Why Work?: Christians Need to Rediscover—And Reapply—The Protestant Work Ethic

BRUCE SHELLEYBruce Shelley is professor of church history at Denver Conservative Baptist Seminary. He is the author of the forthcoming The Gospel and the American Dream (Multnomah), from which this article was adapted.

In April 1988, national news wires reported the death of a self-educated janitor named Lawrence Hummel, who wore his lawyer’s hand-medowns but left over $600,000 to Bethany College in northern West Virginia, where he mopped floors for 30 years.

Hummel had amassed a million-dollar fortune from the stock market with knowledge gleaned from discussions with professors and from economics classes at the college. Even so, to the end of his life Hummel continued to live frugally.

“If you saw him and talked with him,” said Joseph Gompers, his lawyer, “you might confuse him with a bum. But he wasn’t. He was a warm, compassionate person who cared about people” (The Denver Post, April 20, 1988).

The story made news because Lawrence Hummel was different; according to the standards of contemporary American culture, he was even something of a misfit. He saw no need to turn his wealth into any of the normally accepted symbols of the American dream: clothes, travel, homes, or cars. Work, for Hummel, had a higher purpose. Thoughtful Christians have always claimed the same thing—that work has a purpose beyond paychecks and perks.

Restless In The Workplace

Contemporary American culture would give several reasons for work. Perhaps the prevailing one is traceable to Adam Smith’s classic treatise, The Wealth of Nations. In 1776 the Scottish professor of moral philosophy argued that people work because it is in their enlightened self-interest. “Every individual,” Smith wrote, “is continually exerting himself to find out the most advantageous employment for whatever capital he can command.” Capitalism, based on Adam Smith’s views, then, harnesses our innate selfishness for the “common good.”

While capitalism in America has changed dramatically in the last two generations, evidence of the creativity and productivity that it has fostered abounds. We are surrounded by the promises and rewards of the American dream: appliances, cars, conveniences, and toys of all shapes and sizes.

At the same time, thoughtful observers of the American scene have become acutely aware of the dark side of all this: widespread addiction to self-interest, the passion for consumer products, and the empty spirit of today’s worker. Many Americans pursuing the economic dream of hot tubs, condos, and money market accounts are apparently growing restless in the workplace.

One recent poll, conducted for Robert Half International, a New York—based accounting, data-processing, and recruitment firm, indicated that one out of four Americans is unhappy in his or her job. The reasons? Workers most often mentioned their need for greater recognition, more money, less stress, and a better boss.

This frustration in the workplace comes in large part because people feel the squeeze of two conflicting attitudes toward work.

On the one hand, Americans are influenced by the images from our economic culture that portray the workplace as a source of happiness and personal fulfillment. Even when we are not sure how to define work, we know that it is linked somehow with a sense of self. What we do is supposed to describe what we are.

When an American meets someone for the first time, within minutes the question is asked, “What do you do?” The frequency of the question points to our idolization of jobs in America. We even assess a person’s worth according to his or her employment.

In the 1970s, Studs Terkel wrote a hefty volume titled Working in which he let scores of workers describe their feelings about their jobs. It was obvious that most of them nurtured the dream that they would somehow “find themselves” in their work; and when they suddenly found themselves on the list of the unemployed, they were devastated.

Terkel quoted John R. Coleman, president of Haverford College, who probably expressed the trauma of unemployment best. He had taken an unusual sabbatical in 1973, during which he worked at menial jobs. While working as a porter-dishwasher, he was fired.

“I’d never been fired,” he recalled, “and I’d never been unemployed. For three days I walked the streets. Though I had a bank account, though my children’s tuition was paid, though I had a salary and a job waiting for me back in Haverford, I was demoralized.”

On the other hand, recent years have convinced many Americans that work can never be satisfying in itself. Many of us endure work only so long as it promises a satisfactory private life. Work, more recent American culture would have us believe, is simply a necessary evil of physical existence, a mere means to personal pleasure.

Americans subscribing to this line of thinking live from one coffee break to another. When it comes to weekends, “TGIF,” they say: “Thank God, it’s Friday!” Work is the place to accumulate the cash for another escape to Maui or the Bahamas. So a job for these Americans is always a barrier to happiness, never a way of happiness.

Can’t we catch the same attitude in our television commercials? Not long ago one of them showed four friends in their fishing clothes, surrounded by a breathtaking mountain scene. They were sitting around a warm, glowing fire. The fish were in the skillet and the beer was on ice. With everyone smiling, one of the men held up a chilled can and said, “It just doesn’t get any better than this.”

The point is obvious: Life isn’t found on the job accomplishing something significant. It is found instead with the boys, outdoors, on a weekend, with food and a special beer.

The frustration behind this understanding of work has led hosts of Americans today to abandon the traditional Puritan work ethic. According to sociologist Daniel Bell, their capitalism survives but without the advantage of any moral or transcendent ethic. They work with no overarching purpose. In The Cultural Contradictions, he claims this creates “an extraordinary contradiction within the social structure itself.” For on the one hand, he writes, “the business corporation wants an individual to work hard, pursue a career, accept delayed gratification—to be, in the crude sense, an organization man. And yet, in its products and its advertisements, the corporation promotes pleasure, instant joy, relaxing, and letting go. One is to be ‘straight’ by day and a ‘swinger’ by night. This is self-fulfillment and self-realization!”

