Work as a Calling, What Scripture and the Reformers Said About an Ordinary Job

Somewhere in this country, at about six in the morning, a man is lying under a kitchen sink with a flashlight in his teeth, and he is doing God's work. He would be mildly embarrassed to hear it put that way. The commencement speakers never mention him. The magazines that rank the most exciting careers have never heard of him. And yet the old tradition I want to talk about says that the leak he is fixing matters in the order of things, and that the way he fixes it is a form of worship.

That is a radical claim, folks, and it is one of the great gifts of the Western tradition to ordinary people. Most of human history assumed that real dignity belonged to priests, warriors and landowners, and that everyone else merely endured. The Judeo-Christian inheritance said something different. It said that the person who works is made in the image of a God who works. This column traces that idea in order, from the first chapter of Genesis to a break room in the present day. I will tell it as history, with the texts in the order the tradition produced them, and then say what it means for the person who goes to work tomorrow.

Work before the Fall

Start at the beginning, because that is where the tradition starts. Genesis 1 shows God at work: He makes, divides, names and calls the result good. Genesis 2 puts the first man in the garden, and the verse is plain. The man is placed there to till it and to keep it. In the older English wording, to dress it and keep it.

Notice what that means. Work is not introduced as a punishment. It comes before the Fall. Adam is given a job in paradise. Whatever the garden was like, it was not a place of idleness. Labor, in the Genesis account, belongs to the original design of a creature who bears God's image and is asked to care for the world.

Genesis 3 changes the terms, not the fact. After the Fall, the ground is cursed and the work comes with thorns and sweat. The toil is heavier, the results less certain, the bread harder won. The tradition has always read this as follows: work itself is good, and the pain and frustration in it are the damage. That distinction matters enormously. It means the frustration of a bad job does not prove that work is a curse. It proves that we live east of Eden, and that part of our task is to redeem the ordinary labor of the world one honest day at a time.

Six days you shall labor

The Fourth Commandment is famous for its command to rest. Read Exodus 20 again and look at the other half of the sentence: six days you shall labor, and do all your work, and the seventh is a Sabbath to the Lord. The Commandment does not treat work as a regrettable necessity to be trimmed. It treats it as a duty that fills six-sevenths of the week, and it fences it with rest.

That is a balanced picture. The same law that keeps your employer from owning your whole week also assumes you have a week of work. The two ideas hold each other up. A person who rests well works better. A person who works honestly has earned his rest. If you want the other half of that story, The Sabbath is the oldest labor protection on record, so why do we mock it? takes up the rest side of the Fourth Commandment.

The Hebrew prophets and the book of Proverbs round out the picture. Proverbs speaks in a plain voice about the diligent hand and the slothful one, and it has no patience for the man who sleeps through the harvest. The Wisdom literature, in other words, took the daily work of farmers, merchants and craftsmen seriously enough to give it moral instruction.

Paul and the working man

Move to the New Testament. Jesus himself was known in his hometown as a carpenter, which Mark's Gospel records when the neighbors ask whether this is not the carpenter. The founder of the faith did not come from the priestly class. He was a tradesman.

Paul went further. He was a tentmaker by trade, and he worked with his hands to support his ministry rather than burden the congregations he served. He then gave the churches some pointed instructions about work. In his second letter to the Thessalonians, chapter 3, verse 10, he says this, in the familiar King James wording: "if any would not work, neither should he eat."

Here is the context, because a verse without context is a bumper sticker, and bumper stickers have never once settled a theological dispute. Paul was writing to a congregation in which some members, convinced that the return of Christ was imminent, had stopped working and were living off the generosity of others. He told them to settle down, earn their own bread and stop being a burden. The command is addressed to those who will not work, not those who cannot. The same Paul tells the churches elsewhere to help the widow and the poor. The ethic is not "let the helpless starve." It is "let the able take up their own load," and "let the community care for those who truly cannot."

Paul adds two more lines every worker should have memorized. In Ephesians 4:28, he says the one who stole should steal no more, but should work with his hands that he may have something to give to those in need. Think about that. The purpose of earning, in the apostle's account, is not only to feed yourself but to be able to give. In Colossians 3:23, he says, "whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men." That verse is the seed of the whole idea. The clerk, the farmhand and the stonemason all work for an audience of one, and he sees the job you did when nobody checked it.

