Gene Edward Veith

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, show more 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. show less

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 show more 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. show less

The book's first few chapters were a little hard to get into. But they were necessary in setting the stage for the fourth chapter on Vocation, which is where this book really began to shine. It really helps make it clear that we can still be serving God in all aspects of our lives, whether we are parents, children, siblings, coworkers, employees, church workers, layperson, etc.

We cannot escape the arts. They permeate our lives and our culture--the décor, architecture, music, entertainment, everyday utensils. The imagination of this age, its ideas and concerns, percolate throughout the culture via the arts. These ideas affect us for good or for evil. The choice is not whether to live with art; we must choose whether to live with good art or bad art. Art--like all things human--needs to be redeemed. Christians cannot abandon the arts to the secular world, but can show more use them to display God's glory. This book will help us develop an informed artistic taste, open yet critical, discerning yet appreciative of what is truly excellent. show less