The Bible and Life

by Edwin Holt Hughes

The fact is still more significant. School-going is not merely a general experience; it is a long experience. It controls about one fourth of life. Indeed, if we figure the average span of life, the school claims more than one fourth of the individual career. Many persons continue formal school work into the third decade, while many give a score and a half of years in making educational preparation for the remaining twoscore years of the allotment.

Beyond this, the whole educational scheme involves countless millions of dollars. Our bookkeeping is scarcely rapid enough to keep up with the finances of the system. In our own country it really seems as if education had become a primary passion. Our school buildings yearly become more imposing and more costly. Our college endowments annually leap to more generous figures. Our largest philanthropies seek the privilege of enlarging educational opportunity. It thus requires no long observation to convince any thoughtful man that our educational program, involving every young life in the nation and ideally every young life on the planet, is of incalculable meaning. Each morning an army of many millions, ranging from wee kindergartners up to adult postgraduates, moves to the schoolroom door. The whole scene is as impressive as it is human. The question naturally comes, What started that procession? What inspiration keeps it moving through the years? Is there one Book that leads in some forceful way to the study of many books? Does the Bible have any sure relation either to the enthusiasm or to the efficiency of our educational life? If our friend of the day’s program could discover the intricate influences that unite in sending his children to the school, would he find that any large credit must be assigned to the Book?

The aim now is not to show the place that the Bible has had in the curriculum of the world’s education; nor yet is it to show the direct effect that the Bible has had upon the world’s instruction. The Bible has been the supreme text-book, even as it has been the supreme force, in the schools of nearly two millenniums. These facts have been well set forth in many treatises. The purpose now is simpler and more meaningful: to trace to its main sources the influence which the great Book has had upon the intellectual life of the race.

We are met at the outset by the singular fact that the Bible has little to say specifically concerning education. Nowhere in its pages do we read the command, “Thou shalt found schools.” The literalist who started out to find a biblical order for education, as such, would come back from an unrewarded search. But we have long ago discovered that the silence of the Bible does not constitute a commandment. There are some things that are stronger than detailed orders. An outer law that has fought an inner sanction has usually fared badly in history. On the other hand, the inner sanction, unenforced by any objective form of obligation, has won some big victories. An explicit command to act as an immortal is not so powerful as the implicit conviction that we are immortal. It is safe to declare that the implications of Scripture are often as deep and influential as its explications. If, then, the flowers of knowledge bloom not by command in the fields of the Bible, may we still find there the seeds out of which such flowers inevitably grow? If the school building is not definitely prescribed, as was the Temple of Solomon, does the Book yield in a deeper sense the wood and stone and mortar by which the building must surely rise? Answers to these figurative questions will go far toward determining the relation of the Bible to education. The contention now is that the Bible has been the fountain whence streams of intellectual life have flowed, and that, minor influences being freely admitted, these streams may be traced to the Scripture’s implicit doctrine of human responsibility.

In discussing the bearing of the Bible on learning much has been made of the example of the Bible’s mightiest characters. This fact is striking, and it lends itself to popular treatment. The average man takes a truth more readily when it is offered to him in a human setting. Hence it may be granted that the spirit of the Book in its influence on education has been supplemented by its concrete examples. In the patriarchal era the majestic figure is that of Abraham. Whatever the critics may say about the historicity of his person, they can hardly doubt the historicity of the intellectual process by which some “Father of the Multitude” must have reached the creed of the divine unity and spirituality. We could not expect, of course, to find organized education in the primitive days of religious history. But, after all, education is relative. An eminent American graduated from Harvard in 1836 when he was sixteen years of age. In this day his sixteen years and his completed course of study would barely admit him to the Freshman class. So Abraham’s education must be graded by the standard of his dim and far day. Tradition represents him as reaching the central doctrine of the Jewish, Mohammedan, and Christian faith by a method of reasoning. You may say of his physical journey that he went out, not knowing whither he went, but you cannot say that of his intellectual journey. While his feet pressed an unknown way, his mind and heart traveled straight toward the discovered God. If the best educated man of a period is he who sees most deeply and clearly into its essential truths and problems, then the “Father of the Faithful,” whoever he was and whenever he came, was the supreme scholar of his generation.

