Notes
Christ's bondservant. (23) Ye were bought with a price; become not bondservants of men. (24) Brethren, let each man, wherein he was called, therein abide with God."
In verse 29 follows the remark that time is shortened, followed by the well-known commandments motivated by eschatological expectations: (31) to possess women as though one did not have them, to buy as though one did not have what one had bought, etc. In verse 20 Luther, following the older German translations, even in 1523 in his exigesis of this chapter, renders κλῆσις with Beruf, and interprets it with Stand. (Erlangen ed., LI, p. 51.)
In fact it is evident that the word κλῆσις at this point, and only at this, corresponds approximately to the Latin status and the German Stand (status of marriage, status of a servant, etc.). But of course not as Brentano, op. cit., p. 137, assumes, in the modern sense of Beruf. Brentano can hardly have read this passage, or what I have said about it, very carefully. In a sense at least suggesting it this word, which is etymologically related to ἐκκλησία, an assembly which has been called, occurs in Greek literature, so far as the lexicons tell, only once in a passage from Dionysius of Halicarnassus, where it corresponds to the Latin classis, a word borrowed from the Greek, meaning that part of the citizenry which has been called to the colours. Theophylaktos (eleventh-twelfth century) interprets 1 Cor. vii. 20: ἐν οἷῳ βιῳ καὶ ἐν οἷῳ τάγματι καὶ πολιτεύματι ὢν ἐπίστευσεν. (My colleague Professor Deissmann called my attention to this passage.) Now, even in our passage, κλῆσις does not correspond to the modern Beruf. But having translated κλῆσις with Beruf in the eschatologically motivated exhortation, that everyone should remain in his present status, Luther, when he later came to translate the Apocrypha, would naturally, on account of the similar content of the exhortations alone, also use Beruf for πόνος in the traditionalistic and anti-chrematistic commandment of Jesus Sirach, that everyone should remain in the same business. This is what is important and characteristic. The passage in I Cor. vii. 17 does not, as has been pointed out, use κλῆσις at all in the sense of Beruf, a definite field of activity.
In the meantime (or about the same time), in the Augsburg Confession, the Protestant dogma of the uselessness of the Catholic attempt to excel worldly morality was established, and in it the expression "einem jeglichen nach seinem Beruf" was used (see previous note). In Luther's translation, both this and the positive valuation of the order in which the individual was placed, as holy, which was gaining ground just about the beginning of the 1530's, stand out. It was a result of his more and more sharply defined belief in special Divine Providence, even in the details of life, and at the same time of his increasing inclination to accept the existing order of things in the world as immutably willed by God. Vocatio, in the traditional Latin, meant the divine call to a life of holiness,
