Crafts and Trades: Doing Kingdom Work in the Machine Shop
My head learns knowledge, but my hands test if it is true.
My hands do the work, but my heart gives it meaning.
My heart has passion, but my hands and head give it expression.
It is not an exaggeration to state that modern and ancient civilization would not exist without the development of trades and crafts throughout world history. From the building of cities and their infrastructure to the simple daily use of a spoon and bowl, crafts and trades are not only integral to our daily life but is evidence of what it means to be human and made in the image of God. And yet, too often we place this topic in the realm of the secular, failing to recognize crafts and trades are not only foundational to our very existence but are indeed at the very heart and character of God.
I must first make a confession. I approach this topic with more than a little bias. For I was once among the throng that bought into the misguided Christian hierarchy of worthwhile professions. My family was near the bottom rung of the ladder as simple blue-collar folks. As the son of a machinist/gear maker, I spent countless hours in our family business manufacturing gears for all kinds of equipment that provide modern necessities and luxuries. The smell of cutting oil was our family scent, always on my father’s clothes, in our family vehicles, and even at home. And yet, I never heard a pastor or theologian remark that my father’s work was kingdom work, or even important work for our society to function. While my high school classmates were off to university to pursue dreams and a supposed higher sense of calling, I stayed home and became an apprentice under my father, embarrassed I wasn’t doing something important with my life.
When I experienced a radical spiritual conversion less than halfway through my apprenticeship at age 19, my embarrassment deepened as I was subjected to the subtle and often not so subtle message that if I was serious about my faith in Jesus, I should prove it by “going into the ministry.” So, I endured the final two and one-half years of my apprenticeship, anxious to complete it so I could finally follow God’s leading. During the eight years of living far away from the family business, I pursued the traditional ministry path of church work and mission work and attended theological graduate school. But then God led my wife and I back to the family business. We believed this was just a short-term commitment to allow my father to retire. Our plan was to restructure the company and sell it within five years, after which God would reveal his true calling for us to live a life of “ministry.”
After 30 years, I am still in the family business, recognizing that my trade as a gear maker, and countless other trades and crafts, offer countless opportunities to do kingdom work. I am eternally thankful to my earthly father, although knowing nothing of Jewish tradition, for he fulfilled a requirement of ancient rabbis by teaching me his trade. “Whoever does not teach his son a trade has taught him robbery.”
Looking back, I realize now how warped my theology and definition was of “ministry.” Most of the church has had it all wrong for decades, if not centuries. Working in a local church as a renumerated pastor or as a financially supported missionary is not the highest rung of the spiritual ladder. In fact, there is no ladder in scripture. But if there was, I believe I could make the argument that the crafts and trades reflecting God’s creativity and his character through the work of our hands would be near the top of the ladder.
I’ve come to conclude that learning a trade, which is the engagement of the head, heart and hands, is inextricably tied to virtuous character development, which is, in essence, the attaining of wisdom. Since true wisdom can only come from God, I believe the argument can be made that learning a trade, though lacking the evangelical component of introduction to the person of Jesus Christ, is an exercise in training in godliness and, therefore, furthering one’s spiritual journey. Especially for a young person, learning a trade can be the cornerstone for discovering his/her sense of purpose and calling in joining God in His massive work project of creation. Eugene Peterson famously says, “I’m prepared to contend that the primary location for spiritual formation is the workplace.”[1] As a play on an old proverb I ask, is craftsmanship next to godliness?
The Image of God
Any discussion that makes such a bold assertion that learning a trade is akin to godliness necessitates a strong argument rooted in solid biblical theology. If our intent is to help people discover their sense of purpose, or in other words, who they should become, we must first explore God’s intended purpose for humankind from the very beginning. Most Christians are familiar with the Genesis account, “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27). Although I have often heard references of being made in God’s image in terms of humankind’s nature or even physical attributes, for the sake of this discussion, it helpful to examine what God’s purpose was for creating humankind in his likeness. After blessing his new creation, God told them to, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it” (1:28), often referred to as the Creation mandate. Immediately, humankind was given a job to do, albeit, in the vernacular of my sons, a ginormus one. But is it just a job? Is humankind simply put on earth as caretakers of God’s science project, or is there something fundamentally linking work to our relationship with God?
