Nomos: Developing People from Rules to Love (original) (raw)

2018, Biblical Principles of Hiring and Developing Employees

How does one start a conceptual chapter but to say, "I think I understand something from scripture that I didn't understand before?" As an evangelical Christian, I believe in the inerrancy of scripture, and that scripture is God-given and recorded by inspired writers. Although the writers were inspired and heard from God, it is not always true that we, as readers of the Word, are inspired enough to "know' what God intended. This difficulty in interpretation is confounded by the realization that much of our English-translation Bibles represent a progression of the spoken Aramaic, referring to Hebrew concepts, recorded in the Greek, and then translated to English-by inspired translators (we hope). The difficulty in interpreting and applying scripture includes our biases and common ignorance of the sociocultural context of the first century church, and the implications our bias and ignorance bring to the contemporary application of the scriptures and the difficulty of translating a complex language, such as Greek to the more simplistic English. This is not to say that English is not a respectable language, but by this, it is suggested that the Greek terms have a richer, fuller, and more complex meaning than the English words and phrases we find in our English-translation Bibles. The difficulties in understanding and applying scripture to modern organizations may cause leaders and researchers of organizational theory to miss concepts that might lead us to higher performing organizations. This effect may have been the case with Nomos-the focus of this chapter. This chapter was presented at the Second International Conference on Value-based Leadership Styles, CHAPTER 4