Visions of Vocation:
Common Grace for the Common Good by Steven Garber
From the fast food employee to the Dotcom CEO, vocation is
not something to be hidden only for ourselves and to pad our bank account, but
we ‘are responsible, for love’s sake, for the way the world is and the way it
ought to be,’ (18) writes Steven Garber, author of the new book Visions of Vocation. What does it mean to know the world and still
love it? What does it mean to be
implicated by the world we live in and the devastation all around us? These questions are a few of the baseline
points that Garber seeks to answer in his thoughtful and wise book on
vocation. What is the most telling
feature of the whole book is Steven’s insistence that work cannot be
deconstructed into a few isolated statements that merely reflect economics and
earnings, but that our vocations because of their intrinsic nature affect all
of life, most importantly our ethics or how we live with what we know to be
true. I used this book in a recent God,
Culture, and Conversation setting at my church and the people met it with
eagerness and excitement. Rather than
run through a brief overview of the entire book, I want to highlight a few
chapters that really made an impact upon myself and my congregation.
Building on his discussion around the Hebrew word ‘yada, to
know,’ Steven gets to the crux of the issue concerning the responsibility of
knowledge in his retelling of the story of Le Chambon. These French Huegenot villagers in the tiny
village of Le Chambon were true heroes in that they hid over 5,000 Jews in
barns, houses, and anywhere they could find them from the Nazi forces who
wanted them dead. They knew the horrors
of the Holocaust and acted with compassion in saving the lives of many who had
done nothing wrong. Their only reward
for doing this was possible persecution or death. (106-111)
Steven comes back to the point time and again that knowledge is never an
abstract ideal but is rooted in doing.
Relationship, revelation, and responsibility provide the framework to
understand God’s involvement in the biblical narrative and the impetus for a
life of doing that holds others above ourselves. We are in relationship with others and by
this connection we care for love’s sake for their good. Knowing is all about doing. We could even make the case that we haven’t
really engaged in knowing well unless we live out fully the implications of
those truths.
Steven brings out this concept that ‘words have to become
flesh’ in chapter 5. He writes, “We see
out of our hearts. We commit ourselves
to living certain ways – because we want to – and then we explain the universe
in a way that makes sense of that choice.” (123) What we love first compels us more than a
cognitive and epistemological insight.
This is why most objections to the Christian faith are in the end not
intellectual barriers but different visions of the world that people are
committed to by their heart, their affections.
Drawing out the implications of the woman at the well in John 4, Steven
pays close attention to how Jesus reaches for the woman’s heart rather than just
answering surface questions. Jesus’
words offered life to this woman because they were coming alongside of
compassion, tenderness, and wisdom that reaches out toward a person rather than
standing aloof. The expectation that God
enters into the muck and mire of life through Jesus gives us great strength to
enter into our neighbors stuff as well.
We see the highest example of this in Jesus, who even on the cross
reached out to the other men on the cross and saying to one, ‘Today you will be
with me in Paradise.’
We are implicated in this life as we grow in our
understanding. From economics and
farming, to prisons and welfare, each sector of culture is not to be cut off
from the common grace it deserves. Yet,
it is the plight of believers everywhere to see knowing as doing and in turn be
changed by this.
Thanks to IVP Books and Adrianna Wright for the copy of this
book in exchange for an honest review.
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