Apologetics is based on the political assumption that Christians somehow have a stake in transforming our ecclesial claims into intellectual assumptions that will enable us to be faithful to Christ while still participating in the political structures of a world that does not yet know Christ. Transform the gospel rather than ourselves. It is this Constantinian assumption that has transformed Christianity into the intellectual “problem,” which so preoccupies modern theologians.

We believe that Christianity has no stake in the utilitarian defense of belief as belief. The theological assumption… that Christianity is a system of belief must be questioned. It is the content of belief that concerns Scripture, not eradicating unbelief by means of a believable theological system. The Bible finds uninteresting many of our modern preoccupations with whether or not it is still possible for modern people to believe. The Bible’s concern is whether or not we shall be faithful to the gospel, the truth about the way things are now that God is with us through the life, cross, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.

Hauerwas & Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony, 22.

Them’s fightin’ words.

1. Christ against Culture
2. Christ of Culture
3. Christ above Culture
4. Christ and Culture in Paradox
5. Christ Transforming Culture

The critiques of Niehbuhr’s typology are legion, and I won’t rehash them here. What I do find interesting, however, is the different typology that Hauerwas and Willimon draw from John Howard Yoder:

Yoder distinguishes between the activist church, the conversionist church, and the confessing church.

The activist church is more concerned with the building of a better society than with the reformation of the church. Through the humanization of social structures, the activist church glorifies God. It calls on its members to see God at work behind the movements for social change so that Christians will join in movements for justice wherever they find them. It hopes to be on the right side of history, believing it has the key for reading the direction of history or underwriting the progressive forces of history. The difficulty, as we noted earlier, is that the activist church appears to lack the theological insight to judge history for itself. Its politics becomes a sort of religiously glorified liberalism.

On the other hand we have the conversionist church. This church argues that no amount of tinkering with the structures of society will counter the effects ofhuman sin. The promises of secular optimism are therefore false because they attempt to bypass the biblical call to admit personal guilt and to experience reconciliation to God and neighbor. The sphere of political action is shifted by the conversionist church from without to within, from society to the individual soul. Because this church works only for inward change, it has no alternative social ethic or social structure of its own to offer the world. Alas, the political claims of Jesus are sacrificed for politics that inevitably seems to degenerate into a religiously glorified conservativism.

The confessing church is not a synthesis of the other two approaches, a helpful middle ground. Rather, it is a radical alternative. Rejecting both the indivudlaism of the conversionists and the secularism of the activists and their common equation of what works with what is faithful, the confessing church finds its main political task to lie, not in the personal transformation of indiviudal hearsts or the modification of society, but rather in the congregation’s determination to worship Christ in all things.

Hauerwas & Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony, 46-47.

I must say at the outset that there is a lot of conceptual fuzziness between the terms calling, vocation, gifting and career that must be addressed in any discussion of calling. What someone means when they talk about calling is often an unstated mix of some combination of all of the above, leading to much confusion and misunderstanding. So, I will offer my thoughts on the points of similarity and divergence in the hopes that, once everyone thinks the way I do, the world will be a safe place for us all.

Firstly, calling and vocation should largely be seen as one and the same. Vocation comes from the Latin vocare (to call), from which we also have the word vocal. They convey that something from beyond ourselves (or possibly within ourselves) is speaking to us about the kind of person we are.

Note that I did not say the kind of person we are meant to be, as that is the language of advertising, romanticism and self-deception. Indeed, one of the problems in discerning our calling is that we believe that the problem is in figuring out who we should be, rather than recognizing that a large obstacle in discerning our calling is the many voices of “should be” drowning out who we actually are.

Before I’m misunderstood, I’m not advocating some type of fatalism here, where we can never change. I fully affirm the need to grow, develop and change over the course of our lifetime. What I’m saying is that the masks we wear on a daily basis generally aren’t who we are, but rather some collection of personas we’ve been told we should be. This means that we’re constantly avoiding who we really are in the name of who we are meant to be, while calling/vocation speaks to who we actually are beyond the lies, hype and overly romantic notions of self that are bought and sold every day.

So, vocation (or calling) is simply the voice that is calling us to be who we have actually been created to be, but what about the links between calling and gifting? Simplifying in the extreme, I’d say that they should be seen as closely related, but ultimately different things.

At the most basic level, the difference between calling and gifting can be seen as the difference between being and doing: calling has to do with being the people we actually are, while gifting has to do with the particular talents, aptitudes and skills that we use in living our lives and serving others.

I want to stress that viewing calling and gifting as separate is only truly possible at an abstract level. In concrete lived life, who we are and what we do are tightly bound up with one another and could never be truly isolated. But I find the distinction useful insofar as it helps us to think of who we are as being somehow deeper and more fundamental than merely what we do. In a world where we’re too easily defined by what we do—what’s the first question you’re asked when meeting someone new?—it’s liberating to see that there’s some entity called “myself” that is more than merely what I do.

To illustrate, let’s imagine a pianist whose playing profoundly moves whoever hears him play. Now let’s imagine that a terrible accident befalls this pianist where he loses the use of one of his hands. This would, of course, be a tragedy, both for the pianist himself, and for the world that is now deprived of the beauty of his music. And, as an embodied creature, this unavoidably changes the makeup of who he is.

Can we imagine him finding ways to live his life that are consistent with the person he was before losing the use of his hand? Is he not still the same person, however changed his life is by his loss? Perhaps in time he will see that there are aspects of who he has always been that he now lives via means other than music. Maybe playing music was his way of giving hope to people in pain, and he now enacts that part of who he is by sitting with terminally ill people in a hospice, reflecting the love of Christ as best he can to them.

