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CALLING, KINGDOM, AND CULTURAL ENGAGEMENT: RECOVERING CHRISTIAN SPIRITUALITY FOR THE PUBLIC SQUARE
A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY FULLER THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE DOCTOR OF MINISTRY
BY
FRANK BOSWELL JUNE 2011
ABSTRACT
Calling, Kingdom, and Cultural Engagement: Recovering Christian Spirituality for the Public Square Frank Boswell Doctor of Ministry School of Theology, Fuller Theological Seminary 2011
The purpose of this study was to examine how recovering an understanding of Christian calling could be key to de-compartmentalizing the lives of Christians and fostering a spirituality that connects faith with public life in today’s postmodern environment. After examining the current cultural context, the paper considered how and why the evangelical church finds itself so marginalized and explored the consequences of that disengagement. It also looked closely at the way alternative spiritualities are penetrating the business world with alarming effectiveness and then demonstrated the superiority of the biblical theology of creation and calling, particularly as it applies to work. A significant concern that emerged was the importance of distinguishing between one’s work and God’s building of his kingdom. Although not directly building God’s kingdom, people’s work can still be an indirect vehicle by serving as a witness to the goodness and beauty of the new creation. Another theme was the critical importance of the doctrine of creation and how transforming it is for people’s thinking and behavior in their work. The third discovery was how comprehensive and transformative the idea of calling can be for spiritual formation, particularly in surmounting the pervasive legalism plaguing dedicated Christians. It also provides a subtle but powerful way to interact meaningfully with non-believers. This approach allows conversations to begin with people’s subjective awareness of, curiosity about, and hunger for a sense of meaning and purpose to their lives. The material in this study points the way to a fresh and timely approach to pastoral ministry by wedding ancient spirituality to the contemporary work environment and providing Christians with an increasingly urgent need for a voice in the public square.
Content Reader: Richard J. Mouw, PhD
Words: 299
To Jeannie, the love of my life and my traveling companion, who made the journey possible and filled it with joy.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am forever indebted to the elders and congregation of Hunt Valley Church for their unfailing support and encouragement for this project. Thanks to my counselor, Ken Zeigler, for pressing me to undertake this work; to my staff for their never-ending patience and cheerful support in completing this project; to the countless members who prayed so faithfully for me and continue to look to God for great things; and most of all to my kids who always reminded me to “just finish it, Dad.” I have not only gained a second wind and fresh energy for the next season of ministry, but have been humbled in two ways, primarily: by the wonder of God’s world, and by the love and affection of my friends and family.
iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... iv
INTRODUCTION ...... 1
PART ONE: THE CHALLENGE OF SPIRITUALITY IN THE PUBLIC SQUARE
Chapter
1. HOW THE POSTMODERN SHIFT CHANGES PERSPECTIVES ON WORK ...... 15
2. THE EVANGELICAL CHURCH’S CULTURAL DISENGAGEMENT ...... 37
3. ALTERNATIVE SPIRITUALITIES IN THE WORKPLACE ...... 56
PART TWO: A BIBLICAL THEOLOGY OF CALLING
4. HISTORICAL THEMES AND UNDERSTANDINGS ...... 75
5. BIBLICAL THEOLOGY AND THEMES OF CALLING ...... 91
6. DISCERNMENT OF CALLING ...... 113
PART THREE: COMMUNICATING AND CONVEYING CALLING IN THE PUBLIC SQUARE
7. NEW VOCABULARY AND NEW BEHAVIOR IN THE WORKPLACE ...... 130
8. CALLING AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF CULTURE ...... 150
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS ...... 168
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 174
v
INTRODUCTION
Vocation - It comes from the Latin vocare, to call, and means the work a man is called to by God.…The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet. Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Theological Abc
For a pastor it was a refreshing privilege to be able to participate for a whole year in a business group in which people from various walks of life met monthly for learning and mutual support. Not many of them seemed to have any particular religious commitment or understanding, although a couple were quite outspoken in their frustration and resistance to “religion.” One day, the discussion somehow touched on a matter that I can no longer recall, but that prompted a recollection of Buechner’s well-known quote on vocation. When I off-handedly shared it with the group, time stood still. There was a sudden riveting of attention on what I had just said; in fact, people got out paper and pen as they asked me to repeat it for them – slowly – so they could write it down. It was startling to see the sudden fascination with the words of someone I know to be a religious writer and a concept that is more “religious” than they knew.
This simple vignette provides a glimpse into the possibilities for Christianity in our post-Christian culture. Despite prevailing pessimism in the church and its continuing ineffectiveness in engaging culture, it is possible to broach subjects of faith in a secularized and pluralistic setting. People remain hungry for spiritual reality and respond to spiritual wisdom. The church can do more – much more – to foster a spirituality that connects faith with public life. When believers learn how to de-compartmentalize their lives, they will begin to see the content of their work and their life in the public square as vehicles for God’s Kingdom in addressing human need and providing for the common
1
2 good. In so doing, a more robust spirituality will emerge that can better withstand the problems and pressures of contemporary culture. The center of gravity and motivation for this spirituality will be a profound and joyful sense of living out of one’s unique personal calling before God.
What was it that those business people found so startling and magnetic in
Buechner’s words? In that moment, I believe, the curtain parted to reveal the spiritual longing that lurks within every person. People would love to know that their lives actually mean something and are not simply a purposeless exercise in order to sustain life for the weekend. This particular group met, supposedly, to learn how to run their businesses better, which usually simply means to run them more efficiently. Guest speakers would deliver (excellent) teaching on how organizations and markets work and what is necessary, for example, for a new start-up business to grow and thrive. The group members’ response to Buechner’s definition of calling, however, was indicative of something Christians (are supposed to) know, namely, that “man does not live by bread alone.” Material success in and of itself is empty and toilsome.
Sadly, most Christians do not have any better notion of what Buechner’s words mean for their lives than do non-Christians. The idea of vocation or calling may be enormously attractive, but it is functionally absent in most believers’ day-to-day lives.
The mention of the integration of faith and work turns most people’s minds to images of grafting religious practices or language or behavior onto their work lives. The world of work, or the public arena in general, is a world apart from people’s “spiritual” lives.
Christians, by and large, do not have a vision for their jobs that goes beyond the categories they have inherited from a radically secularized culture, namely, to make
3 money for the weekend. If one is a Christian, then the job must be done in an ethical way.
What is not understood is how to see their work as a spiritual vehicle for their love of
God and neighbor and as a vital instrument for the Kingdom of God on earth. The vision for a “Christian” workplace does not often go beyond being a nice person and cleaning up their language and ethics. At most, they might entertain the radical idea of a lunchtime
Bible study. The thought that their work in itself could be a critical ingredient in their spiritual walk is pretty much a foreign idea.
The irony deepens further when one looks at how hungry the culture is for this kind of teaching. Ideas and stories about matters like calling strike a very deep chord in people’s hearts. Stories like this one illustrate a growing fascination in our culture with various forms of “spirituality,” most surprisingly, perhaps, in the supposedly hard-core business world. Books and seminars are increasingly oriented around less rationalistic ways of knowing and are subtly conveying a new, more mystical view of the universe, and, from a Christian standpoint, it is no wonder. Contrary to Enlightenment assumptions about reality, the world is indeed a “magical” or “enchanted” place. It is charged with divine presence that even non-believers in Christ can sense.
In all fairness, there has been a parallel hunger in the church in the last few decades that has manifested itself in a dramatic resurgence of interest in ancient spiritual practices. A realization has grown that our troubles are not primarily external but have to do with our interior lives, our hearts. Given the drift of our culture, therein lies a great opportunity. If people in the world are more interested in matters that are inward, spiritual, and mystical, then believers need to be involved in that conversation. Like the altar to the Unknown God in Athens (Acts 17) that Paul used as a point of contact with
4 his pagan listeners, there is an open door before us today that hinges on our culture’s renewed interest and hunger for the spiritual. This interest may not be an entirely pure and “Christian” understanding or search but, then, neither was that represented by the
Athenians’ altar to the Unknown God. The Athenians may not have known all that they needed to know, but they did know something. So do people today. Consequently, there is an added imperative for believers to become more experienced in spiritual practices and conversant with their own inner world, for, if they do not, then they will not be able to address the growing hunger burgeoning around us.
Complicating the picture, however, is the dualistic split that has persistently plagued our culture since the Enlightenment. “Reality” has come to be seen as something that exists in two “stories,” and lives are split between two worlds: one secular and dealing with ordinary, everyday matters; the other “sacred” and far removed from the concerns of life on Monday through Saturday.1 Christians seem unaware and untroubled that this understanding relegates Christ and His Lordship over all creation to the margins of culture and life. His Lordship is truncated and reduced to the size of their interior lives, which is to say, compared to the entire universe, – not very large.
This will never do if the Kingdom of God is truly to be manifested on earth.
Believers cannot even properly say, let alone experience, the part of the Lord’s Prayer that asks for God’s will to be done on earth. Consequently, at a time of what can only be described as phenomenal change – change that is not only unprecedented but discontinuous and unpredictable in nature as well as global in scope – the church is
1 For a thorough exploration of the two-tier dilemma, see Nancy R. Pearcey, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity, Study Guide ed., with a foreword by Phillip E. Johnson (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2005).
5 becoming more and more a museum to a past, bygone era (Christendom). People’s imaginations are not being stirred with new dreams and opportunities for God’s Kingdom in this present moment. They are instead playing defense for a world that is already gone.
The solution is not found in accommodating these changes and trying to generate a parallel culture of Christian practices and programs to compete with what the world is offering. That only reinforces the trap of living on a spiritual “reservation.” What is needed is a way to penetrate the surrounding consensus in a way that is as captivating as it is challenging. If Jesus is truly Lord of heaven and earth, then Christians have no choice but to incorporate and integrate their faith with their daily lives, the ones they experience during the rest of the week besides Sunday, when they are “off the reservation.” The goal is not to add “Christian” activities to the workplace so much as it is to infuse the public arena with a different spirit. It has to do with the very content of the work that occupies so much of people’s time being transformed so as to put feet to their prayer that God’s kingdom and will would be done on earth as it is in heaven. Clinging defensively to an old world which no longer exists and old ways of thinking that smell moldy and musty will not “make disciples” and followers of Christ out of all the peoples of the earth.
Nor is this an appeal for Christians to be more up-to-date and contemporary, trendy, and “with it.” Christians do not need to ape the world to make a difference. In fact, it is quite the opposite. They need to operate out of a different interior place of motivation and understanding and vision. What they really need to do is recover their own heritage, traditions that go back for centuries, a long time before the scientific and
6 industrial revolutions, back to a time when Christians were setting the agenda for the world.
Besides, discipleship that is only interior, that is reduced to one’s own private life with God, is insufficient to sustain interest and energy over the long haul. There is a big, wide world that God has created, and our spiritual lives are not healthy unless they are somehow engaging it in its fullness. To put it another way, believers need to grasp the true nature of the Kingdom that Jesus came to announce and make present to us. For far too many Christians, the Kingdom is a remote, abstract notion that smacks of the academic (i.e., irrelevant for daily life), in short, everything that it was not in Jesus’ teaching. It is surprising how un-”religious” Jesus’ teaching was, how everyday the language and concerns and illustrations that he employed to convey what this “kingdom” was all about. How ironic it is, then, that most believers do not know how to communicate spiritual truth in the everyday language of their contemporaries the way
Jesus did. Instead, they are stuck in language and concepts that are far removed from the everyday context of their lives and those of their neighbors.
The engine, I believe, that draws these disparate worlds together is the classic biblical theme of calling or vocation. Like most themes in Christian theology, it is not a new idea that has never been thought of before. On the contrary, there have been periods in history where the emphasis on calling has been much more pronounced than it is today. It is a surprisingly comprehensive idea that embraces many facets of Christian life and practice and, therefore, holds promise to be a force for the reintegration of believers’ private, “spiritual” lives with their public lives. Particularly, it can be an integrative factor in the midst of the fragmentation and confusion of the postmodern world. Properly
7 understood, the idea of vocation has the potential to dissolve the artificial rifts between public and private, and between reason and intuition, that plague us today. In his book,
The Call, Os Guinness asserts that calling “has been a driving force in many of the greatest ‘leaps forward’ in world history – the constitution of the Jewish nation at Mount
Sinai, the birth of the Christian movement in Galilee, and the sixteenth-century
Reformation and its incalculable impetus to the rise of the modern world, to name a few.”2 He goes on to say, even more dramatically: “Let me speak personally. I’ve written several books during the last twenty-five years, but no book has burned within me longer or more fiercely than this one.”3 This experience and passion is not unique to Guinness. It is frequently the experience of people who delve into the rich depths of biblical teaching on calling.
Calling provides a point of contact with the surrounding culture, for more and more people are attracted to this idea and are resorting to its vocabulary. Despite the fact that it is often put forth in a somewhat corrupted and inadequate version, it still holds great attraction as a topic of interest for many people today. It also makes the participation of Christians in that cultural conversation all the more imperative. If believers in Christ do not bring defining clarity to bear on people’s lives, who will?
What makes this moment particularly striking is the fact that the Catholic Church, which has historically parted company with Protestant thinking on this doctrine, is re- thinking its understanding of calling. Some of the most interesting work being done today on vocation and calling in the public arena is being done by Catholic thinkers. There
2 Os Guinness, The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life (Nashville, TN: Word Publishing, 1998), 4-5.
3 Ibid., 5.
8 seems to be a new and unprecedented convergence of thought between Protestants and
Catholics on this idea, which suggests fresh possibilities for a unified face before a skeptical world.
What is needed, in fact, is an entire facelift for the church of Christ in the United
States. The vision needs to be broader, the spirituality needs to run deeper, and the motives need to be purer and more genuine. Calling addresses all of those needs. It provides a very different mainspring for the Christian life, a life that is comprehensive and that embraces the entirety of life. It speaks powerfully to what occupies the majority of our time after sleep, and that is our labor.
Calling has the added benefit of helping surmount the pervasive legalism that plagues evangelicalism by promoting a deeper interior life and spirituality. Instead of being driven by obligation and guilt, it invites people into action in a way that is at once more challenging and more powerful. The language, too, that surrounds the idea of calling provides a helpful vocabulary with which people can articulate to others what their spiritual lives are really like.
It is the intersection, then, among these three broad – but key – areas with which this paper has to deal: the cultural life and engagement of Christians with the world-as-it- is in all its breadth and richness; the rich subversiveness of the Kingdom of God in undermining the powers-that-be, along with the confident hope of a different world; and the driving engine of calling that moves believers into action for the sake of that
Kingdom. Together, these three themes alter the landscape of Christian life by shifting the focus away from the privatized salvation and outward behavior that end up
9 conforming to the pattern of the world, and toward a more interior spirituality that can withstand the pressures and snares of our public life together with all people.
The first chapter of this paper takes a hard look at the place of work and public life in the new “postmodern” context. In this extraordinary post-Christian moment when the old certainties are gone and the old rules no longer apply, church people must wake up to the changing reality around them. As difficult as these transitions may be, they also provide fresh opportunities for witness and cultural change that did not exist, even a generation ago. For many people today, life feels as empty as it is fragmented and leads to the search for a spirituality that provides an inner identity and security. Outwardly, there is the apparent emergence of a new altruistic economy characterized by social and spiritual entrepreneurship. Recovering the combined ideas of kingdom and calling makes possible a new engagement of people in this public square in a way that is marked by coherence and plausibility.
Against this backdrop, the paper explores the cultural disengagement of the evangelical church (chapter 2). Increasingly, the church is marginalized, in part by social developments and pressures, but also because the church is complicit in its own irrelevance by its blind adherence to the sacred/secular dualism that relegates the
Kingdom of God to some “upper story” of “religious truth.” In the midst of this, the idea of calling has largely fallen by the wayside and been forgotten. While there are those who will assert its importance, it does not as yet have any functional power in the church-at- large. It is not part and parcel of church life or theological discussion, nor a centerpiece of
Christian discipleship. It is still more of a specialty subject that, if taught at all, is presented only in special seminars or classes. Consequently, Christians are strangers to
10 the spirituality of their own labor and of the dynamics of their own inner lives. The legalism and lack of imagination that flow from that ignorance result in a sterile spirituality that is impotent in the face of the globalized culture emerging all around us.
At a time when human need is increasingly seen by more and more people as global in scope and demanding of a “spiritual” solution, the Christian voice in the culture is lacking, rendered moot by being as implausible as it is incomprehensible.
The third chapter, therefore, takes a look at some of the alternative ways that people are seeking to address these needs through new varieties of spirituality. While
Christians remain largely unaware of their own rich heritage with respect to calling, the world is happy to co-opt the language of calling and vocation in the marketplace. Strong voices are using corrupt versions of the church’s own insights to capture the attention, as well as the hearts and minds, of consumers who are tired of the empty pursuit of materialistic satisfaction. In order to survive, let alone be effective, in this new culture, believers will not only have to come to terms with the meaning of calling in their own lives, but they will also need to be able to discern the subtle differences between the spirituality of Jesus and those that are being promoted by others today.
This calls for a deeper exploration of the theology and biblical underpinnings of the doctrine of calling (chapter 4). Sorting out the biblical view of calling from the distortions that have plagued the church over the centuries has the potential to re-energize rank and file believers and churches in their primary “calling” to make disciples who will be as effective in turning the world upside down as were the believers of the early centuries of the Christian era. Knowing something of the historical background and
11 understandings of calling through the centuries can bring clarity to the problems, as well as the opportunities, provided by a better grasp of this truth.
Seeing how calling infuses the grand epic of Scripture and plays out in the lives of ordinary people (few of whom were “clergy” or religious “professionals”) generates a fresh perspective on what our spiritual lives are supposed to look like (chapter 5). Here the concepts of kingdom, calling, and cultural engagement need to be carefully defined and explored with a particular view to the integration of faith and work so that Christians can not only “live a life worthy of the Lord” but also “please him in every way” (Col.
1:10). Calling is a missing, or at least muted, note in much of the contemporary discussions of spirituality and spiritual formation, and it is important to see the ways in which it enhances those processes. It not only helps people look inward, but it offers an outward benefit as well. By serving as a navigational reference point in the midst of the speed, blur, and flux of postmodern culture, calling can provide powerful stability as well as leverage Christian influence in the public square.
Given the vital importance of calling, then, for people’s spiritual lives and for the growth of the kingdom of God in and through their lives, those callings must be discerned
(chapter 6). This is an area that seems so mysterious and exotic to most believers that they often feel defeated and paralyzed before they even begin the journey. It is important to understand the ways that people come to know and be energized and sustained by their own personal callings. Sometimes the discernment of calling can be a dramatic moment, which grabs people and turns their lives upside down, but more often it is a subtle and gradual process. In that discernment, weight must be given not only to personal design and desire but also to intuition and prayer. Common misunderstandings and traps that can
12 either defeat or distort people’s desire to live out of a deeper place must be identified so they can be avoided. In particular, the wisdom and insight of the community of believers is a much-neglected resource in helping followers of Christ discern their calling without falling into those traps. Mutual insight and encouragement of each other’s calling could be one of the greatest gifts Christians offer to one another.
Finally, equipped with a new sense of direction and confidence and spiritual power, calling must be communicated and conveyed effectively in the public arena
(chapter seven). The idea of vocation enhances believers’ roles outside of the church and a privatized context. It powerfully benefits others whom God wants to bless through his people. Lives lived out of a sense of vocation reintroduce wonder into the world by serving as a window onto the flourishing of human life that God desires and toward which all history is moving.
The greatest neglected opportunity is surely that of the workplace. Old paradigms about imposing Christian views and values on a resistant public can now be discarded in favor of approaches that are more subtly creative and even “artistic” in nature. Armed with an understanding of their own callings, followers of Christ can communicate with non-believing fellow workers in ways that are winsome and wise. The very things which they “have” to do (whether they are paid or not) now become wonderful vehicles for displaying the beauty of the kingdom of God, windows through which people can catch at least a glimpse of the kind of life Christ came to give, the life that is eternal and suited for the everlasting age to come.
The tricky question of exactly how culture is transformed is the subject of the final chapter (chapter 8). Here Christians must understand the limitations and realities of
13 living in a fallen world and the dangers of misguided grandiosity, however well- intentioned, in their desire to see God glorified in the world. At the same time, they must realize that Christ’s lordship really does make a difference, one that is eternal, to be sure, but one that is also not what they might expect. Believers should have known all along that the way forward would be a way downward and that the seed would have to die in order to bear fruit, but they also need to know what it looks like in practice so they can more fully embrace that aspect of their calling. Because work can be such an effective means for loving our neighbors, even work communities have the possibility of demonstrating what true human flourishing looks like. Finally, the church must find fresh and concrete ways to equip people for this level of understanding and cultural engagement for the sake of God’s kingdom. Vocation must be conveyed and pressed into the hearts and minds of those who say that they love Christ and want to follow Him?
After all, Christ’s followers are already “there,” in the world, in places of influence and witness. It is not as if most people have to “go” anywhere to obey God or be used by Him. They just need to grow in their awareness of what God is already doing in their world and spheres of influence. Then the life in Christ will become a true adventure, compelling even – perhaps especially – in times that try and tempt people’s souls. Obedience will no longer be confined to the personal and private, but will play itself out in the same arena in which Jesus himself lived and worked. Whatever it was that he did, it changed the world forever. If he is truly alive and spiritually present in the lives of believers, wherever they happen to be, there is surely, by God’s grace, much more that they can expect him to do through them for, if he is not finished working in this world, then neither are they.
PART ONE
THE CHALLENGE OF SPIRITUALITY IN THE PUBLIC SQUARE
CHAPTER 1
HOW THE POSTMODERN SHIFT CHANGES PERSPECTIVES ON WORK
Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is often cited as saying, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience, but spiritual beings having a human experience.”4 A huge portion of that human experience revolves around the work that people do. Work is the activity that most brings people into connection with others through their public lives. If people truly are spiritual beings, then work must of necessity have spiritual implications. The first opportunity in engaging the public square may not be church pronouncements and social projects, but people learning to serve God by integrating their faith with their work in the places in which He has already providentially placed them.
The timing could not be more strategic for a recovery of this truth because current developments and trends in Western culture are generating in people a greater awareness of and hunger for spiritual reality in their lives. As they do so, the classical doctrine of calling or vocation is a crucial key to reaching their hearts and helping them navigate the turbulence that lies ahead. To understand how and why this is so, it is necessary to sketch briefly the cultural movements and developments that have brought about the present moment. What follows is, of necessity, a sweeping overview and summary that is not intended to negate the complexity and variety of cultural currents operating today.
4 Cited in Laura Nash and Scotty McLennan, Church on Sunday, Work on Monday: The Challenge of Fusing Christian Values with Business Life (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001), 3.
15 16
Increasingly, observers across multiple disciplines have been noting the huge cultural shift that is underway and transforming the West. The significance of this shift can be gauged by considering what happened during the last one: “The Enlightenment lasted barely two centuries; yet during this relative brief period a new cosmology managed to displace the one that had reigned in Western civilization since the time of
Augustine.”5 Today’s shift is, in a similar way, a repudiation of the modernistic mindset that has ruled since the Enlightenment. In short, this new shift appears to be on the order of magnitude of that which occurred from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and
Enlightenment.
Such transitional times are notoriously difficult to see when one is in the very midst of them, but there does seem to be broad agreement that this one “marks the end of a single, universal worldview.”6 Although the word “postmodern” has come to be used to describe this emerging world, not everyone likes the term. Some argue that what is occurring is really more of a “hyper-modernity.”7 On the other end of the spectrum, New
Age theorist Ken Wilber says “postmodernism is so yesterday (and isn’t that ironic?).”8 It may be that, from our vantage point in the middle of this sea-change, it may not be possible to say exactly what is emerging, only that it is not what came before. David
Wells probably has it right when he says that “modernity and postmodernity are actually
5 Stanley J. Grenz, A Primer on Postmodernism (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1996), 60.
6 Ibid., 11-12.
7 Andy Crouch in Leonard Sweet, gen. ed. et al., The Church in Emerging Culture: Five Perspectives (El Cajon, CA: emergentYS, 2003), 71-72.
8 Ken Wilber, A Theory of Everything: An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science and Spirituality (Boston: Shambhala Publications, Inc., 2001), xv.
17 reflecting different aspects of our modernized culture. They are more like siblings in the same family than rival gangs in the same neighborhood.”9 Wells also goes on to say that postmodernity is not so much an intellectual movement as it is “a cultural ethos that presents a moving target.”10 From this perspective, then, the term post in postmodern simply means “after,” or subsequent to, the modern era. For the sake of convenience, this paper will use the term postmodern in a broad sense to refer to the cultural change, whatever it is, that is occurring now.
Since postmodernism is a reaction to the modern era, it can be better understood by revisiting two revolutions in understanding that occurred at the genesis of modernity, one philosophical and the other scientific. In the former, René Descartes employed a new approach in philosophy that enshrined human reason as the primary way of knowing.
This development was parallel to and reinforced by the scientific revolution, epitomized by Isaac Newton, which set forth a view of the universe as a vast cosmic machine. In short, one could sum up the modern world as the one shaped by the implications of
“Newton’s mechanistic universe populated by Descartes’ autonomous, rational substance.”11
On the intellectual level, reason became elevated to the point where it eclipsed revelation as a way of knowing.12 This perspective tended to reduce reality to only that
9 David F. Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2005), 62.
10 Ibid.
11 Grenz, Primer, 67.
12 Ibid., 64.
18 which is measurable.13 It is ironic that the physics which helped provide the foundation for the modern enterprise is also what led to its unraveling, for all of life must now be explained by purely natural cause and effect. One effect of this way of thinking is a rupture between “facts” and “values,” with the resultant loss of any kind of overarching purpose or intent to the universe. With the absence of convincing “meta-narratives” that bind reality together in one comprehensible whole, “it has become impossible to move from statements about ‘what is’ to statements about ‘what ought’ to be.”14 In this reduced and flattened world without transcendence, “reality loses its connectedness, everything drifts apart. It begins to resemble confetti - a myriad of experiences, none of which is related to the other and one of which, in the absence of this relation, can mean anything.”15
Confidence in reason thus dissolves into a radical understanding of all perspectives as being relative and contingent. The quest for knowledge ends up questioning the very possibility of knowing truth at all. Postmoderns “reject the fundamental assumption … that we live in a world consisting of physical objects that are easily identifiable by their inherent properties. They argue that we do not simply encounter a world that is ‘out there’ but rather that we construct the world using concepts we bring to it.”16 Rationality is no longer seen as the only, or even primary, way of knowing. In this new, deconstructed world, the emotions and the intuition may be seen as
13 Grenz, Primer, 66.
14 Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs, 88.
15 Ibid., 37.
16 Grenz, Primer, 41.
19 more profound ways of knowing than Enlightenment ever suspected. In a sort of mirror mockery of the Enlightenment confidence in reason, postmodernity has little time for formal logic or disciplined reasoning. It embodies instead a mood of “rebellion” that likes to “juxtapose things that do not belong together in a kind of flippant, or maybe ironic, dismissal of logic …”17 Thus, a movement that began as a way to exalt humankind results in the diminishment of humankind’s place in the grand scheme of things.18
The intellectual theories and opinions of the educational elite are more properly called postmodernism and are to be distinguished from postmodernity, the popular expression of those ideas that takes place on a broader cultural level. The latter is, for the most part, not thought out or self-conscious, but rather results in “a diffuse, unshaped kind of expression.”19 With the rise of global population growth, nuclear warfare, environmental pollution, and the general rootlessness and fragmentation of modern life comes a pervasive disillusionment. Not only is science no longer seen as the source of solutions for humankind; the “solutions” it presents are themselves part of the problem.
Because of the pessimism regarding the possibility of real knowledge, progress is no longer seen as inevitable. The result is a civilization which is “the very first to have no agreed-on answer to the question of the purpose of life.”20 Americans find themselves in the odd position of being in a world in which it is hard to imagine anyone today writing
17 Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs, 70.
18 Grenz, Primer, 63.
19 Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs, 84.
20 Guinness, The Call, 3-4.
20 about the “self-evident” truths so boldly presented in their own Declaration of
Independence.21
Concurrent with and reinforcing these developments is the radically new environment brought about by revolution in information technology. In fact, the shift from the industrial to the information era has been one of the most significant factors in the speed with which postmodernism has spread as well as the depth and breadth of its impact. M. Rex Miller argues that information and communication technology is the primary factor in cultural shifts because it affects the way people look at the world.
When our means of storing and distributing information change, our perceptions change. Changed perceptions create changed understandings and even changed psychology. Changed identity affects relationships. Changed relationships affect the traditions and institutions that support those relationships. These changes eventually reach a cultural critical mass, igniting a battle between old and new worldviews. Communication is the medium for relationships, community, and culture; so a more efficient or powerful tool of communication results in their restructuring.22
Miller goes so far as to assert that this “shift to a coming digitally defined culture is more than a change in technology, attitude, and understanding. It is a sensory change … change is not only the constant, it is the organizing principle and the foundation from which we build.”23 The turmoil generated by such constant, unpredictable change levels the playing field and democratizes knowledge. People are more likely to turn to peers through Internet webs and networks for knowledge than they are to cultural “authorities.”
21 Douglas Groothuis cited by Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs, 84.
22 M. Rex Miller, The Millennium Matrix: Reclaiming the Past, Reframing the Future of the Church (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004), x.
23 Ibid., 77.
21
It is against this historical and cultural backdrop and in the midst of the swirling currents of change that Christians must learn to not only survive but flourish. The first requirement is admitting that the old world with its comforts and familiarity is gone and not coming back. The seeming tragedy of this, however, may very well be the greatest opportunity of the hour, for the shift to postmodernism has brought about what centuries of rational argumentation and evidential apologetics were never quite able to do: effectively bring about the end of the suffocating reign of rationalistic naturalism. A wedge has been driven into the monolithic understanding of reality that can become an open door to divine encounter.
The Longing for Coherence and Meaning
While postmodernists may see themselves as weaving their own personal narrative out of the shards of deconstructed reality, that very effort reflects a desire for meaning and connectedness to life. This can be seen, for example, in research interviews conducted by Laura Nash and Scotty McLennan. One man commented: “‘I spent ten years single-mindedly pursuing success at my company, and all the time I felt I was a good person. But increasingly, I just feel empty.’”24 Another remarked: “The best times at work, when I really feel that I am living out a vocation in business, are when I’ve been in a situation that has worked out well and I have genuinely contributed to that outcome by contributing my self.”25
24 Nash and McLennan, Church on Sunday, 22.
25 Ibid., 21.
22
This latent desire for coherence is up against very strong cultural pressures, however. Economically, capitalism is “the economic incarnation of humanist-oriented aims toward progress” and seems to threaten the very life it promises to deliver.26 It effectively embodies philosophical naturalism by enveloping people in an ethos of never- ending and never-satisfying consumption. The idea that “the material is all there is” thus becomes the rallying cry, not only for the intellectuals in the academy, but for consumers on the streets. Consumption, in turn, confronts people with a burgeoning number and variety of choices and options that become overwhelming and bewildering and contribute to a deepening sense of fragmentation in life.27 It not only compromises people’s sense of continuity and coherence in life. It also effectively diminishes their commitment to anything in particular besides their own right to autonomously choose.28 Choice becomes everything. Whereas economics has always involved production and consumption, now
“the sole end of production is consumption.”29 The pervasive commodification of life that this reflects only leads to inner emptiness. “The aftertaste of affluence is boredom.”30
In particular, the meaning of work is diminished. When quantity and efficiency reign as ultimate values in the marketplace, work is drained of meaning as it becomes simply a means to greater consumption.31 It is not simply a necessity to be endured for
26 Bob Goudzwaard, Capitalism and Progress: A Diagnosis of Western Society, trans., Josina Van Nuis Zylstra, New ed. (Carlisle, PA: Paternoster Press, 1997), 161.
