Every Good Endeavor

Every Good Endeavor

Author: Timothy Keller

I enjoyed this book. I read it during a 3-month sabbatical my job generously offers after every five years of work with them. I thought it would be a good re-focusing on the value, meaning, and importance behind work.

Brook’s first point is that so many college students do not choose work that actually fits their abilities, talents, and capacities, but rather choose work that fits within their limited imagination of how they can boost their own self-image. There were only three high-status kind of jobs-those that paid well, those that directly worked on society’s needs, and those that had the cool factor. Because there is no longer an operative consensus on the dignity of all work.

“Before all else, technique concerns means and not ends…Instead of being inspired by transcendental ideas… the modern economy functions like Darwinian natural selection… No one today can be reasonably convinced that this teeming and disruptive evolutionary impulse…leads infallibly to what is better … For the first time in the history of life, a living species holds the means to destroy the entire planet, and this species does not know where it is going.” Heidegger, Docx, and others such as Jacques Ellul are saying that technology, uncertainty, and the market have become the idols of a postmodern society. Because in a postmodern society no one is sure or can agree about “ends” or goals for the human race, we now have only “means” or techniques. Since there is no longer any dominant vision of healthy human life or good human society, we are left with nothing but individual competition for personal success and power. If something can be done through technology, it will be done, because our technology has no higher ideals or moral values to guide it or limit it.

Look again at the uniqueness of Christianity. Only the Christian worldview locates the problem with the world not in any part of the world or in any particular group of people but in sin itself (our loss of relationship with God). And it locates the solution in God’s grace (our restoration of a relationship with God through the work of Christ). Sin infects us all, and so we cannot simply divide the world into the heroes and villans. (And if we did, we would certainly have to count ourselves among the latter as well as the former.) Without an understanding of the gospel, we will be either naively utopian or cynically disillusioned. We will be demonizing something that isn’t bad enough to explain the mess we are in; and we will be idolizing something that isn’t powerful enough to get us out of it. This is, in the end, what all other worldviews do.

Without an understand of common grace, the world can be a pretty confusing place for a Christian. It would be natural for many Christians to identify with Antonio Salieri: He is bewildered and bitter that as a morally good person, his talent is modest, while Mozart (a morally despicable person, at least in Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus) has been favored by God through the gift of his soaring talent. Beyond his blindess to his own sin, Salieri’s problem was a failure to understand the reality of common grace. God gives out gifts of wisdom, talent, beauty, and skill according to his grace, that is, in a completely unmerited way. He casts them across the human race like seed, in order to enrich, brighten, and preserve the world. By rights, sin should be making life on earth here much more unberable than it is, and in fact, all creation and culture should have fallen apart by now. The reason it is not worse is because of the gift of common grace.

While most churches are smaller than Redeemer and would need to shape their ministry to integrate faith and work very differently, we encourage every church to develop something that fits its own context. Most churches could develop vocation groups to discuss the particular challenges and opportunities for workers in three basic fields: business, arts, and human services. Alternatively, the pastor could gather a group of twelve to twenty four people in different professions to read a book like Os Guiness’s The Call or Al Wolter’s Creation Regained and discuss its implications for their own lives. Redeemer has found that people are seeking far more theological study in order to navigate the challenges of their vocation, and they long for their pastor to be interested in learning more about the situations they face on a daily basis.