‘Integrity’ speaks of wholeness: consistency, honesty and an internal unity. It ensures that who we are at work is not sharply divided from who we are in ourselves. Such integrity has not been encouraged by late modernity. This instead has emphasised a radical freedom of choice: to be who we want, and to do what we want, without a necessary link between the two. That has its attractions. We can choose an employment position or a research subject without people inferring anything about us personally. The distinction of our private and public capacities can seem to protect us from laying ourselves on the line through what we do in an office, lab, or journal article.

Christianity, however, promotes an integrity so profound that our personal faith in Christ automatically entails a public responsibility to do good in the service of his creation. This situation arises because of the function of our faith. Faith joins us to the person of Christ and so our identity is changed at the deepest level. Who we are now derives from who he is. Christ’s righteous standing before God becomes our own. As this union is real it has implications beyond the question of our justification, explaining our adoption as God’s children and our future resurrection body. So what about our role in the workplace? If integrity requires an alignment of our working lives with who we really are, then Christian integrity at work will require an alignment of our public role with Christ’s.

To explore this further we will need to trace what it means for Christ to be king and its implications for our daily work. For both of these tasks we will need to understand the character and function of salvation history, which is what we will look at in this part.