27 Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs, 78.
28 Guinness, The Call, 175.
29 Adam Smith, emphasis added. Cited by Goudzwaard, Capitalism and Progress, 201.
30 Michael Novak, Business as a Calling: Work and the Examined Life (New York: Free Press, 1996), 6.
31 Goudzwaard, Capitalism and Progress, 201.
23 the sake of survival; work is seen primarily as a way of providing resources in order to consume. In a corrupt world, the driving forces of capitalism and industrialization served to trivialize work so that it became merely “a series of disconnected and repetitive tasks.
Technique replaced craft. Efficiency rooted out creativity. The promise of money replaced purpose.”32
Thus, scientific, technological, and economic developments reinforce each other, and the cultural conditions spawned by the Enlightenment take on a life of their own, contributing to the often unconscious assumptions that shape people’s lives.33 It is not simply that the ideas of the (elite) philosophers have trickled down to the masses as much as the fact that their ideas have contributed to modernization which produces attitudes and beliefs that are parallel to and also consistent with Enlightenment ideals of freedom and autonomy.34 As Wells sums it up: “The Enlightenment was thought; modern life has been experienced.”35 The postmodern shift, therefore, does not really extinguish the longing for meaning and coherence in life. Rather, it relocates it from the “outside” to one’s “inner reality.”
The Shift toward an Inner Focus
With the loss of objectivity comes a shift inward, for the only reality of which people can be sure at all is their own, inner experience. Ironically, “what began as the
32 Stephen R. Graves and Thomas G. Addington, The Fourth Frontier: Exploring the New World of Work (Nashville, TN: Word Publishing, 2000), 58.
33 Goudzwaard, Capitalism and Progress, 201.
34 Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs, 58.
35 Ibid.
24 physical conquest of our world by technology … has now become a profoundly psychological reality.”36 The quest is for “answers” from within rather than from the outside, material world through the employment of reason. The psychologizing of life has opened up the way for a host of spiritual and quasi-mystical gurus informing the world that the solution lies within the recesses of people’s own native, untapped powers.
Yet, the other side of this cheery optimism is a little darker. For many, the
“answer,” if you will, is that there are no “answers.” In Wells’ words: “Other philosophies have had agendas, goals, and objectives; this has none because at the heart of reality, it is believed, there is Nothing. There is just experience, just accumulation, just passing fun, just private perceptions and preferences.”37 Looking at popular culture and its ability to shape lives, Thomas Hibbs declares that “nihilistic premises pervade our popular culture, not just through horror films and violent movies-of-the-week, but through the most successful sitcoms of the last decade, The Simpsons and Seinfeld.”38
Life is a comical succession of ultimately meaningless moments with “an attitude in which the question of meaning is no longer negated but it is simply not allowed to appear. It is a matter of unquestioning surrender to the moment, to the immediate activity, the immediate duty, the immediate pleasure.”39
36 Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs, 35.
37 Ibid., 189.
38 Thomas S. Hibbs, Shows about Nothing: Nihilism in Popular Culture from the Exorcist to Seinfeld (Dallas: Spence Publishing Co., 1999), 6.
39 Helmut Thielicke, Nihilism: Its Origin and Nature - with a Christian Answer, trans., John W. Doberstein (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 148. Cited by Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs, 189.
25
Subjective
It is no wonder that such despair lurks just below the surface when the overall coherence of life is missing. Confidence in the supposed “objective” discoveries of science is diminished by the growing realization that even science itself is not totally objective, nor can it ever be. It is always conditioned by assumptions that the scientist brings to his or her enterprise. Furthermore, discoveries in the “new science” itself – from relativity theory to uncertainty principle to chaos theory – have reinforced the sense that ultimate certainty is simply not achievable. In this context, reality becomes unknowable and, by default, becomes whatever people decide it is.
Stanley Grenz suggests that the computer is to the postmodern world what the factory was to industrial society in that it “epitomizes the postmodern blurring of the traditional contrast between the subjective self and the objective world.”40 That is to say, the ubiquitous computer “brings us into its world just as it enters into ours. As what happens on the screen becomes an extension of ourselves, we become an extension of it.”41 The whole experience of the digital world reinforces the sense that reality is what we make it, and the computer “thus becomes an embodied form of our psychic worlds.”42
This growing subjectivity has powerful implications for Christian claims to
“absolute truth.” As culture becomes more and more subjective, concern for “tolerance” soars, for in a pluralistic society fear increases that any kind of certainty will necessarily devolve into an absolutist attitude that threatens social harmony and human dignity. It is
40 Grenz, Primer, 35.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid.
26 certainly not an environment in which claims to “absolute truth” are going to be understood as anything but threatening, let alone accepted. They will generate not interest and curiosity but fear.
Self-Referential
The Enlightenment emphasized human autonomy through its emphasis on the scientific observer rationally and objectively comprehending and mastering the universe.
That confidence in rationality and objectivity may be gone, but the autonomy remains in full force. The current mood is not only subjective but it is self-referential. In fact, self is all that is left in the new deconstructed universe and so becomes the all-important focus of attention. What is gone is any larger metanarrative that explains life. It is replaced instead by “privatized worldviews … valid for no one but the person whose world it is and whose view it is.”43
In the place of rational propositions and principles postmodernism has rediscovered the power of myth and narrative. Instead of a central, universal myth, there are many individual stories that weave in and out of other individual stories and combine in the story of an entire community. The television show aptly named Lost epitomizes this perspective in its intertwining narratives that only seem random but are, in fact, deeply dependent on one another.
There is no longer a sympathetic understanding of the need for a God-centered perspective from which to view life. Christian assertions to that effect have a very alien feel about them. The same is true of the emphasis of the last few hundred years on
43 Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs, 74.
27 principles, propositions, and systematic theology. In the swamp of subjectivity, people do not want mere ideas about truth. They are looking on an even deeper level for personal meaning, and their assumption that all things are gauged in reference to self is a serious barrier to the Christian message.
The Search for Personal Identity
“No longing seems more widespread,” Nash and McLennan discovered in their research, “than the search for recovery of personal significance.”44 The postmodern soul is cast into a bewildering and ever-changing environment that raises profound questions about one’s personal identity. With the subjective self at the center, consumption has become deeply significant because it is really about the construction of the self. The consumption and convenience “project” has a serious purpose that transcends mere physical survival and becomes the very means by which the self finds its identity.
Consumption is not just desirable. It is necessary for defining the very meaning of people’s lives. “I consume; therefore, I am.”
Paradoxically, the search for identity is also communal because knowledge itself has become communal. One of the hallmarks of postmodern thinking is that one’s perceptions of truth are influenced by the community in which one lives. Because
“beliefs are ultimately a matter of social context” and perspective is a reflection of one’s social environment, identity is found in a group.45 Thus, postmoderns very much “believe that truth consists in the ground rules that facilitate personal well-being in community
44 Nash and McLennan, Church on Sunday, 19.
45 Grenz, Primer, 15.
28 and the well-being of the community as a whole.”46 This awareness of the centrality of community is particularly felt among those in the post-Boomer generations and may help account for some of the urgency postmoderns feel about caring for “the least of these”
(Matt. 25:40,45). After all, by their logic, if all are not safe in the global village, none is safe.
Increasing Hostility toward Christian Faith and Expression
The safety applies to nearly all people, it seems, except for Christians. An additional factor that plays into the postmodern ethos is the extraordinary pluralism of our culture, which, in America, has intensified since immigration reform in 1965. Not only is there greater diversity today than ever before but many of the new immigrants are from cultures vastly different from the one in the past that came primarily from Europe.
With these immigrants come faiths that are also very different from the historic faiths of
America – more than fifteen hundred varieties, in fact.47 This situation generates new and different questions for Christians in America who have never been confronted by spiritual alternatives in this way.48 The pluralism also increases the general sense of doubt and certainty about the convictions that were once taken for granted in the culture.
The modern “solution” to the dilemma of multiple faiths is to exclude it from the public square. At its heart, modernism represents the marginalization of God from progressively more and more areas of social and cultural life, a process called
46 Grenz, Primer, 14.
47 Gordon Melton, Encyclopedia of American Religions (London: Gale Research, 1999), 15. Cited by Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs, 108.
48 Ibid., 95.
29 secularization. “In particular, it refers to how our modern consciousness and ways of thinking are restricted to the world of the five senses.”49 D. A. Carson aptly calls it “the squeezing of the religious to the periphery of life.”50
However, Europe and America dealt with secularization in different ways.
Whereas, in Europe, religion was virtually eliminated from life to survive in small cultural enclaves, America continues to be the most “religious” of the industrialized nations of the world. That is not all it seems, however, because the reality is that religion has been redefined. Instead of being the heart and soul of the culture, it has been banished to the private realm where it is no longer a “threat” to the rest of society.
It was thought by many that secularization would be the inevitable consequence of the triumphant march of reason, eliminating the need for any kind of “religious” superstition. In fact, the opposite has occurred as religious faiths have proliferated.
However, the pluralism of those faiths puts additional pressure on social harmony.
Christianity, being the “first faith” of America, is particularly suspect in people’s fear of intolerance and theocracy. The prevailing supposition is that to be “religious” is to necessarily be intolerant. The thought that someone could hold to strong positions of absolute truth and yet be gracious and accepting of others who do not share those beliefs is virtually inconceivable. In a mere ten years, the percentage of non-Christians between
49 Guinness, The Call, 156. Emphasis by Guinness.
50 D. A. Carson, Christ and Culture Revisited (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2008), 116.
30 the ages of sixteen and twenty-nine who have a favorable view of Christianity’s role in society diminished from a large majority to only 16 percent.51
If Christians are perceived as a threat to pluralism, it is going to be very difficult for them to gain a hearing in the cacophony of competing cultural voices. The truth must also be acknowledged that the behavior and rhetoric of far too many Christians has played into that fear. Efforts to communicate that begin with head-on confrontations about the “truth” of Christianity are not likely to be coherent, let alone persuasive.
Christians need to be acutely aware of their new social status in the postmodern world if they are going to be “wise in the way [they] act toward outsiders” (Col. 4:5).
The Emergence of the Altruistic Economy and Social Entrepreneurship
A new development that plays into the attractiveness of calling is the emergence of a new altruism in society. The communal sensibility of postmoderns, combined with a globalized world that is immediately accessible through various technologies, sensitizes them to the plight of vast numbers all over the world. Unlike previous generations, postmoderns do not look to centralized control and top-down planning. Rather than the homogeneity implied by that stance, they are attracted to the diversity found at the localized level. They seek personal involvement and meaning in efforts to address human need. In contrast to the twentieth century, the future belongs to nongovernmental entities and forces.52 Don Eberly boldly asserts that, in the twenty-first century, there will be
51 Eddie Gibbs, Churchmorph: How Megatrends Are Reshaping Christian Communities (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), 15-16. Gibbs cites research from David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons, UnChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity … and Why It Matters (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007).
52 Don Eberly, The Rise of Civil Society: Building Communities and Nations from the Bottom Up (Compassion as America’s Most Consequential Export) (New York: Encounter Books, 2008), 1.
31
“more social entrepreneurship, private philanthropy, public-private partnerships, and grass-roots linkages involving the religious and civic communities.”53 In particular, he notes “the emergence of international movements promoting corporate citizenship and social responsibility.”54 In other words, at a key moment when capitalism is under intense scrutiny and criticism, it is capitalists who are making profound contributions around the world, and they are doing it as a matter of principle.
“Good deeds” have become a sort of lingua franca in the postmodern pluralistic world, for it is the kind of expression that everyone can understand. For Christians, this means that a message of hope for the world not backed up with concrete actions and involvement will ring hollow. There is another reason, however, why the Christian voice is more needed than ever. A key theme running throughout Eberly’s book – a surprise given secularization theory’s expectation that religious influence would wane – is the prominence of the role of religion today, particularly in Asia and the Middle East. In the new emerging “clash of civilizations,” Christians cannot afford to be on the sidelines when their voice is needed more than ever. However, the posture and tone they adopt is going to be absolutely critical.
New Opportunities for Influencing the Workplace
On the one hand, Protestantism and evangelicalism are very much products of the modern world. They have never strictly existed outside of that context. On the other hand, the Christian faith has always been as much an inward reality as it is a set of truth-
53 Eberly, The Rise of Civil Society, viii.
54 Ibid., 10.
32 claims. The new subjectivity can be a dark trap in which people become spiritually lost, but it can also be a door through which believers can walk, armed with fresh language and insight surrounding the idea of calling. Postmoderns seem to be very responsive to cultural voices that are appealing to the language of calling to provide some sense of direction and meaning to life. One of the advantages of the idea of calling is precisely this: that it is about the subjective dimension of spirituality, which is of such interest to people. At the same time, it whispers transcendence and provides an opportunity for the internal sense of calling to be viewed through the biblical lens of the grand epic story of the gospel. Calling may not be all there is to know or believe; it may not be sufficient by itself for a well-rounded Christian spirituality, but it is an effective starting point, one that can at least gain a hearing, for if any people should be active participants in that conversation, it should be Christians.
The notion of calling also suits this new cultural environment for it has very much to do with how one’s “self” fits into the universe. After all, Christians through the ages have often seen the spiritual quest as a matter of finding one’s way home.55 Fourteenth century mystic Meister Eckhart employed the phrase “coming home to your true self” as a way of understanding the parable of the prodigal son.56 The call is ultimately to come
“home” and thereby discover one’s identity by taking one’s place in the Father’s household once again. Calling thus fosters a biblical holism by serving as the integration
55 For example, see Os Guinness, Long Journey Home: A Guide to Your Search for the Meaning of Life (Colorado Springs: Waterbook Press, 2001). See also G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy: The Romance of Faith (New York: Image Books, 1959).
56 Albert Haase, O.F.M., Coming Home to Your True Self: Leaving the Emptiness of False Attractions (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 12.
33 point for navigating through life and maintaining unity and continuity in the midst of the surrounding fragmentation and confusion.
Calling circumvents cultural resistance by “coming in under the radar” of people’s suspicion and defensiveness. It allows conversations to be framed in terms of people’s own subjective experience and longings without being sidetracked by misleading arguments and concerns, such as those about theocracy. The very terms that non-Christians employ in public conversation prove that it is not just Christians who have a concept or sense – or longing for a sense – of calling. There is a kind of common ground here that can be leveraged for further conversation in the same way that the
Apostle Paul began his talk on Mars Hill by referring to the “unknown god” of the
Athenians (Acts 17:22-23). For if anyone has a rich tradition and history with the idea of vocation and calling, it is Christians. This is the native turf of the Christian faith. It may be true that the “globalized, pluralistic situation has subverted the Enlightenment vision,” but it has not really subverted the Christian position, properly understood.57 In Christ, every tongue and tribe will be unified, for God is the creator of all in an incredibly diverse world.
In the past, suggest Nash and McLennan, the ways the church has sought to address social problems have usually taken three forms. One is ideological statements from a religious or ecclesiastical authority that set out in detailed subtlety the church’s
“position” on various issues of the day. There may be an important place for such pronouncements, but postmoderns are not listening, nor are many church people. A second form is various social actions addressing human need in practical ways. The
57 Grenz, Primer, 42.
34 importance of this has already been indicated, but by itself it is not sufficient to address the root problems. The third form is ministers, coaches, and spiritual leaders relying on personal relationships to influence those in the public arena.58 Each approach has its strengths and weaknesses, but none of them effectively equips the person in the marketplace to influence the organization in which he or she works. Attention tends to be more focused on the negative practices that need to be avoided than on how to integrate faith with one’s public life. In recent years, thought has been given to how faith-based institutions can promote spiritual concern in society at large. However, little seems to be discussed about how the actual enterprises of business themselves can be utilized for spiritual benefit.
There are more ways to bring about spiritual influence than preaching to the unconverted. One primary way is through business. It has, as Novak asserted over a decade ago, “a special role to play in bringing hope … to the billion or so truly indigent people on this planet. Business is, bar none, the best real hope of the poor.”59 If this is really true, then bringing spiritual influence to bear on the workplace could be one of the most strategic things Christians could ever do to love their neighbors. Significantly, since
Novak wrote his book, social altruism has only intensified.
Nash and McLennan call the corporation the “halfway world between public and private.”60 In fact, they were very disturbed in their interviews by “the pervasive lack of awareness or interest among ecclesiastics in how deeply anticapitalist the message
58 Nash and McLennan, Church on Sunday, 74-81.
59 Novak, Business as a Calling, 37.
60 Nash and McLennan, Church on Sunday, 73.
35 continues to be among many liberal and conservative clergy .…”61 This is despite the fact that the revolutionary changes taking place in the business world have launched many businesspeople on a quest for spiritual wisdom with which to navigate the postmodern world, and there are literally thousands of business gurus ready to provide guidance and advice. Conspicuous by its absence is the Christian voice.62 If believers are to reconnect to the public square, the relationship between churches and business must be addressed.
On one hand, non-Christians are turning everywhere but to Christianity in their spiritual quest. On the other hand, even Christians have no clear idea of how to communicate effectively and coherently in the current cultural environment.
It is exciting that Nash and Mclennan found that “this spiritual awakening is even more widespread and diverse than is normally thought, especially among businesspeople.”63 On the other hand, it is sobering to realize that this need is being addressed not by Christians but by “the new spirituality-in-business movement that has taken hold with such vigor.”64 Referring to the same reality, Wells observes: “Rarely has a missionary opportunity of such magnitude dropped into the lap of the Church; rarely has so large an opportunity been abandoned for other things.”65
The church has a rich heritage on which to draw in offering perspective and insights to a needy world. The idea of calling and cultural engagement is Christian “turf.”
61 Nash and McLennan, Church on Sunday, xxx.
62 Ibid., xxv.
63 Ibid., xxiii.
64 Ibid., 8.
65 Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs, 313.
36
It is a heritage, however, which Christians have yet to appreciate, let alone employ. They need to realize that, in the history of the West, so many cultural themes, such as freedom, progress, law, and property rights, are distinctly Christian ideas. The combination of ideas and the developments that issued from them did not arise anywhere else in the world except in those areas shaped by a Christian way of looking at the world.66 The idea of calling goes back a long way, too. It has ancient credibility. Christians are not playing
“catch-up” in reintroducing the idea of calling in the public square. Rather, for people in the Christian tradition, it is spiritual home, and failure to recover its wisdom “may be the largest act of self-marginalization mainstream churches have ever engaged in.”67 That is why a recovery of a sense of vocation and calling is absolutely essential in this day and time.
66 For a striking presentation of this argument, see Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (New York: Random House, 2005).
67 Nash and McLennan, Church on Sunday, 9.
CHAPTER 2
THE EVANGELICAL CHURCH’S CULTURAL DISENGAGEMENT
Despite the opportunities presented by postmodern culture for Christians to be more engaged in the public square, Christians have painted themselves into a cultural corner. The church has moved from its place at the center of things that it enjoyed under
“Christendom” to the margins of the culture where it not only exercises less influence but is expected to remain quiet. Because churches are filling up with thousands of people, it is easy for Christians to miss the fact that they have lost their cultural voice and become a distinct subculture, just one among many in the postmodern world. If anything, Christians are looked upon by many in less than favorable terms, precisely because they used to represent America’s “first faith” and occupy a dominant place in society. Consequently, they are held to blame for many of what are considered to be the ills of society.
Meanwhile, faith lacks functional relevance in the daily, public lives of believers; even the concept of an integrated faith is unknown.
Increasing Marginalization
By all accounts, America is the most religious of all the modern industrialized countries in the world. However, this success has come at great price, for “it is at the expense of being ever more firmly relegated to the private sphere.”68 The Church finds itself on a cultural reservation, isolated from the rest of life. Portrayals of religion in the
68 Pearcey, Liberating Christianity, 68. Italics in the original. 37 38 entertainment industry and popular culture scarcely ever depict religion as a normal part of ordinary life.69 While people are still free to believe as they wish, they are not welcome to bring it into the public sphere without it being labeled “biased,” as when
Christopher Reeve declared in reference to the stem cell debate, “When matters of public policy are debated, no religions should have a seat at the table.”70
This split is not confined to Christianity. In general, there is a chasm between “the huge and immensely powerful institutions of the public sphere … and the private sphere.”71 The church of Jesus Christ may have the greatest wisdom to offer the world for what constitutes the common good and how best to achieve it, but in capitulating to this state of affairs, the church becomes complicit in its own ineffectiveness by accepting false assumptions it has inherited from the modern world, a world that is passing away.
The Sacred/Secular Dualism
At the heart of the problem lies a dualistic outlook that is deeply rooted in western culture, despite the fact that the West is virtually alone around the world and throughout history in viewing life this way. According to Robert Bellah, “The most distinctive aspect of 20th century American society is the division of life into a number of separate functional sectors …”72 This blindness is the legacy of years of societal evolution in
69 C. John Sommerville, Religion in the National Agenda: What We Mean by Religious, Spiritual, Secular (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2009), 9.
70 “Reeve: Keep Religious Groups out of Public Policy,” The Associated Press, April 3, 2003. Emphasis added. Cited by Pearcey, Liberating Christianity, 22.
71 Peter Berger, cited by Pearcey, Liberating Christianity, 20.
72 Robert Neeley Bellah, ed., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 43. Cited by Graves and Addington, The Fourth Frontier, 64.
39 which “reason” has sought the ascendancy over “faith.” From a Christian standpoint, of course, faith is not the opposite of reason at all; the opposite of “reason” is not “faith” but
“revelation.” In this culture, however, “reason” has been used as code language for discarding God from the discussion and has advanced the process of “secularization.”73
The symptoms of this “disaster of dualism” are many and everywhere.74 A host of
“unspoken dichotomies” haunt daily life and thinking.75 Dualism manifests itself, for example, in the distinction between the work of “clergy” (ministers, missionaries, religious professionals) and that of the “laity” (people with “real” jobs, like plumbing and law enforcement). Church work is considered “sacred” while that of common people is perceived as “secular,” as though it has nothing to do with God’s work in the world. For example, when David Miller speaks to clergy, he poses these questions:
“Who here prays for and commissions your teenagers as they go off on a mission trip?” Invariably, all hands go up. Then I ask: “Who here prays for and commissions your Sunday school teachers each September as the new church year starts?” Most of the hands go up again. Finally, I ask: “Who here prays for all the certified public accountants in your congregation around April 15, and who here prays for all the salespeople and those working on commission at the end of the month and end of the year, when quotas are due?” Silence. Eyes drop to the ground. Usually, not a single hand is raised.76
73 Guinness defines secularization as “the process through which the decisive influence of religious ideas and institutions has been neutralized in successive sectors of society and culture, making religious ideas less meaningful and religious institutions more marginal. In particular, it refers to how our modern consciousness and ways of thinking are restricted to the world of the five senses.” Os Guinness, The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life (Nashville, TN: Word Publishing, 1998), 156.
74 Chris Seay, The Tao of Enron: Spiritual Lessons from a Fortune 500 Fallout (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2002), 54.
75 Graves and Addington, The Fourth Frontier, 46.
76 David W. Miller, God at Work: The History and Promise of the Faith at Work Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 2007), 10.
40
Dualism is also reflected in the distinction between physical work that deals with material reality, and work that is intangible. In most people’s minds, ministers deal with
“religious” truth, a subject matter that is non-material and dealing with an “eternal” realm entirely separate from ordinary existence and with no real bearing on it. “Sacred” work is seen as having no connection with the world of observable, scientific facts; whereas,
“secular” work deals with temporal matters of physical existence and is therefore considered “neutral.”77 A sense of reductionism that requires everything to be explained in terms of the material and empirical thus rules. Physical sciences are considered “hard” while the arts, humanities, and morality are “soft.”78 The Bible is soft, and any content that is not empirically verifiable is not considered to be real knowledge at all. That part of the Bible is only allowed to serve as a guide to one’s private, interior spirituality.
Thus, even the realm of faith becomes divided, between “religion” (private) and
“spirituality” (public).79 In the public realm, the split manifests itself in the celebration of what is irrational and fanciful: from the tremendous popularity of myths, such as Harry
Potter and The Lord of the Rings, to the preoccupation with horror and the macabre (cf. movies, television shows, and the soaring popularity of Halloween as a cultural holiday).
On the personal, private level, distinctions are drawn between head and heart. The head is considered thoughtful, logical, and rational while the realm of the heart has to do with emotions and unspecified longings that are thought of as “spiritual.”
77 The “collateral damage” of this dualistic thinking, as Nancy Pearcey puts it, affects more than religion; morality and the arts are also considered non-neutral. Pearcey, Liberating Christianity, 101.
78 Ibid., 113.
79 Ibid., 117.
41
It is the same with the body and the soul. The body is connected to the material world where it is open to empirical observation, but the soul is invisible and non- verifiable from a scientific standpoint and, therefore, connected to the “religious” realm.80
Knowledge is split, too, between “belief” (especially of the religious variety) and
“knowledge,” which is public and accessible and lays claim to authority over all. The religious conflicts that took place over the centuries convinced “many to conclude that universal truths were simply not knowable in religion.”81 Consequently, “beliefs” are valued, not by whether they are true, but because of their utilitarian benefits.82
The consequences of this are far-reaching, changing the very nature of religion and making it, in Peter Berger’s words, an “innocuous ‘play area.’”83 Having been separated, these two “orders of existence” tend “to separate and grow increasingly independent.”84 People now find themselves in the peculiar position of knowing certain things and believing certain other things, a situation Nancy Pearcey dubs “postmodern mysticism.”85 Their deepest longings are not connected with the world in which they actually have to live every day, and whatever addresses those yearnings is not found in
80 Pearcey contends that churches and seminaries first of all “largely withdrew from intellectual confrontation with the secular world, limiting their attention to the realm of practical Christian living. Two, they gave up the idea that Christianity gives a comprehensive framework to interpret all of life and scholarship, allowing it to become boxed into the upper story. Three, in the process, they abandoned an entire range of intellectual inquiry to the lower story.” Pearcey, Liberating Christianity, 323. Italics in original. She acidly sums up the result by saying Christianity was “reduced eventually to little more than a ceremonial benediction pronounced over the results of science.” Ibid., 308.
81 Ibid., 103.
82 Ibid., 117.
83 Cited in Ibid., 68.
84 Ibid., 80.
85 Ibid., 109.
42 the ordinary world but in some other, “spiritual” one. It amounts to a virtual split in human nature itself and creates “enormous tension” in one’s personal life.86
Social Developments and Pressures
This pervasive dualism is exacerbated by an unprecedented global culture. Rex
Miller sees this time as one that is “right smack on the fault line between broadcast and digital communications.”87 The enveloping web of media, combined with the massive power of global business, makes it very difficult to keep from being swallowed up by overwhelming forces beyond anyone’s control.
Digital networks create simultaneous interactive events that cycle thousands of times per second. Each time information loops through the system, it changes slightly because the system is fluid. Each little change, magnified over hundreds of thousands of cycles, can produce major shifts in the system. The iterations amplify to create a kaleidoscope of possible outcomes. What may take decades to surface within natural systems can show up within minutes in a digital environment. In this new reality, known as systems thinking, the threat of terrorism, a single word from our Federal Reserve chairman, an outbreak of a deadly disease – reverberates globally, systemwide.88
This unprecedented, interconnected environment connects everything with unimaginable complexity at the same time that it accelerates its effects. The integrated nature of the digital environment functions synergistically and with astonishing immediacy. Outcomes and consequences are as unintended as they are unpredictable.89
86 Pearcey, Liberating Christianity, 110.
87 Miller, The Millennium Matrix, 93.
88 Ibid., 4.
89 Rex Miller summarizes seven qualities of the emerging digital world: interconnection, complexity, acceleration, intangibility, convergence, immediacy and unpredictability. Ibid., 5-7.
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For example, fostered by pluralism, issues of religious faith and controversy, which were unthinkable only a generation ago, again take center stage. Culture wars used to be “fought locally and nationally; but we are now beginning to witness a convergence of these battles into a global cultural war – thanks to digital media.”90 Meanwhile, the speed, blur, and flux generated by technology only add to the sense of fragmentation and helplessness that keeps Christians sitting passively on the sidelines.91
This new environment is very different from the one to which Christians in the
West have been accustomed and in which current forms and structures were adopted.92
The Christendom paradigm is coming apart at the seams. All the institutions and patterns of life that grew up during Christendom are having their foundations shaken …. We live in the memory of great ways of understanding how to be a church and to be in mission. Those memories surround us like ruins of an ancient … civilization.93
Since old rules no longer apply, tools and mindsets that came out of the now- defunct era are of limited usefulness in producing genuine disciples. It is hard to say exactly what aspects of this dilemma are new and which are only being exposed by the new conditions. Rex Miller asserts, “The church is not losing ground. On the contrary,
90 Miller, The Millennium Matrix, 9.
91 I am indebted to Bill Easum for the “speed, blur, flux” reference. He uses this regularly in his conferences. cf. Bill Easum, Leadership on the Other Side (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2000). Also, William Easum, Put on Your Own Oxygen Mask First (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2004).
92 “Throughout the West, it is now apparent that there is a major shift in mood and outlook taking place.” Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs, 66. “In much the same way that smoke from a volcano signifies seismic and chemical activity, every critical indication points to dramatic change. First, there is the rise of a powerful new technology – telecommunications. Second, the resurgence of spirituality signifies an increasing cultural desire for a more holistic lifestyle. And third, people are everywhere searching for meaning beyond the static definitions of money.” Graves and Addington, The Fourth Frontier, 45.
93 Loren Mead, The Once and Future Church (Herndon, VA: Alban Institute, 1991), n.p. Cited by Miller, The Millennium Matrix, 8.
44 we’re simply awakening to our true condition.… Change and turbulence don’t create today’s problems; they bring them to the surface.”94 Thus, while the culture is becoming an ever more daunting challenge to Christian spirituality, Christians are increasingly ineffective in confronting, let alone changing, culture or preventing its decline.
All of this combines to dissolve people’s confidence in the ability to understand and control, twin characteristics of modernity, but therein lays a strategic opportunity.95
The “coercive humanism” of the Enlightenment has finally been broken.96 The sheer intangibility of the information torrent opens up people’s hearts to new possibilities and potentialities. The human element, once overshadowed by the machine in the modern era, has once again become paramount.97 In surrendering the illusions and pretensions of the modern mindset, people are becoming more open to ideas that would have formerly been considered “spiritual” and “mystical.”
The Absence of Effective Teaching on Calling
The opportunity this new environment presents to the church will be of no benefit unless Christians are taught a biblical response. Otherwise, they are left to
“unconsciously absorb some other philosophical approach.”98 In a way, they already
94 Miller, The Millennium Matrix, 12.
95 Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs, 75.
96 Ibid., 72.
97 “Eventually a new breed of analysts emerged to speak what was an obvious truth: In order for work to succeed, companies must be sensitive to the need for human dignity. Social scientists like Kurt Lewin, Abraham Maslov, Douglas McGregor, Frederick Herzberg, and Richard Walton argued for a work environment of openness, communication, and trust, rather than control and punishment.” Graves and Addington, The Fourth Frontier, 49.