Hans Walter Wolff argues that the phrase “the image of God… points first and fundamentally to a correspondence between man and God. The unique nature of man in creation is to be understood in the light of his special relationship to God.”[2] Humankind has a special place in creation as God’s rulers and stewards but not in the sense often thought of as rulers and authority, to exploit resources for humankind’s own benefit. On the contrary, Wolff makes the case that people are like God’s living statues. “In the ancient East the setting up of the king’s statue was the equivalent to the proclamation of his domination over the sphere in which the statue was erected.”[3] People are God’s living statues, a sign to creation of God’s glory and dominion. Indeed, this imagery is seen in Psalm 8 as the psalmist proclaims, “You have made mankind a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor. You made them rulers over the works of your hands; you put everything under their feet” (verses 5, 6). Humans are God’s representatives, his stewards over His creation, entrusted with His dominion yet dependent on God’s grace and goodness. The task is so great and God’s desire for relationship so grand that Adam and Eve are instructed to fill the earth with other stewards. “The stewardship over the world is therefore entrusted to the great company of mankind with the multitude of its members; and this presupposes that they all partake in the dominion over creation.”[4] Wolff continues to argue from the very beginning, humankind has been given the commission to establish civilization. I quote him at length as he captures the breadth and depth of this endeavor.
This …commission to establish civilization… applies to all men, and it embraces every age. There is no human activity which is not covered by it. The man who found himself with his family on an unprotected plain exposed to ice-cold wind and first laid a few stones one upon another and invented the wall, the basis of architecture, was fulfilling this command. The woman who first pierced a hole in a hard thorn or fishbone and threaded a piece of animal sinew through it in order to be able to join together a few shreds of skin, and so invented the needle, sewing, the beginning of all art of clothing, was also fulfilling this command. Down to the present day, all the instructing of children, every kind of school, every script, every book, all our technology, research, science and teaching, with their methods and instruments and institutions, are nothing other than the fulfillment of this command. The whole of history, all human endeavour, comes under this sign, this biblical phrase. “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it.”[5]
Unfortunately, today, the practical implications of the stewardship commission in churches or schools are rarely spoken of. Children are instructed to get an education so they can get a job. The purpose of this job is often to simply have a means to buy the desirable things. Not only have we lost sight of humankind’s royal purpose but no thought is given to how the fulfillment of God’s commission provides infinite opportunities for humankind to interact with the Creator through His creation. Wolff continues, “When man enters into relationship to the things of this world, whether in his day’s work, or in his meals, or in his discoveries, he also enters objectively into relationship with God, as their Creator, who has apportioned these things to him.”[6] The things of this world have been apportioned to humans by God. If rightly understood, this phrase should cause every believer to engage every area of life with new vigor and purpose.
I remember when my father “apportioned” his life-long work to me, his gear shop. He entrusted it to me, to care for it, to manage it diligently, to ensure that it prospers beyond him, but it wasn’t just a legal transaction. It was a relational transaction that continues to this day. Working in the shop under his authority was to learn not just machining; it was to learn from my father as well. How much more so with God when his children interact with his material world? God’s creative act is an act of a passionate artist full of creativity and love. He creates unfathomable beauty and complexity and essentially leaves it unfinished so that his most prized creation can share in the joy of finishing it, to learn of him in all endeavors.
Bearing “the image of God” is no small matter and needs to be impressed upon youth. I argue crafts and trades have the intrinsic potential to awaken the slumbering royalty in everyone.
Thinking as Doing
Matthew Crawford, in Shop Class as Soul Craft argues, “real knowledge arises through confrontation with real things.”[7] He states that work “is meaningful because it is genuinely useful,”[8] and that he often finds “manual work more engaging intellectually” than working for a think tank. As a philosopher/academic scholar and motorcycle mechanic, Crawford has credibility on both sides of the fence between the world of academics and the blue- collar tradesman. From a philosophical standpoint, Crawford rails against the educational norms that put so much emphasis on thought while providing such little value on doing. “We take a very partial view of knowledge when we regard it as the sort of thing that can be gotten while suspended aloft in a basket. This is to separate knowing from doing, treating students like disembodied brains in jars.”[9] He proposes that thinking separated from doing is not only an anemic substitute for true knowledge but degrades the human spirit to the point that, “it becomes imperative to partition work off from the rest of life.”[10]
