virginia Woods Callahan, FC 58 (Catholic University of America Press, 1967), introduction (p. 6). Here we should observe that the book’s title, On Virginity, does not merely cover sexual purity but rather is about an entire life devoted to moral and ethical purity. How does the Bible describe idolatry and sin but as adultery, infidelity to Christ, our bridegroom (e.g., Ezek 23:37; Isa 57:7–8; Jas 4:4). For Gregory, the only way that a person has a “share in the pure mysteries of virginity” is that they “become themselves partakers of the glory of God, who is alone holy and blameless, since they participate in His purity and incorruptibility.”¹⁶Gregory, On Virginity, §1 (p. 9). Gregory here appeals to the doctrine of participation, namely, that all creatures share in God’s existence. This does not mean that they are God, but rather God must sustain the existence of all things. In creation, this is the apostle Paul’s “In him we live and move and have our being,” and in redemption this is what Peter describes as becoming “partakers of the divine nature” (Acts 17:28; 2 Pet 1:3–4).¹⁷See., e.g., Kathryn Tanner, Christ the Key (Cambridge University Press, 2010); Andrew Davison, Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics (Cambridge University Press, 2020). If we participate in God’s holiness in salvation, then God’s holiness must shape and change us.

Greogry takes the doctrine of participation and applies it to the nature of how we know God: “[Jesus Christ] wanted to demonstrate through the manner of his becoming man this great mystery, that purity alone is sufficient for receiving the presence and entrance of God, a purity that cannot be otherwise achieved fully, unless one alienates himself entirely from the passions of the flesh.”¹⁸Gregory, On Virginity, §2 (p. 11). Observe that Gregory rests his observation on Christ’s incarnation, but the point is, the more we sin the less we see of God. Thus, we need to disentangle ourselves from earthly things so that we can pursue heavenly things.¹⁹Gregory, On Virginity, §6 (pp. 30–31). The purer our sight (the less clouded by sin), the clearer we perceive the beauty of God: “But the man who has purified the eye of his soul is able to look at such things and forget the matter in which the beauty is encased, and he uses what he sees as a kind of basis for his contemplation of intelligible beauty. By a participation in this beauty, the other beautiful things come into being and are identified.”²⁰Gregory, On Virginity, §11 (p. 39). Gregory plies a truth that we find in the Psalms: “In your light do we see light” (Ps 36:9). Or likewise, we read: “One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple” (Ps 27:4). In other words, when we see the beauty of God, the sin no longer looks appealing—we see it for its ugliness. We instead desire and thirst after God’s beauty, both to behold and reflect it.

Gregory digs deeply into the holiness of God and shows how sin obscures our sight: “The person who removes himself from all hatred and fleshly odor and rises above all earthbound things, having ascended higher than the whole earth in his aforementioned flight, will find the only thing worth longing for, and having come close to beauty, will become beautiful himself. Through his participation in the true light, he will himself be in a state of brightness and illumination.”²¹Gregory, On Virginity, §11 (p. 40). Gregory does not press a moralistic or legalistic approach to godliness. He stresses that conformity to God only comes through a “participation in the true light.” That is, only by drawing on the power of Christ do we become more like him: “For, being like the divine is not our function, nor is it the product of human ability, but it is part of the generosity of God who freely, at the birth of the first man, gave our nature a likeness to Himself.”²²Gregory, On Virginity, §12 (p. 44). Again, Gregory writes: “Uniting yourself with God comes from being crucified with Him and living with Him and sharing His glory and His kingship; offering yourself to God means transforming human nature and worth into the angelic.”²³Gregory, On Virginity, §23 (p. 74).

