As I look back on it now, it seems to me that the book started as a short essay for my students on the nature and process of theological thinking. I wrote a few versions of this for my classes in my earlier years at Hanover. Later, the opportunity to direct Hanover’s PTEV program came along, and I ended up presenting a paper on the theology of vocation for one of the symposia of Hanover’s Center for Free Inquiry. These two projects came together as I realized that no theology of vocation could stand on its own but needed to be part of a larger and broader theological framework. My motivation, then, was to write a book that would introduce readers to theological thinking, help them to discover and affirm their basic theological commitments, and then enable them to build, on this foundation, some understanding of what God is calling them to do and to be.

I wrote the book with several audiences in mind. I think introductory courses in theology, or even advanced courses that want to talk about theological method or help students to identify their own basic theological convictions, will find it helpful. I think courses on vocation and calling will find it useful. It is written as accessibly as I know how to do, and I hope that any interested Christian person will be able to pick it up and work through it on their own to learn what it means to do theology, to work out their own theological issues, or to consider what God is calling them to do or to be. I hope that church groups and church pastors will find it helpful in pondering all of these things as well. I included questions at the end of each chapter to guide people on a journey of discovering their own theological understanding of the world. And, I wrote it in such a way that it does not require the reader to agree with me in order to benefit from using it; it is meant to be part of an ongoing conversation, not a definitive statement of anything. I would much rather have someone disagree with me and improve on what I’m doing than have anyone see it as intended to be a final word of any kind.

I am passionate about my faith. My bottom-line conviction is that God and Love and Resurrection are the very heart of reality. At the same time, I don’t believe we can be certain of this or of any of the fundamental theological claims of Christianity. Faith may be knowledge of a kind, but it has much more in common with deep conviction and commitment than it does epistemological certainty. I wanted to acknowledge this in the book, but at the same time to make clear that this uncertainty does not undermine the Christian life. We may not be able to be sure that we know who God is, but that doesn’t change our ability to make God the center of our lives for the betterment of the world. Living as a faithful Christian takes developing or constructing the very best understanding of God we possibly can, based on all the conversation partners provided to us in the tradition, and living in accordance with that understanding in our daily lives. Uncertainty about theological things is, it seems to me, simply a fact about human existence, but it is not a fact that takes away from us the truth, pragmatically speaking, of our faith.

By the way, some of the language I am using here, like “epistemological” and “pragmatically,” is explained carefully in the book, and all of these ideas are developed much more slowly there. I would not want potential readers of the book to think that some of my compressed answers here reflect the way the book is written!

I guess I should start by saying that we often reflect theologically without noticing it. We think about who God is or what God is doing at many of the difficult moments of our lives, for instance. What we do not do, however, is regular and intentional theological reflection, the kind that identifies and works with our deepest theological reflections and builds for ourselves a view to which we are deeply committed and out of which we can live well. That’s what I’m trying to encourage.

Having said that, I try to name and illustrate the process of theological reflection in five steps. First, identify your issue. What, exactly, is the theological question you want to try to answer? Second, say why you care about this issue. What are you looking for in life that makes this an important question? This step helps you to engage your issue as deeply as possible by highlighting for you its autobiographical importance. Third, say where you are now. What are your current convictions about your issue? What is your starting point for your exploration? Fourth, examine your current position in conversation with the many conversation partners I identify in the book, including Scripture and your experiences. You might think of this as testing your hypothesis. From this fourth step, you will emerge with a new understanding (or a confirmation of your old one), and be ready to make a new commitment. Although your faith journey may well cycle back through the same questions another time, for the moment you will have identified a place you can stand with awareness and fully-chosen conviction. Fifth and finally, you must discover what kind of world is created when you live out your commitments. This real life test is the final one and can take a long time, but it will ultimately let you know whether your conviction is worth keeping or should be replaced. This process is one anyone can do; a little practice and it becomes almost second nature.

I think the challenges that get in the way of our doing intentional theological reflection are pretty much the same wherever we are in life. They include, but certainly are not restricted to, fear, laziness and indifference. First, it can be scary to examine what one believes. It can separate us from those we care about; it can make us change our plans and our lives; it can shake the ground beneath us. Often, these challenges are more disconcerting and uncomfortable in the imagination and in the moment than they are in reality or in the long term, but that is not always the case. Second, laziness comes into play in part because critical thinking of any kind, and this includes theological thinking, is often difficult work, especially when we are trying to address serious issues. Third, we can be indifferent to this kind of reflection because we do not trust that these really are the most important issues we can be exploring, or we do not trust that we can actually find answers to them. We have been fed answers to many of them all our lives, answers that have not worked for us, and we have given up supposing that anyone actually wants to think carefully about them in a way that both honors our freedom and addresses the important dimensions of our lives. Finally, these issues are ultimately about how to make the world a better place, and indifference often reigns when we get into that arena simply because so many of us feel helpless there.

