A Theology of Political Vocation

Christian Life and Public Office

John E. Senior

• Editorial: Baylor University Press
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781481304603
• Categoría: Teología y religión
• Categoría: Teología cristiana

Power, money, endless competition. A zero-sum game. Politics as usual. Only the hearty or craven need apply. The political actors have lost sight of the politics of a common good.

A Theology of Political Vocation takes up the question of public life precisely where most discussions end. Proving that moral ambiguity does not exclude moral possibility, author John Senior crafts a theology of political vocation not satisfied simply by theologies of sin and grace and philosophical theories of power. For Senior, political theology moves beyond merely staking a claim within a public conversation, a move that prizes discursive skills and aims at consensus concerning shared norms and values. Political theology must offer an account of a political vocation.

Senior connects political deliberation to moral judgment, explores use and consequence of power, analyzes political conflict and competition, and limns the ethics of negotiation and compromise. In light of this richer understanding of political vocation, Senior develops theological resources appropriate to a variety of ecologies—ordinary citizens, political activists, and elected officials. A Theology of Political Vocation shows how Christian politicians can work faithfully within the moral ambiguity of political life to orient their work—and indeed, their very selves—toward the common good.

1

What Is a Political Vocation?

The word “vocation” is often used to connote some noble dimension of work. Vocational work is supposed to engage a person’s sense of purposefulness, their understanding of why they “were put on this earth,” to do what one is “meant” to do. Vocational work, therefore, is understood to be intrinsically meaningful: one pursues a vocation even if it does not generate instrumental goods, like wealth or status. Often, the idea of vocation also suggests a commitment to a “greater good.” Vocational work contributes to a project that transcends, but also includes, the individual’s good. Such a project, one might say, is for the “common good.”

Politics, in popular perception, is simply not this kind of work, for the reasons cited above. Politics is, no doubt, morally inhospitable terrain, rendering problematic the very possibility of political vocation. It is helpful, then, to begin by clarifying what it might mean to suggest that work is a vocation and that politics can be understood as vocational work.

Vocation as Framing

Vocation, from the Latin vocatio (calling) and vocare (to call) (related also to the Greek klesis), is a framing of work.1 A framing, as used here, is a kind of interpretation. A frame imputes explicit and implicit moral meanings to an interpreted object. Framings often sound like descriptions, as though they are simply providing an objective account of a phenomenon. To call a description of some reality a frame is to signal the way in which descriptions are morally freighted. The meaning of work can be framed in a number of ways. Each frame provides an account of what work is, what makes work meaningful, and the motivations one has for doing work.2

To frame one’s work as “a job,” for example, is to invoke a particular understanding of what work is and why it is meaningful. A job is ordinarily a discrete task, often done with a view to compensation. The word “job” sometimes signals a kind of distancing from work, implying that one’s work is not a constitutive element of one’s identity. The expression, “It’s just a job,” likely means that work is toilsome and meaningful only to the extent that it provides a livelihood. Indeed, the money-earning potential of a job may be the most decisive reason for doing it. Of course, people do sometimes use the word “job” in more expansive ways. But never does one hear the expression “It’s just a vocation” to capture the money-earning potential of work.

The frame of a career captures a somewhat different nuance. Like a job, a career yields income that sustains a lifestyle. To frame work as a career is to signal that work is caught up in one’s identity and sense of purpose in life. In a career, as people often use the term, the center of value is likely one’s own experience of fulfillment and purposefulness. A career denotes a diachronic movement: one’s working life, perhaps over thirty or more years, produces a significant cumulative achievement, reflecting one’s fundamental commitments and sense of value.3

The idea of vocation brings yet another set of meanings to work. When persons talk about “being called,” they often mean that they feel summoned to some kind of work that would be valuable even if they hadn’t been called to it.4 To be called to some work, furthermore, implies that another has initiated a project in which one is being called to participate; it is not work, in other words, of one’s own devising. That project, whatever it is, is a center of value that makes work meaningful. The project that is the focus of vocation is a center of value in that it confers a sense of purpose to the lives of persons who dedicate themselves to the work. Thus, if one has a calling to law, presumably that calling is meaningful not only because legal work is lucrative or because one is a skillful lawyer. Law is a vocation because the law itself is a project worthy of a substantial, perhaps lifelong, commitment.

Like a job and a career, a vocation is work that provides for one’s own flourishing. Unlike a job, and like a career, however, the work of a vocation is meaningful in ways that transcend the work’s potential for livelihood. A career is meaningful ultimately because it provides a person with a sense of purpose. Vocation takes this a step further. Vocational work is meaningful because it includes but also transcends one’s sense of purpose, aiming ultimately at an external and more holistic purpose, a common good.

