THE CHRISTIAN’S CALLING IN THE WORLD
By Marc Kolden
Part
1. God’s Work in Creation
How are Christian believers to live appropriately in the world of daily
life, to live as morally good people in the world we call “secular?” And how do we think that God is related to
that world? What follows is a proposal
for a way of thinking that tries to be true to the Bible and to the heritage of
the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation—a “framework” to help Christians
understand and live in the exciting and daunting world of the early
twenty-first century and surrounded by moral questions and ethical debate.
First, some background. To speak
of life in the natural and social world a Christian must speak of the doctrine
of creation. The Christian doctrine of creation says that
nothing exists with which God is not involved.
The biblical understanding of creation tells us that in our daily life
we have to do with God because God gives daily life and this earth and our
neighbors and even our social structures.
God gives these in large part now through human activity, but it is
still God who gives all these things,
according to the Bible.
The most important point for us to remember is that the biblical view of
creation is not that “once upon a
time” God created these things and now they just run of their own accord. The Bible says that not only did God create
in the beginning but that in every moment God is creating, that each of us and everything in the world depends
upon God continually creating and preserving or we and everything else would
cease to be. Martin Luther knew this: in
his Catechisms he speaks of the God who “has created and still preserves my eyes and ears and all my powers” and who “daily
provides abundantly” for all the needs of my life.” Psalm 104 is the most vivid portrayal of
this; the whole Psalm is about God’s creative work and most of the verbs—the
action words—are in the present
tense.
We often forget this and are misled in our
thinking and speaking. For example, we
may say about someone that “she doesn’t have a relationship with God.” What we probably mean is that this person
doesn’t believe in God, but it is dead wrong to say that someone isn’t related
to God; people wouldn’t be alive if God weren’t relating to them in every
moment. A famous preacher once said that
you can tell if God is working in your life if your nose works! (He got that also from Psalm 104.)
Another thing we often say is that “God works
through the church.” Of course. That is a good thing to say, but we sometimes seem to imply that God
isn’t working anyplace else. And that is
dead wrong again. God is constantly at
work in the whole world, not only in the church or among believers. One of our tasks as Christ’s followers is to
proclaim the truth about God so that all those in and through whom God is
working but who don’t know it yet may hear and believe.
Second, why so much emphasis on God’s creative work? Because it doesn’t make much sense to speak
of our roles in the world as divine callings if the world has nothing to do
with God. If the world were godless or
totally secular, then why would we have any divine callings there at all? Yet in our time that is how many people,
including many believers, think about the world. We say, “it’s a godforsaken place.” Or, our experience of life’s trials and pain
is so great that we think God must be somewhere else. Or, sin in so prominent in the world—just
watch the evening news—that we can’t see how the world can belong to God.
And there is truth in those feelings.
We can’t deal with the world only
as God’s good creation, even though the most important thing the Bible says
about all of God’s creative work is that it is “very good”—and that even
includes God’s verdict on each of us (Gen. 1:31). Yet we all know that this is not the whole
story. The Bible also speaks of sin.
And when it speaks of sin, here too it doesn’t just speak of “once upon
a time.” The apostle Paul wrote that
“all [of us] have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom.
Therefore, sin is a very important qualifier of the world’s
goodness. Yet we shouldn’t let our
belief in the seriousness of sin make us forget that God still creates anew
each day and that everything that comes from God is good—even though we
constantly pervert it. This is true for
human beings as well: that which we are essentially—human—is good, even though we constantly misuse
and demean our own humanness. The point here is this: for the Bible the
existence of sin is never a reason to abandon the world, as some Christians
mistakenly have thought. God’s still
gives us roles, duties, tasks, relationships, responsibilities, opportunities,
and challenges precisely in the world; and God gives us the commandments, and
our own reason and abilities, and our societal institutions and communities, to
aid us in living in the world. Our faith
helps us see this and sets us free and motivates us to serve in the world.
Third, we need to ask how this emphasis on God’s creative work relates to
our salvation in Jesus Christ. Sometimes
Christians have thought (wrongly) that salvation is an escape from the world—a
flight to heaven, a preoccupation with the “spiritual” over the material, a
retreat to religion away from daily life.
But this does not fit with the way the Bible portrays God’s saving act
in sending Jesus Christ. Jesus came
because God so loved the world; he
took on flesh and became truly human; he came that we might have
abundant life; and our eternal hope
is for the resurrection of our bodies
and for a new heaven and a new earth. Jesus enacted what was always true: that God
is a “down-to-earth” God. Our sin is
when we flee the earth and our humanness, our neighbors and our callings in
daily life—when we don’t believe God’s word that it is good to be a human
creature and instead seek to rise above our creatureliness and “lord it over”
others or (conversely) to sink beneath our human status and flee from freedom
and responsibility into mere sensate existence (giving in to despair, drugs,
cynicism, conformity, or whatever).
Redemption through Christ is to reclaim and restore, and complete and
fulfill, the creative work of God—not to abandon it. Christianity first of all is about life, not
religion. The Sabbath was made for
people, not people for the Sabbath.
