A theology of work: part 1 - rule

Problems in Christian thinking about work

‘What do you do for work?’  It’s probably the second question that most of us ask when we meet someone new.  Right after we’ve forgotten the name that they’ve just told us!

It’s just the way things are.  For most of us, work is somewhere right at the heart of how we see ourselves and how we explain ourselves to others.  Usually, it’s right at the heart of our diaries, too - in any given working week, this is the place where we spend around half our waking hours.

For lots of people work is also at the heart of our relationships.  A decade ago, shows like Friends, Seinfeld, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, told us that our friends were our family.  A generation before that they told us that family was family – think of shows like The Cosby Show, The Brady Bunch, or Hey Dad.  But today, isn’t the message from shows like The Newsroom and Grey’s Anatomy, or any of the crime shows like NCIS and CSI, that work is now our family?

Work is, therefore, not just an important part of how we see ourselves and how we explain ourselves to others.  It’s also a big part of our culture’s view of life.

But it’s also an area that we sometimes struggle with when we’re trying to think Christianly.  We’re ok when we’re talking about the gospel, or about our life together as Christians, or growing in love for one another, or sin and holiness, or trying to make disciples. But for lots of Christians, we’re nowhere near as good at speaking about work, except perhaps as something you should give up in order to do full-time paid Christian ministry.  This means that for some of us, a big disconnect can develop between our Christian faith and our lives at work, and we’re not quite sure what one has to do with the other.

So how should we think about the value of work in a world that God has made, but which is also going to pass away?

Work in the creation

The important starting point, of course in our Christian thinking about work is Genesis 1-2.  The first thing to say is that work is good.  It’s good because God does it.  It’s good because creation needs it.  And it’s good because mankind was made for it.

The idea that God works is taught to us very clearly in Gen 2:1-3:

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and wall the host of them. And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done.  So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.

It’s the very first explicit reference to ‘work’ in the Bible, and it’s all about God’s work of creation.

But God didn’t just do his initial work of creation, and then just leave things to go on their merry way.  He continues to work in the creation, by sovereignly ruling all things.  Ps 104 is just one place that speaks of this work of God (e.g., Ps 104:24-29).  This work that God does is delightful, and God delights in it (104:31).

But work is also good because creation needs it.  Thus Gen 2:5 tell us:

When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up—for the LORD God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground …

In other words, right back at the very beginning, there was a time when not much was happening in the creation.  And the reason was there was no man to work the ground.  The creation is good, and very good.  But without a man to work the ground, it is somehow incomplete and unfulfilled.

Finally, work in creation is good because it’s what mankind was created for.  Not just later on in Gen 2 when the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it; or even later than that when God brings all the animals to the man to see what he would name them; but even back in Gen 1:27-28, when:

God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

It’s box 1 of 2 Ways to Live, for anyone who has ever been trained in that way of explaining the gospel.  God has made us in his image.  And he has put us in charge of the world: to rule it, to care for it, to be responsible for it.  This is the work we were made for.

One of the immediate implications for our thinking about work is that we often use the word in a much narrower sense than Scripture does.  Typically for us, we use the word ‘work’ to refer to our employment, which is why we can so easily get ourselves in knots when we’re speaking about activities that are clearly hard work but which are not employment in the usual sense, such as the work of parenting.  Biblically, though, human work includes a whole range of human activities – whether paid or unpaid – that reflect our ruling of creation and which are necessary for the well-being of human communities.  Work in the sense of our employment is simply one expression of the much bigger category of work that God has given us to do as his image-bearers in this world.

So here is the starting point for a Christian view of work.  Work is good, and we ought to keep affirming its goodness.  It’s not a necessary evil that has to be endured so that we can get to the really good stuff of life, which is doing nothing.  It hasn’t come into the world because of sin.  It’s been there from the beginning.  God does it.  Creation needs it.  We were made for it.  It’s good.