98 Pearcey, Liberating Christianity, 44.
45 have, for “in some sense evangelicalism – with its focus on scientific thinking, the empirical approach, and common sense – is a child of early modernity.”99 It is no coincidence, then, that “North American evangelicalism reached maturity in the mid- twentieth century at the height of the modern era.”100 It is time to rethink the content and manner of Christian discipling.
The Value and Dignity of Work
Teaching on the theology of work needs to be reintroduced and made more prominent. After all, the very first glimpse of God in Scripture shows him hard at work
(Gen. 1). In the garden, the humans made in his image are likewise charged with the task of working. Work has to do with one’s very identity as a human being.101 It is as serious as it is inescapable and “seems to have about it a necessary and obligatory quality.”102
Even avoiding it requires work.
Work is the primary way people come into contact with culture and the broader public life of the community; that is to say, their neighbors. That reality is reflected in the fact that to “cultivate” the earth is derived from the same root word as “culture.”103
99 Grenz, Primer, 10.
100 Ibid., 161.
101 “The pivotal questions to ask ourselves in the mirror every morning, successful or no, … deep, uncompromising ones of personal identity.” David Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity (New York: Riverhead Books, 2002), 155.
102 Editor Gilbert C. Meilaender, Working: Its Meaning and Its Limits, The Ethics of Everyday Life (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000), 15.
103 Pearcey, Liberating Christianity, 48.
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“Martin Luther liked to say that people’s occupations are God’s ‘masks’ – his way of caring for creation in a hidden manner through human means.”104
It is remarkable, then, that work is not emphasized more in the church. It might have a place in people’s formal theology, but it usually does not assume the significance in people’s minds that it holds in Scripture. Prayer, Bible study, worship, sacraments, witness, service, spiritual disciplines – the list is long of things that disciples of Jesus are expected to learn and master. Notably missing from the list, however, is the idea of vocation or work, even though that is where most discipleship plays itself out. Since
“religious truth” is held to be separate from the “real (empirical) world,” work ends up disconnected from religion and faith. Research indicates, “Only about one tenth of the respondents report that their clergy often address work issues in their sermons.”105
Colman M. Mockler, former chairman of Gillette, complains: “I wish pastors had a clue. I want to be equipped on Sunday for what I face on Monday.”106 As Pearcey points out, there is something wrong with a worldview that does not fully explain the world.107
What teaching there is on work is often inadequate. David Miller identifies four categories of teaching on this subject. One emphasizes ethics, an important area, but one that can easily focus on outward, behavioral criteria with little regard for the interior life.
Teaching that focuses on evangelism often reduces the workplace to a mission field filled
104 Pearcey, Liberating Christianity, 50.
105 Stephen Hart and David A. Krueger, “Faith and Work: Challenges for Congregations,” Christian Century (1992): 684. Cited by Miller, God at Work, 83.
106 Mockler Center for Faith and Ethics in the Workplace; available at http://www.gcts.edu/ ockenga/mocker/index.html (accessed May 6, 2002). Cited by Miller, God at Work: The History and Promise of the Faith at Work Movement, 103.
107 Pearcey, Liberating Christianity, 111.
47 with prospects for the faith. The New Age movement capitalizes on enrichment with its emphasis on “healing, prayer, meditation, consciousness, transformation, and self- actualization,” but usually neglects Christian prayer and resources.108 The last category is experience, which has to do with calling and a sense of meaning in work.109 The first three categories are reductionistic, and of the fourth very little is heard in church.
The Centrality of Calling
The language of calling occurs throughout the Old and New Testaments, and yet this language is only vaguely familiar to most Christians. Calling has to do with more than just work, but certainly not less than that. People are not able to undertake just any kind of work, cultural myths notwithstanding. Since work is inescapable, they have an inescapable desire to know their place in the scheme of things, the kind of work that is suited for who they are. All people have moments when they experience a feeling of being “one” with their work, when time passes - or stands still - with “amazing grace” and leads to a profound sense of satisfaction. Those moments are a hint of the nature of calling, and a Christian will sense in them an echo of God’s pleasure in creation (“God saw that it was good”). If it is not taught or explained, however, people will not know what to name it. If they cannot name it, they cannot know what to do with it.
In a time of transition and upheaval, the longing for a sense of integration and wholeness becomes more acute. That is why non-Christians are addressing this concern in greater and greater numbers. As David Whyte puts it, “The antidote to exhaustion is
108 Miller, God at Work, 137.
109 Ibid., 135.
48 not necessarily rest.… The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness.”110 People who feel a sense of wholeheartedness sense that they are engaged in something in which they ought to be engaged. They have a sense of calling, even if they do not use that word.111
The Dynamics of the Inner Life
A capitalist society is a “doing” society.112 The church’s tendency to emphasize the cognitive and the behavioral has neglected the heart and left a vacuum that the reductionist spirit of the age is unable to address. The strong emergence of movies and books on the occult, science fiction, and horror witness to the starvation of the spirit. In past ages, Christians had a vocabulary to name these longings and to discuss their dynamics in the spiritual life. Today, however, they are not conversant with the spiritual masters of the past and are unable to benefit from their insights. Left without depth of faith, people become shallow and superficial, strangers to their own inner lives.113
Lacking an understanding of their own hearts, Christians cannot adequately keep guard over their hearts, the wellspring of life (Prov. 4:23).
Pearcey expresses concern that merely giving children a “heart” religion will not be sufficient to “counter the lure of attractive but dangerous ideas.” 114 She cites a well-
110 Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea, 132. Italics in the original.
111 “It’s all right … to support yourself with something secondary until your work has ripened, but once it has ripened to a transparent fullness, it has to be gathered in. You have ripened already, and you are waiting to be brought in. Your exhaustion is a form of inner fermentation. You are beginning, ever so slowly … to rot on the vine.” A monk, Brother David. Cited by Ibid., 133-34.
112 Goudzwaard, Capitalism and Progress, 7.
113 Ronald Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern: Rediscovering a Felt Presence of God (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2004), 41.
114 Pearcey, Liberating the Church, 19.
49 known quote from Charles Malik: “The problem is not only to win souls but to save minds. If you win the whole world and lose the mind of the world, you will soon discover you have not won the world.”115 While that is true, a rationalistic faith is just as big a danger, especially in the postmodern environment. It is also true that, if all that children are given is a religion of the mind, the heart will remain unmoved.
The genius of calling is that it unites the internal, one’s perception and embracing of God’s call, with the external, the task one is given to be performed in the world for the benefit of others. Calling has to do with something one does, but it also stems from the person one is. It requires people to think inwardly, and points the way to a character- based leadership and life as opposed to one that revolves primarily around personality and technique. It gives one a sense of self.116
Sterile Spirituality
Of the several “faith tribes” George Barna identifies in America, he calls the largest group, comprised by two-thirds of American adults (150 million), “casual
Christians.” They are, he says, the “only true megatribe. More than four out of every five
115Charles Malik, The Two Tasks (Westchester, IL: Cornerstone, 1980). Cited in Pearcey, Liberating the Church, 63.
116 Typically, David Whyte puts it beautifully: “Underneath the face, underneath the surface professionalism, underneath the brief obituary in the paper, there are forces grander than any individual human life at play. To lose contact with these forces is to lose a real sense of living, and especially of living a life we can call our own. Suicide, literal or metaphorical, is the loss of conversation with these forces. Any life, and any life’s work, is a hidden journey, a secret code, deciphered in fits and starts.” Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea, 8. “Work is difficulty and drama, a high-stakes game in which our identity, our esteem, and our ability to provide are mixed inside of us in volatile, sometimes explosive ways.” Ibid., 11. “Work is where we can make ourselves; work is where we can break ourselves. It is a making and an unmaking that an ultimately never be measured by money alone.” Ibid., 12.
50 adults in America consider themselves to be Christian.”117 He describes this group as being “notably lax in their beliefs and practices.”118 They embrace “an odd amalgam of biblical and extra-biblical views.”119 What is most unsettling is that they are “generally comfortable with their spiritual condition.”120 They “do not get too excited about matters of faith.”121 Their casualness extends to their belief that God’s highest desire for them is basically to be happy.122 They are mostly caught up in the fervent pursuit of the American
Dream.123 Yet, “(59 percent) think of themselves as ‘deeply spiritual’ .…”124
The impotence of this faith can be seen in the financial disaster at Enron, “the second largest bankruptcy in American history.”125 CEO Ken Lay had “long professed to be a Bible-believing follower of Christ, a Christian businessman holding to Christian values and ethics .…”126 “When [Chris Seay] asked a long-time friend and coworker of
Ken Lay’s about Ken’s faith, he replied unwaveringly, ‘When it comes to faith, Ken’s a
117 George Barna, The Seven Faith Tribes: Who They Are, What They Believe, and Why They Matter (Carol Stream, IL: Barna: An Imprint of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 2009), 29.
118 Barna, The Seven Faith Tribes, 16.
119 Ibid., 34.
120 Ibid., 31.
121 Ibid., 32.
122 Ibid., 36.
123 Ibid., 40.
124 Ibid., 31.
125 Seay, The Tao of Enron, 14.
126 Ibid., 45.
51 schizophrenic.’”127 Lay’s situation is a symptom of a deeper problem, one rooted in a mistaken, inadequate understandings of spirituality itself.
Beyond Ethics
The split existence of the modern world tends to reduce faith to behavioral categories. People conceive of their spiritual lives in terms of compliance with a standard, oblivious to the reefs hidden deep within their own souls on which countless people have crashed. “Superficiality,” says Richard Foster, “is the curse of our age. The doctrine of instant satisfaction is a primary spiritual problem. The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people.”128 While a great deal of the literature on work tends to focus on ethics, the problem is deeper; it lies with the heart and the imagination. Seay correctly notes, “To right the wrongs of Enron and protect against similar abuses in the future, it will take more than tougher corporate laws; it will take a change of heart.”129 Calling can lead people away from mere behavioral conformity and deliver them from moralism, the notion that pressing ideals and morals on society externally will bring about God’s will on earth. It is a major trap, the “curse of Christian witness in the public square.”130
First, it removes grace from the discussion in question. Then it reduces the whole issue to the moral dimension. Next it rationalizes its own sense of superiority by using moral judgment as a weapon to attack others. In the end, it reinforces both
127 Seay, The Tao of Enron, 60.
128 Richard J. Foster, Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth, Revised and Expanded ed. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978, 1988), 1.
129 Seay, The Tao of Enron, 24.
130 Guinness, The Call, 211.
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sin and hostility to God, who – alas – is blamed for the moralism dispensed in his name.131
Calling sets a very different tone. It is more invitational than confrontational. By its very nature, it presumes grace as a basis for action. It is more indirect, not attacking the problem directly but relying on people’s responsiveness to their callings to make the difference over time. Instead of being abrasive, it allows Christians to come alongside people in a helpful, constructive way, as co-searchers and co-learners who are seeking to hear and pursue their own calls, as well. In Anne Lamott’s words, “You don’t always have to chop with the sword of truth. You can point with it, too.”132
Lack of Imagination
Worldview thinking has an important place, but overemphasizing it can fit too neatly with the Cartesian emphasis on rationality. “It reduces Christian faith primarily to a set of ideas, principles, claims, and propositions that are known and believed. The goal of all this is ‘correct’ thinking. But this makes it sound as if we are essentially the sorts of things that Descartes described us to be: thinking things that are containers for ideas.”133
Protestantism, in particular, came of age in the same era as the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, and, to the extent that it shares their perspective on human beings as
“cognitive machines,” it suffers a form of worldliness.134 People’s thinking, as important as it is, is not all there is to be said about them, or even the most fundamental thing.
131 Guinness, The Call, 211.
132 Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird (New York: Doubleday, 1995), 156.
133 James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2009), 32.
134 Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 42.
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“Being a disciple of Jesus is not primarily a matter of getting the right ideas and doctrines and beliefs into your head in order to guarantee proper behavior; rather, it’s matter of being the kind of person who loves rightly .…”135 James K. A. Smith asks:
What if education, including higher education, is not primarily about the absorption of ideas and information, but about the formation of hearts and desires? … What if education was primarily concerned with shaping our hopes and passions – our visions of the “the good life” – and not merely about the dissemination of data and information as inputs to our thinking? What if the primary work of education was the transforming of our imagination rather than the saturation of our intellect? And what if this had as much to do with our bodies as with our minds? What if education wasn’t first and foremost about what we know, but about what we love?136
Dallas Willard agrees. “If we are concerned about our own spiritual formation or that of others, this vision of [life in] the kingdom is the place we must start.”137 For too long, the doctrine of calling has sat in the left brain without being energized by the imagination. It is so fundamental and powerful and deep that its power to energize
Christian living is incalculable. No wonder the apostles appeal to it so frequently (e.g., 1
Cor. 1:1-2,9,24,26, Eph. 1:18, 4:1, Col. 3:15, 1 Thess. 4:7, 2 Thess. 1:11, 1 Tim. 6:12, 1
Pet. 2:9, 2:21, 3:9, 5:10, 2 Pet. 1:10).
If Christians want to capture hearts, they must stir people’s imaginations. They must learn how to paint a picture of shalom, the Hebrew word for “universal flourishing, wholeness, and delight …. the way things are supposed to be.”138 The west’s spiritual
135 Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 32.
136 Ibid., 17-18. Italics in the original.
137 Dallas Willard, Renovation of the Heart: Putting on the Character of Christ (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2002), 86.
138 Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., Engaging God’s World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Learning, and Living (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), 15.
54 dilemma stems in large part from the fact that “a God who is not allowed to be God beyond our human understanding and imagination will, in due time, be rejected for being less than God!”139 The imaginations of Christians are at stake as well.
What we have lost … is a full sense of the power of God --- to recruit people who have made terrible choices; to invade the most hopeless lives and fill them with light; to sneak up on people who are thinking about lunch, not God, and smack them up side the head with glory.140
None of this is meant to denigrate thinking or action. The challenge is to bring them together, “to recognize that contemplation and action are not contradictions, but poles of a great paradox that can and must be held together.”141
Loss of the Christian Voice in the Culture
Having forgotten its own heritage and neglected the idea of calling, the Church has lost a vocabulary for understanding and expressing the inner life of the heart in an effective way. The Church has insisted on speaking its own language from a time far distant from the one in which people actually live. Many people may not so much reject the Christian alternative as fail to understand it. While it is true that all people are incapable of spiritual comprehension apart from the mysterious working of God’s Spirit, it is also true that God uses means to do his work. The Church is as responsible to be comprehensible to the culture around it as it is to translate Scripture into native tongues.
139 Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern, 102.
140 Barbara Brown Taylor, “Miracle on the Beach,” in Her Home by Another Way (Boston: Cowley, 1999), 38.
141 Parker J. Palmer, The Active Life: A Spirituality of Work, Creativity, and Caring (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1990), 7.
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Another reason the Church is not heard is because its vision for shalom is not clearly visible in the public arena. One of the most powerful witnesses to God’s kingdom is the way Christians approach work and employ their labors to love their neighbors. The
Church’s failure to incorporate work into its understanding of Christian spirituality reinforces the fragmentation that is so damaging to society. In a culture so epistemologically pessimistic, Christians may be some of the few people who still believe in a vision of the universe that unifies and integrates all the dimensions of human existence. Instead of displaying shalom, the church seems like a curious oddity, a society for the preservation of a world everyone else has left behind and to which no one wants to return. The bills for centuries of imbalanced Church teaching and understanding about the world are coming due in this generation: “every region of the United States and every major Christian group (Catholic, mainline, evangelical) experienced a decline in total attendance between 1990 and 2005.”142 Because of the church’s disengagement, people are taking their spiritual hunger almost any place else except the church.
Today, the vacuum left by the absentee church is being filled by numerous alternatives that beckon people with promises of meaning and fulfillment. At the core, however, they are unbiblical and ultimately dangerous to the soul. To fully grasp the urgency of the present moment those spiritualities need to be explored and exposed.
142 David T. Olson, The American Church in Crisis (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008), 72-78. Cited by Soong-Chan Rah, The Next Evangelicalism: Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009), 17.
CHAPTER 3
ALTERNATIVE SPIRITUALITIES IN THE WORKPLACE
The spiritual vacuum created by the postmodern juggernaut has not left people unaffected or uninterested in spirituality. With increasing frequency, corporations have been looking to consultants and “knowledge experts,” for guidance.143 Stephen Graves and Thomas Addington call this development the “Fourth Frontier,” one that reflects a shift in business thinking from so-called “hard” aspects of measurability to the “soft” side of interpersonal relationships and dynamics.144 Growing numbers of these consultants have been relying on spiritual perspectives as a way of making work more satisfying and productive.145 They come because reality on this side of the Enlightenment “holds no dimensions of mystery beyond the empirical.”146 In a time of suffocating pragmatism, people are hungry for anything that seems to be spiritual or transcendent in nature, for
143 According to Nash, in one count, such consultants numbered over 31,000, a dramatic increase over the past. Laura Nash, “How the Church Has Failed Business,” Across the Board (July - August 2001): 13-14.
144 Graves and Addington, The Fourth Frontier, 10.
145 It is typical of the modern economic dynamic that even religion is commodified and subordinated to the corporate bottom line so that spirituality becomes a means to business and financial success, becoming, in effect, a secularized and pluralized caricature of the Prosperity Gospel. It is also ironic that advocates of the Prosperity Gospel, who would be horrified by the thought of any association with New Age spirituality, actually share some of the same premises with them. Miller, God at Work, 138.
146 Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern, 52.
56 57 now even the experience of wonder itself is a cause for wonderment.147 It also leaves people ripe for deception.
The new spiritual search proceeds on the postmodern assumption that ultimate truth is unknowable and that one is left to work out one’s own spiritual “truth” according to one’s own subjective needs. The search itself, which never arrives at any permanent conclusions, becomes another expression of personal identity. In much the same way that consumption has come to dominate people’s approach to the purchase of material goods and choice of various lifestyles, spirituality has become a lifestyle accoutrement, a designer faith reflecting and expressing who one is.148 This consumptive motivation can be an attractive alternative to traditional guilt pressure and institutional authority and often has greater appeal in blending spirituality and work than do popular Christian approaches.149
The attractiveness of the alternative spiritualities is not as big a danger as the fact that many of them insist that all spiritualities are, at bottom, the same. Because “religions tend to blur in the postmodern mind and become undifferentiated from each other,” the more insidious danger is that Christian faith will be seen as just one possibility among many spiritualities in the marketplace, without its utter distinctiveness being perceived or much less understood.150 Just as liberal theology diminished Christian faith by viewing it as merely one viable alternative among the world’s religions, so a Christian spirituality
147 Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern, 53.
148 Sommerville, Religion in the National Agenda, 2.
149 Nash and McLennan, Church on Sunday, 88.
150 David F. Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs, 126.
58 that is just another option will be a faith that has lost its meaning.151 When it comes to workplace spirituality, not all spiritualities are created equal, nor do they have equal validity and power. Spirituality still must be rooted in truth and reality.
The Emergence of the New Spirituality
The Greek word for “business” is pragma, the source of the English word pragmatic with all its “connotations of efficiency, sensibleness, and practicality,” a spirit that Rolheiser says is virtually “synonymous with Western life.”152 It represents a way of life in which “the truth of an idea lies in its practical efficacy.” “Things are good if they work, and what works is good.”153 This spirit reigned for a long time over western culture and tended to be dismissive of spirituality. If anything, economic success was a substitute for it. Ironically, while spirituality was not seen as necessary for economic success, it is that very success which has made spirituality necessary.154
The shift has been developing for centuries and finally went mainstream in the
1960s when Baby Boomers came of age riding the crest of cultural upheaval. The culture’s long drift away from Christian moorings, combined with the reality of the new global, cybernetic economy, produced a cultural environment that lacks confidence in any one way of looking at reality. “Globalism demands tolerance, openness to novelty, intuitive ability to adapt quickly to unforeseen administrative problems – a call for a
151 Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs, 123.
152 Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern, 36.
153 Ibid.
154 Richard John Neuhaus, Doing Well and Doing Good: The Challenge to the Christian Capitalist (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 63.
59 whole new mind-set in the marketplace. Cookie-cutter solutions from an Anglo-Western tradition simply won’t do.”155 The old paradigm of one dominant viewpoint held in common by all is replaced with the belief in the necessity of “multiple, simultaneously entertained ways of knowing.”156 “Multiple, ultimately relativistic frames of reference fit well in an economic environment that is marked by uncertainty and the need to adapt quickly. They also fit well with the essential pluralism, innovation, and want-it-all behavior of the boomers.”157
By one count, there are over 1,500 religious organizations in America.158 It can be confusing trying to make sense of the vast array of religious and spiritual alternatives that present themselves to people today. It is difficult to know where or how to delve deeply into any one of them. The more appealing approach is to borrow and blend different aspects from favored alternatives in order to construct one’s own, customized spirituality.
In the space of little more than a generation, “spirituality” has replaced “religion” as the faith of choice. C. John Sommerville notes the difference: “In English ‘religion’ is a word for a certain kind of response to a certain kind of power …. Spirituality, on the other hand, does not seem to require the same kind of ethical or existential response.… spirituality is more like an aesthetic category. It is an awareness or apprehension, like a feeling for beauty.”159
155 Nash and McLennan, Church on Sunday, 11.
156 Ibid., 13.
157 Ibid.
158 J. Gordon Melton, Encyclopedia of American Religions (London: Gale Research, 1999): 15. Cited in Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs, 108.
159 Sommerville, Religion in the National Agenda, 6.
60
David Wells calls it a religious “Third Wave,” the first two being the Christian faith, which accompanied the founding of America, and the eastern religions, which have become popular since the 1960s.160 An entire movement exists called “SBNR” (Spiritual
But Not Religious) that even has its own website and Facebook page.161 According to a
2009 survey by LifeWay Christian Resources, 72 percent of millennials (eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds) identify themselves as SBNR.162 In addition are those who do not identify themselves as SBNR but share the assumptions of SBNR that tend to underlie most spiritualities: “… it is less a stream flowing into America than it is a spring bubbling up from within the American psyche and incorporating into its flow other religious ideas.”163 The streams flowing from this spring run the gamut, from New Age spirituality to self-help books to back-to-nature movements.164
The diversity of the Third Wave movement tends to “obscure its size and its impact on the larger society.”165 Only as one stands back and takes the wide-angle historical view is there an adequate context to discern the true significance of these developments, for they represent nothing less than a massive “transformation of
160 Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs, 110.
161 John Blake, “Are There Dangers in Being ‘Spiritual but Not Religious’”? http://www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/personal/06/03/spiritual.but.not.religious/index.html?iref=allsearch (accessed June 5, 2010).
162 Ibid.
163 Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs, 110.
164 Miller, God at Work, 103. David Wells states: “New religions are born --- about three every day worldwide --- and old ones sometimes fade away or, at least, become inconsequential.” Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs, 109.
165 Michael D’Antonio, Heaven on Earth: Dispatches from America’s Spiritual Frontier (New York: Crown, 1992), 17. Cited in James A. Herrick, The Making of the New Spirituality: The Eclipse of the Western Religious Tradition (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003), 17.
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American spirituality.”166 It appears that “something like a fundamental shift in spiritual assumptions has transpired, almost without our noticing it.”167 The shift is to “a new way of thinking about nature, the divine and human potential …”168 Most alarming, many of those who identify with aspects of it are undiscerning believers in the church, unaware of the change they have embraced.169 Herrick contends that it is the culmination of “the concerted and highly successful efforts of a host of skilled advocates who have for more than three centuries actively and persistently promoted alternative spiritualities in broadly public settings and through powerful popular media.”170 This makes the church’s naiveté and its need to communicate in compelling ways all the more urgent.
The New Science
One of the most striking aspects of this shift is the way it has been wedded to the
“New Science,” a development that combines the massive power of Enlightenment rationalism and the perceived authority of science with contemporary mysticism.
New science paradigms suggest that intuitive and systems approaches carry powerful capacity for problem solving.… These new mental paradigms – which start with such concepts as chaos theory, quantum physics, and genetics – are particularly appealing in their ability to model, if not predict, the uncontrollable.
166 Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 14. Cited in Herrick, New Spirituality, 19.
167 Herrick, New Spirituality, 17.
168 Ibid., 22.
169 Philip Jenkins, Mystics and Messiahs: Cults and New Religions in American History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 10. Cited in Herrick, New Spirituality, 19.
170 Herrick, New Spirituality, 21. “The rise of the Other Spirituality is not so much the outworking of a psychic law as the result of sustained, intentional and successful public efforts to change the Western religious mind.” Herrick, New Spirituality, 35.
62
Fractals … offer a population feeling overwhelmingly disjointed and chaotic a paradigm that is deeply reassuring.171
The new paradigm entails a conversion of “science into Science,” that is, the transformation of “a method of investigation into a source of theological insight.”172
Until this development, the locus of scientific authority was seen as residing in the empirical world. Now, that very arena is being perceived and touted as mystical in its own right, thus supporting and adding credibility to the insight of ancient Eastern religious thought. “The old distinction between religion and science … has all but disappeared.”173
The key vehicle driving this credibility is the evolutionary assumption that all is moving inexorably towards a better world.174 This assumption was not shared or did not seem obvious to the generations that preceded the scientific revolution, but the idea of progress is one of the key distinctives of the modern era. Instead of residing in the past, paradise is perceived to lie in the future, based on increasing confidence in human capability.175 So pervasive is this way of thinking in the west that it is difficult for people to imagine reality being any other way. As the lens through which everything is viewed,
171 Nash and McLennan, Church on Sunday, 12-13.
172 Herrick, New Spirituality, 97. “Science as a window on a sacred cosmos is a cornerstone of the New Religious Synthesis, the instrument of Reason in search of ever greater spiritual insight.” Ibid.
173 Ibid., 116. “… something dramatic occurred in the sciences during the second half of the twentieth century. The wall between the scientific and the spiritual was breached and spiritual insight became a matter of scientific interest as it was for the medieval alchemists and Renaissance magical scientists.” Ibid., 117.
174 “… one of the fastest-growing disciplines today is the application of Darwinism to social and cultural issues. It goes by the name of evolutionary psychology (an updated version of sociobiology), and its premise is that if natural selection produced the human body, then it must also account for all aspects of human belief and behavior.” Pearcey, Liberating Christianity, 208.
175 Goudzwaard, Capitalism and Progress, 39-40.
63 it becomes an easy bridge to the critical assumption that spiritual reality is evolving towards higher levels of existence and enlightenment, especially when coupled with the perception that the physical is at bottom, it turns out, spiritual after all.176
The Interspiritual Age
With Enlightenment bias having excluded a transcendent God from the picture, the universe itself is now seen as having spiritual, even divine, properties. The startling design of the universe is cited, not as evidence of a transcendent creator, but as evidence that the universe itself has divine properties. “The cosmos is deity because the cosmos is design.”177 In fact, if “we inhabit a cosmos that is evolving, and if God is a consciousness contained within the very matter of that cosmos, then it stands to reason that God is an evolving consciousness within that cosmos.”178 At last, science has provided “theological insight to guide our quest for spiritual awareness and attainment. Among science’s greatest revelations – second only to its confirmation of evolution as the operative principle of the cosmos – is that monism and pantheism are proven by deep inspection of physical matter.”179 In this way, science and theology blur into the same discipline, and the idea of being created in the image of God is replaced by a spiritual evolutionary process of becoming godlike.180 The claims are not subtle: “‘Our species is evolving,’
176 “The idea that human beings are embarked on an inevitably successful and increasingly self- directed journey toward spiritual perfection via the mechanisms of evolution is now a crucial and taken-for- granted component in much religious thought. This idea exerts a powerful grip on contemporary religious thinking.” Herrick, New Spirituality, 149.
177 Ibid., 175. Italics in original.
178 Ibid., 268.
179 Ibid., 251.
180 Ibid., 154, 173.
64 writes [Gary] Zukav, and this evolutionary process will result in a species that is ‘more radiant and energetic,’ more ‘aware of the Light of its soul,’ and more capable of communicating with ‘forms of Life that are invisible to the five-sensory personality.’”181
Wayne Teasdale calls this the “Interspiritual Age.”182 “According to Teasdale, ‘The real religion of humankind can be said to be spirituality itself, because mystical spirituality is the origin of all the world’s religions.’ The third millennium is evolving towards a religion that is pluralistic in nature – ‘the sharing of ultimate experiences across traditions.’”183 Various traditions and spiritualities thus blend together, united in the conviction that the meaning of spirituality is “a consciousness to be experienced” rather than “a divine person to be worshiped,” as in the Christian tradition.184
The mythic and ahistorical features of the New Spirituality make it perfectly suited to a cybernetic age. The invisible, extensive, and networking nature of the worldwide web seems to combine scientific technology with mysticism because all is connected together in a way that seems to transcend space and time. It appears to dovetail with the reality revealed in the quantum world where different rules apply to the behavior of matter.185 This makes scientific experts the new gurus. Their writing increasingly blurs the line between science and mysticism as they argue that the New Science has rediscovered and validated ancient spiritual truths, pantheistic truths. More than one
181 Cited in Herrick, New Spirituality, 14-15.
182 Wayne Teasdale, The Mystic Heart (Novato, CA: New World Library, 1999), n.p. Cited by Ibid., 13. Teasdale is a lay Catholic brother. Herrick, New Spirituality, 16.
183 Teasdale, The Mystic Heart, 72. Cited by Herrick, New Spirituality, 227.
184 Herrick, New Spirituality, 243.
185 For a website that is overt in promoting New Science thinking, see “Integrative Spirituality,” http://www.integrativespirituality.org/postnuke/html/index.php (accessed July 3, 2010).
65 writer has observed its parallels with gnosticism, “the systematic spiritual effort to escape the confines of history and physical embodiment through secret knowledge (gnosis) and technique (magic).”186 “This impulse manifests itself in the veneration of secret spiritual knowledge, the elevation of spiritual elites in possession of such knowledge, a denigration of time and history, a tendency to view the physical realm as evil and a corresponding tendency to view human embodiment with suspicion.”187
The Strengths of Various Approaches for Work
Unlike the old, pragmatic, rationalistic culture spawned by the Enlightenment, the
New Spirituality acknowledges the yawning vacuum in people’s inner worlds. It validates interiority and puts it front and center. It is sympathetic to the contention that distraction and fragmentation are destroying people’s souls. The motifs of journey, movement, development, and evolution are common themes that resonate well with contemporary life.188 Some of the new age spiritualities even appeal to “living the virtues” as the evidence of a truly transformative spiritual experience.189
186 Herrick, New Spirituality, 179.
187 Ibid., 178. Wells adds: “It is not insignificant that these gnostic movements germinated in a time of social flux and of great uncertainty … when the prevailing worldview was collapsing, and when the pursuit of what is spiritual offered itself as a way out, almost as an escape from the gathering cultural meltdown.” Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs, 137.
188 “… ours is a day of exiles, émigrés, expatriates, immigrants, refugees, deportees, illegal aliens, undesirable aliens, resident aliens, migrant workers, drifters, vagabonds, and bums.” Guinness, The Call, 111.
189 “Integrative Spirituality.”
