Customer comments on this selection.
 Excellent Business Principles
Well written book with business principles that can help guide a Christian's business or work philosophy. Easily applied priniciples. Sound theology. A great read.
 Where's the beef?
I'm a student at Princeton University. I am also a Christian (a practicing Roman Catholic). I was writing a paper on Business Ethics and the New Testament and my professor recommended I get The Gods of Business. Amazon.com recommendations said that customers who bought that book, also bought this book, so I bought it too. I'm sorry i do so.
This book is full of cliches and overly broad proverbs on life. For example: the author writes that when people ask how their lives can glorify God, they are rarely told, "Go into business." Students, when they ask, "How can I serve God with my life," don't often hear the answer, "Go into business." The book goes down hill from there. It feels like a young prof (a TA) reading off a mature and beloved professor's syllabus and expecting the same reaction from the students. It just isn't there.
My guess is that the author had somebody transcribe some talks he gave and had a ghost editor smooth the transitions and called the final product this book. I wouldn't recommend this unless you have a perspective that Christian's can't be in business. Then this book might be of marginal value as a first read. A much better and far more comprehensive book on this subject, but one that Amazon doesn't sell, Is Bob Hartley's Marketplace Christianity.
 Highly Readable Theology of Business
This book is both very short and very packed with information and insights about the moral nature of business. Grudem is well known for lengthy academic works, so I was pleased to see that this book was so concise and clear. In the preface he describes these thoughts as a work in progress with a longer volume in the works, so don't expect this to be a comprehensive coverage of the theology of business. What Grudem does do however is to clearly debunk that business, ownership, money, or competition are inherently evil. In great contrast in fact, they can (and should) be means to glorify God. Chapters in the book include: Ownership, Productivity, Employment, Commercial Transactions, Profit, Money, Inequality of Possessions, Competition, Borrowing and Lending, Attitudes of the Heart, Effect on World Poverty. Christians and/or businesspeople wondering about business and the marketplace would do well to invest the short amount of time needed to read Business for the Glory of God.
 Disappointing
I apologize the hyperbole, but this has to be the most painful text I've ever read in my academic career. I was hoping for some a well-reasoned description of how business can glorify God or how certain codes of ethics help business glorify God, but I was disappointed.
Grudem's arguments, while mostly for things most Americans would agree upon, are poorly supported with a few random Bible verses and almost no logic whatsoever; for example, he states that since Jesus gave laws on how employers should treat their employees, God, therefore, approves of employing people, and being an employer is good. He does not mention that the Bible states that slaves should be allowed to rest on the Sabbath, so, perhaps, God also approves of slavery. I believe giving someone gainful employment is a good deed, but that argument, and almost all the other arguments in the book, were pretty flimsy.
Grudem takes the idea of human's responsibility for the earth and makes in into total dominion, with no references to environmental stewardship. I'm not sure that a company making thousands of shirts is really making the earth that much richer. Some people need shirts, but there is such a thing as using too many resources.
Grudem's arguments tend to be culturally chauvinistic; he argues that any society without a system of ownership is evil. This was intended as a knock against communism, which certainly has had its share of "evil" leaders and laws, but it does not take other societies without as system of ownership, such as many American Indian tribes, into consideration. They do not strike me as particularly evil.
The book was also repetitive, redundant, and I read the same things over and over again.
He says he is writing a book on business ethics. If the argumentation is better, I would be interested in seeing what he has to say.
Glorify God in pursuit of a calling to business.
Wayne Grudem is Research Professor of Bible and Theology at Phoenix Seminary. In addition to his work at Phoenix Seminary, Dr. Grudem also taught at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School for 20 years. He has served as the president for both the council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood and the Evangelical Theological Society (1999). He has written numerous articles and books. Two of his more recent works are The First Epistle of Peter: An Introduction and Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2007) and Countering the Claims of Evangelical Feminism: Biblical Responses to the Key Questions (Colorado Springs, CO: Multnomah Books, 2006).
Business for the Glory of God has a lot to offer for a book that has a total of 96 pages including the notes and indexes. In this work, Dr. Grudem unpacks what the Bible teaches concerning the moral goodness of business. The idea of moral goodness in business sounds like an oxymoron in light of the scandal-laden business world we see around us today. Dr. Grudem does a great job of illustrating how the various aspects of business, when exercised in a Godly manner, allow us to reflect certain characteristics of God. The aspects of business covered in this book are as follows:
Ownership
Money
Productivity
Inequality of Possessions
Employment
Competition
Commercial Transaction
Borrowing and Lending
Profit
Attitudes of the Heart
In each chapter, the particular aspect of business at hand is contrasted as being fundamentally good, providing both opportunities to glorify God as well as many opportunities to sin. The prevailing negative attitude in our culture towards business today may be largely in part to the numerous examples of business professionals succumbing to those temptations to sin rather than pursuing each aspect of their business to the glory of God. The book closes with an argument for the ability of "business rightly pursued" to make a dent in the problem of world poverty. The long-term solution Grudem proposes involves starting and maintaining productive and profitable businesses in developing countries. As these businesses are pursued to the glory of God, the positive effect of creating jobs and commerce should have a ripple effect where the economic status and ability of the people should continue to improve in ever-widening circles.
I would highly recommend this book to any Christian who is working in the business world. A prevailing message in Christian circles today is that the highest calling we could have is to serve God as a pastor or missionary. I feel this book shows how Christians can have a calling to business and in the midst of pursuing it; they can glorify God, reflect His attributes, and bless others.
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