I’m blogging through Nancy Pearcey’s excellent book Total Truth as part of a book discussion I’ve been doing. Last time, I covered the first chapter, which deals with what’s in a worldview. This time, I’m hitting some hightlights from Chapter 2, “Rediscovering joy”. This chapter deals with what “living for God” means, and how it might connect with our “secular” work.

The chapter starts off relating the story of a Christian lawyer who grows discouraged and miserable because he feels like his everyday work is so disconnected from serving God. “I wanted to live for God, and the only frame of reference I had said that meant full-time Christian work”, Pearcey relates. She notes:

Like Sealy, most of us absorb the idea that serving God means primarily doing church work. If we end up in other fields of work, then we think serving the Lord means piling religious activities on top of our existing responsibilities – things like church services, Bible study, and evangelism. But where does that leave the job itself? Is our work only a material necessity, something that puts food on the table but has no intrinsic spiritual significance? Is it merely utilitarian, a way of making a living?

I feel like this is a very common misconception. I remember the first time I read this book, I was feeling almost the same thing – that if I were a strong Christian, if I wanted to truly serve God, I ought to become a missionary or a pastor or similar. This book helped me realize that was not the right attitude.

But what about our secular jobs and tasks, then?

Pearcey goes on to relate how Sealy was longing for spiritual meaning in his life and work, and he found that – not by changing careers but be realizing that God wanted him to bring a Christian perspective to his work, not just do Christian things when he wasn’t at work. Pearcey relates:

Sealy’s search for a solution was finally rewarded when he discovered a Christian study program that taught him how to address clients’ spiritual lives. Instantly, a whole new world opened to him, as he came to realize that the law addresses issues connected to the whole person. After all, “people typically come to lawyers when they’re in a crisis,” he explained. “It’s a phenomenal opportunity to help them do what’s right.” Lawyers can minister to troubled spouses seeking a divorce, counsel misguided teens in trouble with the law, advise ethically conflicted businessmen to do what’s right, confront Christian ministries that are compromising biblical principles. The law is not merely a set of procedures or argumentative technique. It is God’s means of confronting wrong, establishing justice, and promoting the public good.

At the time, and I suppose to some extent even now, I remember reading this and thinking, “Well, fine, that’s easy for you to say about the practice of the law, because the Bible clearly explains what role it serves, but what about my area of science?” I really struggled at the time with how I might be able to develop a perspective on my area of science – which is less about understanding the created world, and more about building computational models to help guide pharmaceutical drug discovery. Sure, from the created order in Genesis I can see the foundations for modern science, and I believe that God wants me to be doing what I do and that I can glorify him in doing it, but how do I develop a uniquely Christian perspective on what I do? How do I understand how I can glorify God in doing it?

In the last few years, though, I’ve begun to develop a somewhat clearer idea. In my workplace, I’m called partly to focus on serving other people. My Christian perspective and worldview makes me focus on problems in my field and in my workplace in a way which few others seem to. When I see people being treated unfairly, or systems which don’t work well for people or are inefficient, I see these as a waste of resource or, worse, a waste of people and I’m deeply troubled. This leads me in to trying to find ways to improve things and tackle big problems – not because I’m so capable but because I have a great God who is that capable and who cares about people, problems, and fairness. And as I’ve grown to see more of the problems around me and focus more on addressing them, I have found more satisfaction in my work, in part because I’m actually trying to help and minister to people, not build my scientific reputation.

Back to the two-level split

As we’ve already seen, a key theme of this book is that we often end up with a sacred-secular divide. Pearcey gets back to that here, noting how Christians often live essentially in two worlds, shuffling back and forth between the “private world of family and church” and the public area “where religious expression is firmly suppressed”, so as a result we bring no Christian perspective to our work other than being a moral person. Work just serves to bring home a paycheck, though we long for something more.