Perhaps this example might also help rid us of the misguided notion that calling has something to do with what is popularly known as destiny. This fatalistic (not to mention nauseatingly romantic) idea needs to die a few thousand deaths and be forever detached from the notion of calling. Calling is about becoming the person you actually are rather than some unavoidable set of preordained steps that you have no say in. Indeed, calling presupposes that we are somehow free to respond in creative love to the voice that is calling us to be who we really are.

I have left career until the end, and for good reason. If there’s one thing I’m thankful for in our post-Industrial world—and there aren’t many—it’s that the idea of “having a career” has basically become meaningless in a world where we’re all expected to change our line of work continually. This is not to say that I favour job instability (which favours corporations much more than workers), but rather that career has often served as a distraction (or replacement) for discerning our calling.

The confusion around calling culminates in its worst possible form when we believe that it is our calling to find a career in which we can make money from utilizing our gifting. I cannot imagine a better recipe for misery. Most will never find work that they feel fully engages their gifting, so they will forever resent the work they do and romantically long to work within their gifting. And then you have the poor souls who actually do make a career of their gifting, and have to navigate the murky path between the integrity of their gifting and the need to make a living. Damned if you do; damned if you don’t.

Finally, while I’ve tried to speak of calling in a distinctly personal manner, I fear that it is likely much too individualistic. Indeed, I believe that we can only ever truly be the people that we truly are if we are doing so amidst a community of souls who help each other to truly be themselves. A community that allows its members to truly be themselves—despite the suffering this diversity will inevitably produce—is a community that has heard the call to love with love of Christ; to live in the way of self-giving love that considers all that we are and have as a gift to be lavishly spent in the service of others. If this is the broad call that our personal callings interact with and support, I believe that we truly have heard the voice of the living God.

Or, go watch it in full size.

I’ll come right out and say it: discovering my calling is generally reduced to some vague notion of self-fulfillment and well-being. This is more easily seen in the process of how we come to decide what is not our calling, namely those things that make us feel unhappy, unwanted, unfulfilled and possibly even marked with garden-variety suffering.

How on earth (or, more appropriately, in hell) has a religion that follows a tortured and executed savior come to so thoroughly identify following said savior with such a trite therapeuticism? We blather on about “the abundant life” promised to disciples of Jesus, but gloss over the whole “the world will hate you like it hates me” thing that Christ made pretty clear to those who would follow him (c.f. John 15:18-21).

This is the place where happy hunters will tell me that I’m being gloomy. Pardon me while I go don some sackcloth and bathe in ashes. I’d like to make it quite clear that shifting the major discernment factor for calling from happiness to misery would be simply to repeat the same mistake we’re currently making in a different direction. I’m not interested in resurrecting self-flagellation or “this world’s not my home”-style escapism either.

No, when we’re discerning our calling, we walk by faith. This means that we don’t have obvious answers or easy measuring sticks. Or, in short, it’s really, really hard, filled with moments of clarity, stretches of discouragement, and occasional snatches of wonder. It’s subject to the full range of what it means to be a human being created in the image of God. God help us to not reduce calling to the myth of unfailing fulfillment.

I do have an interest in this book, which is for sale. (If you have bought it, dear reader, I thank you. If you have borrowed it, I honor your frugality. If you have stolen it, may it add to your confusion.) Most of the sale price pays the publisher for paper, ink, and other materials, for editorial advice, copyediting, design, advertising (I hope), and marketing. I get between 10 and 15 percent (depending on sales) for arranging the words on the pages.

As I understand it, I am being paid only for my work in arranging the words; my property is that arrangement. The thoughts in this book, on the contrary, are not mine. They came freely to me, and I give them freely away. I have no “intellectual property,” and I think that all claimants to such property are thieves.

Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), xviii.

I have not read the book, but I listened to the fantastic originating lectures, which combined wit, intellectual sophistication, political radicalism and good theology. If you prefer free to paid and/or audio to text, you can go listen to the 2008 Terry Lectures on iTunes U. In fact, I think I might just have to listen again.

The Internet has a natural bias toward exhibitionism and thus the erosion of real intimacy. There is nothing exclusive about it, yet it creates, paradoxically, a kind of illusion of of intimacy with people we’ve never met in person. This is the phenomenon of anonymous intimacy—the feeling of a relationship, but one that hasn’t been, and likely never will be, face to face…

This anonymous intimacy has a strange effect. It provides just enough connection to keep us from pursuing real intimacy. In a virtual community, our contacts involve very little real risk and demand even less of us personally. Vulnerability is optional. A community that promises freedom from rejection and makes authentic emotional investment optional can be extremely appealing, remarkably efficient, and a lot more convenient.

Virtual community is infinitely more virtual than it is communal. It’s a bit like cotton candy: It goes down easy and satiates our immediate hunger, but it doesn’t provide much in the way of sustainable nutrition. Not only that, but our appetite is spoiled. We no longer feel the need to participate in authentic community. Authentic community involves high degrees of intimacy, permanence, and proximity. While relative intimacy can be gained in virtual settings, the experiences of permanence and proximity have all but vanished.

I’m not morally opposed to cotton candy or virtual community. However, I am concerned that virtual community is slowly becoming our preferred way of relating. I don’t think the results will be any better than if we started eating spun sugar for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Shane Hipps, Flickering Pixels (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009), 113-4.