The Context of Christian Vocation: Some assumptions of the modern era

"Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect." 

--Romans 12.2

There are two fundamental assumptions that the Apostle Paul makes in this pivotal passage in Romans. First, he asserts that there is a "Caller", one who has summoned us, commissioned us; one who has a plan or will for us. Embedded in this assumption is responsibility: we are obligated to discern the will of the "Caller", to conform our lives to something outside of ourselves. Though Paul doesn't use the term, he is underscoring that we have a vocation, that is, a responsibility to discern the Voice that calls us (the word vocation comes from the Latin word vocare, which means 'to call') to live in this world in a particular way.

The second assumption of this passage is that our vocation is lived out in a context in which we are being directed away from our calling, away from the Caller and His call. Perhaps another way to say this is that there are competing "callings" or vocations. Our default position is "to be conformed to the world" (the Greek word translated 'world' really means something more like 'patterns, standards, or assumptions of the age that we live in').  In Paul's mind this conformity deforms our humanity because it detours us from our calling. 

There are other things we could explore in this passage, but I want to highlight one implication of these two assumptions: if we are going to properly discern the will of God, the Caller and His calling for us, then we must also be aware of the ways in which we are being conformed to the patterns, standards, and assumptions of the age that we live in. In other words, we are compelled to ask, What are we being conformed to? What are the patterns, standards, and assumptions of this age? This goes along with asking, What is the will of God?

Most who read this are situated within the narrative of the West; this is our context. The Western story explains who we are, why we are here, and where we are going. It is the story we tell ourselves in songs, parades, advertisements, political debates, and even in congregations. The Western story exerts enormous influence on our imaginations and on our self-understanding. It shapes the way we think about our work, how we organize our lives, and what we consider to be the good life.  In speaking of the Western story, I am not referring to any particular nationality, or ethnic group, or political ideology. The term is shorthand for the prominent and demonstrable assumptions of the West (mostly Europe and North America) that have shaped our foundational institutions and our daily practices. And for the most part, these assumptions are subconscious and unexamined. 

One of the most helpful analyses of the influence of the Western story on our modern imagination that I have read recently is Ron Highfield's God, Freedom, and Human Dignity: Embracing a God-centered identity in a me-centered culture.  Drawing on the work of Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre, Highfield shows how the Western story has shaped us to view God as a threat to our well-being. For most in the modern Western world,  God threatens our dignity and freedom. Highfield asks, How did we get here? How did we get to the point to where we see ourselves in competition with God? 

Highfield begins by noting that we live in a "me-centered" world. With this term "me-centered" Highfield is not asserting that our modern age is overly selfish or narcissistic. Instead, he makes a more profound observation: the modern self "attempts to create its identity by sheer will power and rejects identity-conferring relationships unless they are artifacts of its own free will" (17). Highfield highlights that "in contrast to previous ages, modern culture denies that one can become an authentic person or experience fulfillment in life by conforming to natural or socially given relationships and roles. Instead we are taught that our self-worth and happiness depend on reconstructing ourselves according to our desires. And the project of redesigning ourselves necessitates that we continually break free from the web of social relationships and expectations that would otherwise impose an alien identity on us" (17). In this framework of understanding what it means to be human, it should come as no surprise, Highfield argues,  that most people in the modern age feel "a weight of oppression and a flood of resentment when confronted by the demands of traditional morality and religion" (18). I would also add that they also feel an enormous weight of oppression and flood of resentment as they are left to their own devices to figure out who they are and why they are here. 

