Empirical Evidence on Vocation

Last updated on: May 19, 2025 at 1:47 pm By Gene Veith

I was asked to review a new book from Oxford University Press entitled Religion in a Changing Workplace.

Elaine Howard Ecklund (a sociologist at Rice), Denise Daniels (a business professor at Wheaton), and Christopher P. Scheitle (a sociologist at the University of West Virginia) polled some 15,000 people and conducted interviews with hundreds of them regarding religious issues in the workplace.

The book was filled with interesting information on a wide range of topics, but what struck me the most is that it offers, in effect, the first large-scale empirical study of vocation that I’m aware of.

See my review at Religion & Liberty Online entitled Faith at Work: The Difference ‘Calling’ Can Make, with the deck, “A major study of religious issues in the workplace gives empirical backing to the doctrine of vocation.”

Read the whole review. I touch on the difference between Luther’s understanding of vocation and that of Calvin (“who narrowed again what Luther broadened out”). And I critique the father of sociology Max Weber, who said that the Protestant work ethic derived from Calvinists who thought that making lots of money was evidence that they were of the elect. (“Now, I have known a number of Calvinists, both living [in my circle of acquaintances] and dead [as a specialist in 17th-century religious literature]. Yet I have never known any who thought like this.”)

But let me give you some of the empirical data from the study that I cite from my review:

The authors cite previous research sorting out how people view their work: as a “job” (that is, as simply a practical necessity to earn a living); as a “career” (satisfying personal ambitions); or as a “calling” (personally fulfilling because it serves a higher purpose and makes a difference in the world).

The current study, however, finds that 20% of American workers see what they do as a “spiritual calling.” This is true of 38% of evangelical Protestants, 23% of mainline Protestants, and 18% of Catholics. Of the “very religious,” 44% have this sense of calling, while 22% of the “moderately religious” and only 8% of the “not religious” do.

Of those who have a sense of calling, 53% are “very satisfied” in their work, compared with 39% who don’t. Of those who consider their work to be a calling, 61% say their faith helps them find meaning and purpose in their daily tasks, compared with 13% who don’t. Those who feel called also better coped with problems at work, experienced less stress, and found a higher purpose, “especially when facing work that is either extremely challenging or mundane.”. . .

According to their findings, the most common verbal religious expression in the workplace is not proselytizing but attempts to offer some sort of spiritual support to a colleague in need. The most common expression of prayer in the workplace is not in the lunchroom or in support of some work-related task. Rather, it is in the context of caring for a fellow worker with a problem by saying, “I’ll pray for you.”. . .

Religious workers we spoke to were most likely to intervene or speak up when unethical behavior affected someone for whom they were directly responsible. These workers would use their faith as a resource to step in and confront authority figures and structures, often based on a religious imperative to love and care for others.

In the section on what responders said about the meaning and purpose of their work, each of the types described involved helping others: “Products and services benefit others.” “Work provides money and skills to serve or help others outside of work (congregation and community).” “Worker feels like their skills put to good use.” “Work provides opportunity to serve coworkers and/or customers.”

All this supports Luther’s view of vocation, that the purpose of every calling—in the workplace, in marriage, in parenthood, in our citizenship, in the church—is to love and serve our neighbors.

Doubtless few of the 15,000 respondents know anything about Luther’s doctrine of vocation. They certainly do not offer prayers for their colleagues or stand up for them when they are mistreated because Luther told them to. Luther was simply describing how ordinary Christians, in fact, live out their faith in their ordinary callings. . . .

The wealth of data gleaned by the authors of this book contains some surprises. Critics of the doctrine of vocation have been saying that the teaching supports highly paid professionals who can be expected to find their work meaningful and satisfying but has little to offer low-paid manual workers, whose labor is a painful, meaningless slog. But this research has found that while the top leaders of companies do often have a sense of calling, workers who make less money are more likely to see their work as a calling than those who make more!

Also, to use DEI language, “marginalized” groups tend to have a stronger sense of calling than “privileged” groups: 31% of black workers do compared with 18% of white workers; 24% of women, compared with 17% of men. Interestingly, black workers are also the most likely to feel motivated to talk about their faith at work (36%), compared with white workers (26%). . . .

