I want to begin with a confession. I did not grow up with a Classical Education. I did not have house groups, identifying me with Augustine, Carey, Edwards, or Tolkien. I had mascots, which meant I was a Roadrunner, a Rattler, and a Bruin. Nor did I did not grow up with an emphasis upon virtues. These were categories, but of no relevance to me, assuming they were the time-capsuled language of the Victorian Era, and I gave them little to no thought.
I have another confession. I did grow up in a Christian home. I am so thankful to have parents who pointed me to Christ, drove me to church, opened the Bible, and led by example. And embedded in this Protestant Christian heritage is the emphasis upon godly character, morality, and being an example to others.
What I am confessing to you is not entirely unique. While you may have come to faith later in life, your participation at Legacy and your presence tonight reflect a shared desire to cultivate godly, well‑formed children in the setting of a Classical Christian education.
The question is, “how?” We often stress the importance of rules. Homes need rules. Civilizations need laws. Christianity is built upon commandments that Christ came to fulfill. Yet rules often fail us. We can write them, memorize them, enforce them, and they don’t seem to produce the results we had hoped.
Earlier this year, I was reading a book by Karen Swallow Prior, and she made a passing observation that captures the dilemma. It became a philosophical earworm. Just like that song that gets stuck in your head, the concept became inescapable.
In her book, “On Reading Well,” and she said,
“…because no number of rules or laws could cover every moral or ethical choice we face, virtue picks up where rules leave off. And where rules abound, virtue, like an unused muscle, atrophies.” KSP, On Reading Well, p 34
Her comment identified a gap I’ve long felt. A rule-heavy approach to character leaves us unready for the real demands of life.
Adhering to rules is much easier than growing and walking in wisdom. But where rules abound, virtue becomes like an unused muscle, atrophied and underdeveloped.
Definitions & Illustrations
Before we get too far down the road, let me try and apply some definition and context for my argument.
First, what do I mean by “rule following?” Let me give you two illustrations.
Rule following becomes a punch list, a checklist of items that must be completed and closely followed. Much like Ikea assembly instructions, you just follow the steps. Now, this approach is helpful if you want to build Billy Bookcases, but what if someone asks you to build a different bookcase? Or, what if you don’t have that painfully awkward tool that comes with every piece of Ikea furniture? Can you still build something without your punch list of box-checking?
Rule following becomes like working on an assembly line. It is possible to stand at the workstation and assemble part A into part B, move it down the line, doing that 100 times a day, 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year. You did your job, you assembled widgets. But a factory worker can “do his job” yet have no idea as to what the factory is actually producing and no concern for the bigger picture.
If we approach life as mere rule-following, we will be incomplete creatures, able only to build bookcases and widgets, unable to respond to environments beyond the programmed rules.
If we view our responsibility to be merely faithful rule followers, we will end up in situations where:
- We don’t know what to do because the rules don’t address the situation (confusion).
- We will assume there are no applicable rules, so we can do whatever we please (autonomy).
- We begin to sound and act increasingly like the fool described throughout Scripture’s wisdom literature. (folly).
The irony of rule-following is that it imagines itself to be the faithful example of godliness, yet often produces immature, ill-prepared people. But through the habit of virtue, we grow in wisdom.
Objections
But before we go any further, we need to address an important concern that sounds something like this: “Rules are good. God gave us 10 of them called commandments. If we downplay rules, are we downplaying something God commanded?”
This is an important objection. As a Protestant with a high view of Scripture, shaped by a confessional tradition that upholds the moral law, I take God’s commandments seriously. In my pastoral vows, I promised to teach in line with the Second London Baptist Confession, which devotes an entire chapter to God’s law.
What’s striking is that earlier generations applied God’s commandments without falling into the rule-following problems we’re addressing. Dipping into the 16th and 17th century writings, we hear that the 8th commandment of “do not steal” should be understood as a duty to:
“…truth, faithfulness, and justice in contracts and commerce between man and man; rendering to every one his due; restitution of goods unlawfully detained from the right owners thereof; giving and lending freely, according to our abilities, and the necessities of others… (Westminster Larger Catechism, Q 141)
And though the 9th commandment says plainly, “you shall not bear false witness,” Christians before us understood it as far more than simply “don’t lie.” They saw it as:
preserving and promoting of truth between man and man, and the good name of our neighbor, as well as our own…a charitable esteem of our neighbors; loving, desiring, and rejoicing in their good name; sorrowing for, and covering of their infirmities; freely acknowledging of their gifts and graces, defending their innocency; a ready receiving of good report, and unwillingness to admit of an evil report…and practising of whatsoever things are true, honest, lovely, and of good report. (WLC Q 142)
My point is that Christians who have gone before us have not looked at the rules given to us by God as “merely rules” to be blindly followed or superficially adhered to. They, too, used the language of virtues to explain, unpack, and apply the principles given to us by God.
Consider William Wilberforce. He opposed the slave trade not because a rule told him to confront Parliament, but because the deeper demands of the moral law (love of neighbor, justice, and mercy) compelled him. Those principles shaped his virtues: courage to stand almost alone, diligence through years of defeat, and a steady commitment to justice. Virtue gave him the moral imagination to see what the law required when Scripture offered no step-by-step instructions.
Principles
Allow me to pull all of this together by suggesting three principles that help us understand the contrast between a rule-driven life and the cultivation of virtue.
