Chapter 47: The Calling
Updated: 3/11/20
Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country, and from your relatives, and from your father's household, to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, but whoever dishonors you I will curse. Through you will all the families of the earth be blessed.” So Abram went, as the Lord had told him to do, and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he left Haran (Genesis 12:1–5).As he was walking by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen. Jesus said to them, “Come, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” Immediately they left the nets and followed him. As Jesus was going on from there he saw two other brothers, James son of Zebedee, and John his brother. They were in the boat with Zebedee their father mending their nets. He called them, and they immediately left the boat and their father and followed him (Matthew 4:18–22).
He went out again by the lake, and all the crowd came to him, and he taught them. As he passed by, he saw Levi son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax collector's tent and he said to him, “Follow me.” He got up and followed him (Mark 2:13–14).
In these three incidents, we see a pattern. Somebody is productive. He has a good job. He has a stable future. Then, without warning, God calls him away from the way of life that has enabled him to become economically successful.
He gave some powerful promises to Abram. Abram would be the founder of a great nation. People would be blessed in the future because of him. God promised to bless the people who blessed him. That is a powerful promise. But who was this God? Could he be trusted? Could he deliver on his promises? Abram had to make a decision, just as his father had made a similar decision to leave Ur of the Chaldees along with Abram and his nephew Lot. His father was dead now, and now it was his turn to pull up stakes and move.
The four fishermen were partners. They had enough capital to have a pair of boats. They had tools of production. They were obviously successful. Jesus walks by and calls them to join him. All four of them immediately leave the boats behind. Zebedee had to replace them. He did not know it at the time, but his sons and their two partners would not return as fishermen on the Sea of Galilee. They would become fishers of men, whatever that meant. The four fishermen did not know what that meant, but they were willing to learn.
Then there was Levi. He had a really good occupation in terms of money, although it was a despised occupation among the Israelites. He was a tax collector. As soon as he got the call, he departed from the table at which he had been collecting taxes. There is no indication that he took his money with him. He just left.
These men responded to a call. The call was from God. They had better not pass by the opportunity to join Him. The opportunity was passing by. There was no time to waste. In English, we have a phrase: “He who hesitates is lost.” In this case, that was literal.
Consider the outcomes of their decisions. Abram was the founder of a nation. It was the most important nation in the ancient world. Because of the Old Testament, we have a detailed record of that nation. Through the church, that nation persists. People remember the name of Abram; even more remember his new name, Abraham: “father of nations.”
Peter became the leading apostle in the Jerusalem church. He also wrote two epistles that have come down through the ages. On the other boat were two brothers: James and John. James wrote an epistle with his name on it. John wrote three epistles, the Gospel of John, and the Book of Revelation. As for Levi, we learn from the Gospel of Matthew that his other name was Matthew (Matthew 9:9). He wrote the first book of the New Testament. Only Andrew among the five did not write a document that has survived. These men helped establish Western civilization. They had far more influence than Plato, Aristotle, or any of the other Greek philosophers had over the next 1200 years.
What if they all had rejected the call? God might have continued to bless their occupations. They were decent men. They were serving consumers effectively. They were benefits to their communities. But, except for immediate family members, no one would have remembered them half a century after they died. They would have joined the ranks of the billions of men and women who are forgotten within a few years of their deaths.
There were prophets in the Old Testament who had been simple men. Elisha was a farmer. He was recruited by Elijah while he was plowing his fields. He was with 12 yokes of oxen, meaning 24 oxen. He was economically successful. Before he joined Elijah as a servant, he sacrificed all of his oxen. He burned his plows to cook the oxen. He gave the meat to locals (I Kings 19:19–21). He severed all ties with the past. He walked away from wealth and a lifelong career. Amos was a shepherd (Amos 1:1). He ceased being a shepherd.
