Thinking Faith blogs

‘Calling’ or ‘vocation’ is something we mention fairly often at Faith in Scholarship. In modern English it’s mostly used, in both secular and church contexts, to refer to profession: often to a certain kind of demanding, valued profession, such as medicine or pastoral work. Many Christian thinkers have (rightly) reclaimed this kind of value for all kinds of work, pointing out that God can be glorified in anything from retail to programming to construction to academia.

Calling in the Bible

But is ‘calling’ the right way to talk about the value of work? I recently noticed an interaction on Twitter between two Christian writers whose work I love – Jen Pollock Michel, author of the excellent Teach Us To Want, and Bethany Jenkins, who runs the Gospel Coalition’s ‘Every Square Inch’ initiative on faith and work:

Michel’s initial tweets had me nodding and agreeing – but Jenkins’ corrective fit with some reading I’ve been doing recently as part of a group here in Oxford (‘Christians in Academia’, a programme run by the Oxford Character Project). Ahead of our discussions about ‘vocation’, we read the first chapter of a book by Gary Badcock, The Way of Life, in which he pointed out much the same as Jenkin’s second tweet above. The call of God in the Bible is almost never connected directly to profession or work as such. Instead, we’re called to repentance (Mark 2:17), salvation (1 Cor 1:2), and holiness (2 Tim 1:8-9).

Work and identity

None of this is to say that the ideas behind ‘faith and work’ thinking are wrong! The value and holiness of work done well for God, using our given gifts and circumstances, is undeniable. But we can unintentionally, and unbiblically, narrow our thinking by linking vocation – the call of God – too closely with our work or role in society (paid or not).

God calls us as whole people, in every part of our lives. This is something I’ve been taught ever since I can remember. But it’s dangerously easy to use the idea of God’s calling to make the label of ‘academic’ (or teacher, or researcher, or scholar) into my central identity. First and foremost, God has called me to be his child, his disciple.

Maybe it’s better to talk about profession and calling using verbs, not nouns. I am called to love God: in my professional context right now, I do this by reading, thinking, analysing, teaching. In the future those particular ways of loving God may be different, but my calling will be the same. This mindset guards against the potential to spiritualise over-reliance on professional achievements or labels.

What do you think? In what ways is the language of 'calling' as regards our work helpful, or unhelpful? 

In my work as a lecturer over the past year, I've had the privilege of working particularly closely with students from a number of different nationalities and cultures. This has been especially exciting for me because it fits into a lifelong love for other languages and other places. As a student I loved being part of the meetings of international students at my university Christian Union, and seeing how people from very different parts of the world (and with wildly contrasting life-stories) could come together in worshipping Jesus and encouraging one another.

Now I'm working on the other side of the chalkboard (so to speak) as a lecturer. Part of my job is to help communicate the ideas and tasks required of the syllabus to the students so that, regardless of where they're coming from (figuratively or literally), they'll be able to make sense of them and put them into practice. This isn't always totally straightforward, as I'm sure you can imagine – but it can be very rewarding! Whilst there have been many occasions where a student response has suddenly revealed that we've been talking at cross-purposes for some time, there have been many others where I have come away from teaching feeling hugely excited because of a breakthrough of some kind, a moment where a bridge has been built between our cultures and there's been an instant of mutual understanding – or, equally, when I have been suddenly awoken to some aspect of a student's culture that throws my own into sharp relief, or indeed puts me to shame. 

