A couple of years ago, I wrote a brief article on the doctrine of vocation for Modern Reformation. It explains what the doctrine is, in its different manifestations–including the Four Estates–and why this teaching is so important. The opening paragraphs:

“Justification by faith alone” is surely the most important contribution of the Reformation. The second most important, arguably, is the “doctrine of vocation.”

Whereas the doctrine of justification has wide currency, the doctrine of vocation has been all but forgotten. The word vocation can still be heard sometimes, but the concept is generally misunderstood or incompletely understood. The doctrine of vocation is not “occupationalism,” a particular focus upon one’s job. The term means “calling,” but it does not have to do with God’s voice summoning you to do a great work for him. It does not mean serving God by evangelizing on the job. Nor does the doctrine of vocation mean that everyone is a minister, though it is about the priesthood of all believers. It does not even mean doing everything for God’s glory, or doing our very best as a way to glorify God, though it is about God’s glory, at the expense of our own.

The doctrine of vocation is the theology of the Christian life. It solves the much-vexed problems of the relationship between faith and works, Christ and culture, how Christians are to live in the world. Less theoretically, vocation is the key to strong marriages and successful parenting. It contains the Christian perspective on politics and government. It shows the value, as well as the limits, of the secular world. And it shows Christians the meaning of their lives.

Rev. Christopher Jackson wrote me this e-mail:

I was thinking recently that a helpful topic for you to take up in these days it the vocation of the unemployed. Specifically, I think it would be interesting to see what the Doctrine of Vocation says about unemployment and how the unemployed could even see unemployment as a special kind of vocation.

First of all, “vocation,” as in the doctrine of, is NOT the same as “vocation” in today’s vernacular, as a synonym for “job.” “Vocation” is simply the Latinate word for “calling.” The idea is that God calls us to different tasks, offices, and neighbors. These fall into the categories of the “estates” that God has established: the family, the church, and the state. One’s job is, indeed, part of our vocation, though Luther himself classified economic activity as belonging with the family, part of the “household” (oeconomia=management of a household, which is where we get the word “economy,” referring to how families make a living). Anyway, the point is that a person doesn’t have to have a job to have a vocation. He is still a member of his family. He is still a member of his church, if he is a Christian. He is still a citizen.

We can also speak of God calling us to different trials. Unemployment can certainly be that.

I’m not sure what else to say. Help me out. What would you say to Rev. Jackson about this?

Michael B. Crawford had a Ph.D. in philosophy, which led him to becoming a motorcycle mechanic. He explains the connection in his new book Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work. From a review:

In his book Crawford argues for a fresh view of skilled labor, especially that of the traditional trades. Go ahead, he’s saying: Get your hands dirty. Own your work.

His book mixes descriptions of the pleasures and challenges of diagnosing faulty oil seals and rebuilding engines with philosophical views of work — he draws upon Aristotle, Martin Heidegger, and Hannah Arendt, among others — and economic analyses for the decline of skilled labor. He laments in particular the recent demise of high-school shop classes, which gave many young men their first manual skills. (Crawford points out that his arguments apply equally to women and says he hopes one day to work on a 1960 Volkswagen bug with his two young daughters.)

Skilled manual labor is far more cognitive than people realize, Crawford argues, and deserves more respect. That is especially true during tough economic times, when an independent tradesperson can make a decent and dignified living, and — this is important — can’t be outsourced. (You can’t get your car fixed in China.) “The question of what a good job looks like — of what sort of work is both secure and worthy of being honored — is more open now than it has been for a long time,” he writes.

Crawford believes that Americans, in their frenzy to send every kid to college in pursuit of information-age job skills, have lost something valuable. “My sense is that some kids are getting hustled off to college when they’d rather be learning to build things or fix things, and that includes kids who are very smart,” he says in an interview. . . .

“It’s a kind of reaction to a loss of contact with what it actually means to make things,” says Richard Sennett, a sociologist whose own book, The Craftsman (Yale University Press, 2008), explores related issues. It’s not a coincidence that a group of scholars is examining notions of what it means to practice a craft or trade at this point in time, says Sennett, who is on leave from New York University while teaching at the London School of Economics and Political Science. . . .

Bill Brown, a professor of English and visual art at Chicago, offers several explanations for the growing body of scholarship on the nature of work and objects. “When there’s a blip in the economy, people start looking up from their desks,” says Brown, whose own work on “thing theory” investigates the way inanimate objects form and transform human subjects. And as the world becomes more digitized — and its physical environment more degraded — people long for more contact with the material, he says.

(You can buy Crawford’s book by following the link above. You can buy Sennett’s by following this one: The Craftsman)