BUSI 301 Week 5 Book Review Example

Business as a Way of Imitating God: A Review of Grudem's Business for the Glory of God

Introduction

Wayne Grudem's Business for the Glory of God makes a claim that many Christians find surprising: business is not a morally neutral activity that believers tolerate for the sake of earning a living, but a set of activities that can glorify God in themselves (Grudem, 2003). Grudem, a theologian, argues that when people own property, produce goods, employ others, buy and sell, earn profit and compete, they can imitate God's own character. For a student studying the legal environment of business, the book offers a theological foundation for the rules the course examines. The law tells a business what it may and may not do; Grudem explains why the activities the law regulates are worth doing at all.

Summary of the Argument

The book is short and organized around specific activities. For each one, Grudem identifies how it reflects something about God and then names the temptations that can corrupt it. Ownership reflects God's sovereignty and allows people to act as stewards. Productivity imitates God's creative work. Employment reflects relationships of authority and responsibility found in Scripture. Commercial transactions allow people to do good to others through voluntary exchange. Profit, rightly earned, shows that a business has created value. Money is a tool that makes trade possible, and competition can push people to do their work well. Borrowing and lending can multiply the usefulness of resources. In each chapter, Grudem pairs this goodness with a warning: ownership can become greed, competition can become cruelty, and lending can become exploitation.

The book's pattern of goodness and temptation is its most useful feature for a business student. It avoids two errors at once: treating business as inherently suspect, and treating every profitable activity as automatically good. Many Christians absorb, without quite noticing, the idea that ministry is holy and commerce is merely necessary. Grudem challenges that split directly. At the same time, he does not let readers off easily, because the temptations he lists, pride in ownership, dishonesty in selling, envy of others' success, are the ordinary sins of ordinary business people, not only of famous executives. A reader who works in sales or management will likely recognize at least one of them in daily life.

Connections to the Legal Environment of Business

The book's themes map closely onto the law covered in Melvin (2018). Ownership connects to property law, which defines and protects the rights Grudem treats as a stewardship from God. Without enforceable property rights, the stewardship he describes would be impossible, because no one could plan, invest or care for what might be taken arbitrarily.

Commercial transactions connect to contract law. Grudem's argument that voluntary exchange benefits both parties depends on honest agreements, and contract law exists to make such agreements enforceable and to provide remedies when they are broken. The legal requirements of offer, acceptance and consideration, and defenses such as fraud and duress, can be read as society's attempt to ensure that exchanges are truly voluntary and fair, which is the condition Grudem says makes them good.

Employment connects to the employment law chapters, which regulate wages, discrimination and safety. Grudem sees the employment relationship as a good form of authority and service, but he also warns against employers who mistreat workers. The legal protections in the course can be understood as minimum standards that reflect the biblical command that workers be treated justly, as in the instruction that masters treat their servants justly and fairly (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, Colossians 4:1).

Competition connects to antitrust law. Grudem argues that competition encourages excellence and serves customers, while warning against the desire to destroy rivals. Antitrust law draws a similar line, protecting vigorous competition while prohibiting monopolization and agreements that restrain trade. Finally, borrowing and lending connect to consumer credit regulation. Grudem defends lending as a way of helping others while condemning exploitative terms, and laws requiring the disclosure of interest rates and loan terms help borrowers understand what they are agreeing to.

Critique

The book's greatest strength is its balance. By pairing each good with its temptation, Grudem gives readers a framework for evaluating real business decisions rather than a simple endorsement of business. Its main limitation is its brevity. Grudem says relatively little about how a believer should act when the law permits something that seems unjust, or when competitive pressure makes ethical choices costly. Van Duzer (2010) takes up some of these harder questions, arguing that business serves God by providing meaningful work and goods that help communities flourish, and that profit is a means to those ends rather than the purpose of business. Reading the two books together gives a fuller picture than either alone. A second limitation is that the book was written before many of the issues now central to business ethics, such as data privacy, gig work and global supply chains, became prominent. Grudem's principles can be applied to those issues, for example by asking whether a company's use of customer data honors the trust involved in a commercial transaction, but the reader must do that work.

Personal Reflection

Grudem's book changed how I think about my own goals. I had thought of a business career as a way to provide for my family while serving God through church and volunteer work on the side. The book suggests that the work itself can be service, if it is done honestly and with care for customers, employees and competitors. It also gave me a reason to take the law seriously beyond avoiding penalties. When I study contract or employment law, I am studying the rules that make faithful business possible in a fallen world. Going forward, I want to evaluate business decisions with two questions: Is it legal, and does it reflect the character of the God I serve? In my current job at a retail store, that might mean something as simple as telling a customer honestly that a cheaper product will meet the need, even when the more expensive one would raise my sales numbers.

Conclusion

Business for the Glory of God provides a theological framework that complements the legal material in this course. Its central claim, that business activities can imitate God's character, gives meaning to the property, contract, employment, competition and lending laws that structure commercial life, and its warnings about temptation explain why those laws are needed.

References

English Standard Version Bible. (2016). Crossway. (Original work published 2001)

Grudem, W. (2003). Business for the glory of God: The Bible's teaching on the moral goodness of business. Crossway.

Melvin, S. P. (2018). The legal environment of business: A managerial approach: Theory to practice (3rd ed.). McGraw-Hill Education.

Van Duzer, J. (2010). Why business matters to God (and what still needs to be fixed). IVP Academic.