Religion in a Changing Workplace closes with recommendations, one of which is for organizations to help develop a sense of calling in their employees: “Organizational leaders can foster a sense of calling among their workers by emphasizing the purpose and value of their work, reminding them how their work helps others, or focusing on how the organization contributes to the common good.” That would almost certainly be more welcome than a DEI seminar.

Keep reading. . .

Photo by Angela Xu, The Church of Almighty God | Church life – Pray 013 via Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Premium Content

The Sacraments and Vocation

Last updated on: May 1, 2025 at 7:50 am By Gene Veith

0 Comments

The Orthodox have a rich theological and spiritual tradition, much of which–but not all– we Lutherans would disagree with. They are very sacramental, but they also value monasticism and asceticism, the strict disciplines of fasting and self-denial.

So I was intrigued to stumble across an article in the Acton Institute’s Religion & Liberty that relates the sacraments to what we Lutherans would recognize as vocation. And key to this is a certain understanding of asceticism.

The article is An Ascetic Way of Life in a World of Abundance by Dylan Pahman. Here is the pull-out summary:

Christians are called to feast on God so they may be ready to pursue their vocations and serve their neighbors. That often requires an ascetic discipline that is in conflict with Western abundance.

Pahman draws on the Orthodox priest and theologian Alexander Schmemann. and what he developed in his book For the Life of the World (which is also the name of the magazine of Concordia Theological Seminary, so there must be Lutheran value in it) as his “liturgical worldview.”

As for the details of this Orthodox liturgical worldview, drawing on the story of Paradise in Genesis 2, Schmemann focuses on eating: “Man is a hungry being. But he is hungry for God. Behind all the hunger of our life is God. All desire is finally a desire for Him.” . . .

All this relates to our everyday, economic life. It guards us against gnosticism, which claims that the material world, and thus material wealth, is inherently evil. Second, it also guards against hedonism and greed, reshaping our consumption of the world. “It is not accidental,” writes Schmemann, “that the biblical story of the Fall is centered again on food. … Not given, not blessed by God, it was food whose eating was condemned to be communion with itself alone, and not with God. It is the image of the world loved for itself, and eating it is the image of life understood as an end in itself.”

This is to say, our need for food takes us into the economic realm. Eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil caused our Fall. Eating the Sacrament of Christ’s body hung on the tree of the Cross is to eat of the Tree of Life (my parallel, not Pahman’s or Schmemann’s, but I think it makes their point).

And the eating we need to do to keep ourselves alive is made possible by our economic vocations. Those also require that we submit to one of the curses of the Fall: “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread” (Genesis 3:29). Jesus Himself refused to sidestep that curse in His temptation by the devil in the wilderness, which as Milton shows us is Christ’s undoing of the sin of Adam. Pahman quotes another Orthodox theologian, Paul Evdokimov: “To transform stones into bread is to solve the economic problem, to suppress ‘the sweat of one’s brow,’ to eliminate all ascetic efforts, and creation itself.”

Evdokimov then applies this principle to society and to vocation:

Indeed, we should not seek purely external substitutes or magical, utopian plans for what can only be accomplished through ascetic effort or love, and we absolutely should ascetically transform our labor and economic consumption from the inside out.

So our need to eat our bread in the sweat of our brows, the need to sometimes eat and sometimes not eat, the need to control our appetites for both food and other things, the need to work hard, brings us to asceticism.

Evdokimov calls for the monastic ascetic disciplines to have a counterpart in the lives of all Christians.

Indeed, it is through the everyday asceticism of what Evdokimov called “interiorized monasticism” that even those of us living “in the world” can face our unique challenges today. “The monasticism that was entirely centered on the last things formerly changed the face of the world,” he writes. “Today it makes an appeal to all, to the laity as well as to the monastics, and it points out a universal vocation. For each, it is a question of adaptation, of a personal equivalent of the monastic vows.” He intriguingly recommends that everyone appropriate the disciplines of poverty, chastity, and obedience, which he labels “a great charter of human liberty.”

Luther shows us exactly how that can be done. As Swedish theologian Einar Billing pointed out, Luther moved those “spiritual disciplines” out of the monastery and into the vocations of secular life. Poverty became thrift and hard work, the discipline of paying bills and trying to make ends meet. Chastity became faithfulness in marriage. Obedience became submission to the law. Furthermore, the monastic practices of prayer, meditation, and worship–while still central to every Christian’s vocation in the Church—also moved into the family and the workplace.

