Belonging to God: Karl Barth and the Value of Daily Work

This essay explores Karl Barth’s understanding of daily work in Church Dogmatics in light of his understanding of Christian vocation. Because Barth is responding to post-Reformation developments in the understanding of work, this essay begins with a typological survey of Christian understandings of vocation and how the language of vocation gets reduced to work in the modern period. I next examine how Barth’s theology recovers important themes of earlier views of vocation, while it also offers critiques of capitalist and state socialist views of work and workers. The essay concludes with a brief contrast between Barth’s own work habits and his celebration of Mozart’s work, a contrast that offers a window through which one might view “good work” in our day.