Vocation is Both Plural and Dynamic

Eric Brinkert is a Ph.D. Fellow 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. In this fourth article, he unpacks how our vocations are both plural, i.e., many and thus demanding, and they are dynamic, or changing. Because of our sinful nature, we resist the demands and changes of our vocational lives and duties, even as the constant need for us to fulfill those responsibilities impacts us personally and even more so impacts others through us. In order to illuminate this battle, Eric here shows us how Luther’s Three Estates serve as a valuable guideline for understanding and practicing our faithful vocation in daily life.

by Eric Brinkert

In the idea of human flourishing, human is the given and flourishing is the product of what is given. The fallacy of individualism is that flourishing is the given, not humanity. Individualism asks the question: what does it mean to flourish, and seeks to conform a vision of humanity to accommodate one’s individual sense of what it is to flourish. But human flourishing, understood theologically, asks a different question, an anthropological question: what does it mean to be human? In the answer to that question, in the fullness of humanity, we find what it then means to flourish.

My guide for the exploration of the question of what it means to be human is Wolfhart Pannenberg, drawing from his opus Jesus–God and Man.¹ In this book, Pannenberg writes that “Openness to God is the real meaning of the fundamental structure of being human, which is designated as openness to the world in contemporary anthropology… man’s question about his destiny expresses itself in this openness” (193). Later in Jesus–God and Man he will go on to say that “openness to God is the radical meaning of that human ‘openness in relation to the world’” (344). Two key characteristics in Pannenberg’s anthropology show what it means to be human: openness to God and openness to the world, or creation. Pannenberg will highlight that the ultimate example of human flourishing, the one man who fully realized the fullness of humanity, was Jesus of Nazareth, writing that “In his personal unity with God, Jesus is then the fulfillment of the human destiny, the true man” (345). But we also see this anthropological vision of human flourishing, openness to God and openness to the world, in the creation account, upon which Martin Luther’s Doctrine of the Three Estates is established.

If we go to the primeval history in Genesis, we see Pannenberg’s understanding of openness to God and openness to the world in full display. To start, let’s return to the creation of the Ecclesia, of the church, in Genesis 2:15-17, which reads: “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, ‘You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die’” (emphasis added).

Luther cites this as the establishment of the Ecclesia, claiming that “Here the Lord is preaching to Adam and setting the Word before him” (LW 1, 105). Here we have an illustration of Pannenberg’s first criteria for the fullness of humanity, openness to God. God is speaking directly with Adam in this scene. We can therefore understand God as creating man to live in relationship with God. Man is created to be open to God, to interact with and receive God’s good gifts. Remember also that this scene occurs in a point in the primeval history before the introduction of sin into the world. This indicates that it was part of God’s original intended order that humanity in its fullness is man and woman open to God. Further, is God speaking to Adam in this scene, but God gifts Adam with responsibilities in the world. “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it” (Gen. 2:17, emphasis added). These were true callings – to work and keep the garden – given directly from God, to which Adam was tasked according to the gifts with which God had endowed Adam in his creatureliness.

In Genesis 2:15-17 we find the beginning the Ecclesia and a glimpse into the coming Oeconomia, upon which Adam’s vocations, or callings, increase when God gifts Adam his bride, in the creation of Eve. In Genesis 2:18-24 we have what essentially amounts to the first wedding, where Adam takes Eve to be his wife, and where, as a result, Adam receives a new vocation, that of husband. Here we have, in the second chapter of Genesis, before man’s fall into sin, a vision of the fullness of humanity as God created it to be – to paraphrase Wolfhart Pannenberg – in openness to God and openness to the world. This two-part nature of humanity is also expressed in Genesis 1, where God gives his creation mandate in verse 27, “And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” Here again we see man as open to God – God speaks to man – and man as open to the world – God places man in the garden with a set of responsibilities: to be fruitful, to multiply, to subdue, and to have dominion, that is to tend and guard creation. The Genesis account of creation seems to align perfectly with Pannenberg’s anthropology, the nature of what it is to be human. That is, the fullness of humanity, or what we are calling human flourishing, is found in God’s creatures existing in openness to God and openness to the world.