If according to Crawford, real knowledge arises through confrontation with real things, are students gaining real knowledge or just information? Put another way, how does acquiring more information further people as God’s image bearers as his stewards? Humankind learns of God’s world and learns of oneself by thinking and doing. As Crawford argues, “The things we know best are the ones we contend with in some realm of regular practice. Heidegger famously noted that the way we come to know a hammer is not by staring at it, but by grabbing hold of it and using it.”[11]
Perhaps what our culture needs today is to think more like the Hebrews of ancient Israel. Johannes Pedersen and Aslaug Moller, Danish biblical scholars of ancient Israel, note “all the Hebrew words most commonly used to designate the process of thinking reveal the movement of the soul in the direction of activity.”[12] According to Pedersen, “thinking is not theoretical, but of a pronouncedly practical character.”[13] Hans Wolff points out that “the Israelite finds it difficult to distinguish linguistically between ‘perceiving’ and ‘choosing’, between ‘hearing’ and ‘obeying’” and that it is “a factual impossibility of dividing theory and practice.”[14] In other words, according to Crawford, “If thinking is bound up with action, then the task of getting an adequate grasp on the world, intellectually, depends on our doing stuff in it.”[15]
It is interesting to note that Crawford entitles his book Shop Class as Soulcraft. Whether his intent was in reference to the Hebrew understanding of the soul, only he can answer; however, for the ancient Hebrew, the soul was the totality of a person. As Stevens instructs, “Soul” in biblical anthropology is a term denoting human being in their hunger “as longing persons.”[16] According to Wolff, humans do not have a soul, like having an organ such as a liver or a heart, but humans are a soul. It is the essence of humankind’. For as Stevens again instructs, “Life, for biblical persons, is total and cannot be segmented into two parts: a disposable shell (the body) and an indestructible “spirit” core (the soul). Thus, the familiar Psalm, ‘Praise the Lord, O my soul; all my inmost being, praise his holy name’ (103:1) could be simply and helpfully translated, ‘Bless the Lord, O my life!’”[17]
Going back to Pedersen, there is a connection among thinking, doing, and one’s entire being. “He who understands how to think well is wise. Wisdom is a property of the soul or, rather, a faculty, an ability to produce, a skill in shaping the very thought which yields the right result.”[18] It is remarkable to think of wisdom as “an ability to produce” and “a skill in shaping the very thought which yields the right result.” According to Pedersen, it is this kind of wisdom that “is essential in the making of a soul. If a man lacks wisdom, then he has no heart.”[19] Wisdom is not just information one can “Google.” Wisdom cannot be measured by grades and degrees. Wisdom is that practical knowledge that only comes “through confrontations with real things.”[20] I can think of no better vehicle to confront real things than crafts and trades.
The Wisdom of Crafts and Trades
Arguing in favor of the wisdom of crafts and trades in developing a person’s character and helping them find their calling in life is a case easily made. “We should note first that Jesus himself did not come from the proletariat day-laborers and landless tenants, but from the middle class of Galilee, the skilled workers. Like his father, he was an artisan, a tekton, a Greek word which means mason, carpenter, Cartwright and joiner all rolled up into one (Mark 6:3).”[21] According to Justin Martyr, “He was deemed a carpenter (for He was in the habit of working as a carpenter when among men, making ploughs and yokes; by which he taught the symbols of righteousness and an active life”[22]
There is a stunning Old Testament example of God sanctioning and blessing craft work. In Exodus 31 and 35, Bezalel, an Israelite, was “filled with the divine spirit, particularly with wisdom and understanding to devise thoughts and to work in gold, and in silver, and in brass”[23] A further reading of Exodus 31 and 35 shows Bezalel and his crew were also artisans in wood, stone, weaving cloth, making utensils, and even in making anointing oil and incense. By every definition, Bezalel was an artist. In God the Worker, Robert Banks shows numerous examples of God being especially concerned with craftsmanship and quality. In designing the earthly tabernacle, Scripture gives extraordinary detail to design. “There was an overall concern for excellence both in structure and furnishings. God is a God of detail as well as vision and of quality as well as quantity.”[24]
Through crafts and trades, not only is there an outlet for creative expression but crafts and trades necessitate virtue as well. In Becoming Good, David Gill defines virtue as those “powers and capabilities we have… that enable us to achieve excellently our intended purposes. We could also say that virtues are the skills [italics mine] needed to accomplish the task of life.”[25] Working in the trades provides a constant feedback loop of progress in accomplishing purposes. A person may think he or she knows how to accomplish a task such unclogging a sink drain, or fixing a broken gear but until the gear is actually machined and assembled in the gearbox, theories are simply theories. If the water doesn’t go down or the gear doesn’t fit, obviously the plumber and machinist didn’t know as much as they thought they did. In discussing the importance of failure in learning, Crawford humorously states, “Not only do things tend to go to hell, but your own action contributes inevitably to the process.”[26] Interaction with the material world forces upon the worker humility and, hopefully, the attainment of wisdom, (i.e. practical knowledge) as we learn what works and what doesn’t.
