The Christian life
Vocation and work
Why ordinary work is a calling, and why God does not need your good works but your neighbour does.
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Vocation means calling. Every Christian has one, and it is not reserved for clergy and religious.
The foundational calling is baptism: you are called to be a Christian. Every other calling is how that one is lived out - as a parent, a child, a spouse, a worker, a citizen, a neighbour. Most people hold several at once, and the callings can conflict, which is one of the ordinary difficulties of a Christian life rather than a sign that something has gone wrong.
Work is good. It precedes the fall: Adam is placed in the garden to tend and keep it. What the fall added was toil - thorns, frustration, sweat. So work is not a punishment, and it is not merely a means of earning the money that funds the parts of life that matter.
God works through people. This is Luther's great insight and the tradition's most useful contribution here. God feeds the hungry - through farmers, hauliers and shopkeepers. He heals - through doctors. He protects - through soldiers and police. The person doing the work is what Luther called a mask of God, God's hands doing His work in the world without the world noticing.
Which produces the sentence that reorganises everything: God does not need your good works, but your neighbour does. Salvation is not the point of your work. Your neighbour is.
Two errors to avoid. The first ranks callings, treating religious work as higher than ordinary work. The second empties work of meaning altogether, making it a transaction that funds real life elsewhere. The traditions reject both.
The two callings
Scripture uses calling in two senses, and both matter.
The general call - to be a Christian. God is faithful, by whom ye were called unto the fellowship of his Son (1 Corinthians 1:9). This is the primary vocation, it is identical for everyone, and it is given in baptism.
The particular calls - the stations in which that life is lived. Paul's rule in 1 Corinthians 7 is blunt: let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called. He is not forbidding change of circumstances; he is denying that becoming a Christian requires a change of station. The slave, the free man, the married and the unmarried are all already in a place where the Christian life can be lived completely.
That is the pivot. The question is not what should I do with my life to serve God? but how do I serve God in the life I am already in? - which is a far more answerable question and usually a more uncomfortable one.
Pause and thinkPause: a young Christian says he wants to do something that really matters for God, and is thinking of ordination or missionary work because his current job is "just" accountancy. What would the four traditions say to him?
They would say two things, in this order.
First, that his instinct is good and might be genuine. Some people are called to ordained ministry, and the Church needs them. That call should be tested with his priest or pastor, through the Church's process, rather than settled by his own enthusiasm.
Second, and more importantly, that the premise is wrong. Accountancy is not just anything. Honest accounts are how a society's trust is kept; an accountant who refuses to sign something false is protecting people he will never meet. That is neighbour-love performed with a spreadsheet, and God is at work in it whether or not anyone finds it inspiring.
The deeper problem with the question is the assumption behind it - that proximity to religious activity is proximity to God. The traditions deny this. Luther's version is characteristically earthy: a milkmaid milking a cow in faith is doing work as pleasing to God as a monk's prayers, and more useful to the cow.
And a practical warning worth giving him: people who move into church work to find significance often discover that the significance problem travelled with them. It is rarely the job.
Luther's masks of God
The Reformation's contribution to this subject is large, and the four traditions have largely absorbed it, including the ones that did not produce it.
Medieval usage had narrowed vocation to the religious life - to have a vocation meant to enter a monastery or take orders. Everything else was permitted but second-class. Luther attacked this directly, and the argument is worth following.
If God commands you to love your neighbour, then the ways you actually serve your neighbour are where the commandment is kept. A father changing a child at three in the morning, a judge giving a just verdict, a farmer bringing in a harvest - these are how God's care for the world reaches it. Luther called those who do them larvae Dei, the masks of God: He hides behind them and works through them.
Two consequences follow.
Ordinary work is holy without being religious. The baker does not need to evangelise while baking for the baking to be a Christian act. Good bread is the service. Luther: the Christian shoemaker does his duty not by putting little crosses on the shoes, but by making good shoes, because God is interested in good craftsmanship.
The value of work is measured by the neighbour, not by the worker's feelings about it. Work that serves people is valuable whether or not it is fulfilling. This cuts against a great deal of modern advice, which treats personal fulfilment as the test of whether a job is right. The traditions would say fulfilment is a gift where it comes and not the criterion.
Rest, and the limits of work
If work is a calling, it is also bounded.