[See Einar Billing, Our Calling (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1964), p. 30. This classic treatment of vocation is out of print, but go here for a free online text.]

Pahman’s discussion is complex and I am simplifying it in a Lutheran direction. I question his and the orthodox theologians’ arguments that the sacraments make everything sacramental. If everything is sacramental, what is so special about the Lord’s Supper and Baptism? Of course, though, God’s use of the physical realm, which He created and into which He was incarnate, to reach us physical beings sanctions the Christian’s vocations, which involve us in the physical, not just the spiritual, realm.

And I question the premium this article puts on monasticism and asceticism, since I see their value primarily in the Lutheran sense that Billing describes.

But Pahman’s article and the theologians he cites have much to offer. Not that they are purposefully drawing on Luther. But when the parallels are close, it is evident that both the Lutherans and the Orthodox are simply working out the logic of the Christian life.

The article also includes a great quote: “As St. Justin Martyr put it: ‘To God nothing is secular, not even the world itself, for it is His workmanship.’”

And a great anecdote:

In his book Everyday Saints, Archimandrite Tikhon recounts a story told to him by a priest about life in the Gulag:

Many priests knew the text of the Liturgy by heart. We could find bread even if it wasn’t wheat bread, usually without difficulty. We had no choice but to replace the wine with cranberry juice. Instead of the altar with the relics of the martyr on which Church rules require us to serve the Liturgy, we would get the fellow convict-priest among us who had the broadest shoulders to help us. He would strip to his waist, lie down, and then we would say the Divine Liturgy upon his chest.

In extreme circumstances, a man himself can literally be Christ’s holy altar. This altar, too, contained holy relics—the bones of the “convict-priest.”

Photo: Fr. Alexander Schmemann by https://www.schmemann.org/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=142163762

Premium Content

A Stunning Text on Vocation from the Apocrypha

Last updated on: April 12, 2025 at 4:48 pm By Gene Veith

0 Comments

The Apocrypha are ancient Jewish texts written in Greek from between the time of the Old and the New Testament. Catholics consider seven of them as canonical–actually, deuterocanonical, meaning “second canon,” reflecting their controversial status as Scripture–while the Orthodox accept those and six more.

Protestants, though, do not accept these late, Hellenistic books as divinely inspired. Luther said of the Apocrypha, “These books are not held equal to the Sacred Scriptures, and yet are useful and good for reading.” So he included them in his translation of the Bible, but he collected them together and placed them all between the Old Testament and the New Testament, thus making clear where they fell historically.

Other early Protestant Bible translations, such as the King James version, followed Luther in this, though eventually the Apocrypha was dropped from most Protestant editions and modern translations. More recently, though, some modern translations, such as the ESV, do have editions that include them, setting them apart as Luther did.

Lutherans have often drawn on these books in treatises, liturgies, sermons (as Walther did), and even the Lutheran confessions. Concordia Publishing House has published a translation of the Apocrypha: The Lutheran Edition with Notes.

At any rate, I quite randomly stumbled upon a passage from The Book of Sirach, also known as Ecclesiasticus, that addresses vocation in a manner that blew me away.

Sirach chapter 38 begins by praising the vocation of physicians and pharmacists (my bolds):

Honor the physician with the honor due him, according to your need of him,
    for the Lord created him;
for healing comes from the Most High,
    and he will receive a gift from the king.
The skill of the physician lifts up his head,
    and in the presence of great men he is admired.
The Lord created medicines from the earth,
    and a sensible man will not despise them.
Was not water made sweet with a tree
    in order that his power might be known?
And he gave skill to men
    that he might be glorified in his marvelous works.
By them he heals and takes away pain;
the pharmacist makes of them a compound.
His works will never be finished;
    and from him health is upon the face of the earth.