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The new spiritualities fit what William Donnelly calls the, “Confetti
Generation.”190 They appeal to people’s sense of autonomy in a life that feels like a random series of undifferentiated experiences given meaning only by their choices.191
This spirituality builds its own reality out of the bits and pieces of existence so that it beautifully fits the fragmented, postmodern environment. As Wells puts it, “In a decentered culture, eclecticism is the coin of the realm.”192
In contrast, much of the Christian world in the West seems hopelessly wedded to a passing paradigm. While others speak of spirituality and consciousness and mysticism, evangelicals still resort to truths and proofs and syllogisms. They do not seem to take cognizance of the cries of human hearts except in an abstract, intellectualized way, or in a superficial way that sounds like a cross between Madison Avenue, pop culture, and evangelical optimism.193 Thus, the New Spirituality seems much more adept than
Christian faith at connecting with contemporary culture. Despite giving occasional lip- service to the importance of people glorifying God in their jobs, the church has not really shown anyone how or emphasized it to any great degree. “Let it be readily admitted: the
190 William J. Donnelly, The Confetti Generation: How the New Communications Technology Is Fragmenting America (New York: Henry Holt, 1986), n.p. Cited by Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs, 234.
191 “Having been nurtured in an Autonomy Generation, the Confetti citizen consumer will be inundated by experience and ungrounded in any cultural discipline for arriving at any reality but the self. We will witness an aggravated version of today when all ideas are equal, when all religions, life-styles, and perceptions are equally valid, equally indifferent, and equally undifferentiated in every way until given value by the choice of a specific individual. This will be the Confetti Era, when all events, ideas, and values are the same size and weight --- just pale pink and green, punched-out, die-cut wafers without distinction.” Donnelly, The Confetti Generation, n.p. Cited in Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs, 235.
192 Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs, 235.
193 “Too often, however, Christian faith neither mends the world nor helps human beings thrive. To the contrary, it seems to shatter things into pieces, to choke what’s new and beautiful before it has chance to take root, to trample underfoot what’s good and true.” Miroslav Volf, “The Church’s Great Malfunctions,” Christianity Today International http://www.christianvisionproject.com/2006/11/the_ churchs_great_malfunctions-print.html (accessed February 4, 2010).
67 churches have generally done a deplorable job of enabling people in business to work adverbially to the glory of God and love of neighbor. What is needed, it seems, is a spirituality of economic enterprise.”194
Weaknesses Inherent in Non-Christian Spiritualities for Work
New Age “spirituality” is made to order for an individualistic and narcissistic culture. It “travels light. It needs no buildings, no rituals, no professionals, or even sacred books. It can be practiced alone.”195 Essentially a-historical, New Age spirituality is utopian, as opposed to eschatological.196 The private and secret nature of the New
Spirituality is at odds with the public nature of revealed religion in which there is an historical reality that exists entirely apart from one’s personal consciousness. Pantheism derives its powers and insights from nature, rather than from a transcendent creator. It looks to present mystical experience for salvation as opposed to looking forward to a future transformation in space-time history. Revelation in history is not needed to know about God because one is able to access God directly through one’s inner world. Truth is
“accessed intuitively, not historically.”197 After all, the “God” of the New Spirituality is not transcendent; “he” is identified with the cosmos itself, and, since each person is a part of that cosmos, each person is a virtual god as well. Humans are not made in the image of God, for they are “evolving towards a divinity of their own.… Our rational self-
194 Neuhaus, Doing Well, 61-62.
195 Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs, 111.
196 Neuhaus, Doing Well, 41.
197 Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs, 170.
68 awareness – Reason, Mind, Consciousness, Intellect – is the first inkling of our own latent divinity.”198
For all the supposed inclusiveness of the New Age business spiritualities, they tend to bleach out Christian distinctives. What is said and what is evidenced are not necessarily the same. One conference that drew hundreds of people (at $1,200 each) and declared its openness to all religious traditions displayed icons from Buddhist and Hindu traditions while symbols of the three historic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) were nowhere to be seen.199 Also absent are any hints of the problems posed by sin and fallenness. It is a curious paradox that New Age approaches have a blind spot toward evil. Despite occasional talk of virtues in the New Spirituality, there is very little emphasis on, or sense of, accountability to a transcendent standard that brings moral obligations to bear on everyone.200 The New Spirituality suffers from the moral confusion that characterizes all monism in which polarities are viewed as ultimately deriving from the same source.
… the weakness of community in [the spirituality of] the New Age is not an accident but an inevitable consequence of its solipsistic basis of authority …. This explains why, for all the talk of counter-cultural and alternative community, New Age spirituality has not produced its alternative schools and communions…. Only a religion that has an authoritative reference point outside the individual is capable of providing a challenge to any status quo.201
198 Herrick, New Spirituality, 251.
199 Miller, God at Work, 138.
200 “… Christianity includes commandments, while ‘spirituality’ includes only values.” Peter Kreeft, How to Win the Culture War: A Christian Battle Plan for a Society in Crisis (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002), 34. Italics in the original.
201 Steve Bruce, “Secularizaton and the Impotence of Individualized Religion,” Hedgehog Review 8 (2006): 43. Cited by Sommerville, Religion in the National Agenda, 7.
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Such spirituality is far too optimistic about the possibilities for human nature, viewing it as essentially and morally innocent. Sin is merely a matter of being in the dark about the ultimate nature of things. There is no need of forgiveness because there is no need to think that sin has ruptured access to the sacred.202 Evil ends up being trivialized because of the inescapable (and ultimately irresolvable) tension between the belief in evil and the conviction that the divine and the human are ultimately one. “In this understanding, there is evil in the world but no sin.”203 Rebellion against God is then incomprehensible because, at root, the human and divine are one and the same.
The evolutionary premise underlying the spiritualities feeds personal ambition and the longing to validate oneself by outdistancing one’s peers.204 In a universe in which
God is believed to be non-existent, the longing for personal significance does not disappear. It reasserts itself in other ways than by seeking to know and please God, namely by trying to set oneself above others.205 Rolheiser astutely observes:
Self-development is salvation pure and simple. Everything – marriage, family, community, justice, church, morality, service to others, sacrifice – makes sense and has value only insofar as it enhances one’s self. Self-development is pursued with a sense of duty and asceticism that were formerly reserved for religion because, for the yuppie, self-development is salvation, the religious project.206
202 Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs, 165.
203 Ibid., 167. Wells says eloquently that “we have lost the conceptual language to name [evil] for what it is. We are speechless before our own darkness.” Ibid., 165.
204 “When you are evolving toward and with Ultimate Reality through direct spiritual experience, you are on one of the greatest and most rewarding adventures in the evolving physical universe. It is one of, if not the most primal, purposeful and only adventure in all of existence….” “Integrative Spirituality.”
205 Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern, 30.
206 Ibid., 31. Italics in original.
70
The preoccupation with self feeds the movement towards “cocooning” and excessive privacy.207 The raging narcissism extends to private cars, offices, rooms, baths, phones, stereos, and televisions as people virtually recede into themselves.208 Without some kind of interaction that pulls people out of themselves, narcissism only grows stronger.209
The Christian idea of calling is dramatically different, for service is the very essence of the call. Vocation has to do with how, specifically, one is to love and serve his or her neighbor. Volf makes the interesting observation that “if faith only heals and energizes, then it is merely a crutch, not a way of life.”210 The contemporary seeker on the journey is more like a tourist “than a purposeful traveler.”211 “They are there only for their pleasure and entertainment. They are unrelated to any of their fellow travelers.
They contribute nothing to the country they are visiting …”212 Instead of pouring one’s life out in service to a transcendent God, the focus keeps coming back to one’s own inner potential and consciousness so that, in the end, a person is not serving God or appealing to God as much as managing one’s own inner force and potential. While direct spiritual experience can be transformative, it is not viewed as a decisive break with a sinful world through rebirth or conversion but as an incremental, evolutionary advance. It is “natural” in the sense that all the resources needed are latent in the present world and reality and,
207 Faith Popcorn, The Popcorn Report: Faith Popcorn on the Future of Your Company, Your World, Your Life (New York: HarperBusiness, 1992), 27-33.
208 Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern, 32.
209 Ibid., 33.
210 Volf, “The Church’s Great Malfunctions.“
211 Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs, 132.
212 Ibid., 132-133.
71 therefore, at one’s disposal without recourse to a transcendent resource outside of oneself.
The “Reality” with which one engages is not a divine person capable of an ongoing personal relationship so “human beings are in the cosmic driver’s seat as minor deities.”213 The appeal does not seem to go beyond what is personally rewarding and exciting.
The New Spirituality sees salvation in personal and individual terms rather than cosmic and universal. Issues of ethics or social justice in the community in general are overshadowed by narcissistic preoccupation with one’s own individual self- actualization.214 “The New Religious Synthesis calls us to self-adoration as spirituality
…”215 In the end, it descends to “spiritual narcissism…. ruthless self-interest masquerading as rational self-liberation. The less mentally gifted among us – the
‘incompetents of the earth’ - that is, the poor, are punished for the sin of having not enough of the new god.”216 Like the ancient gnostics who looked down on those who were incapable of moving upward and onward as spiritually inferior, elitism is inherent in the logic of new age spirituality.217
Christian spirituality, by contrast, requires a deep level of reflection and honesty.
Like the evil whispers in the Garden, New Age spiritualities promise a shortcut to salvation that avoids the hard work of facing oneself. Nor do the grandiose claims of
213 Herrick, New Spirituality, 224.
214 Miller, God at Work, 138.
215 Herrick, New Spirituality, 259.
216 Ibid.
217 Ibid., 180.
72 these spiritualities leave much room for drudgery in life after the fall. They are not realistic in their assessment of life and ignore the essential brokenness of the world in its current condition.218 Christian spirituality, by contrast, proceeds with the recognition
“that drudgery is part of the cost of discipleship.”219 Far from being compatible with
Christian spirituality, the alternative “spiritualities must be recognized as a form of temptation.”220
Ironically, the new pantheism has not democratized spirituality as much as it might seem for there is growing reliance on new forms of guidance. Traditional, priestly authority has been replaced by that of shamans, gurus, scientists, and scholars in studies of religion who serve as a new class of priests. For those who take biblical demonology seriously, one of the most alarming aspects is the new openness towards, and outright embracing of, a variety of spirit guides.
The New Synthesis affirms a new gnosis consisting of spiritual and scientific secrets.… Moreover, in spite of its foundational pantheism, the New Religious Synthesis embraces a host of minor divinities – spirit guides, teaching, angels and alien visitors. A consistent message of these voices … is that all faiths express the presence of the numinous sphere just beyond ordinary experience.221
In past eras, chastity and caution were considered critical in spirituality. Today they are replaced by undiscerning experimentation of all kinds.222
218 Os Guinness says of Oswald Chambers that “repeatedly he hammers home the point that ‘drudgery is the touchstone of character.’” Cited in Guinness, The Call, 201.
219 Ibid.
220 Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs, 160.
221 Herrick, New Spirituality, 251.
222 Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern, 54-55.
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This is the battlefront for Christianity in the emerging world. Dallas Willard pinpoints spirituality as “the arena in which specifically Christian faith and practice will have to struggle desperately in the coming years to retain integrity.”223 The difference is not small and neither are the stakes.
223 Dallas Willard, The Great Omission (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006), 71.
PART TWO
A BIBLICAL THEOLOGY OF CALLING
CHAPTER 4
HISTORICAL THEMES AND UNDERSTANDINGS
The Church has a beautiful heritage on which to lean for its understanding of vocation. It speaks powerfully to contemporary yearnings but is largely hidden from most evangelicals today. It is important, therefore, to have a sense of how calling has been understood and lived in earlier centuries in order to learn from those who had a vantage point different from the one people now inhabit.224 When C. S. Lewis looked back to earlier centuries, the beauty of such an integrated life amazed him. He wrote in a letter of
“the beautiful, cheerful integration of [William] Tyndale’s world. He utterly denies the medieval distinction between religion and secular life.”225
Calling Defined
While calling cannot be reduced to one’s job, one’s job should ideally be in line with one’s calling. Calling refers to God’s intention for people’s lives as reflected in their design. There is fruitful work for everyone to do, but not everything is suitable work for everyone. It is the same principle as the biblical teaching on the various parts that make up one body (Rom. 12:4-8, 1 Cor. 12:4-31). In the same way that the Holy Spirit determines one’s spiritual gift(s) (1 Cor. 12:11), God designs each person with a
224 “G. K Chesterton once wrote that history is the hill we stand upon to see the town in which we live.” Graves and Addington, The Fourth Frontier, 43.
225 Leland Ryken, “The Original Puritan Work Ethic,” ChristianityTodayLibrary.com http://www.ctlibrary.com/print.html?id=33908 (accessed October 19, 2010).
75 76 particular intention in mind (Eph. 2:10, Ps. 139:14-16), not only in the church but in the world at large. People truly are “God’s work of art.”
From Classical to Christian Views
Calling assumes a view of work that is far removed from earlier conceptions.
Classical thinkers viewed work as unworthy of themselves; repugnant, in fact. Work was done only to the extent that it was necessary in order to make leisure possible. They wanted to live like the gods, and the gods did not work. Leisure was not simply rest, however; its purpose was to devote oneself to contemplation, the cultivation of the mind.
Thus, instead of defining leisure by the absence of work, work was defined as the absence of leisure.226 Nor was leisure the same as play and amusement, for the latter were simply for renewal to return to work. Play was not an end it itself as leisure was.227 After all, the body is temporal and dies; whereas, the soul is eternal, so the soul must be more valuable than the body. However, since people need to eat, a large proportion of the human race is required to do the work that sustains natural life. Therefore, only a select few are “called” to a higher order of living: contemplating heavenly realities.
This way of thinking infected the early Christian Church as evidenced by the two- tier approach of Eusebius of Caesarea (fourth century):
Two ways of life were thus given by the law of Christ to His Church. The one is above nature, and beyond common human living; it admits not marriage, child- bearing, property nor the possession of wealthy, but wholly and permanently
226 Meilaender, ed., Working, 7.
227 Ibid.
77
separate from the customary life of mankind, it devotes itself to to[sic] the service of God alone in its wealth of heavenly love!228
The contemplative tier was thus considered “perfect” while the second – action, business, farming, family, ordinary life – was merely “permitted.”229 Scripture was read through this lens so that passages like that contrasting Mary and Martha (Luke 10:38-42) were interpreted to mean that Mary’s choice was superior to Martha’s because it entailed sitting at Jesus’ fee to learn spiritual truth as opposed to the mundane labor of cooking dinner.
This approach did not lend itself to a high view of work. Christians who had to work for a living were for all practical purposes considered second rate, while “the perfect Christian life was one devoted to serving God, untainted by physical labor.”230
People at the bottom of society supported those at the “top,” the philosophers of Greece now replaced by Christian monks.231
From Middle Ages through the Industrial Revolution
In the Middle Ages monks provided for themselves through their own labor, but it was still done simply to stay alive in order to pursue the higher contemplative calling. It also had value to the extent that it served as an ascetic discipline to counter temptations to
228 Eusebius, Demonstrata Evangelica, bk. I, chap. 8. Cited by Lee Hardy, The Fabric of This World: Inquiries into Calling, Career Choice, and the Design of Human Work (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1990), 25.
229 Os Guinness, presenter, Faith Work Conference, York, PA: 1994.
230 Alister McGrath, “Calvin and the Christian Calling,” in The Second Thousand Years: Ten People Who Defined a Millennium, ed. Richard John Neuhaus (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2001), 71.
231 Hardy, The Fabric of This World, 26.
78 idleness, subdue troublesome desires, and promote humility.232 The Benedictine motto gave dignity to work (“To work is to pray”), but the first duty of the monk was always the Divine Office.233
With the shifting values of the Renaissance came a new perspective on work. The
“Renaissance Reversal” stemmed “from its regard of God as the all-powerful creator of the universe. No longer the passive and distant pure mind, God was conceived of as a cosmic craftsman .…”234 People were captivated by the extraordinary activity of God in creation so that productive activity was now seen as imitating the divine. Work became more obligatory because it was seen as the way that people, like God, gain sway over nature. The Renaissance saw a world in which “man is free, the master of his fortune, not chained to his place in a universal hierarchy but capable of all things.”235 “The ideal human being is not the thinker who merely contemplates the idea of beauty, but the artist, who both contemplates that idea and shapes the world accordingly.”236
During the Reformation, the critical perspective that Luther turned towards the view of salvation embodied in the monasteries also made him look in a new way at the assumptions that monasteries embodied a higher form of spiritual life. He saw work as a spiritual vocation equivalent in value to ecclesiastical work. One did not fulfill one’s calling by withdrawing from the world of mundane work to pursue a contemplative life
232 Hardy, The Fabric of This World, 45.
233 McGrath, “Calvin,” 71.
234 Hardy, The Fabric of This World, 27.
235 Jacob Burckhardt, Civilization of the Renaissance, Harper Torchbook ed., 2 vols., vol. 2 (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), 303. Cited by Goudzwaard, Capitalism and Progress, 13.
236 Hardy, The Fabric of This World, 27-28.
79 but rather by conscientiously serving God and loving one’s neighbor from within the station that God had placed one.237 These stations are no accident; they are the providential intention of God as a way of providing for the needs of the human race.238 In living out their vocations, people are actually participating in God’s ongoing providence in the world; i.e., God milks cows through those who are called to it.239 No longer were the baker and butcher and cobbler spiritually second-class citizens, nor were monks to be regarded as going the extra mile in dedicating themselves to God. If anything, monks were avoiding the true call of God for their lives. What makes one’s work holy is not the particular form it takes but the particular motivation it expresses. Rather than merely being the way one “get[s] by with minimum requirements,” mundane work is an exacting and demanding form of taking up one’s cross.240
In the parable of the sheep and goats (Matt. 25) God identifies himself with the neighbor who is in need, so that, in loving and serving one’s neighbor, one also loves and serves God. From this perspective, withdrawing into a monastery is tantamount to a refusal to love one’s neighbor through one’s work.241 Thus, monasteries fail on two counts: they convey the wrong idea about how to pursue salvation and they neglect love of neighbor. Luther considered it “a thinly disguised form of religious egotism.”242
237 Hardy, The Fabric of This World, 47.
238 Ibid.
239 Ibid., 48. Hardy cites Martin Luther, Werke Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. 44 (Weimar: Hermann Bohlaus, 1883), 6.
240 Hardy, The Fabric of This World, 52.
241 Ibid., 49.
242 Ibid., 50.
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From Stations to Structures
There remained, however, a subtle dualism in Luther’s thinking. He distinguished between two kingdoms, that of heaven and that of earth. For Luther, vocation was specifically about love of neighbor and was distinguished in his thinking from concerns of faith that had to do with the kingdom of heaven.243 One’s calling came through the station in life into which one was born. That station shaped the particular way one was to love one’s neighbor.244
Until Luther’s time, people did not change their station in life. Human society was stable and set; one no more chose one’s station in life than one chose the family into which one was born. Trying to step outside one’s given vocation would not have looked like freedom so much as insubordination.245 The societal changes that took place shortly after Luther’s time with the industrial revolution brought about a breakdown in this structure of things. Calvinism eventually modified Luther’s teaching by taking fallen structures into account. It is not as though everyone is placed in his or her perfect job or that jobs are dispersed among humankind in an even and effective way. Fallenness extends to people’s labor, too (Gen. 3:17-19).
This shift in understanding entailed a shift in the language used to describe vocation. Instead of identifying it with people’s stations in life, the focus shifted to the
God-given skills and talents people were to employ in whatever station they occupied or job they had. A subtle obligation emerged which made one responsible for finding a
243 Hardy, The Fabric of This World, 46.
244 Ibid.
245 Ibid., 64.
81 station that was a suitable outlet for the use of one’s gifts.246 “We must not only serve
God in our calling; our calling itself must be brought into alignment with God’s
Word.”247
The Reformers saw three primary callings in the Scriptures. The first and most fundamental call was the call to be a Christian, the “general” call. The second call was more “specific,” “a defining purpose or mission, a reason for being.”248 People follow
God differently, according to their gifts and their station in life. The third calling is
“immediate” in that one is always confronted with daily demands and responsibilities as a father or mother, husband or wife, student or other role. In all of these callings, one is not so much called to something (e.g., “the ministry”) or someplace (“Africa”), but to someone (God). All one’s work and life is by, to, and for him.249 People are not only called to faith, but called to express their faith in their daily lives.250
This perspective sanctified and dignified all work. Tyndale declared that “there is difference betwixt washing of dishes, and preaching of the word of God; but as touching to please God, none at all.”251 There were no “sacred” places or people to serve God for, done in devotion to Christ, it was all sacred.
The homeliest service that we doe in an honest calling, though it be but to plow, or digge, if done in obedience, and conscience of God’s Commandement, is crowned with an ample reward; whereas the best works for their kinde (preaching,
246 Hardy, The Fabric of This World, 66.
247 Ibid.
248 Gordon T. Smith, Courage and Calling (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999), 9.
249 Guinness, Faith Work Conference,
250 McGrath, “Calvin,” 72.
251 William Tyndale. Cited by Ryken, “Puritan Work Ethic.”
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praying, offering Evangelicall sacrifices) if without respect of God’s injunction and glory, are loaded with curses. God loveth adverbs; and cares not how good, but how well.252
What matters most in this understanding is not the particular task in which one is engaged but rather the way in which one engages in it. C. S. Lewis captured it nicely: “… the
Christian was to focus not on doing good works, but on doing good work – on faithfulness and diligence in the calling.”253
Calling implied that every life was a stewardship accountable to God. That brought a moral dimension to the work and inspired diligence as well as ethical care. It also had some startling implications. If, for example, a way opened up for someone that was more lucrative, morally appropriate, and not detrimental to one’s spiritual growth, it would not only be allowable before God to undertake it but obligatory. To choose the lesser of the options would be poor stewardship.
The dignity of work should prompt an attitude towards the world of joy and gratitude.254 Work becomes an act of worship and praise to God. At the same time,
Christians must remain detached from the world. “Christians are to live in the world, while avoiding falling into that world, becoming immersed within and swallowed by it.”255
252 Puritan Joseph Hall quoted in Charles H. George and Katherine George, The Protestant Mind of the English Reformation (Princeton: Princeton University, 1961), 139n. Cited by Plantinga, Engaging God’s World, 121.
253 Meilaender, ed., Working, 12. cf. C. S. Lewis, The World’s Last Night and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1960), 71-81.
254 McGrath, “Calvin,” 71.
255 Ibid.
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Calling Distorted
While the Middles Ages believed pursuing earthly life as an end in itself was spiritually dangerous, the Renaissance embraced and celebrated it. In addition, providence was reinterpreted in such a way that everyone became the master of his or her own destiny. Paradise no longer lay in the past but resided in the future, based on increasing confidence in human capability.256
Classical Roman Catholic language used “vocation” to refer to clergy in accordance with medieval dualism. However, contemporary Protestantism distorts it in the opposite direction by secularizing it. To most people today, “vocation” refers to one’s employment or occupation without any reference to God whatsoever. Paradoxically, although work was secularized, it was also glorified for it became seen as a means of salvation. Calvin Coolidge once spoke, for example, of the factory as a temple and workers as worshipers.257 Missionaries and ministers, on the other hand, did not have
“jobs” or “work” to do; they had a “calling.”258 As Os Guinness puts it, if the Catholic position hallowed work, the contemporary Protestant position hollowed it.259
Having moved the redefined “vocation” to the center, one’s job becomes all- important. Work is romanticized, and an idolatry occurs in which one looks to work to provide meaning and purpose in life, worshiping it even to the extent of offering
“sacrifices” of one’s family, time, and integrity. Economic theories appeared which
256 Goudzwaard, Capitalism and Progress, 39-40.
257 Guinness, Faith Work Conference.
258 Ibid.
259 Ibid.
84 replaced “virtue” with “self-interest” so that good ethics was reduced to simply possessing the most through the least effort.260 “‘By a remarkable inversion,’ writes
Lesslie Newbigin, people began to find ‘in covetousness not only a law of nature but the engine of progress by which the purpose of nature and nature’s God was to be carried out.’”261 Eventually, people are no longer thought of as propelling progress forward at all; they are themselves being propelled by the forces of evolution.262 The irony is that, while seeming to elevate humankind to a sovereign position with respect to economic and technical processes and their direction, a culture “which isolates and absolutizes the potentials for economic and technical development” ultimately “relegates this ‘master’ to the position of utter dependence on the powers of development which he himself has enthroned. He ends by being an object, an extension of his own creations.”263
A Christian version of this distortion is to reduce calling to mere guidance for one’s career. Calling, however, has to do with far more than any particular guidance. It is the expression of one’s gifts, abilities, and identity in all that one does. If one focuses too much on one’s gifts, it is easy to lose sight of the larger issue of serving God and others out of one’s true self.264 Narcissism subverts service by using calling to justify the pursuit of one’s own status and power rather than the benefit others. Work is not simply so one can accumulate for oneself, and gifts and abilities are not given simply to enable
260 Pearcey, Liberating Christianity, 332. Interestingly, Pearcey notes, “the word competitive now entered the English language for the first time.” Ibid.
261 Lesslie Newbiggin, Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans 1986), 109. Cited by Pearcey and Johnson, 332.
262 Goudzwaard, Capitalism and Progress, 85.
263 Ibid., 69.
264 Guinness, The Call, 51.
85 the devoting of all of one’s energies to acquiring personal fame and fortune.265 Work is to provide people with resources to help and bless others (cf. 2 Cor. 8:13).266 The Christian life is one of giving away oneself on behalf of others as Jesus did.
It is not even possible to find in one’s job all that one desires. Putting too much emphasis on fulfillment overlooks the curse that lies on everyone’s labor. In this fallen world, knowing one’s calling does not necessarily mean that one will always have the best job. A lot of work is very difficult and unsatisfying, and false expectations only add to the misery. People must realize that “to find work now that perfectly fits our callings is not a right, but a blessing.”267 It is entirely possible that the full utilization of one’s gifts will not occur in this life but in eternity.
Evangelical theology in general seems to be captive to individualism, not explicitly, but its point of view is that of the individual rather than the community of the faithful.268 The individualism is expressed in two forms. One is “utilitarian,” seeking fulfillment on the job in which work becomes the meaning of life; the other is
“expressivist,” seeking fulfillment off the job in private pursuits.269 The idea that calling has only to do with the individual is inadequate. Calling is not only individual but communal. People’s gifts are meant to complement those of others and to be used in collaboration with them for the greater good. People are part of various groups and
265 Hardy, The Fabric of This World, 61.
266 Ibid., 60.
267 Guinness, The Call, 51.
268 Hardy, The Fabric of This World, xvii.
269 Ibid., xiv-xv.
86 communities, from families to clubs to churches to corporations. There are callings and intended purposes for those institutions as well.
Calling should not be used to hide from moral obligations and responsibilities, from taking care of one’s family to confronting injustice in the public square. It is more apparent today that Luther’s assumption that everyone’s station in life was essentially good was blind to social sin. Historically, evangelicals have not been as sensitive to structural and institutional evil, and, if they do recognize it, they are likely to resign themselves to something that seems overwhelmingly powerful and unchangeable. To ignore needs embedded in structures and systems, however, is to shirk one’s calling, not fulfill it.
Calling subtly challenges this pervasive autonomy by insisting there is a “destiny” which precedes people and “calls” them forward. It is opposed to the idea that they invent themselves. People are not free to be whoever they choose. They have it backwards.
Instead, they must learn to “let their lives speak” to them about their true calling.270
Contemporary Expressions
Graves and Addington see the sacred/secular split dominating the early Church
(300-1517) and being healed during the Reformation (1517-1730). The industrial revolution (1730 to late 1900s) fragmented work, and, since the late 1900s, there have been several “waves” of efforts to integrate faith and work.271 Most remarkably, the
Catholic Church has been undergoing change as well. The shift became apparent in 1891
270 cf. Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1999).
271 Graves and Addington, The Fourth Frontier, 44. For a thorough exploration of these movements, see Miller, God at Work.
87 in Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum. In 1981 Pope John Paul II’s Laborum
Exercens officialized the shift, for it virtually coincided “with the traditional Protestant position at every major point.”272 In their 1986 pastoral letter, Roman Catholic bishops wrote that Catholics “have much to learn from the strong emphasis in the Protestant tradition on the vocation of lay people in the world.”273
Catholic encyclicals do not generally set forth a systematic theology of work because they are directed towards specific social problems.274 However, they have beautiful insights that are relevant to contemporary work and calling. Commenting on
Gen. 1:28, Pope Paul VI writes that “the Bible, from the first page on, teaches us that the whole creation is for man, that it is his responsibility to develop it by intelligent effort and by means of his labour to perfect it, so to speak, for his use.”275 The Catholic Church also recognized the reality of suffering in one’s calling.
Sweat and toil … present the Christian and everyone who is called to follow Christ with the possibility of sharing lovingly in the work that Christ came to do. This work of salvation came about through suffering and death on a cross. By enduring the toil of work in union with Christ crucified for us, man in a way collaborates with the Son of God for the redemption of humanity. He shows himself a true disciple of Christ by carrying the cross in his turn every day in the activity that he called upon to perform.276
272 Hardy, The Fabric of This World, 68. Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum (1891)(Boston: St. Paul Editions). John Paul II, On Human Work (Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 1981).
273 National Council of Catholic Bishops, Economic Justice for All (N.p.: United States Catholic Conference, 1986), sec. 59. Cited by Hardy, The Fabric of This World.
274 Ibid., 70.
275 Pope Paul VI, Populorum Progressio, sec. 22. Cited by Ibid., 71.
276 Pope John Paul II, Laborum Exercens, sec. 27. Cited by Hardy, The Fabric of This World, 47.
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Meanwhile, many of the heirs of the Reformation have lost sight of their own heritage. David Miller examined the Presbyterian Social Witness Policy Compilation, which “covers some fifty years of Presbyterian policy statements.”277 Notes Miller,
… the policy papers are largely oriented to macro policy and structural questions, usually pertaining to issues of economic justice, sustainable development, offshore manufacturing, and third world debt forgiveness. However, they seldom speak to the level of individual vocation, accountability, and responsibility in the marketplace.
What is more, when such pronouncements do mention vocation, they “seldom move from theory to praxis, or from the structural to the personal.”278 Furthermore, their perspective seems truncated:
Further, these policy statements tend to assume a pejorative attitude toward the fallen, if not unchristian, nature of business itself, at least in its capitalist form. Finally … they presume the righteousness of certain economic decisions (e.g., consumer boycotts, individual and institutional divestment of certain stock holdings, minimum income levels, and other forms of governmental and regulatory intervention) without making the theological case for these actions, or allowing for other legitimate Christian approaches to social and economic problems.279
While the Catholic Church has its liberal elements, it did not succumb officially to socialist and communist approaches to alleviating the condition of the working class. It took up their cause without advocating the abolition of private property.280 Pope John
277 Presbyterian Church (USA), Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy, Presbyterian Social Witness Policy Compilation, ed. Peter A Sulyok (Louisville, KY: Presbyterian Church [USA], 2000), 255-294. Cited by Miller, God at Work, 85.
278 Miller, God at Work, 86. Robert Wuthnow agrees: “When the church does tend to the economic realm, ‘An overwhelming share of [its] attention has been focused on government, wanting it to do more, wanting it to do less, lobbying, sending it petitions, and treating it as the way to get anything done. And yet, by comparison, the church is by far a more powerful institution in our society than government.’” Robert Wuthnow, Christianity in the 21st Century: Reflections on the Challenges Ahead (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 200. Cited by Miller, God at Work, 87.
