Courage as Theological Virtue

For generations, courage has been thought of as virtuous.  But what makes courage a theological virtue?  In other words, how might we enact courage in particular ways for the sake of knowing God well?  Miriam, I think, has a lot to teach us about this.  She’s one of the figures I’m examining in a soon-to-be-released book called Walking the Theological Life, and if you’d like to join the launch team, please let me know!  Miriam, especially, demonstrates that a theological virtue of courage is more than dogged determination; it names God’s activity in the face of an unknown future. Theological courage sings the song of God’s faithfulness as we face a frightening wilderness.

The waters of the sea had just receded into place, swallowing the world’s most powerful military force, hot on the trail of a terrified and exhausted group of newly freed slaves, clinging to whatever they could carry with them. Against all odds, Israel survived their escape. Against every expectation, a vulnerable and frightened people watched the waters of the Red Sea cover up their pursuers, drowning the threat of their swift, violent, and immediate destruction. It was then that Miriam began to sing.

“Sing to the Lord,” she begins with tambourine in hand, “for he is highly exalted. Both

horse and driver he has hurled into the sea” (Ex 15:21). Her song is short, but it is courageous. With the Red Sea at their backs and the vast mystery of wilderness in front of them, Miriam’s song is what sets the tone for these first steps into an unknown future. Without food or water, this people’s path is anything but certain. While they may not have certainty about the days to come, they have Miriam’s song, singing them into a wilderness journey with no lack of theological courage. Her song recalls the past events of divine faithfulness, propelling them into God’s future. I like to imagine Miriam, tambourine in hand, boldly carrying their song of deliverance out into an unknown wilderness. There, between nearly certain destruction and the unrelenting possibilities of danger, Miriam sings. In her song, we find a virtue of the theological life.

The Courage to Sing

Theology can be worshipful proclamation of God’s activity in the face of an unknown future. At times, theology is a summons to dance to the hope-filled song of God’s salvation. In Miriam, we see the courage to sing of God’s activity and dance boldly between the realities that threaten to unmake us. Her life reminds the theologian that our work, in part, is to have the courage to sing of God’s salvation so that God’s people can dance into the future. It is to create an eschatological culture by staring down uncertainty with a song of God’s faithfulness on our lips, calling people to dance defiantly in the presence of possible destruction. It is to step boldly into the days to come, propelled forward by a song of God’s past faithfulness.

The philosopher Aristotle famously defined courage as acting to grow, move, or become. For the musician, practicing one’s instrument is an act of courage. For the student, courage is found in picking up a book and challenging oneself to learn. A failure of courage, Aristotle argued, was to stay as one was, to be stymied in the status quo. Letting Miriam’s witness go to work on Aristotle’s understanding of courage offers us a perspective that sees theological courage as the virtue of proclaiming God’s actions into the way things are, expecting that God’s actions will change them in an uncertain future. In Miriam’s case, it is staring down a reality where her people have no home, no food, and no water, and speaking of what God has just done to the world’s most powerful military force, bent on her destruction. Her circumstances were real. The threat of annihilation was a bona fide possibility. But the things Miriam saw God do will not let that possibility be her reality. God’s activity gave her a song, and to that song she courageously and joyfully danced into the wilderness. When the very real circumstances of our world press in, sometimes it takes a theologian to remind the community of God’s action, pick up the tambourine, and invite others to join the dance into God’s future.

Courage At the End of the World

To live with theological courage is closely related to eschatology, the theological study of the purposes and conclusions of history. Eschatology has taken many forms in both ancient and contemporary theology, and it is important for us to remember that there is not a single approach to eschatology that has come to be officially recognized as the orthodox approach. When we are setting out to do the work of theology, though, it is important to raise a level of self-awareness of how our eschatological leanings will shape the kind of the theology that results.

In a salvation-historical approach, theologians often draw a link between God’s past activity and the unfolding of events yet to come. In other words, the reality God is bringing about will be consistent with God’s past activity. For theologians who take this approach, eschatology is not as much about predicting forthcoming events as much as it is about recognizing the type of reality God is bringing into being. This also signifies that the future God is bringing will be a good and fitting conclusion to God’s previous and ongoing work of creation rather than an arbitrary destruction of the creation God loves. While eschatology does study the end of the world, it often has a keen eye to the fulfillment or completion of the world rather than its cessation. As I often remind undergraduate students, there are two ways to end one’s college career. One of them involves withdrawing from school, while the other ends in earning a degree. Both are an end; only one is a fulfillment.

When theologians take a fulfillment approach to eschatology, they tend to read God’s activity in history as moving creation toward a good and complete fulfillment of everything God intended for creation. Sometimes this calls for an act of theological courage in the face of daunting circumstances. We might think of the kind of theological courage that fueled Martin Luther King Jr. to proclaim a bold, eschatological future in his “I Have a Dream” speech. In those sixteen historic minutes, King cast a vision of a creation that was more complete, allowing for the flourishing of Black Americans, created in the image of God. He spoke boldly into an incomplete reality, singing a song of what God had done in the past and reminding a people that God’s activity would continue in the same direction, that the “arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”  With the Red Sea of slavery and Jim Crow at his back, King turned toward an uncertain wilderness with a theological vision of God’s future that remained unrealized, riffed on Miriam’s song, and invited a nation to dance.

These approaches to theology exhibit a Miriam-like virtue of speaking courageously into a real situation. Even as we await the fullness of God’s realized time, theological courage is boldly singing of what God has done in Jesus Christ, speaking it confidently into a world that is yet unfulfilled. The Christian life, we could say, is the dance Miriam teaches us, our bodies moving according to the hope of a God who has acted to bring salvation. In this way, hope is anything but wishful thinking about a favored future reality. Hope, rather, is the Christian act of living now in light of the reality that is yet to come in its fullness. It is looking toward the fulfillment of creation and living its dynamics now because of Christ’s empty tomb and the empowerment of the Spirit that Jesus breathed on his disciples (Jn 20). Hope is an approach to the work of theology that calls the Christian community to live now in light of the end of salvation history or, as it is sometimes called in theology, realized eschatology.

Tambourine in hand, Miriam sings us into an unknown future, confident of what she has seen God accomplish in the past. The saving acts that rescued them from the grasp of slaveholders will be consistent with the acts that will sustain them in the wilderness, where there is no food or water. Her theological act is singing of God’s salvation in real-life situations, even in the face of uncertainty. To be sure, the work of theology often involves proclaiming the goodness of God’s activity when we are faced with harsh real-life realities. It is to recall with boldness the activity of a faithful and living God rather than shrinking back in the face of difficult—even seemingly impossible—realities.