My son, when you are sick do not be negligent,
    but pray to the Lord, and he will heal you.
Give up your faults and direct your hands aright,
    and cleanse your heart from all sin.
Offer a sweet-smelling sacrifice, and a memorial portion of fine flour,
    and pour oil on your offering, as much as you can afford.
And give the physician his place, for the Lord created him;
    let him not leave you, for there is need of him.
There is a time when success lies in the hands of physicians,
for they too will pray to the Lord
that he should grant them success in diagnosis
    and in healing, for the sake of preserving life.
He who sins before his Maker,
    may he fall into the care of a physician. (Sirach 38:1-15)

Here is Luther’s point that God works by means of human beings in their vocation. God gives healing, but He does so through the medical professions. “By them he [God] heals and takes away pain.”

Then, after a touching passage about mourning for the dead, Sirach turns to the calling of craftsmen and those who work with their hands. He begins by acknowledging that these folks may not have the education or the intellectual wisdom of the scribes. For that you need leisure. And manual laborers do not occupy the heights of the social hierarchy. And yet, their skill is marvelous and they and their labors are the foundation of human society!

. . . .every craftsman and master workman
    who labors by night as well as by day;
those who cut the signets of seals,
    each is diligent in making a great variety;
he sets his heart on painting a lifelike image,
    and he is careful to finish his work.
So too is the smith sitting by the anvil,
    intent upon his handiwork in iron;
the breath of the fire melts his flesh,
    and he wastes away in the heat of the furnace;
he inclines his ear to the sound of the hammer,
    and his eyes are on the pattern of the object.
He sets his heart on finishing his handiwork,
    and he is careful to complete its decoration.
So too is the potter sitting at his work
    and turning the wheel with his feet;
he is always deeply concerned over his work,
    and all his output is by number.
He moulds the clay with his arm
    and makes it pliable with his feet;
he sets his heart to finish the glazing,
    and he is careful to clean the furnace.

All these rely upon their hands,
and each is skilful in his own work.
Without them a city cannot be established,
and men can neither sojourn nor live there.
Yet they are not sought out for the council of the people,
nor do they attain eminence in the public assembly.
They do not sit in the judge’s seat,
nor do they understand the sentence of judgment;
they cannot expound discipline or judgment,
and they are not found using proverbs.
But they keep stable the fabric of the world,
and their prayer is in the practice of their trade. (Sirach 38: 27-34)

Notice how Sirach enters into the point of view of the craftsman, showing vividly what it feels like to be a blacksmith working at his furnace (“the breath of the fire melts his flesh”) and the scrupulous care that it takes to do the job right (“he is always deeply concerned over his work”).

And appreciate Sirach’s insight about the critical, foundational importance of these lowly workers: “Without them a city cannot be established, and men can neither sojourn nor live there.”

Then comes the climactic summary: “they keep stable the fabric of the world”! Followed by a statement that captures the spiritual significance of all vocations: “their prayer is in the practice of their trade”!

Illustration: Jeremiah 18 , AI image via BiblePics, CC BY-NC 4.0

Premium Content

Vocation and the Division of Labor

Last updated on: March 30, 2025 at 7:08 pm By Gene Veith

0 Comments

Many conservatives today are debating or trying to reconcile their traditional commitment to free markets with President Trump’s protectionism and tariffs. In the course of his defense of free market economics, Dominic Pino quotes some passages from Adam Smith, the original theorist of capitalism, that shed some interesting light on vocation.

Today I’d like to discuss not so much the protectionism vs. free market debate, but the connection between vocation and the key economic principle of the division of labor. I’ll let Pino give you the passage from The Wealth of Nations:

In almost every other race of animals each individual, when it is grown up to maturity, is entirely independent, and in its natural state has occasion for the assistance of no other living creature. . . .But man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren.

Let that sink in. Most animals are self-sufficient. Even when they live in packs, flocks, or herds, their actions are not much different from each other. Yes, in the insect world, bees and ants have sort of a division of labor, but nothing on the scale that humans do.

The point is, human beings need each other. They (we) exist in groups–the three estates again–in which we are mutually dependent on each other. The result is a kind of unity with others, but at the same time we retain our individuality in the things we do for each other.

We don’t have to make the clothes we wear or build the house we live in. Other people, more skilled at those arts than we are, can do such things for us. In exchange, we give them the value of what we are good at–teaching or farming or managing or preaching.

Economists call this mutual interdependence the division of labor. Theologians call this the doctrine of vocation.

