Martin Luther took a word reserved for priests and gave it to cobblers.
Before the Protestant Reformation, the word vocation, from the Latin vocare (to call), referred exclusively to a religious calling.1 To have a vocation meant to enter the priesthood, a monastery, or a convent. Everyone else simply had work. There was no word that elevated secular labor to the status of something summoned by a higher power.
Martin Luther changed the scope of the word. In his German translation of the Bible, completed in 1522, he used the word Beruf, meaning occupation, in a passage that the Latin Vulgate had rendered as vocatio.2 By using a word that meant secular work where the Bible said divine calling, Luther collapsed the distance between the two.
Luther argued that the cobbler's work was as sacred as the priest's, because all honest labor served one's neighbor and therefore served God. The doctrine of the "priesthood of all believers" meant that no one needed a monastery to fulfill a divine purpose.3 A farmer plowing a field was answering a calling as surely as a monk at prayer.
Max Weber analyzed the consequences of this shift in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, published in 1905. Weber argued that Luther's concept of Beruf as a divine calling to worldly work created the psychological foundation for the modern work ethic.4
In modern English, calling retains traces of its religious ancestry. When people say they are "called" to a profession, the language implies that the choice came from somewhere beyond personal preference, that the work chose them as much as they chose it. The word carries a weight that "job" and "career" do not.
In 1973, the theologian Frederick Buechner offered a definition that has since been widely quoted. He wrote that vocation is "the place where your deep gladness meets the world's deep need."5 The sentence assumes that such a place exists for everyone. Five centuries after Luther, the expectation that work should feel like a calling, not merely a livelihood, is one of the heaviest assumptions the industrial system placed on the individual.