279 Miller, God at Work, 85.
280 Hardy, The Fabric of This World, 69.
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XXIII wrote in Mater et Magistra (1961): “In the right of private property there is rooted a social responsibility.”281 The solution for social ills is to be sought, not in political revolution, but “in the faithful discharge by all parties involved .…”282 These developments prompted Os Guinness’ remark that today the Pope is closer to Luther than most Protestants.283
As for the evangelical wing of the faith, it is interesting that churches that tend to be more heart-oriented, that emphasize the personal dimension of faith in God, seem to be the ones that place the higher value on work.
… according to a study by Stephen Hart and David A. Krueger, the churches that display a positive response to the needs of the workplace and those called to the marketplace often tend to come out of evangelically oriented churches and, to some extent, Pentecostal churches. Indeed, the same study suggests that evangelicals “show a consistently higher level of integration between faith and work that do other religious groups.”284
The need for integration is great because people are trapped by their work. The wounds they receive through their jobs are innumerable and notorious, yet the lack of work through unemployment is also crushing.285 While work is one of the chief ways people integrate their lives, countless numbers of the employed lack passion for their work or are bored with it. Addressing work is an often overlooked way of alleviating social misery. Pope Pius XI once eloquently observed the strange irony that labor “has
281 Pope John XXIII, Mater et Magistra (Boston: St. Paul Editions, 1961), sec. 19. Cited by Hardy, The Fabric of This World, 70.
282 Pope John XXIII, Mater et Magistra, sec. 19.
283 Guinness, Faith Work Conference.
284 Hart and Krueger, “Faith and Work,” 683-686. Cited by Miller, God at Work, 80.
285 Hardy, The Fabric of This World, 5.
90 everywhere been changed into an instrument of strange perversion: for dead matter leaves the factory ennobled and transformed, where men are corrupted and degraded.”286 For
Christians to recover their heritage and carry vocation into their public life would be nothing less than a revolutionary alternative to the futility of modern work.
286 Pope Pius XI, Quadragessimo Anno (Boston: St. Paul Editions, 1931). Cited by Hardy, The Fabric of This World, 69.
CHAPTER 5
BIBLICAL THEOLOGY AND THEMES OF CALLING
Calling may be more than one’s work, but it is not less. In a world where work is the one thing all have in common and the felt needs are so acute, attention to work is an essential part of the ministry of the Church. Much suffering and the waste of human life is ensnared in work, and Christians need to know what a redemptive difference would look like. Increasingly, thoughtful voices are citing vocation as a critical element in people’s understanding and for any significant cultural impact.287 Besides that, work is to be part of one’s worship of God, and that lies at the very heart of the Christian life.
Survey of Biblical Themes
Work is difficult to define, but it is not simply activity for which one is paid. It refers to what one “has” to do, paid or not. It is what one does for survival and is to be distinguished from play.288 There is a seriousness, an obligatory nature in work that is
287 “Robert Bellah and other noteworthy social theorists reaffirm Protestant vocation to combat the bureaucratic, individualist tenor of so much American cultural and institutional life. I think Bellah and others are right: Christians must recover anew the language, meaning, and reality of life as vocation.” Douglas J. Schuurman, Vocation: Discerning Our Callings in Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2004), xii.
288 “Trying to define play is like trying to catch the wind with a butterfly net.” Bradhsaw L. Frey et al., At Work and Play: Biblical Insight for Daily Obedience (Jordan Station, Ontario, Canada: Paideia Press, 1986), 43. Note, also, this intriguing comment: “Work is harder to define that one might think.” Keith Thomas, ed., The Oxford Book of Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), xiii. Cited by Miller, God at Work, 18.
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92 lacking in play.289 Work is also transitive; that is, it has useful effect on some one or some thing.290 Play, on the other hand, is done primarily for oneself and is an end in itself.291 Even if one loves to play baseball, being paid so others can watch is work, not play.
For the ancients, physical work was reserved for people on the bottom of the social scale, e.g., slaves, not gods. The picture of God working in Gen. 1 and of humans being created in the image of this working God would have been astonishing. The doctrine of creation is anything but incidental. It is foundational for everything else.
Significance of Work
The reason for God’s creating has nothing to do with a need or deficiency within
God himself. What one senses in Gen. 1 is the sheer exuberance of God as he stretches, shapes and develops the universe he has created and then expresses his delight at the end of each day’s activity. Plantinga calls creation “an act of imaginative love.”292 It was “a way for God to spend himself…”293 Like all good art, it is an expression of the artist’s soul. It “is not required but is better for being. It adds nothing to God … yet he takes
289 Adriano Tilgher, Home Faber: Work through the Ages (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company. Reprinted by permission of Ayer Co. Pubs., Inc., 1958), chapter 23. Cited by Meilaender, ed., Working, 16.
290 Yves R. Simon, Work, Society, and Culture (New York: Fordham University Press, 1971), 6. Cited by Meilaender, ed., Working, 15.
291 Lester DeKoster, Work: The Meaning of Your Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Christian’s Library Press, Inc, 1982), 44.
292 Plantinga, Engaging God’s World, 23.
293 Ibid., 22.
93 pleasure in it.”294 It was like God to do such a thing and entirely in keeping with who
God is.
It is like humans to do such things as well, for they are made in the image of this outwardly expressive God (Gen. 1:26). In fact, he invites his image-sakes into his activity and into the delight that goes with it. God’s first two mandates for his newest creatures, marriage and procreation (Gen. 1:28, 2:23-4), mirror his essential relationality as Trinity.
The third mandate, to work and care for God’s garden (Gen. 2:15), mirrors his creative activity. If the first mandates have to do with the generating of life, the third addresses the sustaining of it. Yet, more than mere survival is in mind. In Gen. 1, God begins a process and brings it to completion on the seventh day; he finishes and consummates what he begins. Life is not static; it moves forward, and history is going somewhere, a story in sharp contrast with religions that see history as cyclical, with no ending.
Creation ex nihilo is followed by a process of diversification that takes place throughout the six days and amounts to “a finishing and a furnishing of an originally unfinished and empty ‘earth.’”295 The couple was not only to care for the garden but to subdue the earth (Gen. 1:28), so the human race is envisioned filling and forming (being fruitful and subduing) the earth even more, extending Eden to the whole world. The goal was not just minimum support, but maximum mastery. The earth, it is presumed, is entirely hospitable and receptive to human effort, containing undreamt of potentialities and treasures that would be discovered and unlocked along the way. The entire project
294 Ralph Mattson and Arthur Miller, Finding a Job You Can Love (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, Inc., 1982), 45.
295 Albert M. Wolters, Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), 41.
94 was not simply for Adam and his wife, but for the race that would descend from them.
What is envisioned is nothing less than civilization and an extended period of history that would come to some kind of consummation. Anything but static, creation is like a newborn child full of possibilities and potential yet to be developed.296 Bradshaw Fray, et al, call the cultural mandate the “third stage of creation.”297 In other words, “God’s rule is immediate in nature, but mediate in culture and society.”298 It is not only the natural world that is God’s gift to the human race, says Andy Crouch, but also the culture that it makes possible.299 The humans were not only custodians but cultivators, and the Tree of
Life stood as a mute reminder of the consummation and confirmed integrity that lay ahead of them.300
Despite his resting on the seventh day, God is more than a bystander. His rest does not mean that he is inactive (Gen. 2:2) but refers to his cessation from the kind of activity outlined in Gen. 1. “The contrast is between the work of creation and what is not the work of creation …. the rest of delight in the work of creation accomplished.”301 He is still in relationship with his image-bearers as they go about their task so that they can be said to be in partnership with him and his purposes. Implicit in their rule (Gen. 1:26) is
296 Wolters, Creation Regained, 45.
297 Bradshaw Frey et al., All of Life Redeemed: Biblical Insight for Daily Obedience (Jordan Station, Ontario, Canada: Paideia Press, 1983), 4-5.
298 Wolters, Creation Regained, 42.
299 Andy Crouch, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 108.
300 John Murray, Principles of Conduct (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1957), 40.
301 Ibid., 30-31.
95 the responsibility to guard the garden. It is the Garden of God, and their rule is an expression of their loyalty to him above all else (Gen. 2:8, 15-17). The Hebrew word for
“work,” avodah, is also the root of the word “worship” as well as of “service.”
It is hard to imagine a more extraordinary dignity for human labor. “The church finds in the very first pages of the Book of Genesis the source of her conviction that work is a fundamental dimension of human existence on earth ….”302 Deeply ingrained in every human is the desire to work and find delight in it as God does. Everywhere one looks, people do exercise dominion, and civilization has unfolded in ways that would astonish the original humans. There is no happiness or fulfillment in life without working.303
The entrance of sin does not abrogate any of the mandates given to humanity, for the curses assume them (Gen. 3:16-19). Work is not the curse, since it preceded the fall, but it is now transformed. There is both continuity and discontinuity. Despite sin, the next chapter (Gen. 4) depicts culture continuing with the development of domestic livestock, tilling the ground, playing stringed instruments, and forging tools.304 The mandates are repeated at various times as scriptural history unfolds (e.g., Gen. 5:25, 9:7).305 The
Sabbath commandment that runs throughout the Old Testament is not only a command to
302 Pope John Paul II, On Human Work (Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 1981), 9-10. Cited by Meilaender, ed., Working, 2.
303 Graves offers a striking illustration about thirty-six men (twelve of whom were Christians) who “cashed out” of their careers in their thirties to retire early and enjoy life. A few years later, they were “universally depressed,” and thirty three of them were divorced. “Most of them, in fact, were spending less time with family and on personal development – some of the very reasons why most of them had decided to cash out in the first place.” Graves and Addington, The Fourth Frontier, 57.
304 Crouch, Culture Making, 115.
305 Murray, Principles of Conduct, 43.
96 rest, but presumes the command to labor, without which it is meaningless (Exod. 20:9).
The New Testament is filled with exhortations against idleness.306 There are also regular references to the principle that the laborer is worthy of hire.307 Conditions and circumstances are affected by sin, but the basic structure and purpose of things are still in place.308 What has changed due to the fall is not people’s callings but rather the ease and pleasure with which work would have been accompanied in a world without sin.
No work would be possible unless God upheld creation at every moment, and the fact that he does so points to his desire to see things unfold, that he has not forsaken his good creation.309 Cultural activities are still important because the goal of redemption is the proper restoration of wholeness, of shalom. Evil could be defined as “any spoiling of shalom.”310 Sin makes a caricature of creation, maintaining recognizable features but distorting them out of proportion.311 There are even hints that all is not lost with the cultural development of this age. Glimpses are provided in Scripture of the eschaton when “the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it” (Rev. 21:24, 26). Entire cities, though likewise corrupted, will be purified and redeemed (Rev. 21:2). All of this is the fullness that belongs to the Lord (Ps. 24:1). Wolters asks, “Are these the cultural
306 For passages that exhort against idleness, see and compare 2 Thess. 3:6; 2 John 10, 11; 1 Cor. 5:11; 2 Thess. 3:11, 10; 1 Tim. 5:8; cf. vv. 13-16; 2 Thess. 3:12; 1 Tim. 5:4, 8; Mark 7:9.
307 For passages that speak of the worthiness of work, see and compare Lev. 19:13; Deut. 24:14- 15; Luke 10:7; 1 Tim. 5:18; Matt. 10:10; 1 Cor. 9:14; Col. 4:1.
308 Murray, Principles of Conduct, 44.
309 Wolters, Creation Regained, 46-47.
310 Plantinga, Engaging God’s World, 51. Italics in original.
311 Wolters, Creation Regained, 58.
97 treasure of mankind which will be purified by passing through the fires of judgment, like gold in a crucible?”312
Because “the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof” (Ps. 24:1, RSV), all the centuries of human obedience to the cultural mandate will have produced some treasure by the end … trash, too, but also treasure. If this is the “fullness” that belongs to God, then we may think of the holy city as the garden of Eden plus the fullness of the centuries.313
Work is inherent in people’s nature as image-bearers of God, and redemption will restore it to its rightful place so that work will shine forth in the coming age in ways that can scarcely be imagined now (compare Gen. 3:17 to Rev. 22:3; cf. also 1 Cor. 2:9).
Love of Neighbor
Since God provides and cares for his beloved image-bearers through their labors in partnership with him, it is no surprise that the second greatest commandment is love of one’s neighbor. It is striking that this is not mentioned more in the literature on work.
“Work is the form in which we make ourselves useful to others; civilization is the form in which others make themselves useful to us.”314 After all, if a person’s labor does not benefit someone somewhere, there is no demand for doing it.315 Work is literally the difference between culture and barbarity and needs no further proof than for one to imagine what would happen if everyone simply stopped working.316
312 Ibid., 47.
313 Plantinga, Engaging God’s World, 32-33. Plantinga gives credit to Richard J. Mouw, When the Kings Come Marching In: Isaiah and the New Jerusalem, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002), 17.
314 DeKoster, Work, 8.
315 Ibid., 13.
316 Ibid., 5.
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When the kingdom comes in its fullness, it will be characterized more than anything else by love, so one’s labor on behalf of others is one of the most important ways one can demonstrate the new age. So fundamental is this that it serves as the basis on which sheep and goats are separated on the Last Day (Matt. 25:31-46). As the parable unfolds, it becomes apparent that God is served by addressing people’s hunger (work which includes agriculture, food production, preparation, transportation, manufacture of implements, and a multitude of support services), people’s thirst, and need for clothing and shelter. 317 Besides these basic necessities of life, the various dimensions of human health and social need are also addressed (i.e., sickness and prison).318 Thus, work reflects the love of God for the world God has made (Matt. 5:45) and becomes a primary way one fulfills Jesus’ priority of loving one’s neighbor as oneself.
Calling is not usually or primarily about a particular place or task, although at times it can be.319 What matters is whether or not work is an offering to God (Col. 3:17,
Eph. 6:7) and an expression of love for one’s neighbor. “In its true sense, then, work is in itself not vocation. Rather the work is one means of giving expression to vocation.”320
God does not call people to be doctors, lawyers, or truck drivers. Such a notion secularizes the concept of call and vocation. Rather, God calls persons with talents, natural abilities, such as doctors, lawyers, truck drivers, etc., to be in
317 DeKoster, Work, 22-24.
318 e.g., sickness would embody all manner of health problems; visiting in prison would address social outcasts, social services, law, education, politics and government, providing employment, and human rehabilitation of any kind. Ibid., 27.
319 cf. Oholiab and Bezalel, two workmen who are specifically said to have received special gifting from God to be employed in the making of the tabernacle. Exod. 31:6, 35:34-5, 36:1-2.
320 Roy Lewis, Choosing Your Career, Finding Your Vocation: A Step by Step Guide for Adults and Counselors (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1989), 47.
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vocation. Work … becomes vocation when it welcomes God’s purpose, to serve God and community in love. The call is to service regardless of occupation.321
This is what Mother Theresa meant when she said, “I don’t do big things. I do small things with big love.”322 It is the meaning of the Puritans’ insight that vocation was about adverbs, not nouns.323 Carl Michaelson captures it well: “Work does not make us holy.
Instead, we must make work holy. We must let our duty become our desire, not depending for meaning of our life upon our work, but letting the meaningful lives confer meaning upon our work.”324
Common Grace
The question arises as to how, exactly, God views the world in its present rebellion. If God views people with repugnance when he looks at the world, it leads to a different kind of involvement and interaction with the world than if he is seen as having genuine empathy for his creatures, even in their sin. Given the terrifying depravity of the human race, it is amazing that the world blunders on from generation to generation and continues to unfold the richness of creation as culture develops. Common grace is the recognition that God’s graciousness is not just exercised solely with those who will be saved but extends also to those who are not part of his covenant community. It refers to
321 Ibid., 45.
322 Cited by Guinness, The Call, 197. Again, Guinness offers a good illustration with the Shaker philosophy of furniture-making. Ibid., 198.
323 “God loveth adverbs; and cares not how good, but how well.” See extended quote of Puritan Joseph Hall in chapter 4. George and George, The Protestant Mind, 139n. Cited by Plantinga, Engaging God’s World, 121.
324 Carl Michaelson, Faith for Personal Crises (Nashville, TN: Abington Press, 1958), 111. Cited by Lewis, Choosing Your Career, 46. “The priority, then, is not with the question as to what you should do but with the question as to whether you will admit God into what you are doing.” Michaelson, Faith for Personal Crises, 113. Cited by Lewis, Choosing Your Career, 45.
100
God’s gracious, though non-salvific, acting in the world through various people and other means to see that his purposes are ultimately fulfilled in spite of human sin.
Common grace is notoriously tricky to define.325 The reason an understanding of common grace may be so elusive is that “an acknowledgment of common grace is arrived at by a ‘way of negation’; it is something we are left with after having gone through a process of elimination.”326 It offers an explanation as to why there is any good in the world, perhaps an even more profound question than the question of evil. Wolters suggests “conserving grace” might convey better the sense of the doctrine.327 Whatever it is called, it is the graciousness of God that maintains the fundamental grain of the creation and uses even those who are not his followers to bring blessing to the world. It is entirely possible, then, that there is a kind of calling that the unregenerate experience simply by virtue of being human. Paul speaks of God “bearing witness” to the hearts of the Gentiles through their consciences (Rom. 2:15). Robert Novak, too, thinks that non- believers can have a strong sense of calling.328 It would seem to be a part of that general revelation that Scripture indicates is available to all. Paul’s appeal to the Athenians’ altar to an unknown God (Acts 17) did not discount their instinct but used it in building his case for Christ. He offered a way to understand something they already intuited. The
325 Richard Mouw says that Herman Hoeksema, a theologian from the early twentieth century, was reputed to have said that he “had studied the problem [of common grace] for forty years, that he felt quite sure that there was such a thing as common grace, but that he did not know what it was!” Richard J. Mouw, He Shines in All That’s Fair: Culture and Common Grace (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2001), 13.
326 Ibid., 90.
327 Wolters, Creation Regained, 60.
328 Michael Novak, Business as a Calling: Work and the Examined Life (New York: Free Press, 1996), 37.
101 sense of call that is part of God’s general revelation may very well be one of the ways
God calls to people’s hearts and leads them to the discovery of himself.
Personal Identity
Like the returning prodigal, calling involves coming home to one’s true self and taking one’s proper place in creation. Everything else in the universe has its own nature, which constitutes its “native way of being in the world.”329 When Scripture invites all of creation to burst into song, it is declaring in a poetic way that every element of creation – trees and hills and animals – honors God by simply being what he intended it to be.
Parker Palmer calls it one’s “birth competency.”330 The effectiveness of great people consists precisely in the fact that they are acting out of their true selves.331
Great care has gone into one’s design (Ps. 139:14), and, as people grow and mature, their self-understanding will become clearer, but their nature will not fundamentally change. They have their fingerprints for life, as well as their motivational pattern, the shape of their will, their manner of moving through life. Given the fact that the pattern of redemption is to recover and restore and renew that which was corrupted by sin, it would appear that one’s pattern of gifts and talents would continue into eternity.
There is great freedom in this, as Jesus promised there would be (John 8:32), for truth is not only doctrinal but relational as well. To operate out of the truth of who one is made to be brings a current of energy, excitement, and joy and provides a small taste of
God’s pleasure in creation (Gen. 1). This is in sharp contrast to the world, which views
329 Palmer, Let Your Life Speak, 21.
330 Smith, Courage and Calling, 39.
331 Poet David Whyte notes, “One of the outer qualities of great captains, great leaders, great bosses is that they are unutterably themselves.” Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea, 48.
102 people in terms of how they will best serve the prevailing system, whether it is school, government, or corporation. For all its talk of individuality, the world has been slow to see people in terms of their unique gifts and calling.
Yet there is more at stake than individual fulfillment. Everyone needs everyone else’s giftedness for no one is sufficient by himself or herself. The ecology that is observable in the natural world also plays out in culture. “When man takes his correct position in creation, divine ecology falls into place and praise naturally emerges.
Competence then manifests itself in work and play.”332 What is at stake is not simply individual but cultural, the carrying out of the original mandates given in the garden.
“There are plenty of gifts to do all the work that needs to be done everywhere and to do all of it gloriously well – so well, in fact, that people would go rejoicing from day to day over how much was accomplished and how well it was accomplished.”333
Sin’s frightening power is to corrupt God’s intention for creation. At stake in
Jesus’ parable about the sheep and the goats (Matt. 25:31-46) is a discernment of animals.
The judge does not bring about the change into one animal or the other but simply divides them based on what they have already become. He then provides words of explanation.
“Each is told what he or she has spent life in becoming …. The parable is teaching us that we will ‘see’ at last what day-by-day living is all about. It’s a matter of becoming ‘sheep’ or becoming ‘goat’.”334 Everyone appears before God “without baggage – no trappings of learning, of academic degrees, of wealth, or of power.… Death strips us of all but our
332 Mattson and Miller, Finding a Job, 41.
333 Ibid.
334 DeKoster, Work, 21.
103 selves.”335 The response of Jesus to the question of the sheep and goats reveals that the defining difference is intent. The goats are surprised because it “never occurred to them that work had anything to do with the service of God!”336 The most important product of labor is the person one becomes through it. Choice is the chisel, and it is one that people cannot help but use.337
Desires of the Heart
People’s deepest yearnings are based on their creational design. Just as the instinctual longing of birds to fly reflects the kind of creatures God made them to be, there is correspondence and congruence between the design and desires of human beings.
Scripture calls these “the desires of the heart” (e.g., Ps. 20:4, 21:2, Prov. 11:13). That is why, despite the ravages of sin, the human race has demonstrated an instinct for dominion. As much as contemporary people want to equate themselves with the animal creation, they cannot help but feel responsible for creation and exercise dominion.
The English word “enthusiasm” comes from the Greek en theos, as if the pagan
Greeks instinctively recognized that when one is in a state of high energy there is a divine quality to it. The pleasure and delight it entails is what they imagined the gods to experience.338 The experience of being so absorbed in work that one loses sense of time is something everyone experiences at one time or another but which somehow remains
335 DeKoster, Work, 35.
336 Ibid., 30.
337 Ibid., 36.
338 For an insightful exploration of the kind of knowledge embodied in general revelation, see J. Budziszewski, What We Can’t Not Know: A Guide (Dallas: Spence Publishing Company, 2003).
104 tantalizingly out of reach. It is as palpably extraordinary as it is temporary and elusive. It would appear that God’s image-bearers cannot escape a lingering taste of what it means to find in work pleasure and delight like that evident Gen. 1. What people cannot do is hold on to it or generate it at will. It still comes as a gift whispering of better things.
The Germans refer to a phenomenon called Sehnsucht, the divine whisper that haunts people’s souls and memories and arouses unfulfillable longings. Hard to describe, it is the longing for “more than these things can give.”339 It is felt as a pain that is strangely pleasurable, even in the absence of that for which it yearns, because of the hope of some unnamed reality that seems to beckon. It is more than simple nostalgia, for it is not focused on the past but looks forward to something that has not yet occurred. C. S.
Lewis says the longing is to be united with transcendent beauty.340 Never satisfied by this world this longing seems to call from somewhere beyond. God has not left himself without witnesses. Theology needs not to discount this experience but to account for it.
The Importance of Calling for Spirituality
To think about spirituality without any reference to calling is a disservice to both concepts, for, if calling is not fulfilled in the power of the Spirit of God, it will accomplish nothing (John 15:5). On the other hand, spirituality is not simply an end in
339 Plantinga, Engaging God’s World, 5. The following two quotes capture the feeling of Sehnsucht as well as any I know. Although I have not been able to document them, the sense is still valid. “You don’t know quite what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache you want it so.” (Mark Twain). “The main thing that I sensed back in my childhood was this inescapable yearning that I could never satisfy. Even now at times I experience an inescapable loneliness and isolation…. Oh, God, how I remember that feeling, though. Sitting on the front steps on a summer night and hearing a lawn mower in the distance and a screen door slamming somewhere. It would actually make my heart ache.” (Actress Jessica Lange).
340 See C. S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (New York: Collier Books, 1980).
105 itself. It needs to be expressed through one’s calling. Both have to do with God’s redemptive work of restoring to people their dominion in Adam.
Motivation (Beyond Legalism)
The bane of spirituality is legalism, “the disease of the devoted.”341 The temptation is perennial to motivate and manipulate people by putting direct pressure on the will. While believers in the New Testament are “called” by God, churches often give the impression that believers are being pushed toward sainthood rather than called to it.342
Any compliance this generates is self-defeating for God desires obedience from the heart
(Eph. 6:6). Appealing to people on the basis of calling, however, speaks to the deepest desires of their hearts. That is what Scripture does. The difference is like that between pushing a car with rear wheel drive, which encounters resistance from the front tires, and pulling a car forward with front-wheel drive, which is more efficient. The shepherd in the
Scriptures does not drive sheep like cattle but is seen “leading” them (Ps. 23:2) from in front (John 10:2). The gentleness of the shepherd in caring for his sheep (Ps. 23:1-3) conveys a tone that legalism, with its sense of being driven by a taskmaster, lacks.
The New Testament bases the imperative on the indicative. Apostles urge believers to live a holy life by reminding them of their true identity in Christ (e.g., 1 Cor.
1:4-10).343 Marriage, for example, looks very different when viewed as a calling. They
341 Rebecca Manley Pippert, Out of the Saltshaker: Evangelism as a Way of Life (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1979), 78.
342 For examples, see Rom. 1:6; 1 Cor. 1:2, 9, 24, 26; Gal. 1:6; Eph. 1:18; 1 Thess. 2:12; 2 Thess. 1:11; 2 Tim. 1:9; 1 Pet. 1:15; 2 Pet. 1:3; Jude 1.
343 In Ephesians, for example, the Apostle elaborates for three chapters on the blessings the Ephesian Christians have received before he urges them (Eph. 4:1) to live a life “worthy” of that “calling,” which is expounded and illustrated in the final three chapters.
106 represent challenges to surmount rather than problems to escape. Believers are “called to suffer” (1 Pet. 2:21, 3:9), and the question is not simply how to make the marriage better but how to become better through the suffering it entails. In this world, calling will entail suffering. What keeps one going and not giving up is the hope that the one who calls is faithful to finish what he started in one’s life (Phil. 1:6, 1 Thess. 5:24).
In recent years, there has been a growing effort to resist the reduction of the gospel to merely forensic categories of forgiveness and justification, critical and central though they may be.344 This movement understands the good news to be all that Jesus said and did (Mark 1:1), not simply a formula for forgiveness.345 Calling, too, is a more comprehensive concept that does not look backwards to a prayer or public profession but looks beyond the forensic to the future destiny of believers (Rom. 8:28-30).
Attending to one’s call means “learning to attend to God’s presence” because it requires relationship with the caller.346 “God’s will is not impersonal – reducible to a code of law. Nor is it primarily about what we do. It is deeply personal and inherently relational.”347 The call invites one to be willing rather than willful. “Willfulness,” says
Benner, “is the deadly fruit of the kingdom of self. Willingness is the river of life flowing
344 Simon Chan also notes that the tension between justification by faith and sanctification is a long-standing problem in the Protestant church. Simon Chan, Spiritual Theology (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998), 79-84.
345 Dallas Willard calls it “bar-code faith” because, like the electronic eye that responds to the bar- code and not the contents of a package, Christian character is thought to be inconsequential as long as one has faith in Jesus for justification. Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1998), 36-37.
346 David G. Benner, Desiring God’s Will (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2005), 60. Benner says that such attending is not like the “active mental process of concentration…. Rather, it is suspending our thoughts and allowing awareness to develop.” Ibid., 66.
347 Ibid., 60.
107 through the kingdom of God.”348 The more one tries to control one’s destiny, the more tightly the cords of self-control become wound around one’s soul, so it becomes spiritually self-defeating.349 “What God desires is our consent, not our willpower.”350
Willingness is expressed through surrender, which “is less an act of volition than an impulse of love,” a different dynamic than compliance with rules. The invitation of one’s calling is more likely to elicit love than the deadly dynamic of the law (Gal. 3:10,
5:18).351 To teach people that “grasping destroys. Surrender restores and transforms” is to introduce them to the way of the Spirit and enables them to “taste and see” (Ps. 34:8) what Christian spirituality is like. 352
Significance for Spiritual Formation
Calling and vocation should be woven into the process of spiritual formation, for the goal of formation is to become and do that to which believers are called to become and do. It is coming into possession of one’s true self in Christ which, in the final analysis, is what one’s vocation is, to be one’s self before God in complete devotion to him. The motivation of calling stimulates formation from the heart.
The sphere of formation must be all-inclusive, for obedience is to one with all authority in heaven and on earth. Disciples are to pray in that authority for the coming of
348 Benner, Desiring God’s Will, 32.
349 Benner made this observation about Christian spirituality, but it would seem to apply to calling as well. Ibid., 66.
350 Ibid., 72.
351 “Guilt is not enough to motivate surrender.” Ibid., 47.
352 Ibid., 41.
108 his kingdom on earth, including the realm in which people labor and spend such a large portion of their time. Work should be a chief vehicle by which one works out his or her spiritual formation before the Lord.
Calling lends itself to the idea of a life-long spiritual journey and not just a one- time spiritual experience. The evangelical emphasis on conversion has fostered a mentality of looking back to a spiritual turning point, however valid, instead of forward to where God is inviting one to go. One responds to calling throughout life, and, since arrival does not happen in this lifetime, the doctrine helps check any tendency towards perfectionism. Above all, calling is a gift, not something that originates with people. It does not insure God’s favor, but is itself a sign of a favor that comes by grace, not by works, the true basis for one’s relationship with God.
The Relationship between Calling and the Kingdom of God
The coming of the kingdom with Jesus was “the coming of a new phase in God’s rule of the earth” and was the fundamental idea around which all of his teaching revolved.353 The signs of the kingdom displayed through Jesus’ miracles not only confirmed the reality of its presence but illustrated the nature of that kingdom. The message of the kingdom continues in the preaching of the apostles (cf. Acts 19:8, 20:25,
28:23, 31). The good news is good news of the kingdom (Acts 8:12). When someone comes to faith in Christ, the person enters that kingdom (Col. 1:13) and “become[s] a part of the age to come.”354 The kingdom remains to be “inherited” in the future (1 Cor. 6:9-
353 Ken Myers, Christianity, Culture, and Common Grace, Mars Hill Monographs (Charlottesville, VA: Berea Publications, 1994), 36.
354 Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs, 211.
109
10, 15:50, Gal. 5:21, Eph. 5:5) so that believers look forward to the coming consummation of the kingdom into which they will receive a “rich welcome” (2 Pet.
1:11).
Believers need to grasp the exact meaning of their work in relation to the kingdom. Believers are called into the kingdom (1 Thess. 2:12), are workers for the kingdom (Col. 4:11) who suffer for the sake of the kingdom (2 Thess. 1:5), and are even said to be a kingdom (Rev. 1:6, 5:10). What is never said is that they are to bring it about.
