Work and Vocation

The Bible begins with God at work. He speaks, separates, makes, names and fills, and when the work is done he looks at it and calls it very good. Genesis 2:2 says that by the seventh day God had finished the work He had been doing, and the Hebrew word there, melakah, is the ordinary word for craft and labour, the same word used later for the workmanship of the tabernacle. Whatever else work is, it is not beneath God. The first thing scripture tells us about the one in whose image we are made is that he works, and the second is that he rests.

Then the man is given work before anything has gone wrong. 'Then the LORD God took the man and placed him in the Garden of Eden to cultivate and keep it' (Genesis 2:15). The verbs are abad and shamar, to serve or work, and to keep or guard. The same pair appears together in Numbers 3:7-8 for the Levites' care of the tabernacle, and scholars such as Gordon Wenham and G. K. Beale have argued from this and other links that Eden is pictured as a sanctuary, with Adam as a kind of priest whose gardening was also worship. Not every commentator accepts the full sanctuary reading, and you do not need it to see the plain point: tending the ground was part of the good world, not a punishment for leaving it.

This matters because many Christians carry an inherited picture in which work is the curse and heaven is permanent retirement. That picture comes partly from Greek thought, where leisure was the mark of a free man and manual labour was for slaves, and partly from a careless reading of Genesis 3. Scripture does not support it. The prophets picture the age to come as full of work that is no longer frustrated: 'They will build houses and dwell in them; they will plant vineyards and eat their fruit' (Isaiah 65:21). The promise is not that work will end but that the worker will enjoy what his hands have made.

The New Testament completes the picture. Jesus was known in Nazareth as 'the carpenter' (Mark 6:3), and the Greek word, tekton, covers a builder or craftsman in wood and stone. For most of his adult life the Son of God earned his living with his hands. Paul made tents (Acts 18:3) and reminded the Thessalonians that 'in labor and toil, we worked night and day so that we would not be a burden to any of you' (2 Thessalonians 3:8). A student who preaches in a village where almost everyone farms, trades, carries or cooks should never let them think that their work is less holy than his.

Genesis 3 does not curse work; it curses the ground, and it puts pain and futility into the work. 'Through toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it will yield for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your bread, until you return to the ground' (Genesis 3:17-19). Every farmer whose rains failed knows the meaning of the thorns. Ecclesiastes adds the inner side of it: the Preacher looked at all he had toiled to achieve and 'found everything to be futile, a pursuit of the wind' (Ecclesiastes 2:11), and he saw that much labour springs from envy of a neighbour (4:4). Work after the fall is hard, uncertain, often wasted, and easily twisted into rivalry.

Yet Ecclesiastes refuses to end in despair. 'Nothing is better for a man than to eat and drink and enjoy his work. I have also seen that this is from the hand of God' (Ecclesiastes 2:24). Both things are true at once: work is frustrated, and the satisfaction a person still finds in it is a gift. A sermon on work that leaves out either half will be false to someone in the room, either to the man who loves his trade or to the woman who hates the factory floor.

The fall also brings something worse than thorns: one person profiting from another's sweat. The law forbids it repeatedly. 'You must not withhold until morning the wages due a hired hand' (Leviticus 19:13). 'You are to pay his wages each day before sunset, because he is poor and depends on them' (Deuteronomy 24:15). Jeremiah pronounces woe on the king 'who makes his countrymen serve without pay, and fails to pay their wages' (Jeremiah 22:13). And James speaks to rich landowners in words that every employer in the church should hear read aloud: 'Look, the wages you withheld from the workmen who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of Hosts' (James 5:4).

Here the anchor verse needs honest handling. Colossians 3:23 was first spoken to slaves. Paul did not overturn Roman slavery in that letter, and Christians have argued ever since about why, and some later used his household instructions to defend slavery, most notoriously in the American South. Two things must be said plainly. First, the same paragraph turns at once to the masters and tells them to give their slaves what is right and fair, because they too have a Master (Colossians 4:1), and in Philemon Paul asks a master to receive his runaway 'no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a beloved brother' (Philemon 1:16). Second, the verse does not bless the conditions of the work; it gives dignity to the worker within them. It tells a person whom the world treated as property that the Lord himself is the one he serves and that an inheritance awaits him. The Hermeneutics track deals with how to read culture-bound instructions; for ethics, the point is that the text speaks to the powerless first and to the powerful immediately after.

