The Theologian of Work

In constructing a theology of work grounded explicitly in creational norms, Bahnsen has showed Christians (and not only Christians) God's chief calling for our earthly lives.

Feb 23, 2024

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Dear friends and supporters:

One of my academic specialties is systematic theology. I own numerous systematic theology sets. Some of them are exceptional. Almost every one deals with traditional categories like soteriology, pneumatology, bibliology, angelology, eschatology, and so on. Only one of those sets treats work as a category of systematic theology (“vocationology” we could call it).

David Bahnsen’s new work on work has filled this lacuna. It has accomplished more than that. It is to my knowledge the first distinctively Christian treatment of work in the history of the church rooted in the theology of the creational order. In giving the weightiest consideration to creation, Bahnsen lays out his most controversial theme in a book featuring enough controversies to raise eyebrows all over Christianity: man’s chief calling in God’s creative order is to work. Bahnsen would not dissent from the well-known catechetical statement that “man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” But man’s chief end is not the same as man’s chief calling. And man’s chief calling as a relates to his responsibility in the earth is to work.

Work and Worship

Likely the immediate protest of many Christians would be that man’s chief calling is to worship. Bahnsen would agree, but that agreement itself neutralizes their protest. For he points out that in the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, work and worship are two sides of the same coin. In fact, in the Old Testament the Hebrew word uniformly translated both work and worship is the same word. For the godly individual, to work is to worship and to worship is to work.

The Crisis of Despair

Bahnsen begins by arguing that the “crisis of despair” in the modern world — loneliness, alienation, depression — is principally the result of a failure to fulfill our divinely established calling: to work. People fall into despair when they don’t work, or when they have a sub-biblical attitude toward work. Work leads to “earned success,” and this is not measured by a paycheck. The waitress who does her job effectively and productively has earned her success just as much as the multimillion-dollar Wall Street executive.

It stands to reason, therefore, that for Bahnsen work is not simply a means to an end — more money, more creature comforts, or even more provision for family and church. Rather, work is an end in itself. It is that for which God has created man. The most pernicious pandemic of the last few years has been worklessness, and the vaccine for it is a restoration of the understanding and practice of work, man’s central calling.

The Economic and Wealth and Population Mandate

Bahnsen knows and affirms the cultural mandate of Genesis 1: man’s primal task is to exercise benevolent dominion and stewardship (work!) over the rest of creation. But he observes that this cultural mandate entails both the economic and wealth mandate. John Frame once said that creation is what God makes, the culture is what we make. God’s creation + man’s creative interaction with it = culture. In fact, we must say that man’s culture-making adds value to creation. If this sounds sacreligious, it’s because we don’t understand why God created the world and man in the first place:

Mankind’s ability to act as an image-bearer of God is directly tied to the mandate God gives: that they work to cultivate the potential of creation. God’s created world was intentionally created unfinished, and mankind (made in the image and likeness of God) was entrusted with transforming that potential into the actual. The verb that best captures actualizing the potential of creation is, well, work. (67, emphasis in original)

In another eyebrow-raiser, Bahnsen devises the moniker “population mandate,” which he states is “entirely economic“: “God made us with certain needs, and wants and tasks us with ruling over this process of increase and extraction” (67). Though the secular and (sadly some Christian) anti-natalists will be aghast at this assertion, it’s demonstrably biblical — God wants us to have children, chiefly to work to steward the world for his glory.

Producers Versus Consumers

That means prudent economics. Economics is often defined as the allocation of scarce resources. We should never assume that the resources in the Garden of Eden were not scarce. The earth wasn’t made with infinite resources. Therefore, man was required from the very start to make choices about the prudent use and transmission and preservation of those resources. This is economics.

In modernity one of the great attitudinal battles is between those who see man as basically a producer and those who see him as basically a consumer. A consumption economy devalues work. Work is understood as a means of getting to the really important thing: consuming goods and services. Bahnsen shows the biblically the important factor is production, which permits consumption and blessing for our fellow man.

