We are reading through Working Blessedly Forever, Volume 1: The Shape of Marketplace Theology by R. Paul Stevens. In this volume, the first of three, Stevens explores the shape of marketplace theology, its posture and methodology. Marketplace theology is the science of working blessedly forever.
This week we look at the Introduction: What Is So Good about Marketplace Theology?
- These three volumes will encompass all the arenas where work is done: the home, the office, the factory, the medical clinic, the school, the government office, including work done in the church and other not-for-profit organizations.
- Marketplace theology is good because it helps us make sense of where we spend most of our waking hours.
- For believers this theology means integration, bringing work and faith together for the glory of God and the benefit of neighbors.
- First, we will ask what the investigation or the science of marketplace theology involves. Second, we will explore the meaning of working, taking a comprehensive, biblical approach. Third, we will inquire how the worker, the neighbor, the workplace, and even God are normally blessed through human enterprise. Finally, we open up the ultimate future of humankind and all creation. In the Epilogue we attempt to summarize the entire book.
Chapter 1: Doing Marketplace Theology from Above
- I offer an adaptation of Perkins’s cryptic definition as follows: Marketplace theology is the science of working blessedly forever.
- Positively, marketplace theology engages the whole of biblical theology in the understanding, practicing, and spirituality of work, the worker, and the workplace.
- Marketplace theology engages the Triune God as the ultimate worker and humankind made in God’s image as co-Creators or sub-Creators to work and worship in community.
- We do marketplace theology with head, heart, and hands.
- The integrating theme of marketplace theology is the kingdom of God.
- Consequentially, marketplace theology needs to be done from “top down” and “bottom up.”
- “Top down” or “from above” means starting with the revelation of God and God’s purpose in Scripture and the tradition of the church. But we will apply it in life.
- But “bottom up” or “from below” means beginning with practice through using case studies, work experiences, and workplace situations as the starting point, not just the endpoint.
- “Bottom up” theology could partially be crafted through narrative and story, seeing the intersection of the divine story with our own stories. This is what is called theological reflection.
- But “from below” theology does in fact depend on “from above” which primarily through Scripture and biblical theology provides perspective, correction, and inspiration.
Chapter 2: Doing Marketplace Theology from Below
- The marketplace is an arena for growth in faith, growth in the knowledge of God and God’s purpose in and through work.
- All our work in the marketplace, provided it is good work, enters into God’s ongoing work of creation, sustaining, redemption, and consummation.
- The word of God in the Psalms is this: you can bring your entire experience to God.
- A truly biblical theology of the marketplace must include head, heart, and hand—exactly what a kingdom theology of the marketplace provides.
Chapter 3: Going to Work with the Professor
- Dorothy Sayers has it right. Work was meant to be a way of life, a source of delight, a way in which human beings can find fulfilment and a means of glorifying God. Work should be undertaken for the love of the work itself.
- God brings to us the meaning of our work. In God we bring meaning to our work.
- When we accept the presence of God we do not become suddenly and insanely happy with our work life. But we have joy, the mark of God’s presence.
Chapter 4: Thinking and Praying about Work
- It is important to note that the command to work was given before the fall and hence work is meant to be a blessing and not a curse.
- Toil and frustrating work, and conversely, the idolatry of work as in workaholism, are the result of the fall.
- The cosmic scope of God’s redemption means that everything affected by sin and the curse can be redeemed including human work.
- Most good work in this world extends the kingdom of God and brings shalom and human flourishing.
- Our work will last, and we will work in the new heaven and new earth.
Chapter 5: The Practice of Work – The Handiness of Theological Learning
- I discovered that God gives us joy in work, that God wants us to see the results of our work.
- Management is a practical way to love. It provides the infrastructure whereby people can thrive.
- Every culture has its unique expectations of leadership and service which may or may not permit the servant leader to function.
- I learned that the theology of work is good for the body and the soul,
- I learned that finding one’s calling to the workplace is a lifetime process rather than a one-time word from God.
- I learned that it is important not to leave work prematurely.
- You can only learn about yourself, and God’s purpose for your work, by an extensive commitment to a particular work.
- I learned that God gives approval and delights in your work that is well done because it is done for him even when people do not acknowledge that you are doing the work of the Lord.
- Any work, and not especially religious or church work, is an arena for spiritual growth.
Chapter 6: Working with the Trinity
- The great themes of God’s work as revealed in Scripture include creating, sustaining creation and human life, redeeming, transforming, and consummating.
- The Bible makes it clear that we are vice-regents over creation and therefore are commanded to act as stewards of God’s created world.
