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Vocation Day Miscellany, 9/1/25

Vocation Day Miscellany, 9/1/25

Last updated on: September 1, 2025 at 7:44 am by Gene Veith

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Vocation Day Miscellany, 9/1/25 2025-09-01T07:44:17-04:00 Gene Veith

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Just as the early church is said to have co-opted pagan festivals to turn them into Christian holidays (though this didn’t happen as much as has been claimed), the Cranach blog has been pushing the idea of taking over Labor Day and turning it into a commemoration and celebration of the Christian doctrine of vocation.So we’ll devote this Monday Miscellany to Labor Day, I mean, Vocation Day.

The good news is that the concept of vocation is catching on. The bad news is that yet lots of people are still misunderstanding it, though in interesting and revealing ways:

Catholics discover Luther’s doctrine of vocation, but some are pushing back. Some evangelicals hold to the Catholic view of vocation, with twists. And secularists adopt a Reformed view of vocation without faith.

We will close the column with links to what vocation actually is.

Catholics discover Luther’s doctrine of vocation, but some are pushing back

Catholicism used to reserve the word “vocation” for callings to be priests, monks, and nuns. Luther taught that laypeople too have vocations, that God calls all Christians to tasks, relationships, and offices in which they can serve God as they serve their neighbors.

But Vatican II issued a Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity, the first chapter of which is entitled “The Vocation of the Laity to the Apostolate,” which says things like this:

This plan for the spiritual life of the laity should take its particular character from their married or family state or their single or widowed state, from their state of health, and from their professional and social activity. They should not cease to develop earnestly the qualities and talents bestowed on them in accord with these conditions of life, and they should make use of the gifts which they have received from the Holy Spirit.

That sounds like Luther’s point that we have vocations in the three estates of the church, the family, and the society, including the workplace and other “conditions of life” that God has brought us to and equipped us for. (The Vatican does not credit Luther for these insights, of course.)

Pope St. John Paul II made an even bigger (uncredited) concession to Luther in his encyclical Laborem Exercens [Through Work], which echoes–perhaps in a more synergistic way–Luther’s teaching that God Himself works by means of human vocations (italics in the original):

The word of God’s revelation is profoundly marked by the fundamental truth that man, created in the image of God, shares by his work in the activity of the Creator. . . . Awareness that man’s work is a participation in God’s activity ought to permeate, as the Council teaches, even “the most ordinary everyday activities. For, while providing the substance of life for themselves and their families, men and women are performing their activities in a way which appropriately benefits society.

Nevertheless, Catholic theologian David Paul Deavel discusses this broader and richer view of vocation, while also pushing back against it. He has written an article for Catholic World Report entitled Do we have vocations to marriage and singleness?

He says of that wider view, “There is a healthy aspect to this. There are also dangers.”

The healthy aspect is that this conversation has made people think about the fact that all Christians have a primordial vocation to be holy before the Lord in their own lives. An unfortunate tendency throughout the Church’s history, on the part of some Christians, is to treat holiness as the business of priests, monks, nuns, and other religious—the “professionals.”

The danger, though, is that it risks neglecting “a different level of vocation: namely, to a particular state of life. And this sense of ‘having a vocation’ is usually to the more extraordinary callings of holy orders or religious life.” He acknowledges that popes, church fathers, and even the recent Catholic catechism have been calling marriage a vocation, but he tries to explain those statements away and–unusually for a conservative Catholic–basically disagrees:

But is marriage a vocation in the same way as a vocation, say, to be a cloistered Benedictine or a diocesan priest?

Even though many talk about marriage as a vocation in the same way, I doubt the wisdom. . . .

Better to act on the basis that one is free to pursue marriage as long as God has not called one to a more specific vocation, such as religious life.

Luther, on the other hand, teaches that marriage, as well as parenthood, are indeed vocations. Not only that, he teaches that vocations are multiple. Thus, a person may have a church work vocation and have a vocation to marriage.

Some evangelicals agree with Catholics on vocation, with twists

Plough has posted a section from Holly Berkley Fletcher’s book Missionary Kids: Unmasking the Myths of White Evangelicalism entitled “What Is a Christian Calling? with the deck, “A child of overseas missionaries asks how we know what our calling is and whether it really comes from God.”

She tells of her life as a Southern Baptist missionary kid. As in traditional Catholicism, the understanding of “divine calling” has to do with church work, as in the calling to be a minister, or, as in her essay, the calling to be a missionary. She speaks of the difficulty involved in what Catholics call “vocational discernment.”

She says how her father would discern what God was calling him to do. He would stand the Bible, let it all open, then randomly put your finger on the page. “Whatever verse it happens to rest upon is the word God has for you.” She then charmingly tells how she tried that when trying to talk her parents into letting her go to boarding school. Her finger first fell on a passage about a rock badger. The second try led her to a verse about a siege that would lead to parents eating their own children. Finally, she landed on the passage about God telling Abram to leave his family for the land of promise. She showed that to her father, whereupon she got to go to boarding school.

“On the level of personal faith, too – and even in secular forms of self-help – many American Christians have made calling key to lives of meaning and purpose,” Fletcher writes. Today we have a plethora of choices, and Christians often expect God to direct them all. We don’t usually know exactly what choice God wants us to make, so we can be terrified lest our choices go against God’s will–and calling–for our lives. And those who are convinced of God’s call can use that as an excuse to do what they shouldn’t.