Jesus specifically disavowed that his kingdom was political or rooted in the current world order (Matt. 4:10, John 18:36). God’s kingdom is something that only he can establish when the time is fulfilled. Until then, believers are to maintain a sober spirit and a posture of watchful praying and waiting for its arrival while living under the reign and rule of
God every moment of their lives. Their work in the world that God graciously sustains by his common grace bears witness to the reality of his coming kingdom and what it will look like. Ken Myers argues strongly that any “cultural activity divorced from the proclamation of the gospel, is not kingdom work.”355 “The great irony is that the message of the Kingdom of God has profound cultural and political consequences precisely because it is not a cultural or political message. It cannot be fought by cultural means. It cannot be defeated by cultural power”356 The world does not become the kingdom of God through the efforts of God’s people; only with the seventh trumpet does “the kingdom of the world … become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ …” (Rev. 11:15). The
355 Myers, Christianity, Culture, and Common Grace, 45.
356 Ibid., 43. Italics in original.
110 distinction is between actually building the kingdom, which is not the role of the believers now, and expressing the kingdom-reign of God, which is their proper role.357
The Relationship between Calling and Evangelism
Jesus’ method of evangelism was often to pose questions that brought to the surface deeper issues that were not conscious to the person.358 It was the way he would answer others’ questions (Mark 10:17-18) and address his enemies (Mark 3:4, Luke 7:42,
20:3-4). Even the obliqueness of his parables was intended to raise questions (Mark
4:11). Philip Johnson is experienced in interactions with skeptical and hostile critics: “In a lifetime of studying and participating in controversies, I have learned that the best way to approach a problem of any kind is usually not to talk or even think very much about the ultimate answer until I have made sure that I am asking all the right questions in the right order.”359 Wise questions about people’s longings and experience of Sehnsucht are the right questions. When they do give answers, believers will be equally wise and thoughtful.360 People must be gently pressed regarding the inconsistency of using the language of calling apart from belief in a personal God. Furthermore, the fact that calling
357 Myers also notes: “By ignoring the appeal to general revelation in the public arena, Christians have virtually turned it over to the opponents of truth, to twist and distort for their purposes. Louis Berkhof says that public opinion is one of the means of common grace.” Myers, Christianity, Culture, and Common Grace, 64.
358 For examples of such questions, see Mark 4:10, 10:18, 13; Luke 9:18, 10:36; John 5:6.
359 Phillip E. Johnson, The Right Questions: Truth, Meaning and Public Debate (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002), 27. Johnson puts it nicely: “The logic train is going to go where we lay the tracks for it to go!” Ibid., 29.
360 Richard Bolles provides a good example of this in the final chapter of his best-selling book on finding work. It is his gracious answer to the question people have for the hope that he has (1 Pet. 3:15). Richard Nelson Bolles, What Color Is Your Parachute? A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career- Changers, 2011 ed. (Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press, 2010). Bolles’ book is republished annually. He also published the chapter separately: Richard Nelson Bolles, How to Find Your Mission in Life (Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press, 1991).
111 establishes personal identity, whereas pantheism ultimately extinguishes it, is a feature, which could resonate with western individualism. The Christian view of calling challenges the skepticism and nihilism of postmodern philosophy and offers a better explanation of people’s longings and desires. One’s intuitive sense of calling moves the conversation away from the rationalistic and brings it down from the level of theoretical abstraction to that of deep, personal concern. Instead of just a bare declaration of the gospel without context, the listener hears something that is coherent and compelling. The person of faith is in the position of answering questions that people are actually asking, if not overtly, then at least within their hearts.361 The people cannot not ask questions about such intuitions, for they are hard wired into them from the day of creation.
This calling-based, questioning appeal to people’s intuition is a Christian response to pluralism and secular spirituality that meets postmodernism on its own terms without capitulating to it. It takes work seriously for all people and arouses curiosity. It builds bridges in love while gently confronting autonomous individualism. Above all, it is true to the reality of what is.
To be effective in this way of dealing with others, a person must be in touch with his or her own personal call. The theology of calling must be incarnated as one lives a life worthy of the calling he or she has received (Eph. 4:1). That requires a profound journey of discernment into the mysteries of one’s own heart that can be as daunting as it is
361 “… do those of us who know God have something of substantial merit and importance to say to those who do not know him? Can we participate confidently in the marketplace of ideas? I have no need to argue that we should prevail in that market. Once we are admitted, the truth will speak for itself, but that can happen only if we possess a truth that is capable of speaking for itself.” Phillip E. Johnson and Foreword by Dallas Willard, The Wedge of Truth: Splitting the Foundations of Naturalism (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 166-167.
112 exciting. However, many have walked that trail and have wise words of advice to guide those who follow.
CHAPTER 6
DISCERNMENT OF CALLING
In popular imagination, a call should be as unmistakable and unavoidable as
Paul’s Damascus Road conversion. Usually, however, people are unaware of their calling and do not know how to access it. They do not even know that it is their responsibility to discern it. The matter is complicated by a culture that is short on mystery and that tends to believe everything can be neatly categorized, defined, and determined from a test.
Matters of the heart do not lend themselves to such an approach.362 Many voices call to a person, including one’s upbringing, peer-pressure, ego, self-interest, various careers, and the culture in general.363 One must “test the spirits” (1 John 4:1) to distinguish those voices from the Spirit’s.364 “Discernment is ‘sifting through’ our interior and exterior experiences to determine their origin. Discernment helps a person understand the source of a call, to whom it is directed, its content, and what response is appropriate.
362 John Carroll Futrell, Ignatian Discernment, vol. 2, no. 2 of Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits (St. Louis: American Assistancy Seminar on Jesuit Spirituality, 1969), 129-134. Cited by Suzanne G. Farnham et al., Listening Hearts: Discerning Call in Community, newly revised ed. (Harrisburg - New York: Morehouse Publishing, 1991).
363 Farnham et al., Listening Hearts, 24.
364 For an excellent explanation of principles of spiritual discernment, see Gordon Smith, The Voice of Jesus (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003).
113 114
Discernment also involves learning if one is dodging a call, is deaf to a call, or is rejecting a call.”365
Calling and Spirituality
Attending to one’s calling invites one to go beyond the merely cognitive.366
Calling is not designed or determined by oneself but must be discerned and discovered. It precedes anything one does and comes from outside a person with its own authority.
Unlike generic spirituality, calling confronts autonomy at the outset.
Sincerity in pursuing one’s calling does not mean an exemption from personal darkness and distress along the way. On the contrary, it is more likely.367 People can lose their way because of the distorting gravitational effects of culture, prosperity, self- interest, self-absorption, and self-righteousness. Desire for security or certainty can undermine spirituality, as can self-doubt and assuming human time frames.368 Jesus’ experience in the wilderness after his baptism (Mark 1:12, Matt. 4:1, Luke 4:1) indicates that doubt and struggle accompany those who take their vocation seriously. “Frequently, many false paths are taken …”369 One must learn the art of “keep[ing] in step with the
Holy Spirit” (Gal. 5:25).370 Highlighting the spirituality of calling helps make it clear that
365 Farnham et al., Listening Hearts, 23.
366 David G. Benner, Desiring God’s Will (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2005), 14.
367 Palmer, Let Your Life Speak, 17-18.
368 Farnham et al., Listening Hearts, 36-37.
369 Michael Novak, Business as a Calling: Work and the Examined Life (New York: Free Press, 1996), 35.
370 Richard Bolles gives very good, concrete examples of what this step-by-step approach actually looks like in daily practice, and in so doing thing helps the reader begin to “try on” Christian spirituality. Bolles, How to Find Your Mission, 40.
115
God’s will is more than career guidance or which job to take. It reinforces the notion that spirituality is concerned with daily life and not just occasional bursts of inspiration.
Heeding one’s call fosters humility, for one must be willing to place oneself in
God’s hands and trust him for outcomes (Ps. 37:7). Paradoxically, it can also intensify the sense of urgency to pursue the call further. It can be exhilarating to connect with one’s call. It can also be spiritually deadly if the focus shifts subtly from the one served to the service itself. One must seek God more than just a solution to a problem or an answer to a decision that needs to be made.371 “If discernment follows, fine; if not, so be it. Let it rest lightly.”372 This was Jesus’ caution to his disciples when they returned from a missions tour excited about the power and authority they had experienced (Luke 10:20). Always, the caller must be kept at the center (Deut. 4:29).
Calling and Giftedness
God’s calling for people reflects who he has designed them to be. “The deepest vocational question is not ‘What ought I to do with my life?’ It is the more elemental and demanding ‘Who am I? What is my nature?’”373 Thus, after Romans 12 begins with an appeal for people to offer themselves as living sacrifices to God rather than be shaped by the world around them, the apostle’s advice is that they think of themselves with “sober judgment” (Rom. 12:3). Immediately following comes Paul’s teaching on spiritual
371 Farnham et al., Listening Hearts, 29.
372 Ibid., 35.
373 Palmer, Let Your Life Speak, 15.
116 gifts.374 To live in any other way than seeing oneself clearly is to live in falsehood rather than truth. Coming to a sober understanding of oneself is part of the renewal of the mind and need not be narcissistic because the greatest gift one can give to others is the gift of one’s true self expressing and acting out of one’s own giftedness and strength. That is the purpose for the gifts, and Paul’s examples in Rom. 12 are given with the edification of the church in view. The one requirement common to all gifts is that they be exercised with wholehearted enthusiasm (Rom. 12:8). Paul is thus exhorting believers to first of all know themselves, and then to be true to themselves.375
Giftedness leaves a trail in people’s lives and manifests itself in everything they do. A pattern emerges in the way they are energized and in the kinds of things at which they seem to be peculiarly effective. Parents will see it in their children early on, even in the way they play, which is, after all, work for them in that season of their lives. Critical to the whole process is “the ability to see and appreciate our own stories and the footprints of the Spirit through the course of our lives,” which will also entail coming to terms with one’s past, one’s family of origin.376
Spiritual and natural gifts may not be as different as people often think. Whatever the difference is, it does not seem to bother the writers of Scripture a great deal, and there do not seem to be rigid categories of natural and spiritual gifts in the Bible. It is hard to imagine someone having a spiritual gift, which was not rooted in some way in his or her
374 Between moral integrity (vv.1-2) and relational integrity (vv. 9ff), says Gordon Smith, lies calls “vocational integrity.” Smith, Courage and Calling, 36.
375 Smith, Courage and Calling, 49.
376 Ibid., 107.
117 creational design. Writing from the vantage point of years of practical experience,
Mattson and Miller observe:
We have never seen nor can we understand God’s giving a supernatural gift of the Spirit that is not at least in harmony with, if not an extension of, a person’s natural gifts. Why would God violate His own creation by giving a supernatural gift to someone without the natural ground for its expression? Sometimes a spiritual gift is exercised in spite of psychological problems that would otherwise inhibit, sometimes in spite of emotional difficulties or fears, but probably not in spite of who the person was to begin with.377
Wolters, on the other hand, does not view gifts as supernatural at all because “they belong to the nature of God’s good created earth. They are gifts of the Spirit as genuinely as love, joy, and peace are, but they do not add anything to what God had intended for his earthly creation from the beginning. They are therefore thoroughly ‘natural.’”378 Thus,
God can use the gifts of people who do not acknowledge him, such as the pagan king
Cyrus, whom God even calls his “anointed” (Isa. 45:1).379
Common grace comes into play once again. Although the Church is the object of
God’s special love and attention (Eph. 3:10-11), he loves and cares for all people (Matt.
5:24).380 The same God who arranges gifts within his own body is the God who “works
377 Mattson and Miller, Finding a Job, 158.
378 Albert M. Wolters, Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), 105.
379 Farnham et al., Listening Hearts, 19.
380 Richard Mouw observes: “This issue of multiple divine purposes is obviously a point of contention among Calvinists. Indeed, I am convinced that it is the underlying issue at stake in the longstanding intra-Calvinist debates between ‘infralapsarians’ and ‘supralapsarians.’” Mouw, He Shines in All That’s Fair, 51.
While it is beyond the scope of this paper to address the issues involved in the two positions, this author is suspicious of the rigid logical consistency in the superalapsarian belief. It does not seem to do justice to what Mouw calls the “emotional complexity” of God that is presented in Scripture (p. 60). In particular, though there is no way of knowing who is elect in God’s eternal plan, this line of thinking makes it difficult to regard non-believers in as compassionate a way when holding the belief that everything ordained for them has their damnation in view. Treating everyone with love seems like the better approach
118 out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will” (Eph. 1:11), and clearly abilities and talents have been dispersed freely throughout the human race. What is at stake in calling is not simply individual or ecclesiastical but cultural. This beautiful display of interdependence is for carrying out the mandates given in the garden as well as
God’s call to Abraham’s children to bless the world around them (cf. Gen. 12:3).
Calling is congruent with gifting, but broader, and must not be overly identified with it, for God can call people to that for which, at first glance, they do not seem suited.
Moses’ lack of eloquence did not deter God’s call (Exod. 4:10). Jeremiah and Isaiah, too, knew the experience of feeling overwhelmed by the call (Jer. 1:6, Isa. 6:5). Gifts and talents are the first clue to calling, but by themselves they do not constitute one’s calling.
Vocation is also larger than one’s job. Paul’s business card may have read
“Tentmaker” but to see him only in those terms would have been to miss who he really was. His tentmaking was a vehicle for an apostolic vocation that lay much deeper. Some will find that their vocations are more fulfilled outside of their job. Even the unemployed still have work to do and a vocation to fulfill. Still others may find their vocation ripening and blossoming during their retirement years. The one guiding rule in matters of vocation is that there is no one guiding rule. A great deal lies beyond one’s discernment and seen only “through a glass, darkly” (1 Cor. 13:12, KJV). God knows people’s complexities
and one that does more justice to the gracious character of God. The issue certainly matters greatly in the argument of this paper whether or not the issue of calling can be a point of contact with those who do not yet believe. Mouw seems to agree: “These questions have an important bearing on how the Reformed community will position itself in the contemporary dialogue between those who insist that we cannot abandon any Christian particularities as we address policy issues in the public square and those who advocate that we employ, whenever possible, a mode of public discourse with broader appeal to citizens of a variety of religious and non-religious persuasions.” Ibid., 66-67.
119 better than they do and so faith must be in him and his leading, not in his gifts. What matters are not the gifts but the caller, and his ways are inscrutable (Isa. 55:8).
Calling and Motivation
One’s design includes the way one is motivated. Arthur Miller speaks not simply of giftedness but of “motivated abilities,” and Janis Harris speaks of “gifted passions.”381
Motivation is more than surface desires for there are many things people are able to do, even well, that are not things they are primarily motivated to do.382 Motivation represents a convergence between gifting and deep desire, so discernment not only takes account of talents and abilities but also energy and motivation.
The religious or secular nature of our cultural creativity is simply the wrong question. The right question is whether, when we undertake the work we believe to be our vocation, we experience the joy and humility that come only when God multiplies our work so that it bears thirty, sixty and a hundredfold beyond what we could expect from our feeble inputs.383
However, vocation is more than simply exercising giftedness. Buechner’s definition is a reminder that vocation also resonates with the world’s deep need. Gordon
Smith notes that Romans 12:6-8 identifies what could be seen as “ways of seeing the world and its pain or brokenness” and relates the gifts of God to the world’s needs.384
381 Janis Long Harris, Secrets of People Who Love Their Work (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1992), 35.
382 “… there is a style to who we are. We are not shapeless. We have a mode of action .…” Mattson and Miller, Finding a Job, 60. Mattson’s approach is to look at one’s “trail” for abilities, the subject matter to which one is drawn, the circumstances one prefers, the relationships one tends to cultivate, and underneath it all, one’s central motivational thrust.
383 Crouch, Culture Making, 256.
384 Smith, Courage and Calling, 43. Plantinga asks: “What would my career do for ‘the least of these’?” Plantinga, Engaging God’s World, 117.
120
Prophets, helpers, teachers, encouragers, givers, leaders and people of compassion find peculiar joy in meeting the needs for which their gifts have equipped them.385
Personality and Spiritual Orientation
Temperaments, which come in amazing variety, are “as unique to us as our fingerprint” and part of the richness God has lavished on His creation.386 Whether personality comes ready-made at birth or is formed by one’s environment, it is God who is at work to shape and mold the person for his purposes (Ps. 139:15-16). While personality provides a certain style to what one does, it does not in itself constitute one’s calling, nor is it determinative of one’s giftedness. People who are, for example, shy and quiet in ordinary situations can be very different when their motivated abilities are engaged.
In the local church, personality and temperament can be a helpful place for people to learn to think in a different way about themselves and others. It can be a step on the way to greater self-awareness, a process, which requires a lot of time. Many different testing instruments are available, but people need to be reminded repeatedly that those tests are limited in what they can reveal about either their personalities or their vocation.
The Role of Intuition and Self-Discovery
One discerns underlying patterns and drives in one’s life by becoming deeply acquainted with one’s history.387 The turning points and key moments of one’s experience disclose a kind of knowledge that no scientific tests can uncover. Thus, the
385 Smith, Courage and Calling, 43-45.
386 Smith, Courage and Calling, 45.
387 Farnham et al., Listening Hearts, 40.
121 process of discernment introduces and validates the role of intuitive knowledge and imagination. However, even historical investigation of one’s recurring pattern of behavior is not sufficient apart from God’s illumination. The rationalistic knowledge prized by the
Enlightenment looks with suspicion on anything that is not objective, but the Bible has a larger epistemological perspective. Intuition is a valid way of knowing. Various kinds of knowledge are not in competition with each other, nor are reason and faith. Whatever knowledge God discloses by special revelation is apprehended by reason. “Reasoning is what we do with revelation.”388 In addition, Ken Myers points out, “All knowledge about anything is based on revelation. That is, all knowledge comes from God because it comes from his creation.”389 Though not susceptible to scientific inquiry, intuitional knowledge is also part of God’s creation. The universe is bigger than either intellect or intuition on its own can search out or understand.
Intuition not only challenges the presumption that only scientific knowledge is valid, but it meets New Age pantheists and mystics on their own ground. It agrees that there is, indeed, within each person some kind of irreducible knowledge that is crucial, but disagrees as to the nature of that knowledge and what it reveals. The pantheist thinks that this knowledge informs people that they are gods, a contention all too congenial to postmoderns. That is why the idea of calling is so critical, because it keeps the discussion focused on that which neither pantheism nor materialism can explain, that calling presupposes someone calling. The belief in a universe that is eternal does not explain the sense of calling and desire for a sense of mission to which people of all faiths attest. The
388 Myers, Christianity, Culture, and Common Grace.
389 Ibid., 13.
122 persistent longing people express for a sense of calling in their lives and work is itself part of the data which any theory of the universe must explain.
Neither way of knowing is adequate without the revelation presented in Scripture, which functions as a lens through which all things are seen and evaluated. Without the subjective aspect, calling has only theoretical importance, which is to say, no functional importance in daily life at all. Because it is a process that unfolds over time one could even say that discernment “may be understood as ‘apprehending’ rather than
‘comprehending.’”390 Discernment may not properly be thought of as “discovery of
God’s will, which ‘forever remains a mystery,’ but instead as ‘aligning ourselves’ with
God.”391 Farnham compares it to driving a car at night and seeing only as far as the headlights cast their light.392 Christians must be diligent in praying for one another, as
Paul did for his converts, that “the eyes of [their] heart[s] may be enlightened” by God
(Eph. 1:18).
The Role of Wisdom
Just as people’s lives and personalities are unique, so are their experiences of calling. “Not only is every call unique, but the hearing of every call is unique also.”393
390 Diocese of Bethlehem (Pennsylvania) of the Episcopal Church, The Manual of Policies, Guidelines, and Requirements for Seeking the Ordained Ministry. Accompanied By “Additional Guidelines for the Parish Discernment Fellowship”(Bethlehem, PA: Diocese of Bethlehem, 1984), 2. Cited by Farnham et al, Listening Hearts, 26.
391 Tilden Edwards, Episcopal priest, author, and executive director of the Shalem Institute in Washington, D.C., in an interview, January 30, 1989. Cited in Farnham, et al., Listening Hearts, 115, n13.
392 Ibid., 27.
393 Ibid., 11.
123
The subjectivity and uniqueness of calling does not lend itself to a formula.394 Many of the things involved in discernment fall in the area of wisdom. It is well known that God speaks through everyday events as well as things that are imposed on oneself.395 Teresa of Avila notes in her introduction that she wrote her classic, The Interior Castle, out of sheer obedience because she was assigned the task.396 The imprisonments of the Apostle
Paul and of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, likewise, are a reminder that God’s calling can come through very difficult events and circumstances.397
Spiritual disciplines have centuries of experience behind them, an accumulated wisdom from which people can draw to help in discernment. Common elements include feelings of restlessness, dissatisfaction, longing, yearning, wondering, a sense that one is at a crossroads or a time of transition. There may be unfolding circumstances that seem to press one in a particular direction. God often speaks through other people, if not directly, then by startling one with a piece of radiant insight from something another says. A need can harbor a call, but not necessarily.398 Narrow preoccupation with particular needs or with questions surrounding job and career can prevent one from hearing God clearly.
394 Ibid., 43.
395 Farnham et al., Listening Heart, 8.
396 Teresa’s comments are insightful: “Few tasks which I have been commanded to undertake by obedience have been so difficult as this present one … because I do not feel that the Lord has given me either the spirituality or the desire for it…. But, as I know that strength arising from obedience has a way of simplifying things which seem impossible, my will very gladly resolves to attempt this task …” Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle: The Classic Text with a Spiritual Commentary by Dennis Billy, S.Ss.R. (Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press, Inc., 2007), 34.
397 Farnham et al., Listening Heart, 9.
398 Ibid., 12.
124
What does not happen is that a blueprint or a roadmap appears and resolves all questions and tensions. Part of God’s agenda is for people to re-learn humble dependence on him in all that they do, and so one’s calling functions more like a beacon or a homing signal to which one must be constantly attuned. The familiar biblical image of fruits suggests that a call will only manifest itself and become clearer over time.399 From a human standpoint, the call is always evolving, but, from God’s standpoint, he is revealing what a person is able and willing to receive and handle at any given point (John 16:12).
“If we go on listening, we feel God pulling us, drawing us into another current, a larger, deeper, stronger one than our usual little force.”400 Moses had an inkling at age forty that he was chosen to rescue Israel (Acts 7:25), but his perception of timing was inaccurate, and his maturity not ready for another forty years. When Abraham left Ur to follow the
Lord, he did not know where he was going (Heb. 11:8), but he was fulfilling his calling the whole time he was waiting upon God to act (Heb. 11:11, 13).
We will not necessarily be called to come up with a correct answer, as in a crossword puzzle, but something freer and more creative. We are given building blocks to see what can be done with them, using for the task all of our intelligence, creativity, sensitivity, and love. Our critical faculties are required; we must use them the best way we can, constructively and with love.401
An essential capability, says Gordon Smith, is the ability to be fully present. “A simple rule of thumb: God only leads us one step at a time.”402 One must not wait for
399 Farnham et al., Listening Heart, 13.
400 Ann Ulanov and Barry Ulanov, Primary Speech (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1982), 9. Cited by Farnham et al, Listening Heart, 15.
401 Esther de Waal, Seeking God: The Way of St. Benedict (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1984), 49. Cited in Farnham et al, Listening Heart, 14.
402 Smith, Courage and Calling, 109.
125 clarity about the meaning of the entire journey. “We are not building a career; we are responding, at this time, and in this place, to a call .…”403 It may require the greater part of one’s life to pass before one is able to see what unifies his or her life.404 Often, the call unfolds in an ordinary, unspectacular manner as it did in the life of Ruth or for the first thirty years of Jesus’ life. To look for grandiosity in one’s call is as likely to immobilize
405 as to catalyze a person. One needs to look at opportunities as they exist right now and not as one might wish them to be.406 Spirituality does not preclude realism or moment- by-moment dependence on God.
Pursuing one’s call will seem risky at times but obedient responsiveness to what one knows is paramount. The word “obedience” comes from the Latin audire which means “to listen.”407 It is obedience to the next step that leads to discovery of the one after that. Conversely, if one does not respond faithfully, the sense of call will fade away and be replaced by lesser things: “… the power may come only as we respond.
Conversely, if people do not respond to God’s call, they may cut themselves off from the
Lord’s strength and become increasingly blind and deaf to his promptings. To ignore or resist a call may ‘fracture us further, widening, the split between what we subscribe to
403 Ibid., 77.
404 Ibid.
405 Farnham et al, Listening Heart, 39.
406 Smith, Courage and Calling, 109.
407 Donald P. McNeill, Douglas A. Morrison, and Henri J. M. Nouwen, Compassion: A Reflection on the Christian Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1982), 36. Cited by Farnham et al, Listening Heart, 13.
126 inwardly and what we do outwardly.’”408 Perseverance will be essential, not only in active terms but sometimes simply sticking it out in a difficult situation one desperately wants to escape.409 God may be asking one to stay and finish the fight in that particular place.410
The key word is courage, which Smith, citing 2 Timothy 1:7, calls “the central defining principle of this whole discussion of vocation: If we embrace our vocation and thrive within that to which God has called us, it will first and foremost be because we are women and men of courage.”411 Ultimately, “true courage is essentially the courage to be oneself.”412
The Role of Community
People are not able to see themselves with total clarity or simply rely on their instincts, for sin corrupts their ability to see clearly. They are dependent on what others around them can see in them. Discernment of one’s calling may be personal, but it is not private. It requires the help of community.413 Romans 12:3-8 assumes a community context within which people are to discern themselves “soberly.”414
408 Servant Leadership School Program Offerings, Fall 1990. Washington, D.C. Cited by Farnham et al, Listening Heart, 15.
409 “A Christian call is not an elitist calling but an invitation to make something good and holy of our lives … it is a lifelong conversation with God through which we continue to hear hints and rumors of who we might become, of what we are to do.” Evelyn Whitehead, Seasons of Strength (New York: Image Books, 1986), 23. Cited in Lewis, Choosing Your Career, 34. 410 Farnham et al, Listening Heart, 41.
411 Smith, Courage and Calling, 117.
412 Ibid., 121.
413 Palmer, Let Your Life Speak, 92.
414 Smith, Courage and Calling, 47.
127
This marks a significant difference between the spirituality of Jesus and the individualistic, autonomous spirituality in vogue in American culture. Calling is not primarily for oneself nor is it discovered and fulfilled by oneself. For Christians, the church is a crucial environment in which to discover vocation. They, of all people, grasp the spiritual dynamics involved, and those who have gone before and have more wisdom and experience can benefit those who follow. There is also beauty in having companions for the journey. God never intended discernment to be a solo project. It is friends that sustain one over the long haul, for a long haul it will be. People need examples who model the possibilities in following God, affirmers who help identify and confirm their gifts, and mentors who come alongside to help them grow forward toward their call.415
Parker Palmer speaks of the Quaker practice of getting a “clearness committee,” people outside of oneself who can provide insight and feedback for one’s process of discernment.416 One of the most important needs is for people to encourage one another in the face of fear, for moving towards what one most yearns for generates fear and anxiety. Left to oneself, it is easy to be overcome. Drawing on the strength of others can help one find courage to confront one’s fears and move forward in spite of them.417
Therefore, Christians need to be taught the priority of calling, the wisdom involved in discerning it, and the sheer pleasure of seeing it unfold in others and helping them see it, too. To see someone truly fulfilling his or her calling or exercising a gift of
God is thrilling because one is glimpsing the glory and beauty of God. One not only
415 Harris, Secrets, 28, 29, 31.
416 Palmer, Let your Life Speak, 44-46. Palmer gives personal examples of how such a committee uncovered his ego motivation and spared him much grief.
417 Ibid., 93.
128 beholds beauty of God that is shining through the gift, but it also arouses one’s own personal yearning to be living in congruence with one’s own giftedness. “What a long time it can take,” says Parker Palmer, “to become the person one has always been!”418
Discernment, then, is a profoundly spiritual and complex exercise, one that occurs over a lifetime. The hard work involved is not optional; every Christian is responsible, for the discernment of his or her calling is part of that calling. The arduous nature of it is sanctifying and helps equip people to function effectively in the world where God is already present and working. Calling collapses the false dualism and frees people to function in fresh and different ways in the place where they spend so much of their time.
418 Palmer, Let your Life Speak, 9.
PART THREE
COMMUNICATING AND CONVEYING CALLING IN THE PUBLIC SQUARE
CHAPTER 7
NEW VOCABULARY AND NEW BEHAVIOR IN THE WORKPLACE
There is no more significant place where people of every imaginable background, lifestyle and belief system come together than the workplace. Believers do not have to search far and wide to connect with people of different beliefs. In this environment, where people spend so much time and which is often regarded as a trial to be endured,
Christians have one of their best opportunities to witness to the new creation.
A Topic for Workplace Conversation
Since people spend much of their time at work, and the curse on humankind often comes to a focus there, work is bound to be a topic of conversation among co-workers. In
America, what one does for a living is often one of the first questions people ask. The culture also emphasizes hard work as a means of providing one’s fundamental identity and station in life. Efforts to direct conversation towards Christian assumptions of absolute truth are problematic in a tolerant, relativistic, and privatized age.419 Randomly interjecting comments about Jesus, church, and religion into this milieu invites resistance and ridicule. To someone with an entirely different framework of thinking and experience there is no apparent connection between the topic and what one does all day.
419 Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs, 130-131.
130
131
An appeal to the universal sense of calling, however, provides a different point of contact, arousing curiosity and interest that opens doors for dialogue and makes a coherent conversation possible. George Gallup “reported that more than 45 percent of respondents who were religious claimed to have some awareness of God on the job. The felt need is for awakening these punctuated moments of transcendence more frequently.”420 People may not be used to discussing calling, but everyone knows what it is and it is intriguing to many. Furthermore, if one has come to grips with calling in one’s own life, there is no need for additional training, complex theories, or apologetic arguments to get started. One simply needs to share openly, transparently, gently and naturally about one’s understanding and experience of meaning and purpose in work.421
Sharing Longings and Experience to Connect with Others
The loss of meaning, says Bob Goudzwaard, amounts to a crisis of faith:
… the theme of progress has penetrated western society so profoundly because it was able to present itself as a faith in progress, as a religion of progress. That is also why the present-day crisis of the idea of progress has the depth of a crisis of faith…. The unfulfilled promises of progress have brought about an emptiness, a vacuum, with respect to the meaning of life and society.422
Goudzwaard considers this to be “a very critical juncture in the development of western civilization. No society or civilization can continue to exist without having found an
420 Nash and McLennan, Church on Sunday, 22. Italics in original.
421 Richard Mouw shares the concern for care in communicating with those outside the faith. He notes a distinction between “thick” and “thin” communication. “Do we speak the ‘thick’ discourse of our own confessional particularity and risk being misunderstood or ignored? Or is it legitimate to translate the terms we use among ourselves into a ‘thin’ public discourse that relies upon less specifically Calvinist or even Christian language, to make the case for our policy proposals in a way that might convince someone who does not share our theological convictions?” Mouw, He Shines in All That’s Fair, 84.
422 Goudzwaard, Capitalism and Progress, 248-249. Italics in original.
132 answer to the question of meaning.”423 It is no wonder, then, that people are increasingly turning inward in search of a spirituality to sustain them in their work.