From the creation account in Genesis, with the assistance of our friend Pannenberg, we get a vision of human flourishing that is tied up in the created order, our being open to God – the Ecclesia – and being open to the world – the Oeconomia. We also begin to see how our vocations are formed within this created order. Adam is placed in the Garden where he receives the word of God from God himself, he receives his instruction to tend and guard the garden, and he is gifted his wife. From this Genesis account, we can glean two important lessons about vocation which will inform our understanding of how vocational balance is tied to human flourishing. The first, as I have highlighted before, is that vocation is plural. That is, we all have numerous vocations, or callings, or places of responsibility, not just one. The second is that vocation is dynamic. Our vocations change over time. The vocations we are given and how we fulfill those vocations shift and change throughout the course of our lives. It is to a fuller exploration of vocation as plural and vocation as dynamic that we will now turn.

Vocation is Plural

Let’s continue with Adam as our example for understanding both vocation as plural and vocation as dynamic. Recall from above how I already started to outline the plurality of Adam’s callings. In the creation narrative, Adam starts out (we can safely assume) as a young man. Early on, while still a single man, he is given a vocation in the Ecclesia; he is to assemble and receive God’s word. He is also given some of the vocations that will be in the Oeconomia: working and keeping the garden, or as Luther says, to work the garden and to guard it. (LW 1, 101-102) We are not told against what Adam is to guard the garden, but nevertheless, Adam receives two callings to two distinct stations in the garden. After the fall, while no longer working the garden in Eden, Adam continues to have the vocation of tending the soil, now just under the curse, where the labor will be hard, and the ground uncooperative, but Adam retains the vocation of tending creation. In addition to the vocation of work, Adam is gifted the vocation of husband when God presents Eve as his bride in Genesis 2. Then in Genesis 4, Cain and Abel, and eventually Seth, are born to Adam (and of course, Eve) and Adam is gifted the vocation of father. And later in Genesis 5 we find the lineage of Adam and see that he was gifted the vocation of grandfather and great-grandfather, etc. As a father and grandfather, Adam, by implication, is no also gifted the vocation of priest in the Ecclesia, as the one tasked with bringing his children to the assembly to hear God’s word and receive God’s good gifts. So just from these few short chapters in the beginning of Genesis, in the creation narrative, we see Adam alone being entrusted with not one calling or vocation, but with no fewer than seven, and those are merely the ones recorded in scripture. (And of course we could repeat this exercise with Eve as well.) Then, after Adam’s death but still in the primeval history, an added layer of vocation is added, in the creation of the Politia, in Genesis 9:6 (“Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed”). Now at least two more vocations are introduced, that of citizen and ruler, not to mention bureaucrat and all of the other government functions that would emerge over time.

That in the creation narrative alone, before all of the complexities of modern life are factored in, we can see a plurality of vocations should disabuse any of us from the fallacy that there is a single vocation to which we are each uniquely called, a unique destiny that is achieved through one singular – almost also professional – station or position. Rather, in God’s created order, in the Three Estates, we are gifted numerous vocations. This is no less true today than it was in the time of Adam or in the time of Martin Luther. The vocations gifted to Adam, and later to Noah after the flood (Genesis 9, the creation of the Politia) are the same vocations that we are called to fill today. Not all of us will fill all of these vocations, and of course there are numerous permutations of these vocations in a more complex society, but the fact remains that vocation is plural today and always has been.

To illustrate this fact, we will present a similar scenario to that of Adam in the creation narrative. Consider a young man today. He is born into a family and is gifted the vocation of son. Later, he may be gifted with the vocation of brother. As he gets older, he may wed and be gifted the vocation of husband, to be followed by the vocation of father. Along the way he will fill other vocations, like student and employee. He may later start a business and become an employer. He takes his family to church, where he is gifted the vocation of priest to his family, but also perhaps as a trustee on his church council. He votes regularly and serves on juries, according to his vocation of citizen, and he is elected to serve on the Board of his public utility, fulfilling a vocation station as ruler, in a limited manner, within the Politia. I could go on, but I think the point is clear. This character illustrates the plurality of our vocations in modern life just as we saw the plurality of vocations in Adam’s life.

Vocation is Dynamic

The challenge presented to our fictional character above, unlike what Adam experienced in creation, is that our vocations are marked by ambiguity. We must discern all our various callings and discern how to apply our unique gifts in fulfilling these vocations. We will return to that shortly, but next I need to discuss the related issue of vocation as dynamic. As the illustration above indicates, our vocations change over time. Both the unique stations we are called to fill as well as the nature of these stations themselves change over time. We saw this in both my fictional illustration and in the example of Adam from Genesis. In both cases we saw that as the individual ages, the vocations they fill change – a son becomes a father – and the nature of the vocations change – father of a young child becomes the father of a grown man.