- When we are stewards of matter, creation, history, human talents, and giftedness in a company, a church, or an organization, we are doing Father work.
- When we are doing protective work, like the police, the military, and security officers do, we are doing Father work.
- When we are doing steward work, protective work, and provision work we are working with the Father, doing Father work.
- If the Father’s and Son’s work appeal to the mind, the Spirit’s work is known through experience, prayer, and worship (the heart).
- The Spirit confirms in our hearts that we belong to God wherever we are in the workplace.
- The Spirit leads in vocational discernment, in making decisions, planning, and the execution of our plans.
- The Spirit anoints our creational talents and enables us to work with excellence.
- The Spirit anoints the creational talents that we use in work, bringing them to a higher level of excellence and fruitfulness.
- Through the Spirit’s work we can make good and beautiful things as workers.
- The Holy Spirit brings joy even while we work.
- Workers do the Father’s work when they design and envision a task, when they are engaged in protection and provision.
- Workers do the Son’s work when they “incarnate” the plan, execute it, and serve in humility and with downward mobility (Phil 2; John 20:21).
- The Son provides a model of how we are to work.
- And workers do the Spirit’s work when they evaluate, express the creativity inspired by the Spirit, and enjoy their work (Exodus 31; Isa 58:14).
Chapter 7: Growing Spiritually through Work
- Money and the lack of it or, unusually, the abundance of it, is a test we often face in the workplace.
- Use every work opportunity and every challenge to seek God in prayer.
- Welcome testing in the workplace as an arena for growth (Jas 1) but do not seek it. God may allow you to be tested, as Jesus was, in the workplace.
- We are not the only ones blessed by God through our work. Our work, if it is good work, or mainly so, blesses others.
Chapter 8: Blessing Your Neighbor
- We will reach the world with the good news of the kingdom of God partly through work.
- The Great Commission invites us to love our neighbors through our work,
- The coming of the kingdom of God brings human and creational flourishing.
- We will flourish in the kingdom of God in our work. That means that work will be redemptive—restoring things that have been broken or debased, and work will be worshipful.
Chapter 9: Blessing the Workplace
- Virtues are the qualities of a person’s character or a corporate cultural character that indicate an appropriate awareness of what is right and commendable behavior.
- Organizational leadership is not simply leading individual people in an organization. Leaders must work with the whole—culture and systems included.
Chapter 10: Work and Worship
- The most amazing thing about our work in the marketplace is this: through it we can bless God.
- It is important to note that the Hebrew word avodah means both “to work” and “to worship.”
- Work in Christ is now a way to bless God, a priestly and royal act. It is pleasing to God, exalting God as the owner of creation and the proper object of all we do in this world.
- Essentially work is a sacrament through which men and women in the workplace are offering their work-service to God and neighbor as a sweet and pleasing gift.
- There is no such thing as secular work for the Christian. They either view their work as a sacrament with themselves as royal priests offering up their work to God or they are defaming their work.
- So go to work to worship God. And join in the gathered life of the congregation to continue to worship, but also to be mutually edified in the integration of faith and work.
Chapter 11: The Beatific Vision and the Marketplace
- Prayer is work, working with God who prays with us and in us.
- If we can even for a moment stop and ask about a specific work we have undertaken, asking whether there was a compassionate dimension, a judging factor, a surge of creativity, a consummating dimension, or a providential-sustaining action, we can see God in our work.
- We are walking sanctuaries of God. Workplace spirituality is shoe-leather spirituality.
- In our final workplace, the new heaven and new earth, all work will be play and worship. But for now, we have a foretaste of that beatific work experience in the next life.
- The kingdom is crucial for understanding and practicing marketplace theology.
- Whatever gifts, talents, and personality you have now will be present and exalted in the new heaven and new earth.
- Your calling, which I assume is to help people, does not end with death, or worse still with formal retirement. It continues into eternity.
Epilogue: A Summary
- Marketplace theology concerns the integration of faith and work in the world.
- Marketplace theology is an example of faith active in love.
- Marketplace theology takes time, indeed a lifetime.
- Marketplace theology is not something we get convinced about but something we get converted to, and continuously.
- Marketplace theology should never be prayed, performed, and pondered alone.
- Marketplace theology is not only about our vocation but is part of our vocation.
- Calling tells us why we work, for whom we work, how we are to work, and what our work should be.
- Marketplace theology is based on the coming of the kingdom of God.
- Marketplace theology is never finished, always provisional, always in process, ever being learned and practiced however imperfectly.