Callings, part 4 (and final part)

As Placher enters the "fourth historical period" that he calls "Christian Callings in a Post-Christian World, 1800-present," he notes that modern writers have given more attention to the notion of what Karl Marx called "alienated labor." If you have been following this blog, you might recall the notion was often used by Miroslav Volf. Whereas monastic life was viewed early on as a true call from God and all other forms of life and job fell short of the ideal, so the Protestant Reformation shifted thinking that every occupation could be a calling from God. However, the Protestant Reformation also had a tendency to "sanctify" ordinary work and life to the point that some writers began to question whether we should think of anything particularly unique or special about a Christian's calling. German Lutheran Dietrich Bonhoeffer would later write about the "Cost of Discipleship" and the importance of obedience married to faith in the Christian life. Karl Barth wrote, "Protestantism successfully expelled monasticism by recalling the fact that klesis (calling) is the presupposition of all Christian existence. But it lost sight of the divine grandeur and purity of this idea which were always in some sense retained even by monasticism...." (p. 434). To put it bluntly, what's so special about a call from God when everyone has one whether sought out or not?

Nuance regarding jobs and calling grew as we entered an industrial and information age and much of society veered away from an agrarian society. As Placher writes:

Jobs can seem not only meaningless but actually destructive of our lives as Christians. Store clerks and computer programmers miss church because they have to work Sundays.... on average people work longer hours than they did a generation ago, and a long commute often adds to the length of the working day, with less time to spend with spouses and children, less time to be an active church member or an active community citizen. Corporate careers regularly involve multiple moves... parents and grandparents get left behind, to be visited only on rare occasions. In such a context, to urge people to think of their job as the call from God that gives their life meaning may be to push them in exactly the wrong direction, toward centering their lives ever more on jobs that already obsess them.  Callings, p. 327

Certain Christian writers like Jacques Ellul reacted to the Reformation idea of every job being a vocation, i.e. call from God. Ellul made the case for the Bible always speaking of a summons or special invitation to a particular task when using the language of calling. Work is necessary for survival but not as a “superfluous spiritual decoration” (p. 328). Our jobs do not give our lives meaning and the Bible never claims they do, so believed Ellul. American Baptist James Holloway wrote that we don’t know what the prophets and apostles did to earn a living because this wasn’t important to their calling from God; work is not a vocation (p. 328). Stanley Hauwerwas cautions us against making more of work than we should, that work is nothing more than “the means to survive, to be of service to others, and perhaps most of all, … gives us a way to stay busy” (p. 328). Even Miroslav Volf believed that the term “vocation” should be lifted from the Christian idea of work.

So much being written in recent years against the notion of “job as vocation,” Placher pushes back some by seeing there to be high value in many kinds of work but also that vocation can mean a lot of things for a lot of people. Early on priesthood and monastic life comprised an individual sense of call. At other times, like the ones in which we live, Christians have felt “called” to secular jobs or possibly to family life. As Placher writes, “We do not have to limit ‘vocation’ or ‘calling’ to one meaning and then vote it, in that sense, up or down” (p. 330). Job as vocation should stay on the list, but not as the only option. At the end of the day humans want to know, does my life have meaning and purpose?




For some of us, the center of the answer may lie in our jobs- from doctors curing patients to landscapers making the spaces in which people live a bit more beautiful. For others, our jobs will be meaningful primarily only in that they help us support our families, and it will be in the nurturing of a family that we find the core of our life’s vocation. For still others, a hobby may create a community and reward not found in a paid job. Still others may find the activities of their church the work that most gives meaning to their lives. Even on the job, some people may find the support and friendship they give their co-workers more significance than the doing of the job itself. Indeed, in an age when once again committed Christians in Europe and North America may find themselves a minority voice in their society, simply being publicly a Christian, as in the early church, may itself be an important calling…. These are not, moreover, brand new issues…. What should I do with my life? How can I know? Will I find something that gives my life a sense of purpose or meaning? Even through the context in which we ask such questions has grown ever more complex, the Christian tradition still provides us with a range of resources for thinking about how to answer them.  Callings, pp. 330-32