As an exercise, I recently made a list of the people who have most influenced me, whose qualities I want to emulate. I stared at the list for some time before realizing that all have in common the surprising trait of humility.

For a time I did not appreciate humility, which I saw as an expression of negative self-image. Humble Christians seemed to grovel, parrying all compliments with "It's not me, it's the Lord." And as a nerdy, mathematical friend of mine once expressed it, the humble are a self-swallowing set: when you become conscious of belonging, you're immediately excluded.

Yet I now see that neither complaint applies to the people I most admire. A great scientist, a splendid poet, a theologian who works with the poor—none has a negative self-image. All excelled in school, won awards, and have little reason to doubt their gifts and abilities. Humility is, for them, an ongoing choice to credit God, not themselves, for their natural gifts and then to use those gifts in God's service.

According to many historians, pagan thinkers had never honored humility. Whereas worldly philosophers admired the virtues of accomplishment and self-reliance, Christians saw a grave temptation in anything that makes one feel superior to another. They encouraged, instead, an honest self-appraisal and open dependence on God.

Jesus talked freely about his most stressful moments: How else would we read in the New Testament about the lonely temptation in the wilderness, or the struggle in Gethsemane as his friends slept? The apostle Peter looks worst in Mark, the Gospel that apparently relies on his eyewitness details. (And John Mark may cryptically include himself as a naked character running away from the scene of Jesus' arrest.) John and Peter, ...