As the life of the chosen people reaches more definite form, the place of education is more plainly seen. Doubtless most men would agree that Moses was the arch figure of the Old Testament. He is represented, both by the Scripture and by the tradition given among the Jewish historians, as having the best mental furnishing of his day. The book of the Acts says of him that he “was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.” Clemens Alexandrinus records that Moses had the finest teachers in Egypt, and that the choicest scholars were imported from Greece and Assyria to instruct the adopted prince in the arts and sciences of their respective countries. Perhaps we must allow something for the idealizing habit here; but it is significant that both sacred and secular history unite in declaring that the Lawgiver was learned.

In the era of Prophecy we find the same development, only it is more speedy. Elijah may have been the crude and forceful son of mountain and rock, but his successor is the product of one of the numerous “schools of the prophets.” Although intellectual training might be presumed to have little to do with the stern function of Old Testament prophesying, the “school” arrived quickly and began the training of the young men. Criticism has not attacked the view that the book of Isaiah bears marks of high culture. If that book had two authors, the ancient world is entitled to the credit of a second scholar. When the radical is done with the story of Daniel we have left at least the schoolroom in which the youthful prophet gained his superior wisdom. It would appear that the examples of the worthies of the Old Testament give slight encouragement to the idea that any type of selection or any mood of afflatus may not be supplemented by trained intellect in the kingdom of God.

We need not halt long with the like lesson from the New Testament. Much has been made of the fact that the twelve apostles were uneducated men. Doubtless we often do their intellectual life scant justice. Desiring to score in an argument, we give it out as an evidence of the divinity of the faith that it conquered in spite of the disciples’ lack of education. The truth is that the New Testament does not warrant the application to the apostles of such words as “illiterate.” Some of them wrote books that have moved the ages. But, whatever the fact be here, he would be wild indeed who would find in ignorance any explanation of the gospel’s victory. Let us remember, moreover, that, when the “unlettered” Twelve were cramping the universal faith into a local religion, the corrector of their blunder was the “lettered” Paul. In his statement of experience he was ever ready to say that he had sat at the feet of Gamaliel, the greatest Jewish teacher of the day. After Christ Paul is the colossal figure of the New Testament; and there are those who would confidently declare him the greatest man who has walked the earth since Calvary. For a review of his education, let anyone read a standard Life of the Apostle. We thus gather the one result from both the Old and the New Testament. Moses was the mightiest personality of the one, and Paul was the mightiest human personality of the other; and both were highly educated. The signal examples of the Bible range themselves on the side of education.

As in all things else, so in the relation of the Bible to the intellectual life we reach the climax only when we come to Christ. Here, too, we find in the life of Christ that same element of paradox that we often find in his words. That saving was losing, giving was getting, and dying was living were apparently contradictory statements that real life proved to be true. Where words seemed to fight each other, the deeper facts were found to live in peace. So Jesus in his personal influence was ever reaching goals of which the paths did not give promise. This is seen peculiarly in his relation to the intellectual life. He left no manuscripts. The only time he is represented as writing was when he wrote the sentence of the sinning woman on the forgetful sands of the earth. Yet he who wrote no books has filled the world with books. Something in him quickly evoked Gospels and Epistles which were forerunners of a marvelous literature. Even this moment thousands of pens are being moved by him. He wrote no books, and still he writes books evermore.

It was so with his relation to the schools. Men tell us that the incarnation imposed a limitation on intellect—that it involved a kenosis, an emptying of knowledge even as of power. Be that as it may, our human explanations do not easily reach the mystery of his influence on the schools of the world. Did the boy Jesus go to school in Nazareth? Was his mother his only earthly teacher? Did his neighbors speak literal truth in the question, “Whence hath this man wisdom, having never learned”? The silent years give no answer to the questions. But this we do know: He who went to school slightly or not at all has sent a world to school. He who founded no immediate institution of learning has dotted the planet with colleges. His schoolroom was itinerant and unroofed. It moved quickly from town to city, from capital to desert, from mountain to seashore. We have dignified it with a great name. The school of Jesus, whose plant and endowment and faculty all centered in one life, is named “the College of Apostles.”