Veith Jr. God at Work

Your Christian Vocation in All of Life
1. Auflage 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4335-1608-5
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 176 Seiten

Reihe: Focal Point

When you understand it properly, the doctrine of vocation-'doing everything for God's glory'-is not a platitude or an outdated notion. This principle that we vaguely apply to our lives and our work is actually the key to Christian ethics, to influencing our culture for Christ, and to infusing our ordinary, everyday lives with the presence of God. For when we realize that the 'mundane' activities that consume most of our time are 'God's hiding places,' our perspective changes. Culture expert Gene Veith unpacks the biblical, Reformation teaching about the doctrine of vocation, emphasizing not what we should specifically do with our time or what careers we are called to, but what God does in and through our callings-even within the home. In each task He has given us-in our workplaces and families, our churches and society-God Himself is at work. Veith guides you to discover God's purpose and calling in those seemingly ordinary areas by providing you with a spiritual framework for thinking about such issues and for acting upon them with a changed perspective.

Gene Edward Veith (PhD, University of Kansas) is provost and professor of literature emeritus at Patrick Henry College. He previously worked as the culture editor of World magazine. Veith and his wife, Jackquelyn, have three grown children and seven grandchildren.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Veith Jr., Gene Edward

Leseproben

CHAPTER TWO

How God Works Through
Human Beings

God healed me. I wasn’t feeling well, so I went to the doctor. The nurse ran some tests, and the lab technicians identified the problem; so the doctor wrote me a prescription, I got it filled at the pharmacist, and in no time I was a lot better. But it was still God who healed me. He did it through the medical vocations.

God talked to me. The pastor was reading God’s Word. In the sermon, he drew out of the Bible God’s Law, which made me realize just how sinful I am; but then he proclaimed the Gospel, showing how Christ has done everything for my salvation and that I am forgiven in Him. I appreciate how God got through to me through the vocation of the pastor.

God fed me, not with manna but with what the teenager working at the fast-food joint gave me. God clothed and sheltered me, with the help of my employer. God protected me, though I wish the highway patrolman hadn’t pulled me over. God gave me pleasure, thanks to the talents He gave that musician playing on my new CD.

All of this is to think in terms of vocation.

PROVIDENCE

This sort of talk seems strange today. We think of God in mystical terms, as an otherworldly magical power, not Someone so close to home. God works in mysterious ways, not in ordinary ways, we think. If He is going to heal us, we expect something spectacular—a miraculous rising from the wheelchair or hospital bed, something that doctors cannot explain. Sometimes this happens, but the usual way He heals us is more mundane, though nonetheless wonderful. If He is going to talk to us, we want at least an inner voice, if not a mystical vision. That He uses a Book—mere ink on paper—much less a preacher, whom we know is not that different from us, can seem like a letdown.

Our usual view of God today is that He is not part of the external world outside ourselves. He is either “far above” the everyday world or He is “inside us.” The world, we assume, runs pretty much on its own. The truth is, God does indeed transcend His creation, but He also governs it. “He himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything,” says the apostle Paul. “He is not actually far from each one of us, for ‘in him we live and move and have our being’” (Acts 17:25, 27-28).

Christians in the past have taken for granted the notion of God’s “providence.” Coming from the word “to provide,” the term refers not just to God’s control in a deterministic sense, but to God’s care that He exercises over everything that exists.

One of the consequences of “modernity,” that secularizing frame of mind that has been dominant in the culture from the Enlightenment to the last century, has been to drain any trace of God—even any trace of meaning—from the objective world. Science, it has been thought, fully accounts for everything in nature and society. Rational but impersonal natural laws explain everything that exists. Religion is fine, if someone needs it, but it is a wholly private matter, an inner, experiential, mystical set of feelings that might make a person feel better, but that can have no bearing on “the real world.”

