It is the simplest words that have the most “culture.” Work is one of those rich terms, wrinkled and soft with history. The first description of work ever offered may be the best, and it came rather as a pronouncement. The Lord said to Adam, “Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life.… In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread …” (Gen. 3:17, 19).
Sorrow and sweat! That is what work is.
A later definition, one of the best around, is contained in Horace Bushnell’s book Work and Play. Work, Bushnell says, is what we must do; play is what we want to do. Work is what we do to get something else; play is what we do for its own sake. In Eden, Adam tilled and tended the garden as the Lord has instructed him because he wanted to; although he perspired and needed rest, necessity and desire were one thing to him. In exile, Adam worked because he had to. He toiled as before, but the joy had gone out of it, and only necessity was left.
A man jogging, and a child racing—which of them is working? Here is the same activity, running. The man runs because he needs to lose weight; the little boy is pretending he’s at the Olympics. Work is a state of the mind, or spirit. In the strongest terms, work is what we would rather avoid doing, what we dread doing, what we hate to do.
Work is not in the thing being done; it is not in the way the thing is done; it is in the attitude we bring to what is to be done. As the Bible shows, work is activity carried out under a certain spiritual condition, a condition that is universal. And the remedy for the condition can be nothing other than a spiritual remedy.
Obvious? Hardly. For well over a hundred years, Western man (and now Eastern) has been trying to beat the work hitch. Modern technology and Communism have taken their places in a long list of competitors for the loyalties of gullible man. The technocrat says that leisure is man’s true end, and so he builds one labor-saving device after another, shortens the work week, lengthens the pay and vacations, and waits for the day when machines will do all the work. Meanwhile, Communism seems to tell man that work is a delusion created by capital to enslave the laborer. Abolish capitalism, says the Communist, divide the wealth equally among “the people,” and then no one will have to work much because all will be working equally.
Biblical man saw the end of work only in heaven. Technological and Communist man regard work as something to be abolished on earth.
Democracy, particularly as practiced in America, has greatly affected the popular conception of work. For centuries a man had to follow his father’s trade, with no hope of change unless the Church or the king discovered him and took him away to school to be a priest, an accountant, or a scribe. Broad political suffrage and a freely operating economy on a new continent changed all that. Men were at last set free to choose their vocations, limited only by their abilities. Competing with one another for wealth and influence, they plunged into a thousand different enterprises in the new land. Work became a kind of liberation for them as forests fell, railroads pounded across the prairies, cities arose on the hills and swamps, and gold flowed like a mighty river.
Technology promising men the transfer of all their labor to machines, Communist philosophy promising them the abolition of work by political fiat, modern Western democracy offering them the chance to turn work into play by choosing their own vocations—with such powerful movements gripping the imagination of men, the old biblical work ethic may seem threatened with collapse.
But Communism hasn’t abolished work, nor has it come close to equalizing it. Ask the ordinary Chinese or Soviet laborer if his state-assigned job fulfills him. Modern technology hasn’t abolished work either; it has simply made it, for many people, less fulfilling, downright boring. And multitudes wearily find that their freely chosen vocations soon become a treadmill of drudgery.
What of the new leisure that was to open a new life of culture to the world? At times leisure only frees people from long hours at the job so that they can find other work in their spare hours! After being spared the necessity of doing everything from warming themselves to entertaining themselves, many find that extra time lies heavy on their hands; they become restless and irritable. The real trouble is within. They discover that the condition causing “work” is the condition of their souls. The new leisure that was to bring so many golden hours of pleasure turns unchanged habits into a snare.
The Bible is right. There is no escape from the curse of work. So long as men are in their present spiritual condition, they will always work.
The spiritual condition of the curse has a second aspect. The remedies of Communism and technology, the democratic principle of free choice—these mistake the nature of the ill and thus fail. Eric Voegelin has pointed out how the world-lusting socialist programs are built on a passionate hatred of the world as it is and of the God who made it. The alienation, the sense of being “flung” into existence (Heidegger), so familiar to man in his lostness, is declared by the adherents of these systems to be the product of either an evil capitalism or an insufficiently realized evolution. Only they have the true knowledge of metaphysical reality; and they labor to demolish the old world, so that the new may emerge, and in their time! But, as Voegelin says, “the structure of the order of being will not change because one finds it defective and runs away from it. The attempt at world destruction will not destroy the world, but will only increase the disorder in society” (Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, p. 12). Modern revolution generates a whirlwind of delusions.
There is a proper longing for a higher and freer state of being that is just as old as the world-lust. This longing, however, seeks relief in another direction; it looks beyond the world for peace and satisfaction. It recognizes that man originates not in flesh but in spirit, and that the spirit can be satisfied with nothing less than reunion with the God who made it. All activity that drives us away from God ends up as work; all work that leads us to God ends up as joy.
There was One who knew how to reconcile work and fulfillment perfectly. He told his disciples to do the work of God while they still had daylight. He had come from the Father, bringing the longed-for Light with him. He asked only that they stop their work long enough to look at him—carefully, considerately—because he knew that if they did, they could see all the way Home through his eyes. They could see the Way back in his company. He could show them how to reconcile work—any work—and joy, by the work of believing in him.
Because man is an immortal creature, his work can have meaning only when it is engaged with eternal purpose. For such high ends, nothing is too mean a discipline, not even sweeping floors or feeding pigs; and nothing is so high, not even the presidency and management of a modern government, that it cannot be turned into hourly soul-work.
Christian discipleship is the glorious alchemy that can turn unprofitable labor into inspiration and growth. Discipleship is the “work” for which we were created. The effects of discipleship are the only rewards from our time on earth that we can take with us into the next world. Our growth in character, energized by the Light over us, will endure. It is designed for life in eternity.
Let us have no delusions about dispensing with work. Work is a dispensation of God and the only way out of our condition. It is a necessity that matches our situation, and no law or political delusion can abolish it.
The true abolition of work is the transmutation of work into a discipline that rebuilds our souls. It is the daily holy offering of the self, the job, temporal aims, all the trivia, hurts, sleep, and games to God as so many building blocks for the spirit. There is no salvation from work; there is only salvation in work—work, that is, caught up in discipleship. Changing Carlyle a little, we can say, “Blessed is the man who has found this work; let him ask for no other blessedness.”
One day we shall be concentrating on our work and be surprised to find how easy it has become. We shall say to ourselves in our newfound strength and skill, “This is the only thing I would want to do, ever.” And looking around us we shall see we are standing under the Tree of Life by the river of water of life.
Byron C. Lambert is dean of the Rutherford (New Jersey) campus of Fairleigh Dickinson University. He has the B.D. from Butler University School of Religion and the Ph.D. in cultural history from the University of Chicago.
