چکیده :
this contribution might be best understood as a conversation with a theological friend and teacher, along the lines of what he says about the promise of ‘deferential’ love, taking his cue from the apostle's famous portrayal: ‘love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude.
love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right.
love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things’ (1 cor.
13:4‐7, rsv).
o’donovan characterizes this account of ‘love as deference’ as moving around a well‐described circle: ‘restraint of competitive self‐assertion, acceptance of others’ activities and initiatives, flexibility in waiting upon them, and readiness to give them time and space’ (2).1
deferential love and the surplus of meaning
theological conversation is perhaps best understood as an exercise in that love which invites the other in and allows the other to contribute to one's own thought.
the most rewarding examples i can remember – some of which i had the privilege of experiencing with oliver – are of a characteristic cascading type, where one ventures humbly to confirm that one has rightly understood what the other has said or written by re‐articulating in one's own words what is understood.
if successful, this exchange leads to an extension of meaning, insofar as it allows the other to discover a kind of secret ‘surplus’ in his or her own original statement – something that somehow was ‘there’ in what he or she said, albeit within the distant horizon of insight, but not quite close enough to be captured in expressed terms, at least not of the same clarity as the partner's reiteration now affords.
such surplus becomes perceptible to the partners in brotherly conversation as a kind of ‘third thing’.
although originating from partner a's original wording, it is no more his than it is that of partner b, whose reiteration proved instrumental in bringing it to light.
what i am describing here is certainly a common experience.
anyone invested in good, deep and sustained conversation with a congenial partner will be able to testify to such blissful moments in human communication.
recognizing their rarity is part of what makes such moments particularly enjoyable, all the more so when set against the more common mode of conversation (especially in the academy), which tends to be marked by the spirit of competitiveness that makes us think that our insights need to be protected over against others’ attempts to ‘have a say’ in them, fearing they might steal them from us or at least ‘water them down.’
the privilege that a theological perspective enjoys is that it helps us understand that the emergence of that ‘third thing’ – which is neither ‘mine’ nor ‘yours’ but genuinely ‘ours’ – is owed to the operation of that spirit which eternally communicates with the other divine persons in and through and (following augustine) as love.
such theological understanding of ‘surplus’ conversations sheds a particular light on the phenomenon of ‘agreement’.
seen from this perspective, the point of agreeing would not be to determine whether what you say is coherent with what i say, but would reflect rather the verbal aspect in the notion of ‘finding agreement’: finding a new and agreeable way of saying what we have – with the help of each other and led by the spirit – discovered to be right and true.
along the lines of these preliminary remarks, my following engagement with o’donovan's account of labour and work is mostly an attempt to ‘reiterate’: to mark insights that i have found especially inspiring and to reformulate them in a way that may – in the best case – extend the horizon of their meaning and significance toward aspects that might be said to ‘belong’ there, even though o’donovan may not have made them explicit or elaborated them much in the context of his discussion.
when it comes to work: why love and what love?
as we watch o’donovan operate in the way seasoned moral theologians do, moving as he does in the third volume of his opus ethics as theology from foundational concepts to concrete spheres of moral life in a kind of de officiis approach (vii), we find a move in his chapter on ‘the communication of work’ (102‐34) that may take us by surprise.
when discussing the manifold facets and turbulences of labour and work, o’donovan chooses love, of all concepts, to provide him with the basis of what he wishes to say about such specific issues as unemployment, management, digitalisation and more.
but why should we be surprised when a christian theologian makes this choice? after all, love has been described as the ‘mother’ of all virtues (thomas aquinas), and ‘love of neighbour’ has been marked as the all‐embracing moral directive that followers of (the torah and) jesus’ teachings are to heed.
but taken in this general and most obvious sense, the imperative to love is easily reduced to a via negativa approach, in which love appears mainly as a corrective to whatever other, apparently more concrete moral concepts appear to demand or allow.
the virtue of love as a moral concept lies then precisely in its non‐concrete nature, the pervasiveness of which allows for each concrete moral concept to be reminded that ‘without love, it is nothing’.
there is nothing wrong with emphasizing the corrective power of love in its capacity to reach and purify any moral concept, motivation and operation.
but o’donovan's referral to love differs from such approaches in that it banks on specific aspects of love, as he finds them outlined in paul's portrayal of the ‘highest way’ in 1 cor.
