Note: From Worth Doing (IVP, 2025). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Citations have been omitted.
“The real world.” It is a phrase we often use when comparing various people’s situations in life, including our own, or when we want to impress on a young person what they can expect when they enter adulthood. (Because the adult world is “the real world.”) Furthermore, it is not uncommon that directly or indirectly, paid employment is often at the center of the notion of “the real world.” After all, for many people, work is where we spend most of our time.
Real World, Real Work
However, the real world is not simply a notion. It is the real world. It is the world in which all of us and each of us lives. It is the world in which all of us and each of us works, both paid employment and mundane but necessary tasks, some of which are invigorating and interesting, others of which are stultifying and frustrating. It is the world – particularly as it bears on and shapes work – that we hope readers will understand and navigate a bit better as a result of this book. A genuinely Christian understanding and navigation of the real world will be distinctively theological, and we here pursue a contribution to the theological foundation and framework for approaching work in the real world. The chapters that follow will address rather specific and discrete theological issues. Specifically, this book will address itself to one key question: Is there a theology of work – a way of understanding the nature and purpose of human labor in light of the Christian faith – capable of speaking to work the way that we experience it: a mixture of pleasure and pain, fulfillment and futility, beauty and boredom, satisfaction and stress, finitude and fallenness? Is there a theology that might resonate both for workers with high degrees of autonomy and prestige and those who do not naturally find much meaning in their work or whose work is degrading? In short, is there a theology of work for the real world?
Over the last two decades, evangelical accounts of the theology of work have proliferated. Indeed, the “faith and work” movement has become a cottage industry unto itself, complete with a vast literature, dozens of organizations and a bustling conference and media scene. However, as both its critics and proponents have observed in recent years, even though the faith and work movement has exploded among what Andrew Lynn has termed “creative class Evangelicals,” it has struggled to gain traction among blue- and no-collar workers. “Many conversations about calling and work among professionals,” explains Jeff Haanen, entrepreneur and founding CEO of the Denver Institute for Faith and Work, “assume a certain amount of choice and agency that are foreign to most working-class men and women.” [“God of the Second Shift,” Christianity Today, p. 10] In short, the preponderance of faith and work resources has been devised by and for the creative class. Indeed, from its inception, the faith and work movement has always focused on “the great professions”: “law, education, medicine and the social sciences…commerce, industry and farming, accountancy and banking, local government or parliament, the mass media.” [John Stott, Christian Mission in the Modern World, pp. 31-32]
Living into the Limits
But as it stands now, the movement has yet to produce a theology that might resonate with other kinds of workers, those who populate not “the great professions” but “the ordinary professions.” Whether and to what extent this can be done remains an open question. However, in what follows we do aim to address this lacuna in the faith and work literature through some constructive proposals rooted in two key methodological emphases: the recovery of finitude as a genuine good of creation (and therefore a genuine good in our working lives) and greater attention to and a more sober reckoning of how sin has distorted work. As we will argue at length, all human work east of Eden is undertaken in medias res – that is, in the middle of a story that is already unfolding. We labor, as it were, between two gardens, exiled from Eden and not yet residents of that future garden-city, the new Jerusalem. To put it another way, we come onto the scene in chapter two of a four-act drama, sometimes called the grand narrative: creation (chapter one) – fall (chapter two) – redemption (chapter three) – consummation (chapter four). Though we have been told about chapter one, none of us ever experienced it, and though we’ve heard rumors of chapter four, none of us has ever seen it. Accordingly, any realistic theology of work will need, first, to attend to the sheer finitude of human creatures, our fundamental boundedness, while also reckoning with the phenomenology of sin, the ways in which sin twists and malforms the very fabric of reality. A realistic theology of work, then, will need to make the experience of finitude methodologically prime, since the experience of finitude is universal, and it will need to make fallenness methodologically prime, since the experience of the majority of workers reflects Genesis 3, not Genesis 1-2.
In light of these considerations, we propose here a revision to the ways in which the grand narrative described above is typically deployed in faith and work literature. As we shall discuss, most evangelical approaches ground the theology of work in protology (chapter one) while also drawing heavily on eschatology (chapter four), with sustained reflection also on redemption (chapter three). However, we suggest that at least part of the reason the faith and work movement has stalled out in its attempt to translate its message for blue- and no-collar workers is due to some key theological deficiencies to which we address ourselves in this book. In the first place, our revision will involve greater emphasis on an oft-overlooked aspect of chapter one of the grand narrative, since many of these theologies of work have not attended sufficiently to creational finitude and its impact on work, sometimes conflating finitude and fallenness. Yet, in the second place, existing accounts almost universally situate their theologies of work in the doctrine of creation, emphasizing human co-creation with God as the primary meaning of the imago Dei. Such a move, however, may inadvertently exclude workers who do not experience their work in these terms.
Finitude, Fallenness, Flourishing
We aim to address these deficiencies in the form of two overarching emphases. In the first part of the book, we offer a more robust account of human finitude as a foundational element of the Bible’s view of work. Accordingly, a realistic theology of work may and should appeal to protology, of course, but this must include an adequate and accurate reckoning of finitude, which is entirely proper to creaturely existence, as it does so. In the second half, we propose a methodology that more accurately reflects our present experience of work – which is beset by enmity, absurdity and tragedy – by grounding it primarily in the doctrine of the fall (chapter two of the grand narrative) and only secondarily in the doctrine of creation. With this restructuring in place, we then gesture toward some ways in which the prevailing theology of work might be recalibrated to speak to the experience of a broader range of workers.
To anticipate the full breadth of the argument that follows in these pages, we propose a theology of work grounded primarily neither in protology nor eschatology, but rather a theology of work from the middle, for the middle – a theology rooted firmly in what David Kelsey calls “the quotidian.” [Eccentric Existence, vol. 1, p. 190] That is to say, although the Bible offers multiple theologies of work, the faith and work movement, broadly speaking, is concerned mainly with two: the dignity-agency-power narrative rooted in Genesis 1-2 (protology), which relies on an interpretation of the imago Dei that (over)emphasizes human creativity and often ignores or understates human finitude, and the perfection-of-human-culture narrative glimpsed in Revelation 21 (eschatology). Our constructive proposals for a more realistic theology of work, expounded at length in chapter six, are from and for the middle, situated between protology and eschatology, and will revolve around three main theses. First, we consider creaturely work, finite though it is, in relationship to God’s freedom and transcendence and sustained by God’s presence. Second, we aim to recover instrumental approaches to work – not just intrinsic approaches to work – as biblically sound, theologically viable and pastorally workable. Third, we situate human work within a broader anthropology that does not identify the imago Dei primarily with the capacity for creative co-labor with God but rather with a christological teleology in which the saints are conformed fully to the image of Jesus Christ. This methodological shift will therefore also involve deconstructing two harmful work mythologies that are at risk of being unwittingly reinforced by the faith and work movement: “You are what you do” and “Do what you love,” both of which rest on dubious anthropological foundations and a questionable theology of vocation. Paradoxically, we argue that, ultimately, a realistic and healthy theology of work will be a theology in which work is de-emphasized and de-centered.
Taken from Worth Doing by W. David Buschart and Ryan Tafilowski. Copyright (c) 2025 by William David Buschart and Ryan Paul Tafilowski. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press.
W. David Buschart, professor emeritus of theology and historical studies, Denver Seminary; and Ryan Tafilowski, assistant professor of theology, Denver Seminary