(1) Rules are rigid, virtues are flexible
In her book, “Ask of Old Paths,” Grace Hamman writes,
“It is significant that virtues are not rules, laws or even guidelines, but habits of creatures oriented toward love of God and neighbor. As a result, the virtues are not one-size-fits-all. They are incredibly flexible, diverse, contextual, and sometimes hidden from plain sight.” – Grace Hamman, Ask of Old Paths, p 17
She emphasizes that while rules are narrow and often context-dependent, virtues expand and contract to fit individual lives and moments in history.
Courage remains courage, but it expands and contracts to fit the person or situation. A knight in combat, defending his realm, has been an emblem of fortitude for centuries. A six-year-old would hopefully never have to go into battle, but we can think of some pretty courageous six-year-olds who nobly face difficulty at great cost.
Consider also diligent reading and study. It should look one way for an eight-year-old and another for an eighteen-year-old. Rules stay narrow, but virtues adjust to the person and the moment.
Rules would say, “If you are in a battle and someone throws a grenade, you must fall on it to save your brothers.” But what if there are no grenades? What if I am not in the Marines? Do I need a whole new set of rules?
How do I live when someone lobs a slanderous remark about a classmate into the group discussion? Rule followers will comb through their Ikea-based rule book, and if they don’t find a step that outlines their current situation, they will either wrongfully conclude there is nothing required of them or be uncertain as to how they should respond.
But virtuous living recognizes categories of injustice and justice (giving each one what they are owed), and recognizes that slanderous comments are unjust. Upholding justice often requires courage, because defending a neighbor’s reputation may invite the offender’s scorn or even cost you a “friend.”
Rules are rigid, virtues are flexible.
(2) Rules are limited virtues are universal
Rules address narrow slices of life. Their usefulness depends on whether circumstances match the scenario they were designed to regulate. Virtues, by contrast, apply everywhere because they shape the kind of person one becomes.
Aquinas saw this as well. Laws offer broad direction, yet life often presents situations that the letter of the law can’t cover. For this, he pointed to prudence—the virtue that knows the right action, in the right way, at the right time, and applies the moral law wisely to real circumstances.
In our own era, Alasdair MacIntyre has warned that modern moral life has become a web of fragmented rules divorced from the traditions that once gave them meaning. Without shared virtues, rules lose their coherence and become arbitrary. But virtue restores unity by forming people capable of understanding both the aims of a community and the goods toward which our actions are directed.
This is certainly the emphasis of Scripture as well. Solomon gathered thousands of proverbs because wisdom cannot be reduced to a simple set of commands. Wisdom literature assumes life’s complexity: one proverb urges answering a fool, another warns against it. The tension is intentional. It signals that wisdom, not rule following, determines the faithful response.
Virtue enables someone to know which word fits the moment, which path preserves righteousness, and which action serves neighbor and honors God.
Rules are limited, virtues are universal.
(3) Rules allow for immaturity, and virtues promote maturity
In many ways, rules function like the grammar of character formation. Grammar is essential, as no one becomes a writer or orator without learning the basic structures that make communication possible. Yet grammar is never the goal; it prepares a student for clear logic and the cultivation of beauty.
In the same way, rules establish the foundations of moral life, but they are only the beginning. They give shape, boundaries, and early guidance, yet they cannot produce maturity on their own.
A child relies on rules because they lack judgment. They need explicit instructions for what to do and what to avoid. But as they grow, we expect them to move beyond “nobody told me to do that” or “I didn’t know that was required.” Those phrases are expressions of immaturity, evidence that the person still depends entirely on external direction.
Virtue, by contrast, forms people who anticipate good, perceive what love requires, and take responsibility without being prompted. Maturity shows itself when someone recognizes the right action before a rule is invoked: seeing a need and meeting it, guarding a reputation without being asked, exercising patience when no one is watching.
Rules can restrain, rebuke, and redirect, but only virtue can propel a person toward the good with wisdom and steadiness.
The Task Before Us
Could it be that some of our frustration in parenting comes from raising children who know how to follow isolated steps but have little sense of what they are ultimately meant to build?
When we emphasize only rules, we inadvertently produce factory workers who repeat motions without understanding the larger purpose or the beauty of what they are called to build. But Scripture, the Christian tradition, and the classical vision all point toward something richer. We are not forming compliant workers; we are forming image bearers. People meant to exercise judgment, love, courage, and discernment in a world where the most meaningful decisions rarely fit into prewritten instructions.
Rules remain necessary. They give clarity, shape, and guardrails. But if rules are ~all we hand down~, our children will be unprepared for every moment when life goes off script. Virtue, on the other hand, forms the kind of person who can navigate the unscripted moments with wisdom.
The task before us, parents and teachers, is not to produce well‑behaved rule followers but to cultivate men and women whose lives are maturing into greater expressions of prudence, temperance, justice, and fortitude.
We are working and praying that by God’s grace, faith, hope, and love will blossom. This is slower work, deeper work, and oftentimes the hard work. Yet this is the wonderful and sobering task before us as faithful stewards of God’s grace.
If virtue is caught, not produced by rules alone, then our greatest work is to become the kind of people whose lives invite imitation, growing in virtue so that others can see the path ahead and say, “follow me, as I follow Christ.”
This was originally delivered as a lecture at the Classical Journey event for Legacy Classical Academy.