Believing in Christ and receiving the forgiveness of our sins is to set
us free to be faithful creatures,
people who can believe once again that this life is good because it comes from
God, who can see other people not merely as competitors or “pains in the neck”
or interruptions or enemies but as neighbors—as
those through whom God comes to us and to whom God comes through us.
If we are in Christ we are new creations.
We are restored to play a role in God’s world, even in the midst of our
own and the world’s sin. One of the
temptations of Jesus was to worship the devil as the “ruler of this world;” but
to give into this temptation would have been for Jesus to “let the world go to
the devil” even though the world actually belongs to God. This very well may be our temptation also,
especially in difficult times, but here we are well advised to stick with
Jesus, in whom God was, reconciling
the world to himself, not letting it go to the devil.
Part 2. God’s Work through Us
Now we must get more specific about what it means that we have divine
callings in the world. Here we can
benefit greatly from Martin Luther’s insights because his understandings of
faith and life were developed in a situation of struggle and conflict about the
very heart of the Christian life. His
new understanding of the Christian’s worldly
calling (or “vocation,” the Latin form of the same word) became central for him
in contrast to his previous calling as a monk.
Even in the midst of the harshness of life in the early sixteenth
century, with wars, plagues, poverty, and oppression, Luther rejuvenated the
biblical teaching of God’s ongoing, ever-present creative work. Not that God controls everything—humans are given a certain amount of freedom
and responsibility for things on earth—but that since God gives all life, God
is involved in some way in everything.
As Luther portrays it, God gives new babies through fathers and mothers;
God raises children through parents, other family members, and teachers; God
creates food through farmers and soil and sun and rain, and then through
millers and butchers and processors and distributors. Even if people don’t realize it, they serve
God as God works through them in their roles, using their activites to keep the
world going and bless its inhabitants.
How did Luther come to think this way?
And why should we? It all
followed from his major discovery that we are saved by faith in Christ and not
by doing good works for God (which then were supposed to cause God to judge us
to be righteous). Luther saw in the New
Testament that good works (or “works of law”) have no role in gaining our
salvation. Christ does it all when it comes
to salvation and graciously forgives our sins and gives us faith, new life, and
salvation. So then, Luther asks, What is
the role of our works? He answers that
when God in Christ sets us free from
worrying about achieving our own salvation God also sets us free to live life on this earth in ways that
are faithful to our being God’s beloved creatures in the world. We know then that God works through us to do
his will on earth and that our good works are one of God’s means of caring for
the whole creation.
This would seem to be quite clear to Lutherans, but many followers of the
reformer have gotten it mixed up. They
have talked a lot about being saved or “justified” by faith, but they have
wrongly thought that this means that God arbitrarily decided to save those who
believed that they are saved by their faith
rather than those who believed they were justified by their good works. That is crazy thinking because it turns
“faith” into the “good work” of believing!
God has a reason for saving us
through Christ’s atoning life and death rather than what we do and the reason
is this: God does not need our good
works. All the monastic practices that
Luther rejected—religious exercises, buying indulgences, saying a thousand
prayers, fasting (things also urged on the laity in general and not only on the
monks)—didn’t do anything for God and, even worse, they kept people from doing
useful works for the good of other people.
Luther saw what the apostle Paul had been talking about in the first
place: that God saves us by faith in Christ and not by works so that our works can be directed toward
those who really need them—our neighbors.
(And a “neighbor” is anyone in need, as the parable of the Good
Samaritan shows us.)
To put this in strict doctrinal terms: Christ frees us from the law as a means of achieving
salvation for living according to the
law as a means of benefiting others by promoting good and restraining
evil. This latter is what Luther called
the “first” or civil use of the law,
for the good of life in the world. But
if one tries to use keeping the law as a way of gaining salvation, then Luther
spoke of the law’s “second” or accusing
use, because the law will always also
reveal our sin of not keeping it fully or gladly, of not loving our enemies or our
neighbors as ourselves. Luther located
Christian vocation in the sphere of the first or civil use of the law. And he also realized that anytime we deal
with the law its second or accusing use will be close at hand. (We will come back to this later.)
How did Christians in
Luther’s time respond to his insights?
At first, they were puzzled because it was almost exactly the opposite
of what they had always been taught. It
was clear to Luther because he had been caught up in the monastic system that taught
that the only people who had real callings to serve God were those in full-time
religious service—especially monks and nuns and also priests. When he rediscovered the apostle Paul’s
insight that salvation is by grace through faith, apart from works, he realized
that it had been completely backward to say that the only people who have
divine callings are those who seek to gain salvation by works. So he took the same word, “calling” or
“vocation,” and applied it instead to ordinary Christians. He said that it was not the professionally
religious who had callings from God but rather all believers have divine
callings. In fact, he added, most of the
activities that the professionally religious were engaged in should not be
named “callings” at all because they are of little or no earthly good. Luther took
vocation out of the religious realm, where works have no value, and put it into
daily life—the only place where works matter.
