Customer Reviews

After Sunday

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Armand Larive weaves an elegant and deceptively simple argument about how our everyday work is fundamentally connected to our spirituality. I was taught growing up that you work hard during the week, play hard on Saturday and pray hard on Sunday. All three activities were completely separate from one another and had only distant connections like, "you can party on Saturday as long as you repent on Sunday" or "it doesn't matter how you make your money as long as you tithe." This worldview left me wanting when I entered the work world. It took me 15 years of deep searching to make the connections Larive arrives at in these pages.

God designed our bodies to be about a physical task. We are meant to do hard work until we die (Gen. 17-19) and that is not a bad thing when we can touch the eternal in those moments.

If you have difficulty finding God in your labor or you grew up with the disparate messages I did, then I would recommend this book.

If you have read this book I would also suggest the philosophy and poetry of Wendell Berry. Good stuff.

Well done Aramand. I can't wait for more.

This book has changed fundamentally the way I approach my workaday life. The author's obvious grasp of difficult theological concepts and liberal use of dense, technical language can make the book somewhat unapproachable at times for the rest of us, but his classic writing structure (introduce, explain, conclude) goes a long way toward keeping the reader on track through tough ideas. He begins the book by discussing the current state of the work / spirituality connection in the Christian faith, and insight-fully critiquing the shortcomings. He moves on to integrate the concept of work into a formal theological framework. From this integration, he explores in depth the philosophical relationship of human work with each Person of the Trinity. Finally, he ties all the major themes together in a strong conclusion, giving the reader much to think about and apply to daily life and work.

It all sounds pretty heady, and it is, but the memorable things I have carried from this book (I read it over a year ago) have altered and redeemed my own view of work. Furthermore, I look forward to taking another crack at some of the more esoteric knowledge presented with the trust that there is much more good I can glean here. Larive goes a long way toward dignifying the often tedious and mundane tasks of everyday work with the spark of the divine. And better yet, he admirably achieves his goal of beginning to reconcile the Sunday life we experience in church with all the days that come after...

Larive begins this book strong by tackling the common approaches with regards to 'Theology of Work.' He critiques most conferences and teaching seminars as either spiritualizing work via 'spirituality of work,' or merely inculcating 'workplace ethics.' He describes the predicament well with Barbara Brown Zikmund's lament about the confusion of good Christians.

"The four ways we tell serious Christians to live out their vocation are either simplistic and shallow, or they are so demanding that people pale at the task. At the risk of caricature, we insist that an authentic understanding of Christian vocation: (1) has little to do with our jobs, (2) has something to do with all jobs, (3) has more to do with certain jobs, (4) or has everything to do with on-the-job and off-the-job existence. No wonder good Christians get confused." (Zikmund quoted in p3)

His central thesis is that God in present in all our work (2). He goes on to argue, using Miroslav Volf's model of the Triune God of Father/Mother as 'protological,' Son as 'eschatological,' and Spirit as 'pneumatological.' While conceptually, this is reasonable, his interpretation is to me rather wierd. By seeing God as Father/Mother being a Maintainer, Son as 'developing new things,' and Spirit as 'energy,' I cannot help but feel Larive's theology is unorthodox and modalistic.

Despite his efforts, I find that the reader can easily get lost in the technicality. In other words, having started with a good job of critiquing current theologies of work either as too 'spiritualizing' or too moralizing, his third way appears cloudy. Larive may have a point, but I have problems making sense of it.

conrade