13, such as ‘patient’ and ‘bearing’ that o’donovan characterizes as ‘deferential’.
in this more specific sense, love may seem not quite so obvious a choice for a moral discussion of labour and work, a discourse that has tended to employ anthropological concepts such as ‘personhood’ or concepts more specifically attuned to the sphere of public life such as ‘responsibility’.
without denying viability and merit to those approaches, in what follows i would like to accentuate the fertility of o’donovan's account by highlighting aspects of how our understanding of work – and the vocation that comes with it – can be deepened when work is understood as an exercise of ‘deferential love’.
‘investing .
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in putting people out of work’: the economic fatalism of our time
led by a false antithesis that conceived work merely as the price to be paid for the satisfaction of leisure, we continue to plan, by research in artificial intelligence and in other ways, for a world in which as few people as possible will have any work to do.
and since every adult now, not only one in two as a generation ago, looks for paid employment, the sense of scarcity is all the greater (108).
what o’donovan states rather matter‐of‐factly is one of the most intensely and controversially debated issues in contemporary discourses on the future of work.2 will the big and apparently irreversible trends of digitalisation and investment in artificial intelligence really make for less work in the future? or will these trends rather open up a rich variety of new possibilities for work that we can hardly imagine and which will more than compensate for the losses that will be inevitable for certain sectors? irrespective of the speculative nature of any such prospective account, what appears rather uncontroversial is that the evolving culture of labour and work will likely see a considerable shift towards higher qualified and more complex patterns of work that continue to rely on human power, with a concomitant trend for less complex and less qualified jobs to fall to the wayside.
most likely the new culture of work will be one that reinforces existing divisions and even reintroduces new types of division in society, perhaps no less dramatic than the social rifts we associate with feudalist or early industrialist times.
when hearing those trends described as ‘inevitable’ and ‘irreversible’, we may find o’donovan's provocative statement that western societies appear to be actively and purposefully ‘investing .
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energies in putting people out of work’ (109) perhaps less exaggerated than it may first appear.
while hardly anyone who is investing in digitalisation and artificial intelligence today would be comfortable to have their endeavours characterized in this way, it would seem not altogether unfair to say that many if not most agents in this context instinctively and implicitly follow a principle which o’donovan laments when describing a particular deficit in contemporary theological debates about work.
since the time john paul ii's encyclical letter laborem exercens was first published in 1981, o’donovan states that ‘our theological talk about work, following what arendt saw as the inevitable modern trend, has been swallowed up in the discourse of economics, which is only incidentally about work and is primarily about the generation and distribution of resources of life’ (108).
it is hardly a secret that the technological investments that are about to revolutionize work, along with other elemental aspects of modern societies, such as communication, education, and administration, are mainly if not exclusively driven by the most basic economic considerations, namely, reducing cost and maximising benefit.
the likely or more‐than‐likely consequences for the provision, division and experiencing of work tend to be addressed in terms of ‘knock on’ effects that force themselves onto modern societies with the power of tidal waves generated by underwater tectonic shifts that the rapid development of new technologies resemble.
as such, these effects are often discussed within the framework of ‘chances and risks’, and even when the consequences for human work and labour are pictured in gloomy terms, the impression is still that we are dealing here with a separate, subaltern sphere of life that is affected by trends in a different and hegemonic sphere – for better or worse, but inevitably so.
