Day Jobs

Last updated on: May 18, 2016 at 9:02 pm By Gene Veith

Scot McKnight has a post from an Australian source on the Day Jobs of 20 Famous Writers. Most of these seem to be what the writers were doing before they were able to make a living just from their writing. I could list more examples of day jobs that writers held even after they became successful: Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive; Geoffrey Chaucer and Nathaniel Hawthorne were both customs officials; countless writers today are teachers or pastors or manual laborers.

Day jobs are not just for authors. Artists and musicians often support themselves primarily by teaching.

The fact is, it’s hard to make a living by writing or artistic pursuits. That’s the nature of those particular callings.

We’ve got to remember that the doctrine of vocation is NOT primarily about making a living, despite the secular uses of that term. It’s mainly about the various neighbors that God puts into your life and calls you to love and serve. (more…)

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What the Bible says to writers

Last updated on: April 27, 2016 at 9:46 pm By Gene Veith

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My daughter Mary Moerbe picks up on my mini-series on what she calls “passages tucked away in plain sight” that speak to artists, musicians, and scientists. She has a post about what the Bible (specifically, the Book of Psalms) says about the vocation of writing. She picks up on these:

“Open my lips and my mouth will declare your praise.” (Psalm 51:15)

“My heart overflows with a pleasing theme; I address my verses to the king; my tongue is like the pen of a ready scribe” (Psalm 45: 1).

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What the Bible says to scientists

Last updated on: April 25, 2016 at 10:52 pm By Gene Veith

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I’ve been reading the Psalms and I keep coming across texts that I’ve usually skimmed over but that speak in a startlingly direct way to contemporary questions. I’ve blogged about some that deal with aesthetic issues and with artists. Here is one that deals with scientists:

Great are the works of the Lord,
studied by all who delight in them. (Psalm 111:2)

A person takes “delight in” something that God has made; that is, some aspect of the physical world or facet of existence. That delight leads to study, to learning more and more about this work of the Lord.

A person may find delight in animals, rocks, the human immune system, stars, sub-atomic particles. Or, by extension, anything else. This is also a text for scholars of every kind.

It’s interesting to note that “delight” is a legitimate factor in finding one’s vocation. (more…)

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“To you, O Lord, I will make music”

Last updated on: April 20, 2016 at 10:15 pm By Gene Veith

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More aesthetics in the Bible, from passages that I had never noticed before: Psalm 101, identified as “a Psalm of David,” reflects specifically on singing and making music. It begins:

I will sing of steadfast love and justice;
to you, O Lord, I will make music.

Elsewhere, David also refers to singing and making melody “to the Lord” (Psalm 27:6; see these other places). So the Lord is the audience of the music. The artist is addressing not other human beings but God Himself.

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How Inner Mission evangelizes

Last updated on: March 14, 2016 at 10:18 pm By Gene Veith

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As I’ve explained with my first trip to Scandinavia, Christianity in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland has two tracks: the state churches (which are confessionally Lutheran, have a liberal hierarchy, but many conservative pastors) and the Mission organizations (which carry out evangelism, conduct Bible studies, and sponsor ministries to specific groups, such as children, youth, and the elderly). Inner Mission works within the country, and Outer Mission works overseas.

These mission groups were founded back in the 19th century and grew out of the Pietist movement. With their Mission Houses in nearly every city and town, they have become a fixture of Scandinavian culture. Today, they represent conservative Christianity–indeed, conservative Lutheranism–in supposedly secularist Scandinavia.

I have been invited twice now to speak at various Inner Mission activities–to lecture at a Danish university, sponsored by the conservative theological faculty endowed by Inner Mission; speaking at a Bible school, where Christian young people are trained before going off to university; and giving a series of addresses to an all-Scandinavia Inner Mission youth ministry leaders’ conference in Norway. I just came back from giving a series of lectures on vocation to a conference of all Inner Mission staff members in Denmark.

They tend to think this two-pronged Christianity is just the way it is. “Don’t you have anything like Inner Mission,” I was asked, “in the United States?” But I’ve gotten very interested in how these folks conduct their work, particularly in the very difficult context of European secularism. And yet, they have some impressive success stories, such as their work in converting Muslims to Christianity. I was curious how Inner Mission does evangelism. (more…)

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“Common grace”?

Last updated on: March 5, 2016 at 11:38 am By Gene Veith

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Steven Peterson sent me a link to an article by the Reformed theologian Richard J. Louw. It deals with vocation and the Two Kingdoms, but he comes at it from a completely different perspective than Lutherans do. He uses the concept of “common grace,” as well as Kuyper’s “sphere sovereignty.”

In the early days of my Lutheranism, I referred to “common grace” and was chastized for it by a colleague in Concordia’s theology department, who explained that Lutherans reserve “grace” to refer to God’s unmerited favor by which He justifies sinners. For God’s blessings that He bestows on entire His creation, Lutherans use other terms, such as “God’s First Article gifts,” a term referring to the exposition of the Creation article of the creed in the Small Catechism. (But aren’t those gifts unmerited, and thus proceeding from a kind of grace?)

Read the article by Prof. Louw, linked after the jump. Does he arrive at the same place that Lutherans do, arriving at an objective truth from a different angle? Or is there a difference, however subtle, between the Lutheran and the Reformed view on these issues, one that comes from their different approaches and terminology?

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