Pearcey then asks how we can break free of this dichotomy or split, and her answer is that we need a worldview which sees all of life as falling together within a single framework. All work, “sacred” or “secular”, can be a calling from the Lord. At some level, in my view, this is really no more profound than saying “Jesus is Lord” (the basic Christian confession) then realizing that means he is Lord over all areas of life and beginning to try and figure out what that means for the aspects of our life that aren’t explicitly oriented towards ministry. On the whole, as Pearcey is pointing out, it is the Biblical principles and calling for our life that give us purpose. The key question, then, is this: “How do I live for God in everything I do?”

Pearcey also relates the example of a doctor who says he left his practice to work in ministry, and she told him, “That’s exactly the problem: Your medical practice was a ministry, just as much as what you’re doing now.” He had apparently never thought of it that way.

How did we get here?

Pearcey also devotes some time into investigating how we got where we are – how we ended up in a situation where, essentially, Christianity is assumed to or allowed to have no bearing on our “secular” work. I won’t get much into details here, but she argues that in part to ensure we maintained religious freedom, we surrendered the public sphere. We ensured we could hold on to our faith, but at the expense of having it thought a private matter that can’t be brought to matters of public debate. In some sense, I think, people see this as the logical extension of the separation of church and state. If we bring up the Bible in a discussion of policy, the attitude almost seems to be, “How dare you bring your private views into this discussion!”

It’s crucial, Pearcey argues (and I agree) not to solely think of the Christian goal in different occupations/areas of life as evangelism, or as advancing private morality. Yes, we ought to share the gospel, and yes, we ought to stand for what is right. But further than that, what is the Biblical perspective on our whole area?

Pearcey also traces our problems back to the classical thinkers, and to some extent even the gnostics and Plato. Classical thought, she notes, draw a dichotomy between matter and spirit, treating the material realm as less important than the spiritual. Then in Platonic dualism, some part of the world –the material– was seen as inferior or bad. This was its own type of two-level split. And this was profoundly anti-Biblical; God created matter as one part of his creation. Everything came from him and is subject to him.

Pearcey argued that this classical dualism continued on past the Greeks, though. Scripture says our problem is moral – that we’ve broken God’s commandments – but many, including the gnostics and on up to the present day – see the problem as the physical and the material. The material world is bad, so religious life is about avoiding and escaping from the material aspects of life. These tendencies showed up in monasticism, asceticism, and certain attitudes towards marriage, sexuality, etc. Spiritual life was more important and “higher” than material things. Committed Christians were those who would reject the ordinary and devote themselves to ministry, etc. Pearcey argues that these views influenced many of the early church fathers.

She goes on to trace this line of thought through history up to the Reformation, and ends up arguing that it took until the reformation for this thinking to be wholly rejected, including in part by the idea of the priesthood of all believers. Christianity is not a summons to separate from physical life, but to participate in creation as it was designed to be. Luther, she notes, repurposed the term “vocation” to no longer refer to religious callings but all callings. She notes that the Reformers emphasized that creation itself is good, and God’s redemption is not a redemption out of the world, but rather a redemption to the design he had originally intended.

In view of this, secular work, she argues, is not good or bad in itself; what matters is what we seek through it and how we do it. She quotes Solzhenitsyn, who wrote, “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through the human heart.” In other words, it’s not just what we do but how and why we do it which determines whether we do right or wrong. Even “religious” activities can be sinful.

All creation, she notes, was originally good, but all was subject to the Fall, and all will be redeemed. Evil is not housed in some part of creation, but happens when that part of creation is used or directed other than how God intended.

The fact that all of creation fell is also critical, because it means there is no aspect of creation which is not tainted by the fall. Some attempt to rely on “pure” reason to arrive at truth, but that, itself, has been corrupted by the fall. There is no true neutrality, there are no truly objective observers. All creation – even our thought processes themselves – need redemption.

Overall, this chapter covered a lot of ground. But it was especially important for me to see how important it is to recognize that there is no such thing as “secular” work. Everything God calls me to do, whether outwardly religious or not, can be done for his glory, and seen as part of his calling. To divide things into material and spiritual categories and look down on the material or secular is to follow the path of the monastics away from authentic Christianity, in which God created everything good, and Jesus is Lord of all.