Vocation: Some Disappointments

I apologize ahead of time that this post is somewhat of a rant, so proceed at your own discretion. I do feel there was good material but I could not help but focus on the parts I disagreed with.

I finished reading Plantinga's chapter on vocation with a somewhat bitter taste in my mouth. The rest of the book had been mostly enjoyable and often illuminating. This chapter however, disappointed me and left me wanting a more direct and complete approach to vocation. There were two main areas reasons that I was not satisfied with Plantinga after this chapter.

The first of those two reasons was that I felt Plantinga  was a little to shameless and brazen about throwing in a plug for Calvin. I feel that Calvin is a great school and I am very excited to be a part of it however I felt that Plantinga's presentation of the school was both out of place and incomplete. Firstly, I'll deal with incomplete. Plantinga brings up how the Calvin's curriculum has been designed "to help you love the Lord our God with all you mind, and then to love your neighbor as yourself with a life of educated service" He also talks about how Calvin strives to wrestle with big issues such as evolution and Nietzschean thought. Plantinga however, talks only of design and the design is not reality. That is not to say that the design is not helpful and that Calvin operates entirely other than the design, but to speak only of the design does not reveal the struggles and the flaws in the implementation of that plan. And as I said earlier this was not the place to bring up that design in the first place. The chapter was designed to talk about vocation not about Calvin College. While the vocation of most of the people who will ever read this book to be at Calvin College that does not mean that Calvin College becomes then the topic of discussion, vocation itself should still be central. It should already be clear to the students reading the book that vocation is an important topic to wrestle with and one that Calvin stresses, as that is made apparent by the fact that they have been assigned to read the chapter in the first place.

My second issue with this chapter was it's treatment of secular universities, which I saw as somewhat hypocritical in light of what Plantinga said earlier in the chapter. I will explain that in a moment. Plantinga's description of secular universities is quite daunting and negative. The picture he paints is bleak and he implies that the majority of Christian students attending such universities will get sucked into academic atheism even while retaining a personal faith.  I can understand the fear and I agree with Plantinga that secular universities can be daunting places and difficult ones for Christians to shine their light in. However, Plantinga's argument that secular universities are lions dens which only a few Daniels should brave while Christian universities are the primary place where students can learn their vocation, is to me contradictory to his own earlier ideas of vocation. Are not Christian called to ever field? Called to every occupation? Why then should only such a small number be called to secular universities? Plantinga talks about how Christians should enter every occupation and seek to reform it. The occupation of college student at a secular university is certainly one that needs reforming, so why does the book seem to discount that as a viable vocation for most? Secular universities need Christians and  if a Christian answers the vocation to go to one God will provide a way for them to think just as deeply about their future vocation (though perhaps without using the term vocation which is very much a Calvin term) as any student attending Calvin would.