Summary: A theology of vocation, rooted in the thought of Martin Luther, and covering God’s call over all of our lives.

It seems there are two extremes in the discussion. On one hand there is the notion of vocation as a religious calling that was the dominant idea prior to the Reformation, and there is the modern idea, which equates vocation with job–vocational training is job training. Gene Edward Veith, Jr. digs into the Reformers ideas of vocation, particularly those of Martin Luther, drawing extensively on Luther theologian Gustav Wingren’s Luther on Vocation. I found the book laden with insights giving meaning not only to our work but to all of life because Veith would insist that God’s calling extends to ever dimension of life, all the roles we fill as believer, congregant, spouse, parent, child, citizen, employee or employer.

One of the first was a subtle challenge to Weber’s Protestant work ethic. Veith proposes that the Reformed doctrine of vocation and its emphasis on encouraging the full expression of the individual’s unique gifts means we work not to prove our election but rather because we are elect, with a deep sense of the satisfaction and fulfillment that may come out of our work. Vocation is a place where we experience the love of God and act out of love and service in grateful response. He especially speaks of this in role relationships that the culture views as all about power. For the Christian, our vocation is lived out in prayer, in love, and service.

One of the basic grounds of vocation is that God sovereignly has chosen to work through human beings. He speaks to us, feeds us, heals us, and protects us through human beings faithfully living their vocations. When we speak of vocation, we speak of God’s “calling.” This is not singular. We have a number of callings. First of all, God calls us to himself through Christ. We all have callings to display God’s grace and mercy. We are called into families, into churches, into employment, into citizenship. Some have the calling for a period of being students. A significant aspect of calling, Veith insists, using the example of safety personnel who rushed into the Twin Towers on 9/11, consist simply in doing one’s job well. He devotes chapters to work, family, church, and society. In some of these he allows that one’s vocation as a peace officer or soldier, or judge or executioner, allows one to take lives lawfully that one could not do in one’s personal life. In others, like that of spouse, we violate our vocation if we join ourselves to any other than the person with whom we are covenanted in marriage, sinning against our vocation in the process. For pastors, he has challenging things to say about what does and does not fulfill pastoral calling, and how those with the ministry of the word, prayer, and spiritual care forfeit these to “run” the church.

He recurs to these ideas in the ethics of vocation. In many dimensions of life, sin is acting contrary to one’s calling. Often this means understanding our various callings–church work ought not draw us away from fulfilling our employment obligations and responsibilities well. In some seasons parenting takes precedence over some of the spiritual disciplines we might give ourselves to in other seasons. He speaks of the trials we face in our vocations and the practice of prayer and faith as we lean into these.

The concluding chapter focuses on resting in our vocations, accepting what we are rather than longing for what we are not, realizing we can please God in every good endeavor. And we look forward to our ultimate rest.

This book offers a whole of life perspective to calling, that recognizes that the same One calls in all of life. God is not just in church. He’s in the home, the kitchen, the bedroom, the shop floor, the laboratory, the crop-filled field, the city council chamber and the courtroom. God is at work through people in all of these places whether they recognize their calling or not. But for the Christian there is the great joy of knowing that as we “do our jobs” in each of these areas, often in ways little different from others, we know that we work alongside God. This is a wonderful book for enlarging our perspective on the significance of our lives. We are called. ( )

Veith always does a good job explaining whatever he is talking about in a way that we can understand and apply to ourselves. The doctrice of vocation is a wonderful way to show how theology can help us in our day to day lives, how God works through us in our vocations in the home, in the workplace, in the community, in church to help others and to serve our neighbors. I don't think I ever made it all the way through A Purpose Driven Life. This would be a better book and the world would be better if it had sold millions of copies. Rather than search for a vocation that is rewarding, find the reward and the blessing and the way God is working in the often mundane tasks of our everyday lives. ( )

Excellent book! Nice presentation on the term vocation. ( )

In evangelical Christian circles, you might often hear the encouragement to “do everything to the glory of God,” an exhortation taken from 1 Cor. 10:31. But just what this means or how this is to be done more often than not goes unsaid and ends up coming across as a meaningless platitude. While Christians should indeed pursue the glory of God in everything they do, how to go about doing this can sometimes remain a mystery.

In God At Work, Gene Edward Veith seeks to help Christians in understanding what has been called the doctrine of vocation, crediting much of his writing to Gustaf Wingren who in turn wrote on Martin Luther’s stance on the doctrine. It would be safe to say that this book is largely about how Christians interact with their culture and how indeed Christians find the presence of God in the ordinary, everyday activities of life.

For example, when we ask God to “give us this day our daily bread,” Veith writes sensibly that in meeting this provision, God does not simply rain down bread from heaven, although this certainly isn’t impossible as was shown during the Israelites’ journey from Egypt. Rather, God provides our needs by the hand of the farmer who grows the wheat, the baker who put this and other ingredients together to make the bread, and the many other people involved in the process. Or when we are sick and pray for healing, while God may indeed choose to miraculously heal us without any human intervention, the more common method is using the knowledge of physicians to diagnose and treat the illness.

Vocation then, according to Veith, is seeing how we and those around us interact with one another through roles God has placed us in and how God is honored when we do so. Veith rightly and quickly points out that while our relationship to God is not based on how we live out our vocation, our relationship to our neighbors is. He quotes Gustaf Wingren in saying “God does not need our good works, but our neighbor does.”

Chapters discuss how a person goes about determining what his or her vocation is, how we are to live within the vocations we have been given, and what certain vocations look like, namely in the family, in the citizenry and in the church. Veith provides an excellent discussion on how Christians interact with the culture around them in each of these areas, bringing it back to showing just how this does indeed bring glory to God.

