书评：奥斯•葛尼斯《一生的呼召》
好的书能像好的汽车和好的相机一样经得住时间的考验。自奥斯•葛尼斯的那本当代经典《一生的呼召》——关于职场工作的专题研究——第一次出版已经过去了十五年，许多事情都在这十五年中发生了变化。经济不景气阻碍了上个世纪末和本世纪初的繁荣乐观。那个时代，机会似乎层出不穷，因此也产生了大量的福音书籍和讲道系列，那些关于追寻目标、有意义的工作还有实现人生激情与欲望的主题被基督徒视为至高美德。忠心和喜乐地顺服在自由与选择面前退居幕后，好似成熟的基督徒就意味着做自己的老板。
这些都是葛尼斯和《一生的呼召》这本书要面临的时代激流。即使这本书的语言很有时代性——但它的副标题是《追寻生命的意义与目标》——这是一个极少数出版于上世纪九十年代至本世纪初，但还能适用于2013年的标题，它让教会里的许多人从想要抓住梦想的工作转变为想要谦卑地寻求并保住一份能养家的工作。葛尼斯这样写道：
如果人不曾堕落，我们的工作会天然地、完全地表现出我们的本相，并且会运用我们被赋予的天赋。但是堕落之后就完全不一样了。现在的工作是创造力与咒诅并存的。因此，能找到一份完美契合我们呼召的工作，并不是我们的权利，而是我们的祝福。
葛尼斯认识到，在我们被呼召的生活与堕落又摇摇欲坠的现实之间有无可避免的冲突，这个认识给了《一生的呼召》一个坚实的现实基础。我读这本书的时候是用乡村歌手史蒂夫•厄尔（Steve Earle）的一首“有一天”作为背景音乐循环播放的（现在我在洲际公路的加油站上班／数着过往其他州的车牌）；这首歌并非不应景。这本书适合那些做着梦想中的工作，却因此屈膝在工作坛前的基督徒去读。同样这本书也给那些在吃力不讨好的工作中劳苦的人（例如厄尔歌里的那个加油站服务员），让他们能抓住机会，努力信靠神。
最广泛的应用往往源于最简单的宣告。基本的原则被葛尼斯在《一生的呼召》中一次又一次地提到，即职业——作者称之为“次要呼召”——已完全改变了。工作不可回转地被一个更首要的呼召激发，也就是呼召我们在福音里归向基督。
葛尼斯的出版商托马斯•尼尔森（Thomas Nelson）本可以将这本书作为哥林多前书10:31的扩展默想。“有关呼召的事，没有神圣的与世俗的，高等的与低等的，极佳的与过得去的，思想与行动的分别，”葛尼斯写道，“呼召抹平了神职人员与平信徒之间的差异。重要的是’每个人，在每个地方，在所有事上’用活出来的方式回应上帝的呼召。”
葛尼斯作为一个受过牛津学术训练的社会学家，曾创办了华盛顿领袖集训来辅助“圣三一论坛”，他在接受九标志2010年的深度采访时，被问及他作为公知的工作，他是这样说的，“我试着使严肃的学术能让普通人理解并运用”。
确实，《一生的呼召》的阅读乐趣一部分来自于看见葛尼斯确实在做这些事。他善于综合历史、艺术、文化以及人心的倾向。这本书充满哲学上的延伸，又有奇闻趣事的冲击。葛尼斯敏捷地找出了历史对于工作神学的扭曲 —— 一个极端是新教徒倾向于高举世俗超越宗教，另一个极端是天主教徒做着相反的事——在所有地方他都能找到灵感的例证。
他所列举出作为论点支持的名人有列夫•托尔斯泰（Leo Tolstoy），索伦·阿拜·克尔凯郭尔（Soren Kierkegaard），莱昂纳多•达芬奇（Leonardo da Vinci），哈维尔（Vaclav Havel），T.E.劳伦斯（ T.E. Lawrence），萨尔瓦多·达利（Salvadore Dali），多萝西·塞耶斯（Dorthory Sayers），约翰·济慈（John Keats），约翰•克兰特（John Coltrane），乔治·福尔曼（George Foreman），亚历山大·索尔仁尼琴（Aleksander Solzhenitsyn），温斯顿•丘吉尔（Winston Churchill）以及章伯斯（Oswald Chambers）。在某一章，主题是关于呼召是如何进入大众视野和政治生活时，他用到了同是荷兰首相又是新教改教家的亚伯拉罕•凯柏尔（Abraham Kuyper）的例子，葛尼斯这样写道，“凯柏尔的艰巨事业不仅仅是繁重的工作（他因此被女儿称为’钢铁军团’），而是他有属灵的眼光，知道基督掌管他的生命”。
《一生的呼召》中有几章看起来用了过多的故事和引用。葛尼斯的观点大多没有依据。（我们真能把英雄主义的衰落和资本主义的弊端归咎于对呼召的误解吗？）他有夸张的倾向，很少引用圣经。而且对于一本叫作《一生的呼召》的书来说，葛尼斯很少提到该如何辨别一个人是否应该全职侍奉。
书中有些比较难忘的部分是葛尼斯的自传式的旁白。在将近两百页中，他讲述了他那穷困潦倒的曾曾祖母本打算在都柏林跳桥自杀，但被附近的一个快乐农夫劝阻下来。这是一个感人的故事，强大并令人难忘。如此难忘以至于我如果是个编辑的话很想把它剪下来贴在第一页。
尽管有上述缺点，《一生的呼召》还是保留了一个概览，即在耶稣受死和耶稣再来之间中思考呼召。它在这十五年中，从动机的层面引导基督徒在职场中做门徒。我们有理由认为它会在接下来的年月中仍作为重要的资源发挥作用。
Book Review: The Call, by Os Guiness
With books as with cars and cameras, the good ones stand up over time. Much has changed in the fifteen years since Os Guinness’s now-classic disquisition on work, The Call, was first published. Economic recession has stonewalled the prosperity and optimism of the late 1990s and early 2000s, an era in which opportunity seemed unbounded and which produced, by consequence, a rash of evangelical books and sermon series that too often touted as supreme virtues in Christian discipleship the quest for purpose, meaningful work, and the fulfillment of lifelong passions and desires. Faithfulness and joyful obedience took a backseat to freedom and choice. It sometimes felt that to be a mature Christian meant to be one’s own boss.