People who had thought they were only second-class Christians, and who
thought that they only served God when they attended worship or prayed or gave
money, were astonished to hear that when the gospel called them to faith it
also revealed that all the activities of their lives were areas in which God
was calling them to serve and in which God wanted to work through them. Aspects of life that previously had seemed
merely matters of circumstance or birth (e.g., race, gender, nationality,
appearance, aptitude, family situation, age, occupation, citizenship, etc.)
were given a new interpretation: these were all ways in which God had given
them life and where they could and should serve God by being faithful
creatures; that is, faithful to what that
aspect of life asked of them. Doing
so would enable God to work through them in regular, reliable, and effective
ways. (This is very important for
ethics. The role itself guides people
toward morally responsible actions. See
pages 10-11 below.)
One does not have to become a monk or a nun, Luther said; one does not
have to go on a pilgrimage to
How is it possible that you are not
called? You have always been in some state
or station; you have always been a husband or wife, a boy or girl, or
servant. Picture before you the humblest
estate. Are you a husband, and you think
you have not enough to do in that sphere to govern your wife, children,
domestics, and property so that all may be obedient to God and you do no one
any harm? Yea, if you had five heads and ten hands, even then you would be too
weak for your task, so that you would never dare to think of making a
pilgrimage or doing any kind of saintly work.
(From the Lenker edition of Luther’s Works, v. 10, p. 242.)
Note
that “calling” or “vocation” does not only mean one’s occupation. It sometimes has come to mean that in our
society (as in Vocational Technical Schools), but that is much too narrow. Luther called people’s occupations
“vocations” primarily to make the point that all the Christian’s activities in
the world can be places where we serve God, even daily work. He made this point against a religious system
that had denigrated secular occupations and primarily emphasized religious
roles. For the same reason Luther
emphasized the calling of marriage and having children, in contrast to the
monastic ideal of celibacy. In truth, Luther’s
view of divine callings was exceedingly broad, including being students,
children, government officials, citizens, elderly, and all sorts of other
private and public roles and activities.
We in our time should not make the opposite mistake of so exalting as
divine callings only occupation and marriage that these become new forms of
works righteousness and suggest that single people or the unemployed do not
have divine callings—exactly the opposite of what Luther was saying.
All
Christians have callings to serve God by seeking the common good in every
aspect of life in which they find themselves or which they choose to
enter. Notice that this is not to claim
that God calls anyone only to certain tasks; nor is it necessary that persons
stay forever in the same sort of work or role in order for God to work through
them. Luther’s point is: wherever we
are, there we are called. Only if we
cannot serve God there, or God cannot work through us there, since some
occupations and roles do not allow one to love one’s neighbor, must we change. In saying this, Luther again was broad in his
intention, not limiting love to the neighbor only to some very uplifting or
sacrificial types of service, but seeing even the most common acts as part of
God’s working through people if these acts were for the neighbor’s good.
It
is important at this point to address a common criticism made of Luther’s ideas
on vocation. He often quoted the advice
of the apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians that Christians should stay in the
situation in which they were called (1 Cor.
Part 3. Our Work with God
Now, let’s look at some examples of how we might think about our callings
in God’s world. Suppose you are an adult
who is fortunate enough to be employed for pay.
In faith you will see your job not only as a means of making a living or
of building your career or of being able to do other things, such as traveling
or buying a boat; but in faith you would see your job as a means by which you
work with God to keep the world going and get other people loved (including
your family, if you have one, but many other people as well). If your work is teaching, for example, then
the love you are to show to your neighbors (students, their parents, staff,
school board, community, others) is not only or primarily that you are nice to
them but that you teach students things that are true and useful and important
for living in God’s world. That might be
auto-mechanics, math, literature, nursing, or even theology! The point is that God works through you as a
teacher and you work with God there to equip others so that the will be able to
work with God also.
Or, suppose that you work in a business.
Serving your customers accurately and efficiently, serving your fellow
employees and the business itself so that it is profitable, which in turn serves
the community in which it is located and less directly the nation and the
world: all these are fairly obvious parts of the job to believers and
non-believers alike. But as a believer
in God, you will understand that in all of these ways you are also serving God
by helping to keep this part of God’s world going and providing in various ways
for what God’s world needs. This
awareness also may lead you to make certain decisions in your work or to work
harder than you otherwise would have; it may even lead you to challenge certain
practices or policies of the business.
The point is that in all of these ways you are working with the God who
calls you in this role.
If one of your callings is being a member of a family (whether as child,
parent, grand-parent, spouse, sibling, in-law, or whatever), then that too is a
role in which God is served as we care for and about other family members. Or if you are a farmer, while being able to
make a living economically obviously is very important, it cannot be your only
or primary goal if you understand what you do to be part of God’s work of
feeding the world’s people and of contributing to the surrounding
community. At a time when family farming
in North America is becoming more and more difficult, simply knowing that one
works with God also by farming will not in itself solve the problems, to be
sure; but it will put farming in a larger context than only the political or
economic aspects to which farm problems often are reduced, because it will take
people, the environment, the affected communities, and matters of justice more
seriously. On the other side, confidence
in God’s goodness and steadfast love may be what frees people from making an
idol out of farming (or any other occupation or way of life) when it is necessary
to think about other ways of working with God.