I am taking the concept of vocation as dynamic from Robert Benne, in his book Ordinary Saints. Speaking to this idea, Benne writes that “We are thus caught up in persisting change. This means a constant redefinition of our roles and our places of responsibility. Even when we resist change we redefine ourselves in relation to an environment that is changing” (72). Two things are important to highlight in Benne’s quote above. First, our places of responsibility are inherently subject to “constant redefinition.” That is, our vocations, and how we fulfill them, are not stagnant. They are always changing. For example, returning to Adam in the creation narrative we started with Adam as a young, single man. But when he wed Eve, he took on a new vocation, husband, and all of his other vocations changed as he reprioritized his life to accommodate this new calling. Then, when Adam and Eve became parents, the nature of their vocations as husband and wife, as any parent can attest, changed to adapt to their new vocations of father and mother. Upon the death of their son Abel and the exile of their son Cain, how they were called upon to fulfill their vocations of husband and wife changed yet again. They now needed to support each other in their grief. And then finally, with the birth of Seth, they returned to the vocations of parenting a young child, but now as much older adults with different abilities, for better or worse. This leads us then to the second point to be drawn from Benne’s quote.

The second point is that while we may resist changes, we cannot control the changes in our environment that impact our vocations. Take again the example of Adam and Eve. The environment in which they were to fulfill their vocations of husband and wife changed dramatically with the death and exile of their first two children. They could resist that change, but change in that case would be inevitable. To put this in a more contemporary, and more trivial, context, here is a modest example from my life as a millennial. As a young child, the internet was not widely available, but all that changed in my high school years when my home went from having no internet, to dialup internet, to high-speed internet. My parents could have resisted having internet in the home, but they could not resist the changing environment in which they were parenting. How they fulfilled their vocation of parent changed from being a parent in an environment without internet to parenting in the internet age. Furthermore, as I aged, the vocation of my mother and father changed because they were no longer parenting a child, but a young adult, and now a middle-aged man. My parents retain their respective vocations, as mother and father, but those vocations look remarkably different today than they did when I was an adolescent.

This leads to another important point about vocation as dynamic, while we are gifted new vocations throughout our lives, throughout our lives our responsibilities in our vocations can also be discharged. This is most clearly seen in our modern economy in the context of work for pay. When we are young, we must work in order to support ourselves and our families as part of our responsibilities in and to the Oeconomia. At some point, however, we will cease to work. This may come when we have secured sufficient financial stability that we no longer need to work for pay, or it may come when our bodies simply give out, but at some point, for most of us, work for pay will be discharged as one of our responsibilities. The responsibility for financially supporting a family then falls on others according to their vocations. This could be one’s children growing and taking on employment to support themselves and their families, but it might also be to those very children supporting their parents as they age and can no longer support themselves.

This third point, about the loss and transition of vocations and responsibilities, brings us back to another important instruction from Benne on vocation as dynamic. He goes on to write in Ordinary Saints that, “Being caught up in dynamic change also teaches us about our finitude. The large societal changes affect us in our places of responsibility” (73). This reminds us of the givenness and giftedness of our vocations and our human nature. This reminds us that we have limited control over our gifts or the places in which we will be called to employ those gifts. Even this finitude can be seen as a gift. We are each uniquely gifted in our own unique ways to fulfill our unique vocations. This giftedness can also be seen as limiting, there is a finitude to what and who we can be. This brings us back to our central concern, vocational balance, for it is partially when we reject this finitude that we experience vocational imbalance, and we move further from the fullness of humanity, further from human flourishing. This comes when we are tempted to be what, or who, we have not been created to be.

Let’s consider this again through the story of Adam in the primeval history in Genesis. For a time, Adam lived in perfect vocational balance. In the garden, before the fall, Adam experienced the plurality of vocation and the dynamism of vocation. And he fulfilled his vocations according to the gifts he had been given and gifted by his creator. Adam experienced the true essence of human flourishing, for a while. But then Adam was tempted. Adam was tempted to be what and who he was not created to be. He was tempted, and sinned, in two meaningful ways. First, in Genesis 3:5, the devil temps Adam² with the claim, “you will be like God.” And Adam ate. So, Adam sinned in falling prey to the temptation to be like God. He was, to reiterate, tempted to be what he was not created to be. He was created to be man, yet he rejected that gift and sought to redefine what it is to flourish at the expense of what it is to be human. But Adam sinned in another way. Adam was also tempted, and sinned, by abdicating responsibility for his vocation of husband. He was with Eve as she was tempted. He saw her temptation to sin. He knew that her actions would lead to her death, and yet, as her husband, he did not intervene. He failed her as a husband. In that moment you could say that he was not a husband to her, he did not intervene to protect his wife. And now, as a result of these two sins, the perfect vocational balance that Adam experienced, the essence of human flourishing he enjoyed, is lost.

