The Givenness of Vocation

Eric Brinkert is a Ph.D. student of the Christ School of Theology at the Institute of Lutheran Theology who as adjunct faculty teaches ethics at Christ College and the Christ School of Theology as well as at Tillamook Bay Community College in Tillamook, Oregon. In his ongoing series of articles for Verba Vitae Substack across 2026, Eric intends to explore the notion of vocation and the balance it provides for a faithful Christian lifestyle and mindset. This third article makes clear the unique givenness and giftedness that we each have and that we are thus called by God as His creatures to live the life He gives to us and to be the person He made us to be. Our vocations all work together, because we have been “knitted together in our mother’s womb” by God’s loving design for our lives.

by Eric Brinkert

Individualism presents a vision of human flourishing where you can be or do anything you want. Utilitarian individualism claims that you can do anything you want. Expressive individualism claims that you can be anything you want. But utilitarian and expressive individualism are fallacies. Individualism belies the givenness of our being and individualism belies the giftedness of our being. Vocational balance, which is my model for human flourishing in these essays, demands that we recognize both the givenness and the giftedness of our beings. If we cannot recognize the truth of our being, we will not flourish, we will stagnate. If we are to pour out our cup through our vocations, we must first recognize what is being poured into our cup. That is, we must recognize the givenness and giftedness of who we are, what we are, and the unique places of responsibility we have been given in which we will employ the gifts we have been given.

Both an ontological and a theological argument is to be made for the givenness of vocation. Ontologically, the nature of our being is that it is given. We are not self-created beings. Theologically, what is given—our being—is given by our creator, God. This is the giftedness of our being. This giftedness, or givenness, limits and directs our lives’ activities and our vocations. We will begin here by exploring my ontological argument, which is crudely based on Martin Heidegger’s concept of In-der-Welt-sein (being-in-the-world) as discussed in his magnum opus, Being and Time. Here I am arguing that we are beings in context; that is, our beings are inherently limited by the context in which we exist. Or rather, we are limited by the givenness of our circumstances. My ontological argument for the givenness of our being is based on four premises.

First, you cannot control when or where you are born; that is, the time and location of when your being comes into existence is given. This immediately places limitations on your being. You cannot choose when you were born. You cannot simply choose to be someone living in the Victorian age and then suddenly it is so. If you were born in the early 20^th Century, or late 20^th Century, or the 21^st Century, your being and your vocations are inherently narrowed by the time in chronological history in which you were born and exist. Likewise, you cannot control the location of your birth. Again, if you were born in the United States you can no more choose to be someone born in Africa than you could choose to be someone born in a different century. You could certainly move to Africa, but even then, you would not be African, you would still be an American living in Africa.

My second ontological premise is related to my first: you cannot control the culture into which you are born; that is, the cultural conditioning of your being is given. This further narrows your being and your vocations. Your cultural context inevitably conditions your worldview. Similar to my argument above, if you are born in the American culture of the late 20^th Century, you cannot control the cultural influences that shape your thinking or the opportunities available to you in that culture. Again, you can move around the world, you can expose yourself to different cultures, and you can explore all sorts of different philosophies, but you will also always be a product of the culture into which your being came into existence and you are always limited to only the cultural context available in your time. You may study and immerse yourself in the culture of 18^th Century Vienna, but you will never be part of the culture of the Hapsburgs.

My third premise is like the two above: you cannot control to whom you are born or into which family you will belong. It is true that much of your family you may be able to choose. In most cultures, today anyway, you can choose your spouse, and so in a way you can therefore choose your extended family through your spouse. But you cannot choose your parents. You cannot choose your grandparents, your aunts and uncles, or your siblings or cousins. Further, you cannot control your family culture: whether they are loving or cruel, whether they are active or sedentary, or whether they are ambitious or relaxed. Finally, you cannot control the socio-economic condition of your family, whether your family will be rich or poor, high class or lower class, influential or unknown. Once again, you can certainly affect some of this—you can remove yourself from your family, you can make a new family, you can become rich or even donate your entire family fortune—but the family into which you are born and their circumstances are always given.

My final ontological premise builds on my third premise: that you cannot control your biology; that is, you cannot control your innate talents and abilities. You can certainly develop your talents and abilities by building skills. You can cultivate and steward your abilities, perhaps performing in ways that no one ever through that you could, but you cannot control the substance of which you are made—your biology—or the limitations and the advantages conveyed by your biology.