God didn’t create man simply to admire creation and eat the fruits of the culture developed within it (though we should do that), but to be a co-creator, a co-worker. In cultivating creation, man is benefiting his fellow man. He is creating services and products to be used for the benefit of mankind. This faithful work produces wealth, which Bahnsen defines as “the goods and services that enhance our quality of life and serve the needs of humanity” (69).

Who’s the Real Materialist?

It’s just here that Bahnsen makes another eyebrow-raising assertion, refuting a popular Christian economic piety: that pro-growth, pro-work, and pro-productivity advocates are materialistic. He tells us just the opposite is true. It’s precisely because they don’t give inflated importance to material things that they can exalt work. The real importance is in the God-ordering work itself, and not the goods and services we derive from them, though these are essential.

Still, Bahnsen is naturally an avid opponent of all forms of Gnosticism, the ancient but persevering heresy that the material order is inherently inferior to the non-material order. The material allegedly leads us away from God, while the non-material draws us to God. A little thought indicates this is far from the truth. Jesus Christ was a material being if they’re ever was one, and the most evil being in the cosmos (Satan) is pure spirit. The problem isn’t materiality, or non-materiality, but sin. The Christian Gnostic that sees material things as inherently inferior and at best a necessary evil undermines the economic mandate and turns the created world into a terrestrial purgatory. Our earthly calling is work, and this work operates largely, though not exclusively, within the material world.

Godly Aspiration, Ambition, and Success

Bahnsen targets the frequent Christian criticism of aspiration, ambition, and success. He offers a striking juxtaposition between how these topics are treated among modern Christians and how they should be treated in the Bible:

Evangelical churches have seemingly grown incapable of leading with praise for hard work and condemnation of low productivity. If you ever heard this setup for a sermon, what would you expect the next point to be?
“Today I want to address those of you who are striving for the corner office, who worked late a couple of nights this week, who are receiving big bonuses and the praise of men, and yet are grinding, struggling, and fixating so much of the time on your jobs and careers.”
Does anyone actually think if that were the setup that the next line would be something like this?
“Well done! You are being faithful and obedient. I pray you are finding the joy in this worthy calling you are after, and I hope we can address in this sermon the Biblical commandments that we all behave that way, with ambition, diligence, excellence, and hustle!”
Or do we all know that the next line would be something like this:
“We must address the temptation to think that our work defines us and is the basis for our identity. We must check our motives and make sure that we are focused on generosity and giving, and not professional accolades and rewards.” (89-90)

Pulpits that warn against godly aspiration, ambition, and success dilute or sideline God’s primal creational mandate and create a “safe space” for Christians’ irresponsibility, laxity, laziness, and ambition-less existence.

The Retirement Disaster

Bahnsen’s chapter on “The Retirement Disaster” delivers a devastating biblical analysis of this entirely modern and thoroughly non-biblical idea. He’s not arguing that 70-year-olds should be working as hard physically as 25-year-olds. Rather, he’s making the point that we shouldn’t spend our first 40 working years navigating a torturous endurance gauntlet just to get to our final 30 years of golf, shuffleboard, and cruises. As long as we have our faculties, we should be productive. At the root of the idea of retirement as commonly understood is the contra-Christian presupposition that work is boring, tiresome, and burdensome, and the quicker we can make enough coin to shed work, the better. Rather, there’s nothing remotely Christian about this idea, and the quicker we eliminate the retirement mentality, the better.

Gnostic Pastors

Bahnsen levels much-deserved criticism at many modern pastors, who preach an implicitly Gnostic message, and often exhibit a poor work ethic themselves. Pro-work and -productivity preaching redirects attention from the ethereal to the down-and-delightful material world in which God has placed this. Gnostic preaching is constantly trying to escape the present world into pious platitudes anchored only in heavenly realities. Bahnsen is all in favor of preaching the heavenly realities of the Bible, as long as we preach its overwhelmingly earthy message of work, productivity, and success in the years God has given to us.

