"If God is sovereign, then his lordship must extend over all of life, and it cannot be restricted to the walls of the church or within the Christian orbit." Abraham Kuyper Common Grace 1.1.
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The modern concept of work has little in common with that of Genesis. In contemporary society our whole identity is too often tied up with "what we do", our employment. The fruit of this identification of work with employment and identity is that we have marginalised the unemployed. They are the outcasts.
The biblical story of creation. fall and redemption provides a useful framework in which to look at work.
The creation narrative is highly subversive(Hasel 1974; Walsh 1992; Wenham 1987). It undermined ancient near Eastern worldviews and continues to subvert contemporary ideas about work:
Creation
The first thing to note is that work is not a product of the fall. It is a part of the creation order. This undermines any notion that work is a necessary evil. God works and expects his creatures to work as well. Melakah, the ordinary word for human work (Wenham 1987: 35), is used to describe the activity of God: God works. This is in refreshing contrast to Greek gods who spent their time eating and drinking.
For the Greeks and Romans work was "unleisure" (Vanderkloet 1980: 21). From a biblical perspective work is positive not negative. It is part of what it means to be image bearers of God. Imaging God involves work. Thus, work can, in and of itself, bring fulfilment, it is not a means to the end of pleasure. To be human is to work (Dow 1987:13). This is in stark contrast to the Babylonian creation stories.
In the sixth tablet of the Enuma Elish humans are created so that gods do not have to work (Walton 1989 :22)
Blood will I compose, bring a skeleton into being,
Produce a lowly, primitive creature, "Man" shall be his name: I will create lullu-amelu - an earthly, "puppet"-man.
To him be charged the service that the gods may then have rest...
(Enuma Elish VI.5 in Winton Thomas (1958:12))
In Atrahasis some deities become tired of their work and rebel: "The gods' solution is to create [humans] to do the work" (Walton 1989: 21). Work is seen as a punishment; in the biblical narratives work is a privilege and a divine commission.
For the Greeks to be a manual labourer was to be considered part slave; freedom to pursue leisure was the only worthwhile life. In Gen 2: we have God creating humans out of the earth presumably as a potter with his hands! Here God vindicates manual labour.
What is often supposed to be the so-called second creation story places the creation of humanity in the context of work. There was no-one to work the ground, so God created humanity (2:5-7). Work (abad) in this context takes on a stewardship function. Work is important so that the garden can be cultivated. This echoes the supposed Priestly creation story where part of the human task of imaging God is to subdue the earth and rule over the living creatures(Cf Hall 1986;1990)
Work is integral to the human task of stewardship, hence work is not merely for humans to eat and feed others (pace Houston1980:162), or to earn a wage. It is part and parcel of developing and continuing the task of creation began by God.
We can concur with William Tyndale:
There is no work better than another to please God: to pour water, to wash dishes, to be a souter (cobbler) or an apostle, all is one; to wash dishes, and to preach is all one, as touching the deed, to please God.
Fall
Work is deformed by the fall. Its direction has been changed. Instead of meaningful work we can expect toil. The boa constrictor of toil has swallowed the warthog of work. Abad becomes itstsabon.
Itstsabon used only 3 times in the scriptures: twice in Gen 3 the other in Gen 5:29. It has been translated as sorrow, pain and toil. As a result of the fall, childbearing and work become a painful toil.
The work in developing the garden and producing food to eat is hampered by thistles and thorns. The mandate to fill the earth and subdue it is not rescinded it just becomes that much harder.
Redemption
Genesis 1-4 can only hint at the redemption of work: the warthog of work can now swallow the boa constrictor of toil - thanks only to the redemptive power of the cross and resurrection. Work and rest go hand in hand. It is this aspect that can help redeem work. Work without rest results in workaholism; rest without work results in laziness. The jubilee legislation and the decalogue are rooted in these creational aspects of work and then rest and are designed to bring a measure of redemption to work.