This final premise might be the most controversial and the most difficult to accept, but it is no less true. Despite the best efforts of researchers and physicians, our ability to modify our biology remains limited. If you are born with white skin you can do all sorts of things to your body to make yourself look darker, but you will never have black skin. Or if you are born as a skinny, short kid, you can work as hard as you want, spend as much time in the gym as you want, and even become a great athlete, but you will never dunk a basketball like Lebron James. And while there are certain medical technologies that are manipulating DNA to fight disease and even make changes to babies in utero, you still cannot radically change your DNA to reshape your physiology.

All of these ontological truths unmask the fallacies of individualism. Individualism claims that what you are does not constrain what you can be, and that who you are does not constrain who you can be. But that is simply not the case. We are gifted with many skills and abilities, and with many options for how we can employ those skills and abilities, but we are inherently limited. There is a “givenness” to the status of our being that we cannot change. So if we are fixating on trying to be who and what we are not, we risk missing out on being what and who we are. We miss out on the “giftedness” of our being, which takes me now to my theological argument: that the givenness of our being is given by a creator, God, and as such our giftedness is a gift of God.

Each individual is a unique creation of God. Each individual is created with certain gifts—their biology as well as their innate abilities—that are gifted to them by God. We see this throughout Scripture, but perhaps nowhere is it as artfully presented as in Psalm 139: “For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.” Now anyone who either is or knows a knitter can tell you just how singular each knitted garment is and how each inch of it is painstakingly crafted. The image of God knitting each of us individually is the image of each of us as “fearfully and wonderfully made.”

As Christians, we confess the givenness of our being when we confess the First Article of the Creed. As Martin Luther writes in his Large Catechism: “What is meant by these words, ‘I believe in God, the Father almighty, maker,’ etc.? Answer: I hold and believe that I am a creature of God; that is, that he has given and constantly sustains my body, soul, and life, my members great and small, all the faculties of my mind, my reason and understanding, and so forth…. Thus we learn from this article that none of us has his life of himself, or anything else that has been mentioned here or can be mentioned, nor can he by himself preserve any of them, however small and unimportant.”¹

I want to highlight three key features from Luther’s explanation of the First Article here. First, we confess in the Creed that “I am a creature of God”; that is, we confess the givenness of our being. We confess that we are not self-created, but that we are created by another, by God, who shapes us according to His will as we are about to see. And second, we confess that “God has given my body and all my members”; that is, there is a givenness to the substance of my being. Just like in the fourth premise of my ontological argument above, we confess here that our biology is given. God sculpts each of us into what we are from the substance that He created. And finally, we confess that “God has given all the faculties of my mind, my reason and understanding”; that is, again like my fourth ontological premise above, God has created me with all my innate abilities and talents. This creation of God, my body and my faculties, are the gifts that God has given me in my created being to be employed in the service of his creation through my various vocations. And these gifts of body and faculties are uniquely suited for some vocations—those to which I am called—and not for others; thus, we have a givenness to our vocations.

We find the givenness of vocation in the creation account, the same source from which we receive the Doctrine of the Three Estates. In Genesis 2:15 we read: And so the Lord God took man and placed him in the Garden of Eden to work it and to guard it. Lecturing on this section of Genesis, Martin Luther notes the following:

• After God had equipped the entire world in various ways, He also made ready the Garden of Eden, which He intended to be the dwelling place and royal headquarters of man, to whom He had assigned the rule over all the beasts. Now He places man into that garden as into a castle and temple….

• Moreover, God assigns to Adam a twofold duty, namely, to work or cultivate this garden and, furthermore, to watch and guard it. Some traces of this assignment remain in the wretched remnants we possess. Today, too, these two things must be done together; that is, the land is not only tilled, but what has been tilled is also guarded (LW 1, 101-102; emphasis added).

Several times throughout this commentary, Luther returns to two important verbs signaling back to the passage in Genesis: assigns and places. From the Genesis text we see that God both places Adam into his role of responsibility, and then assigns the specific responsibilities, to tend and to guard. This concept was part of the created order, that man would be given places of responsibility, just like Adam. Furthermore, Luther notes, that man continues to be called by God to tend and guard his creation and that each individual is equipped by God for this purpose. God gave Adam his life, his body, and his faculties, to be employed in tending and guarding creation. And likewise, God gives to all of his creatures life, body, and faculties to be employed by each in their own way to tending and guarding creation in their own places of responsibility.