Making the decisions that define our lives gives us a sense of agency and destiny. But it can also produce anxiety and fuel unrealistic expectations and deep disappointments. On a spiritual level, we might live in fear of missing our calling, or feel guilt over being disobedient to it. The pursuit of something perceived as a divine calling can encourage destructive narcissism, a hero/martyr complex that erodes self-awareness and deflects accountability.

To her credit, as Fletcher works through all of this, she arrives at a view closer to Luther’s understanding:

As a person of faith myself, I’ve become less fixated on what God might have planned for me personally than on the universal Christian calling to love my neighbor as myself and the winding road toward understanding what that really means and allowing it to change me. . . .

Each new day offers opportunities to listen for this kind of calling – to use the gifts we’ve been given and serve the people we meet along the way. . . .

The discovery and expression of who God created us to be through relationship, vocation, service, or even the most boring of responsibilities, is the miraculous conduit through which we fulfill our divine purpose. . . .

Maybe we don’t need to go searching for our calling; we only need to show up.

Exactly! Vocation is not about our choices. Nor is it about trying to find God’s special plan for our lives, as if God’s will is something we can thwart. Vocation is not primarily about us, our self-fulfillment or the great things we do for God. Rather, vocation is about loving our neighbors. We do this where God places us, in the here and now, where we find ourselves in the ordinary course of our lives. “We only need to show up,” whereupon God will use us, as we love and serve the neighbors He brings into our lives.

Secularists adopt a Reformed view of vocation without faith

Unherd has published Michael Cuenco’s article Grindset Is the New Protestant Ethic. He refers to the phenomenon displayed on social media of “the archetypal ambitious young professional man who must ‘grind’ to get ahead in a cutthroat world”:

He is defined by his routine, the “grindset,” which sees him wake up early, take cold showers, work out religiously, eat austerely, and dedicate the rest of his energies to a monotonous but lucrative job, usually in finance or tech. . . .

The grindset displaces all the other pursuits and pleasures, including romantic, sexual, and social life — as well as the whole concept of open-ended leisure. These other activities are generally derided as superfluous, if not dangerous, diversions from the only thing that should matter to any serious individual: his work.

Cuenco quotes other observers of this phenomenon: “[Derek] Thompson observes that ‘what is most striking about [grindset] videos … is the element they typically lack: other people.’ The protagonist typically wakes up alone, stays that way through his day, and goes to bed alone.” This can be seen, says Cuenco, in “manosphere” influencers–some of whom scorn marriage as weakening men–and in the liberal meritocracy, where friendships and relationships are treated as disposable means to reach the top.

Cuenco then relates the “grindset” mentality to Max Weber’s pioneering work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber sees the beginning of capitalism in the Calvinist work ethic, with its ascetic self-discipline and its intensive fixation on work. Weber related that to the Protestant doctrine of vocation, which displaced otherworldly spirituality into human work and the secular arena. The Puritans did not believe in spending all the money they made on themselves, so they plowed it back into their businesses, socked it away in banks, and invested it in other ventures. Thus creating capitalism

Weber speculated that the reason the Puritans worked so hard was that they believed success in business was a sign of God’s favor, thus reassurance that they were of God’s elect. Now I have spoken and written about how Weber was wrong about this–that view no Calvinist would believe his earthly success was a sign of election and the Prosperity Gospel had not been invented yet–and other scholars agree.

But the Calvinist view of vocation does tend to emphasize “job,” whereas Luther subordinates economic labor to the estates of the family and the society. And it does tend to focus on the isolated individual glorifying God through his work, whereas Luther’s view has a social dimension and focuses on the needs of the neighbor.

Cuenco does recognize that the Puritans did emphasize their families above all other social obligations. He comments, “The grindset, it would appear, takes this process of social delimitation several steps further, heralding a shift from the family to the lone individual.” He concludes,

The original Puritans grasped at the nascent modern notion of the individual through a theological lens — they saw him as an instrument of a providential plan. But they still retained social and civic ideals, centred around the building of a “godly commonwealth.” By contrast, the pull of secularism and today’s technological environment has made it possible to dwell in a society without either religious community or human companionship, thus the deracinated Calvinism in which the individual is left alone with only his work to preoccupy him, with neither a God to sanctify his labor nor a family to consume its fruits.

In order to remain social human beings, Cuenco says, we need a different perspective. “What’s missing today,” he says, is an “ideal to leaven and humanise our labours and to anchor them in a more hopeful future.”

Well, again, I offer Luther’s doctrine of vocation. You don’t have to be a Lutheran to believe in it. Some of Luther’s theology is controversial, but vocation is one of Luther’s contributions, like reading the Bible in your own language or singing hymns in church, that all Christians can appreciate and profit from.

For a fuller explanation, read this essay I wrote, or my book God at Work: Your Christian Vocation in All of Life, or Gustaf Wingren’s Luther on Vocation.

And have a happy Vocation Day!

Catholic view of vocation

Evangelical views of vocation

grindset

Labor Day

Max Weber

Reformed views of vocation

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