Moses had been a shepherd. He lived in the wilderness. He was successful. His father-in-law was a priest of Midian. Then he saw a burning bush. He was called by God, who spoke out of the bush. He had spent four decades herding sheep. He would then spend the next four decades herding Israelites. What he did changed the world. But there is no indication that he was not a successful shepherd. He might’ve continued being a shepherd for the next 40 years. But we would not remember his name.
In every case, God called successful people. He called them out of their comfort zones. They had specialized in economic production, and they had found markets for the output of their labor. They all abandoned their occupations. Their jobs had fed them and fed their families. Now they would leave those jobs, never to return.
They were not forced to do this. They were called to do this. They were called by God to do this. That made a difference for them, and it has made a difference for the world. It has made a difference for you.
My point is simple: there is a difference between a man’s job and his calling. The job puts food on the table. The job is conventional. The job is predictable. A calling from God also puts food on the table, but there is no visible guarantee of this at the time of the calling. It is not clear what the calling is all about. In the case of the prophets of Israel, the calling was mostly about personal trouble. Their message was not well received by the people or the leaders. The ministry of Jesus is the archetype. His message was not well received by most of the people and all of the leaders with any power. But a remnant responded, and that remnant changed the world.
I define a job or occupation as follows: the work that puts food on your table. I define calling differently: the most important thing you can do in life in which you would be most difficult to replace. The examples that I have provided are case studies of the transition between job and calling. There is no question in my mind that what God called each of those men to do for the rest of their lives was the most significant thing that they could possibly have done. Other people might have done them. We do not know who those people might have been. But we know this much: these men responded to God’s call, and the world was never the same again. We remember these men because they did not stick with their jobs. They saw the opportunity of a lifetime, or more to the point, they heard the opportunity of a lifetime, and they responded appropriately.
Another man who heard the call of God was Saul of Tarsus. He became the apostle Paul. He left his job as a persecutor of the church. Jesus literally called him to do this (Acts 9:3–7). But he got a new job. He became a tent maker. Perhaps he was already a tent maker. We don’t know. But we know for sure that, while he was an apostle, he made his living by making tents (Acts 18:3). We are told nothing of the quality of his tents. We know nothing about his marketing plans for selling these tents. The information about his tent making is relevant only to the extent that this occupation provided him independence. He was not dependent on the donations of churches. He reminded the church at Thessalonica of this fact. “For you remember, brothers, our labor and toil. Night and day we were working so that we might not weigh down any of you. During that time, we preached to you the gospel of God” (I Thessalonians 2:9). He reminded the church in Corinth of this fact. "We are fools for Christ's sake, but you are wise in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong. You are held in honor, but we are held in dishonor. Up to this present hour we are hungry and thirsty, we are poorly clothed, we are brutally beaten, and we are homeless. We work hard, working with our own hands. When we are reviled, we bless. When we are persecuted, we endure” (I Corinthians 4:10–12). “I have been at hard work and in hardship, in many sleepless nights, in hunger and thirst, often in fasting, in cold and nakedness” (II Corinthians 11:27). He was trying to raise money from the church to support the church in Jerusalem. He indirectly reminded them that he was not taking any money from them. It was a powerful argument. In his case, his job supported his calling as an apostle. He was self-financed. That is to say, he was customer-financed.
Paul made it clear that the calling of a minister is to be paid for by the church. He said this in the context of his refusal to accept any money from the Corinthian church. “Who serves as a soldier at his own expense? Who plants a vineyard and does not eat its fruit? Or who tends a flock and does not drink milk from it? Do I say these things based on human authority? Does not the law also say this? For it is written in the law of Moses, "Do not put a muzzle on an ox when it is treading out the grain." Is it really the oxen that God cares about? Is he not speaking about us? It was written for us, because the one who plows should plow in hope, and the one who threshes should thresh in the expectation of sharing in the harvest. If we sowed spiritual things among you, is it too much for us to reap material things from you? If others exercised this right from you, do we not have even more? But we did not claim this right. Instead we endured everything rather than be a hindrance to the gospel of Christ” (I Corinthians 9:7–12). [North, First Corinthians, ch. 11:A] Yet he kept his day job in order to keep his independence. He did not answer to them. He answered to God and to his customers.