The monks and the rule

The tradition took institutional shape in the monasteries. Benedict of Nursia, writing in the sixth century, composed a Rule for monastic life that became the pattern across Western Europe. Its balance of prayer, reading and manual labor is its most famous feature. The Rule says, in one memorable line, that idleness is the enemy of the soul, and it assigns the monks regular hours of work in the fields and workshops as well as regular hours of prayer.

You will often hear this summed up in the Latin motto ora et labora, pray and work. A word of honesty: the motto is a later summary of the Benedictine spirit, not a phrase in the Rule itself. It is a fair summary, though. Monks drained marshes, copied books, brewed beer, kept bees and farmed land, and their communities were among the engines of medieval agriculture and learning. The idea of working as an offering was lived out in thousands of ordinary days by men who had no other audience than God and the next hungry traveler.

There was still a limit. In the medieval picture, the monk's labor was a form of holiness, but the "religious" life, the cloister and the priesthood, was still considered the higher calling. The farmer and the merchant were thought to live at a lower spiritual level. That is the arrangement the Reformers challenged.

Luther and the priesthood of all believers

Martin Luther, in the years after 1517, attacked the idea that holiness belonged to a special class. In his 1520 address To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, he argued for what became known as the priesthood of all believers: that every baptized Christian stands before God in the same standing, and that there is no spiritual aristocracy.

The practical conclusion was powerful. If there is no higher class, then there is no lower class either. The shoemaker, the farmer and the magistrate each have a station assigned by God, and each can serve God and neighbor in it. Luther used the German word Beruf for a person's calling, and the word came to cover not only the monk's call but the worker's job. He taught that a believer serves his neighbor through his work: the baker feeds, the farmer supplies, the judge protects, the mother tends. In Luther's picture, God does not need our good works, but our neighbors do, and the daily job is where they arrive.

Put plainly, Luther moved holiness out of the cloister and into the kitchen, the field and the shop. That is one of the most consequential ideas in the history of the West, and it came from a close reading of the same Bible that every Christian had.

Calvin and the post you were given

John Calvin carried the idea forward in Geneva. In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, he taught that the Lord has assigned each person a particular way of life, a kind of sentry post, and that no one should abandon it carelessly. The effect was to give ordinary work a seriousness and a sense of assignment. Your job was not an accident of birth or a mere means of survival. In some real sense, you were placed there.

You can also see what that did to attitudes toward diligence and thrift. If your work is a calling, then slacking is not merely poor business; it is a failure of duty. Waste becomes a moral matter as well as an economic one. A man who has been given a post and keeps it faithfully becomes a reliable neighbor, a dependable employee and a stable head of a household.

The Puritans bring it to America

The English Puritans turned all this into a manual. William Perkins, an Elizabethan preacher at Cambridge, published A Treatise of the Vocations in the early 1600s, setting out the doctrine of the calling in practical terms: every person has a general calling as a Christian and a particular calling in a trade or office, and each should be pursued with diligence and honesty.

The Puritans who settled New England carried that framework across the Atlantic. Their towns were built on the assumption that every adult had a trade, a duty and a place. Idleness was a social offense; honest work was a public good. This is one root of what later generations called the American work ethic. The sociologist Max Weber, in 1905, famously argued that this Protestant understanding of calling helped shape the habits of modern capitalism. You can debate how much weight Weber's thesis deserves, and historians do. But the underlying observation, that a culture which treats ordinary labor as a duty to God and neighbor will tend to produce diligent workers, is hard to dismiss.

Benjamin Franklin, who was no Puritan in his private opinions but grew up in their Boston, translated the habit into secular maxims about industry and frugality. His Poor Richard sayings turned a theology of calling into a household economy, a story told in Benjamin Franklin's The Way to Wealth, Read Line by Line for Modern Savers. Franklin kept the habit and left out the heaven, which is roughly what a gym membership does to the habit of rising early. A good many Americans have done the same ever since.