We Americans with our frontier heritage prize self-reliance. Ideally, we would make our own clothes and build our own houses. For those with those kinds of aptitudes, good for them! They are especially gifted, though they too are usually still dependent on other people who grew the cotton, manufactured the textiles, chopped down the trees, mined the metals, and shipped it all to them.

Sometimes, though, the ideal of self-reliance comes with an attitude: We don’t want to be dependent on anybody. And yet we are: dependent on God above all, but also on other people, who are also dependent on us. “It is not good for man to be alone,” so God created us to live in families, the state, and the church.

To lift something else from Pino out of its context of economic controversy, he points out a curious phenomenon (my emphasis):

Countries where people don’t specialize and trade — countries where people grow their own food, make their own clothes, build their own houses — are the world’s poorest. The country that elevated self-sufficiency to a foundational national principle and has almost completely isolated itself from international trade — North Korea, with its Juche ideology — is a communist police state.

In vocation, God calls us to different tasks and relationships in the church, the family, and the state. Those latter two are where Luther locates economic activity, what we do to make a living for our family (the word “economy” meaning originally the management of the household) and contribute to the society where God has placed us.

In these estates, in these mutually dependent relationships that only human beings have, we live our lives and our faith in love and service to our neighbors.

Now here is where vocation differs somewhat from Adam Smith. Pino goes on with our first quotation, above:

“But man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only,” Smith wrote. “He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favour, and shew them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them.”

Vocation is driven by love of neighbor. Capitalism is driven by self-love.

Yet Smith is surely right that we can’t necessarily expect our brethren’s help from their benevolence only. And in God’s design, carpenters won’t build our houses for nothing. Nor should they. As Jesus Himself says, “the laborer deserves his wages” (Luke 10:7).

This world, fallen as it is, must be ruled by law to constrain our sinful tendencies. We would take advantage of carpenters if they built our houses for free. We must give them something from our labor of equal value. We need a medium of exchange–money–to ensure that the exchange is equivalent, and we need a rule of law to ensure that our exchange is fair, not breaking the commandment against stealing.

The economy channels our self-love so that it is outer directed, so that we help others, even despite our own selfish tendencies.

A key text for vocation is “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 10:31). This means that we are to love ourselves. But that doesn’t have to contradict our love for our neighbor. In fact, in the economy, we love our neighbor as the result of loving ourselves.

Thus, God compels even sinners to help each other. A non-Christian and a Christian may do the very same work. But that work may have different motivations and different meanings. A non-Christian might do the work solely out of self-interest–a desire for money, ambition, or just the personal pleasure of doing the work–whereas a Christian, who may also desire money, be ambitious, and take pleasure in the work, also has the additional dimension of loving and serving his neighbor for Christ’s sake.

Image by Alexa from Pixabay

Premium Content

Vocation and Outreach

Last updated on: February 22, 2025 at 3:20 pm By Gene Veith

0 Comments

One outreach theme that resonates powerfully with today’s secularists is the doctrine of vocation. The success of that approach is evident in Silicon Valley.

We’ve been blogging about the comeback of religion in what used to be secularist circles. The New York Times, no less, has a recent article on how this is happening in Silicon Valley. The news story, without a byline, is entitled Seeking God, or Peter Thiel, in Silicon Valley.

It starts by describing the 40th birthday party of Trae Stephens, one of the founders of the high tech defense company Anduril Industries, who is also a venture capital partner with the tech mogul Peter Thiel. At the party, Thiel “delivered a talk about miracles, forgiveness and Jesus Christ,” according to the article. “The guests were enthralled.”

“The room of over 220 people, mostly in technology and venture capital, were coming up to us saying, ‘Oh, my goodness, I didn’t know Peter Thiel was a Christian,’” recalled Michelle Stephens, Mr. Stephens’s wife. “‘He’s gay and a billionaire. How can he be Christian?’”

I don’t fully understand the answer to that question either, but it turns out, according to the article,

Mr. Thiel has long been an exception to the atheism and agnosticism of his peers. He has said his Christian faith is at the center of his worldview, which he expounds upon with a heterodox approach — fusing references to Scripture and conservative political theory, parsing ancient signs and wonders for their connection to tech wonders today.

