Posts ⁂ The Postmodern Terminal >_
How the sacred-secular divide reorganized itself inside the church's own operations, and what the vocation tradition and its pneumatological critics do about it.
Is a budget spreadsheet ministry? Budgets are moral documents, so yes, and the whole argument sits inside that question. I will argue that how work gets theologized determines how workers get formed. I will trace the sacred-secular divide from Luther's attempt to abolish it, through Miroslav Volf's alternative to the word "vocation," to where Kathryn Tanner makes the affirming move expensive.
Start with the Reformation. Medieval Christendom mostly reserved the language of vocation for those who entered the monastery or the priesthood. Luther blew that reservation up. Under the German word Beruf, every legitimate station becomes a calling from God: household, civil authority, ordinary trade. Gustaf Wingren gave this its definitive treatment in Luther on Vocation (1942; English 1957), and his Luther is startlingly concrete. Vocation is horizontal, not a ladder you climb toward God but service to the neighbour who needs something. God works through the worker as through a mask; God milks the cows through the person whose calling that is.
The divide Luther attacked did not disappear across five centuries of Protestant institutional life; it reorganized, and stopped running between monastery and marketplace to run instead through the middle of the church's own operations. Preaching, shepherding, and counselling kept theological language; budgets, staffing, systems, and facilities quietly picked up corporate language. In this unspoken arrangement the Spirit supervises the pulpit and outsources the office. R. Paul Stevens named the pattern in The Other Six Days (1999): the clergy-laity divide and the sacred-secular divide are one divide wearing two costumes. Listen for it. Does your organization describe its executive director with Lencioni, and its associate pastor with Ephesians four? That asymmetry is a doctrine nobody states.
Douglas Schuurman's Vocation (2004) defends the tradition ably, distinguishing the general call from particular callings, plural and simultaneous. So Volf's alternative has to earn its keep.
Volf's judgment is blunt: the dead hand of "vocation" needed lifting from the Christian idea of work. The classical scheme assumes a single lifelong station, but modern people hold several jobs at once. A theology built for a stable estate cannot describe a stochastic labour market. Work in the Spirit (1991) therefore reframes the field pneumatologically. The organizing category is not vocatio but charisma: Spirit-given gifts, distributed to each person, exercised in and as work. Work is not a fixed slot you occupy; it is a giftedness you deploy, cooperation with a God who chooses, in Volf's phrasing, to become "dependent" on the human helping hand. And Volf sides with transformatio mundi against annihilatio mundi: what work produces is not incinerated at the end but taken up and transfigured.
Do not miss the other half of that book, where Volf analyzes alienation. The Spirit's gifts do not sanctify a grinding workplace; they indict it. Darrell Cosden supplies the tool for the indictment. Work, he argues in A Theology of Work (2006), has three interrelated dimensions: instrumental (it meets needs, the worker's and the neighbour's), relational (it binds people into community and into relation with God and creation), and ontological (it is how people develop their humanness). Theology has been fluent in the first two and nearly mute on the third.
Then the necessary interruption. Kathryn Tanner's Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism (2019) turns Weber over. Weber asked how Protestant asceticism helped capitalism take hold; Tanner asks how Christian practice might resist what capitalism has become. Her target is finance-dominated capitalism and its person-shaping power: perpetual indebtedness, the self managed as ceaseless self-improvement, a horizon collapsed into an unrelenting present. Christian practice has comparable power, deployable against that formation.
So here is the test. Take one "secular" responsibility you carry, a budget line, a hiring decision, a system you maintain, and redescribe it twice: once in the vocation tradition (whom does this serve, in what station?) and once in Volf's terms (what charism is exercised here?). Then ask where theologizing the work would baptize an economic logic that deserved resistance. Watch for the moment "stewardship" becomes the word that keeps a position part-time, precarious, and underpaid while calling the arrangement faithful. A theology of work that can only affirm has stopped being theology. It has become an internal communications asset.
The Postmodern Terminal >_