Business for God's Glory

Business for the Glory of God: The Bible’s Teaching

on the Moral Goodness of Business

Wayne Grudem

Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway Books, 2003 (96 pages)

Wayne Grudem has done much to promote the concept of business as a calling, as labor

that provides a context for human flourishing. Grudem writes out of a conviction that

people who work in the business world are often made to feel guilty because few people

think “instinctively of business as morally good in itself” (11). The purpose of this

book is to demonstrate that many aspects of business activity are morally good in themselves

and that these good activities bring glory to God.

Christian Social Thought

Reviews

112

The book is an expanded version of a paper given at the Conference for Holistic

Entrepreneurs in 2002. It opens by grounding the entrepreneurial vocation in the Imago

Dei. Business people imitate the character of God by representing God on earth through

various business activities. Within each of the categories reflected by the chapter headings,

Grudem shows how the activities that fall into these categories represent unique

opportunities to bring glory to God: private ownership, productivity, employment, commercial

transactions (buying and selling), profit, using money as a medium of exchange,

producing inequalities in possessions, competition, borrowing and lending, and reducing

world poverty.

Through private ownership, the human person imitates God’s sovereignty by exercising

human sovereignty over creation. When we care for our possessions, Grudem

argues, we have an opportunity to imitate the attributes of God such as “wisdom, knowledge,

beauty, creativity, love for others, kindness, fairness, independence, freedom,

exercise of will, blessedness (or joy), and so forth” (20). The desire to have our own

things is not bad and simply reflects our divinely bestowed desire to be sovereign over

things. Private ownership also provides opportunities to do good with our resources...