The Stephens are both devout Christians, and the party gave Mrs. Stephens the idea of forming a ministry called ACTS 17, an acronym for “Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society” and also a reference to Acts 17, which records Paul’s sermon at the Areopagus in Athens.

ACTS 17 has been putting on well-attended programs featuring other tech luminaries speaking about their faith.

The article is interesting on its own terms and well-worth reading. (Here it is, not behind a paywall.) But what struck my attention the most is a theme that keeps recurring in the accounts of successful outreach to denizens of the tech world: the doctrine of vocation.

The Stephens attend Epic Church, a San Francisco megachurch of some 1,000 members that is part of a network of congregations planted in “spiritually hard to reach” parts of the country. As reported in the Times:

Ben Pilgreen, Epic’s pastor, preaches a message that has resonated with San Francisco locals: He believes that any job someone does — ad sales, software engineering, H.R. — can be sacred. It’s not just clergy doing the Lord’s work. This is an appealing notion to those members of his congregation who want to believe the time they’re pouring into their careers has a higher purpose.

“If you’ve been called to be a graphic designer,” Mr. Pilgreen said, “that’s a sacred vocation.”

Sure enough, the website of Epic Church lists its values, and #7 is “Vocation is sacred.”

The reporter writes about this as if it’s some new, unique idea. But, as readers of this blog know full well, it’s simply a version of Luther’s doctrine of vocation.

The article says that what the Stephens learned at their church about vocation “sharpened their own thinking of how Christian faith should inform their Silicon Valley endeavors.” The couple hosted a “Faith and Work” group on the subject, which Thiel and tech startup tycoon Garry Tan sometimes attended.

This is not the only outreach effort in Silicon Valley to emphasize vocation. The article also quotes technologist-turned pastor Paul Taylor, who heads the Bay Area Center for Faith, Work & Tech. He brings out the purpose of vocation, which as Luther said is to love and serve your neighbor. “We really feel a burden to help people consider how the model of Christ might help them think about how they change technology,” he says in the article. “How do they think about technology for the sake of the good of the world, for the sake of people who might not have a voice?”

Silicon Valley is not the only place where people today are consumed with their work while struggling to find its meaning. This mindset is pervasive throughout the developed world. Its toxic form breeds workaholics, neglect of families, greed, pressure to succeed, and despair at failures. The doctrine of vocation orders not only work but also relationships, daily life, and a sense of oneself in accord with the love of God and the love of our neighbors.

Vocation is not the gospel, of course, and there is no substitute for the message of Christ crucified for sinners. But vocation is a dimension of Christianity that is highly relevant to people today that is little known outside Lutheran circles. That seems to be changing, though.

I’d like to think that my books on vocation have had something to do with that. By the way, in addition to God at Work, Family Vocation, and Working for Your Neighbor, I’ve just finished with my co-author Trevor Sutton, an LCMS pastor and techno-whiz, a book for Lexham Press about vocation and technology!

Illustration: Busy Tech Office via StockCake, AI generated, Public Domain

Premium Content

Vocation and the Order of Love

Last updated on: February 10, 2025 at 7:25 pm By Gene Veith

0 Comments

Yesterday we discussed a theological and ethical concept called the ordo amoris, the order of love. I would like to offer a Lutheran take on the concept by bringing in what the Catholic version lacks: the doctrine of vocation.

To review, Vice President J. D. Vance brought up the topic, describing it this way: “There is a Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world.”

This provoked some outrage, but First Things editor R. R. Reno explained that the principle that “we are to love those near with a greater fervor than those far away” comes straight from Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas.

In our post, we pointed out that Jesus extends the notion of the neighbor whom we are to love to people “far away” from us, including ethnic outsiders such as Samaritans and Gentiles and going so far as to include our enemies. Furthermore, Aquinas was missing the original sense of the “ordo amoris,” a term coined by Augustine to refer to the “disordered loves” of us sinners, which can be “ordered” by the love of God.

Two other points about that. The Catholic version that creates a hierarchy of loves based on proximity has been used in arguments for Christian nationalism. Actually, though, this view supports not so much nationalism as localism. According to this way of thinking, our primary love should be to our local community, then our state, and only then our nation.