In Chapter One, "How the Me-Centered World Was Born", Highfield traces the way in which the Western world moved away from self-understanding and morality that was grounded in external things like nature or group identity, and has now shifted to "inwardness" as the norming norm. In the past, freedom, dignity,  and flourishing could only be attained by bringing oneself into harmony with the natural order of things--something extrinsic to the self. But with the scientific revolution came a new assumption about what it means to be human: freedom, dignity, and human flourishing are attained by conforming the world to our desires, wants, and will. We determine what is good. There is no human nature to which we ought to conform; there is no teleology, no design or purpose inherent to the natural world and our embodied lives in that world;  there is no created order that governs morality, justice,  and the good. Instead, dignity and fulfillment are now rooted inward in our feelings, preferences, thoughts, opinions, and wishes. This is the fundamental project of the Enlightenment, which has shaped all of our institutions and practices in the West: we must disengage from all external impositions upon our will and being. Our calling is to conform the world to our will, our wishes, our desires. In this regard, technology becomes the high priest, the effectual means by which we can achieve our dignity and freedom. 

Highfield goes into detail demonstrating how this has become the predominant assumption about what it means to be human in the modern age. He draws the line from Galileo to Descartes, Locke, Deism, Rousseau, Kant, Hume, and the Enlightenment,  and even shows how some Christian traditions have embraced some of these assumptions. I find that Highfield's description (or perhaps diagnosis) of the modern self accords with my own experience as I encounter all kinds of people in my dual professions of pastor and university professor. So, what are the implications of this modern understanding of what it means to be human? I would like to highlight at least four:

1. This helps explain why today most people think about their “calling” or "vocation"  without any reference to something outside of themselves, without any sense that there is an agent who has a claim on or a plan for their lives; rather, what the modern age usually means by “calling” is more akin to discerning how they can be more authentic or true to their desires and feelings. Highfield shows that we all, to some degree, have been conditioned to think about our “calling” without any reference to God or some other external order of things. In the formative years of high school, for example, if we thought anything about our “calling” it was likely to be related to what major we were going to pick, or what school we were going to attend, and that was often shaped by either our academic aptitude, and/or which professions paid well, and where we lived (or wanted to live!). Rarely is “calling” ever related to big questions like What is a good life?, or What kind of person do I want to become?, or What is my life made for? And even if in rare cases where these bigger questions are a factor in discerning one’s calling, these important questions are not usually shaped by deep reflection on the “Caller”, the agent who has a claim on and plan for your life—in part because for many, perhaps most, these are simply things that we cannot know, but also because in many institutions those kind of big questions are sidelined as inappropriate.

2. We live in a world where morality or justice are not derived from something outside of ourselves. Our modern age has been reduced to what MacIntyre calls 'emotivism': all contemporary discussions about what is good, right, true, and just are clashes of antagonistic wills, each determined by a set of arbitrary choices that are shaped by our inwardness, by our competing wants, desires, and wishes. This explains much of our political environment today. This is explains why power and technology are to be desired most in life. 

3. The modern self is in competition with God. And we have three responses: (1) we can defiantly resist; we can try to figure out how to use God as a means to our end; or we can seek to ignore God as we pursue our sense of dignity, freedom, and fulfillment. 

4. In a related manner, "[w]hile our contemporaries look within themselves for moral sources and authority to guide them toward fullness, Christianity points to the transcendent God, who is Lord and Judge. Hence, God may appear to them as a threat to their dignity, which they identify with autonomy...Whereas our contemporaries trust the innocence of their inner depths and seek expression in ways that transgress the bounds of traditional morality, Christianity denies the unambiguous goodness of nature's first impulses. It warns against unruly passions, urges self-discipline guided by divine law and urges to love God above all other things. Christianity locates genuine human identity at a point in the space determined by the three axes of respect, fullness and dignity very different from that of contemporary society; indeed, it is so different that, from the perspective of the modern self, it can appear as disrespect, unhappiness and debasement instead of respect, fullness and dignity" (37). In short, we are called to "discern the will of God" in a context that rejects the claim that human beings are given their essence and end by God. This helps explain why the gospel is so unintelligible in our age. This is the pattern that we are being conformed to unless we are transformed by the renewing of our minds. And this is the context in which we are called to love our neighbors. 

* This is a sampling of a draft of a new book I am working on, Understanding Christian Vocation.