Living Theology in
the Metropolitan
Volume 9, Number 1
Spring 2004
The Vocation of the Laity
Richard J. Niebanck
Note: The following excerpts are from an article by
the same name in Lutheran
Forum,Vol. 29, No.
4, November 1995. Used by permission.
Over the centuries since the Reformation, Lutherans have
proudly laid claim to the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers and that
of Christian vocation. Luther, they
declared, was the first Reformer to strike a blow at the medieval system of
religion with its two classes of Christians.
With justification by faith as his wrecking-ball, Luther, they assert,
reduced to dust the two-story edifice of salvation-by-merit, placing all
believers on the same level before God: equally forgiven, equally free, equally
empowered to serve their neighbors in the world...
The redeemed in Jesus Christ, having been called out of the
world, are at one and the same time called back into it to be its salt, leaven
and light. As Christ became incarnate in
order to be the obedient servant of all even to his death on the cross, so
Christians are called to be servants of all, bearing the cross within their
bounded existence in the situations, structures, and roles where they happen to
be. This means doing both the priestly
work of mediating Christ’s reconciling love and the non-redemptive work of
holding the world together through the offices or roles of spouse, parent,
magistrate, worker, manager, as responsibly and competently as possible. The Word is to become incarnate in daily
life, in the family, in the arena of work, in politics and the state, and in
the church. In the economy of God,
matter matters.
Lutheranism has often been alleged to have given divine
sanction to a rigid social order and thereby to have acquiesced to injustice in
favor of stability. Luther, like Paul,
believing that the Parousia was imminent, did not
hold out much hope for fundamental social change and was actually horrified by
the excesses of the utopian sectarians.
But Luther did not hold a particular social order to be divinely
sanctioned. The “orders” were God’s loving means of preserving civil justice and peace and
providing the conditions for people to live together in harmony and to insure
the free course of God’s saving Word.
Luther was neither a utopian nor a theocrat: he did not espouse a rigid,
much less a totalitarian, state and society.
Indeed, totalitarianism as the modern world knows it would have struck
Luther as demonic. For him, the orders
were spaces for the flourishing of the Christian’s freedom in service to all.
To Luther, the role model of Christian obedience within
bounded existence through one’s office or role is the Blessed Mother of our
Lord. The Reverend Jesse Jackson, in his
address to the 1992 Democratic Convention, had it all wrong. In that address,
For Christian piety and theology, and certainly for Luther,
it was God’s choice, not Mary’s, that was decisive. Mary is the model of humble obedience who brings Christ into the world through the faithful
exercise of her office, motherhood. As
Mary bore the Incarnate Word to sinners, so Christians are to incarnate God’s
gracious word through their faithful exercise of their offices.
I offer the following personal story of what I believe to be
the proper division of labor in the exercise of the calling that is ours in
Christ.
During the Vietnam years it fell to me, as a bureaucratic
official in the then Lutheran Church in America, to facilitate as best I could
the sorting out of the ethical issues in relation both to U.S. policy and to
the problems of conscience facing young men of draft age. As a pastor, I turned to a study of the normative
sources, Scripture and the Confessions, and the writings of theologians and
ethicists. For reliable descriptive
information I turned in large part to trusted Christian laypersons regardless
of their political preferences.
I made then the acquaintance of one of the finest Christian
laymen I have ever known. He first
sought me out after having read something I had produced on war and Christian
conscience. He was a career official
with the U.S. Department of State who would shortly be sent to
My friend was an astute reader both of events and of human
nature. He shared Reinhold Niebuhr’s “Christian realism” and had a profound sense of
both sin and grace. Not a utopian, he
was nevertheless an idealist. His
political leanings were Democratic Socialist which, given his position in
government, he pretty much kept to himself.
Through the
My own passionate opposition to the war policy was tempered
and nuanced by my friend’s input. I
credit him with keeping me a Lutheran in more than name during that troubling
time.
About a year before the war’s end my friend came home and was
reassigned to the State Department unit on Anglo-American affairs. I saw him often and continued to benefit from
his knowledge and wise analysis. As
before, he provided a corrective to my tendency to view events through an
overly simplistic, ideological lens.
During that period the
At about the same time, the Rev. Helmut Frenz,
bishop of one of the Lutheran church bodies in
One sunny afternoon, my telephone rang at LCA headquarters
in
That was all. Still in
shock and disbelief, I called the individual charged with arranging Frenz’ itinerary and escort and passed the word. I learned later that the bishop had been well
shielded throughout the duration of his trip.
I continue to give thanks that my friend and I had both been at our respective
stations that fateful day.
A year or so later my friend suddenly took sick and
died. At the funeral I was privileged to
speak some words of remembrance. I
organized my thoughts about the three words that, for me, capture the essence
both of the Christian’s calling in the world and of my dear friend’s life in
Christ: salt, leaven, and light.
The
Rev. Richard J. Niebanck, III