[Apologetics] FW: The Bible's impact on Western civilization

[Art Kelly]

WSJ.com - The Bible Tells Me So
-----Original Message-----
From: David Franke [mailto:dfranke00 at comcast.net]
Sent: Monday, September 26, 2005 11:48 AM
To: dfranke00 at comcast.net
Subject: The Bible's impact on Western civilization


An interesting article on a new high school textbook about the Bible's
impact on Western civilization.


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      September 23, 2005


     HOUSES OF WORSHIP



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      The Bible Tells Me So

      By ADAM NICOLSON
      September 23, 2005; Page W13

      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.

      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.

      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.

      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.

      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?

      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?

      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.

      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.

      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."

      "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.

      Mr. Nicolson is the author of "God's Secretaries" on the making of the
King James Bible.

           URL for this article:
            http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112744215221949586,00.html






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