Looking at life in terms of God’s calling us opens up our situations for
thinking in terms of God’s will and God’s presence in ways which otherwise
probably would not happen. This may
result in our seeing some new directions or solutions; it may give us
encouragement and patience or resolve and perseverance; and it may help us to
call it quits in some role without thinking that there is no other place in
which God could call us. Someone has
said very wisely: “Respond to every action upon you as if it includes also God
acting upon you.” We still have to
interpret what is happening in such cases; we still have to make decisions and
take actions; but we will do so confident that the God who comes to us in Jesus
Christ is involved in the seemingly mundane and often difficult aspects of
daily life.
A point that Martin Luther often makes, that probably surprises us, is
that while most of our roles and places of responsibility in life are good
because they are created by God, the devil attacks us precisely in these good
callings in order to lead us astray, to lead us away from serving the good of
others and instead to seek only our own good.
This can happen in many ways, according to Luther. The devil might tempt us to think that God
may not have (or surely could not have) called us to a particular role we have
and would urge us to leave it, perhaps because it is not pure enough or it is
not worthy of our ability. But giving in
to that temptation also might mean leaving neighbors whom God needs us to
love. To be sure, some invitations to
move to a new job or other situation rightly will be seen as God’s call; but
the devil is subtle and seeks to deceive us in many ways—whether in staying or
leaving. That is Luther’s point. Certainly TV advertising is a means that the
devil can use to promote values and ways of living that undermine what God
calls us to do. The multiplication of
lotteries and gambling could be seen as a way that the devil tempts us to seek
to become rich, which would have as one of its results that we would quit our
jobs (and the neighbors we serve there) and live only for our own
pleasure. Would God call anyone to enter
the lottery? Yet millions of people are
answering someone’s call to do so. We
must not be naïve when we serve God in worldly callings.
As might be obvious from all of these examples, simply believing in Jesus
Christ and believing that we are called to serve him in our roles in daily life
will not always tell us what we are
to do or how we are to do it. The Bible does not teach us how to cut hair
or drive a tractor or run a computer; and though it does say some things about
being parents and citizens or about responding to humans in crisis, even there
faith by itself may not give us enough guidance. Martin Luther was pretty clear about this:
the gospel of Jesus Christ has to do with our salvation; it is not to be used
to run the world. Over the centuries
some Christians have tried to run the world according to the gospel, with
exclusive Christian communities or by trying to put gospel practices (e.g.,
loving one’s enemies) into society directly, but such experiments have usually
been very strange, if not disastrous, and have ended up back in works
righteousness—for if you do not live in a certain way, then you aren’t a “real”
Christian.
Luther’s point was that God guides our way of life in the world through
the law or divine commands (and not through the gospel); and he understood
commands or law to be not only the Ten Commandments or the two Great
Commandments but what he called “natural law,” by which he meant God’s will
built right into the world itself and available to some extent through human
reason. If God’s will is part of God’s
creative work, when it comes to our helping to keep the world going and our
neighbors loved we will be able to rely on the insights, knowledge, and
scientific discoveries that are available in the world and to all who can
think—and not only to believers.
For example, we do not learn a language or how to operate a machine
primarily by praying; rather, we go to school or take lessons and we study and
practice. We do not just preach the
gospel to people so that they will be good, but we pass laws and enforce them,
knowing that people are not only capable of good but also are sinful. It may be that a non-believer or a member of
another religion learns faster or is better at something than a Christian
is—all people are God’s creatures, after all, and according to Romans 1-2 all
people have some knowledge of God’s will.
The difference will be that Christians know that in dealing with the
world we are also dealing with God; which means, at the very least, that we
will deal with the world and its ways with the help of God’s law.
Some Christians, including many Lutherans,
have thought that we should only say bad things about God’s law. But the law is only bad when it intrudes on
our salvation, when we think God only saves us or forgives us when we do so
many good things that we deserve it.
Then the law is bad because it tempts us to think that Jesus’
crucifixion for our sins was unnecessary.
And that same law will turn on us, revealing our sin (where we have
broken the law, where we have hated what the law commands, or even hated the
One who gave the law) and driving us into despair or rebellion against
God. That is why Luther and others often
have said bad things about God’s law—because sinners get it all messed up. But on
earth, Luther said, the law is the most wonderful thing in all creation; in
fact, he even says that on the human and historical level we can be justified
by keeping the law! That is, in society we correctly judge some people
to be “righteous” or “good” on the basis of their achievements or character or
their principles. And we correctly
condemn others because of their hateful or vicious or thoughtless actions or
statements. On earth these conclusions, based on the law, are important. Life would be chaos without them. With this clarification, we can get back to
the way the law works in our callings.
