Drawing Insights From Biblical Ideas

The Be (Happy) Attitudes by Robert Schuller (Word Books: $15.95). Improving Your Serve: The Art of Unselfish Living by Charles R. Swindoll (Word Books: $10.95).

Western culture’s all-time best seller remains the Bible--which, come to think of it, has become the prototype self-improvement book. Perhaps no one is quite as successful as Robert Schuller, author of several books, founder of Garden Grove’s Crystal Cathedral and well-known TV minister, in illustrating how solid happiness and personal growth emerge from putting biblical principles into thought and action.

“The Be (Happy) Attitudes”--a close approximation of the word “beatitudes” from the Sermon on the Mount--takes the eight gentle blessings of Jesus and translates them into contemporary terms. Each beatitude begins with the word “Blessed,” a term Schuller interprets to mean “happy.” Thus, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth” is rendered to mean “Happy are the mighty.”

Yes, Schuller admits, he’s wrenching meaning a bit when he says only the “emotionally stable, the educable, and the kind-hearted” can overcome adversity to achieve mighty deeds. Such an example is Linda Down, a young woman with cerebral palsy, who participated in the 1982 New York City Marathon on crutches.

Relying on family parables, testimonial letters and examples from the lives of both the famous and humble, Schuller has written a comforting, if somewhat formulaic book.

In “Improving Your Serve,” Charles Swindoll, a Fullerton radio minister, finds his thesis in a passage from Mark: “For even the son of man did not come to be served, but to serve.”

It’s of course, far better to give (that is, serve) than receive, but sometimes a “giver” gets “out of control,” as in the case of cult leader Jim Jones, whose fearsome hold over 900 followers ended in their mass murder-suicide in Guyana’s jungles.

Delving into psychological theory, such as the ranking of stressful situations (death of a loved one, loss of a job) and roaming widely through the Gospels, Swindoll strives to bring insight into what ails the latter days of our dark century in what he views as a “tough, rugged, wicked world,” but a world still capable of salvation.