I believe that a touchstone for our attitude as Christians towards those of other cultures is found in the account of Pentecost in Acts 2. Not only did this momentous event mark the birth of the church and the arrival of the Holy Spirit as a universal anointing for God's people, but it also presented a tantalising reversal of the curse of Babel. Where in Genesis the multiplication of language had brought chaos and division, here the Spirit's gift of tongues united seekers of God from many nations in worshipping Him and hearing the truth about Jesus. This is a foretaste of the new creation, where peope from every tribe and tongue will come together to worship the Lord; those of us working across cultures in an academic context have a unique opportunity to show this same unifying love and power in our own attitudes and actions. Here are a few things I'm trying to remember as I teach in this context:

• God's love cannot be culturally constrained. As the world enters a period of increased tribalism, some voices wish to draw Christianity into the orbit of a particular cultural group – either to claim ownership of it, or to outlaw it. But from the beginning, the message of Jesus was radically anti-tribal (to an extent that caused friction among all the cultural stakeholders in the early church). We need to be very careful that we don't conflate our own culture with God's calling.
• We need the Holy Spirit. God deeply desires to break down divisions between people-groups, especially those with a long history of hostility. What He did at Pentecost He is still doing now, through the power of the Spirit. As we serve across cultures at university, we need to ask for His help not just to overcome language barrier, but to reflect His genuine love for and interest in all the people He has made.
• All Christians are cross-cultural. Paul called the Philippians to see themselves as citizens of heaven, living as ex-pats in their earthly world. We should be able to understand something of what it is like for a student in an unfamiliar culture, because we are all in that position to some extent – 'foreigners and strangers on earth', in the words of the writer to the Hebrews. Let's not get too comfortable, but take every opportunity to reach out across cultures, as God has reached out to us.

I’m supposed to be on holiday. And on holiday we (sometimes) relax: we take stock of our lives and ‘where we are right now’. Relaxation and recuperation are implied in this word, ‘holiday’.

But when we start to relax and recuperate things can get a bit messy. We’re no longer submerged in our workaday lives, and some things which seemed like important activities and tasks are unmasked as distractions which conceal truth from us.

Driving down Spain last week I found myself thinking a lot about Sisyphus and his labour. In Greek mythology Sisyphus was King of Ephyra (Corinth) and was punished by the gods for his wrongdoing and forced to roll a boulder up a hill until it would fall down to the bottom and he’d have to do it all over again, for all eternity. In contemporary imaginations Sisyphus is connected with labour that is unrewarding, irrational, and de-humanising. 

Yesterday I was able to connect Sisyphus and my holiday because I received a(nother) journal article rejection. In academia we are told to treat rejections like a wet-weather forecast – nothing out of the ordinary. But the thing is that we’re taught to normalise an awful lot of things in academia which, once we take a step back from the environment, may be better treated as harmful: things such as competition, individualism, elitism, snobbery, exclusivity, overwork, shaming – and the list goes on.

Feeling twisted and confused inside, I texted a friend about my periodic disillusionment with the academic world. A sense of bondage – of being enslaved to someone else’s idea of who I should be – always carries with it the calling card of negative spiritual forces. We come to feel like Sisyphus – condemned to the irrationality of futile labour which serves nobody else but that (and those) which act against Christ. We become the person held upside down by the devil in one of Jędrzej Wowro’s sculptures, being ‘what we know not’. So my friend reminded me that I was on holiday, and to remember not only who I am, but whose I am.

Before I left for my holiday I had to complete an end-of-year report which helps my funders write their annual report showcasing all their students’ achievements. As academics we spend a lot of time writing monitoring reports like these. But how often do we write alternative reports, or at least consider their equivalent in more positive spiritual terms? The ‘world’ (for want of a better word) wants to value us for one set of qualities, whereas our Lover is far more concerned about who and where we are as unique persons, seeing the end from the beginning, yet expectant of the unexpected in between. I don’t think He sees us primarily as ‘academics’. Our professions are only an incidental way of helping us fulfil our vocation(s) in life: they help us to bring forth fruit from the talents God gave us.  