If God’s law in some ways is God’s own will built right into the whole
creation, this means that we will know
God’s will in a certain situation by the demands of our role itself. If you are a parent, for example, God’s will
in many ways is defined by what is required to be a parent (interpreted in
faith, to be sure, but with help from psychology, hygiene, nutrition, common
sense, and the like). An infant screams
to be fed and expresses God’s will; the parent feeds the child and does God’s
will. The child loves being loved, held,
played with, being sung to, being told stories; in these needs God’s will is
made clear for those who care for the child.
Clearly, some aspects of parenting are much more complicated than this,
but even so we should not ignore or forget the obvious: that the requirements
of our roles themselves tell us what God’s will is and how we are to work with
God
Likewise with marriage: God’s will is that husband and wife love and
honor each other until one or the other dies.
God may not have willed for two people only to marry each other (in any
manipulative sense, at least), but once they do marry then God’s will for them
is built right into the institution of marriage itself: making a home,
supporting each other in many ways, probably having children and caring for
them responsibly, caring for each other in sickness and in health, in good
times and bad, cherishing each other—to name only a few things. Of course, in any society, a lot of other
(non-divine) demands get built into marriage also, so that many people marry
with hopelessly unreal expectations regarding happiness, sexual satisfaction,
self-fulfillment, etc. This means that
working with God in marriage will involve faithfully sorting out rightful opportunities
and demands from those that are impossible or unwise. But if we think of marriage as a calling by
God this will help us in our sorting out how we might work with God to achieve
what God intends by marriage. Even if
the marriage suffers an irreparable breakdown, so that divorce finally is
judged to be the only possibility, for those who understand marriage to be a
calling this action will be taken only after doing everything possible to
improve and save the marriage; in that case, even the process of divorce will
honor the calling of marriage.
The point is that we will find God’s will (and therefore what is right,
good, or responsible) in and through the demands and contexts in which we find
ourselves. Not that the will of God can
be equated with all demands upon us (or opportunities in front of us); many
will be anything but divine. Rather, the
demands will confront us in our various places and roles in such a way that we
will have to ask what is loving and just for the particular neighbors that God
has given us in this time and place. And
in responding in terms of our calling we will first of all do what our roles
and duties suggest or require. We do not
have to do some other thing to be doing God’s will or working with God.
Part 4. Faith and our Callings
Almost everything we have considered to this point has been about our
life in the world, with its needs and activities and with things not normally
considered to be religious or specifically Christian. What about what we often call “the Christian
life,” the life of worship and prayer, of fellowship and Bible study, of
evangelism and acts of service and mercy?
Are we to neglect these things?
Sometimes that has been a problem with an over-emphasis on Christian
vocation—it gets reduced simply to ethics: to being a good citizen, worker, and
family member, while the role of faith in Christ and everything that faith
involves gets minimized. Yet without a
close and living relationship with the One who calls, how would anyone have a
calling? Or, to say it in another way:
to live one’s life under God’s law alone, in the context of our worldly roles
and duties, would not sustain anyone’s faith, hope, and love.
When we review the origin of the idea of Christians having callings in
the world, we realize that it came as a biblically-rooted corrective to an overly-religious way of life for Christians,
epitomized by certain forms of monasticism.
Devoting all of one’s life to things religious had led to denigrating
God’s world and God’s ongoing creative involvement in the world. It had “spiritualized” the Christian life in
an inappropriate way. (“Spiritual” in
this inappropriate view meant primarily non-material
or non-worldly, while “Spirit” in the
Bible [i.e., as the breath of God] is related both to the creation of the
world, including matter and humans, in Gen. 1-2, and to the incarnation,
literally, the “enfleshment” in the world of God’s Son, according to the N.T.)
Anytime something begins as a corrective the danger exists that it too
will become one-sided if it succeeds and the original problem situation no
longer exists. In some instances, that
has happened with the idea of worldly callings; people have reduced them merely
to occupations or other roles with no sense of God’s involvement. On the other hand, it probably can be argued
that Christians and other religious people perpetually are tempted to retreat
into the supposedly “spiritual” life (in its non-biblical and anti-material
sense). If that is true, it means that
resurrecting the idea of worldly callings is important even in our age that is
no longer dominated by Christian beliefs and institutions, because it offers
Christians an appropriate way of understanding life in light of their faith in
Christ.
Then what do the gospel and Christian faith mean for or contribute to
Christian vocation? It has already been
stated that God does not intend to govern daily life by the gospel; it also has
been said that non-believers actually serve God without knowing it as they
carry out their roles and responsibilities.
If these things are true, does faith add anything? Does the gospel have anything to do with our
callings?
One way to answer these questions is to look at the experience of
Christians in their callings. An
immediate answer for many would be prayer. When the going get tough, Christians pray for
help. When things are great, Christians
thank God. When faced with important
choices and decisions, Christians ask God for guidance. When we make wrong choices and act badly and
fail, we pray for forgiveness. If we
give it some thought, much of our prayer life has to do with our callings—as
family members, in relationships, at work, in our communities, at school, in
emergencies, illness, and death, for our system of government and public
services. (Some people pray every time
they hear a fire engine’s siren or that of a police car or ambulance; the sound
becomes a call to prayer—for the people in the vehicles and for those they are
sent to help. And maybe for other
things—as long as they are praying anyway!)
