Vocation as the Thread of the Human Tapestry (Part Two)

But something went terribly amiss. The beautiful tapestry of relationships woven with the thread of humanity’s vocation has frayed and unraveled. Adam and Eve were not content to be like God and bear his image—they wanted to be God. As a result, their perfect, harmonious communion with God was broken, as was their communion with one another and the created order. Keller states, “The desires of the sinful heart create strains in the fabric of the real world that always leads to breakdown.”[1] Now, both the beauty and corruption of the creational tapestry is seen most vividly in humanity’s vocation.

Where work was to be worship of the Creator, it is now idolatrous worship of the creature. God’s curse upon Adam that he would return to the dust in Genesis 3:19 certainly means that Adam would return to the dust in death, but Adam and all his descendants also return to the dust in life. The ground out of which man was taken and of which he was commanded to make something, he now returns to make something of him. The creation over which he was to have mastery and dominion won mastery and dominion over him. Therefore, the identity given to him and out of which he was to work (the imago Dei), is now marred, and he works in order to establish an identity for himself. In this desperate search for identity, no regard or glory is given the Creator. In his work, man not only neglects his Creator, he rejects his Creator and turns to love and serve and seek identity in the created order, especially the work of his own hands.

Where work was to be directed outward at the benefit of others, it is now misdirected inwardly at self-preservation and self-promotion. And as Keller argues, “A life of self-glorification makes unity and love between people impossible.”[2] Man’s bent to seek first his own good undercuts any potential to leverage his work for the benefit of others.

Where work was to produce a flourishing of actualized potential, it is now often a burdensome, fruitless toiling. Man’s exercising of his Creator-endowed vice regency in the whole of creation was once fruitful and uninhibited, but it is now drudgery by the sweat of the brow and inhibited by thorns and thistles. “Work, even when it bears fruit, is always painful, often miscarries, and sometimes kills us.”[3] But this is not, praise God, the end of the story.

Re-Weaving the Tapestry

The point has been made previously that the continuity between God and his creative work is his word. His word is the agent through which God created the world in the beginning. Likewise, His word is the agent through which God is re-creating the world, in part now and perfectly in the eschatological future. This word is not, however, an impersonal utterance, but a person. As Saint Athanasius proclaims in his seminal work On the Incarnation:

The renewal of creation has been wrought by the Self-same Word Who made it in the beginning. There is no inconsistency between creation and salvation for the One Father has employed the same Agent for both works, effecting the salvation of the world through the same Word Who made it in the beginning.[4]

The New Testament affirms that the Word of whom Athanasius speaks and by whom God created in the beginning is the God-Man, Jesus Christ. John 1:1-3 declares, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. All things were made through him and without him was not anything made that was made.” Therefore, because it is the same Word by whom God worked to create and re-create, the end towards which God is at work is unchanged from creation to re-creation. Moreover, the work to which his creatures who have been re-created by the Word are called is not at all dissimilar to the work his creatures whom he created in the beginning were given.

Adam and Eve were instructed to fill the earth with image bearers who would cultivate the potential of the creation and place it in service of others. Where this tapestry of humanity unraveled as a consequence of sin, God is re-weaving it in and through Jesus, the same Word by whom the tapestry was woven in the beginning. In Jesus, God is re-creating a humanity who bears his image and he calls to love one another through their vocational cultivation of creation. So the doctrine of vocation does not only intersect with the doctrine of creation but with the doctrine of re-creation as well. At this intersection is a reiteration of the cultural mandate of Genesis: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28.19a). Because the church has so long understood this charge through a dualistic hermeneutic, she has failed to see that the command to make disciples is not limited to personal evangelism but encompasses the entirety of creation over which her Lord and Re-Creator has authority! Making disciples, therefore, is in part personal evangelism, but it is also co-laboring with Jesus to re-weave the relational tapestry of humanity—image bearers of the Creator, care takers of other image bearers and cultivators of creation—with a renewed and redeemed thread of vocation.

Christians have been called and empowered to direct the whole of their lives, in a variety of vocations, to manifest and multiply the realities of re-creation while they anticipate the final consummation of God’s work of re-creation when Christ comes again to at last make all things new. Whether accounting, medicine, homemaking, scholarship, architecture, marketing or agriculture, Christians ought and must work out of a renewed imago Dei for the benefit of others by stewarding and cultivating the creation over which God has placed them. By doing so, while imperfectly and in part, the beauty and glory of the re-woven tapestry of humanity as God intended it will be displayed in the people of God among the world.   

     

The Church as Tapestry Weavers

The point of intersection between the doctrines of vocation and creation come to bear on the life of the church in a multitude of ways, though only three will be highlighted here. First, it demands that work be regarded and praised as essential to our humanness. Second, it requires a re-allocation of the fruit of the church’s work. And third, it necessitates a celebration of the diversity of vocations to which God has called his church.

If the church is to be all she has been called by her Lord to be, she must recover a whole-life view of discipleship. God has called his church to live in all of life, in the whole of his world, manifesting and multiplying the realities of re-creation—realities that transcend any secular/sacred fabrication and gather all of life under the lordship of Jesus. The dividing wall of dualism must be broken down. Key to this is a biblical vision for vocation that sees work not as an inconsequential activity but as the vital and necessary thread that weaves together the fabric of humanity. Innate to humanity’s creatureliness is a disposition to work, and necessary to work is an engagement of creation. To neglect or marginalize the importance of work, therefore, is to be sub-human. The church must equip her people to think this way or she will fail to call her people up into a renewed, fully human humanity.

Perhaps the most urgent call for the church today in the West is the mandate to leverage her vocations for the benefit of others. In illustrating this point in the story of Esther whom God placed in a vocation of great power in king’s palace, Keller writes, “Unless you use your clout, your credentials, and your money in service to the people outside the palace, the palace is a prison; it has already given you your name… If you are unwilling to risk your place in the palace for your neighbors, the palace owns you.”[5] In a culture inundated with consumerism and individualism to the point even the church is desensitized to their destruction, a call to leverage work and its fruit for the benefit of others seems hardly possible. But the church must. And the church can. She has been called and equipped by God to work in a diverse multitude of vocations in order to bless her neighbors in his world.

Therefore, the church must recognize and affirm the necessity and worth of all vocations as they place the realized potential of creation into the service of others. Any culturally constructed value system or hierarchy of vocations must be leveled by the biblical paradigm. The biblical paradigm leaves no room for condescension or dissension in the body over varied vocations because the biblical paradigm not only recognizes but celebrates the diversity of vocations to which God has called his people.

By ascribing value to work as innate to humanity’s image bearing, directing the work of all vocations to love of neighbor and celebrating the worth and necessity of the diversity of vocations, the church will co-labor with God as weavers of the renewed human tapestry that is soon to be perfected in glorious splendor. 

This post is the second part of a continuation of the Doctrine of Work series. Read Vocation as the Thread of the Human Tapestry Part One here. Read the first post of the Doctrine of Work series here and the second post here.

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This essay was originally published in fulfillment of coursework for Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary's Th.M. program, THE6960 Doctrine of Vocation, Spring 2015.

[1] Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavor (New York: Dutton, 2012), 116.

[2] Ibid., 116.           

[3] Ibid., 89.

[4] Athanasius, On the Incarnation¸ (Fig Book, 2012), iBooks edition.

[5] Keller¸ Every Good Endeavor, 123.