Book Learnin' for business and church

The new April issue of Harvard Business Review is all about learning from failure in business, and how most businesses really don't. There is much to be learned from things like failed product launches and failed new business launches, but most often the pain of learning from them makes us hesitant to do the self-assessment that is required to learn from it. At the end of this issue is an editorial piece about an attempt to publish a book about an entrepreneurial business failure. The publisher commented to the author, 'All the evidence suggests that business books are not in fact about learning, but about escapism, just like a romance novel. The business book is about imagining yourself a success, not making yourself a success through learning from failure.'  I had not thought of it quite that way, but that is one reason I read few business books: I try to carefully pick the ones that have a lot of analysis and learning involved (The Innovator's Solution is especially good, by the way) since I find most of them very superficial. In the case of failures, experience seems to be more the norm than 'book learnin', as my grandfather would say.

I think that is true of many popular Christian books as well, so they need to be selected carefully. Much of the popular press is superficial. C. S. Lewis said he tended to focus on books that had already stood the test of time. It is interesting how often we rehash the same issues over the centuries. The current debate about Rob Bell's latest book and his tendency toward 'universalism' is a recent example (in my opinion he has always had a rather post-modern point of view in which his concept of 'truth' is very mushy) where a rather shallow look is taken at an issue that has been debated in great depth through the centuries of the church (here is a link to an interesting overview of that history from a 2001 issue of First Things from the Catholic priest Richard John Neuhaus who leans toward Bell's view but recognizes that universalism can never be doctrine and points out the history: 
//www.firstthings.com/article/2009/02/will-all-be-saved-30  He too caught much flak for this position though he makes clear the limits of his own hopes. This review of Bell's book in the online Christianity Today is very even handed and points out Bell's distortion of history:  http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2011/april/lovewins.html?start=2 ). In a great many Christian books, the writer doesn't  argue with himself enough, failing to bring up and discuss opposing points of view in a way that seeks to learn rather than to dismiss. We all tend to do that in conversation, but one of the purposes of writing is to be rather more thoughtful and complete than we are in everyday conversation. Another is to confront things like our failures that are too painful to confront in everyday conversation.

So I think there is much to be gained from 'book learnin'; but I agree with Lewis that those that have stood the test of time deserve priority.  With newer books we should make sure they have made the effort not to re-invent what the church has already learned through the centuries.