The Bible and Restoring the West

The Bible made the West, and the Bible is needed to restore the West:

As I and others have often said, Western civilisation is basically Judeo-Christian civilisation. It would not have arisen without the Scriptures, and it cannot be sustained with the Scriptures. So to speak of the West is to speak of the worldview found in the Bible.

This has long been acknowledged by many great minds – both Christian and non-Christian. And with America having just celebrated 250 years of nationhood, this has certainly been the case there. As JD Vance recently stated: “Christianity is America’s creed. We have always been a Christian nation. It’s okay to defend your culture.”

Some 15 years ago I looked at how America was transformed by the Bible. As I said in that piece: “Here I wish to explore one example of national transformation. I refer to the momentous events leading up to and centring on the American Civil War (1861-1865). The main issue of course was slavery, and the role that both Scripture and literature played in all this is highly illuminating.”

I examined many key individuals in this, and then focused on Abraham Lincoln:

He famously stated concerning the Bible: “In regard to this Great Book, I have but to say it is the best gift God has given to man. All the good the Saviour gave to the world was communicated through this book. But for this Book we could not know right from wrong.” While in the White House, agonising over the course of the nation, he regularly and earnestly prayed and read the Bible.

 

Indeed, Lincoln frequently referred to God and quoted from Scripture – both before and during his role as president, especially when he spoke on the issue of slavery. For example, he memorably told the Republican Party in 1858, quoting from the words of Jesus, “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently, half slave and half free.”

 

In his First Inaugural Address he said “Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him who has never yet forsaken this favored land are still competent to adjust in the best way all our present difficulty.”

 

When Lincoln left Springfield for Washington in 1861 he was handed a flag which encouraged him greatly. On it were embroidered the words of Joshua 1 in which God promised to be with Joshua as he was with Moses, so he need not fear, but be strong in the Lord. https://billmuehlenberg.com/2011/10/06/the-bible-and-the-transformation-of-a-nation/  

It was not just America of course that was so thoroughly influenced by the Bible. All of the West had been impacted. Back in 1998 D. James Kennedy and Jerry Newcome wrote What if the Bible Had Never Been Written? (Thomas Nelson). They said this early on in the book:

“The impact of the Bible on our culture, on our nation, on world history has been enormous. Author and former Yale professor Williams Lyons Phelps observed, ‘Our civilization is founded upon the Bible. More of our ideas, our wisdom, our philosophy, our literature, our art, and our ideals come from the Bible than from all the other books combined’.”

The authors examined in great detail how the Bible has impacted politics, law, medicine, science, morality, literature and other areas. They then said this in the closing chapter:

No book can be rightly compared to the Bible. No book has changed so many lives, so many cultures, so many nations….

 

The Bible has no equal. Charles Dickens – a good judge of books – once wrote, “The New Testament is the best book the world has ever known or will know.” Ernest von Dobschutz sums it all up in his classic work, The Influence of the Bible on Civilization:

 

“There is a small book: one can put it in one’s pocket, and yet all the libraries of America, numerous as they are, would hardly be large enough to hold all the books which have been inspired by this one little volume. The reader will know what I am speaking of; it is the Bible, as we are used to call it – the Book, the book of mankind, as has properly been called.”

 

The Bible is indeed the Book of books!

And in 2011 the Indian Christian intellectual Vishal Mangalwadi penned The Book That Made Your World (Thomas Nelson). In the Prologue he wrote this:

A cursory glance may give an impression that this book is a book about the Bible. Those who actually read it will know that this is about great literature and great art; great science and liberating technology; genuine heroism and nation building; great virtues and social institutions. If you have a zillion pieces of a puzzle, would you begin assembling them into one picture, without knowing what that picture is supposed to look like? The Bible created the modern world of science and learning because it gave us the Creator’s vision of what reality is all about. That is what made the modern West a reading and thinking civilization.

In over 400 well-argued and well-documented pages he carefully makes this case. The final paragraph of the book is also worth sharing:

Rome’s collapse meant that Europe lost its soul – the source of its civilizational authority – and descended into the “Dark Ages.” The Bible was the power of revived Europe. Europeans became so enthralled with God’s Word that they rejected their sacred myths to hear God’s Word, study it, internalize it, speak it, and promote it to build the modern world. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the West is again losing its soul. Will it relapse into a new dark age or humble itself before the Word of the Almighty God?”

See my review of the book here: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2011/09/28/5981/

One final set of quotes on the mega-significance of the Bible comes from a brand-new article titled “Teaching Civilization Means Teaching the Bible”. It is by Jenna A. Robinson who is part of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Restoring the West project. She begins her piece this way:

Biblical principles and Christian ideas shaped Western culture in critical ways. Many of our laws, moral assumptions, ethical commitments, and social practices trace their origins to biblical teachings and the Christian tradition. The resulting civilization has been remarkably successful. Well-educated citizens should understand the ideas, stories, and teachings that shaped the civilization in which they live.

 

Sadly, few Americans read or understand the Bible and its cultural significance. . . . This biblical illiteracy has serious consequences. A society increasingly disconnected from the sources of its own moral and political assumptions risks losing sight of the foundations on which it rests. Tom Holland explains in Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, “Assumptions bred of Europe’s ancestral faith continue to structure the way the world organizes itself.”

 

As Tom Holland enumerates many examples. Among them, he notes that the ideas of freedom of conscience and that conscience should dictate law come from the Bible, and that even our generally accepted ideas of right and wrong derive from Christian teachings. America’s founding documents explicitly state that rights come from God, not government. E.D. Hirsh’s New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know states unequivocally that, “The Bible is…essential for understanding many of the moral and spiritual values of our culture,” regardless of current religious belief. The Bible, Hirsh says, is “embedded in our thought and language.”

She goes on to discuss how teaching the Bible in schools does not violate the First Amendment’s establishment clause in the US. She then says this:

The Bible remains the most influential book ever written. With its teachings on human dignity, equality, individual moral responsibility, universalism, and limits on power, the Bible profoundly shaped Western culture, politics, and institutions. Today, we benefit from the legacy of Christian values embedded in our laws and jurisprudence. But deference to tradition and the echoes of our Christian past are inadequate to sustain this system. To do so, it is essential to revive knowledge of the Bible and the moral vision it helped create.

 

Schools should ensure that students understand the Bible and Christianity as major historical forces. At a minimum, school curricula should include the Bible’s central teachings, Christianity’s influence on the Roman Empire, the Church’s role in medieval education and science, the impact of the Protestant Reformation, and Christianity’s role in the American Founding. The American Birthright K-12 Social Studies Standards, created by the Civics Alliance, are a good place to start.

To know anything about western civilisation and what has made it so great (despite its various flaws) means knowing something about the Scriptures. Ignorance about what is in the Bible will mean ignorance about why the West even came into existence.

That sort of ignorance must be remedied. The books and articles mentioned here will go a long way in helping to undo such ignorance.

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