Work is full of paradoxes. It frees and liberates us in many ways. Yet it also binds us and ties us down to fixed schedules and timetables.

Work makes a variety of things more available to us in greater proliferation; yet we must make ourselves more available in the process. We must work longer hours, bear greater workloads, and spend more hours on call, outside of working hours, and so on.

Work simultaneously enriches and impoverishes. Harder work means more production but also more monotony. Work makes us powerful and at the same times increases our dependence.

Through work we make things serve ends that we determine, yet we grow more dependent on the very things we make to serve us.

Work increases our human sense of worth and achievement. Modern living comforts, quick communications, space exploits, technological innovation are all achievements we can be proud of.

Yet mass production and standardisation suggest sometimes that we ourselves are just so many sheep following standardised living patterns imposed on us by the work of our own hands.

Again, through work we have created forces and energies we can no longer control. Atomic energy is one of the most striking of these creations.

What was at first a sign of ingenuity and creativeness has become the very symbol of our inability to control what we have made. Self-expression through inventiveness has resulted in the real possibility of self-destruction.

From the Protestant Reformation came the notion of work as a "calling" or "vocation." This was opposed to the Catholic notion of calling as pertaining only to those in religious life. The conjunction of work and calling has had the merit of making work a religious, i.e. not a purely secular, phenomenon.

Its religious meaning did not depend on the religious attitude you brought to work. Religious meaning was inherent. Luther thus settled in one stroke something that still dominates the religious discussion of work: how can I bring my faith and my work together?

Luther's answer was that you don't have to bring them together; they already are. Your work is your calling, your vocation; it is there that you serve God most ordinarily and organically. The notion, however, has two shortcomings.

First, it implies a singleness and permanence of vocation that no longer corresponds to much of human work experience. Luther did not envisage that many "callings" are possible in a single life, as more and more people have discovered, or are discovering. Secondly, the vocational understanding of work as calling has not been sensitive to the potential of work for dehumanising and alienating people.

The emphasis on staying where you were called overrode every other consideration - or better, blocked the emergence of any other perspective.

One may take any of three approaches to a theology or a spirituality of work, or better, have a perspective that gives varying weight and attention to three dimensions.

As I indicated last week, a negative view of work has dominated its understanding historically. To this corresponds what we may call the penitential perspective.

Work is a punishment for sin. Before the Fall work is part of God's plan for creation, Adam is put in the garden to " till it and keep it " (Gen 2:15 ). Work was a constituent feature of human existence.

After the Fall, there's a drastic change. Yahweh cries out: " Cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. In the sweat of your brow you shall eat bread, till you return to the dust, for out of it you were taken ."

Note that the curse falls primarily on the soil, the work field assigned to human beings to cultivate. Work, which should have been a purely humanising activity, now becomes painful.

Work is hard. Humans discover with difficulty the powers of nature and the energies that go into the formation of the world.

The Bible thus sees a connection between disobedience and the oppressiveness, fatigue, drudgery, and labouriousness of work.

A second approach is the creationist view. Humans also have a mandate to be stewards of the earth, to cultivate and take care of it ( 2:15 ).

Work is co-creative activity, cooperation with God in the continuing act of creation. We are free to shape and determine creation as something that has been entrusted to us. In the exercise of this responsibility we act in the "image" of God.

In both accounts of creation in Genesis we see different aspects of creation itself as work. In the first account there is the joyous surprise of God when he sees the final result of his creativity. " God saw everything that he had made, and behold it was very good " ( 1:31 ).

In the second account God makes the human being proprietor of the garden, committing him to the work that maintains God's own work. In naming things the human being is a partner with God in bringing things into existence and conferring meaning on them.

The big value of the second account is its dynamism and positive character, in contrast to the resignation that stems from the penitential view. The second view also embraces an evolutionary perspective. Human collaboration with the divine plan is an ongoing activity.

A third view of work departs from the Second Coming, with its vision of a new heaven and a new earth. One may interpret this in either of two ways: first, in the sense of a complete disruption between the work of our hands and the new creation.

From this point of view, the new creation is completely and entirely God's doing. One may also see the newness in terms of continuity, mysterious as this must remain.

In this perspective, the fruit of our labour, in all the forms that this assumes, will form part of the new heavens and new earth. The value of work is not destructible. It is something caught up for ever in the plan of God for creation.