for the latter (‘worse case’) scenario, it is understood that the state is summoned to take subsidiary measures in order to buffer the worst consequences for affected individuals and groups, but rarely does the idea appear on the political agenda that a well designed culture of work that is open to everyone may be just as important to the wellbeing of a society as a robust, functioning economy.
at least in mid‐term prospects, a balanced and stable culture of work will prove conditional for any sustainable economy within a peaceful and just society.
in such a society, to borrow from ecclesiological language, there is no ‘economy’ that can say to ‘work’: ‘i am more important than you’, and blindly invest in developing a future job market in which the ‘head’ (‐type of work) says to the ‘hand’ (‐type of work): ‘i have no need of you’ (1 cor.
12:21).
real work
in an interesting exegetical observation, o’donovan suggests that in the biblical narrative of creation there is already a fuller account of work implied than most exegetes appear to acknowledge, in that the ‘tilling and keeping’ (gen.
2:15) is not the sole descriptor of the types of agency that comprise work.
in putting adam's task of ‘naming’ (of animals and of his fellow human) as a shortcut for ‘linguistic and scientific work of recognition and classification’ (109) next to the first human being's call to physical labour, o’donovan acknowledges the archetypical division of human labour along the lines of physical and intellectual work.
but his observation can also be understood to imply that, according to his understanding of the biblical narrative of the original vocation of mankind, there is no hierarchy to be assumed among these archetypes of work – whether in the way that characterized the ancient world of the greek polis3 or in terms of the direction that our future work‐market is threatening to take.
o’donovan points to a phenomenological dimension that reinforces the exegetical insight of the inseparability of work into principled classes of dignity or importance: it is already written into the creaturely fabric of human nature that the ‘physicality’ of work cannot be overcome even in the most complex and engaging types of (apparently) ‘purely’ cognitive or academic work.
while the ‘materiality’ factor that people engage with might be as drastically different between types of work as is the difference between soil and ideas, what unites all types of work is that all are subjected to the creaturely rhythm of engagement, exhaustion and regeneration.4 as o’donovan puts it: ‘.
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whatever work we do, our physical resources are expended on it.
work exacts toil.
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if heavy lifting may damage the back and a blowtorch hurt the eyes, so may constant sitting at a desk and gazing at a screen.
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all these are toils of “real” work, whatever its type’ (111).
this is certainly a needed reminder, given the various ways and traditions in and by which some have looked down on others who they considered as not engaged in any ‘real work’ – whether the verdict was issued by the tanned, muscular brick layer about the pale‐skinned, frail ‘scribe’5 at his desk, or inversely used when pointing to the supremacy of ‘white collar’ over ‘blue collar’ work, where the ‘real work’ tag was relative to the degree to which the one undertaking work could be said to ‘know what he or she is doing’ as opposed to merely executing ‘mindless’ manual operations.
market as leviathan: loss of dignity of work
all such derogatory verdicts pronounced on other people's work mirror a construal of human society in which the value of any member is derived from their place in a system of hierarchies that reflect the changing values of a market‐driven society.
this explains the transient nature of those verdicts, relative to what kind of work is assumed ‘real’ and meritorious in a society at any given point in time.
after all, values are, as carl schmitt has demonstrated, but functions of markets and their transformations.6 but more importantly, and certainly more disconcertingly, it also explains the transient and unstable nature of the way in which people perceive the significance of their own work.
the market‐driven spirit of competitiveness makes people believe that the significance of their work is to be determined by comparison: by measure of how it relates not to the work of others itself but to the significance of their work, as both assume their respective place within a hierarchy of values.
in a culture of work that is defined primarily if not exclusively in economic terms, that type of work will be considered of higher value which makes another's work less needed, and consequently the highest value would be found in that type of work which makes others’ work superfluous.