Work in a particular area often permits all three framings. If work in the law, for example, is framed primarily as a job, the focus of the lawyer’s concern may be on the material rewards that the work produces. If it is framed as a career, the emphasis may be on one’s sense of identity and self-fulfillment in relationship to the law. If, however, this work is framed as a vocation, the lawyer is likely to understand her work primarily as dedication to an external source of meaning and value, such as, for example, the ideals of justice and fairness that the law is supposed to uphold. Those goods—justice and fairness—give the lawyer’s work a center of value outside of her experience of the work. At the same time, one’s lifelong dedication to the goods of justice and fairness contributes to one’s own sense of identity and thus the pleasure that comes with doing the work.5 A framing of work, then, is never simply attached to work. Instead, a person must actively assert the meaningfulness of work in a particular framing. A person must, in other words, claim that her work is a vocation. To do so is to express a particular motivation for doing work, that it contributes in some sense to a common good.

The above discussion turns on wordplay, which should not be confused for rigorous analysis. But wordplay does begin to excavate traditions of meaning associated with different framings of work. Wordplay suggests four claims associated with the idea of vocation: (1) as a “calling,” there is a calling party, a caller; (2) the calling party initiates a project; and (3) invites others, the called, to participate in the work of the project; and finally, (4) the project constitutes a locus of meaning, value, and purpose for all working participants and even for others who are not actively working on the project.

This chapter develops a theological frame in which to explore these four claims. Vocation is work on a project, initiated by another, conferring meaning and purpose on both work and worker. The theological frame developed here borrows heavily from John Calvin’s understanding of vocation. Calvin emphasizes the relationship between vocational work and the project that is its focus. His approach also underscores the struggle involved in becoming the kind of self capable of doing vocational work. Both of these insights enrich contemporary understandings of political work.

Vocation as Pilgrimage

Following classical philosophical patterns, Catholic traditions subordinated matter to spirit, body to soul, the via activa to the via contemplativa. Medieval religious orders stratified these distinctions socially. Vocational work was reserved for monks and other religious, who, through a life of prayer, study, and work, expanded the soul’s capacity to know God. All other work that created and sustained the material conditions of existence fell outside the scope of vocational work.6

The Protestant Reformation radically reoriented vocation.7 In Martin Luther’s theology of grace, persons are genuinely free only because God, in God’s grace, has chosen to redeem them. No work of any kind can achieve redemption.8 Thus, the hierarchy of via activa over via contemplativa does not hold. Monasticism, Luther argues, falsely elevated monastic work to “supererogation or perfection which has no like or equal.”9 Instead, all Christians are free to live sanctified lives in whatever context in which they are called to work.10 All persons can be called to vocational work.

Calvin shared Luther’s understanding that all are called to work in ways that participate in God’s redemptive purposes. Calvin situated vocation in the journey of sanctification. Through the movement of the Holy Spirit, the image of God is gradually regenerated in persons as they make a pilgrim’s journey through a treacherous and inhospitable world. For Calvin, the ultimate call—the redemption of creation—constitutes the context of earthly vocation.

In Calvin’s account, the moral life is a long and arduous journey with Christ toward final communion with God.11 The journey begins with an awakening to God’s redeeming work from within, when human beings are joined with Christ by way of the Holy Spirit, “the bond by which Christ effectually unites us to himself.”12 The journey continues with regeneration in Christ. It includes encounters with suffering and toil that mark existence in this world and mirrors Christ’s own journey through it. And the journey ends with the resurrection of the body, for which Christ’s resurrection on the last day is the “prototype.”13

Earthly existence has an indispensable role in the greater movement toward salvation. With Augustine, Calvin views earthly existence as a penultimate stage, a pilgrimage, that finally gives way to the culmination of creation in the life to come.14 In comparison with the “life to come,” the “present life,” Calvin writes, must be “utterly despised.” The earth is but a “place of exile.”15 However comparatively loathsome earthly exile is, Calvin is careful to say, earthly life ought still to be considered a gift from God.16 Thus, the stages of a pilgrim’s progress toward final reconciliation with God are not equally valuable in an absolute sense. Earthly exile is an impermanent condition that ultimately gives way to the fulfillment of creaturely being in the final resurrection. But each stage of the pilgrimage discloses, by way of “lesser proofs,” the shape of creation ultimately fulfilled, “the inheritance of eternal glory.”17 This point is crucial for understanding the status of the earthly pilgrimage as an intermediate movement that is also necessary and valuable in its own way.

