Faith in Occupations / Called to Character: A new initiative
Around a year ago, I began dreaming and planning a new academic initiative with a friend who runs a leading faith & work organization. Our concept started as a writing project aimed at filling out the faith-and-work conversation with concrete guidance for Christians serving in a variety of occupations. I liked “sectors,” but my thought partner preferred “occupations” as more concrete – since most workers do not tend to think of their work in terms of a “sector.” Thus early on, I dubbed this dream initiative “Faith in Occupations” (FIO).
Our vision was for a series of substantial articles drafted by teams including both practitioners and scholars. In the past few months, however, the initiative has gained an implementation dimension, aiming to serve Christian universities and Christian Study Centers.
As our vision for FIO has continued to gain detail and depth, I have found myself coming back again and again to the Aristotelian virtue of “practical wisdom” (prudence)—and to the modern field of virtue ethics that has been adopting and interpreting that and the other Aristotelian virtues—as a potential crux or fulcrum between faith and occupations. I knew already, especially from my reading of Robert Wilken, Hans Boersma, and Jens Zimmermann, that Christian thought had long absorbed such classical ideas within its mainstream tradition of “Christian humanism,” informed and corrected by such biblical truths as the imago dei and the Incarnation and by specific lists of biblical virtues.
A key concept in that absorption comes from the second-century Christian apologist Justin Martyr: the logos spermatikos – the seed of reason that God implanted in all human beings, including the Greek philosophers. In Justin’s view, this gift of reason mediated important and valuable (though partial) truths about humanity, the world, and even God to pre-Christian thinkers—such that, given the divine origin of these truths, they remain worth studying and also acting upon to this day by Christians.
This logos idea of Justin’s has always been the answer to his contemporary Tertullian’s curmudgeonly question “What hath Athens to do with Jerusalem?” But the question has continued to echo in modern Christian suspicion about classical philosophy.
But in the field of virtue ethics, this is now changing . . .
I hadn’t realized how much it is changing until I recently read a generative essay by my friend Klaus Issler, Professor Emeritus of Educational Studies and Theology at BIOLA and its Talbot School of Theology, for the journal I serve – Faith & Flourishing. Titled “An Emerging Consensus on Virtue Ethics in Christian Living and Sanctification,” this essay traces the rise of Christian scholarly engagement with classical wisdom about virtues, whose roots lie in Aristotle’s ethical teachings. Issler points to the increasing absorption, in roughly the past half-century, of virtue-ethical concepts not only by Christian ethicists, but also by Christian scholars working within such cognate fields as theology and biblical studies. Within the short article, Issler provides a meaty bibliography substantiating these claims—which I am currently raiding for my research on this initiative.
In fact, I have been thinking about virtues for a long time. In particular, during my years at Wheaton (2014-18) I came to appreciate the work on intellectual virtues by Christian scholars Jay Wood and Robert C. Roberts. Even before this, at a seminar led over a decade ago by Calvin’s Rebecca DeYoung and Baylor’s Robert Kruschwitz, I had become aware of the magisterial counter-argument against the long dominance of rules-based, deontological ethics penned by Roman Catholic scholar Servais Pinckaers: Sources of Christian Ethics. Wood, Roberts, DeYoung, Pinckaers, and others (including The Southern Baptist Seminary’s Jonathan Pennington) have shown me that both the Bible and the multiple wisdom traditions carried within Christianity already teach us much about virtues—teachings that had been hybridized (in a Justin Martyr kind of way) with the classical teachings on the subject.
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The next step in my dreaming with my faith-and-work friend was to connect my suspected nexus between the faith and work conversation and the field of virtue ethics to a third current conversation: the discussion about how our universities can educate students for character. The seeds of this connection are also years old—planted as I founded and ran Opus, a Kern-funded faith-and-vocation center at Wheaton College (2014-2018), which has now morphed into that university’s Center for Faith and Innovation. The work of Opus with Wheaton undergraduates brought me to a vision of “vocation formation” that stands athwart the rush to professionalize American university education—that is, to leave behind the old liberal arts model of forming well-rounded, characterful citizens for a more and more exclusive obsession with education as a technical matter of credentialling for careers.
So my mind was already primed, when I arrived at the Kern Family Foundation in 2019 as a fellow, to connect virtue ethics, vocation (faith and work), and character education. At the foundation, I began to read more heavily on the virtues as they might be taught within the modern American university. This reading included, in the form of intensive book studies with colleagues, Aristotle’s Ethics, James Arthur’s The Formation of Character in Education, and Identity Excellence: A Theory of Moral Expertise for Higher Education, by Perry Glanzer, Baylor professor of educational leadership and fellow of the Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion.
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All of this has come to color and fill out my thinking, with my faith-and-work leader friend, about a potential “faith in occupations” initiative serving Christian universities and Christian Study Centers.
And so, I have become convinced of a fruitful and largely unexplored Venn-diagram overlap between the faith and work movement’s desire for increased occupational specificity and concreteness, the growth of character education as a focal concern in our universities (currently attracting significant funding from such foundations as Lilly, Templeton, and Kern), and the decades-long absorption of virtue-ethical research and study within the traditional theological disciplines.
In several more upcoming posts, I’ll be sharing the language my friend and I have been developing over the past year for a grant proposal to help an initiative at this intersection to happen in the real world.
In the next post, I’ll share the initial need statement of the draft proposal, which in light of its evolved higher-education direction we have moved from calling “Faith in Occupations” (FIO) to “Called to Character” (C2C).