Of course, we also pray at other times (for example, at meals, in the
morning, before going to sleep, at worship, etc.), but prayer in and for our
callings is an important way that our faith in God affects our life in our
vocational roles. Prayer reminds us that
God cares about who we are and what we do in our roles; prayer gives us a true
perspective on what otherwise often might seem to be just a bunch of trivial
matters. Prayer opens us up to think
about what God might want for that situation, for those neighbors, and for the
larger context. Through prayer God may
give us new ideas, may open us up to receive help from others whom we had
ignored, or may help us to realize when there is nothing more we can do. Prayer should help us to say “Not my will but
thine be done, O Lord.” It may lead us
to acknowledge our sin and repent. In
all of these ways, prayer offers ways for God to become part of the situation
that had not been available before—at least not available through us and
through and for those whom God has given us.
Without elaborating the following points, we could acknowledge from
experience or simply from what we have been learning so far that faith in
Christ and the hope that comes with it motivates
Christians to be fervent in love, dedicated to justice, and generous in
mercy. Faith in Christ will affect our values, perspectives, and goals, as it draws on biblical pictures
of God’s steadfast love and righteousness, of God’s passion for the oppressed
and those who are suffering, and of God’s desire to seek and save all
persons. Faith helps give us understanding of the world and of God’s
will that becomes part of other things we know and learn and teach; this in
turn will contribute to our ability to figure out what needs to be done and
what we can do about it. Faith brings
things into focus, it helps us see
and perceive more truly—no small feat in a world as diverse as we now see ours
to be. Faith may give us courage and selflessness so that when extraordinary things are asked of someone
we will be able to respond. Finally,
faith should make us properly critical
in each situation and role in which God calls us. Sin persists, not least in and among persons
of faith; roles become “old” and self-serving even though once they may have
been excellent means of service; situations often are not what they seem to be
and must be looked at with appropriate skepticism. In a culture where so much emphasis is put on
material success and individual happiness, faith’s critical role is very important
in all the areas in and to which God calls us.
The last point calls for some additional comments. With the heavy emphasis on serving God in the
roles that are provided in the created world and being guided in doing this by
God’s law as built into these roles, there is a constant danger that we will
lapse into a sort of “status quoism.” We will simply go along with the way thing
are or do things only in the traditional way; we will take the path of least
resistance (and perhaps most pay)—and it will not necessarily seem wrong since
it fits with other roles and locations that already exist. Many people in Nazi Germany excused
themselves for their involvement in the persecution of Jews by saying that they
were simply doing what they were told to do by their superiors—which was what
they had been taught about Christian vocation.
However, any historical expressions of the law and the stations and
offices of a society can become damaged and perverted, so that sometimes
Christians will need to be so critical that they will break the law in the name
of loving the neighbor, whether that involves hiding Jews or illegal aliens,
speeding while taking someone to the hospital, breaking segregation laws,
withholding taxes, taking part in protest demonstrations, using one’s position
to block unjust and immoral activities that it would be easy to overlook,
etc. Often this will involve conflicts
between one’s various callings—as citizen and family member, for example, or as
whistle blower and employee, as a friend of people and as one who reports those
same friends for child abuse. We should
not be surprised at this, so it is important to lift up this critical aspect of
faith’s relation to vocation.
Insofar as the church also is an institution
of the created world, it too will share in being part of our service according
to God’s law—though never apart from the gospel and faith, as we have just
seen. While the church’s essential work
has to do with serving the gospel of Jesus Christ (both in believing and living
it and also in telling it to others), we will also have worldly callings that
are part of the church, whether those are volunteering our time and talents to
programs and institutional concerns or supporting God’s work through the church
with our money or trying to help in conflict situations within the church.
Another aspect of our lives as Christians
must be mentioned at this point. In
addition to our worldly vocations, Christians also have a unique calling with respect to the mission of the church: that of
responding to Christ’s command to be his witnesses. Clearly, faith will be of great help in this
area and it will drive us more deeply into worship, prayer, and study. In the context of this study, we need to
raise the question of whether bearing witness to Christ has any role in our
worldly vocations. If we follow the
Bible, we cannot say that God only calls us to our roles in daily life, since
all Christians are called to be disciples and to make disciples. (See Matt. 28:16-20 and Acts 1:8, for example.) Confessing our faith in Jesus Christ to all
people is essential to being a Christian.
It is our unique task, since if believers don’t bear witness to Jesus,
who else will? None of us could even
know about our callings in daily life if we hadn’t first heard the gospel of
salvation through Christ from someone confessing that good news to us.
The reason for not dealing with Christian
witness as a separate topic until now is that we cannot talk about everything
at once—and in this study we are dealing with the Christian’s calling in the
world. However, the matter of bearing
witness to our faith does come up in our vocations, so it needs to be
mentioned, at least.