For the record, I have always followed Paul’s lead in this regard. I have never taken money for the time that I have invested in writing Christian economics. I invested something in the range of 20,000 hours in writing, and at least 10,000 hours raising money through the Institute for Christian Economics from 1975 until I shut it down in 2001. I never wanted anybody to claim that I was profiting financially from my writing on Christian economics. I did my financial newsletter writing as a way to support myself. This is sometimes necessary if you have a calling for which you cannot get financial support.
It was through discussion with my printer in 1981 that I recognized the distinction between my job and my calling. I did not see it clearly before this. I wrote an article on this for the next issue of my bi-monthly newsletter, Christian Reconstruction (March/April). I tried to keep my presentation practical. Here is part of what I wrote.
The Bible teaches us that there is a special calling of God to His people. He calls them to faith in Jesus Christ. This involves a turning away from the evil lifestyle of the past. God calls men to a new way of life. He restores them to full ethical sonship (John 1:12). This is the doctrine of adoption. “Call upon the name of the Lord,” is a familiar biblical phrase. Christ said, “No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw [literally: drag] him: and l will raise him up at the last day” (John 6:44). God calls His people to faith in Christ. This is sometimes called the “effectual call,” and it is also referred to as the “special call.” It is a call to salvation. The general calling refers to men in general. Each man is called to subdue the earth to the glory of God (Genesis 1:28). This is a call to labor under the general sovereignty and providence of God. It is man's assignment to exercise dominion. The general calling is a man's vocation (“vocal” or “voice”). A man's vocation is his life's work, a form of service to God, whether he recognizes that he is under God or not.
The general calling took on great significance during the Protestant Reformation. Luther and Calvin stressed that all godly, honest labor is acceptable to God, and that there should be no distinction of an ethical nature between the minister and the farmer. There are functional distinctions, of course, which is why the Bible establishes certain personal requirements for men to serve as church leaders (I Timothy 3), but there is no ethical distinction. No man is more holy in the sight of God because of the kind of job he has.
This doctrine freed men from the psychological suppressant of feeling inferior because of their work. If any man's labor is acceptable to God, then it pays a man to work as well as he can. God honors competence, and grants more competence, to those who humble themselves before Him and who try to improve their performance. A good plumber gains more respect from his work than a lazy preacher. The question relates to diligence, not the kind of work performed.
This is clearly a liberating doctrine. It calls all men to labor hard and honestly. It teaches men that no matter what they do for a living, it is worth doing well. This, in turn, increases economic output, for men strive to work more intelligently and less wastefully. They strive to give a good account of themselves before God, and in doing so, they give a good account of themselves before men. This means greater wealth for all members of the market, for everyone is a beneficiary of efficient labor—everyone except those who are inefficient, lazy, or incompetent, who face greater competition than before. They deserve what they get.
The general calling is universal. All men will be held accountable for their work, and they will be rewarded in heaven, or cursed in hell, in terms of their general callings (Luke 12:47–48; l Corinthians 3). This kind of moral obligation to work hard and honestly pressures men to improve their performance. It is a form of self-government, and society does not have to impose direct sanctions on men in order to reap the rewards of self-government. The widespread conversion of men to a form of Christianity that preaches the binding nature of the general calling will produce increased wealth per capita in that society. People work harder, and people work smarter.
Which calling?
I have been economically successful so far in my life. Because of my outward, visible success, I am often asked by men, especially younger men, what I think are the rules of financial success in life. The Christians who ask me this question sometimes ask me what I think they ought to do for a living.