Framing work issues in terms of calling speaks to people’s longings for meaning and purpose and shifts conversation away from external problems to the interior life, the arena in which people will and must find God in their lives. At the same time, it provides a vocabulary for the discussion. The kind of interior realities that can serve as topics of interest vary. Richard Neuhaus writes of a conversation he had with a post-Communist
Czech who said to him: “The one thing that has really surprised me is that doing business is so much fun.”424 Dennis Bakke decided to organize an entire company around the idea of fun at work.425 Neuhaus declares, “Never underestimate the creative pleasure that drives many who find their calling in business.”426 Another attractive aspect to calling is the challenge it presents. Many people, perhaps especially in the marketplace, “like the feeling, toward the end of life, that they were severely tested and accomplished something – something that they can see, that they know has made a contribution.”427
Calling even has implications for one’s longevity in work. Retired chairman of Dow
Chemical Company, Paul F. Oreffice, observes: “If a guy doesn’t look at business as a
423 Goudzwaard, Capitalism and Progress, 248.
424 Neuhaus, Doing Well, 203.
425 cf. Dennis W. Bakke, Joy at Work: A Revolutionary Approach to Fun on the Job (Seattle, WA: PVG, 2005).
426 Novak, Business as a Calling, 26.
427 Ibid., 27.
133 vocation, he’s not gonna make it.”428 Passion and zest for work can be a powerful magnet for people in the public square.
The desire to serve human need in a meaningful way is another powerful motivation, particularly among emerging generations. N. T. Wright says it is because the world cannot imagine the New Creation that it lives in the old patterns.429 Christians can envision a different reality and it can appeal to the natural hopes of people for a better world. For example, the Greek language had two words translated by the word
“economics.” One is oikonomia, the origin of the English word, which refers to the steward to whom an estate is entrusted to manage. The other word is chrematistike which means “the pursuit of self-enrichment, for ever greater monetary possessions, if need be at the expense of others.”430 Oddly, in the west, “economics” has been associated with the second word and its connotations of greed, but greed is not essential and inherent in capitalist enterprise. It corrupts capitalism and makes it dysfunctional.431 Os Guinness’ reframes it in terms of a “calling economy” versus a “commercial economy432
428 Cited in Novak, Business as a Calling, 30.
429 “The world cannot imagine the new creation; that is why it lives in the old patterns.” N. T. Wright, “The Bible and Tomorrow’s Christian,” (personal notes from lecture, sponsored by the Ecumenical Institute of Theology at St. Mary’s Seminary and University, Baltimore, MD, February 26, 2008). Parker Palmer, too, puts it memorably: “The Gospel sees abundance where the world sees scarcity, and scarcity where the world sees abundance.” Parker Palmer, The Company of Strangers: Christians and the Renewal of America’s Public Life (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1981), 104.
430 Goudzwaard, Capitalism and Progress, 212.
431 Novak points out that the simple notion of greed fails to “explain why Andrew Carnegie gave virtually all his money away, according to a vow he made long before he gained it; or why, as he was gaining it, he did not take it, keep it, hoard it, or spend it.” Novak, Business as a Calling, 75.
432 Guinness, The Call, 141.
134
Some are concerned that orienting a conversation around spirituality will compromise truth by unwittingly capitulating to the culture. Recognizing the deep differences that lurk below the surface of the two spiritualities, Christian and pantheistic,
David Wells asserts that “spirituality is the enemy of faith.”433 He is correct in noting that many points of difference nullify the assertion that all spiritualities are, in essence, the same, and he is rightly concerned that those differences not be blurred. None of this, however, precludes beginning the discussion at the level of spirituality. One begins where commonality can be found, and then, as opportunity comes, gently raises questions designed to lead people to deeper reflection on the implications of the calling they sense.
It has the added advantage of not triggering controversial topics that stop conversations before they can begin.434 Since calling also has to do with the betterment of people
(something not always associated with Christianity), work can be the lingua franca in a pluralistic culture struggling for common language and frameworks for understanding.
Work and Personal Identity
Laura Nash states, “No longing seems more widespread than the search for recovery of personal significance.”435 Her interviewees realized that, without spiritual integration, something is missing that cannot be dismissed or denied: “I spent ten years single-mindedly pursuing success at my company, and all the time I felt I was a good
433 Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs, 161.
434 D. A. Carson, Christ and Culture Revisited (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2008), 145.
435 Laura L. Nash, Believers in Business: Resolving the Tensions between Christian Faith, Business Ethics, Competition and Our Definitions of Success (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, Inc., 1994), 19.
135 person. But increasingly, I just feel empty.”436 It is increasingly clear to people that merely pursuing financial and material success is an insufficient basis on which to build a life.
In his reflections on work, David Whyte writes: “The pivotal questions to ask ourselves in the mirror every morning, successful or no, are deep, uncompromising ones of personal identity.”437 Contemporary corporate culture, Laura Nash notes, is
“particularly problematic” in this regard because it “sends highly ambiguous or contradictory signals about identity.”438 The spiritual interest so many feel results from being “caught up in a bewildering cycle of encouragement and denial of the authentic self. A world so dominated by illusion and contradiction prompts disillusion.”439
Although American culture fosters the tendency to establish one’s identity through achievements as a kind of secular salvation by works, God’s image in the Bible refers first of all to who one is, not just to what one does.440 A person’s true identity “lies … in the fact that God made us his artwork: sculptures molded out of living flesh, kinetic art which is to become active.”441 Work does not establish but expresses identity.
Biblically, human identity is never found solely in oneself but must be discovered in relationships or in community. Business takes place in the context of multiple
436 Nash, Believers in Business, 22.
437 Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea, 155.
438 Nash, Believers in Business, 20.
439 Ibid., 21.
440 Hans-Ruedi Weber, Living in the Image of Christ: The Laity in Ministry (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1986), 57.
441 Ibid., 51. cf. Eph. 2:10.
136 relationships and entails working with people inside and outside of an organization.442
The simple act of engaging people in the public square powerfully affects one’s identity.
“In public, individuals are drawn out of self-obsession into the lives of others – and that is the first step toward finding a healthy self.”443 Palmer notes that the words “public” and
“puberty” are rooted in the same word and that “both suggest the movement into adulthood.…”444 Poet David Whyte similarly observes: “To find good work, no matter the path we have chosen, means coming out of hiding. Good work means visibility.”445
The Christian contention is that it is only in giving oneself away that one finds oneself, and many secular authorities agree. “Self-actualizing people are, without one single exception, involved in a cause outside their own skin, in something outside of themselves. They are devoted, working at something, something which is very precious to them – some calling or vocation in the old sense, the priestly sense.”446 The workplace is a perfect place to demonstrate that. As mentioned in chapter 1, one of Nash’s interviewees said, “The best times at work, when I really feel that I am living out a vocation in business, are when I’ve been in a situation that has worked out well and I have genuinely contributed to that outcome by contributing my self.”447 In his research on
442 “Most business callings are not for loners.…” Novak, Business as a Calling, 25. “On the whole, a certain instinct for community and working well with others is highly desirable, if not required. Good social habits – and even social graces – are significant assets.” Ibid.
443 Palmer, The Company of Strangers, 87.
444 Ibid., 20.
445 Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea, 146.
446 A. Dean Byrd and Mark D. Chamberlain, Will Power Is Not Enough (Salt Lake City: Deseret Publishing Co., 1995), n.p. Cited by Quinn, Building the Bridge, 110.
447 Nash, Believers in Business, 21.
137 identity and work Robert Quinn recounts numerous stories of organizations, which were changed because of the inner transformations undergone by the leaders of those organizations. “Over the years,” he says, “I have become a strong believer in the fact that the external world can be changed by altering our internal world.”448 His statement is an extraordinary insight and admission, one that he calls “deep change” and that he defines by saying that “it requires new ways of thinking and behaving. It is change that is major in scope, discontinuous with the past and generally irreversible.… Deep change means surrendering control.”449 Relinquishing is precisely what is entailed in surrendering to a call that precedes and has priority over one’s life. One’s strong conviction that one is called to do a certain thing and that it would be disobedient not to do it helps overcome one’s natural inertia and self-protection.450 Quinn labels this “adaptive confidence,” which “means that we are willing to enter uncertain situations because we have a higher purpose and we are confident that we can learn and adapt as we move forward.”451 As a statement of the dynamic of calling, his description is hard to improve.
Quinn also speaks autobiographically: “I tend to spend plenty of time seeing myself negatively. So do you. So does everyone else. When we do see ourselves
448 Robert E. Quinn, Deep Change: Discovering the Leader Within (San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1996), 217.
449 Ibid., 3.
450 The picture Quinn paints is sadly realistic. “… rather than accepting the need for deep change, most of us practice denial. We rationalize away the signals that call us to courage and growth. We work very hard to preserve our current ego or culture. To give them up is to give up control.… we strive to stay in our zone of comfort and control. Given the choice between deep change or slow death, we tend to choose slow death.” Quinn, Building the Bridge, 6.
451 Ibid., 148.
138 negatively, our self becomes a problem to be solved.”452 Understanding justification by faith can be transformative for people, for only a God who looks compassionately on people would be willing to call them into partnership in his redemptive work.
The redemptive meaning of Christ’s death has deep implications for the laity in ministry. How can we live our daily lives with that glorious freedom of forgiven sinners who need no more indulge in guilt complexes and morbid self-analysis? What does it mean for our presence in a society where one must constantly build up one’s image and ego because that society judges people by their works, their achievements, because it is a society which lives by merit and not by grace? How does our justification by grace relate to our life in a world where we can no longer remain deaf to the cries for justice among the oppressed?453
Relaxing in one’s true identity elevates one above the crushing burden of others’ opinions and provides a basis for boldness and courage to embrace the challenges of the workplace. It also opens people up to the poetry of life, an appreciation of beauty and mystery, without which they cannot find themselves or make sense out of their experience. Whyte makes this interesting observation on the need for ease and lack of compulsiveness in one’s work:
Most people who exhibit a mastery in a work or a subject have often left it completely for a long period in their lives only to return for another look. Constant busyness has no absence in it, no openness to the arrival of any new season, no birdsong at the start of its day. Constant learning is counterproductive and makes both ourselves and the subject stale and uninteresting.454
452 Quinn, Building the Bridge, 130-131.
453 Weber, Living in the Image of Christ, 34.
454 Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea, 176. Whyte makes the startling statement that “Stress means we have committed adultery with regard to our marriage with time.” Ibid., 181.
139
Work as a Window onto the Age to Come
For believers, says, N. T. Wright, true prayer is living at the intersection of the present and the future.455 Because the Christian view of life is eschatological, and work is seen as having eternal validity, the work one does can reveal something of where the universe is going in God’s plan. After all, in the Lord’s Prayer believers petition God for his will to be manifest on earth and one cannot sincerely pray that without wanting to be part of the answer to that prayer. It opens up exciting possibilities to talk with people in terms of participating in Christ’s project of making all things new, particularly as an alternative explanation to the divinization of nature. Christians must learn to speak to the imagination by painting a picture of what shalom means in their particular context,
“universal flourishing, wholeness, and delight … the way things are supposed to be.”456
Currently, things are not what they are supposed to be, however. No one escapes difficulty in this tragically broken world and there is additional suffering inherent in simply being a follower of Christ (cf. Rom. 8:17).457 Christians who enter the workplace must realize that, at some level, they are entering onto dangerous ground that is controlled by the enemy. This is the world that, after all, executed the Son of God. The terrain where work occurs is dominated by “powers and principalities” (cf. Eph. 6:12,
Col. 2:15). These powers may include institutions in the political realm as well as in the economic and technological. Some are peculiar to our age with its extraordinary scientific
455 N. T. Wright, “The Bible and Tomorrow’s Christian.”
456 Plantinga, Engaging God’s World, 15.
457 Smith, Courage and Calling, 144.
140 and technological advances.458 All, however, are characterized in some way by the
“hollow and deceptive philosophy” about which Paul warns (Col. 2:8). Whatever they are, they “seek their own goals; they build their own structures; they establish their own domains. Human ambitions, desires, hopes, and fears are their driving forces, and because of this they become superhuman systems, demonic spiritual opponents of God that subject human beings to their own domination.”459
The risen and reigning Christ, however, has revealed where history is going and what his purposes and intents are for his creation. This “ultimate reality … governs all our understanding, our action, and our hope.”460 The church is the witness to the world of the power and presence of God in the midst of the world and at the end of time. “The church … is not a separated community that can pursue its own identity apart from the world’s fate. The church is a witness to the world, in the world, of God’s coming reign in
Christ over the powers of the world.”461 The church is the first-fruits.462 It communicates
“to the world what God plans to do, because it shows that God is beginning to do it.”463
Virtues reflect the coming age, and emphasizing calling may be one of the best ways to restore an interest in virtues. Business, says Novak, “cannot go forward with realism, courage, wisdom, honesty, and integrity without a highly motivated and virtuous
458 James V. Brownson et al., Stormfront: The Good News of God (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2003), 87.
459 Ibid., 89.
460 Ibid., 87.
461 Ibid., 91.
462 Ibid., 110.
463 John Howard Yoder, “Why Ecclesiology Is Social Ethics,” in The Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiological and Ecumenical (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), 126. Cited in Brownson et al., Stormfront, 110.
141 work community.”464 He indicts churches for not emphasizing virtue and character as they once did.465 In fact, “no major institution today appears to concern itself with the standing of virtue and character in modern culture.”466 The truth is, “business is dependent on the moral and cultural institutions of the free society: families especially, schools, and public civic life. A nation’s moral culture is even more fundamental than its physical ecology.”467 Consistent and thorough teaching on vocation in churches would go far to address that situation. Once calling is understood, ideas like sin and virtue resonate in an different way.468 Far from being arbitrary requirements that threaten to suffocate life they can be seen as impediments to the fulfilling of one’s calling, which is to say, one’s real life for which one yearns most deeply.
Christians particularly stand out in the context of suffering and difficulty, simply by virtue of the hope that is in them, hope that will provoke questions on the part of others (1 Pet. 3:15).469 The culture’s tendencies to victimization and careerism tend to
464 Novak, Business as a Calling, 115.
465 Ibid., 113.
466 Ibid., 114.
467 Ibid., 115.
468 Quinn’s perspective on addiction also speaks eloquently to the destructive consequences of sin on a person’s identity. “Patterns of foolish freedom often turn to addiction to alcohol, drugs, smoking, overeating, sleep, money, power, status, sex, pornography, gambling, procrastination, and so forth. We may claim that in choosing to pursue these things, we are making our own choices – we are being free. In reality, those things we cannot help but pursue become demons ruling our lives, and we surrender our freedom to them, literally becoming their slaves. That is often when we start compartmentalizing our lives. That is often when we begin feeling hopelessness. We have reduced self-control and reduced capacity to perform and contribute.” Quinn, Building the Bridge, 179.
469 Nancy Pearcey recounts a remarkable example of the importance of hope. For some sixteen years, the music of Bach has been exploding in popularity in Japan. Founder and conductor of the Bach Collegium, Masaaki Suzuki, tells an interviewer, “Bach works as a missionary among our people. After each concert people crowd the podium wishing to talk to me about topics that are normally taboo in our society – death, for example. Then they inevitably ask me what ‘hope’ means to Christians. I believe that
142 obscure the importance of suffering.470 The response of Christian spirituality goes in the opposite direction, the conviction that, through suffering, people’s hope strengthens their endurance and character so that their hope is even further strengthened (cf. Rom. 5:3-5).
Gordon Smith calls this accepting the pain that is inherent in one’s vocation.471 It proclaims the message that “God is good, but life is unfair.”472 True hope avoids any note of triumphalism as well as an unrealistic spirit about the possibilities for redemption in this world.473 On the other hand, living in hope helps prevent the “despairing tendency to write the world off.”474 Christians are not free to do so because God has not done so.
Instead, they live in the hope of Jesus’ promised coming “to finish what he started.”475
New Passion for Work from the Theology of Work
Entire books are written in the culture about the necessity of passion in one’s work and genuine hope generates passion.476 The apostle Paul encourages Timothy to fulfill his vocation (1 Tim. 4:14, 2 Tim. 1:6, 4:1-2, 5), to embrace it with wholehearted
Bach has already converted tens of thousands of Japanese to the Christian faith.” Nancy Pearcey, Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning (Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing Group, 2010), 267.
470 Smith, Courage and Calling, 156.
471 Ibid., 152.
472 Ibid., 143.
473 “We can then no longer live with the naïve assumptions of the epoch of Enlightenment.…” Weber, Living in the Image of Christ, 37. At the same time, “we cannot join with the apocalyptic doomsayers of our time.” Ibid., 37.
474 Plantinga, Engaging God’s World, 119.
475 Ibid., xii.
476 e.g., Patricia E. Boverie and Michael Kroth, Transforming Work: The Five Keys to Achieving Trust, Commitment, and Passion in the Workplace (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, 2001).
143 enthusiasm and commitment (Col. 3:17, 23-4, Eph. 6:7-8). Passion matters, first of all, because passionate work is fulfilling work, the very antithesis of boredom. Secondly, it helps ensure that work gets done and gets done well (2 Tim. 2:15). Excellence and half- heartedness do not go together well. Thirdly, such passion shows itself in diligence and persistence, qualities that are increasingly rare in a culture of entitlement (2 Tim. 4:2).
Lastly, passion honors the work and expresses its intrinsic value. It demonstrates that work is worthwhile and serves as a powerful witness to Christian spirituality.
At the same time, it can be a danger to focus too much on enjoyment of work.477
Work done primarily for oneself, including perfectionism, is ultimately destructive.
Instead of being a tool that helps the person become more like Christ, the work, which was so promising, becomes destructive in the person’s life. It ends up being used to build the kingdom of self instead of the kingdom of God. The work becomes the focus of devotion instead of the Lord to whom it is offered. It becomes, in other words, idolatrous, even though God in his common grace may put it to good use for the benefit of others.
Thus, passion depends as much on a person’s love for God as on the content of the work itself. In fact, if work is not done out of a proper spirit towards God, two consequences follow. First, the work will not be useful as a sign of the new creation. It will be too easily subverted by the worker’s focus on self, something that will become evident when the anticipated outcome does not materialize, which is likely in the broken world in which people must labor. Christians must recognize that work does not always pay, and yet their passion clearly demonstrates that they are living for more than their next paycheck. Secondly, the person who operates out of self will not benefit personally.
477 Harris, Secrets of People Who Love Their Work, 149.
144
Work deals with more than products and processes. It is a way to develop people, to not only help them do their best but also to be their best.478
Related to passion is the contemporary idea of empowerment. “We do not … empower people. Empowerment cannot be delegated. We can only develop an appropriate empowering environment where people will have to take the initiative to empower themselves.”479 Quinn discovered that it was a mistake trying to change people
“by altering their minds. Teaching them the concept was not the key. The key was to challenge them and support them in choosing to enter the fundamental state of leadership.
I cannot inform people into tough love. I must be the change I want to see. Only then can
I invite others into that creative state.”480 This is the posture that people living out of vocation must adopt. Being faithful to one’s calling helps put people in touch with their own sense of calling and teaches them what that means for their lives.
Paradoxically, when passion is restored, Christians can rediscover Sabbath- keeping. Operating out of one’s calling is, says Smith, a great cure for perfectionism.481
Many believers have lost sight of the great rhythm enshrined in the Ten Commandments, not as something to be done legalistically but as a gift from God that puts work in proper
478 Ernie Mrozek, Vice Chairman, President and CFO (retired), ServiceMaster Company (notes from personal comments at Breakout Meeting 2, “Economists’ Perspectives”), “Civilizing the Economy: A New Way of Understanding Business Enterprise?” A Conference Sponsored by the Princeton University Faith and Work Initiative, April 9, 2010, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ.
479 Quinn, Deep Change, 228.
480 Quinn, Building the Bridge, 229.
481 Smith, Courage and Calling, 92. Gordon Smith astutely observes: “The antidote to laziness is not hectic activity. Ironically, when we are consumed by hectic activity, we are essentially doing our work and that of others, which means that we are not doing our own work well …” Ibid., 90.
145 perspective so that it is not seen as a burden.482 Stepping back from preoccupation with one’s work on a regular basis helps one maintain a more wholistic and balanced perspective on life.483 Thomas Merton captures this thought:
Unnatural, frantic, anxious work, work done under pressure of greed or fear or any other inordinate passion, cannot properly speaking be dedicated to God, because God never wills such work directly. He may permit that, through no fault of our own, we may have to work madly and distractedly, due to our sins, and to the sins of the society in which we live. In that case we must tolerate it and make the best of what we cannot avoid. But let us not be blind to the distinction between sound, healthy work and unnatural toil.484
Therefore, the compulsive pressure is off. “The apostle Paul was not asking [Timothy] to be a hero or a miracle worker but merely to remain true to his vocation.”485
A passion for one’s calling does not mean that one is “called to be or do everything for everyone who comes our way.”486 Believers are to love others for Christ’s sake, not simply to please them or avoid unpleasantness or certain reactions on their part.
Refusing inappropriate expectations is ultimately empowering and loving because it refuses to cripple people by collaborating with their illusions. Instead, it calls people to a higher responsibility. There is no greater example of this than that of Jesus himself who, when he was at the height of his popularity, refused to “entrust himself to [the people] ….
He did not need man’s testimony about man, for he knew what was in a man” (John 2:24-
482 Smith, Courage and Calling, 93.
483 Ibid.
484 Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (London: Burns & Oates, 1961), 16. Cited by Ibid., 83.
485 Smith, Courage and Calling, 94.
486 Ibid., 91.
146
25 NIV). People-pleasing is the bane of people in ministry, and developing a strong sense of vocation can help replace it with a proper motive and dependence.
Recovering the Power of Wisdom for the Workplace
Many problems emerge in the workplace for which there is no formula, but which require insight into the nature of things; i.e., wisdom. The difficulty, which constantly confronts people is that, in a fallen world, work simply does not work. In a strange turnabout, while the world has no shortage of ideas for improving work, Christians are the ones who can be the most realistic. Contemporary observers cite the new physics to justify new perspectives on reality, but their inability to recognize the reality of sin leaves a business naive and vulnerable. Christians are armed with a view of the world that recognizes the presence and operative dynamics of sin while, at the same time, holding out hope for its redemption. Christians understand the human heart, have priorities more in line with the way God has made creation, and bring different values to bear. Such practical realism has the added value of being something business people highly prize.487
The world’s ideas revolve around efficiency and power and tend to make profit all-important in ways that end up being self-defeating. The systems of the world tend to press people into preconceived molds in order to make people fit the human-made system rather than adapt organizations around the God-given talents and orientations of people.
Van Duzer rightly argues that God has a purpose, not just for individuals in business but for business per se. The purpose is wealth creation, unlocking and unleashing the potentiality built into creation in such a way that it provides goods and services allowing
487 Novak, Business as a Calling, 128. “Executive officers are paid for getting reality right and getting things done.” Ibid., 130.
147 human life to flourish, and work opportunities that allow people to express their God- given creativity.488 Profit may be an indicator, but it is not a good in itself and can never serve as the ultimate purpose of a business.489 There is power in this kind of wisdom because business can be one of the most powerful ways to help people, and believers can be in the forefront of solving contemporary issues and problems.
There may be no greater example of this than the Old Testament character,
Daniel, a teenage hostage from a foreign and defeated country. When examined by
Nebuchadnezzar, Daniel and his comrades were found to be “ten times better” than all the other credentialed people on his staff (Dan. 1:19-20). He consulted with them regularly “in every matter of wisdom and understanding” (Dan. 1:20). Daniel’s example is particularly relevant because, unlike so many other characters in the Old Testament,
Daniel did not live in the theocracy of Israel. He was embedded in a culture with foreign values, like the situation of Christian workers today.
It is not just highly visible people with positional power who can make a difference. People on every level of the organization have some kind of influence they can exercise. Middle managers, for example, are the “chief community builders” in organizations, yet are often overlooked and undervalued. “They give (or fail to give) the firm its human character.”490 Novak adds: “They are also the main trustees of the
488 Jeff Van Duzer, Why Business Matters to God (and What Still Needs to Be Fixed) (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Academic, 2010), 41-2.
489 Neuhaus, Doing Well, 190. Increasingly, secular writers are asserting the same thing. cf. Joseph H. Bragdon, Profit for Life: How Capitalism Excels;Case Studies in Living Asset Stewardship (Cambridge, MA: Society for Organizational Learning, 2006). Also, C. Otto Scharmer, Theory U: Leading from the Future As It Emerges (Cambridge, MA: Society for Organizational Learning, 2007).
490 Novak, Business as a Calling, 29.
148 integrity and moral practices of the firm. They are its moral and intellectual spine.”491
Patricia Aburdene agrees, pointing to the central significance of middle managers as one of the key “megatrends” of the early twenty-first century.492 Like Daniel, their wisdom can have an impact simply by asking questions that frame the situation or the problem differently. They can raise questions about who is being served by various proposals and how they will benefit others and help them flourish. They can offer innovative suggestions that would not necessarily occur to others but the wisdom of which is self- evident. They will always need to be wise and judicious (cf. Col. 4:5) and have a sense of timing in pressing the point (Prov. 15:23), but courage has always been a prerequisite for effectiveness.
For this to happen in the twenty-first century, believers must exercise discernment, something that is cultivated over time. As Brownson observes, it is a lot easier to rail against evil than it is to “probe the subtle complexities of sin.”493
Our task is to understand the powers of today’s world as they really are, not in the oversimplified caricatures that our fears or our desires produce. We need to identify their systemic tendencies, their aims, their driving motivations, and their destructive and constructive effects. We need to perceive how we are involved in their operations.494
491 Novak, Business as a Calling, 29-30.
492 Patricia Aburdene, Megatrends 2010: The Rise of Conscious Capitalism (Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc., 2005), 46-65.
493 Brownson et al., Stormfront, “The devil is enormously clever in misleading us, especially where power is involved.” Ibid., 93.
494 Ibid.
149
What is more, “All these powers operate in an economic system that no one finally controls.”495 Brownson goes so far as to say that “the church owes the powers of the world a ministry of social imagination.”496 Because the church is bound all over the world by a common Spirit and transcends national and cultural boundaries, it can call attention to global realities that might not be visible to others.497
The witness of work is a different kind of witness from that which plays out in the political arena. It stands in contrast to the pietism that withdraws into one’s own inner experience and is also more optimistic than the so-called “remnant view of the church.”498 It holds far more hope for the world than an “apocalyptic assessment of the future course of history.”499 Instead of seeking to win culture wars, which generates paranoia in others and the results of which are questionable, this approach works from the inside out, just like Jesus said would be true about the kingdom that he proclaimed.
Professional theologians cannot think through the complexities to spell out in detail what this means in all the various professions and institutions in today’s society.
Discerning God’s will and discovering the concrete steps of obedience must be worked out on the front lines by people living in similar professional and institutional milieus.500
They are the ones whose dominion is being restored in Christ, and it is through them that
495 Ibid., 95.
496 Brownson et al., Stormfront, 101.
497 Ibid. “The church of Jesus Christ was global long before the powers of finance and business, were.…” Ibid., 102.
498 Mouw, He Shines in All That’s Fair, 3.
499 Ibid.
500 Weber, Living in the Image of Christ, 9.
150 cultural change will come. What that looks like and how it transpires is the final issue to be explored.
CHAPTER 8
CALLING AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF CULTURE
Referring to Acts 13:36, James Davison Hunter asks how the church can serve
God in this generation unless it grasps “the unique and evolving character of our times.”501 Many would also echo Nancy Pearcey’s opinion that “Christians need to move beyond criticizing culture to creating culture.”502 The work people are called to do is one of the most significant vehicles for creating culture and something God provides for human flourishing. It seems reasonable to conclude that people faithfully pursuing their callings would make the world a far different place.
The Inadequacy of Politics for Cultural Change
A few decades ago, people like Carl Henry were calling Christians to move away from a focus on personal salvation that was too often at the expense of the social dimension of the faith.503 Today, many have moved beyond evangelism and praying for revival to more direct cultural involvement.
501 Acts 13:36 states, “For when David had served God’s purpose in his own generation, he fell asleep; he was buried with his fathers and his body decayed.” James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 197.
502 Pearcey, Liberating Christianity, 58.
503 e.g., Carl F. H. Henry with foreword by Richard Mouw (2003), The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1947). Summarizing Carl Henry’s critique of Fundamentalism in the 1940s, McGrath writes: “Fundamentalism had totally failed to turn back the rising forces of modernism, achieving no significant impact upon the world of its day, 151
152
However, the situation seems to have swung to the other extreme by putting too much confidence in politics as the primary vehicle by which justice is established.
George Barna sees various faith “tribes” in America vying for dominance but having each other checkmated.504 Increasingly, they resort to legal and political tactics to dominate the other faiths, but it reduces social interactions.505
Not only is there far more to culture than just the political dimension; politics fails to witness to the kingdom of God and is powerless to change the human heart. The politicization of faith and public life reduces people’s spiritual imaginations to what is merely political when there are more creative options available.506 A political culture emerges that thrives on “injury and grievance .…”507 It fosters “an identity rooted in resentment and hostility is an inherently weak identity.…”508 Discourse becomes negative and confrontational with little room for the demonstration of love or constructive ideas509
because it failed to address the social problems of its time.” Alister McGrath, “Calvin and the Christian Calling,” in The Second Thousand Years, ed. Neuhaus, 74.
504 Barna says “the country is dying a painful death and nobody seems to have much of a solution.” Barna, The Seven Faith Tribes, vii.
505 Ibid., 22. Barna goes on to say that “people’s inability to experience the religious freedom guaranteed under the Constitution is causing them to feel as if the nation is losing its heart and soul, and along with that, its greatness.” Ibid., 23.
506 Hunter defines politicization to mean “that the final arbiter within most of social life is the coercive power of the state.” Hunter, To Change the World, 106. Things have evolved to the place, he says, where “ideals and values that are discussed in public have been largely reduced to instruments for one side or another in the quest for power.… they have become political slogans.” Ibid., 172.
507 Ibid., 173.
508 Ibid.
509 Ibid., 174.
153
One of the reasons Christians fall into the political trap is because they confuse cultural engagement with kingdom-building. Only God can build the kingdom, however.
Jesus made it clear that the kingdom is hidden in the current milieu like yeast in dough: out of sight and incremental yet destined to transform everything. When and how that happens is in God’s hands, not the Church’s. “The Kingdom is God’s to give and to take away; it is only ours to enter and accept (Matt. 21:43; Luke 12:32). We can inherit it, possess it, or refuse to enter it, but it is not ours to build and we can never destroy it
(Matt. 25:34; Luke 10:11).”510 Confusing the kingdom with culture “tends to lead to one version or another of the Constantinian project … to ‘take over’ the culture …”511 Once that happens, Christians are prone to whipsaw between triumphalism and despair.
The Importance of a Public Faith
Some Christians seek to remain separate from the world as much as possible, hoping simply that a few individuals will change along the way.512 Such a perspective, however, is dualistic and isolates the realm of things like politics, economics, science, art, and education, and relegates theology, church, soul, morals, and meaning to another realm that is disconnected from the ordinary world in which people live.513 Such a posture betrays the lordship of Christ by abandoning areas that rightfully belong to
510 Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs, 214.
511 Hunter, To Change the World, 233.
512 John A. Olthuis, “Building a Curriculum with the Kingdom Vision,” in To Prod The “Slumbering Giant”: Crisis, Commitment, and Christian Education (Toronto: Wedge Publishing Foundation, 1972). Cited by Frey et al., All of Life Redeemed, 72.
513 Frey et al., All of Life Redeemed, 73.
154 him.514 It is also hostile to Christian faith, despite its pretensions to neutrality and objectivity.515 “Together,” says Peter Kreeft, “our mind-molding media constitute a nonorganized religion of missionaries who are evangelizing religious people out of their primitive superstitions like poverty, chastity and obedience and into the missionaries’ new, ‘enlightened’ religion of greed, lust and pride (that is, money, sex and power).…”516
George Weigel writes of the “Christophobia” of western culture and articulates the urgency and the stakes that are involved.