The punishments that come as the result of human sin i.e. infertile ground, that leads to toil, and banishment are standard curses, the remedy for which is obedience (cf Lev 26; Deut 28).
Many jobs are boring, repetitive and tedious, these jobs - if technology for instance were done responsibly before God - could be transformed. It is an obedient use of appropriate and responsible technology (Monsma 1986) that could relieve the frustration and tedium from jobs. If businesses and factories were run in obedience to biblical norms then jobs could be redeemed. Unfortunately for many employment is little short of slavery.
We can catch glimpses of redeemed jobs this side of the eschaton. We can, however, look forward to the toil that resulted from the fall being undone at the consummation. The thorns and thistles will be no more: there will be a whole transformation of the creation(Gowan 1986: ch 4).
There will be work in the new earth, it will however be work that is meaningful and not frustrating or tedious.
References
Graham Dow "What place does work have in God's purpose" Holy Trinity Papers (1987)
Donald E. Gowan Eschatology in the Old Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986)
Douglas J Hall Imaging God: Dominion as Stewardship (Friendship/ Eerdmans, 1986)
Douglas J Hall The Steward: A Biblical Symbol Come of Age (Friendship/ Eerdmans, 1990)
Gerhard Hasel "The polemic nature of the Genesis cosmology" Evangelical Quarterly vol 46 (1974) pp 81-102
James M. Houston I Believe in the Creator (Eerdmans, 1980)
Stephen Monsma (Editor) Responsible Technology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986)
D. Winton Thomas (ed.) Documents from Old Testament Times (London: Nelson, 1958)
Edward Vanderkloet "Why work anyway?" in Labour of Love: Essays on Work (Wedge, 1980)
Brian J. Walsh Subversive Christianity: Imaging God in a Dangerous Time (Regius, 1992)
John H Walton Ancient Israelite Literature in its Cultural Context (Regency/ Zondervan, 1989)
Gordon J. Wenham Genesis 1-15 (WBC) (Word, 1987)
Viola spends a few chapters showing 2nd-5th century Greek and Roman influence on Xn gathering, preaching, and hierarchy formation - and shows just how far we’ve drifted from the simplicity of “being” church - gathering together in Acts-like communities.
The notion of “going to church” / “church building” / paid clergy giving a “sermon in church” (etc.) would have been unknown to early Christ followers. The concept of church with “paid experts up front dispensing religious information” appears to be a third-century confluence of Greek sophistry and Roman judicial hierarchy.
Viola shows how Protestantism simply rearranged the ecclesial deck chairs of middle-ages Catholicism, including the elevation of religious experts (pastors, etc.) that effectively “run the show.” Says Viola, “…after the smoke cleared from the Reformation, we ended up with the same thing that the Catholics gave us – a selective priesthood!”
“The modern pastor is the most unquestioned element in modern Christianity. Yet he does not have a strand of scripture to support his existence… Rather, the modern pastor was born out of the single-bishop-rule first spawned by Ignatius and Cyprian. The bishop evolved into the local presbyter. In the Middle Ages, the presbyter grew into the Catholic priest. During the Reformation, he was transformed into the preacher, the minister, and finally the pastor – the man upon whom all of Protestantism hangs. To juice it down to one sentence: The Protestant pastor is little more than a slightly reformed Catholic priest.”
If I had to distill Pagan Christianity into one sentence, it would be this: We have institutionalized, centralized, formalized, stratified, professionalized, academized, and mega-fied something that was intended to remain organic, holistic, distributed, participative, fluid, and deeply communal.