Work In The Bible

What is the Christian alternative to the raw self-interest of the American dream? The Bible teaches that work is ordained of God, for our benefit.

That is the significance of the Christian view of work. In their book Why Work? (Baker), John Bernbaum and Simon Steer summarize the biblical teaching with five basic principles:

First, work is God-ordained. According to the Genesis story of Creation, the command to work comes from One who is himself a worker. Work was not a result of sinful rebellion; it was a part of God’s original intention for human beings. According to Genesis, God commands humanity to “fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature” (Gen. 1:28, NIV). We work, then, because God intended us to work.

Second, as a result of fundamental human rebellion against God, work no longer brings the fulfillment and joy God intended. Human rebellion is reflected in human work. Work can now become a means of exploitation and oppression, or it can become an idol.

The teacher of Ecclesiastes is a striking example of our human frustration. “I built houses for myself,” he writes, “and planted vineyards.… I bought male and female slaves.… I amassed silver and gold for myself.… Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done … everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind” (Eccles. 2:4–11, NIV).

Third, Jesus Christ has redeemed our work from the curse. That the incarnate God worked at a carpenter’s bench is a striking testimony to the sanctity of the workplace.

Fourth, for the Christian, work is to be done as a service to Christ. “Slaves,” wrote the apostle Paul, “whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving” (Col. 3:22–24, NIV).

Finally, the Bible tells us that work not only brings glory to God if done for him, but has moral benefits as well. In 2 Thessalonians 3:10–12, Paul tells us that we should work in order to provide for ourselves and our families. And in Ephesians 4:28 he urges believers to undertake work that is useful, that we may have “something to share with those in need.”

A Christian’S View

In our time it is almost impossible for Americans to see how their work can be useful and serve the community at large. The growth of cities and the organization of labor have “privatized” work. In the last two generations, Americans have come to look upon their work almost exclusively in terms of personal advantages. Any benefit for the community—beyond economic growth—has largely dropped from view.

Christians, however, are governed by a higher conception of work. In the collect for Labor Day, the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer entreats God, “So guide us in the work we do, that we may do it not for self alone, but for the common good.” This concern for the “common good” can make work more than a private enterprise.

“The entrepreneur who creates hundreds of new jobs,” writes Denver’s Catholic Archbishop J. Francis Stafford in This Home of Freedom, “is performing a morally good act: he or she is giving fellow human beings an opportunity to exercise their capacity for honest work. Workers who perform their duties conscientiously and well, and trade unions which bargain in good faith for the rights of workers, are also moral agents, contributing to the integrity of the workplace.”

We should remember that the colonial Puritans who shaped so much of our thinking about work spoke of work as vocation. The word carries the thought that our work is a calling from God. The Lord himself, it implies, has a purpose for every person’s work, whether as a nurse, a pilot, a social worker, a lawyer, a mechanic, or, as Jesus, a carpenter.

Certain vocations, it is true, more directly influence the thinking and viewpoints of people in society. Teachers, scriptwriters, politicians, editors, judges, artists, and ministers all fall into this category; they address questions of life and its meaning. Because Christians hold a special view about the kind of creatures we are and what is in store for us in the future, Christians in these “meaning-of-life” vocations carry a special responsibility to communicate the Christian view of the world. And when they do, they will make a difference in American life.

In many other vocations the questions of ultimate purpose and human destiny never affect the quality of the work itself. A plumber’s work itself, for example, never addresses the question of life’s meaning. But in these sorts of vocations, the Christian reflects his or her faith in another way, through the care given to the work itself. A Christian plumber therefore works honestly and does the best work he can.

Quality Is Job One

Whether we directly influence others in our jobs or reflect our faith more indirectly through our handiwork, Jesus’ workbench suggests to us something about the importance of the quality of our daily work. Who, after all, can imagine Jesus turning out shoddy work?

The biblical term for carpenter suggests a craftsman. In the earlier days, and still today in many places, in small towns like Nazareth, there were village craftsmen, handymen who could repair a gate, build useful cabinets, or make a set of table and chairs.

That is the kind of work Jesus did. The drawers of the cabinets ran smoothly, the yokes were well balanced, the boxes were square, and the toys were sturdy and safe.

Why does that sound like “the good old days”? Has quality slipped from the American workplace?

Addison H. Leitch, the late Presbyterian professor at Gordon-Conwell Seminary, wrote not long before he died about how he once made himself unpopular at a college convocation at the end of a semester when everyone was getting ready to go home for the holidays.

“Suppose,” Leitch said, “that the last man to check out the jet plane on which you will fly home did his job just as faithfully as you have done yours here during the last semester.”

A groan went up. The students all knew that the man on the jet can be depended on to do the right thing.

But did they know that? In a day of dirty restaurants, trains that crash, television repairmen who don’t “fix it,” police who take bribes, and students who lift books from libraries, how did they know that the maintenance man would do his job?

Quality is a Christian concern because for the Christian the daily job is a daily offering to God. It is never a mere matter of personal choice.

That perspective is vital today. Americans are trying to conduct business, run companies, and get ahead with little concern for standards of right and wrong. Morality, we like to think, is a personal matter. “The business of America is business,” some say.

But Christians know better. Like Lawrence Hummel, they have an unusual view of work. They hold that the gospel brings responsibility, dignity, and purpose to what happens in the shop or office. Jesus Christ, their Savior and Model, was, after all, a carpenter. And God has purposes for our work that go far beyond our day-to-day tasks.

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