The existentialists of the latter part of the modern era, laying the groundwork for postmodernism, went further. The external world, they said, is, strictly speaking, meaningless. Yes, it follows natural laws, but these are only absurd repetitions, as meaningless, to use one existentialist’s description, as a lunatic mouthing the same words over and over again. Meaning is a purely human creation. Though we live in a meaningless universe, human beings can create meanings for themselves—values, commitments, even religions—to enable them to survive with dignity in a meaningless world. It follows, of course, that meaning is private and such constructed “truths” are relative. One person’s meaning is not valid for anyone else. It cannot claim the status of objective truth. Existentialists could allow for Christianity, as long as it was a Christianity that did not intrude itself upon anyone else or insist on truth claims about the objective universe. Religion was allowed as long as it stayed inside a person’s mind. An objective God was ruled out, though a subjective deity, roughly equivalent to a divinized self, was socially acceptable.

Remarkably, Christians went along with this worldview. Even while many of them rejected the atheism of modernity, they cooperated in driving God underground. Faith became reduced to a subjective experience, and Christian morality became just a matter of personal behavior, rather than a social necessity. Christianity became, as Francis Schaeffer put it, an “upper-story” experience, compartmentalized away from everyday life. Christianity became more and more withdrawn from the world, as did Christians, who generally went about their worldly occupations but did not see them as being related to the jolt of transcendence they sought from their faith. Even the Church, being a physical institution, fell out of favor for many religious people, who reasoned that if the spiritual life is purely interior, there is no need for external institutions. In the words of country singer Tom T. Hall, all that is necessary is “me and Jesus,” and even Jesus lives inside my head.

How did this happen? Why did the external world cease to be perceived as an arena for God and spiritual reality? Surely the claims of modernity were weak. How can a natural law be both rational and impersonal? Isn’t rationality evidence of a mind, of a personality looming behind what we see? And what does it mean to say that life is meaningless? Isn’t there order, design, and purpose in every stage of life, from conception to death? Isn’t it rather the experience of meaninglessness that is subjective, coming from the anguished heart of a lost soul?

I suspect that one reason Christians capitulated so completely to the new God-forsaken vision of the universe is that, well before modernity, they had lost the understanding that God works through means. Before, it was assumed that God causes it to rain. Then the scientists of the Enlightenment presented data about air pressure, relative humidity, and cold fronts. That’s what causes it to rain, they said; we don’t need God to explain it. But knowing the chemical and meteorological processes involved by no means diminishes the fact that it is still God who makes it rain. He is the one who designed, created, and sustains all of these natural processes. He works through means.

The Christians of the Reformation understood this very well. Luther believed that God rules in two kingdoms: His spiritual kingdom, in which He brings sinners into the life of faith, in which He rules in their hearts and equips them for everlasting life; and His earthly kingdom, in which He rules everything that He created (that is to say, everything).

God’s spiritual kingdom comes through what both Luther and Calvin called the means of grace. God does not just zap people into faith. Rather, He employs certain means by which He converts the lost and sustains His people. God’s Word is the primary means of grace, the revelation of God in human language—vibrations in the air; marks on paper—in which the Holy Spirit is active, calling people to faith and nourishing their growth in the Christian life (Hebrews 4:12; Romans 10:17). God’s grace, the message of His love and forgiveness through Christ, comes to people too through the Sacraments, which are tangible manifestations of the Gospel (the union with Christ’s death and resurrection in baptism; Christ’s gift of His body and blood for the forgiveness of our sins in the Lord’s Supper).

God’s spiritual kingdom finds tangible expression in the Church, in which His redeemed people gather around His Word and Sacraments. God employs this institution to give spiritual care for His children and to bring His saving message to others. This includes the vocation of the pastor, who has been “called” into ministry. When the pastor teaches God’s Word, proclaims the Gospel, baptizes, and presides at the Lord’s Supper, there is a sense in which it is really Christ who is teaching, evangelizing, baptizing, and presiding, working through the “earthen vessels” of the ministers whom He has called.

Just as God works through means in His spiritual kingdom, so the Reformers thought, He also works through means in His earthly kingdom. God works through the natural laws that He built into creation. He rules the nations, including those who do not know Him, by means of His moral law. And He works in the so-called secular world by means of vocation. That is, He institutes families, work, and organized societies, giving human beings particular parts to play in His vast design.

VOCATION IN THE BIBLE

The Bible gives a particularly direct discussion of how God works through the agency of human vocations in what the apostle Paul says about earthly rulers:

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God’s servant for your good....