Viola concludes, “Herein lies the root and stem of Christian education. It is built on the Platonic idea that knowledge and spirituality are the same… (ital mine) Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle (both students of Socrates) are the fathers of modern Christian education. To use a biblical metaphor, modern Christian education, whether it be seminarian or Bible college, is serving food from the wrong tree: the tree of the knowledge of good and evil rather than the tree of life…”
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The only Christian work is good work done well. Let the Church see to it that the workers are Christian people and do their work well, as to God: then all the work will be Christian work, whether it is Church embroidery, or sewage-farming. As Jacques Maritain says: 'If you want to produce Christian work, be a Christian, and try to make a work of beauty into which you have put your heart; do not adopt a Christian pose.' He is right. And let the Chruch remember that the beauty of the work will be judged by its own, and not by ecclesiastical standards. Let me give you an illustration of what I mean. When my play The Zeal of Thy House was produced in London, a dear old pious lady was much struck by the beauty of the four great archangels who stood throughout the play in their heavy, gold robes, eleven feet high from wing-tip to sandal-tip. She asked with great innocence 'whether I selected the actors who played the angels for the excellence of their moral character?' I replied that the angels were selected, to begin with, not by me but by the producer, who had the technical qualifications for selecting suitable actors - for that was part of his vocation. And that he selected, in the first place, young men who were six feet tall, so that they would match properly together. Secondly, angels had to be of good physique, so as to be able to stand stiff on the stage for two and a half hours, carrying the weight of their wings and costumes, without wobbling, or fidgeting, or fainting. Thirdly, they must be able speak verse well, in an agreeable voice and audibly. Fourthly, they must be reasonably good actors. When all these technical conditions were fulfilled, we might come to the moral qualities, of which the first would be the ability to arrive on the stage punctually and in a sober condition, since the curtain must go up on time, and a drunken angel would indecorous. After that, and only after that, one might take character into consideration, but that - provided his behaviour was not so scandalous as to cause dissension among the company - the right kind of actor with no morals would give a far more reverent and seemly performance than a saintly actor with the wrong technical qualifications. The worst religious films I ever saw were produced by a company which chose its staff exclusively for their piety. Bad photography, bad acting, and bad dialogue produced a result so grotesquely irreverent that the pictures could not have been shown in churches without bringing Christianity into contempt. God is not served by technical incompetence; and incompetence and untruth always result when the secular vocation is treated as a thing alien to religion.
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It is not known who made the first English translation, as distributed by the ICS mimeo. I have made some spelling corrections and grammatical changes. The original underlining in the typewritten translation has been replaced by italics, as in the original. The propositions marked with an asterisk [*] include both the original Dutch and the English text. For those propositions, this is a new translation. More importantly, I have used W.J. Ouweneel’s book De leer van de mens (Amsterdam: Buijten & Schipperheijn, 1986) in order to include extra material that Dooyeweerd added to these propositions. Ouweneel found this extra material in Dooyeweerd’s unfinished manuscript De mens: Inleiding tot de anthropologie van de Wijsbegeerte der Wetsidee (typescript volume II, pages 753-898, Dooyeweerd Archives, Amsterdam, dated approximately 1942). I follow Ouweneel’s practice of inserting this extra material for these propositions between the markers <>. This unfinished manuscript was to be volume III of Dooyeweerd’s Reformation and Scholasticism, but he did not complete it. In his 1964 lecture, Dooyeweerd indicated that he still did want to finish it, although he said that Volume 2 of that planned trilogy, which was supposed to be a polemic directed against Roman Catholicism, had lost its point. This is because recent developments in Catholic theology (la nouvelle théologie) had resulted in that book having lost its point. He says that Roman Catholic theology is now moving in a direction opposed to scholasticism; it has now raised the following ideas: (1) it speaks about man’s radical corruption (2) it opposes any split between a domain of philosophy belonging to natural light of reason and a domain of theology belonging to the divine light of revelation (3) it denies the autonomy of thought (4) it affirms the religious center of man.
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There are no crosses in Makoto Fujimura's paintings. No images of Jesus gazing into the distance, or serene scenes of churches in a snow-cloaked wood.
Fujimura's abstract works speak to his evangelical Christian faith. But to find it takes some digging.
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A few words of explanation ...in general terms?
Well, erm, it’s about right and wrong in ... general terms...It’s a technical paper in mathematical logic. but it’s also about the difficulty of telling wrong from wrong. You see people think, that well, most most people think that in mathematics we always know what is right and wrong, not so, not anymore. It’s a problem that has occupied mathematicians for forty or fifty years.