What the idea gets right, and what it is not

Now let me take the argument into the open, in the way I always do, and answer the strongest objection.

The objection runs like this: a doctrine of calling is a convenient way to tell the poor to stay in their place. If your drudgery is holy, why would you ask for better pay or a better job? Marx, and a long line of critics after him, said that religion of this sort was an opiate for the working man.

It is a serious charge, and it deserves a serious answer, though I notice that the critics of working-class piety have rarely been seen under a sink themselves.

1. The doctrine does not say that your current job is permanent. The tradition holds that a calling is where you serve, not a cage. Paul, in 1 Corinthians 7, tells slaves who can gain their freedom to take it. Americans have always read callings as roads that can lead somewhere, and a great many have used honest work to rise.
2. The doctrine dignifies the worker; it does not justify the abuse. The same Scripture that praises labor condemns the employer who withholds wages. The Epistle of James, in chapter 5, thunders against those who defraud the laborers who mowed their fields. A theology that makes work holy makes cheating a worker a sin.
3. The history runs the other way. The notion that every person has a standing before God and a calling worth honoring was a driver of literacy, of schooling, of the Protestant demand that every child learn to read the Bible, and of the habits of self-government that built the early American republic. Contempt for ordinary work has never been the friend of ordinary people. It is the tradition that honors the plumber, not the one that sneers at him.

That last point deserves emphasis. A culture that tells its young people that the only respectable path runs through a four-year degree and a desk is saying, whether it means to or not, that the electrician and the welder are failures. The old doctrine of calling is the antidote. For the modern application, see Seven Myths About Blue-Collar Work That Steer Young People Away From the Trades and Your First Job Is Not Beneath You, and Here Is Why It Matters So Much.

Faith at work today, without preaching on the job

What does all this mean for the person walking into a workplace on Monday? I would say five things, and none of them requires you to hand out tracts.

• Do the job well. Colossians 3:23 sets the standard: work as though the boss were the Lord. The best witness a worker has is a job that is done right, on time, and honestly, with no corners cut when no one is watching.
• Treat the people around you with respect. The customer, the coworker, the new hire, the man who cleans the building. The idea of a calling includes the dignity of everyone else's.
• Be honest in small things. Time sheets, expense reports, the quality of your work. A reputation for integrity compounds like interest, as Compound Interest Year by Year, the Arithmetic That Rewards the Patient Saver shows with money.
• Keep your faith from becoming a weapon or a distraction. Nobody wants to be cornered at the coffee machine. Let your conduct do the talking, and share your convictions when someone asks. A person who is invited into a conversation about faith is far more receptive than one who is ambushed.
• Know your rights and respect other people's. American law protects religious practice at work within limits, and employers are generally expected to accommodate it where they reasonably can. It also protects coworkers who believe differently or not at all. Check the rules for your own workplace and your state, and ask a qualified person if you have a real dispute.

There is also something here for the person whose job feels small. If you have ever wondered whether the work you do matters, the tradition answers yes. The person who stocks the shelves, drives the truck, balances the books or sweeps the floor serves the neighbor who needs what the shelf holds. The great chain of ordinary service is how a civilization eats, warms itself and keeps its lights on. Whether or not you share the faith that first taught the idea, you can see why a society is wise to honor it.

The case in brief

1. Genesis puts work before the Fall, so labor is part of the original design of a creature made in God's image; the frustration in it is the damage.
2. The Fourth Commandment gives six days to labor and one to rest, and Paul in 2 Thessalonians 3:10 tells those able to work to earn their own bread while the community cares for those who cannot.
3. The Benedictines, Luther and Calvin carried the idea from the cloister into every shop and field, and the English Puritans brought it to America, where it fed the habits of diligence and thrift.
4. The objection that a doctrine of calling keeps the poor in their place fails on the text and on the history, because the tradition dignifies every worker and condemns the cheating of the laborer.
5. Today the idea means doing ordinary work well and honestly, respecting everyone you work with, and letting conduct speak before words do.

What you can do: this week, read Colossians 3:17 through 24 and Ephesians 4:28, then pick one task you have been doing carelessly and do it as well as you can.