I have a stock answer. It relates to the biblical doctrine of the calling. It is not a complicated answer, and most Christians see the truth of my advice. The astounding thing in my mind is that they never have heard anything like it before. No pastor has counseled them. No parent has sat down with them to talk to them about these basic rules of thumb for a Christian's occupation. Here they are:
1. Evaluate your capacities accurately
2. What is the most important job you can perform?
3. What is the most important job you can perform in which few men can replace you?
A man who has even a vague idea of the answers to these three surveys has a good grasp of what he ought to do with his life. It is not easy to conduct such a survey, but it is vital. God calls each man to make this survey.
Capacities: The more you have, the harder the decision. The man with limited capacities except for one skill has a much easier time of it. He knows what he ought to be doing. But someone who has multiple talents—and this includes most men—has some hard evaluating to do. “What kinds of work appeal to me? What are the ones I do best? What are the ones I would be willing to do for the remainder of my life? What are the ones that I could not stand to do for very long? What skills should I seek to improve, if I am given the opportunity?”
You must be rigorously honest here. You should probably consult others: teachers, parents, pastor, employer, and even a professional testing service, if necessary. You must come to grips with yourself. You must also come to grips with other people's evaluations of you. You will be serving a market, after all. Get used to the idea of having to take seriously other people's opinions of your talents.
Job importance: If a man can do several things well, he will then have to face the problem of meshing his skills with an occupation. If he can speak five foreign languages fluently, what should he do with his talent? Teach school? At what level? Translate for a multinational corporation? Translate for a Federal bureaucracy? Translate for a publishing company? Join a Wycliffe Bible translating team? There are several possibilities. Salary levels are only one way to make the decision. There are others.
I tell people to use this rule of thumb in making a decision. Try to peer ahead 40 years, or whenever you think you will be too old to work at this job. When you look back at your life, what will you think of your work? Was it God--honoring? Did you leave a large inheritance behind for your children? Did your children grow up with the moral training to handle their inheritance in a godly way? Did you give a lot of money away to charity? Did you give your life away in service rather than money? Was it a good decision when you accepted this calling as your life's work? If you even try to answer these questions in advance, you are far more likely not to be disappointed when you ask them again in 40 years.
Replaceability: This is something few men consider in advance. They should never stop considering it. It is not enough to select the most important job you can do. You have to ask yourself this question: “If I were to quit, or die, would the job be rapidly filled by someone just as effective as I am, and at the same wage?” If the job is easy to fill rapidly and at the same wage, then the person who now holds it has not distinguished himself by the level of his performance. If a humanist could do a Christian’s job just as well, then there is something wrong with the Christian's work. If his work is good, then there is probably some other job that he could do that God wants to have filled by a Christian.
Today, few Christians operate in terms of the doctrine of the calling. They do not think about how important they are, as Christians, in their calling. They do not understand how they should provide unique, exclusively Christian services to their employers. In short, they do not think as Christians.
The job a man does may be important in his own eyes, or in the eyes of others, but if by remaining in what appears to be the most important job, when God could use the same skills to far better advantage in another job, then the employee is wasting his talents. Any man who cannot say that he, as a Christian worker, is not uniquely suited to his job, should consider finding new employment. If he is easily replaceable, then he had better look around and see if there is some other important job available to him in which he would be more difficult to replace.
In short, go where there is not much competition. Go where your presence in the field will elevate that field. Go where you, as a Christian, will generate imitators, even among non-believers. Go where you will have an opportunity to train others in their callings. If you are not now in such a position, but you could be, then you are not in the proper calling. Replaceability is one way of testing your place in life. You do not want to be just another cog in a vast, impersonal economic machine.
It is most common for a scholar to support himself by teaching. With the rise of the universities in the West in the eleventh century, teachers were in a position to become scholars. Most teachers are scholarly, but very few teachers in history have become so dedicated to their academic field that they write books. They do not make major breakthroughs in their fields. They do not define themselves in terms of their scholarship meaning their unique discoveries. They define themselves and their lives in terms of being advanced teachers.
