The Call: Everyone, Everywhere, Everything

I'm blogging some of my favorite quotes from The Call by Os Guinness. These come from chapter 4: Everyone, Everywhere, Everything.

Calling is the truth that God calls us to himself so decisively that everything we are, everything we do, and everything we have is invested with a special devotion, dynamism, and direction lived out as a response to his summons and service.

Here are four essential strands in the biblical notion of calling that we must always hold.

First, calling has a simple and straighforward meaning. Human beings call to each other, to God, and to animals. Animals too can call.

Second, calling has another important meaning in the Old Testament. To call means to name, and to name means to call into being or to make. Calling is not only a matter of being and doing what we are but also of becoming what we are not yet but are called by God to be. Thus name-calling is the fusion of being and becoming.

Third, calling gains a further characteristic meaning in the New Testament. It is almost a synonym for salvation. In this context, calling is overwhelmingly God's calling people to himself as followers of Christ. Just as God called Israel to him as his people, so Jesus called his disciples.

Fourth, calling has a vital, extended meaning in the New Testament that flowers more fully in the later history of the church. Thus in the New Testament, as Jesus calls his followers to himself, he also calls them to other things and tasks: to peace, to fellowship, to eternal life, to suffering, and to service. But deeper even than these particular things, discipleship, which implies "everyone, everywhere, and in everything," is the natural and rightful response to the lordship of Christ.

In short, calling in the Bible is a central and dynamic theme that becomes a metaphor for the life of faith itself. To be a disciple of Jesus is to be a "called one" and so to become "a follower of the Way."

The third and fourth strands of the meaning of calling are the basis for the vital distinction elaborated later in history between primary and secondary calling. Our primary calling as followers of Christ is by him, to him and for him. First and foremost we are called to Someone (God) not to something or to somewhere.

Our secondary calling, considering who God is as sovereign, is that everyone, everywhere, and in everything should think, speak, live, and act entirely for him.

This vital distinction between primary and secondary calling carries with it two challenges - first, to hold the two together and, second, to ensure that they are kept in the right order.

The truth of calling means that for followers of Christ, "everyone, everywhere, and in everything" lives the whole of life as a response to God's call. Yet this holistic character of calling has often been distorted to become a form of dualism that elevates the spiritual at the expense of the secular. This distortion may be called the Catholic distortion, because it rose in the Catholic ear and is the majority position in the Catholic tradition.

Protestant confusion about calling has led to the Protestant distortion that is even worse. This is the form of dualism in a secular direction that not only elevates the secular at the expense of the spiritual but also cuts it off from the spiritual altogether.

If all that a believer does grows out of faith and is done for the glory of God, then all dualistic distinctions are demolished. There is no higher/lower, sacred/secular, perfect/permitted, contemplative/active, or first class/second class. Calling is the premise of Christian existence itself. Calling means that everyone, everywhere, and in everything fulfills his or her (secondary) callings in response to God's (primary) calling.

"There is not one square inch of the entire creation about which Jesus Christ does not cry out, 'This is mine! This belongs to me!'" Abraham Kuyper