These were the choppy waters Guinness waded into with The Call. Although the book is soaked in the language of the genre—the subtitle is Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life—it is one of the few work-related titles from the nineties and noughties that still seems apropos in 2013, when for many in our churches the hope of snagging a dream job has been replaced by the more modest hope of finding and keeping a job that pays the bills. Writes Guinness:
If there had been no Fall, all our work would have naturally and fully expressed who we are and exercised the gifts we have been given. But after the Fall this is not so. Work is now partly creative and partly cursed. Thus to find work that perfectly fits our callings is not a right, but a blessing. (50)
Guinness’s recognition of the inevitable dissonance between the life we often feel called to and the realities of this fallen, faltering world gives The Call a refreshing grittiness, a truer-to-life air. I had country singer Steve Earle’s “Someday” playing low in the background on repeat as I read the book (“Now I work at the filling station on the interstate / Pumping gasoline and counting out-of-state plates”); the song wasn’t out of place. Here is a read for the Christian doing the thing he always wanted and thus tempted to genuflect at the altar of work. And here is a book for the one toiling away in thankless fields (Earle’s gas station attendant, for instance), grappling for motivation, struggling to trust God.
The broadest applications often stem from the simplest claims. The basic principle that Guinness hammers home again and again in The Call is that vocation, which the author dubs the “secondary calling,” is changed utterly—is indeed irrevocably infused with meaning—by a more primary calling, namely our call to Christ in the gospel.
Thomas Nelson, Guinness’s publisher, could have marketed the book as an extended meditation on 1 Corinthians 10:31. “[T]here is no sacred vs. secular, higher vs. lower, perfect vs. permitted, contemplation vs. action where calling is concerned,” Guinness writes. “Calling equalizes even the distinctions between clergy and laypeople. It is a matter of ‘everyone, everywhere, and in everything’ living life in response to God’s summons.”
In a wide-ranging 2010 interview with 9Marks, Guinness, an Oxford-trained sociologist who started the D.C.-based leadership-training outfit the Trinity Forum, was asked about his work as a public intellectual. “I try to make serious scholarship intelligible and practical to ordinary people,” he said.
Indeed part of the pleasure of reading The Call comes from witnessing Guinness do that very thing. He is an adept synthesizer of history, of arts and culture, of the proclivities of the human heart. The book is philosophically sprawling, yet anecdotally flush. Guinness nimbly surveys the historical distortions of the theology of work—on the one end the Protestant tendency to elevate the secular over the spiritual, on the other the Catholic penchant to do the reverse—all the while finding exemplars of his ideas everywhere.
Among the luminaries he taps for support are Leo Tolstoy, Soren Kierkegaard, Leonardo da Vinci, Vaclav Havel, T.E. Lawrence, Salvadore Dali, Dorthory Sayers, John Keats, John Coltrane, George Foreman, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, Winston Churchill, and Oswald Chambers. Of the Dutch prime minister and Protestant reformer Abraham Kuyper, in a chapter on how calling figures into public and political life, Guinness writes, “Kuyper’s Herculean portfolio of jobs was due not just to overwork and what his daughter called his ‘iron regiment’ but to his inspiring vision of the lordship of Christ over the whole of life” (155).
Occasionally The Call’s short chapters feel overstuffed with stories and quotations. Here and there Guinness’s contentions come off as speculative. (Can we really trace the decline of heroism and the shortcomings of capitalism back to misunderstandings about calling?). He is prone to hyperbole, reticent to quote Scripture, and for a book entitled The Call, Guinness has precious little to say about how to discern whether one should go into vocational ministry.
Some of the book’s more memorable sections are Guinness’s autobiographical asides. Nearly 200 pages in, he relays the story of how his down-and-out great-great grandmother in Dublin was dissuaded from leaping to her death from a bridge by the sight of a plowman working happily in a nearby field. It is a moving narrative, powerful, unforgettable. So unforgettable, in fact, that the editor in me wanted to cut and paste it onto the very first page.
Despite these shortfalls, The Call remains a stellar overview of how to think about calling here between Calvary and Christ’s return. It has held up for fifteen years as a motivational field guide to Christian discipleship in the workplace. There is no reason to think it will not remain a vital resource for years to come.
作者：Drew Bratcher
翻译肢体：咸燕美
用圣经视野和实用资源装备教会领袖
进而通过健康的教会向世界彰显神的荣耀
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