The Christian man’s calling will take him into the world, not to identify him with it but so that he may subdue it for the glory of God. What is more, it may be that in this way the gospel will find a point of entry into the lives of our neighbours not many of whom are interested in religion but not a few of whom are concerned about the quality and significance of life.

One consequence of the individualism that blights the modern evangelical is the loss of what the Puritans called the Christian man’s calling. This loss is partly a cause and partly a result of the present impotence, and derives from the idea that people are primarily non-material beings with non-material¹ needs and throw-away bodies. Creation is separated from redemption; the gospel exists to meet the non-bodily needs of men, and to wean them from interest in and involvement with the material (This is in strange contrast to the sensation-seeking and sensation-creating that goes on within evangelicalism). The message of the cross thus speaks only to the private world of the soul and not to the public world in which men live and work. This is of course an old, old heresy that in the past has encouraged hermits and monastics, but for all that its influence dies hard. One sign of its persistence is the fact that the word ‘calling’ has dropped out of use.

It has gone because for all our individualism we have grown unaccustomed to think of individual lives in all their detail. Men and women are souls to be saved, and no more. And because we think in these abstract yet individualistic ways we never come to think concretely about how the faith that, say, a businessman professes is to affect his business, or that of a student his studies.

The very way in which we have become accustomed to think of the gospel cuts across this sort of problem; these questions are never raised, or if they are they are given the haziest of answers.

1. Without the notion of a calling we have no means of connecting up faith and life; faith remains something interior, finding its expression only in religious experience and individual acts of worship. But we do not experience the grace of God as souls but as men and women who are involved in life, with a network of privileges and responsibilities which the gospel is not to leave untouched but to transform. As Adam had a divine calling, so Christians as the fallen but redeemed descendants of Adam have callings, and are to take up again the divine mandate to replenish and subdue the earth (Gen. 1:28).

This means that as God’s workmen not only our motives but the character of what we do must be changed. If the modern evangelical thinks at all about the implications that faith has for life he thinks only in terms of motives. In this he is being true to his understanding of faith as private and psychological. It is at this point perhaps that we falter. We are ready in principle to acknowledge that the character of our work is involved as well as our motives but fail to see how much this is to make an effective difference in our case. We look in the Bible and our hesitations seem to be reinforced for we find there only general principles of guidance which seem far removed from the shop floor or the slum-clearance project, or from electronics and accountancy.

But this is where our mistake is made. We cannot find detailed instructions and so we slip back into our old ways of thinking. But this is a wrong reaction; for the Christian is called upon to be re-creative, and because of this it is in the nature of things impossible to specify in advance what the implications of his re-creative activity will be in the immense number of different situations faced by Christians in all places and at all times. The Bible of course gives us positive and negative guidelines but as far as we are concerned the future is open. The Christian should thus be characterized by initiative, a willingness to consider new ideas, and a shunning of second-rate or sloppy thinking. For ‘the earth is the Lord’s’ and the Christian is the Lord’s steward. This is surely part of what it means to be a man and not a robot or a brute. The Bible is not meant to programme every detail of our lives, but we are meant under the divine guidance to think and work for ourselves. If we despise the search for solutions as worldly as this is to betray our callings. Just as it is to expect supernatural divine guidance to save us the trouble of thinking for ourselves.²

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