I read David Bahnsen’s Full-Time: Work and the Meaning of Life with no small amount of skepticism: What could a hedge fund manager teach about the theology of work? The answer is: a lot. Spending time with Full-Time is worthwhile; in addition to delivering information, the book prompts readers to reflect on their own lives. Full-Time is also fun: Bahnsen’s willingness to say the awkward thing is absolutely delightful. For example, he notes that Christians in Newport Beach, California, safely ensconced in their multimillion-dollar homes, consider themselves “middle class” and “opposed to extravagance.” The punchline, of course, is that Bahnsen himself has a home in Newport Beach, so he is speaking, one can only presume, about his neighbors.

I laughed out loud at Bahnsen’s characterizations of younger professionals talking to him about a future in wealth management. Here’s one example:

His first question upon sitting down in my Manhattan office: “How solid is the work-life balance in the field of wealth management?” Twenty-one years old, never had a real job in his life—“How solid is the work-life balance?” I never really bounced back in the rest of the talk.

What’s wrong with the language of work-life balance? First, the phrase mischaracterizes half of life (the pesky work part) as being somehow, well, dead. But not every office is a mortuary. Second, the stated desire for balance clothes our unimpressive desires with apparent respectability. Let’s be honest: What do people—especially the young, unmarried, and childless—want to do during their non-work lives? Learn Chinese? Probably not. Mindlessly watch hours of television? Let’s go! Even parents can speak of needing to be at home—for the sake of work-life balance—but once there they may grip their glowing smartphones as junior’s algebra homework languishes.

We are a culture in need of an improved understanding of work. Bahnsen states the book’s thesis directly, even provocatively, in the opening paragraph of the introduction: “This book is going to argue that work is the meaning of life.” He begins by analyzing what’s wrong with the state of work now and then makes the theological, philosophical, and economic case for his thesis that work is the meaning of life. In the final four chapters (plus an appendix), he considers practical applications of this claim.

The Blessing of Work

Bahnsen appeals to the opening chapters of Genesis to make the case that humans were made to work. Genesis 1–2 gives us insight into the kind of work we are supposed to do; we should produce, Bahnsen says, and not merely gather. People generate wealth by serving others with their God-given creativity; they make money because they deliver unique goods and services others appreciate and enjoy. Those who denigrate work may be the real materialists, assuming that people can be satisfied with physical things regardless of whether they work or not—a serious mistake with real-world consequences.

Not all is well for those not working, even if they have their material needs met. They rob themselves of what Arthur Brooks calls earned success, which Bahnsen characterizes as “the inner feeling of not just receiving something, but earning it,” adding that it comes “through the service of others, not the vanity of only serving oneself.” This inner feeling corresponds to objective outcomes: “We don’t pretend that Steve Jobs and the twenty-six-year-old playing video games all day in his mother’s basement contributed the same thing to society—because they didn’t.” That’s not to say that Steve Jobs deserves greater concern (or less) as a human. On the contrary, Bahnsen affirms, “The inherent dignity of every human being was established at creation.”

But, Bahnsen says, we should recognize that some people contribute more to society than others; they are better at what they do than other people. “And,” he adds, “let’s be honest: you believe that, too, even if it is uncomfortable to acknowledge.” We should all acknowledge that “some people work hard because they actually do believe that some of their value is tied to what they have to offer.”

His most interesting argument comes in the context of Genesis 3: After the Fall, someone could say, work is not a blessing, but a curse. Bahnsen notes that something can be a blessing overall—even if it includes pain. He draws a helpful parallel with children: What begins in Genesis 1 as a command and a blessing (to be fruitful and multiply) remains a blessing even in Genesis 3: “The curse refers to the pain of childbirth, but the actual child is a pure blessing.” Bahnsen notes that Jesus makes a similar point in John 16:21.

Because work is mischaracterized as an unmitigated curse with no blessing, productive laborers yearn for the post-work life known as retirement. But retirement itself is a recent creation of unprecedented wealth and greater life expectancy. This thirst for the possibility of retirement—if you only have enough, if you only live long enough—crowds out the gratitude we should all feel to live in this historical moment. Instead of thinking about retirement, people should pursue greater financial freedom so they can do more with their time, and not less. If people retire to indulge in their own personal pleasures, they remove themselves from mentoring younger versions of themselves; they will more likely dissipate than promulgate the wisdom they have gathered in their working years. Instead of pursuing a new career in a nonprofit, successful entrepreneurs should do what they have shown they can do—start successful businesses.

