What is Christian Courage?

By Matthew Arbo

The earliest Christian communities were widely and ruthlessly persecuted.  

To be Christian required courage. To bear witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ was to risk everything. 

The Cost of Belief 

The apex of Christian courage is martyrdom. All persons die, but some die for the sake of something ultimate that transcends them. Many Christians have been put to death for their allegiance to Jesus Christ. Through martyrdom, the greatest depth of Christian commitment is displayed. 

Courage requires reckoning with death. As Josef Pieper explains, “Fortitude that does not reach down into the depths of the willingness to die is spoiled at its root and devoid of effective power.” A courage that stops short of a willingness to die is no real courage at all. This willingness is announced and repeated by Christ himself, who commands disciples to take up the cross to follow him. Suffering, scorn, rejection, and death—these his disciples may expect to receive from the world for their faithfulness. 

Courage points to the transcendent. It isn’t enough to be courageous for its own sake. Any display of genuine courage points beyond itself to some superior good. Courage consists in resoluteness toward the good and is thus a commitment requiring confrontation with something “dreadful.” The courageous person suffers yet endures. 

Endurance Is the Essence of Courage 

Endurance, or perseverance, is a principal feature of courage. Thinking of courage narrowly as the heroic act, the boldest step toward danger, misses the more common “passive” sense of courage; “passive” in the sense of it happening to us or coming upon us.  

Clinging to the good requires endurance. The terminally ill patient, for example, suffers from the disease racking their body but, rather than take their own life prematurely, courageously forbears until their natural passing. This capacity for endurance is closely associated with patience. This patient endurance is the essence of courage. 

As the essence of courage, endurance is antithetical to wrathful aggression. The Christian conception of courage underscores the duty to endure, through which the moral substance and strength of the soul is manifest. It also happens that worldly power so much structures the world that endurance, as Pieper puts it, “is the ultimate decisive test of actual fortitude, which essentially is nothing else than to love and realize the good, in the face of injury and death, and undeterred by any spirit of compromise.” That strength comes through weakness is among the deepest truths of Christian faith. The meaning of “weakness” is turned inside out. 

Weakness Turned Inside Out 

Strength through weakness is revealed first and foremost in Jesus Christ.  

Jesus apprises his followers that they will suffer for his sake. It is an inevitability. To be human is to struggle against corrupting powers set against humanity—envy, malice, hatred—and Christians in particular are subject to still greater sufferings because of their identification with Christ. He can ask his disciples to endure suffering as one who is himself subjected to abuse, betrayal, torture, and execution. From the beginning of his ministry, he is ready to die. He endures even the cross and forsakenness. 

Thus Christian discipleship supposes courage: Courage to obey, to witness, to persevere, and ultimately to be crucified with Christ. This is courage to believe and to keep on believing; Christian courage is persevering.  

Those of us who take up the cross to follow Jesus are sustained by the Holy Spirit and supplied all the grace needed to stay the course set before us.  

This article has been adapted from Matthew Arbo’s book The Pursuit of Character: Recovering the Virtues, published by Baker Books. In it, he argues that we can learn how to live a good life by recovering the virtues that have guided Christians before us. Arbo reintroduces readers to the seven cardinal and theological virtues of prudence, temperance, fortitude, justice, faith, hope, and love. 

Matthew Arbo is an ethicist and policy advisor in Washington, D.C. He is the author of Walking through Infertility and Political Vanity.