but can the significance of work really be left to the market to determine? not only is the market prone to sending out confusing signals at times, when for example, in a time that values the capability to engage in abstract thought (such as in the creation and development of algorithms) over anything else, a university lecturer in the uk was reported to have given up his reputable post in order to retrain and henceforth offer his services as a plumber, for the simple reason that this would allow him to make ‘twice as much’.7
but the main reason why a theological account must resist allowing the market to determine the significance of people's work is that a market‐driven comparative approach for determining work's significance takes for granted (and thus as normative) a hobbesian account of society in which there is no creational, benign and direct mutuality assumed among its members.
rather, all relations are channelled through the big leviathan: the market.
in such a society, work is implicitly and effectively denied any inner dignity, since the market can, in principle and at any point, reduce to nothing the value of any type of work while elevating any other to unknown – and unhealthy – heights.
giving work
demonstrating the rationality of a market‐driven competitive and comparative determination of the value of work as essentially (though often secretly) undermining any substantial account of its dignity and its principled gravitation towards making (types of) work superfluous prepares us to grasp the principled nature of the difference that donovan's account makes.
in finding the highest vocation human work can assume precisely in its capacity to ‘give work’ (115) – to make the work of others ever more possible, needed and valued – o’donovan provides a stunningly precise counter vision to the market‐driven rationality described above.
with this pointer we turn now to o’donovan's discussion of the dignity of work.
at its most general level, he locates this dignity in work's capacity to elevate our physical interactions with matter towards advancing ‘meaningful contributions to social existence and means of serving the divine purpose for the world’ (111).
one must be careful to avoid misunderstanding the notion of ‘contribution’ here, namely, assuming that our work is given value solely through the measure of value it creates, and that its importance is determined through the measure of permanence it may assume in its ‘product’.
by contrast, o’donovan draws attention to god's own unsurpassable way of sanctifying impermanence as a measure of human existence and work: the resurrection.
‘work is made precious as impermanent, since god has taken time and its works to himself, restoring them through and from their passing away, not ‘cumulatively’ as a process, but by an act that bears testimony to himself as creator and redeemer, which is resurrection’ (114).
in a particularly important passage, o’donovan explains the significance of work in terms of its impact not only on the material but on the social world, too.
work, he states, builds us into society by defining our responsibilities and privileges over against others.
‘in work we spin a thread tough enough for others to weave with.
and it is one reason that we desire to work, that it confers a certain social dignity upon us; it makes us an element in other people's worlds, “something” that they count on’ (114).
characterising work in this way explains why unemployment is not only a detriment to those who experience it, as it shuts them out of the culture of mutual recognition that work in its manifold patterns of cooperation and mutual benefitting represents for its participants, but it also tragically reveals what o’donovan calls ‘our common impotence to be an effective society’ (115).
a society characterized by its incapability to create economic and political circumstances that allow creating work and keeping its members in employment must theologically be understood as ‘impotent’, since every human society is called to mirror god's own gracious modes of employing.
as creator and redeemer, god has work to give to all who want it and rewards it with blessings of its effective agency (115).
in order to be able to mirror god's modes of enabling work we shall have to be attentive to the blessing god bestowed on work in the mode of resting ‘from and towards’ it, as o’donovan puts it.
resting from and towards work
‘work is what we rest from, rest what we work towards” (120).
this quotation might first appear as a plain, obvious sociological description of what is often described as ‘work‐life‐balance’.
the predominance of that idea in the contemporary imagination reveals an inner contradiction that marks modern attitudes towards work, when it is understood, paradoxically, as both the essence of life and its sheer opposite – life being at its most miserable when (employed) work is taken from us.
the ‘from/towards’ formula might easily be understood according to a blunt utilitarian logic.
in this perspective, work would be seen as a mere means8 to something more worthwhile, existential and real: the ‘spare time’ which is ostensibly at one's own command, and ‘rest’ as equally instrumental in the service of ‘recharging’ the batteries and recovering full functionality in the workplace.
wary of such ways of misunderstanding the relation of work and rest, o’donovan stresses that ‘rest’ is to be more than a ‘pause’ from work and needs to be seen as having a positive resonance with that from which we rest.