The moral life unfolds in the time between the awakening in the Holy Spirit and the resurrection of the body on the last day. It amounts to the gradual restoration of the image of God in which human beings are made and which has been obscured by sin. Calvin calls this process “regeneration.”18 He suggests that regenerate life must “correspond with the righteousness of God”—it has to be a life, that is, marked by obedience to God’s will. As such, the regenerated life is a life of repentance, an ongoing process of turning away from the self and turning toward God, both “in the soul itself” and also in “outward works.”19

The pilgrimage of regeneration is arduous, requiring that persons be conformed to the cross-carrying Christ. Under the weight of the cross, life is “hard, toilsome, and unquiet,” Calvin remarks. It is “crammed with very many and various kinds of evil.”20 Bearing the cross is a discipline of hardship that disabuses persons of overweening self-love and arrogance in order to teach obedience and attention to God’s grace. More fundamentally, the earthly pilgrimage is a “condition” that moves the saints toward “the end that they be conformed to Christ.” As Christ “passed through a labyrinth of all evils into heavenly glory,” so too must his disciples, conformed to him, “be led through various tribulations to the same glory.”21

The discipline of bearing the cross teaches the elect that existence in this world is only a penultimate stage, which, “by continual proof of its miseries,” bears witness to “the future life.”22 However miserable the world is, Calvin insists that worldly goods are gifts from God that assist progress in the moral life and are to be appreciated in appropriate ways.23 Among these gifts is vocation, the particular station in life to which a Christian is called to attend.

Calvin argues that human beings, left to their own devices, are inclined to wander aimlessly through life, getting themselves into trouble along the way. God brings order out of disorder by way of the calling:

For [God] knows what great restlessness human nature flames, with what fickleness it is borne hither and thither. Therefore, lest through our stupidity and rashness everything be turned topsy-turvy, he has appointed duties for every man in his particular way of life. And that no one may thoughtlessly transgress his limits, he has named these various kinds of living “callings.”24

The demands of the moral life become concrete by virtue of the stations where people are positioned “as a sort of sentry post”—a place of work over which persons have ownership, defined “duties,” and by virtue of duties, “limits.” Limits alleviate the overwhelming weight of absolute moral obligation. Vocation marks out an ordered sphere of responsibility so that persons are not required to attend to every moral problem. Everyone bears a cross, just as Christ bore the cross in the world. But the burden looks different in different vocational contexts. A calling, by structuring the moral life, gives it intelligibility.

Vocational work is meaningful because it has a place in God’s greater purposes. “The Lord’s calling,” Calvin writes, “is in everything the beginning and foundation of well-doing.” By adhering to their calling, persons can be assured that their life will be “best ordered” when it is “directed toward this goal.”25 Ultimately, work, because it is oriented to the “Lord’s calling,” is situated in the common destiny in which all of creation participates. Work is often arduous and tedious, but persons should be content to work conscientiously because they know that work belongs to a larger project. The purpose of vocational work, then, is to glorify God as God works to redeem creation. Vocational work is intelligible because it participates in God’s work for the ultimate common good. Work should therefore also contribute to the common good of human communities. Calvin writes, “Scripture . . . warns that whatever benefits we obtain from the Lord have been entrusted to us on this condition: that they be applied to the common good of the church. And therefore the lawful use of all benefits consists in a liberal and kindly sharing of them with others.”26 God’s work transforms and transfigures a broken world in the direction of wholeness and restoration. Similarly, human work, though subject to the corrupting effects of sin, should contribute to the ongoing reform of social structures so that they more completely align with God’s purposes.27

Calvin’s conception of vocation, because it is rooted in his doctrine of election, removes success as a necessary condition of good work. No amount of good work will earn a person eternal life. People are free, Calvin argues, to pursue their vocations courageously, just as brave soldiers charge into a battle without regard for their prospects of winning.28 Vocation therefore invites spirited, intimate, and transformative engagement with the world.29

For Calvin, vocation participates in God’s project of redemption by creating space in which pilgrims are re-formed even as creation itself is remade. Vocation ties the eschatological destiny of creation to a cruciform ontology. Standing fast in their vocational work, pilgrims negotiate, always imperfectly, the demands of sanctification in worlds fallen around and within them. That negotiation is itself transfigured into the cross-bearing likeness of Christ as cruciform pilgrims are conformed to Christ in their journey with him through the world.

There is much in Calvin’s understanding of sanctification in general and of vocation in particular that merits critique. Calvin’s contention that God intentionally inflicts hardship in the process of sanctification lends itself to all manner of abuse,...

Índice

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Statecraft in a Machiavellian Age
• Chapter 1. What Is a Political Vocation?
• Chapter 2. Responsibility and Representation
• Chapter 3. Vocation and Formation in Political Space
• Chapter 4. The Moral Ambiguity of Political Space
• Chapter 5. The Journey of Political Vocation
• Chapter 6. The Project of Political Vocation
• Chapter 7. Irony as a Political Virtue
• Chapter 8. Good Political Competition
• Conclusion: The Possibility of Political Vocation
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index