I had long desired to write on the Christian doctrine of vocation. The opportunity came when the president of The College of the Bible, Dr. Riley Montgomery, Lexington, Kentucky, graciously asked me to deliver six Lectures in the College in the Spring of 1955. True, the actual subject was not set. I was asked to submit three titles, which I did, this being the first, presenting a plea that it might be chosen by the faculty. They were gracious enough to comply and I am grateful to them and for their courtesy to my wife and myself during the delivery of the lectures.

      In the writing of these lectures I have been greatly helped and encouraged by three books which have recently appeared: God's Grace and Man's Hope, by Dr. Daniel Day Williams, then of the Chicago Federated Faculty and since of Union Theological Seminary, New York; Your Other Vocation, by Dr. Elton Trueblood, of Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana; and Christ in the Haunted Wood, by Dr. W. Norman Pittinger, of the General Theological Seminary, New York. As the lectures will show, I am deeply indebted to each of them and it is perhaps a sign of the times that this book is written by one reared in the Disciple tradition, the lectures delivered at a Disciple institution, and that they depend for much insight upon the lectures delivered on the Rauschenbusch Foundation given at a Baptist Seminary (Colgate-Rochester), and upon books written by a Quaker and an Episcopalian. Such is the ecumenicity in the process which is going on in the theological field of our day.

      The book marks a progress in my own thought in the field, a field which has been natural to one reared in the Disciple tradition and in which I was naturally aware of the profound change which had taken place at the time of the Reformation, a change which had been largely lost and neglected by the children of the Reformation. Both Quakers and Disciples had tried to revive it, the Quakers [5] more surely. In the chaos of our modern life, I am sure that a factor in most Protestant Christianity is the impulse to recover the profound sense of 'vocation' which runs through the Christianity of the New Testament, which was clear to both Luther and Calvin, but lost by later Protestantism.

      This book is written, in the spirit of abiding humility which they both advocated so strongly, with the hope that it may bring clarity into theological and lay thinking and action. I make no claim to have discovered a perfect way. I am only too conscious of my own inadequacy in practice, and my inability to think deeply enough in this field; but I am confident that we shall never come nearer to expressing the Kingdom of God in our day, until we have recovered a profound sense of what 'Christian vocation' means and should mean in the life of the individual Christian and in the life of the church.

[CTR 5-6]