The scholar sees his work differently. He believes that what he is researching and publishing has the potential of changing the opinions of people within his field. In very rare circumstances, the scholar may believe that he will have influence outside of the academic world, meaning outside his own chosen academic discipline. In extremely rare circumstances, scholars do have influence outside their fields. They work in their studies, they spend time in libraries, they teach a handful of students, very few of whom are interested in the field, and they publish something that will have influence in literary circles, intellectual circles, and even politics.
In very rare cases, a scholar may operate outside of the academic world. He has influence inside the academic world, and he may even have influence outside the academic world. In modern times, by far the most influential scholar who was not part of the academic establishment was Karl Marx. He earned a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1841 with a doctoral dissertation on the philosophy of Democritus and Epicurus. He went into journalism immediately after receiving his doctorate, and he never left journalism. He never had a full-time job, except as a journalist. He spent many years studying economic documents in the British Museum. His doctoral dissertation was published in 1902, but only because he had become the philosopher of Communist revolution. It had no influence at all.
A similar figure in the United States was Henry Adams. He was the grandson of the President of the United States, John Quincy Adams, and the great-grandson of President John Adams. He held various government posts, and he was a part-time journalist. He taught medieval history at Harvard from 1870 to 1877, but he retired at age 39. He wrote a nine-volume history of the presidential administrations of Jefferson and Madison, which is still regarded as a reliable source for modern historians to quote. He wrote a book for his nieces in 1904, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. It was released to the public only in 1913. It is regarded as a classic. He also wrote one of the most influential autobiographies in American history, The Education of Henry Adams, which was self-published in 1907. Until after his death in 1918, only about 1,000 copies were printed. It was named by Modern Library as the best English-language nonfiction book of the twentieth century. (I have read it twice. I do not concur with this assessment.) He did not want publicity. But he had grudging respect for scholarship.
Another figure like him was W. H. Lewis. He lived on a small pension from his service in World War I. He lived close to Oxford University and later Cambridge University. He used these great libraries to research late-seventeenth-century French history. He wrote a series of history books that are well respected in the field, including The Splendid Century: Some Aspects of French Life in the Reign of Louis XIV (1953) and The Sunset of the Splendid Century: The Life and Times of Louis Auguste de Bourbon, Duc de Maine (1955). I was well aware of Lewis when I was in graduate school in the late 1960s. What I did not know until two decades later is that Lewis was “Warnie” Lewis, the older brother of C. S. Lewis. He took notes on the meetings of the Inklings' club: literary sessions held at a local pub. The group included J. R. R. Tolkien.
Then there are scholars who are on the fringes of the university system. Ludwig von Mises received his doctorate in 1906. He was not hired to be a professor at the University of Austria. He spent the next three decades as a senior researcher for the Austrian Chamber of Commerce. His influence came from his books, especially Socialism (1922). He had great influence on dozens of younger scholars, some of whom journeyed to Vienna to become part of his circle of disciples. This was common in Vienna in the early decades of the twentieth century. As a Jew, he fled Austria in 1934 to take a position at the Graduate Institute of Geneva. He feared that Hitler would eventually take over Austria, which he did in 1938. He fled Switzerland in late 1940, racing across France in a bus a few hours ahead of invading German troops, headed for neutral Spain. He came to the United States. He received a teaching position at New York University’s Graduate School of Business Administration in 1945, which he held until 1969. But the university never paid him. He was listed as a visiting professor. He was funded by a few rich donors who appreciated his work. He did guide four men who received doctorates in these years. He also trained a number of brilliant young men who audited his evening weekly seminar. The most famous was Murray Rothbard. He had virtually no influence on academia after he left Austria. Yet from his first book in 1912, The Theory of Money and Credit, until his final major book in 1962, The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science, he remained committed to scholarship. He defined himself in terms of his scholarship. He believed above all in the power of ideas to shape society. This is the mark of the scholar, in contrast to the university teacher.
