It is common for Christians to think about life being divided between the sacred and the secular. Prayer, Bible reading, witnessing and teaching at church are sacred while working, school, (unless it is a Bible Collage) raising children, eating, sleeping, traveling and everything else we do is secular. Similarly, working for the church as a pastor, missionary or youth worker is sacred, while working as an accountant, lawyer or longshoreman is secular. Our body is corrupt and a source of temptation while our soul is redeemed and bound for heaven. Contemplating and worshiping God is sacred but contemplating mathematics, philosophy or how best to do a job is secular.

The vision we have for this series of articles on marketplace theology is this: every person in the marketplace could become a theologian of application. But to accomplish this the marketplace theologian must be in the marketplace, and preferably actively so. It is not obvious that one cannot learn well the doctrine in the classroom and do it later. In contrast the best education is education in service. It is transformative not preparatory. And behind this is an important principle of spirituality: the attempt to know God apart from the activities of life is unreal.

The aim of this paper is to provide the theological bases for the intrinsic value of work by considering the doctrines of creation, redemption and eschatology. While noting that all Christian doctrines are relevant for all of life, the discussion in this paper is limited to three doctrines only. These doctrines were chosen for embodying the breadth of God’s action in history from beginning to end. They are important for our purposes because “if we are to understand what human existence is, and what human beings are destined or called to be, we must see these human beings as belonging within the all-embracing coherences of God’s history with the world”.

My interest in marketplace theology began quite early, without, of course, even having the language to call it “marketplace theology,” and certainly decades before I became a professor of marketplace theology. As a young boy growing up in Toronto, Canada, son of a CEO of a steel fabrication company producing steel strapping for shipping containers, I received a small weekly allowance with which I could go into a store and buy a vanilla Ice cream cone for five cents.