Think of Moses atop Sinai and we get an idea of what Gregory means. The longer Moses dwelled in God’s presence, the more he reflected God’s glory. This is the precise point Gregory presses in his book, Life of Moses.²⁴Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses (Paulist, 1978). In other words, the reading, studying, and meditation upon the word of God is not merely about knowledge. By the gift of faith, we enter the presence of our triune God, and he speaks his word to us by Christ and the Spirit by which he conforms us more and more to the image of Christ. In the words of the Westminster Larger Catechism, “The Spirit of God maketh the reading, but especially the preaching of the word, an effectual means of enlightening, convincing, and humbling sinners; of driving them out of themselves, and drawing them unto Christ; of conforming them to his image, and subduing them to his will; of strengthening them against temptations and corruptions; of building them up in grace, and establishing their hearts in holiness and comfort through faith unto salvation.”²⁵Westminster Larger Catechism, q. 155, in Dennison, Reformed Confessions of the 16th and 17th Centuries 4:340.

3. Conclusion

Do we profess and admire the Nicene Creed but ignore the theology of its authors and defenders? We need to be aware of the present divide in theology between wisdom versus knowledge. As we read books, blogs, and posts, do we merely hunt for knowledge and intellectual capital? Are we merely downloading data that will puff us up? Can we profess the intricacies of creedal orthodoxy and yet walk away unchanged or worse, still marked by unchristian, sinful conduct? Do we contemplate the depths of the Nicene truth as explained by the Chalcedonian definition, “The same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in Godhead and also perfect in manhood; truly God and truly man, of a reasonable soul and body; consubstantial with the Father according to the Godhead, and consubstantial with us according to the Manhood”?²⁶Chalcedonian Definition, in The Creeds of Christendom, 6th ed., 3 vols., ed. Philip Schaff (Baker Book House, 1990), 2:62. Behind this creedal statement lies one of the greatest doctrinal truths ever revealed to the world, namely, that though Christ “was in the form of God,” he “did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped.” Rather, the eternal Son of God took “the form of a servant” and was “obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Phil 2:5–8). If we seek wisdom, then how can we contemplate the humility of the Son of God in the incarnation and walk away filled with pride? If we behold the glory of Christ in his transcendent and immanent beauty, how can we act in bitterness and anger towards others? Whether we behold Christ through the eyes of faith or on the last day with our bodily eyes, beholding Christ transforms us: “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Cor. 3:18).

Do we cloud the eyes of our faith with sin, which then obscures the glory and beauty of our triune God in our minds? Do we feed on a steady diet of social media and then think we can instantaneously switch to contemplating the things of God apart from prayer and meditation upon God’s holiness? Do we smear the mud of pornography, anger, or sarcasm upon our eyes and think it will not affect our theology and the way we live the Christian life? In our study of God and his word, do we draw near to God in Christ through the Spirit in prayer, before, during, and after? Is theology purely a rational exercise? Or is it seeking heavenly things through the gift of faith and the indwelling presence of Christ through the Spirit? In this way, theological study is as much a sphere of sanctification and conformity to Christ as any other part of the Christian life, if not even more so because we encounter the living Word of God, not merely a repository of knowledge. As John Webster reminds us, “Holy Scripture disturbs. Precisely as the medium of God’s holiness, it is a rock thrown in our path, an onslaught which smites our idolatries and us as idolaters. In this text we are arrested and addressed by God.”²⁷John Webster, The Culture of Theology, ed. Ivor J. Davidson and Alden C. McCray (Baker Academic, 2019), 71. If our thrice holy God addresses us in Scripture, then a “properly ordered reading involves a certain passivity: respect, receptivity, readiness to be confronted, and, above all, humility.”²⁸Webster, Culture of Theology, 74. How, then, will we engage in the task of theology? Will we sidle next to the bonfire of the virtues that engulfs our culture, or will we cultivate virtue, godliness, and holiness by drawing nigh unto our triune God? If the Nicene fathers are any example, then our prayer and hope should be that the closer we draw to the light of our triune God, the more we will reflect his light in word, thought, and deed. We will not toss our virtues into the bonfire, but rather the refining fires of the Spirit of sanctification will burn up our vices so that only the flames of God’s holiness illumine the world around us all to his triune glory.

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