This advice, to put it bluntly, works. After church one Sunday I talked to a banker near (or past?) retirement age who was almost apologetic about continuing to work. I took a page off Bahnsen’s playbook and told him about his opportunity to mentor younger bankers. The banker received my comments with gratitude, encouraged that his desire to keep working was not something for which he had to apologize. That’s the world we now inhabit: Someone has to be circumspect about his desire … to work.

Some retirees may try to spiritualize their departure from work by saying they are giving in the second half of life what they gathered in the first. For Bahnsen, this attitude undervalues productive work, making it merely instrumental to a later life of charity; it also diminishes the responsibility one should feel in all phases of life to live for the benefit of others, and not just for oneself.

Six Days You Shall Labor

Bahnsen proposes a solution to our woes that is so old school it’s biblical. Instead of a lifelong dream of a multi-decade retirement or a short-term hope for work-life balance, we should speak in the language of the Sabbath, and talk about a life of work and rest.

If this model of six days of working and one resting is so helpful, why do we hear so little about it? Bahnsen’s answer: “I believe one of the key reasons so many pastors fail to preach a Biblical and properly ordered view of work is that many pastors, themselves, suffer from a horrifically inadequate work ethic” (emphasis removed). He offers the following possible sermon introduction and asks us to imagine what would invariably follow:

Today I want to address those of you who are striving for the corner office, who worked late a couple of nights this week, who are receiving big bonuses and the praise of men, and yet are grinding, struggling, and fixating so much of the time on your jobs and careers.

Would the next sentence be, “Well done! You are being faithful and obedient”? Or would it be, most likely, “We must address the temptation to think that our work defines us and is the basis for our identity”? Of course, we can idolize our work; we can idolize anything. But “assuming that the predominant sin of the church is congregants working too hard defies common sense.”

While appreciating the provocativeness of Bahnsen’s slogan—work is the meaning of life—I wonder whether his more basic point is Aristotle’s: human flourishing follows from activity, not passivity. We should not be spectators of the world around us but agents within it. The problem then with work-life balance is the assumption that genuine life is somehow relaxed, rather than industrious. If being active is the goal, then is it wrong for someone who is unmarried to be concerned about having enough time to work out in the gym? After all, that’s work, too, and a work that some of us enjoy rather less than the work that earns our daily bread.

I wish Bahnsen had taken more time to explore the work we do apart from paid employment. At one point, he makes clear he does not construe work in a narrow way: “What we do is, of course, not limited to our vocations,” he writes. But, for the most part, the work Full-Time considers is work in the marketplace. Perhaps Bahnsen would say that this balance is appropriate, given that most people spend a large share of their time working for money. But some people work very hard in jobs that contribute significantly to society but do not, at the end of their lives, have the investment portfolio of a Steve Jobs. Bahnsen rightly contrasts Steve Jobs and the video gamer; a more interesting contrast would have been between Steve Jobs and John Paul II, whom he quotes with approval in chapter 3, or Steve Jobs and the busy mom of toddlers who nevertheless finds time to serve as president of the homeowner association, volunteer at her kids’ school, and take a suffering family a homecooked meal.

And what about the activity that expresses itself in genuine leisure—that is, not mere idleness but a self-conscious desire to be active in ways that pleasurably engage the whole person? Getting the kids into the car and going on a hike in the woods may be framed as “a day away” or “family time,” but any parent can tell you it’s also a lot of work. The work does not involve acquiring wealth, but expending it; even still, this work has, we hope, the kinds of long-term benefits we could articulate using the language of investment. Our children are our best gifts to the future.

In his conclusion, Bahnsen writes,

What inspired this book is the implicit belief that care for vocational calling is inferior to other dimensions of the human experience. I believe that view to be errant economically, theologically, and ontologically. Our productive activities are not at odds with our relationships, hobbies, and other experiential dimensions. The pendulum has swung to a belief that all God-created spheres are good—except one. As image-bearers of Him, we should not tolerate that.

Amen. Ora et labora.