Much like Adam was tempted in the garden to be something other than what he was created to be, we also face the temptation to be something or someone other than what we were made to be. When we do this, like Adam, we abdicate our responsibility and we sin against God and against our neighbor. When we reject the givenness of our callings, like Adam, and we reject the givenness of our being, also like Adam, we sin against the First, Ninth, and Tenth Commandments (and maybe the Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth as well, but we will leave that discussion for another day). We sin against the First Commandment in rejecting God as our God, as our creator. Furthermore we sin against the Ninth and Tenth Commandments by coveting that which we were not given. We can so easily waste away our lives in sin, straining to be something other than what we are created to be, while missing out on the giftedness of what we are created to be and called to do in the mundane places of our everyday lives which God has given and gifted us in our life, body, and faculties.

This is why the process of Christian discernment is so important, but perhaps not exactly in the way one might think. It is not about discerning the one singular calling that we must fulfill, otherwise our lives are failures. That is a vision of discernment which leads to vocational imbalance. However, the Christian is equipped with what Robert Benne calls the focus of faith in his book Ordinary Saints, something which helps us see our vocations as the godly callings they are in the mundane places of life. Through the focus of faith, “the spirit moves our faithfulness toward a heightened personal intentionality within the context of family, work, and public life… We discern our earthly destinies. Put another way, we discern a call or a series of calls” (Benne, 103). As Christians, through the power of the Holy Spirit, we are led to see the Godly work that we are given to do in our family, work, and public life. Notice here that these callings, the Godly work we are given, are in our family life, our work, and our public life. Just like Adam, to whom was given various responsibilities, we too are given various vocations which we fulfill through the given life, bodies, and faculties we have been gifted by God. And then through the Holy Spirit, we do the work of discerning those gifts and how we can employ them in our various vocations. This process of discernment, again through the power of the Holy Spirit, aids us as we seek to be who and what we are created to be and to avoid the temptation to be who and what we are not created to be.

This process of discernment is important and, as Benne notes, “missing one’s [discernment] is a serious matter” (Benne, 104), but Benne also highlights that one of the characteristics of our places of responsibility is that they are ambiguous (Benne, 74-78). That is, our specific callings, and how we fulfill those callings, are not always clear to us. Sometimes our callings are crystal clear, but other times we easily fail to see the opportunities God is placing before us and how God is using us in those opportunities. Not everyone is given to fulfill a prominent vocation, to fulfill a role that we often think of as a vocational calling, like being a pastor, or a Supreme Court Justice, or an athletic superstar, but each one of us is given to godly work. Benne goes on to note that the Christian also has “hope in the Sovereignty of God”; that is, we hope “our actions can and will be used as the Lord sees fit” (Benne, 121-122). In this sense of hope we also recognize that God is at work in all of us, in all of our vocations. What might feel ambiguous, or seem unimportant to us, is actively used by God for his purposes according to his will.

Consider how Paul speaks of the body of Christ in 1 Corinthians 12: “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ” (12). And later “But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose” (18). As Paul is describing the body of Christ, or we might say, the Church, we can also draw parallels to how God works in his creation, through his creatures. He creates all of us, gives us a purpose, and while we might not always see, understand, or appreciate our purpose, God has created each of us in a unique way and given us all unique gifts to be employed in the service of his creation through our vocations. And like the body requires balance, as Paul describes it here, with each part contributing to the whole, so too do our lives and our vocations require balance. Just as Paul writes, “for the body does not consist of one member but of many” (14), our lives do not consist of one vocation, but many. And as the body and all its parts are gifts from God, so too are all our vocations given and gifted to us by God, which means they each need to be tended and guarded. And as the body cannot reject one part, so we must also be on guard to not reject any of our vocations. Our vocations require balance and I will explore that topic in more detail in my next essay.

Note

1. Theodore G. Tappert, ed., The Book of Concord the Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Philadelphia: Mühlenberg Press, 1959), 412 (emphasis added).

Bibliography

Benne, Robert. Ordinary Saints: An Introduction to the Christian Life. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford/New York: Blackwell/Harper & Row, 1962.

Luther, Martin. Luther’s Works, Vol. 1: Lectures on Genesis: Chapters 1-5, ed. Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, Hilton C. Oswald, and Helmut T. Lehmann. Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1999, 101–102.

Tappert, Theodore G., ed., The Book of Concord the Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. Philadelphia: Mühlenberg Press, 1959.