Revisiting the Idea of Vocation: Theological Explorations.
Cunningham, David S.
REVISITING THE IDEA OF VOCATION: THEOLOGICAL EXPLORATIONS. Edited
by John C. Haughey, S.J. Washington: Catholic University of America,
2004. Pp. xiv + 249. $24.95.
Over the past five years, 88 colleges and universities have
received grants from the Lilly Endowment to establish "Programs for
the Theological Exploration of Vocation" designed to help students
and educators think about the relationships among faith, education, and
career. As these PTEV programs got underway, their
directors--particularly those of us trained as theologians--frequently
lamented that the literature on vocation (in the widest sense) was
vastly inadequate. The work of popular writers like Parker Palmer, while
theologically thin, actually represented the more academically rigorous
end of the spectrum. We hoped that the PTEV programs might provide the
impetus to ameliorate this situation.
That hope is now being fulfilled. This is one of the first books to
arise directly from PTEV programs; others are about to emerge, including
an excellent collection of historical sources edited and annotated by
William Placher (Callings: Twenty Centuries of Christian Wisdom on
Vocation, 2005).
The present collection is more modest and necessarily reflects the
shape of the program at Loyola University Chicago from which it arose;
nevertheless, its existence is a good omen. The essays are intended to
"stimulate faculty in other disciplines to reflect on their
understanding of themselves as called ... [and] the relationship of
their own field of study to the idea of call" (ix). The term
calling or vocation is left undefined; its contours are allowed to
emerge through the work of the ten contributors. The essays examine
vocation from the theological subdisciplines of biblical studies, church
history, and practical theology, supplemented by informative
contributions from Jewish and Muslim perspectives.
Given space constraints, I here offer comments on just two of the
essays. Mark McIntosh's lively contribution develops a concept of
vocation from a reading of Pilgrim's Progress. He begins with a
brief apologia for the usefulness of allegory, particularly as a
response to the more empiricist and positivist excesses of modernity. He
argues that Bunyan teaches us to recognize illusory substitutes to our
true calling and to beware of the world's tendency to commodify every element of our discernment process. Bunyan "shows the very
idea of vocation to be a sign of transcendence, a marker of an
ungraspable calling to 'more' in a system that would like to
assimilate everything and everyone within the scope of its own
measures" (128). Bunyan also implicitly questions our modern
reliance on the ego as an arbiter of vocational discernment. "The
human self turns out to be much less stable than we might like to think;
the isolated ego, busily pursuing its own path, is far more susceptible
to unperceived motivations than it usually admits" (132). This
tendency to isolation makes friendship and community essential for real
vocational discernment.
D. H. Williams argues that certain strands of American
Protestantism, while helpfully expanding the notion of vocation to
include forms of life hitherto excluded, nevertheless marginalized
theology in the process. Williams follows Marsden's thesis that
Christians of a certain stripe, in their efforts to avoid
fundamentalism, ran directly into the arms of secular modernity.
Consequently, the universities they founded have "become less a
setting in which inquiry and self-discovery occur than a delivery system
for 'goods and services' " (155), losing the capacity for
encouraging and cultivating genuine vocational discernment. But,
although Williams wisely eschews returning to "a lost golden age,
if there ever was one" (149), his only suggestion is that
universities retain an "essentialist Catholicism"--an
unfortunate appellation, even more unfortunately defined by a vague
sentence from John Paul II's Ex corde ecclesiae (1990) that implies
a modalist trinitarianism (158)! Williams is on firmer ground with his
alternative recommendation of the Apostles' Creed, compared here to
the early Church's "rule of faith"; but he is overly
sanguine in describing the Creed as a "clear and specific guide for
moral and spiritual reckoning." If something like the Creed is to
define the mission of a Christian university, its interpretation cannot
be specified in advance.
I hesitate to append the oft-repeated mantra of reviewers of
collections: that the essays are uneven in quality and address different
audiences, and that these deficiencies limit their usefulness.
Nevertheless, in the PTEV program that I direct, I recommend the book to
faculty who are seeking to explore the contours of the language of
vocation. I also used several of the essays with good success in a
one-day faculty seminar designed to stimulate conversation about
vocation among instructors in our First-Year Seminar program. The book
may be particularly useful in Roman Catholic contexts where the vestiges
of a much narrower definition of the word vocation are still in wide
circulation; but Protestants have much to learn from it as well.
DAVID S. CUNNINGHAM
Hope College, Holland, Mich.