How do you tell wright from wrong?
Bertrand Russell has written a book on it his Principia Mathematica – his idea was to break down all mathematical concepts and arguments into little pieces and then show they can be derived from pure logic. Well it didn’t quite work out that way and after many years of intensive work all he was able to show was that it was terribly difficult to do anything of the kind; but it was an important book. Important and influential it influenced both David Hilbert and and Kurt Godel. It’s rather like what physicsts call splitting the atom. As analysing the physical atom has led to a new kind of physics so the attempt to analyse these mathematical atoms has led to a new kind of mathematics.
David Hilbert took the whole thing a stage further. I don’t suppose his name means much if anything to you? Wel there you are you see, it’s the way of the world people never really seem to hear about the really great mathematicians. But Hilbert looked at the problem from a completely different angle He said that if we are to have any fundamental system for mathematics, like the one Russell was trying to work out
It must satisfy three basic requiremts: consistency, compelteness and decidability.
Now consistency means you won’t ever get a contradiction in your own system, in other words you will never be able to follow the rules of your and end up with showing 2 + 2 = 5.
Completeness means that if any statement is true there must be some way of proving it by using the rules of your system
and decidability means, well decidability means that there must exist some method, some definite procedure or test which can be applied to any given mathematical assertion and which will decide whether or not that assertion is provable.
Now Hilbert thought this was a perfectly reasonable set of requiremtns to impose.
But within a few years Kurt Godel showed that no system for mathematics could be both consistent and compete and he did this by constructing a mathematical assertion, which said in effect: This assertion cannot be proved.
Classic paradox! This assertion cannot be proved. Well, either it can or can’t
If it can be proved we have a contradiction and the system is inconsistent
If it cannot be proved then the assertion is true. But it can’t be proved, which means the system is incomplete.
Thus mathematics is either inconstent or incomplete. It’s a beautiful theorm. It’s quite beautiful. I think Godel’s theorem is the most beautiful thing I know.
The question of decidabilty was still unsettled. Hilbert thought there should be one single clearly defined method of proving whether mathematical assertions were provable. The decision problem he called it the entscheidungsproblem. In my book on computable numbers I wanted to show that no one method can work for all questions, solving mathematical problems requires an infinite supply of new ideas. It is one thing to make this claim it is a monumental task to prove it. I needed to examine the provability of mathematical assertions past present and future. How on earth was it it be done?
Eventually one word gave me a clue – people had been talking a bout a mechanical process and process that could be applied mechanically to mathematical problems, a process without requiring any human invention or ingenuity – machine; that was the crucial word. I conceived the idea of a machine. A Turing machine which would be able to scan mathematical symbols, it read them if you like it would read a mathematical assertion and then arrive at a verdict whether that assertion was provable. I was able to show that Hilbert was wrong. My idea worked.
How could you," began [George] Mackey, "how could you, a mathematician, a man devoted to reason and logical proof ... how could you believe that extraterrestials are sending you messages? How could you believe that you are being recruited by aliens from outer space to save the world? How could you ...?"
Nash looked up at last and fixed Mackey with an unblinking stare as cool and as dispassionate as that of any bird or snake."Because," Nash said slowly in his soft, reasonable drawl, as if talking to himself, "the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously."
I now regard Richard Dawkins as a dangerous enemy of truth, not the 'advocate for disinterested truth' he likes to style himself. As for my humble biology teacher, he is to be pitied for uncritically believing and teaching what he saw in the textbooks. It's the Dawkinses of this world who are the real culprits in this deception. For a number of years I quietly contemplated 'doing something about it' but my annoyance at Dawkins never went any further - that is, until September 2006, when his book The God Delusion came out. After carefully reading through it I concluded there was a need for a comprehensive website exposing Darwin's Rottweiler Charles Simonyi calls him. You're on that site now.
