Silencing Foolish Men: Christian Vocation Today

The concept of vocation, as all concepts, presents itself to us already embedded within a particular socio-historical tradition. Different concepts of vocation, like the concepts of justice and practical rationality, “confront us as closely related aspects of some larger, more or less well-articulated, overall view of human life and of its place in nature. Such overall views, insofar as they make claims upon our rational allegiance, give expression to traditions of rational enquiry which are at one and the same time traditions embodied in particular types of social relationship” (p. 389, Whose Justice?). By examining the politics of vocation in Max Weber and 1 Peter, I have attempted to articulate, more or less well, inherent differences behind the overall view of human life that each text presents. At the very least, I have tried to show the incommensurability between the Weberian vocation and that given in 1 Peter. One cannot translate easily from one conception of vocation to the other without shifting politics, economics, anthropology, sociology, even ontologies.

If this is so, this seems to present a problem for most Christian reflection on vocation today. Most Christian reflection on vocation occurs firmly within Weberian presuppositions. Mark Schwen recently writes, “To describe fully this inner sense of calling for the Christian would require an entire book; nevertheless, one more word should perhaps be added now. We might say that a human being is called at the moment when desire and duty become one, when the source of the deepest longing is at the same time something to which one is obedent’ (“Teaching as profession and vocation,” Theology Today, 2002 59:3). The inner and the outer, vocation and profession, the charismatic individual leading the way to value the objective world, all fall within Weberian categories God becomes the onto-theo-logic that holds the inner and the outer together. Vocation takes place within the competitive marketplace of secular das Fuherern and Christians need to step up and provide their own version of aristocratic liberal formation or be left behind to meaningless jobs of no public significance. Such an argument has already lost the battle to secularity before it has even begun.

One cannot separate Weber’s concept of vocation from the subjectivist modifications of Neo-Kantian thought in terms that Nietzsche would appreciate. To conceive of vocation for Christians with Weberian presuppositions is to naturalize Weber’s understanding of politics as violence. In terms of 1 Peter, it is to understand vocation as defined by the nations, and thus, to reject the particular vocation that God has given the messianic Israel called the text calls Christians.

We must separate the Christian concept of vocation from a concept of an individual’s professionalism, and return it to a concept of confession, willingness to be reviled for the name of Christ. “To this you were called.” To substitute any other notion for vocation other than one that is based on the life, teachings, death, resurrections of Jesus is to shift the politics of vocation away from the holy people that God the Father sent the Son to draw together by the Holy Spirit. It is to deny the distinct mission that God has given the people of God to live as a messianic Israel amidst the nations for the sake of the nations. It is to subject ourselves to the judgment that will “begin with the household of God” (1 Peter 4:17). It is to confess that violence is more primordial than peace, and that God ultimately brings forth God’s will by violence rather than love.

Of course we here in the Christian academy in the United States don’t have the skills even to begin to conceive what the retrieval of a concept of vocation anchored in God’s call to non-violence in Christ would entail. We have profited far too much from the modernist subjectivization of vocation. We have not yet truly learned to suffer. Yet I am confident that God has provided those to teach us about Christian vocation, if we would like to listen. God could teach us in the bodies of the saints and martyrs, those who left the prestige of the nations for the glory of Christ. My guess is that we might even discover what genuine Christian vocation is today from those who confess Christ as the poor, the day laborers, abused women, agricultural workers, the fast food workers, those working for below subsistence wages in non-Western countries for the benefit of Western consumers and stock holders, who manage each day to arise in an unjust world, but live without retaliating because of their faith in Christ. We might find Christian vocation in places such as the bodies of mothers, those who, because of loyalty to Christ, learn to guide children into the faith in love rather than in coercive violence.

To live in solidarity with these believers would force us to conceive of the Christian academy in an entirely different way than our current understanding, for our formation and the formation of our students. We are much more comfortable living in solidarity with those who operate the ruling apparatus of the late capitalist world or with the protesting activists who would like to take the political apparatus over in the name of a governmental redistribution of goods. Only as we radically rethink our lives in terms other than those given to us from within the political norms of the nations can we retrieve a Christian notion of vocation. It seems worthy of the task.