He mentions a criticism I’ve considered before, but have never seen in print until now: the increasing reduction of time pastors spend in their pulpits. Years ago pastors would preach virtually every Sunday, perhaps as many as 45 to 48 Sundays a year. But now many seem to preach only twice or at most three times a month. In other words, they’re shirking. They spend time chatting on the Internet, which Bahnsen doesn’t consider part of their actual calling at all. He delivers the sobering verdict that “a declining work ethic from those in the pulpit will lead to a declining work ethic from those in the pews” (70).

Work-Life Balance Versus Work-Rest Paradigm

To the pervasive concern to maintain a “work-life balance,” Bahnsen counters that work is a big part of our life. The idea that we may compartmentalize family, church and work is a false paradigm:

Different seasons of life present different realities. Some decades present different seasons than others, and each year differs from other years. We see this play out on a minute level every day— some days call for people to leave the office early for a kid’s basketball game, and on other days we have to stay late at the office for a work project. That is the flexible and spontaneous nature of adult life, and post-adolescent impositions of a “work- life balance” clash with reality." (180)

Bahnsen contends that we should replace the “work-life balance“ with the biblical work-rest paradigm. He doesn’t lay out a specific sabbatarian dogma, but avers that the Bible’s idea is not a delicate, carefully measured-out balancing act of life’s responsibilities but rather working hard and then resting.

He takes to task the common assumption that church members, particularly men, are working too hard and need to spend more time with their families. Most men are not working too hard, but are not working hard enough, and their duty to spend time with family and church should never conflict with the duty to work. In fact, he lays out an interesting case that these three cannot be separated —to be a family man is to be a working man. To be a church man is to be a working man. In other words, we’re not doing our duty as a husband, or a father, or a church member if we we’re not working and being productive outside the family and church.

Conclusion

The book smolders with insightful, and sometimes dazzling, and counterintuitive observations. Bahnsen has thought long and hard about — and modeled — these truths and has hammered out a genuinely biblical theology of work. In fact, we could go so far as to say that for the 21st century church in America, he has become The Theologian of Work.

In the early 1990’s I invited Bahnsen’s father Greg, a noted theologian and apologist, to lecture at our church in Ohio. Several times he mentioned his son David, who was a late teen at the time. I asked him if David planned to follow him in the gospel ministry.

“No,” he replied, “Unlike his old man, he’s planning to go unto business and make a pile of money.”

In retrospect, it was an exceedingly prescient answer. David is founder, managing partner, and chief investment officer of The Bahnsen group. He oversees the management of over $4.5 billion in client assets and is considered one of the country’s leading investment advisors.

What Greg could not have foreseen is his son’s profound contribution to the theology of work. Dutch Christian philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd was successor of the theologian Abraham Kuyper, whose idea that Christ must be king “of every square inch” of the universe has shaped Bahnsen’s thinking. Dooyeweerd argued that theology is not the province of professional theologians only. Nor must Christians interpret the Bible through the lens of systematic theology. He suggests that the Christian technologist and historian and botanist and physicist and musicologist and economist — and vocationologist — has every right to interpret the Bible as it applies to his unique field. Professional theology is not privileged.

In constructing a theology of work grounded explicitly in creational norms, Bahnsen has showed Christians (and not only Christians) God's chief calling for our lives in this world. We are made by God to be workers, to be productive, to be aspirational, and to be successful on his terms.

Restoring this creational priority of work will go a long way toward curing our culture of its depression, alienation, inwardness, and despair. It will simultaneously fill man and woman, created in God’s image, with the satisfaction of the knowledge they’re doing precisely what God created them to do.

Man is God’s worker in — and for — the earth.

Yours for the King,

Founder & President, Center for Cultural Leadership