The sabbath commandment is the boundary. A day of rest is commanded - not earned, not permitted when convenient. The commandment assumes people will over-work and forbids it, which is one of the few places where Scripture protects us from our virtues rather than our vices.
Two disorders sit on either side.
Work as identity. When work supplies a person's worth, failure at work becomes failure as a person, and rest becomes threatening because it removes the source of value. The traditions' answer is not better time management but a different foundation: your worth was settled at baptism, before you had done anything.
Work as mere transaction. The reverse error - work as a necessary evil endured for money, with life happening elsewhere. This empties forty years of a person's waking hours of meaning, and it is not what the Christian tradition says about them.
Where the four traditions stand
Catholic
Catholic social teaching has developed the most extensive body of doctrine on work of any tradition, beginning with Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum (1891) and running through Quadragesimo Anno, Laborem Exercens (1981) and Centesimus Annus (1991). Its core principle is the priority of labour over capital and the dignity of the worker as a person rather than a factor of production. John Paul II distinguishes the objective dimension of work - what is produced - from the subjective dimension - what the worker becomes in doing it - and insists the subjective is primary, because the worker is a person. From this follow the just wage sufficient to support a family, the right to form unions, the right to rest, and the principle of subsidiarity: decisions should be taken at the most local level competent to take them. The Church also teaches the universal destination of goods - private property is legitimate but is not absolute, since the goods of creation are intended for all. The Second Vatican Council's Lumen Gentium 31 teaches the universal call to holiness and the proper vocation of the laity to order temporal affairs according to God's plan.
Orthodox
Orthodoxy approaches work through the vocation of the human person as priest of creation: humanity's calling is to receive the world from God, offer it back in thanksgiving, and in doing so transfigure it. This is enacted at every Liturgy, where what is offered is not raw wheat and grapes but bread and wine - the products of human labour, returned to God. Work is therefore part of the eucharistic movement of a human life rather than a separate sphere. Monastic life holds a central place in the Eastern imagination, and it has always been laborious - the Byzantine and Russian monasteries were centres of agriculture, craft and learning, and ora et labora describes them as much as it describes Benedict. Orthodox teaching insists on almsgiving as the proper end of surplus, with John Chrysostom's sermons on wealth among the most severe in Christian literature, and it treats the acquisition of the Holy Spirit rather than the transformation of society as the Christian's aim - which has made Orthodoxy less productive of social-ethical systems than Rome and more focused on personal philanthropy.
Lutheran
Vocation is Lutheranism's distinctive contribution to Christian ethics, and it belongs here more than anywhere. Luther demolished the two-tier scheme in which religious life was a higher calling, arguing that the monk's prayers and the milkmaid's labour are equally pleasing to God when done in faith. His Treatise on Good Works (1520) and To the Christian Nobility develop it, and the key sentence is the one that reorganises everything: God does not need our good works, but our neighbour does. Since salvation is by grace alone, good works have nowhere to go except sideways - to the neighbour - and this frees them from any calculation of merit. Lutheran ethics is structured by the three estates - the household (including work), the civil government, and the Church - each divinely instituted, each with its own duties. Alongside this sits the doctrine of the two kingdoms: God rules the world through law, reason and the sword, and the Church through the gospel, and confusing the two corrupts both. The doctrine has been used well and badly in Lutheran history, and modern Lutheran theology is candid about the periods when it served as a reason not to resist injustice.
Anglican
The Prayer Book's Catechism sets out the duty towards one's neighbour with a practical specificity that repays reading: to hurt nobody by word nor deed; to be true and just in all my dealings; to bear no malice nor hatred in my heart; to keep my hands from picking and stealing, and my tongue from evil-speaking, lying and slandering; to keep my body in temperance, soberness and chastity; not to covet nor desire other men's goods; but to learn and labour truly to get mine own living, and to do my duty in that state of life unto which it shall please God to call me. That last clause has been criticised - and was criticised in the nineteenth century - as endorsing a fixed social order, and its use to discourage advancement was a real abuse. Read in its own terms it says something narrower and better: that the state you are in is where God is to be served. Anglican social thought has a strong reformist tradition - the Clapham Sect and the abolition of the slave trade, F. D. Maurice and Christian Socialism, William Temple's Christianity and Social Order (1942), which helped shape the post-war welfare settlement.
