Heavenly Good of Earthly Work, Part I

It's All Going to Burn

For over one thousand years the Western Church has been undermined by an unbiblical dualism.  The evangelical stream flowing out of the Reformation was unable to shake off its shackles, largely because of the influence of Luther.  Now, however--and not before time, serious efforts are underway to attack this unbiblical nostrum head on, with the Scriptures. The critical issue turns around the place and value of work.

We are going to publish a short series of posts on this issue.  They will interact with a helpful introduction to these matters in a book by Darrell Cosden, entitled, The Heavenly Good of Earthly Work (Milton Keynes, Buck: Paternoster Press, 2006). 

Many years ago we recall being told that there are only three things which are going to last for eternity: God, redeemed people, and the Word of God.  Therefore, we were admonished, above all else devote your life to these three.
  Worship God, be immersed in the Scriptures, and seek to save souls.  Everything else should be subservient.  Here was evangelicalism in a nutshell.

Darrell Cosden recounts his experience with a similar theology.  He rightly points out that it necessarily leads to dualism: in fact, since most of us spend the vast majority of our lives in occupations and callings (that is, work) not directly related to God, saving souls, or the Word of God, we can only conclude that we are second-class, worldly  Christians.  We have wasted our lives on the unimportant.  To be really committed and genuinely spiritual one ought to be in full-time, or near full-time Christian "work".

In some church traditions this dualism is expressed in clericalism and the clergy/laity distinction.

Clericalism, or the belief that those in vocational ministry has a higher status or spiritual value, is a foundational assumption in many churches.  The priest, many believe, spending more time in his or her work dealing with the things of eternity--the case of souls and the ministry of the word and sacrament--than do ordinary working Christians in the marketplace or home.  A spiritually frustrating hierarchy within the people of God ensues.  (Cosden, Heavenly Good, p. 19)

In other church traditions--most notably evangelical ones--whilst there is a formal commitment to the "priesthood of all believers", the dualism is more subtle.  People are not divided into two classes, but the work they do is.  Work is either sacred or secular.  Sacred work has to do with concerns that will last for eternity.  Secular work is labour over things that will be burnt up at the Last Day.  The end result is a division into two classes of Christians: those who do spiritual work, and those who do not.  Much hortatory effort in evangelical churches is focused on enjoining the congregation to get more involved in "spiritual" work (with the implication of lessening their involvement in their careers or "worldly" work).

We do not have to look far to find this piety lived out in practice.  At a recent graduation ceremony at an evangelical theological college, the speaker passionately challenged the graduates to resist the temptation to leave "the ministry" and undertake other kinds of ultimately less important work when vocational ministry becomes (sic) difficult, since this will not count as much for eternity.  After the service, a graduate returning to a career in a high school approached me and sarcastically commented about his "already having opted for second best."  What else could he conclude? (Ibid., p.20)

Underlying all these conceptions is a pagan notion:  the idea that there are two realms, one higher, one lower.  There is the realm of the non-material--the spiritual--and the realm of empirical reality--of matter.  "Spirit" is more true, alive, higher, more divine than "matter".  This dualism is a construction of Greek paganism.  It has been taken over into the Church and continued as an allegedly foundational perspective of the Bible and the Church for two millennia.  In our day, the Roman Catholic, the Eastern Orthodox and most Protestant traditions all subscribe to it in one form or another.

Cosden argues that in the Protestant church traditions--particularly those known as evangelical--this dualism was inherited from the Roman Catholic Church, albeit via Martin Luther (who adapted or tweaked the Roman Catholic conception.)

To present the Roman Catholic position, Cosden turns to the 1981 tract by Pope John Paul II entitled Laborem Exercens ("On Human Work").  This encyclical seeks to counter the increasingly materialistic bent of modern life in the West.  It presents work and related cultural activity as biblically warranted and an expression of being made in God's image.  It celebrates the importance and meaning of earthly work.  (Ibid., p. 25).  But there are two aspects to work: the "objective" aspect and the "subjective".  The former refers to the fruits of human work--what is produced: cell-phone, hamburgers, and automobiles, for example.  The "subjective" aspect of work is the value and good of work to human beings.

According to John Paul II, the latter--the subjective value to human beings who work--is much more important than what is actually produced by work.  It is more important spiritually.  Cosden summarises the Roman Catholic perspective this way: 

The argument he [John Paul II] puts forth boils down to the conclusion that, theologically, a hierarchical ordering of the subjective sense of work over the objective should always be maintained--because this accurately reflects God's pattern for ordering the world  In political and economic terms, the priority from a theological point of view should always be labor over capital.  In human terms, we must maintain the primacy of persons over things.  In the spiritual realm, the priority is always the spiritual over the material--or as John Paul II says in a related encyclical, we [Roman Catholics] believe in "the superiority of spirit over matter." (Ibid., p. 27)

This, then, is the Roman Catholic view of the platonic dualism.  It is presented as Christian.  But it is also the evangelical Protestant view.  In other words, it would be fair to assert this view as commonly held in most traditions within Western Christendom and in Western churches today.

If we were to ask the question, Does the objective product of our work have value in itself for eternity? the Roman Catholic Church would respond in the negative.  Its eternal value is found only in what effect and affect our work has upon our eternal souls.  It turns out, however, that Martin Luther, via a parallel road, ended up teaching the same--and via Luther's construct, the same dualism is regnant in Protestantism.

We will turn to Luther's variant in our next post.