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You say in your book, "The heart of our yearning is to know why we are each unique, utterly exceptional, and therefore significant as human beings." You say this in the context of magazines and popular seminars that encourage people to find their true identities in their work. What is it about the Christian view of calling that is different from all that?
There are a number of reasons why there is such a yearning for this today. One is that it has always been the deepest human longing. Another is that in modern society, with all the choice and change we have, the expectation is created that each of us can choose a lifestyle and, above all, a job, that we can really be ourselves in. But the third reason blocks the other two. Of the roughly 20 civilizations in the course of human history, if you take on Toynbee's reckoning, Western secular civilization is the first that has no agreed-on answer to what is the meaning of individual life. There is a deep yearning today for purpose, and yet enormous ignorance and confusion in terms of how we discover it.
You distinguish in the book between "primary" calling and "secondary" calling. What is the significance of that distinction?
I've reintroduced some of the terms that the Reformers used. The primary call is the call by the Lord, to the Lord, for the Lord. That is first and foremost calling as summarized in Jesus' words "Follow me." The secondary calling is what we do when we rise to follow him. Some people are taken into homemaking, some into teaching, some into law, some into politics. Our secondary calling is all that we do in response to the primary call. Now the great thing is, the primary must always remain primary, and it must never be cut off from the secondary.
You suggest that when that happens, work becomes idolatry.
Yes. Historically there are two great distortions of calling. One is the Catholic distortion, which is a form of spiritual dualism. It makes the spiritual higher than the secular, so you have a distinction between higher and lower, sacred and secular. As Eusebius called it, a perfect life for the monks, nuns, and priests. Now that is the Catholic distortion, although many Protestants have fallen for it. In evangelical circles we hear of "full-time Christian service," a term suggesting that a call to the ministry, or the mission field, or evangelism is higher than a call to being a businessperson. This is an utterly disastrous distortion of the scriptural understanding of calling.
The other distortion is the Protestant distortion. Calvin and Martin Luther rightly said that ordinary work, too, is of our calling. But within a hundred-odd years, work and employment began to be used interchangeably with calling and vocation, so that calling became merely your job. Of course, calling is far, far more than that. Above all, it means we are called to Christ in whatever we do.
You quote William Perkins as saying "the action of a shepherd in keeping sheep, performed as I have said in his kind, is as good a work before God as is the action of a judge in giving sentence, or of a magistrate in ruling, or a minister in preaching." Why was this explosive in its cultural implications?
Perkins was the great "door-opener" of the truth of calling to the English-speaking world, picked up later by John Cotton in New England. And Perkins in turn was following Luther and the great pages in The Babylonian Captivity, written in 1520, where Luther says that the farmer in the fields, or the farmer's wife in the farmhouse, if they are doing their work by faith for the glory of God, are fulfilling as high and holy a calling as the pastor in the pulpit. Immediately such an outlook gives to the whole of life a dignity.
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