Vocation

In its earliest English usage, recorded around 1420, vocacioun referred specifically to a spiritual summons. The Latin Vulgate Bible had used vocatio to describe God's call to salvation and, more specifically, to the priesthood. For centuries in Catholic Europe, to have a vocation meant to be called to religious service, and the word had no connection to secular employment.

Luther's intervention in the sixteenth century rewrote the word's meaning. He argued that God called people not only to the clergy but to every form of honest labor. A cobbler devoted to his craft served God as fully as any priest. John Calvin extended the idea further, attaching it to doctrines of predestination and elect calling. The Puritan minister Cotton Mather later insisted that it was unlawful to live without a settled calling, warning that men without one would fall into horrible snares.

By the 1550s, English writers were using vocation to describe secular occupations alongside religious ones. The theological scaffolding gradually fell away, but the emotional structure persisted. The modern usage still implies that the right career should feel like a calling, that one's work and one's purpose should align, a standard that descends directly from Reformation theology. The word avocation, by contrast, entered English in the 1610s to describe what draws someone away from their primary calling.

The German word Beruf, which Luther used in his Bible translations, carries the same double meaning of profession and calling. Max Weber made this linguistic overlap central to his 1905 argument in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, tracing how a religious concept became an economic imperative. The English word job, by comparison, entered the language in the 1550s with no spiritual connotation whatsoever, likely from the phrase jobbe of worke, meaning simply a piece of work to be done.