Exploitation of workers is not a historical footnote. The joint report of the International Labour Organization, Walk Free and the International Organization for Migration, Global Estimates of Modern Slavery (2022), estimated that 27.6 million people were in forced labour on any given day in 2021. The ILO and UNICEF report Child Labour: Global Estimates 2020 counted 160 million children in child labour at the beginning of 2020. Many of your students will know the shapes this takes: domestic workers whose passports are held by employers abroad, farm labourers paid months late, young men recruited for work that turns out to be bondage. The James 5 text is not about somewhere else.

For much of the medieval period, the word calling, Latin vocatio, belonged to monks, nuns and priests. Eusebius of Caesarea, in the fourth century, described two ways of life in his Demonstration of the Gospel (book 1, chapter 8): a perfect way above ordinary human life, given to those who renounce marriage, property and trade for devotion to God, and a lower way for those who marry, farm, trade and fight, which is permitted and has its own secondary grade of piety. Eusebius was not despising ordinary believers, and the monastic movement produced great holiness and great service to the poor. But the effect over centuries was a two-storey church, in which the farmer was a Christian and the monk had a calling.

Martin Luther attacked the two storeys directly. In his 1520 address To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation he argued that all baptised Christians are truly of the spiritual estate, and that a cobbler, a smith or a farmer each has the work and office of his trade while being as much a consecrated priest as any bishop. The difference between them is one of office and work, not of spiritual standing. Max Weber later argued, in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-05), that Luther's Bible translation was where the German word Beruf, calling, first took on its modern sense of a person's occupation; whatever one makes of Weber's larger thesis, the shift in language was real. In his exposition of Psalm 147 Luther gave the doctrine its most memorable image: the farmer, the parent and the magistrate are masks of God, larvae Dei, behind which God himself feeds, raises and protects his people. God could give bread without farmers. He chooses to give it through them.

Two consequences follow, and both are practical. First, the purpose of work is the neighbour. Luther's insistence was that God does not need our good works but our neighbour does, so the measure of a job is whether it serves someone. A mechanic who fixes a brake properly is loving the family that will ride in that car. Second, no honest work is too low to be holy. John Calvin made the same point in his Institutes (book 3, chapter 10), describing each person's calling as a post assigned by the Lord, like a sentry's station, and insisting that there is no task so humble that it does not shine before God when it is done in obedience. Later the English Puritan William Perkins wrote a whole treatise on the vocations of men, and the doctrine passed into the bloodstream of Protestant preaching.

Catholic teaching moved in a parallel direction in the twentieth century. The Second Vatican Council, in Lumen Gentium (1964), devoted a chapter to the universal call to holiness, teaching that all the faithful, whatever their state, are called to the fullness of Christian life. Pope John Paul II's encyclical Laborem Exercens (1981), written by a man who had worked in a quarry and a chemical plant under Nazi occupation, called human work a key, probably the essential key, to the whole social question. He distinguished the objective side of work, the thing produced, from its subjective side, the person working, and insisted that work exists for the worker and not the worker for the work, which is why he taught the priority of labour over capital. Protestant and Catholic language differs here, but on the dignity of ordinary work the great traditions now largely agree.

The doctrine of vocation has a serious critic, and you should hear him at full strength. Miroslav Volf, a Croatian theologian who grew up under communist Yugoslavia, argued in Work in the Spirit (1991) that Luther's doctrine rests in part on a misreading of 1 Corinthians 7. Paul writes, 'Each one should remain in the situation he was in when he was called' (1 Corinthians 7:20), and the Greek word behind the situation is klesis, calling. Luther read it as a person's station in life. Volf, with many New Testament scholars, argues that in Paul klesis means the call of God to faith in Christ, not an occupation, and that Paul is telling the Corinthians that their social position does not need to change for them to belong to Christ, not that their job is their calling.

Volf's practical objection follows from the exegetical one. A doctrine that sanctifies your station can easily freeze you in it. In a stable village where a son did his father's trade for life, that may have mattered little. In a modern economy where people change work many times, are made redundant, or hold three jobs at once, the language of one fixed calling either fails to describe their lives or makes them feel they have left God's will each time they move. Worse, the doctrine can be used to tell the exploited to accept their place as God's assignment. Volf proposed instead a theology of work built on the gifts of the Spirit, charismata, which are many, can change over time, and are given for the common good.

Defenders of vocation reply with force. Gustaf Wingren, in his study Luther on Vocation (Swedish 1942, English 1957), argued that for Luther vocation was never a fixed rank but the web of relationships in which God places a person at any moment: you have several callings at once, as parent, worker, citizen and church member, and they shift through life. On this reading Luther's point does not depend on a single word in 1 Corinthians 7 but on the whole biblical picture of God working through means. Defenders also note that 1 Corinthians 7:21 itself tells a slave who can gain freedom to take it, so Paul does not freeze anyone in place, and they argue that a pneumatological approach can drift towards treating only exciting, gifted work as spiritual, leaving the man who sweeps the market with less to say about his day than Luther gave him.