What makes the payoff for thinking intentionally about theological things so big is that we are led to identify our very core and our most fundamental commitments for living. We are able to come as close as human beings can come to finding the central realities of the universe, the truth about God, the meaning of life. We are able to find the answers to questions about how we are to live. I’m not sure there is anything as important for living a good life as these discoveries. And, in the end, I believe, we all want to live a good life.

Students face a wide variety of issues when it comes to exploring vocation. Of course, they all want to find meaningful jobs after they graduate, but this is perhaps the least important issue, even if it appears to be the most immediately pressing. A second issue is feeling trapped by the job slots society provides into thinking that one of those must be their slot instead of working to identify what their heart and God are asking of them. Another is figuring out which voice to listen to among the many voices they hear— how to weigh these voices and how to sort them out. In the current class I am teaching on Christian Calling, the most often-raised issue is how we know which voice, of all the voices we hear telling us what to do and how to live, is God’s voice. A fourth issue is the struggle not to see a calling as a utopia that exists out there in the future that will fulfill all one’s dreams and make every day a fun one; I think that is a challenge we all face in this attempt to find God’s way for us in the world. There are certainly other challenges, but these are a few of them.

I guess I’ve given my version of the purpose of this kind of reflection a few times now, but I do think it is something that can be said in a variety of ways. In essence, the purpose is identifying how we are to live in relationship with God. Said in that way, the issue of vocation is perhaps the quintessential question of Christian ethics: it’s all about how the faithful person, the person who is committed to a life centered in Jesus of Nazareth, should live. That’s not an uncontroversial way of putting it, but it is one of the ways I think about it.

This is one of the places where I want to refer readers to the book, because I think I’ve dealt with this there better than I can do briefly here. Let me just highlight a few of the important issues. One of them is that the issue of vocation is partly an issue of who human beings are, or, more specifically, who I am, as we or I stand in relation to God. How this gets described will depend upon what we think about general callings and particular callings, among other things, but there is no denying that the individual person and his or her gifts and talents and his or her relationship with God as a unique individual has something to do with vocational reflection. This may be the least controversial of the ways that autobiography relates to vocational reflection.

We also have to ponder here to what extent processes of discernment are individual and to what extent they are generalizable. One thing I sometimes ask students to do is to consider how God may have spoken to them in the past to see whether that tells them anything about how God may be speaking to them now. This is worth pondering a bit. Does God speak to us in different ways? If so, how does our particular life story tell us something about those ways? Our answers to these questions may convince us that knowing ourselves, as human beings and as individuals, can be an important step in understanding God and what God is doing in our lives.

I just used the metaphor of story to talk about a person’s life. This metaphor offers another helpful way to think about vocational issues; I’ve used this in leading retreats on a couple of occasions. If we see our lives as stories, with themes, characters, plot lines, settings, and all the rest of the components of a story, then where are the places our story intersects with God’s story? And what do these intersections tell us about what God is doing in our lives and about how we should live? What will the next pages or chapters of our story look like as we seek to have our story make sense within the context of God’s story?

Finally, convictions about God and the things of God are deeply personal. They connect in intimate ways to the most important aspects of who we are. They emerge from or speak to the innermost parts of us. Although one might say this is a reason to see them as more certain than other things we claim to know, I would say it is a reason to see them as less certain, but also a reason to understand the depth of conviction we have about them. I encourage people to be careful about taking autobiographical facts about their feelings or about growing up as directly indicative of God or God’s activity. But I also urge them to think carefully about whether some of their experiences have helped them to see aspects of God that not everyone can see. Who we are both allows us to see God and disguises God from us, and it is crucial that we do our best to sort all of this out in our theological reflections. We hope that God is more than the reflection of autobiographical or human facts about us; to assume this without careful analysis, though, leads to over-simplifying the search for God and who God calls us to be. Theology is not only about autobiography, but our life experiences certainly influence and shape our basic convictions.