There have been self-taught scholars laboring completely outside of academia because they did not have doctorates. The Austrian polymath, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, never held a position. He spoke multiple languages, and he visited every continent except Antarctica every year giving lectures. He was a remarkable scholar. But he had influence only in American conservative circles. R. J. Rushdoony had a similar career. He was never granted a teaching position. His views were too conservative for small Protestant colleges that might have hired him. His influence came through his books. He labored in obscurity, reading 200 to 300 books a year, from his years as a missionary on an Indian reservation from 1945 until 1955. His first book was published in 1959. But from 1963 until 1973, his numerous books had considerable impact in Christian academic circles. It was only because of a small publishing house, Presbyterian and Reformed, that he reached an audience. My own experience has been similar. I taught full-time for only one semester at the college level in the fall of 1979. I also taught an evening class twice a week at a community college in Oregon in the fall of 1974. My doctorate was not in economics; it was in history. I chose not to remain in academia after 1979. I was making too good a living as a newsletter publisher, and I realized that I could have influence by publishing my own books and the books of other Christian scholars.
This chapter is something of a digression: less economic theory, more anecdotes. That is because the calling is not governed by “high bid wins.” It is “highest service wins.” Money is not central to most callings. Sometimes, there is more outflow of time or money than inflow. There is an element of charity about a calling.
This book is essentially a recruiting manual. It is a very long recruiting manual. You should be aware of the price that you will be asked to pay if you accept a life of scholarship as your calling. If you hold the views that I have expressed in this set of volumes, you will be on the fringes of academia at best—at least in the early stages of this process of intellectual reconstruction. You must be sufficiently committed to the idea of the long-term influence of ideas in order to make the required commitment.
If you can find a salaried position that will serve as your job, meaning a job that will not require more than 40 hours a week, thereby leaving time for your life of scholarship, you should consider accepting it. If the job is in some way related to scholarship, such as a teaching position in a university, all the better. But if that position requires you to de-emphasize or even eliminate all references to your scholarship, because your scholarship rests on principles that are alien to the institution that hires you, you will be compromised throughout your career. I do not recommend this.
Mises was able to teach his uniquely anti-establishment economic theory on the NYU campus because he was not actually being paid by the university. He offered free labor. “Free market, free labor, and free speech.” Also, one of his major financial supporters, Lawrence Fertig, was on the Board of Trustees of the university. So, the administration let him teach in the Graduate School of Business, which was geographically separated from the main campus. There was no communication between him and the economics department of the university. The faculty members were hostile to his brand of economics.
It was a strange fact that another Austrian economist, but not an Austrian School economist, Peter Drucker, was teaching on the main campus at the same time that Mises was teaching in the business school: 1949–1971. They seem never to have communicated. Drucker was the most influential philosopher of business management in the twentieth century. He created the field. He was able to combine his academic job and his scholarly calling as few other academics in modern history ever have. He was also highly influential as an advisor to large business corporations for 50 years, 1950–2000. He made a lot more money as an advisor than he made as a professor. He wrote 39 books, and they sold very well. But he was not out of step philosophically or economically with American academia.
With the development of the World Wide Web after 1995, scholars can now communicate with the general public apart from the intermediaries of humanistic book publishing houses and humanist universities. If a scholar can communicate effectively through online videos, e-letters, and a website, he does not need the distribution system that prevailed until 1995. The world has opened up to scholars as never before. But to take advantage of this, they must communicate with intelligent laymen. These are the people who will shape the future.
I find myself in agreement with Drucker. This is on the website of the Drucker Institute.
INTERVIEWER: What, then, has inspired your books more than anything?DRUCKER: The same thing that inspires tuberculosis. This is a serious, degenerative, compulsive disorder and addiction.
INTERVIEWER: An addiction to writing?
DRUCKER: To writing, yes.
Writing is my job, my calling, and my life. It began as a minor affliction in 1960, at about the time that I began thinking about this project. I began writing for the college newspaper. I have never stopped. I of course cannot match the master, Jacob Neusner. (http://bit.ly/BooksNeusner) No one can. But I wish I could . . . except for the indexing.
______________________________
The complete manuscript is here: https://www.garynorth.com/public/department196.cfm