The Theology of Work (Part 4): The Holy Shoemaker

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There is a well-known quote attributed to Martin Luther which goes something like this: “The Christian shoemaker does his duty not by putting little crosses on the shoes, but by making good shoes, because God is interested in good craftmanship.” It’s an inspiring line, reminding us that all life is lived before God, and we can express our faith in Jesus as much through making shoes—or laying pipe, or performing brain surgery, or whatever your particular line of work happens to be—as much as we do through our specifically “religious” acts of worship.

It’s a far more radical thought than it appears, and some 550 years after he said it, some of the scandal of the notion he’s expressing here has sort of worn off for us. Martin Luther was pushing back against what the Catholic Church in his day had established as a distinct and impervious division between the sacred and the secular. “Religious things”—the stuff the God cares about—happen in church, under the auspices of ecclesiastical leaders well-trained in such matters. “Secular things”—the stuff the world is interested in—happen outside the church, for purely a-religious goals.

These two worlds touched. Skilled masons and sculptors, for instance, were needed to build cathedrals. But there work was “religious” only so far as it was employed to this end. The cathedral was the sacred space where the sacred things happened, and when the same mason was building, say, a villa or a fortress, his work was distinctly secular. In this model the Church was needed to sanctify mundane tasks; the Church was the steward and the dispenser of the sacred, and without its touch on a given activity, the activity itself remained mundane, profane, secular.

The Protestant Reformation, of which Luther was one of the primary instigators, dramatically shifted this view of the Christian life. “Salvation by grace alone through faith alone”—the battle cry of the Reformation—was as much as statement about the Church as it was a statement about the nature of salvation. According to the reformers, the Church was not the “dispenser” of the religious life; rather that life was offered to all through the grace of God, and appropriated, not through the indulgence of the Church, but by the faith of the individual believer. One of the sociological effects of this shift Protestant Reformation was to tear down, or at least render pervious, the divide between the sacred and the secular. If salvation really was by grace alone, then all of life was, and could be experienced as being, sacred in the eyes of God, and it did not need the Church’s “seal of approval” to sanctify it.

The Protestant Reformation gave us a renewed understanding of that deeply-biblical idea about the “priesthood of all believers.” It is not only the clergy in their cathedrals who could mediate God’s ministry of grace among his people. That happened by the Spirit, through the Gospel, and everyone, shoemaker or pastor, could be part of it.

The Protestant Reformation also gave us the traditional “Protestant Work Ethic.” This is a term that political economist Max Weber coined in 1905 to describe the diligence, discipline, frugality and sense of duty that he believed characterized the cultures that were shaped by the Protestant Reformation. In Weber’s view, the theological underpinnings of the Protestant Reformation, in particular the notion of predestination, encouraged “hard work and frugality” among protestants, because such virtues could be taken as a sign that one was numbered among the elect.

Max Weber’s thesis was controversial when it was released, and the stereotypes it rests on—both of protestant values and of Northern European/North American cultures—need far more unpacking than we can give it here, but there is a seed at its core that is very helpful, I think, in building a theology of work.

The theological vision of the Protestant Reformation discouraged a sacred-secular divide, and encouraged all believers, not just the priests, to see their life and work as playing a role in the ministration of God’s grace and blessing to the world. It was the protestants, for instance, who developed the theological idea of the “vocation,” and extended it beyond the clergy, to include work done by the shoemaker, the stone mason, the surgeon, and so on.

Now adays we use the term “vocation” generally, to describe any work one takes on as part of their career path. When we call one’s work a “vocation,” we are signaling that the work being done is somehow more than just a paycheck. When I worked at a convenience-store as a teenager, I’d taken a part-time-job; when I landed my first job as a teacher, I was following my “vocation.” Part-time convenience-store work can also be one’s “vocation,” of course, but for it to be so, the worker will have to approach it in such a way that draws out its intrinsic value, and allows him to express something of his identity through it.

To the extent that we still think about our work in terms of our “vocation,” we are enjoying the legacy of the Protestant Reformation. The term itself comes from the Latin, “vocare,” which means “to call.” Your “work” was a “vocation,” to the extent you were “called” to do it; and of course, to be called, implies there is someone doing the calling.

In this secular age, we might say something vague about how the work itself “calls” to the worker, but implicit in the term “vocation” is the belief that it’s God who is the “caller.” To see your work as your “vocation,” is to be called of God – asked by him—to do it. Originally, the term could only be applied to religious work. You could be “called” to the ministry, for instance, “called” to be a priest. But shoemakers weren’t “called” to make shoes, in that sense. At least, not until the reformers, following their theological convictions to their logical conclusion, started poking holes in the sacred/secular divide, and suggesting that God actually cared about well-made shoes.

In a world where so-called “secular” life could be spaces of sacred experience, all work, if done with a sense of duty and as an expression of faith in God, could be understood as one’s “calling.” The shoemaker didn’t need to “put little crosses” on his shoes as a way of “sanctifying his work,” rather, he could do it well, and diligently, as his “calling from God.” So long as it was done sola fide and soli deo gloria, it was as much a calling as the work of the preacher in the pulpit.

This vision of work is not without its pitfalls. It can be misused, for instance, to bind people to their work in unhealthy ways. If shoemaking is my calling, so to speak, then not to make shoes would be to disobey God, and to make shoes poorly would be sin. This can lead to all kinds of unhealthy views of work, even an idolatry of work (if I’m divinely “called” to do such-and-such a job, it’s only a hop-ski-and-jump into assuming there is something “divine” about the job itself. It’s no accident that most pastors are also work addicts.)

Those caveats notwithstanding, though, I believe there is something profoundly empowering and in the understanding of work you find among Reformers like Luther, and something profoundly liberating in the theological convictions it rests on. All of life has “sacred potential”—not just the life that happens in the cloister, monastery, or cathedral—and any Christian who does their work as an expression of their faith in God, whatever that work may be, it can be something beautiful, and life-giving, and sacred: a response to his call on our lives.

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