So in an alternative dimension, these might be some of the areas to think about:

• How would I draw an arc of my life (not just my career) thus far? Are there any pivot points, especially beyond my career?
• What would the last year of my life look like if I drew it terms of a circle, or in fits and starts, rather than a linear progression (as our monitoring forms require)? 
• To what extent do I feel a slave to my profession’s ‘expectations’ of me? How might I overcome these or replace them with more profound expectations? 
• How closely do I align with my profession’s understanding of success? Is there a healthier vision?
• Are there any areas of my life that I feel are perhaps unnecessarily squeezed out because of my work? Am I identifying personal value with professional esteem?
• Am I thinking of my academic career in the long-term, or making concessions for short-term security? In other words, have I sufficiently subordinated my day job to my deeper vocational journey, which may take me in unexpected directions?
• Am I at risk of burying my talents, personal and vocational, in order to be ‘safe’?

Answering questions like these is a hard exercise because the academic world in which we live tends to operate by a compass starkly at odds with the values of the Beatitudes and the seemingly upside-down world of the parables.

I am realising more and more that to be renewed in our minds is a lifelong task, beset by obstacles within and around us, but mostly within. And still the Gospel signals freedom; there is a way out, even though it be long and winding. Writing this on Pentecost, I am further reminded that we have a Helper. Together we can ask Him – free us from the labours of Sisyphus; turn us the right way up!

Richard Vytniorgu is a PhD candidate in English Literature at De Montfort University with Midlands3Cities (AHRC). You can find him at www.richardvytniorgu.com.

Last week, I discussed the first half of a talk Biblical scholar and philosopher Richard Middleton gave for FiSch a few weeks ago. I will pick up where we left off. This week I've included quite a few Biblical references, because his talk linked a lot of concepts and elements of the overarching storyline of the Bible together. I would encourage you to take some time to study these, and pray this would deepen your understanding of God and your role in his creation.

We saw that God created the cosmos as his temple, and that we as his image have an important task in developing his creation. But a question immediately arises.  Why does God dwell only in part of creation - i.e. heaven and also, when it was there, the Temple? Why does he not dwell on earth, and why is the eschaton, the fulfilment of all things, sometimes described in the Bible as a time when God's glory 'will fill the earth' (Is. 11:9, Hab. 2:14, Rev. 21:3, 22-23)?

The answer is as obvious as it is stark: it is because of human sin. Instead of filling the earth with God's image and glory, humans misuse the power they have been given and are filling the earth with violence (Gen. 6:13). Note, though, that humans continue to produce culture (Gen. 4), although cultural innovations are often put to the service of oppression, preventing God's presence from permeating the cosmos. Furthermore, the image of God is not completely obliterated (Gen. 5:1-3, 9:6).

Yet regardless of the destruction we have wrought, God still loves the world he has created, including human beings, and he longs to redeem it (Acts 3:12, Rom. 8:21, 23, Eph. 1:10, Col. 1:19). He does this firstly by sending his perfect image, Jesus Christ (2 Cor. 4:4, Col. 1:15, Heb. 1:3), into the world, to restore the image of God in us. Last week we saw a parallel with Israel as a royal priesthood. Here we find another parallel with Israel (see Ex.2): Israel was in bondage and needed to be redeemed, to be restored to their 'garden', the land of the promise. This parallel of bondage can be applied both to creation as a whole, longing to be redeemed from its human oppressors, and to human beings specifically, enslaved to sin.

And so, if we trust in Christ, he redeems us, breathes his Spirit into us once more (Acts 2:1-4, cf. Gen. 2:7) and renews our humanity so that we can become God's temple again (1 Cor. 3:16, Eph. 2:21, 4:24, Col. 3:10) - the locus of his presence on earth. We reign with Christ in the kingdom of God as his body.

The new Jerusalem comes down from heaven, and God will come to dwell with us.  Our calling as the renewed humanity, conformed to the image of Christ (Phil. 2), is to embody an alternative culture to the violence and injustice that now fills the earth. As scholars in particular, our aim is to do our work faithfully so that we will be able to bring the glory and honour of our scholarship into the new Jerusalem (Rev. 21:26).

This is both a challenge and a great calling. How does your research aim to extend God's presence in his creation?