‘it is only as we rest that we see our work as an achievement to take satisfaction in.
it puts us in a position to love our work.
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this is what it means to rest not only ‘from’ our work, but ‘in’ our work.
we let go of our work in order to take a reflective view of it as something to be glad of’ (120).9
here a question arises that we need to put to o’donovan, especially as he continues his thought by pointing to the importance that rest is given in and through the institution of the weekly day of worship, which, as he puts it, qualifies work ‘as a path to lead us into the purposes of our creator’ (120).
what are we to make of the near equation of ‘reflection’ and ‘assessment’, as when o’donovan speaks of work as ‘an achievement to take satisfaction in’? why should our reflecting on our work be directed towards assessing its achievement in the first place? are there alternative, perhaps more appropriate modes of reflecting on our work? a first moment of hesitation may arise with regards to the assumption that reflecting on our work will lead to ‘satisfaction’.
while this may be true in some instances, no less often we shall perhaps find dissatisfaction when looking back on our work, when it is deemed defective, missing, or alienating.10
but the far more important question is this: what if the way worship makes us look at our work is not primarily in terms of assessing its achievement but something altogether different? this question is the more urgent today, as the experience of most workers is now dominated by protocols and imperatives to assessment, including self‐assessment, all of which conduce to either self‐legitimation or self‐degradation.
o’donovan obviously senses a difficulty here when he stresses that the reflection that rest affords is not simply an occasion in which we take encouragement from our own achievements but more importantly an occasion which ultimately ‘leads us into god's purposes’ (120).
this hint appears worth further exploring, as it bears the potential to help us escape from the ‘assessment trap’ – a condition which is hard to avoid if the reflection that rest offers is understood primarily as an evaluating exercise.
a ‘sunday’ vision of work
the kind of resting that worship affords, encourages and instils in us is best understood as a way of redirecting and reorienting the way in which we reflect on ourselves and on our work.
it does so by first directing our gaze away from our own work – away from the pride or desperation that the fixation on its achievement carries with it – towards god's work.
‘auf sein werk mußt du schauen, wenn dein werk soll bestehen’, as paul gerhardt put it in the famous german hymn befiehl du deine wege.11 such a sabbatical view of rest and worship does not make us imitate god's assessment of god's work by assessing our own work in a similar fashion.
instead, it invites us into god's own reflection of god's work – as we hear of and celebrate his mighty deeds in creation and salvation history and make our own god's assessment of it: ‘behold, very good’.
the vision of god's own work and judgement frees us from the compulsion to regard our own work – and ourselves – in the primary mode of assessment.
in this liberty we are offered a new way of looking at our work, as it appears in the light of what god has given and continues to give, and how this inspires, qualifies and limits all that we do and achieve.
in pressing this point, i am not assuming to bring to light something that is completely absent in o’donovan's exposition.
rather, i am trying to draw out more explicitly what seems implicit in a statement like ‘the sabbath celebration calls us to see our own work and rest within the narrative of god's work and rest’ (120).
what i think needs to be emphasised more strongly in this context – the importance of turning our gaze from our own work towards god's and of dwelling in god's judgement instead our own – can be seen as reflecting the theological rationale that inspired the shifting of the holy day from sabbath to sunday in early christianity.
without overstressing the difference, we might say that the sabbath, as the last day of the week, invites a retrospective and assessing view, while the day of resurrection and the beginning of the week provokes a view that takes its lead from god's making all things new.12
stressing this point is just one way of pointing to the vocation that comes with our work or, in other words, the sanctification of work that god has been undertaking and is continuing to undertake.
if the first day of the week makes us look ahead towards that which is not yet visible, including our work not yet done, and which is thus investible with a new vision, it also alerts us to how this new perspective rivals a merely ‘empirical’ one distinguished by its fixation on that which is past and cannot be changed.
with this observation we turn to ‘the sanctification of work’, as an especially apt heading for the most important chapter in o’donovan's treatment of work.