We too are tempted, like Adam, to try to be who and what we are not, or to reject who and what we are created to be. We reject the gifts we have been given and we covet the gifts we have not been given. We all experience vocational imbalance in our lives. This comes when we weigh some callings with more significance than they deserve at certain times in our lives, and when we undervalue other vocations at other times. This temptation is rife in our culture, that promotes professional success and the acquisition of material wealth as the paramount achievement of humanity, especially for men. I think we can easily see vocational imbalance, particularly among men, if we explore the exaggerated (sometimes) caricatures of fathers in sitcoms from the 1960s and 1970s, where the father returns home from work to ignore his family, while the mother shoos away the children, telling them not to bother their father after he spent all day working to put food on the table. This is an example of a father prioritizing work at the expense of his family. Was the father fulfilling his vocation in working for pay, yes, in part. But that vocation does not excuse him from his other vocational responsibilities. At home, he is still called to be father to his children and husband to his wife. Unfortunately, perhaps some of the most illustrative real-life examples come from my pastor friends, especially some of the older ones, who recount examples from their own life of how they would work long hours supporting the church, and make every effort to attend every sporting event and recital of every child in the church, often at the expense of his own wife and children. Yes, the vocation of Pastor is a unique calling, but the calling of pastor cannot come at the expense of all other vocations, especially the central vocations of the Oeconomia, husband and father.

This brings us back to the important topic of discernment. Vocational balance and human flourishing requires three levels of discernment. First, we must discern the numerous vocations in which we have been placed. Second, we must discern the unique skills and abilities God has gifted us in fulfilling those numerous vocations. And thirdly, and perhaps more challengingly, we must discern how to balance these vocations. That is, based on the dynamism of our vocations, we must discern how to weigh our vocations according to their demands in our various stages of life. As was illustrated above, a man will need to devote more of his attention to being a father when his children are young than when they are grown. It would be inappropriate for the father to treat his adult children the same way he treated them as infants or adolescents. Vocational balance shifts then as we experience the dynamism of our vocations.

But is not just the dynamism of our vocations that demands balance, there are also levels of priority attached to our vocations as well. In the two Orders of Creation in the Three Estates – the Ecclesia and the Oeconomia, God establishes a prioritization of the relationship of creation. First, the primary relationship is between God and man. This is the fundamental relationship of humanity. But within creation, the primary relationship ordained by God is between husband and wife. It is from these two primary relationships that all of our vocations are formed. Any of our vocations, including work for pay or professional achievement, that supplants the priority of these two fundamental relationships inevitably leads to vocational imbalance.

When we experience vocational balance, we live as what and who God created us to be. We will never do this perfectly, but through our understanding of vocation and vocational balance, we come closer to human flourishing. In living out our vocations, balanced according to how God is calling us to live, we come closer to fulfilling what it is to be human. We come closer to experiencing that openness to God and openness to the world, which was the criteria for Pannenberg’s anthropology, for what it is to be human. As Pannenberg reminds us, Jesus is the only true man, the only one who ever experienced a life of being fully open to God. It is only in being made part of the body of Christ that we will ever know the fullness of humanity as God intends it. At best, our vocations will only ever be a secondary good. But as Christians, we like Adam, are still called by God, to participate with God in tending creation. How we do that, and how we strike vocational balance in the Three Estates of Church, Household, and Public Life will be the focus of our next three essays in this series.

Notes

1. For a comprehensive investigation of Pannenberg’s anthropology, see his Anthropology in Theological Perspective.

2. In the Scripture narrative it says that the serpent spoke to Eve, but the text also clearly shows that Adam was there as well, so we can safely assume that Adam was equally tempted by the serpent as was Eve.

Bibliography

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

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).

Pannenberg, Wolfhart. Jesus–God and Man, Second Edition. The Westminster Press, 1977.