Taken from the college’s motto “Instaurare Omnia in Christo,” this section features an excerpt from a recent paper or talk by one of Christendom’s distinguished faculty.
Omnia in Christo Personal Vocation: Sketch of a Key to the New Evangelization
I
It is noteworthy that the turning point for a Catholic recovery of the idea of personal vocation was the Second Vatican Council. One of the Council’s principal aims was aggiornomento, or a renewal of the relationship between the Church and the modern world. Such a renewal was necessary because the Church’s evangelical efforts had become trammeled by a defensive culture of opposition to modernity which had set in during the centuries following the Reformation and Enlightenment. This period, especially the long nineteenth century, saw the rise of what was called ‘laicism’. ‘Laicism’ effectively denotes the uncoupling of the Gospel from the secular order and its receding influence on daily life and culture. It was this problem—what we today would call ‘secularism’— that the fathers of Vatican II identified as “one of the more serious errors of our age” (GS 43). Their choice of words is arresting: “One of the gravest errors of our time is the dichotomy between the faith which many profess and the practice of their daily lives.” That is almost like saying the separation of faith from life is today what Gnosticism was in the second century, or Arianism in the fourth. This is the situation the new evangelization must address, and it helps to explain what is ‘new’ about the new evangelization: unlike the ‘old’ original evangelization that took place especially in the first three centuries and in those that followed as increasing parts of the world became known to Christians, the Church’s evangelical efforts today must address a world that thinks it knows and has decidedly rejected the Gospel. A personal vocation is the calling of God addressed in a unique way to each of the baptized. This calling is to a certain way of life—a singular, irrepeatable way of following Jesus. Viewing the same reality from the angle of human response, a personal vocation is the life of good deeds that God prepared beforehand for each of those who have been justified by faith to walk in (Eph 2.8-10). This life of Godgiven good works must be discerned within the concrete, providentially ordained circumstances in which one finds oneself. While one’s personal role in God’s universal plan is limited, the extent of that role relative to the whole of one’s life is comprehensive—no aspect of one’s life falls outside the purview of God’s call.
By Dr. R. J. Matava
A personal vocation constitutes one’s share in the work of Christ who is priest, prophet and king. The believer shares in Christ’s threefold munus because through baptism, the sacrament of faith, he or she is literally incorporated into Christ. This membership in Christ entails the gift and responsibility of contributing to the kingdom that Jesus is building. This kingdom-building work is by nature prophetic, insofar as by engaging in it, believers bear witness to Christ and the truth of the Gospel. For Grisez, while believers have a personal vocation by virtue of baptism, they are strengthened for the witness-bearing, reign-extending work that is the substance of their response by the sacrament of confirmation. This response in turn becomes the material of the believer’s participation in the priestly office of Christ: One’s life lived in response to God’s plan is the concretization of the spiritual sacrifice of obedience (1 Pet 2.5) that is joined to Christ’s redemptive sacrifice in the Liturgy of the Eucharist. The public worship of the Church is lived out through all the elements of ordinary, everyday life and exists as its source and summit. Crucially, the believer himself, above anything which his action exteriorly concerns, is one of the construction materials of the kingdom; he himself is a living stone of the edifice Jesus is building (1 Pet 2.5). Because free choices last as dispositions of character—as determinations of the self—one’s response to God’s call, starting with the act of faith, is as much a matter of becoming as it is a matter of doing. By walking in the good deeds God has prepared, the believer is increasingly conformed to the love poured forth into his or her heart by the Holy Spirit at baptism so that while initially justified by faith, the believer is increasingly justified through every juncture of life’s course by organizing his or her subsequent choices around the central commitment of faith. In short, the one who is justified by faith is continually perfected by finding, accepting and fulfilling God’s personal calling. The above piece is excerpted from a draft of the essay, “Vocation, Holiness, and Freewill in Luther and Grisez: Sketch of an Interconfessional Study,” in Literature of Luther: The Individual, Freewill and Grace, ed. John Edwards (forthcoming from Wipf and Stock, 2014). Dr. R. J. Matava earned his Ph.D. from the University of St. Andrew’s, Scotland, and is Assistant Professor of Theology at Christendom College’s Graduate School. He and his family are parishioners at Queen of Apostles in Alexandria.