More seriously, for any Christian ordo amoris, the love of God must be paramount. On the principle of “nearness,” God is the closest to us of all things. A non-Christian version of the Thomist hierarchy might maintain that the self, by definition, is the “nearest” entity, so that love of self must rule supreme. But self-love is exactly what Augustine says is disordered. But God knows us better than we know ourselves, and, indeed, is more intimately closer to us than we are to ourselves, given our self-alienation due to sin. But Vance and Reno say nothing about God in their analysis.

And yet even when you put God into the scholastic model, if you put God as #1 in the priority hierarchy of love, you risk falling into the “Corban” syndrome condemned by Jesus:

Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother’; and, ‘Whoever reviles father or mother must surely die.’ But you say, ‘If a man tells his father or his mother, “Whatever you would have gained from me is Corban”’ (that is, given to God) then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother, thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And many such things you do.” (Mark 11: 10-13)

The Pharisees were following their understanding of the ordo amoris: I have given the money to God, to whom I owe my highest love; therefore, I don’t have to give any money to support my parents. Jesus, though, says that this approach to love makes void the word of God, who commands us to love and serve our parents, along with other neighbors whom God also calls us to love and serve. This brings us to the doctrine of vocation.

The love of God is not so much about our love for Him as His love for us (1 John 4:10). And He exercises His love for His creation by working through human beings whom He has called to different tasks and different neighbors according to His purposes.

In his defense of Vance’s statement, Reno cites a character in Charles Dickens’ novel Bleak House, Mrs. Jellyby, who is obsessed with helping children in Africa, while neglecting her own children. It isn’t that she is getting the proximity wrong by loving people far away more than she does the people who are near. Rather, she is violating her vocation. God has called her to be a mother, through whom He has created new human beings and through whom He nourishes and cares for them. Yes, she should love the children in Africa, but God has called her specifically to love and serve the particular children He has given her.

We have multiple vocations in the household, the church, and the state. God so loved the world, and so should we, but He has placed us in specific communities and nations, so we are right to love them. We Americans have a particular responsibility to love our country and our fellow citizens, just as the inhabitants of other countries have that vocation for their own nation.

Workers have a vocation to love and serve their customers. They also have vocations in their family, at church, and in the state. Luther also speaks of the “common order of Christian love,” which consists of the informal relationships we encounter day by day. Each of these brings different neighbors into our lives, at different times and in different ways, and God calls us to love and serve them. When we don’t–when we neglect or mistreat them–we set ourselves in conflict with the love of God which works through us, and we sin in and against our vocations.

Someone who has been placed into high office, such as a Vice President, has, in addition to his vocations in his family and church, a calling to love and serve the nation as a whole by enforcing its laws and exercising his authority, always under the greater authority of God (Romans 13).

For Luther, a neighbor is not an abstract category or grouping of people, as in the scholastic proximity hierarchy. Rather, a neighbor is the individual human being whom we encounter in the course of our everyday lives–in the family, the workplace, the church, the state, the “common order”–whom God has brought into our lives for us to love and serve.

How does bringing vocation into the issue relate to the original question of dealing with illegal immigrants? One could argue that immigration shouldn’t even happen, since we all have a vocation to live our lives in love and service to the country where God has placed us. And yet, God sometimes clearly calls people to leave their homeland and calls them to another homeland. He did that with Abraham and various apostles, and more recently in the history of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod with the Saxon immigrants who left the apostate state church for America, as well as similar migrations for religious reasons. But leaving a country for economic reasons can also be a valid calling for a father trying to make a living for his family. But any new citizenship must be made valid by the laws of the countries involved, which the lawful authorities are obliged by their vocation to enforce.

I would say that if we encounter an illegal immigrant, like any other human being in the common order, we should love him and treat him kindly. If a lawful authority encounters that person, the official should do his duty and enforce our nation’s laws by sending him back to his homeland, while still loving that person as an individual.

We’ll touch on more of that issue tomorrow. But notice how Luther’s doctrine of vocation preserves the “common sense” provisions of the Thomist teaching of proximity, while giving love a much broader scope and–most importantly–making God’s love central.

Photo: Love Your Neighbor: Building adjacent to gas station, Mojave, California, by Ian Abbott via Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Premium Content