‘in the service of christ’: work for everyone
o’donovan begins his discussion by emphasising the newness of perspective that the gospel of a crucified and risen christ entailed for the understanding of human work.
although works could no longer be understood as means to secure salvation (‘work righteousness’), the new testament authors identify them, as o’donovan stresses (128), as proper objects of sanctification and even as being reflective of god's own glory – as, for example, when jesus declares that the ‘good works’ of his followers should be visible to others and inviting praise of the creator and the enabler of them (matt.
5.16).
the main emphasis, however, o’donovan puts on a particular aspect that characterizes the newness of the christian perspective of work.
after everything he has said about the internal blessings that work as a creaturely good is to bestow on those engaged in it, including satisfaction and a sense of dignity as functioning members of society, o’donovan marks the newness of the perspective with this clarification: ‘the blessing on our works is for others’ (127, emphasis added).
the grammatical change of number (from ‘work’ to ‘works’) appears significant.
if we understand correctly what is implied here, we could say that while we are to enjoy the manifold blessings of our work, the singular blessing of our manifold works is that they can and should enrich other people in their lives and work.
the vocational dimension of work is, o’donovan insists, only sufficiently grasped when seen in relation to christ's work: ‘.
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because it is in the accomplished work of jesus that we are justified, god sanctifies our work by calling us to a service of christ, in which he works “alongside” us.
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“serving the lord christ” becomes the framework within which whatever service may be required by earthly employers can now be given a definite purpose and a clear effectiveness (col.
3:23)’ (128f).
invested with a sense of the vocation of serving the work of christ in the world, work – as o’donovan describes its historic new role – has seen a ‘massive expansion’ (129) within christendom (freed from its narrow definition in antiquity, where it was seen as a proper activity for the lower classes only).
two strands of the biblical tradition worked together in causing that expansion.
in the hebrew bible, work was regarded as belonging to human creaturely existence and hence both a privilege and a duty of everyone.
the added perspective that the new testament brought to it – that every work, whether employed or not, could be undertaken in the service of christ – made it possible to ‘find work’ even for those who could not find employment.
o’donovan describes the christian revolution as entailing a radical revaluation of work, ‘which allowed the socially neglected to find themselves the recipients of a high vocation that passed through and surpassed the menial tasks they confronted on a daily basis’ (130).
work thus became a main instrument through which the gospel began to take effect in reorganizing society around this conviction, spreading ‘out from the monasteries, where benedict's ora et labora made the saint and the serf one and the same’ (130).
work as vocation
there is an interesting parallel to note here with the protestant reformers’ notion of beruf, which o’donovan mentions briefly in his discussion, suggesting that in this notion ‘there lies a real theological insight’ (118).
an abbreviated version of berufung (vocation), beruf in contemporary german is commonly understood in terms of ‘profession’.
the theological insight that can be gleaned from its etymology is usually specified in terms of the notion that one can be understood as ‘working properly in one's profession’ only on condition that one looks at it as something invested with purpose and a meaning of its own, being more than a ‘job’, a mere means to make ends meet.
what is often overlooked in the ‘profession as vocation’ debate, though, is that the equation of a particular profession with the notion of ‘vocation’ is a theological mistake.
this mistake first appeared in protestant theologies of the eighteenth‐ and nineteenth centuries, when beruf was more and more seen as something given with a particular set of talents, skills and ambitions, when, for example, noticeable musical talent and a drive to perform would be seen as constituting the ‘vocation’ to become an artist; or a particular sensitivity towards injustices, combined with a sharp intellect as constitutive of a ‘vocation’ to become a lawyer; or a particular interest in the bio‐chemistry of the human body combined with a propensity to help people as constitutive of a ‘vocation’ to become a doctor; and so on.
