Vocation
o have a vocation, in the late medieval
church, usually meant to be called out of ordinary life: to the priesthood, the monastery, or the
convent. The religious life was the higher road, and the contemplative life the highest of all. The
farmer, the merchant, the mother, and the magistrate might be saved, but they lived on the lower
slopes of Christian devotion, occupied with things of the world.
The Reformers took the word back and gave it to everyone. A calling, they insisted, is not the privilege of the few who leave the world, but the appointment of God for every believer within it. The kitchen and the field, the workshop and the council chamber, the cradle and the courtroom are places where God is served. Two men above all made that recovery: Martin Luther, who broke the wall between the spiritual and temporal estates, and John Calvin, who taught Christians to see every lawful station of life as a post assigned to them by God.
Luther: The Cobbler and the Priest
Luther’s doctrine of vocation grew directly from his recovery of the priesthood of all believers. In his 1520 address To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, having declared that all Christians are truly of the spiritual estate and that the only real difference among them is one of office and function, he drew the conclusion for ordinary work:
A cobbler, a smith, a peasant, every man has the office and function of his calling, and yet all alike are consecrated priests and bishops, and every man in his office must be useful and beneficial to the rest, that so many kinds of work may all be united into one community: just as the members of the body all serve one another.1 Martin Luther
Two things stand out in that sentence. First, the cobbler is not a lesser Christian than the bishop. Second, the purpose of each calling is not self-advancement but service: every office exists to be “useful and beneficial to the rest.”
Later the same year, in The Freedom of a Christian, Luther showed where the motive for such service comes from. The believer is already justified by faith and has all things in Christ, so his works are not done to earn anything. Luther compared them to the work God gave Adam before the fall, when He put him in the garden “to dress it and to keep it” (Genesis 2:15). Adam did not need to be justified by keeping the garden; he already stood righteous. His labor would have been “works of perfect freedom, being done for no object but that of pleasing God.” So it is with the works of a believer, “replaced afresh in Paradise and created anew.”2
And the direction of that freedom is outward, toward the neighbor. Luther noticed what Paul says about work in Ephesians 4:28:
Thus the Apostle commands us to work with our own hands, that we may have to give to those that need. He might have said, that we may support ourselves; but he tells us to give to those that need.3 Martin Luther
Luther’s conclusion is the whole doctrine in a sentence: a Christian “does not live in himself, but in Christ and in his neighbour; … in Christ by faith, in his neighbour by love.” The believer, having received everything from God in Christ, resolves to “give myself, as a sort of Christ, to my neighbour, as Christ has given Himself to me.”4 Even the monasteries, he said, ought to have been places where each did “the works of his own profession and state of life,” not to be justified, but to serve.
Calvin: A Station Assigned by the Lord
Calvin gave the doctrine its most memorable Reformed statement at the close of his chapter on the use of the present life:
The Lord enjoins every one of us, in all the actions of life, to have respect to our own calling. … Every man’s mode of life, therefore, is a kind of station assigned him by the Lord, that he may not be always driven about at random.5 John Calvin
Calvin wrote this knowing how restless the human heart is, ambitious to grasp many things at once and content with none. A calling steadies a life. It also changes how that life is judged: all our actions, he says, are estimated in God’s sight by this standard, and often very differently from the estimate of human reason or philosophy. He drew from it what he called a singular consolation, that no task is so mean or sordid, provided we follow our call in it, as not to be precious in the sight of God.6
Calvin applied the same conviction to the story most often used to exalt the contemplative life above the active one, Martha and Mary in Luke 10. He would not allow it:
We know that men were created for the express purpose of being employed in labor of various kinds, and that no sacrifice is more pleasing to God, than when every man applies diligently to his own calling, and endeavors to live in such a manner as to contribute to the general advantage.7 John Calvin
The passage, he said, had been “basely distorted into the commendation of what is called a Contemplative life.” Martha’s fault was not that she worked, but that she overdid her serving and neglected the Lord who had come to teach her. Mary’s example is not a call to leave ordinary duty, but a warning not to let ordinary duty crowd out the Word.
Notice the word Calvin chose. Diligent labor in one’s calling is a sacrifice, the language of the temple applied to the workshop. That is the priesthood of all believers carried into Monday morning.
Tyndale: As One Hand Helpeth Another
Tyndale taught English readers the same doctrine. In the Pathway into the Holy Scripture he denied that a celibate man had any claim to “an higher room in heaven, than they shall have which live in wedlock.” The believer serves his brother “even as one hand helpeth another, or one member another, because one feeleth another’s grief.” And every gift God gives is given for others:
Whosoever excelleth in the gifts of grace, let the same think that they be given him, as much to do his brother service as for his own self.8 William Tyndale
Tyndale did not shrink from the hard edge of that truth. He who withholds from his neighbor’s need what he is able to give “robbeth his neighbour, and is a thief.” In The Parable of the Wicked Mammon he put it even more plainly: “God hath given one man riches, to help another at need.”9
Callings, Not Only Occupations
The Reformers did not reduce vocation to paid employment. A person holds several callings at once: in the household as husband or wife, parent or child; in the church as a member and perhaps an officer; in the commonwealth as a citizen, a magistrate, or a neighbor. Luther framed these as the estates of household, government, and church through which God orders human life. (See Church Polity.) Calvin could say that every family of the pious ought to be a church.10 The mother teaching a child the catechism and the father leading prayer at the table were exercising callings as truly as the minister in the pulpit.
Why It Still Matters
Many Christians still live with a divided week. Sunday belongs to God; Monday through Saturday belong to the job, the household, and the errands. The Reformers would not allow that division. “Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ” (Colossians 3:23–24).
The nurse on the night shift, the farmer at harvest, the clerk at his ledger, the mother at the kitchen table, the student at her books: if they are in Christ, they are not waiting for their real service to begin. They are already offering it. Their labor is a sacrifice, in Calvin’s word, pleasing to God through Jesus Christ, and a gift to the neighbors He has placed beside them. “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31).