It often comes up in roles that are not at
all religious and perhaps not very meaningful in themselves. Consider the following: I used to go to a
barber who was a member of our congregation.
Each time I had my hair cut he would tell me that he wasn’t a very good
Christian because he found it so hard to talk to his customers about his Christian
faith. I responded that when I went to
him for a haircut my interest wasn’t in whether or not he talked about Jesus
but whether he gave me a good haircut. I
said that his giving me a good haircut was a way of loving his neighbor—me and
other people who had to look at me. But
he could not agree; his view of God did not really include God’s intimate care
and concern for all aspects of life, even the hairs on my head. I certainly was not against his bearing
witness to Christ, but I think that as a barber his first responsibility to the
God who called him was to be the best barber he could be. That in itself is valuable. And if he was good enough that people would
come back again and again then there might be some very appropriate times when
people he has gotten to know well over the years will be able to see his true
values or hear of his faith or be helped by him in other ways in addition to
having their hair cut. But if he is so
concerned with witnessing that he gives poor haircuts, that is neither serving
God well nor will his words be a very credible witness. They might even drive some customers away.
While some situations in our occupations and
elsewhere provide easy and natural occasions to speak of faith in Christ, often
this is nearly impossible and sometimes even illegal. To be sure, Christians always must be
prepared, when someone calls them to account, to make a defense for the hope
that is in them (1 Peter 3:15), but to do this when no one is calling us to
account often will be counter-productive and we will be written off as some
sort of religious fanatics.
Understanding our roles as callings, as divine vocations, however, may
suggest some opportunities for bearing witness that are both quite natural and
highly effective. Many Christian spend
long hours in their occupations and in other roles along with other people who
are doing much the same thing—whether that is as a parent taking young children
to the playground or working together at demanding or boring jobs. The Christian’s values, attitude, honesty,
work ethic, and respect for and sensitivity toward others precisely in that
vocational situation will be noted by others and may lead almost automatically
to the question of how we think about what we are doing and why. Then our witness to our faith will be natural
and appropriate.
Part 5. God’s Work on Us
There is one last piece in this framework for understanding our lives as
Christians in our worldly callings. It
is a very important piece but it is usually left out in discussions of
Christian vocation. Christian vocation
is related to God’s creative work, as we have seen. It also is related to Christ’s saving work in
that the gift of faith in Christ and the understanding that comes with it will
affect how we carry out our callings.
But does Christian vocation play any part in our own salvation? Is there an
intrinsic relationship between the two or is vocation only the next topic after
we have been justified by grace through faith on account of Christ?
This gets a bit complicated, but here goes. By now we know that we cannot relate vocation
and salvation by claiming that the good works we do in our callings contribute
to our own righteousness before God. We
know that although we are believers, dedicated to our callings, we are still
sinful even though God has pardoned us.
Living as a Christian, we realize, involves some strange paradoxes and
tensions. In faith we see that our sin
is so radical that no part of us escapes its effects and, therefore, we must
rely solely on God’s mercy in Jesus Christ.
Yet because Christ came not to destroy sinners but to save us, to
reclaim and restore us to be faithful creatures, and because we have heard the
promise that we are counted righteous for Christ’s sake, we are in the
situation of being both sinful and yet righteous at the same time—from here to
eternity!
At the same time, in daily life, in this time between here and eternity,
we know that people can improve their character and abilities as these relate
to the common good. We can even grow in
our prayer life and faithfulness as we are nourished by God through the gospel,
the sacraments, Christian fellowship, and our experiences of God’s graciousness
to us. On the other hand, we also can
and do fall back, slipping into old habits or cynicism, forgetting to pray when
things are going well, taking our God-given relationships for granted,
discovering ways to forget or ignore our needy neighbors without feeling
guilty, depending too much and for too long on our own abilities and growing away
from God. The apostle Paul in Romans 7
describes this situation in the Christian’s life: the good that we want to do
we frequently don’t do and the evil that we don’t want to do often is what we
do.
This paradox of Christian existence always seems to surprise us, just as
we are surprised that life becomes more and not less difficult when we believe
in Jesus. At first, we may have expected
everything to be beautiful when became believers, but the risen Jesus comes to
us in the gospel and abides in us in our faith.
As his words and deeds begin to reshape our lives we discover the many
disjunctions between what we ought to be in Christ and what we and our world
are in fact. Paul speaks of this
disjunction as that of being both a “new creation” in Christ and yet at the
same time still being one with the “old Adam.”
Simultaneously saint and sinner!
The problem throughout Christian history has been how to resolve this
situation: how to get the “old Adam,” our old sinful self, either sanctified or
killed off. To sanctify the old sinful
self could mean trying to change it into a new righteous self. This project has been full of illuminating,
sometimes promising, and always dangerous insights and practices. Consider the word “sanctification:”
Literally, it means “to become holy” or “to be made holy”—and “holy” is above
all a religious category. In popular usage, however, it often has
become related to moral improvement,
as each day we seek to become better and better people. While moral improvement is a good thing, when
that meaning gets transferred into thinking about our righteousness in relation
to God, then sanctification may become our
attempt to grow in moral goodness. When
this view of sanctification is linked to our callings, we will be tempted to use
our success and effectiveness in them as evidence of our righteousness and
holiness before God; and then our focus will be on ourselves instead of on
those whom our good acts ought to be serving.