Work with it
Check yourself
What does Luther mean by calling workers "masks of God"?
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Correct. The worker is God's hands in the world, hidden behind an ordinary occupation. It is why ordinary work is holy without needing to be made religious.
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The phrase concerns God's hiddenness, not the worker's discretion.
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The argument is the opposite, and was aimed at exactly that view.
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Luther held that God works through unbelievers' labour too - the neighbour is fed either way.
Check yourself
What is the sentence that reorganises the Christian understanding of good works?
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Yes. Since salvation is by grace, good works have nowhere to go except sideways - to the neighbour - which frees them from any calculation of merit.
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All four traditions deny this.
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The point is precisely that ordinary service to a neighbour counts.
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God is not dependent; He chooses to work through means.
Check yourself
According to 1 Corinthians 7:17-24, what should a new Christian do about his station in life?
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Right. Paul is not forbidding change of circumstances; he is denying that a change is needed. The question becomes how to serve God here, not what to do instead.
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Paul assumes the opposite, and worked as a tentmaker himself.
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Fulfilment is not the criterion the traditions use; the neighbour is.
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Paul explicitly tells the Corinthians he does not mean that.
Objection drill
This is a conveniently comfortable doctrine. Telling a man on a production line that his job is a holy calling is how the Church has always kept people quiet - "do your duty in that state of life unto which it shall please God to call you". Marx had your number. It sanctifies the existing order and discourages anyone from changing it.
A model answer
The charge has a real history behind it and the honest answer begins by granting that.
The Prayer Book's phrase about doing one's duty in that state of life unto which it shall please God to call me was used in the nineteenth century in precisely the way the objection describes - to tell the poor that their position was providential and that ambition was presumption. The verse about the rich man in his castle and the poor man at his gate comes from a hymn written for children in 1848. Lutheran two-kingdoms teaching has, in particular periods, served as an argument for not resisting unjust government, and Lutheran theologians have written at length about that failure since. None of that should be defended.
But notice that the doctrine was born as an attack on hierarchy, not as a defence of it. The medieval position was that a real vocation meant the monastery and everything else was second-rate. Luther's argument levelled that: the milkmaid's work is as pleasing to God as the monk's prayers. That is not a doctrine designed to keep people in their place; it is a doctrine that abolished a spiritual class system, and the people who objected to it at the time were the ones at the top of it.
On whether it forbids change, it does not, and the text usually cited says so. Paul's instruction in 1 Corinthians 7 to remain in the calling in which you were called is followed, five verses later, by a specific exception: art thou called being a servant? care not for it: but if thou mayest be made free, use it rather. Take the freedom if you can get it. His point is not that circumstances must never change; it is that you do not have to wait for better circumstances to begin living a Christian life.
On the Church always siding with the powerful, the record is more mixed than the objection allows, and it is worth having some of it ready. John Chrysostom preached against the rich of Constantinople with a ferocity that got him exiled twice. Ambrose made an emperor do public penance for a massacre. Rerum Novarum in 1891 asserted the right of workers to form unions and the duty of a just wage, at a time when both were contested. The Clapham Sect spent decades and fortunes ending the slave trade. William Temple's Christianity and Social Order helped shape the post-war welfare settlement. Catholic social teaching's insistence on the priority of labour over capital is not a quietist doctrine.
And here is the part of the doctrine the objection misses entirely. If your work is a calling, then it is answerable. A calling can be discharged badly. An employer who underpays, a manufacturer who cuts corners, a lawyer who serves fraud - these are not merely making bad business decisions, they are failing a vocation, and the language of calling is what makes that judgement possible at all. The alternative account, in which work is simply a transaction freely entered into, has far fewer resources for criticising an employer. Once work is a calling, the question is this serving my neighbour? can be asked of any job - and some jobs, honestly examined, do not survive it.
On Marx specifically, his critique of religion as consolation for a wretched condition has genuine force against a Christianity that promises compensation later and demands nothing now. It has considerably less force against a doctrine whose central claim is that God is present in and cares about what happens on the factory floor this afternoon - which is a reason to attend to conditions there rather than to look past them.
Memory work
Turn each card over, then say honestly whether you knew it. Cards you miss come back sooner.