Call and Response
“All human responsibilities, ultimately, represent a response to God. The image of God – male and female, in their generations – is a complex creature called to fill the earth and to develop the whole creation in order to know and praise God and thereby to come to true self-knowledge as the image of God in community. The ability to make music, pursue agriculture, build bridges, fly to the moon, raise a child, write public laws, nurture love in an intimate friendship, invent millions of types of machines, and play in the backyard or on a stage – all of these and much, much more reveal something about both God and the image of God. To develop any of these human talents or interests properly is to pursue a calling from God. And the pursuit of such callings both depends on and requires service to, and cooperation with, fellow human beings and other creatures. In fact, when properly analyzed, every talent and calling is to one degree or another a shared, communal activity exercised in response to normative standards that bind creatures to one another and to their Creator in a covenant relationship.”
– James Skillen, In Pursuit of Justice: Christian-Democratic Explorations