William Muehl has a bone to pick with ministers. Muehl is on the faculty of YaleDivinitySchool, and he has spent many years teaching people who are about to become ministers and those who are already ministers. William Muehl is well acquainted with ministers, and he has a complaint.

What bothers Professor Muehl is what he sees as a widespread tendency among ministers to do some romantic editorial work on the nature of Christian calling. To hear most ministers talk, claims Muehl, God calls people only in moments of theatrical intensity. Someone, for example, is reading a theological book when, suddenly, a shaft of light falls upon a penetrating passage and scales fall from the reader's eyes. Or a hillside communion service at a summer church camp begins to glow with all the luminosity and …