Both sides agree on more than they dispute. Ordinary work is service to God and neighbour; no honest work is spiritually second class; the Christian may and sometimes must leave a job, especially an exploitative one; and the gifts of the Spirit operate on Monday as well as Sunday. Where they differ is on the shape of the doctrine: whether vocation is best described as God's placing or as God's gifting. A student can preach either with integrity, and should be able to state the other.

The fourth commandment is a command about work as much as worship. 'Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God, on which you must not do any work' (Exodus 20:9-10). The two versions of the commandment give two reasons. In Exodus it is grounded in creation: God worked and rested. In Deuteronomy it is grounded in the exodus, and its purpose is spelled out: 'so that your manservant and maidservant may rest as you do. Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt' (Deuteronomy 5:14-15). The Sabbath was a weekly limit on how much a master could extract from a worker or an animal. Walter Brueggemann's short book Sabbath as Resistance (2014) presses this point: a people who stop one day in seven are declaring that they are not slaves of production.

How the Sabbath binds Christians is a genuine disagreement, which Module 1 of this track met in the lesson on the law. The Westminster Confession (chapter 21) teaches that the Lord's Day is the Christian Sabbath, to be kept holy by rest from ordinary work and by worship, and many Reformed, Presbyterian and Baptist churches hold this firmly. Seventh-day Adventists and Seventh Day Baptists keep Saturday as the Sabbath, and the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church has long honoured both Saturday and Sunday. Many other Christians read Romans 14:5, Colossians 2:16-17 and Hebrews 4:9-10 as teaching that the Sabbath command is fulfilled in the rest Christ gives, so that no particular day binds the conscience, while the principle of regular rest and worship remains wise. All of these positions are held by people who take scripture as their authority. What none of them permits is a life, or an economy, in which some people are never allowed to stop.

Then there is the opposite problem: people who want to work and cannot. The International Labour Organization's World Employment and Social Outlook: Trends 2024 put the global unemployment rate at 5.1 percent in 2023, and its Global Employment Trends for Youth 2024 put youth unemployment at about 13 percent. Those figures understate the problem in much of the world, because a person who sells a few tomatoes at the roadside is counted as employed. The ILO's Women and Men in the Informal Economy: A Statistical Picture (third edition, 2018) found that about 61 percent of the world's employed population, some two billion people, work in the informal economy, without contracts, protection or a secure wage.

Unemployment wounds more than the purse. In cultures where a man's worth is measured by provision and a woman's by what she can bring to the household, the jobless often feel shame, stay away from church, and hear 2 Thessalonians 3:10 as an accusation. It is not one. Paul's command, 'If anyone is unwilling to work, he shall not eat,' addresses the unwilling, in a congregation where some had stopped working and were 'accomplishing nothing, but being busybodies' (2 Thessalonians 3:11). The person who is willing and cannot find work is not its subject. The church's word to that person is the dignity of Genesis 2, the patience of Ecclesiastes, and practical help: Ephesians 4:28 tells the former thief to work 'that he may have something to share with the one in need', which assumes that some in the church will be in need and that others will share.

This module adds five cases to the casebook you have been keeping through this track. Each one is a real moral question from your own setting, worked through with scripture, the main Christian positions and your own judgment. At the top of a new page write: Case 1, Work. Underneath, write the four headings you will use for every case: The situation. The texts. The positions. What I would counsel, and why.

For the situation, choose one real question about work that you have met in your church or community. It might be a member who works on Sunday and cannot get the day off, a young person told to take a job that pays only in promises, an employer in the congregation who pays late, a domestic worker overseas whose family asks you to pray, or a woman told that her work in the home is not real work. Describe it in five or six sentences. Do not write the name of any person involved, and change any detail that would let someone else recognise them.

For the texts, write out in full at least three passages from this lesson that bear on your case, and one sentence on how each applies. For the positions, if the case touches a live disagreement, such as Sabbath observance or whether a person should stay in a hard job as their calling, write each view in a sentence its own defenders would accept. Then write what you would counsel, in no more than half a page. Finally, on your phone or in your notebook, set yourself one action for the coming week that follows from your counsel: a conversation, a prayer, a word to an employer, a visit to someone without work. Write the date you will do it.