irrespective of the possibility to understand vocation conceived in such a way, in relation to god's primal gifting with the respective talents and the wish to put these into god's service, such a vocational construal of beruf factually engendered the opposite of what o’donovan describes as the ‘revaluation’ of work in christianity with its unmistakable egalitarian drift, based on the assumed equidistance of all types of work, ‘high and low’, to the service of christ.
it is hardly incidental that the notion of profession as vocation can, without embarrassment, only be attached to those privileged and privileging professions that have an inbuilt sense of purpose and dignity.
having such an inbuilt sense makes the dignity that is bestowed on work through the recognition that it can be undertaken in the service of christ appear additional at best and superfluous at worst.
the ‘called’ teacher, nurse, writer, etc.
all appear to make sense, but could we, without embarrassment, speak of, say, the ‘calling’ to be a cashier at a supermarket, a cleaner or a bin man?
the christian vocation, however, that makes it possible to undertake any type of work as a service to christ and the neighbour, is not tied to the inner qualities of the respective work, as it corresponds to a set of talents of the one undertaking it, but to a particular charisma: love.
for luther, there was only one beruf a christian could ever have: the calling to love, operating in the various spheres of responsibility, including that of profession and particular work.
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in talibus ordinationibus exercere caritatem’, as the one overarching vocation of every christian is nicely summarized in the augsburg confession of the lutheran churches.13
while it was interesting to see how well o’donovan's decision to base his understanding of work on the pauline account of ‘deferential love’ rhymes with the beruf tradition of reformation theology, perhaps the most exciting passages in his account are those where he spells out in some detail what concrete difference deferential love makes in the experience and understanding of work in the actual workplace.
a different culture of collaboration
drawing on the prominent role that notions such as synergoi – fellow workers – and similar composite expressions with syn (together with) assume in the new testament writings, o’donovan explains the particular agapeic logic behind that recurring emphasis on collaboration.
‘the essence of this collaboration is that one person's call to work may strengthen others specifically in relation to their work.
the “higher way” of saint paul is the way that goes beyond an interest in one's own vocation, to include an interest in others’ exercise of their vocations’ (132).
what i find exciting in this description is that it encourages a refreshingly different model of cooperation from the one that appears to dominate in our contemporary work culture.
that ‘interest’ in the exercise of others’ work, which o’donovan speaks of, can be understood as triggering a shift of focus towards discovering how our work is and could be related to that of others – as opposed to clinging to an administrative logic according to which this relation can and must be determined ex ante by an external centralised agency.
agapeic interest in the exercise of others’ work as it relates to one‘s own work insinuates a shift away from the compartmentalizing logic that focuses on scope and boundaries in determining spheres of responsibility in cooperative work, often equating ‘overlap’ with loss of energy and efficiency instead of seeing in it a potential for discovering ways of intensified collaboration.
agapeic interest in the exercise of others’ work as it relates to one's own work resists reducing ‘collaboration’ to a mere labouring alongside each other and sharing in the same workplace or project.
when collaborators understand themselves as ‘fellow servants’ in the service of christ instead of as competitors, they can become and act as true synergoi.
a sense of what this entails is reflected in the german notion of zusammenwirken.
although the rules of grammar would allow separating the notion into two words (zusammen wirken), the german language has nicely kept zusammenwirken as one single composite word, indicating a way of working hand‐in‐hand, a being jointly effective that is more than the sum of two individual parts’ endeavour.
agapeic interest in the exercise of others’ work as it relates to one's own work, moreover, escapes the trap that any competitive framework entails, where every form of collaboration is (more or less) secretly driven by either pride or despair, where one's own contribution is seen as either the essence of whatever the collaboration can achieve, or as merely peripheral to it.
in contrast to being driven by either pride or despair, work understood and undertaken as an exercise of deferential love promises to be a joyful activity in that it only discovers what it is and is destined to be by way of discovering what part it has in the other and her work, and what part, in turn, the other and her work has in mine.