TGR carries my latest on vocation and the sacraments, in which I stress how we are fomed by God as we form God’s world through our work:

Whatever primacy the sacraments have is only a redemptive primacy, not a primacy in the order of creation that redemption is restoring. They are primary as means of redemptive grace, but not primary as divine means across the board. In other words, the purpose of grace is not to replace nature but to perfect nature, and the sacraments have primacy in the perfecting process but not in nature as such…

Daily work, that inheritance of the whole human race, takes center stage six days of the week. On Sunday, it should humbly take a seat in the pew, so the special things of redemption can be exalted. But then the special things of redemption must walk down the aisle to daily work and say, “friend, go up higher.”

This, by the way, is what’s wrong with the Benedict Option – at least as practiced, whatever the theory might be. While specifically Christian communities have a key role in spiritual formation, they cannot substitute for the spiritual formation that takes place as we participate in the surrounding culture through our daily work – and you can’t use daily work as spiritual formation if you take the resentful stance of opposition toward the surrounding culture that TBO represents in practice, whatever the theory might be.

Whoever this is, they’ve expressed how I feel about integralism. What this thread lacks in restraint, it makes up in clarity about the enormous stakes in preserving liberalism rather than imposing pseudo-Christianity on the recalcitrant.

See also.

Update: Okay, now in the further comments added to the original thread, we’re getting “of course liberalism means simply and solely selfish individualism, so…” Guess I won’t be bookmarking.

TGC carries my article “When Work Stinks”:

The typical faith-and-work talk runs like this:

God made you with a wonderful job to do that brings meaning and purpose into your ordinary life. Every day, we have the incredible opportunity to bring the holy love of God into the life of the world around us by the way we do our daily work. We are carrying out the calling to take good care of God’s world, and to shape ourselves in ever greater Christlikeness.

And many people roll their eyes and say, “Sounds like a nice theory. You should try doing my job.”

Check out the Faith at Work Summit if you’re interested – super early bird pricing ends May 31!

My latest post on the sacraments and vocation is live at TGR:

Now, what does all this have to do with the sacraments? It is essential to the nature of a sacrament that material objects and actions are used as signs of spiritual realities. The sacraments provide a model of how spirit conquers and reorganizes the material world for righteousness. In the sacraments, the righteous indwelling of the material world by the spiritual world is so complete that powerful effects are promised from their right use and powerful dangers threatened from their wrong use. (It is the nature of these effects that drives many of our debates over the sacraments. Those debates are so important because they express what we believe about how the spiritual world indwells the material.)

The sacraments are therefore a model of what our daily work is to do – use the material world to manifest the spiritual.

I ride one of my hobbyhorses, but only for a moment:

One more word before I’m done. The essential importance of this daily encounter between the material and spiritual worlds is why I am so alarmed at the movement among many postmodern theologians to deny that there is any distinction between nature and the supernatural. Granted, both come from God and are constantly in God’s presence and under God’s care, so it is important not to overdraw the distinction and try to keep them in hermetically sealed containers with no interaction. But the attempt to bring them closer together by erasing the line between them is fatal. We cannot bring body and spirit into an encounter with one another if they are not distinct things. This is one major reason why “pomo” theologians, who always set out with a ferocious call to arms, always conclude in the dead end of irresolvable ambiguities. Spirit cannot conquer flesh if flesh is spirit.

Use your fingers to tell my eyes how to tell my mind what your mind thinks of this!

TGR carries the latest post in my series on the sacraments and vocation:

The sacraments also take place within history. We will focus next time on their presence within God’s material creation. Here, we are looking more at time than at space. While the sacraments of the church are prefigured in Old Testament rituals, their institution by Christ represents the outbreaking or eruption of the church as a result of his life, death, resurrection and ascension. They are the marks not only of the church, but of the progress of redemptive history. And, of course, they are eschatological, as the Great Commission (“until the end of the age”) and Paul’s instructions (“proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes”) make clear.

Our daily work is, like the sacraments, a sign that Christ has arrived and is working. As we enact the long-term consequences of his redemptive work in our own work, we proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. And he is with us in our daily work, even to the end of the age.

Let me know what you think!