God created humankind for purpose and this purpose must engage a person’s entire being, not just the mind or head as in abstract thinking and information. Humankind’s purpose is more than being a machine on an assembly line that has little need for thought, but a sense a purpose must also have heart, the realm of being where creativity and imagination reside. The trades and crafts require such heart and virtue. Whether crafting a wooden table, plumbing a house, or fixing a broken gear box, all the senses of thought, body, and soul are engaged. For example, if one asks fifty gear makers to reverse engineer a broken gear and make a new one, one would see fifty different ways of getting it done. The same can be said for plumbing a house, building a deck, sewing a dress. First come the creativity and imagination, then the cognitive abilities of making a plan, and finally comes the execution of the idea with the manipulation of the physical materials. It can be said the end product is an expression of the creator.
Dorothy Sayers, in The Mind of the Maker, makes a strong assertion that it is when humans are creating that they are most akin to God. “The difference between the mind of the maker (an artist) and the Mind of his Maker, [is] a difference, not of category, but only of quality and degree.”[27] She asserts that the common human should deal with life creatively for it is their God-given nature; “the very grain of our spiritual universe….If we [confine] the average man or woman to uncreative activities and an uncreative outlook, we are…doing violence to the very structure of our being.”[28] Humans are created to create. Humans need to create. “[The average person’s] need is to express himself in agriculture or manufacturers, in politics or finance, or in the construction of an ordered society.”[29] Again I come back to the trades and crafts for young people searching for a purpose. The tradesperson and craftsperson finds creative expression every day. Through exercising a trade, a rediscovery of humankind’s royal image is possible.
Graeme Smith defines craftsmanship as, “an attitude and a quality possessed by people enabling them to make things that give pleasure to themselves and others. The work of their hands is the very best they can do, and the fabricated objects possess both utility and beauty.”[30] According to Smith, “One thing we know about God is that God makes things and is pleased with what he makes (Gen 1:31). Human beings made in the image of God are like God when they make things and are pleased with the results of their labor. If this logic holds, superior craftsmanship is a form of Godliness.”[31]
For as Stevens concludes in his article on “Trades”:
The life of a tradesperson is shot through with intimations of eternity and invitations to develop a denim-jean spirituality: forming things by hand, making the connection between bodily activity and mental creativity, creating something of benefit for others, working in teams, learning and teaching in an apprentice relationship life on life, talking with fellow workers about the stuff of everyday life…. Trades are like chores; they are not just opportunities to practice spiritual disciplines, but because of their somewhat tiresome nature and service role, they invite us Godward.[32]
References:
[1] Eugene H. Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 2005), 127.
[2] Hans Walter Wolff, Anthropology of the Old Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974), 158.
[3] Wolff, Anthropology of the Old Testament, 158.
[4] Wolff, Anthropology of the Old Testament, 162.
[5] Wolff, Anthropology of the Old Testament, 164.
[6] Wolff, Anthropology of the Old Testament, 160.
[7] Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (New York: Penguin Press, 2009), 199.
[8] Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft, 6.
[9] Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft, 163.
[10] Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft, 192.
[11] Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft, 164.
[12] Johannes Pedersen and Fru Aslaug Møller, Israel, Its Life and Culture, I (London: Oxford University Press, 1926), 125.
[13] Petersen and Moller, Israel, Its Life and Culture, I, 125.
[14] Wolff, Anthropology of the Old Testament, 51.
[15] Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft, 164.
[16] R. Paul Stevens, “Biblical Anthropology and the Dignity of Doing” (lecture, Vancouver, BC: Regent College, 2003).
[17] Stevens, “Biblical Anthropology and the Dignity of Doing,” (italics mine).
[18] Pedersen and Møller, Israel, Its Life and Culture, 126-127.
[19] Pedersen and Moller, Israel, Its Life and Culture, 127.
[20] Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft, 198.
[21] John R. Schneider, Godly Materialism : Rethinking Money & Possessions (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1994), 109.
[22] Mike Wittmer, “Jesus' Plows,” Word Press, http://mikewittmer.wordpress.com/2013/09/13/jesus-plows/ (accessed Nov. 12, 2013).
[23] Pedersen and Møller, Israel, Its Life and Culture, 127.
[24] Robert Banks, God the Worker: Journeys into the Mind, Heart and Imagination of God (Valley Forge: Judson Press, 1992), 221.
[25] David W. Gill, Becoming Good: Building Moral Character (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 31.
[26] Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft, 203.
[27] Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), 182.
[28]Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, 182.
[29]Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, 185.
[30] Graeme Smith, “Craftsmanship,” in The Complete Book of Everyday Christianity : An a-to-Z Guide to Following Christ in Every Aspect of Life, ed. Robert J. Banks and R. Paul Stevens (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1997), 240.
[31] Smith, "Craftsmanship," 240.
[32] R. Paul Stevens, “Trades,” in Stevens and Banks, The Complete Book of Everyday Christianity, 1045.