Two areas are worth mentioning in detail, one good and one not so good. First, Veith excellently points out that the work that a Christian does most often will not look any different than the same kind of work a non-Christian does. As he puts it, “There is no distinctly Christian way of being a carpenter or an actor or a musician. Christian and non-Christian factory workers, farmers, lawyers, and bankers do pretty much the same thing.” The key to recognizing the difference between the Christian’s and the non-Christian’s vocation is that “Spiritually the Christian’s life is hidden with Christ in God” and that “just doing our jobs” is found in “ordinary men and women expressing their love and service to their neighbor.”

The not-so-good detail is that in one section of the book, Veith argues that our vocations are not our choice and are out of control, yet later seems to imply just the opposite. I can understand that our backgrounds and capabilities (physical, mental, etc) control our options as well as the desires of others (in other words, I can’t marry a girl who wants nothing to do with me!). The problem is that he then carries this forward to an illogical and incorrect assumption that ALL choices are outside of our control.

This last point aside, however, this is a great book for providing a framework in viewing how we as Christians interact with the world around us. Veith aptly points out that we are not called to be Christians who sit in a monastery, isolating ourselves from the world, but that it is our responsibility to reach out and serve those around us. ( )

Some interesting passages:
The doctrine of vocation looms behind many of the Protestant influences on the culture, though these are often misunderstood. If Protestantism resulted in an increase in individualism, this was not because the theology turned the individual into the supreme authority. Rather, the doctrine of vocation encourages attention to each individual's uniqueness, talents, and personality. These are valued as gifts of God, who creates and equips each person in a different way for the calling He has in mind for that person's life. The doctrine of vocation undermines conformity, recognizes the unique value of every person, and celebrates human differences; but it sets these individuals into a community with other individuals, avoiding the privatizing, self-centered narcissism of secular individualism.
--page 21

What is distinctive about Luther's approach is that instead of seeing vocation as a matter of what we should do--what we must do as a Christian worker or Christian citizen or a Christian parent--Luther emphasizes what God does in and through our vocations.
--page 21

Vocation is a matter of Gospel, a manifestation of God's action, not our own.
--page 21

Most people seek God in mystical experiences, spectacular miracles, and extraordinary acts they have to do. To find Him in vocation brings Him, literally, down to earth, makes us see how close He really is to us, and transfigures everyday life.
--page 24

"In God's sight it is actually faith that makes a person holy," says Luther in his "Large Catechism"; "it alone serves God, while our works serve people"
--page 38

We often speak of "serving God," and this is a worthy goal, but strictly speaking, in the spiritual realm, it is God who serves us. "The Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many" (Matthew 20:28).
--page 39

Genuine good works have to actually help someone., In vocation, we are not doing good works for God--we are doing good works for our neighbor.
--ppage 39

Since God, in the mystery of the Holy Trinity, is a relationship of persons that constitutes an absolute unity, it can be truly said that He is love (1 John 4:16), since love is a unity of diverse persons.
--page 42

Christians need to realize that the present is the moment in which we are called to be faithful. We can do nothing about the past. The future is wholly in God's hands. Now is what we have.
--page 59

Under Levitical law, people who insisted on working all the time, who refused to rest, were subject to the death penalty.
--page 64

Christians are not to retreat from the realm of the ordinary and the everyday; they are not supposed to be having mystical experiences all of the time, to be otherworldy, to neglect of the real world in which God has placed them. Many religions consider "the material world" to be evil or at least unspiritual; salvation lies in escaping the bonds of mundane experience through meditation or asceticism. Christianity, though, values the material world. God created it (not a demon, as in Hinduism) and "saw that it was good" (Genesis 1:10, 12, 18, 21, 25). Moveover, God entered this material world, becoming incarnate in Jesus Christ. He was born into a family, into a particular culture, where as the son of a carpenter He must have worked with His hands.
--pages 68-69

God works through vocation when it's done right. Imagine the potency of that. When you do right, it's God's acts through you. It is God working down through you to build up his kingdom.
--my notes on page 135

"The natural man is always aspiring to rise out of lowliness to the heights; he follows his evil bent to get away from serving. Through the very action of striving upward toward honor and self-complacent splendor, he separates himself from the living God, who in sacrifical love bows down to created things and stands close to all who are in the depths. This man forsakes his neighbor, so he lives not with God but with the devil who leads him away from the path of his vocation."
--page 148

In other words, the Devil tempts the holder of a vocation to the way of glory. Insisting on being served rather than serving, the calling becomes an occasion to wallow in pride. The mentality this creates is one of self-sufficiency. The person in this vocation feels no need for dependence on God. There is certainly no need for the Gospel, since the person in this successful position is doing just fine by himself. The Devil has twisted the vocation so that it undermines both love for neighbor and love for God.
--page 148

Trials and tribulations, even failure, keep Christians aware of their wekaness, aware of their utter dependence on God. And it gives them empathy for their neighbors in need and a desire to serve them out of love.
--page 149

"Prayer is the door," says Wingren, "through which God, Creator and Lord, enters creatively into home, community, and labor"
--page 150

Realizing that one does not have to worry about what will happen, that the future is in God's hands, is liberating.
--page 152

But "troubles and tribulations are to drive us closer to God; they benefit rather than harm us."
--page 153

For the person without faith, on the other hand, "life's bitterness is actually something evil. It testifies to God's wrath and hands man over to Satan's power, for he is constantly given to impatience, ill feeling and egocentricity. Through tribulations he is led not to heaven but to destruction." The problem of evil really is a stumbling block to those who have no faith in Jesus Christ,and their hardships lead them further and further from God and deeper into their lost condition.
--page 153 ( )