I see people all around me who aren’t believers but who practice what John Calvin called “civic virtue”; that is, they do good things in society. They donate their money for good causes, they help the poor, and they sometimes even sacrifice themselves for others. They do all kinds of wonderful things on the horizontal level (i.e., toward other people), but they do none of it because their hearts have a pure and full love for God. There may be what Jonathan Edwards called an “enlightened self-interest” involved, but it is still self-interest.
