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The word “subdue” indicates that, though all God had made was good, it was still to a great degree undeveloped. God left creation with deep untapped potential for cultivation that people were to unlock through their labor.
Freedom is not so much the absence of restrictions as finding the right ones, those that fit with the realities of our own nature and those of the world.
So the commandments of God in the Bible are a means of liberation, because through them God calls us to be what he built us to be.
Pieper argues that leisure is not the mere absence of work, but an attitude of mind or soul in which you are able to contemplate and enjoy things as they are in themselves, without regard to their value or their immediate utility. The work-obsessed mind—as in our Western culture—tends to look at everything in terms of efficiency, value, and speed.
Simple physical labor is God’s work no less than the formulation of theological truth.
The earth had been completely unformed and empty; in the six-day process of development God had formed it and filled it—but not completely. People must now carry on the work of development: by being fruitful they fill it even more; by subduing it they must form it even more … as God’s representatives, [we] carry on where God left off. But this is now to be a human development of the earth. The human race will fill the earth with its own kind, and it will form the earth for its own kind. From now on the development of the created earth will be societal and cultural in nature.
Our daily work can be a calling only if it is reconceived as God’s assignment to serve others. And that is exactly how the Bible teaches us to view work.
If the point of work is to serve and exalt ourselves, then our work inevitably becomes less about the work and more about us. Our aggressiveness will eventually become abuse, our drive will become burnout, and our self-sufficiency will become self-loathing. But if the purpose of work is to serve and exalt something beyond ourselves, then we actually have a better reason to deploy our talent, ambition, and entrepreneurial vigor—and we are more likely to be successful in the long run, even by the world’s definition.
The difference between [a wilderness] and culture is simply, work.80
There may be no better way to love your neighbor, whether you are writing parking tickets, software, or books, than to simply do your work. But only skillful, competent work will do.
The church’s approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him to not be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours and to come to church on Sundays. What the church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.
We were designed to know, serve, and love God supremely—and when we are faithful to that design, we flourish.
Old Testament scholar David Atkinson writes: “Shame … is that sense of unease with yourself at the heart of your being.”
Entertainment distracts us from our discomfort. And doing good helps bolster our identity as a good person. But the Bible locates the root issue as our separation from God.
Our pride and need for personal significance necessarily lead to competition, disunity, and strife. So a life of self-glorification makes unity and love between people impossible. It leaves us with the dreary choice between making the self an idol (which leads to the disunity of individualistic cultures) and making the group to an idol (which leads to the suppression of individual freedom in tribal or collective cultures). The two things we all want so desperately—glory and relationship—can coexist only with God.
Even the most loving, morally beautiful people fall prey to motives of self-interest, fear, and glory seeking. Our acceptance of our own brokenness—and the world’s—keeps us going back to God to remember what we cannot do on our own.
We have an alternate or counterfeit god if we take anything in creation and begin to “bow down” to it—that is, to love, serve, and derive meaning from it more than from the true God. Because we can set up idols in our hearts (Ezekiel 14:3–7), we recognize that “making an image” of something is not necessarily a physical process but is certainly a spiritual and psychological one.
It means imagining and trusting anything to deliver the control, security, significance, satisfaction, and beauty that only the real God can give. It means turning a good thing into an ultimate thing.
Peter Drucker, the foremost critic of Taylor’s approach argued that the extreme rationalization of work did indeed treat human beings like cogs in a mechanism. “Machines,” he wrote, “work best if they do only one task, if they do it repetitively, and if they do the simplest possible task…. [But] the human being … is a very poorly designed machine tool. The human being excels … in coordination. He excels in relating perception to action. He works best if the entire human being, muscles, senses, and mind is engaged in the work.”134
Science can tell us only what is, never how things ought to be. Human beings are capable of kindness and unselfishness but also of cruelty and violence, and science will simply serve the interests of whoever is in power.
Because in postmodern society no one is sure or can agree about “ends” or goals for the human race, we now have only “means” or techniques.
Many writers argue convincingly that the values of the market—consumerism and cost-benefit efficiencies—are now spreading into every part of life, even family life.
We are encouraged to create a persona through the brands we choose to purchase and the identity we are able to construct for ourselves online.
Yale philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff observes that modern culture defines the happy life as a life that is “going well”—full of experiential pleasure—while to the ancients, the happy life meant the life that is lived well, with character, courage, humility, love, and justice.
The gospel, however, teaches that the meaning of life is to love God and love our neighbor, and that the operating principle is servanthood. These contrasts may sound at first rather high and abstract, but they became very practical when these two executives crafted messages in their advertising.