(And we might be tempted to judge someone with whom we disagree on
matters of morality as being thereby unrighteous before God also.)
This cannot be correct, however, if salvation is entirely God’s doing and
not our own achievement. Sanctification
fully as much as justification is God’s
doing, for it is the Holy Spirit who sanctifies us, who makes us “holy.” At this point, quite unexpectedly, the
apostle Paul speaks of our “dying with Christ” and our “being crucified with
Christ” (see, for example, Rom. 6 and Gal. 2).
He writes that in faith Christ comes to us and becomes our new self, so
that “it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me” (Gal.
How does God put the old sinful self to death? Following Paul, Martin Luther said that this
is a function of God’s law. Not only does the law tell us what we should
do and reveal to us what we have failed to do, but it accuses us of sin, it condemns us, crushes us, and finally kills
our sinful self. Where and how does
God’s law do this? Where does this
“daily dying” (to use Luther’s phrase from the Small Catechism) occur? The pre-Reformation tradition had said that
it occurs in penitential exercises, in prayer, in contrition or sorrow for our
sin, in doing things to punish the sinful self.
Luther put it quite differently.
He said that sanctification as the putting to death of the sinful self
occurs right where we live according to the law, that is, in our callings in daily life.
Here, in our callings, the new self in faith gladly loves the neighbor
even as the old self is compelled to do so by the demands of the calling—and is
put to death, bit by by. The new self
goes to work gladly, to serve the common good and to support her family, while
the law of survival forces the old self to do so even against its will and
thereby it is put to death a bit each day.
Each one of us who is married loves our spouse and we do so gladly; but
the institution of marriage sometimes has to force our old sinful self to do so
when it is tempted to wander off into selfish pursuits—and here again the old self
is put to death a bit each day. We ought
to pay our taxes and we do so with thanks for living in a democratic society,
while at the same time our old self sends in money only out of fear of
punishment. Either way, it should be noted, God’s work of governing life gets
done even while our old self is being put to death.
To use more of Luther’s language, there will
be a “cross” in every person’s life—to put the old sinful self to death. The problem that developed in the church of
the late Middle Ages was that people were taught to take up invented crosses in the form of
religious practices and devotion that caused much pain, suffering, and
inconvenience for the person in question.
Luther insisted from scripture that one is not to bear some
self-selected religious “cross” in imitation of Christ (after all, Jesus told
his followers to take up their
crosses, not his). Rather, a cross will
be laid on each believer, as it was laid on Jesus; and for us, as for him, it
will be laid on us in our callings. There, in the demand to love our neighbor our
old unloving self will be crucified. In
the incredible wisdom and economy of God, the same good work which we do in our
callings both gets the neighbor loved and is a means for God’s Spirit to
sanctify us by putting our sinful self to death.
This is radical stuff. Sanctification in this sense may not look
holy at all. It will be hidden in the
chores and stresses, and in the successes and accomplishments, of ordinary
life. It may well be hidden even from
ourselves; and that is probably a good thing or we would misuse it as an
occasion for self-righteousness. Our
true righteousness is not our own in any case, so whether it is evident or not
is much less important than whether through us God gets some good accomplished. As believers, we should not go looking for
crosses and we certainly should not wallow in suffering or deprivation, or in
oppressive or abusive situations. Some
Christians have thought that way, but that is simply to make one more thing
into a means for self-justification. God
will take care of our crosses; we don’t need to seek them.
This could seem to be a dark and gloomy way to think about the Christian
life; it could sound negative and joyless.
It is better described as “realistic,” however—as true to our experience
of both sin and grace. More than that,
having our sinful self put to death daily, being emptied through the work in
our callings in ordinary life, opens us up to live by faith. It makes room for Christ in our lives, it
literally forces us to pray many times—out of desperation if not out of
faith—precisely because we know ourselves to be called by God in a particularly
difficult role or situation. This way of
thinking about the death of the old self, as a consequence of God’s raising us
to newness of life and calling us to service, gives us courage to endure when
things are bad. In the words of the
familiar prayer, it helps us to have the courage to change those things that
can be changed, the patience to endure those things we cannot change, and the
wisdom to know the difference.
To look at it another way, it is often
surprising to listen to some devout elderly Christian speak of her Christian
faith. She won’t speak of her own growth
or improvement as much as of how over the years she has grown in the
realization of how totally dependent she is on God’s graciousness toward her.
Our old sinful self lives on, to be sure, even if limping and wounded,
until that day when in temporal terms we die.
Then our dying with Christ, which began at baptism (
This essay is published in a slightly different form in The Christian's Calling in the World
(Centered Life, Luther Seminary, 2003).
Marc Kolden, an ELCA pastor, is professor of systematic
theology at Luther Seminary,