The Theology of Work (Part 2): Bruce Springsteen Meets Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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There’s a hidden gem on one of Bruce Springsteen’s early albums, a song called “Factory.” It’s a poignant tune about the heartache of the working life in blue collar America. For the beaten-down laborer in the song, the drudgery of a monotonous factory job sustains his body but steals his soul. “Factory takes his hearing, factory gives him life,” sings the Boss, “It’s the work, just the work, just the working life.”

I’ve always found Springsteen’s handling of “the working life” intriguing. “Factory” isn’t the only Springsteen tune that explores this strange tension, between our profound need for work to do, on the one hand, and the soul-sucking drudgery work, on the other. The same tension is present for the poor souls in “Badlands,” and it’s there for the torn-asunder community in “My Hometown.” Work is one of our deepest needs and also one of our heaviest burdens, a bane and a blessing both.

I doubt Springsteen read much Bonhoeffer, but I see a parallel between the way Springsteen wrestled with the reality of work, and the theological reflection on work we find a in Dietrich Bonhoeffer book called Ethics. Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor in 1940s Germany who was famously interned and eventually executed for his involvement in the Nazi Resistance efforts. An unfinished manuscript of Ethics was on his desk when he was arrested by the Nazis. Though incomplete, it was an effort to establish a theological framework for a system of ethics that might guide a Christian’s day-to-day living in a secular world.

The connection between Springsteen and Bonhoeffer may not seem immediately obvious, except that Bonhoeffer has an extended section in Ethics where he discusses something he calls “the four mandates.” He draws these from the Creation account as it is recorded in the first chapters of Genesis, the four mandates God gave Adam and Eve when he placed them in paradise on the day of their creation. These “mandates” were not commands, strictly speaking, divine rules that Adam and Eve might keep or contravene; rather they were directives, broad purposes that the human being was made to live into. They might be fulfilled in any number of ways, but generally speaking they were the aspects of life that, by pursuing them, humans could fulfill the divine command to live fully as human beings, Imaging God in the world.

The four mandates are: family, worship, government, and work. Bonhoeffer treats each of these mandates extensively in Ethics, but for our purposes here, it’s enough to notice that work sits squarely among the four mandates. On Bonhoeffer’s reading of Genesis, work was a divine mandate, given human beings in paradise before the Fall.

It’s how I read Genesis, too. In Genesis 2:15 it explains that after God had made the man, he took and placed him in the Garden of Eden, to cultivate it and tend it, that is to say, to work it. And before God does this, in Genesis 2:5, it explains that no plants of the field were yet growing because “there was no man [yet] to work the ground.”

There was work to do in Paradise, in other words, and except there were humans to do it, Paradise would not be paradisal. The divine mandate of work precedes the Fall.

This connects seamlessly with how Genesis 3 describes the effects of Adam and Eve’s sin. In Genesis 3:17, we learn that after discovering their sin, God cursed “the ground” because of them, so that it would now produce food for them “only by the sweat of their brow.”

It’s common to gloss this passage by talking about how “God cursed Adam and Eve when they sinned,” but strictly speaking, that’s not accurate. God only uses the word “curse” here to describe the effects of their sin on the earth. Adam and Eve will experience the consequences of their sin, to be sure. Eve will have pain in childbearing and Adam’s work will be miserable for him. But the actual “curse” is not pronounced on the human creatures; rather it is pronounced on the rest of creation, as a result of their sin.

This distinction is important to make, because it reminds us that God did not “curse Adam” by giving him hard work to do. That we would have work to do was part of God’s good intention for his human creatures right from the start. The creation became cursed because of human sin, and under this curse the divine mandate to work becomes distorted, burdensome, laborious, but the work itself is of God.

“Factory takes his hearing,” sings the Boss, and yet, at the same time “Factory gives him life.”

This is the paradox of the human condition, when it comes to work. We were made to do it and without it, paradise can’t be paradise, neither can we be fully human before our God; yet because of sin, the mandate is experienced as a curse. The earth produces our food only by the sweat of our brow. The work we have to do inevitably sucks away the life it sustains.

As unlikely as the combination may seem, both Springsteen and Bonhoeffer have a helpful word to speak when it comes to developing a theological understanding of our work, Springsteen in articulating this paradox that we labor under, and Bonhoeffer by framing it biblically for us.

When we come to see work as one of the four creation mandates God gave human beings when he made them in his image in the beginning, two interrelated things start to happen that have the power to transform how we do our work in the world. First, we start to realize that work itself was intended as a good gift from God, something that, so long as it is kept in its right place and performed for its proper purpose, allows us to live into our creation mandate. But second, we are forced to acknowledge that work can only be this through the redemptive grace of God.

Unredeemed, work wrings every drop of sweat from our souls and rewards our best efforts with thistles and thorns. Put a little less metaphorically: until the Lord redeems us from our own sin nature—the sin that compels us to idolize the work of our hands, and leaves us never satisfied with the outcome of our best efforts, and keeps us toiling under a constant fear of loss and failure and death—until these inevitable effects of sin are healed and transformed, our work will always have a shadow of the curse in it, however necessary, and even life-giving it may be.

For the redeemed, though, for whom the Spirit of God has begun to heal our addiction to idols and transform our sin-fed fears of death and loss—for the follower of Jesus who is having the Image of God increasingly renewed in them, that is—work, too, becomes healed and healing. It finds its rightful place among the four mandates, and becomes—yes, even work can become this—a faint echo of paradise.

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