A post-modern or neo-Kantian neutrality toward worldviews cannot be truly tolerant …; it can only be indifferent. Absent convictions, there is no tolerance; there is only indifference. Absent some compelling notion of the truth that requires us to be tolerant of those who have a different understanding of the truth of things, there is only skepticism and relativism. And skepticism and relativism would seem to be weak foundations on which to build and sustain a pluralistic democracy, for neither skepticism nor relativism, by their own logic, can ‘give an account’ of why Europeans should be tolerant and civil.517
Unlike secularism with its vision of a naked public square, Christians believe it is “the will of God that Christians be tolerant of those who have a different view of God’s will,
514 Ibid., 72.
515 “It is not just any worldview that we encounter in the postmodern world, but one that increasingly resembles the old paganisms. It is one that is antithetical to that which biblical faith requires. It is this transformation of our world, this emerging worldview, which has passed largely unnoticed.” Wells, Above All Earthly Poww’rs, 157-158.
516 Kreeft, How to Win the Culture War, 53. Hunter says that “the realm of ‘common grace’ is, by no means, a neutral space…. In the contemporary world, neutrality is the pretence of all secular establishments,; a myth concealed by its hegemony.” Hunter, To Change the World, 233.
517 George Weigel, The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics without God (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 110. Weigel observes: “The original charge against Christians in the Roman Empire was that they were atheists .…. The Christophobia of contemporary European high culture turns this indictment inside out and upside down.” Ibid., 109.
155 or no view of God’s will …” and the interactions of the workplace and marketplace are an important arena for demonstrating that.518
The contrasting perspective of the Bible is that all of creation is fallen but that all of it is redeemable as well. That includes civilization and the roles people play in it; i.e., their jobs.519 The public realm is part of God’s created reality and part of his common grace.520 Creation is not simply the backdrop or playing field for the conflict; it is itself what is at stake in the conflict. “God will manage to rescue not just human beings but the entire project of human culture from the vanity of Babel.”521 The creation that was formed by God in the beginning and then deformed by sin is to be ultimately reformed by the redemptive activity of God.522 Every job arena has been affected by the deformity of the world and requires some shaping.523 Just as every person contributes to and participates to some degree in sin, so every believer is part of what God is doing in the world in anticipation of the world to come. Humans wrecked creation; humans are to
518 Ibid., 111.
519 Mattson and Miller, Finding a Job, 55. Mattson and Miller call attention to 1 Cor. 6:2, which refers to believers exercising judgment in the new world viewed as something paralleling what people do in this world. Similarly, people’s jobs here will have some kind of counterpart there.
520 Martin Marty, cited in Palmer, The Company of Strangers, 16.
521 Crouch, Culture Making, 123. To put it another way, “culture … is not just the site of human rebellion against God … it is also the site of God’s mercy.” Ibid., 124.
522 Some of the most eloquent voices on behalf of this are not even Christian. Guenter Lewy, “neither a Christian nor a theist,” set out to refute critics of secularism by arguing why America did not need religion. As he researched and wrote, however, he reversed himself and ended up arguing for the strategic importance of religion for culture. The evidence, he came to believe, led to only one verdict: “No society has yet been successful in teaching morality without religion.” Guenter Lewy, Why America Needs Religion: Secular Modernity and Its Discontents (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1996), 133.
523 Plantinga, Jr., Engaging God’s World, 120.
156 renew it.524 Hunter extends the implications of the Great Commission to mean more than just individual conversion.
... the great commission can also be interpreted in terms of social structure. The church is to go into all realms of social life: in volunteer and paid labor – skilled and unskilled labor, the crafts, engineering, commerce, art, law, architecture, teaching, health care, and service. Indeed, the church should be sending people out in these realms – not only discipling those in these fields by providing the theological resources to form them well, but in fact mentoring and providing financial support for young adults who are gifted and called into these vocations.525
Failure to embrace culture, then, is a failure to go into all the world (cf. Mk. 16:15).526
The power of interaction on this level is precisely because it is prepolitical.527 It is critical for the witness of the church, for its “vision of human unity … means very little if not acted out in the public realm.”528 Novak notes that John Chrysostom believed that economics displays the unity of the human race.529 Bringing vocation to one’s economic activity is a visible evidence of the divine work of reconciliation to which the church testifies.530
The Influence of Individuals on the Workplace
Hunter takes issue with the hopes that many Christians place in the conversion of large numbers of individuals as a way to change society. He argues that culture is more
524 Wolters, Creation Regained, 73.
525 Hunter, To Change the World, 257.
526 Ibid.
527 Palmer, The Company of Strangers, 25.
528 Ibid., 26.
529 Novak, Business as a Calling, 46.
530 Palmer, The Company of Strangers, 30.
157 than the sum of people’s individual beliefs.531 Rather, “culture is about how societies define reality …” and “Cultural change is most enduring when it penetrates the structure of our imagination …”532 Evangelicals have tended to underestimate the role of culture in shaping people’s beliefs and determining what makes faith plausible and comprehensible.
Cultural change does not take place one by one at the grassroots level but is established more from the top down: “… the work of world-making and world-changing are, by and large, the work of elites, gatekeepers who provide creative direction and management within spheres of social life. Even where the impetus for change draws from popular agitation, it does not gain cultural traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites.”533 It is telling that, despite the large majorities of people who profess Christian faith and who are involved in church, the culture is being lost.534 In striking contrast,
Jews (3.5 percent of the population) and gays (3 percent at the most) are far more influential.535 Even the emphasis on promoting a “Christian world and life view” unwittingly reinforces the very dualism that needs to be eliminated.536 Worldview thinking often overlooks “the institutional nature of culture” and undervalues “the way culture is embedded in structures of power.”537Andy Crouch, too, “recognizes that culture
531 George Barna seems to assert this when he expresses a popular view: “A nation gets revolutionized from the bottom up.” Barna, The Seven Faith Tribes, 192.
532 Hunter, To Change the World, 42 and 41.
533 Hunter, To Change the World, 41.
534 Ibid., 19.
535 Ibid., 20.
536 Ibid., 27.
537 Ibid.
158 is more than just a worldview. The heart of culture, rather, is constituted by things; the things we create.”538
While this insight is a welcome counterbalance to naïve views of cultural change, the fact remains that the people who make cultural goods are people who work at their jobs. Even after the Fall, culture-making remains at the heart of the human commission and the power of good deeds ought not to be underestimated. Good deeds need not refer only to charity work but also to what believers produce through their jobs. Weigel observes that “history is driven, over the long haul, by culture – by what men and women honor, cherish, and worship: by what societies deem to be true and good and noble; by the expressions they give to those convictions in language, literature, and the arts; by what individuals and societies are willing to stake their lives on.”539 The Church as an institution may not Christianize the world, and the work of individuals may be limited in its effect unless embedded in social structures, but, if people simply did their jobs well, the world would be a better place. Mere servants in Caesar’s household (Phil. 4:22) do have access to Caesar and may very well influence him. Christians also bring a unique perspective because they “see abnormality where others see normality, and possibilities of renewal where others see inevitable distortion.”540 As their minds are progressively
538 Ibid.
539 Weigel, The Cube, 30. “‘We have learned that ‘politics is downstream from culture, not the other way around,’ says Bill Wichterman, policy advisor to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. ‘Real change has to start with the culture. All we can do on Capitol Hill is try to find ways government can nurture healthy cultural trends.’” Cited by Pearcey, Liberating Christianity, 18-19. In a footnote Pearcey writes: “Bill Wichterman, in discussion with the author. Wichterman develops his thesis in greater detail in ‘The Culture: Upstream from Politics,’ in Building a Healthy Culture: Strategies for an American Renaissance, ed. Don Eberly (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), 76-101.”
540 Wolters, Creation Regained, 88.
159 renewed, believers, especially, can envision a different reality borne out of the hope of future shalom and show the way to a better life for everyone.
The significance of individuals’ work can be seen in the fact that it appears that some of the fruits of this culture-making will endure through redemption. Old Testament prophecies of shalom “apply to the future of a very solid, tangible, visible earth.”541
On this view, Fripp Island, S.C., will be a part of heaven. So will the Lake District in England, the Schwarzwald of southwest Germany, and the Great Barrier Reef off the eastern coast of Australia. Banff will be included, and the islands of Indonesia. Kenya’s game preserves will still draw visitors, and so will the mountains of northeast Korea.542
Thus, everything people do now for and in Christ has enduring value (1 Cor. 15:58) and will continue in some way in the next world: “…none of it is wasted or lost. All of it acts like salt that eventually seasons a whole slab of meat, or a seed that grows one day into a tree that looks nothing like the seed at all.”543 God does not throw believers away nor does he discard the culture, which has resulted from their God-given creational mandate.
“Swords will have to be turned back into pruning shears, switchblades into paring knives, and spears into garden hoes.”544 To say that work does not have ultimate significance is not to say it has no spiritual significance.545 Because believers see through a glass darkly
(1 Cor. 13:12), the real value of what they do may not be fully apparent in this life at all.
541 Plantinga, Engaging God’s World, 137.
542 Plantinga, Engaging God’s World, 137.
543 Ibid., 138.
544 Ibid.
545 Hunter, To Change the World, 253.
160
The Unique Opportunities and Responsibilities of Leaders
Leaders in this culture are privileged and susceptible to an elitism that can easily lose sight of Jesus’ pointed declaration that the “great” are not those who hold high positions and “lord it over” others, but who exercise a servant heart in all that they do
(Matt. 20:25-28).546 The same can be said for the contrast between celebrity culture and the virtue of humility.547 Leaders have a unique opportunity to set the pace and direction for others. Leaders can influence organizations to take an open and accepting view of people’s expressions of faith, and they can lead the way in developing “faith-friendly policies to honor, respect, and dignify the spiritual dimension of employees’ lives.”548
To function well over the long haul, business requires, not confiscation, but sacrifice. Quinn argues that organizations “need leaders who take risks and who care enough to die for the organization – which would kill them for caring.”549 Or, to put it another way: “If you are not risking your job, you are not doing your job.”550 When he asks, “Who is willing to die for this vision?” Quinn is pointing, unwittingly or otherwise, to the central reality of Christian faith, a person who gave up his life for others.551 If
546 Ibid., 259. “The paradox is that all Christians are called to a life of humility …. Yet leadership inevitably puts all in relative positions of influence and advantage. There is no way around this paradox and it is especially acute the more social influence one has.” Ibid.
547 Ibid., 260.
548 Miller, God at Work, 150.
549 Quinn, Deep Change, 156.
550 Ibid. 156.
551 Ibid., 197. Quinn’s faith is unknown to the author, but it is interesting that he cites the Journal of John Woolman and writes that it is “considered a literary treasure.” Ibid., 217. He also quotes Thomas Merton. Quinn, Building the Bridge, 98. If Quinn is not a believer, it highlights a running theme of this paper, namely, that the world is more ready to hear deep insight from Christian spirituality than is often thought, that the challenge lies with the church to become at once more authentic and more coherent in the way it expresses its faith, and that the doctrine and experience of calling are essential to that occurring.
161 believers are not prepared to do that through their work, then it is not Christ’s faith that they share. Perhaps that is what Thomas Merton meant when he said: “You can tell more about a monk by the way he uses a broom than by anything he says.”552
552 Cited in Philip Yancey, Rumors of Another World: What on Earth Are We Missing? (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2003), 63.
162
Workplace as Community
Everything in Scripture indicates that people are meant to live and work in community with one another. Novak observes that “most goods today cannot be produced through the work of an isolated individual,” so most people work with others in what they do.553 Hunter argues that culture is generated within networks. In contrast to the “great man” view of history,554 “… the key actor in history is not individual genius but rather the networks and the institutions that are created out of those networks.”555
Community can take place on a number of levels, whether in an office or with vendors or customers and clients, lawyers and government officials, or bankers and suppliers. Every interaction is an opportunity to demonstrate the value of people and treat them as more than simply a means to greater profits. Increasingly, these people are located all over the globe. “Capitalism is not solely about the individual. It is about a creative form of community.”556 Even the corporation may be understood as “a partial but important form of human community.”557
A special challenge for zealous believers is to make sure that they are champions for policies and practices that benefit and are fair to everybody, not just those who share their own faith perspectives.558 They must resist the temptation to think of themselves as just another aggrieved interest group trying to redress perceived wrongs. The Christian
553 Novak, Business as a Calling, 125.
554 Hunter, To Change the World, 37.
555 Ibid., 38. Italics in original.
556 Novak, Business as a Calling, 126.
557 Ibid., 127.
558 Miller, God at Work, 7.
163 agenda, properly understood, is not primarily for Christians at all. Unlike the world’s practice, Christians are to be in pursuit of biblical justice for all people.
…[this] means a constructive resistance that seeks new patterns of social organization that challenge, undermine, and otherwise diminish oppression, injustice, enmity, and corruption and, in turn, encourage harmony, fruitfulness and abundance, wholeness, beauty, joy, security, and well-being.559
Equipping Faith Communities to Make a Difference
Christians are already situated in strategic places throughout the culture. What they lack is understanding and teaching so they can recognize the significance of their work and the grand possibilities of being a spiritually shaping instrument of God in the place they already are. They do not need to change jobs or move to another part of the world or go to seminary. They need to have their imaginations fired by the Holy Spirit to enlighten them to see how they could point the way to shalom in their current setting.
Vocation must be constantly nourished in people’s hearts so they do not lose sight of its significance. More than a theme for a series of sermons or an occasional Sunday school class, calling must become part of the very fabric of life and thought in the church. .
The church’s role is crucial because it is unique and functions as “a plausibility structure and the one with the resources capable of offering an alternative formation to that offered by popular culture.”560 Calling lends itself to that formation because it requires people to pay attention to their interior world from which life issues (Prov. 4:23).
Putting forth calling as a central idea around which to organize discipleship teaches the disciple from the outset that the walk of faith is more than simply conforming to the
559 Hunter, To Change the World, 247-248.
560 Ibid., 283.
164 outward life of the congregation. It helps keep the church from colluding with people’s illusions so that they can avoid dealing with the painful realities of their own souls.
Providing platform time for something in the church signals to everyone that it is important and merits consideration. Pastors must routinely ask how the texts they are preaching on speak to workplace issues, not just issues in the church or in society at large. People could resource their pastors with illustrations of the kinds of tensions they face in the workplace so they can be used in messages. They could also share testimonies, especially ones that illustrate the way God works in settings outside the church itself.
Regular liturgies could be used that focus on the significance of daily work for God.
Small group leaders could be trained to ask questions that take work concerns into account. The mention of service projects becomes an occasion to remind people that service is not just programs and volunteer projects but something that should characterize their work throughout the week. It must be constantly reiterated that giftedness is not only, or even primarily, for one’s own personal satisfaction, but rather for service to others in love. Finally, the church could have people share their stories about how God has led them into new understanding of their calling or blessed their calling in some way.
The matter of discernment is particularly important, for it is notoriously difficult to discern one’s calling. Because it touches on the deepest concerns and longings of people’s hearts, they are vulnerable and frightened by it. Many are not skilled in the art of being quiet and alone with God in listening prayer or used to thinking of preparing their hearts so that they are able to discern well. The issue of vocation, then, must be taught in a gentle and encouraging way that manages expectations so people do not become defeated at the outset and give up entirely. They need to know that they are setting out on
165 the journey of a lifetime, not just a brief sprint for a season. The skills they learn will be with them for the rest of their lives, and the understanding of vocation that they discover will only deepen in rich and marvelous ways as the years pass.
Although vocation is deeply personal, the discernment of it is not individual for callings must be recognized and affirmed by others. A calling no one else recognizes is open to suspicion. It is as possible for a person to be self-deceived as it is for others to misperceive who they are. The Lord of the church, typically, employs others to help people see themselves more accurately. Thus, mutual interaction and encouragement
(Heb. 10:24-5) would naturally include questions of vocation. Classes on spiritual gifts could expand beyond teaching on talents and gifts to include broader questions of life vocation. People would be on the lookout for one another’s gifting and vocational shape as they discover the joy and pleasure in providing feedback to others on how God has designed them, for to behold a person’s design and discern it in any depth is to see something of breathless beauty.
The difficulties and dangers of work provide many occasions for discouragement and getting stuck along the way that may require the gentle prodding of others to keep on going. “Modern progress has a coercive quality” and people will always be confronted by the curse that is placed over labor and that turns work into toil, toil that is that is stressful, tedious, monotonous, wearisome, and sometime even dangerous.561 There is no way this side of the eschaton to resolve these tensions entirely, so people must be constantly reminded and encouraged to do what they do for God in the spirit and expectation of Col.
3:22-24. The reality of being faith-walkers instead of sight-walkers must become a source
561 Goudzwaard, Capitalism and Progress, 197.
166 of genuine excitement and anticipation as people realize that, when people’s “tasks are done before God, they have their own integrity apart from anything else they might accomplish, for the labor itself brings honor to God.”562
At the same time, work can be an addiction and serve as an escape from the real life to which God is calling people. Particularly when people work out of giftedness and calling, an unusual power often seems to accompany their efforts. The results of their labor are out of proportion to the energy being expended. Unless one’s heart is in sound spiritual condition, it is easy to become enamored more with the work than with the God for whom the work is to be done. Attention shifts from the Lord of the work to the work as Lord, and the sacrifices that accompany false worship ensue as “tasks … become godlike in the way we sacrifice family, healthy, friendship, and church on their behalf
.…”563 Neither the work nor the gifting must be central. Instead, people must be taught to be “Presence-centered” in their lives and labors.564
Spirituality should be taught in vocational terms as well. Spiritual disciplines should not just be presented as a way to find personal peace and satisfaction but also as a way of equipping and preparing oneself to be used by God in vocation. Helping people become formed so that they can fulfill their callings is, after all, what spiritual formation is. God’s reclamation and re-formation of souls is not a cookie cutter operation that produces spiritual clones. God delights in the unique, the one-time, the eccentric, so the more the Spirit reigns in a congregation, the more eccentric it should be (2 Cor. 3:17).
562 Hunter, To Change the World, 247.
563 Ibid., 247. Italics in original.
564 I am indebted to Leanne Payne for this concept and terminology. Leanne Payne, “Restoring the Christian Soul through Healing Prayer,” conference at Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL, July 12-16, 2004.
167
Such eccentricity should be actively encouraged and celebrated. As people become more accustomed to thinking in terms of their callings and become less concerned about comparing themselves with others, they will feel a freedom to enjoy each other’s successes without envy or insecurity. They will discover that every person is a being of incomparable wonder that surpasses anything else in creation. What people are seeing in each other is not mere giftedness but the glory of God. In the final analysis, that is what all people really desire, even if they do not yet fully realize it.
Churches must beware of the convoy mentality that seeks to get everyone on board with the latest momentum-building program to generate energy. Helping people live out of their callings will sustain motivation in the long run more than programs can.
The proper way to motivate people is by appeal to vocation and the desires of the heart.
When people are not sensitive to their callings they are more vulnerable and likely to get into spiritual trouble. The question of how clear people’s thinking is on vocation should be included in the spiritual direction and coaching that takes place. Gradually over time it may be that vocational thinking becomes such a part of the church that it is part of the spiritual DNA of the congregation. Passages, such as Hebrews 10:24-25, that exhort believers to give careful thought to how they may stimulate each other “toward love and good deeds,” will be understood to include, if not be mainly comprised of, the love and good deeds that people’s jobs and callings afford them. They will no longer be seen as an add-on or an extra element in people’s spiritual lives; they will be the very substance of those lives at every time and in every place and circumstance in which God places them.
Churches will know this vision is getting traction when people of like mind and/or in comparable work situations begin to form small groups around their vocational
168 concerns. There are a good number of worthwhile books, including thoughtful books by non-Christians, that reflect well on the idea of vocation and right livelihood that groups could digest together. Church is also a wonderful networking environment in which to meet people with whom one might not otherwise come into contact. Perhaps there will be connections formed that lead to innovative, entrepreneurial projects that are a form of mission in the community. It is impossible to imagine ahead of time the kinds of things that could be generated; the only certainty is that of being surprised and even astonished at what the Holy Spirit prompts in people’s hearts and imaginations.
Finally, while cognitive learning alone is not sufficient for sanctification, it is nonetheless an essential element. Without proper theological grounding, people do not have maps by which to navigate the complex issues, which confront them in daily living.
In his research on revivals and spiritual renewal, Richard Lovelace notes that, in
American history, later waves of revival that had less theological grounding were less deep and lasting.565 He sets forth “theological integration” as one of four “secondary elements” of ongoing spiritual renewal. The ministry of teaching, then, will include all four spheres represented by the “four E’s” (ethics, evangelism, experience, and enrichment).566 There should be a conscious effort to ensure that teaching occurs on specific themes and topics that are relevant to the workplace, such as creation, humanity,
565 Richard Lovelace, Dynamics of Spiritual Life (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1980), 179.
566 Miller, God at Work, 147. Miller also raises an interesting question as to whether certain theological orientations predispose people to concentrate their efforts in particular quadrants. Ibid., 151. Even if that is the case, it may be only another instance of how it takes many different churches and traditions to capture the total multi-faceted picture of Christ. As with spiritual giftedness in individuals, certain traditions will be stronger in some areas than others. Still, as with spiritual gifts, churches are not absolved from responsibility for areas in which they are not strong, and they should teach all four “E’s.”
169 calling, ethics, justice, and prayer.567 Creation, in particular, is a critical and foundational issue for, unless this presupposition is challenged and corrected, much of the rest of
Christian teaching will ring hollow and lack transformational power.
It is the church, then, that holds the most promise for real cultural change, not simply technological or political change: “… the church is the largest and most diverse voluntary association in America today…. There is no other institution which involves so large a segment of the American public on so regular a basis.”568 All of this will be done in the spirit as so ably articulated by Novak: “It is not so much that we should pray as we work as that we should intend our work as a wordless prayer.”569
567 Ibid., 147-148.
568 Palmer, The Company of Strangers, 30.
569 Novak, Business as a Calling, 146.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
James Davison Hunter takes note of the fact that “in our late modern world .… words now seem to fail us. Language no longer reliably connects us to the world around us.”570 David Miller agrees: “My research leads me to the conclusion that ‘speaking different languages’ is one of the chief obstacles to fruitful clergy-businessperson dialogue.”571 The lack of language also means the paucity of ideas and creative approaches to people in the-world-God-loves. This paper has sought to re-introduce the concepts and vocabulary of calling or vocation. It is language that validates at the outset the significance of people’s work in the world. Although the language belongs to the
Church by birthright, the world has been quicker to seize upon it than the Church. While the Church has been fighting political battles and arguing for objective or absolute truth, other voices in the culture have been focusing on the longings of the heart for purpose and meaning in work.
This is a time of radical shifts in thinking itself. In physics and medicine the movement is away from a linear, Newtonian conception of the universe. That shift is causing people to rethink what corporations are and how they behave and to see them as
“living, organic systems, communities of people with diverse skills, closely integrated with Nature and society, and focused on serving life.”572 They are properly calling attention to “one of our few unlimited resources – the human imagination.”573 The real
570 Hunter, To Change the World, 238.
571 Miller, God at Work, 146.
572 Bragdon, Profit for Life, 3.
573 Ibid., 10. 170
171 resource in capitalism is imagination and innovation. The new business environment gives rise to a vocabulary of “presencing” and “learning from the future as it arrives.”574
Some look to Buddhism for notions of “right livelihood.”575 Life is increasingly seen, not in terms of conquering and controlling nature, but of interrelatedness, webs and self- organizing systems, and that change in perspective is congenial soil for an emphasis on calling.576 Spirituality is in the air, and Christians must be bold in entering that conversation in a redemptive way, not just criticizing and condemning but collaborating and clarifying.
The world is laboring increasingly under what Orthodox theologian David Hart calls “metaphysical boredom,” “a kind of boredom with the mystery of life itself...”577
His indictment is penetrating:
A culture – a civilization – is only as great as the religious ideas that animate it; the magnitude of a people’s cultural achievement is determined by the height of its spiritual aspirations. One need only turn one’s gaze to the frozen mires and fetid marshes of modern Europe, where once the greatest of human civilizations resided, to grasp how devastating and omnivorous a power metaphysical boredom is. The eye of faith presumes to see something miraculous within the ordinariness of the moment, mysterious hints of an intelligible order calling out for translation into artifacts, but boredom’s disenchantment renders the imagination inert and desire torpid.578
574 Scharmer, Theory U, 8, 39, 51-52.
575 cf. Marsha Sinetar, Do What You Love, the Money Will Follow: Discovering Your Right Livelihood (New York: Dell Publishing, 1987). Also, Marsha Sinetar, To Build the Life You Want, Create the Work You Love: The Spiritual Dimension of Entrepreneuring (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995).
576 Seidman calls it “the business-is-war, information-is-power, to-the-victor-go-the-spoils world of run-and-gun capitalism” and asserts that it “no longer exists.” Dov Seidman, How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything ... In Business (and in Life) (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2007), xii.
577 David B. Hart, “Religion in America: Ancient and Modern,” New Criterion (2004).
578 Ibid.
172
Change is so vast and rapid that it intensifies the sense of being adrift. The prevailing evolutionary paradigm does not provide a satisfactory account for why such longings as those for meaning and significance persist, nor does its myth of progress feel right any more to increasing numbers of people. Instead of a fulfilling and rewarding life, progress seems to have wrought a depersonalized, commodified world that has created a crisis of faith (i.e., in progress) for contemporary society.579 Meanwhile, jobs are being lost and not replaced. Newspapers, watches, landline phones, and the post office are on their way out, and a brave new digital world is unfolding at an ever-faster pace. It is no wonder that people are yearning for some stability and continuity in the midst of it all.
The idea of calling addresses this pervasive sense of meaninglessness. It dignifies and ennobles people as well as the work that they produce. It also allows a different entry into people’s hearts and imaginations. It can be introduced into conversation in an inoffensive way. It gets beneath surface moralistic concerns to the interior life. At the same time it provides people with a vocabulary for discussing that interior life, which is crucially important because it is there that people will and must find God in their lives.
Above all, the classic Christian doctrine of vocation accounts for this yearning and addresses it in a way nothing else can.
579 Goudzwaard notes that with an “increasing adaptation to the demands of the evolution of progress” individual sovereignty diminishes. Goudzwaard, Capitalism and Progress, 110. Even the government surrenders a part of its sovereignty and adapts to the system of progress. Ibid., 111. The cultural perspective narrows as everything is subordinated to technique and economic achievement as ends in themselves. Like an airplane, which must constantly move forward or fall, the very survival of the economic system depends on constant progress. “No stability exists other than the one based on progress. Every part of the social system is directed and geared to this stability.” Ibid., 137. (Italics in original.) The upshot is this: “The West has learned to live by faith in progress, in hope of progress, and out of love toward progress …” Ibid., 151. For the idea, Goudzwaard cites Eberhard Ernst, “Die Fortschrittsidee in Wirtschaftslehre Und Wirtschaftswirklichkeit [the Idea of Progress in Economic Theory and Economic Practice]” (Ph. D. dissertation, University of Mannheim, 1951), 8.
173
Behind the different uses of the words “calling” and “vocation” lay different spiritualities. The world’s version is optimistic, private, individualistic, subjective, and non-institutional. It is focused on connecting with one’s inner self or inner divinity, listening not to the Word that comes from outside of humankind but to one’s inner yearnings and desires. Rather than learn dependence on God, it seeks self-sufficiency and autonomy. It substitutes the confining boundaries of one’s own small story for the liberating story of the ages that God is unfolding and is summed up with a “sigh” rather than a “summons.”580 One is eclectic, a merely “generic” spirituality. The other is “Jesus” spirituality, one that has been visibly demonstrated in the life of the greatest world- changer of history.
Calling speaks to this cultural moment, and it does so in on multiple levels. It would change the terms and manner in which evangelism takes place. Not only does it provide a point of contact for coherent interaction and dialogue with one’s neighbors at work and in the community, but it fosters a healthier, more genuine spirituality in believers which has been lacking for some time. The skills that enable a person to discern calling and maintain an awareness of it are the same skills that foster and sustain a spirituality of the heart. To pursue genuine biblical calling is to pursue genuine biblical spirituality, the only kind that will be able to have an impact in the world or in one’s own heart. Only a more authentic spirituality will arouse people’s curiosity and desire to explore further. They will explore because they are already exploring; spirituality is already on their minds. Armed with an understanding and ability to speak in coherent and compelling ways about the issues of the heart Christians can engage people in non-
580 Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs, 125-136.
174 judgmental ways, in ways that feel more like coming alongside for mutual dialogue and exploration than facing off in a confrontation of truth. The confrontation will come soon enough, for beneath it all are dynamics that only the Spirit of God can surmount.
However, that is precisely what God is doing. He is not waiting for his church to conjure up ministries and programs. He is already at work in the world he loves looking for his
Church to align its desires and dreams with his will, even as it prays for that will to be fully realized on earth as in heaven.
This paper maintains that for a church to take this idea seriously and integrate it in the ongoing life of the congregation would be revolutionary. It would lead to a de facto decompartmentalization of people’s lives and carry spirituality into the workaday world through the lives and individual callings of believers. It would focus the understanding and process of spiritual formation. It would provide a motivation that is not dependent on trying to generate energy through ever more creative and exciting programs. Dov
Seidman believes that, because the world is structured differently now, the thing that most differentiates one’s enterprise from others is the “how.”581 An organization full of people operating from a sense of calling could make an unimaginable difference.
It would root people in the nature of eternity itself, for calling does not change.
Who God has called people to be in this world is who God has called them to be forever, although the full implications of that glorious reality are only seen through a glass darkly at the present time. Coming to terms with one’s calling is really a coming home to oneself. It is the prodigal coming to realize who he really is and where he belongs and
581 Seidman, How, 51.
175 beginning the long journey home, a home that has never stopped calling to his soul but which he could not hear until he “came to his senses” (Luke 15:17).
It has been done before. Most people would be surprised to learn of Christians in past eras that demonstrated wisdom by devising policies that were years and years ahead of their time. The Guinness empire in Ireland provided its employees benefits that
“surpass those even envisioned by modern companies like Google and Microsoft.”582 A similar story can be told about the Quaker roots of the Cadbury chocolate company.583 It needs to be done again because, “if we seek to return to the golden age of memory where we feel safe and at home, we reveal our distrust of the God who calls us forward.”584
582 Stephen Mansfield, The Search for God and Guinness: A Biography of the Beer That Changed the World (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2009), xix. Such benefits included access to on-site dentists, nurses, pharmacists, a masseuse, savings bank, lending library, and educational classes. Ibid., xx. They subsidized meals and funeral expenses. “Every year, every employee was paid to take his family into the country for an ‘Excursion Day.’ Train fare was paid and money for food and entertainment was provided.” Ibid., xxi.
583 Deborah Cadbury, Chocolate Wars: The 150-Year Rivalry between the World’s Greatest Chocolate Makers (New York: Public Affairs, 2010). James Hunter does a nice job of envisioning the possibilities of “faithful presence” in the areas of business and commerce; visual arts, literature and music; architecture and urban planning; news media and academia; and public discourse. Hunter, To Change the World, 265-266.
584 Palmer, The Company of Strangers, 70.
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