I’m feeling quite validated today. Earlier this year I posted a bit of a rant entitled Down with Values. Now I have discovered that David Wells has virtually plagiarized me in the following passage from The Courage to Be Protestant (mysteriously published in April, three months before my article). Wells writes of a shift that has taken place in Western thought that has replaced virtues with values.

Virtues, as I am thinking of them here, are aspects of the Good, or of Virtue. They are the moral norms that are enduringly right for all people, in all places, and in all times. It is true, of course, that there has been debate about what these virtues are.
   In the Middle Ages they were classified into two sets. The natural virtues were wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice while the supernatural virtues were faith, hope, and love. That makes seven virtues, which paralleled the seven deadly sins.
   The Protestant Reformation rejected this classification because it offered of basis of natural merit in four of the virtues that was simply upgraded by an infusion of grace. In fact, Scripture is more or less silent about virtue (cf. Phil. 4:8; 1 Pet. 2:9; 2 Pet. 1:3), but it clearly speaks of moral excellence and goodness in connection with the character of God. And not only in God’s character but also as reflected in the creation (Rom. 1:8-20) and in conscience (Rom. 2:14-15).
   However we understand this matter, it is inescapable that ours is a moral universe. It is one in which God sustains what is right, still abhors what is wrong, and still demands that we be accountable for knowing the difference.
   We can therefore say with confidence that there are moral excellencies that are always right because they make up who God is in his character. What Scripture speaks about in its narratives, psalms, and didactic sections is God’s holiness, justice, mercy, love, and truthfulness. And each of these has multiple variations in its application to human life. That these are the norms by which we should live is rather clear; how we might actually do so is a different matter.
   Across the ages people have tried to emulate these virtues. This has been true in Roman Catholicism, as it was in the liberal Protestantism of the nineteenth century. In their slightly different ways, they made the argument, one which has always appealed to the most morally earnest, that people should aim to be virtuous and that by practice they can become virtuous. Luther attacked this notion that, he said, came from Aristotle. It was the thought that just as a natural talent can be improved by practice, so can our own inherent virtue. This, needless to say, takes too little account of the way sin has intruded into all our virtue, perverting it. It is not practice that we need, but radical, supernatural transformation. That has always been the Protestant understanding of Scripture, and we will have occasion to return to it in due course.
   This brings us to the heart of a conundrum: Does “I ought” mean “I can”? does God still require of us obedience to what is morally normative even though in sin we cannot give that full obedience? Does he modify his demands to fit our abilities?
   The answer, of course, is that God cannot modify his demands because he cannot modify his character. His moral demands, therefore, were the same before the fall a they as they have been after it. What changed was our moral ability to obey what God demanded. Yet, being unable to live as God demands in no way changes how we should live. God does not tailor his moral demands to our ability to fulfill them, otherwise the most degrading and scurrilous miscreants would have the smallest expectation to reach! No, his moral norms are the same for all people, in all places, and in all times. It is these norms that I have in mind as virtues, and when we put them all together they make up Virtue. His grace that we encounter in Christ so takes us into itself that God is able to see us just as if we had never violated a single norm and have always given him his full due.
   To speak of Virtue, then, is to speak of the moral structure of the world of God made. Rebellious though we are, we have not broken down this structure, nor dislodged God from maintaining it. It stands there, over against us, whether we recognize it or not. We bump up against it in the course of life and we encounter its reflection in our own moral makeup. And from all sides a message is conveyed to our consciousness: “Beware! This is a moral world you inhabit!”
   . . .

Values, as we speak of them today, are a relatively new idea. In 1928 the multivolume Oxford English Dictionary, which had been under construction since 1882 and had accumulated the meanings of close to half a million words, had no entry for “values.” “Values” is a word in later twentieth-century talk in the West.
   Indeed, values represent the moral talk of a relative world and one that is clearly quite novel in some ways. It is true that in the past, free thinkers, novelists, artists, and other avant-gardists have dispensed with any kind of moral world. But never before have we seen an experiment on so large a scale as we are seeing in the West today. Everyone is now avant-garde, not just the cultural elite. Everyone is experimenting with how it feels to live in a world without moral form, one that is devoid of objective ethical norms.
   Once we left behind a moral world, we had no option but to treat values in a value-free way because what is right for one is not necessarily right for another. As the older moral world has faded, then, its virtues have faded with it. In the twilight of its dissolution, we are left with values.

—David F. Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth Lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World (Eerdmans, 2008), 143–147.