By Chris Armstrong, reprinted from Humanism as a Way of Life. Part three of a series.
Pastor Tim Keller, in the book Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work, which he wrote with former silicon valley tech CEO Katherine Alsdorf, puts his finger on this syndrome of idolatry.
If you wonder how Tim built the thriving Redeemer Presbyterian Church in the midst of Manhattan’s high-powered business and finance environment, I’d argue that he had unusual clarity and frankness about workplace idolatry in a city with Babel-like towers that famously scrape the sky. And because he was a winsome communicator, people came to listen, and stayed to say “ouch” and to try to find a better way of living and working.
So here are some of Tim’s and Katherine’s observations on this topic. First, he defines idolatry in this biblical way:
We have an alternate or counterfeit god if we take anything in creation and begin to “bow down” to it—that is, to love, serve, and derive meaning from it more than from the true God. Because we can set up idols in our hearts (Ezekiel 14:3–7), we recognize that “making an image” of something is not necessarily a physical process but is certainly a spiritual and psychological one. It means imagining and trusting anything to deliver the control, security, significance, satisfaction, and beauty that only the real God can give. It means turning a good thing into an ultimate thing.
Second, our performance-orientation easily becomes a kind of idol. If we harbor even the implicit, unexpressed hope that our work will earn God’s favor, then we are sadly mistaken. Keller quotes Luther’s Treatise Concerning Good Works, in which the Reformer wrote the following:
The First Commandment commands: “Thou shalt have no other gods,” which means: “Since I alone am God, thou shalt place all thy confidence trust and faith on Me alone, and on no one else.” . . . If we do not believe that God is gracious to us and is pleased with us, or if we presumptuously expect to please Him only through and after our works, then it is all pure deception, outwardly honoring God, but inwardly setting up self as a false god.”
Third, Keller then links our the syndrome of idolizing our own work to this self-deception and self-righteousness. He asks, “Why do the Ten Commandments begin with a prohibition of idolatry?” And he concludes that it is because, as Luther argued, “we never break the other commandments without breaking the first.” What might this look like in our work? Keller paints a scene:
. . . suppose you know that complete transparency in a business negotiation will yield you considerably less leverage than will a small measure of deceit. In that situation, if you lie or obscure inconvenient facts, it is because you have counted success as more important than obedience to God or the good of your “neighbor” with whom you are negotiating. So beneath the sin of lying is the deeper, conditioning sin of idolatry. It could be argued that everything we do wrong—every cruel action, dishonest word, broken promise, self-centered attitude—stems from a conviction deep in our souls that there is something more crucial to our happiness and meaning than the love of God.
This stuff from Keller is hard to hear, but we continue to need to hear it. He lists some of the impacts of this idolatry on how we work:
· Idols of comfort and pleasure can make it impossible for a person to work as hard as is necessary to have a faithful and fruitful career.
· Idols of power and approval, on the other hand, can lead us to overwork or to be ruthless and unbalanced in our work practices.
· Idols of control take several forms—including intense worry, lack of trust, and micromanagement.
And so on.
I believe there are at least three idols today that get in the way of our embracing the goodness of ordinary work, both for our own lives and for those we serve through that work. Each of these idols has its own cult—that is, in the older sense of that word, its own way of being worshiped in our culture.
These are the cult of celebrity, the cult of the event, and the cult of the startup.
The three idols: Enemies of the ordinary
Cult of Celebrity
First, there’s the cult of celebrity. This can get into our bloodstream like Horton says it does—as the pressure to “live up to our Facebook profile” (or choose your favorite social media platform). In this country, not only are we obsessed with celebrities on the larger screens of movies and TV: we are tempted also to grab celebrity for ourselves—however fleetingly or awkwardly, through our self-presentation on the smaller screens of computers, tablets, and phones. Every accomplishment, every promotion, every chance meeting with a famous person—even our romantic relationships, our children, our pets all become part of the image we project for ourselves.
And nowhere is the temptation to strut and shine greater than in our work and vocations. Given the power of work to shape our identity, it is at work that we may be most at risk of being captivated by the ancient sin of vainglory—wanting to be known for successes and virtues that are not even real, but only apparent, “put on for show.”
Cult of the Event
Second, there is the cult of the event. This one cuts close to us as Christians, because it has infected how we worship and even how we understand salvation itself. With the revivalism of the 18th and 19th centuries came the expectation that God will deal with us in big, sudden, flashy ways—and I’d argue that this leaks over into the ways we may consider our own vocations.
Think about all the stirring events that have become a standard part of our faith lives: both the public ones—the Christian camps, the revivals, the arena ministries and Christian concerts; and the private ones—the transformative moment at the height of the religious meeting, the glorious conversion, the moment of decision that leads to service in the mission field.
After a while, we can start behaving as if God’s kingdom work on earth only happens through the crisis moment or the extraordinary event.
But is this true? Michael Horton reminds us that while the dominant American Christian images for god’s kingdom over the past century and a half have been images of fire—these are not, in fact, the dominant images in the NT. When we open scripture, we find over and over again the kingdom being described in images of seeds, cultivation, growth, farming, vineyards.
Of course, the growth and flourishing of plants does not happen quickly—it does not happen in the flash of a crisis moment. We do not plant and expect an instant return. And if we do—if we go impatiently to our little plot again and again, and dig up the seeds we’ve planted, then we’ll see no return. The parallel is a solid one: if we get caught up in the crisis event, we can forget the slow, lasting transformation of a life lived in obedience—with its steady, daily process of discipleship.
And the same thing happens to us in our understanding of vocation and work: certainly in our working lives there will be turning-point events, times of extraordinary effort, of despair, of discovery, exhilaration, joy. But most of the chapters of our vocational lives are stories of patient, incremental learning, mastering, maturing, growth.
Daniel Levitin argues that to achieve true mastery in a vocation takes 10,000 hours of work. We do not master our trades and crafts overnight. Our vocation or (more probably) multiple vocations will grow and mature, in Nietzsche’s phrase, out of a long obedience in the same direction. So if we are worshiping in the cult of the crisis event – expecting sudden changes and a meteoric rise to fame and fortune, we will find ourselves disappointed by the realities of working life.
Cult of the Startup
The third cult that twists our view of work is the cult of the startup.
Among the best-known celebrities today are those who have started disruptive new businesses, often built on new technology: The Steve Jobs’s and Mark Zuckerbergs and Elon Musks. There is something compelling about the heroic narrative of the startup, when told as the story of a single “Great Man” or “Great Woman.” The startup story is a tale of brilliance and adventure, in which young wizards change the world overnight through the sheer power of new ideas.
Of course creativity and innovation can be very great goods, in any industry or sphere of life. It is truly marvelous to watch one industry after another reinvent itself through disruptive technology and methods. Unfortunately, however, the startup narrative doesn’t give the whole story: Nowhere to be seen are the thousands of faithful, role-filling workers, working in large, stable organizational structures, contributing all the decidedly unheroic, but certainly vital labor that allows these wondrous startups to serve so many in such world-changing ways. The cult of the startup is no friend of ordinary work. And the visions of vocation that it feeds are in important ways misshapen visions.
The Green Room 