Business

The Gospel and Personal Reflection

by Kahlib J. Fischer, PhD

© 2006

Project Rationale

As the syllabus states, the purpose of this course is to help you understand organizational behavior, and one extremely important way to do so is to understand how one’s personal behavior influences organizational behavior. After all, an organization consists of a group of individuals—people made in the image of God and therefore equipped with certain gifts and personality traits that make their contributions to the organization uniquely their own.

This idea of individuality is one that many religious and philosophical perspectives would dispute. For instance, secularism would tell us that we are ultimately a jumble of chemical and hormonal reactions, and so all of our behaviors can be reduced down to some self-survival mechanism. Furthermore, the idea of “free-will” in terms of making informed and rational decisions is but an illusion in a secular worldview, because again, all of our actions are pre-determined by the interaction of atoms, chemicals, hormones, etc. on the physical level. For an atheist, the idea of having autonomy apart from the physical world is simply not an option. Likewise, Eastern mysticism, as a general rule, would tell us that ultimately, our individuality is just an illusion, and in the end, something from which we need to flee in order to achieve true unity with the cosmos. Since the energy force that resides within us is really who we are—and since that energy force is impersonal and represents the entire cosmos—we are no more individuals from an Eastern mystical perspective than we would be in a secular perspective. In both worldviews, we are merely “matter in motion” and nothing else.

But Biblical Christianity tells us that as individuals, we are both personal and eternal—we have an eternal destiny which we will experience as individuals—for better or for worse. We are spiritual beings, and as such, our existence transcends...