“Take Heart”: The Confident Hope of Christian Courage

Abstract Courage essentially involves confidence in the face of danger. But in what or in whom does the courageous person place her confidence? The answer, it seems, depends on one’s moral outlook. The person with the Aristotelian virtue of courage is informed by confidence that it is “fine” (to kalon) to fight and die for her noble cause. By contrast, biblical passages that call for courage, including Jesus’ encouragement to his disciples to “take heart; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33), suggest that a distinctively Christian virtue of courage involves love for God and others as well as confident faith in Christ’s power over the dangers in the world and confident hope in a future resurrection of the dead to eternal life with God. In order to understand the Christian virtue of courage, therefore, we must distinguish the kalonic confidence characteristic of Aristotelian courage from two different types of confidence—agapic confidence and eschatological confidence—involved in Christian courage. It must also be appreciated how the courageous Christian can be fully aware of the threat of death and thus need to rely on the virtue of courage, even while being confident that death does not have the final word.