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<DIV class=OutlookMessageHeader dir=ltr align=left><FONT face=Tahoma
size=2>-----Original Message-----<BR><B>From:</B> David Franke
[mailto:dfranke00@comcast.net]<BR><B>Sent:</B> Monday, September 26, 2005 11:48
AM<BR><B>To:</B> dfranke00@comcast.net<BR><B>Subject:</B> The Bible's impact on
Western civilization<BR><BR></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=812193615-26092005><FONT size=2>An interesting article on a new
high school textbook about the Bible's impact on Western
civilization.</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
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<TD class=boldPumpkinSixteen vAlign=center align=left
colSpan=3>HOUSES OF WORSHIP </TD></TR>
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<P class=articleTitle style="MARGIN: 0px">The Bible Tells Me So</P><SPAN
style="FONT: bold 12px times new roman, times, serif">
<P style="FONT: bold 12px times new roman, times, serif">By <B>ADAM
NICOLSON</B><BR><SPAN
class=aTime>September 23, 2005; Page W13</SPAN></P></SPAN>
<P class=times>Do we need to know what it says in the Bible? Are we
somehow illiterate if we don't? Up until, say, 100 years ago, biblical
literacy would have been practically mandatory. If you didn't know what
"the powers that be" originally referred to, or where "the writing on the
wall" was first seen, or what was meant by "the patience of Job," "Jacob's
ladder" or "the salt of the earth" -- if you didn't know what an exodus
was or a genesis, a fatted or a golden calf -- you would have been
excluded from the culture.</P>
<P class=times>It might be said that a civilization consists, at its core,
of these easily transmitted packages of implication. They are one of the
mechanisms by which cultures can be both efficient and rich. You don't
have to return to first principles every time you wish to communicate. You
can play your present tune on a received instrument, knowing that your
listener hears not only your own music but the subtle melodies of those
who played it before you. There is a common wisdom in common
knowledge.</P>
<P class=times>But does this Bible-informed world still exist? I would
guess that on the whole, and outside committed Christian groups, biblical
literacy is a thing of the past. That long moment of Christian
civilization is over. The lingua franca of modern, English-speaking people
is not dense with scriptural allusion, just as the conversation of
educated people no longer makes reference to classical civilizations. If
you dropped the names nowadays of Nestor, Agamemnon or Pericles -- every
one of which would have come trailing clouds of glory up to a century ago
-- you would, I think, draw a near total blank from even educated
listeners.</P>
<P class=times>The references we make today are not to these ancient
sources of meaning. That is not to say that we don't have other sources;
simply that our models tend to come from more recognizable and more recent
worlds: We harken to Jefferson and Lincoln, Nelson and Churchill; to
Madonna not the Madonna, to Britney not Brutus.</P>
<P class=times>Does it matter that we have tended to drop the old
referential structures? Certainly the people behind a new high-school
textbook, released this week, think so. "The Bible and Its Influence" is
an exceptionally well-executed introduction to the books of the Bible and
the shaping effect that it had on the writers and artists of Western
civilization. It is a scholarly, clear and richly illustrated
amplification of the stories of the Old and New Testaments. And where else
will a high-school student find out that the Eucharist was the inspiration
for Beethoven's "Missa Solemnis"? Or that when Hamlet calls Polonius
"Jepthah," he is pointing to the willingness of Ophelia's father to
sacrifice his daughter for his own advantage?</P><REPRINTSDISCLAIMER>
<P class=times>The textbook's intention is to provide precisely the kind
of biblical understanding that has drained out of the culture in the past
century. (This sort of book itself has a long tradition: family-accessible
biblical exegeses began, in English anyway, with the Geneva Bible, brought
to this continent by the first settlers.) But once such understanding is
on the slide, is there anything to be done about it?</P>
<P class=times>The Bible Literacy Project, which published the textbook,
aims to provide a way for students to read the Bible in public schools
without trampling on the rights of religious or secular families. But the
reasons that biblical literacy has declined are more deep-seated than any
First Amendment restrictions on the teaching of the Bible in public
schools. In Britain, where there are no such restrictions, the
understanding of biblical references has, if anything, sunk further.</P>
<P class=times>This is not necessarily a disaster. Ignorance of the Bible
does not mean that we cannot respond to Shakespeare, Rembrandt or Bach.
Just as there is no need to be intimately familiar with the Greek myths to
feel the surging power and humanity of Homer, there is no need to know the
Bible in order to hear the passionate meanings of Martin Luther King Jr.'s
great speeches or the Gettysburg address. These works may be fueled by the
Bible, but they are not in code. What they mean transcends their
sources.</P>
<P class=times>But if this loss of biblical literacy is not disastrous, it
is at least a shame, the fading of an aspect of our civilization that has
enriched it. Without the set of archetypes and fount of wisdom in the
Bible, our lives would be thinner and poorer. I know my own life would
have been immeasurably less if I had never encountered the majestic
language of scriptural stories, as told in the King James Version. I think
of the Bible as our great joint cathedral, a place where, as Philip Larkin
wrote in "Church Going," "someone will forever be surprising / A hunger in
himself to be more serious."</P>
<P class=times>"The Bible and Its Influence" could not have been better
made, but its publication is like putting a fence of palings in a river.
Change, made up of all sorts of powerful modern forces, will continue to
flow whatever high-minded educators do to deflect it. Maybe a few people
will be caught and held back from the swift motion of the current by that
fence. One can only hope so.</P>
<P class=times><I><B>Mr. Nicolson is the author of "God's Secretaries" on
the making of the King James Bible.</B></I></P><!-- article end -->
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