The Bible and Education

The man whose program of daily life suggests the outline of these chapters awakes in the morning to the consciousness of himself. He is soon aware of the presence of his family and catches the sense of home. Directly the children are made ready for school and join that romping procession that moves each day at the joint command of parents and teachers. In the normal Christian community this fact of school-going is all but universal. In such a community the illiterate person is so exceptional as to be a curiosity; he is marked by separateness if not by distinction. All of us have marched to school; all of us have had teachers.

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.”

He said to them, “Go, teach.” They went and they taught. They were not deliberate founders of schools. But the heart of Jesus contained schools, and they, having gotten their hearts from him, carried schools with them. When the gospel reached England and Germany, education reached those countries and began to thrive. The vast majority of the first one hundred colleges founded in America were builded by the followers of the Great Teacher.

Now, this unique relation of Jesus to the educational life of men is not accidental. Subtle as are the laws which determine it, those laws work effectively. They are elusive, but once in a while we glimpse their ways and meanings. The New Testament seems to feel their presence. It calls Christ a Teacher. Forty-three times it uses his name in connection with the word “teach” in its various forms. The world gets the same impression. It persists in calling Jesus the Greatest Teacher. It must note the schoolroom phrases with which the account of his life is filled. The prologue of his wonderful message on the Mount illustrates this. “And seeing the multitudes, he went up into a mountain: and when he was set, his disciples came unto him; and he opened his mouth, and taught them.” The posture of Jesus was that of the teacher. His audience was made up of “disciples,” that is, of pupils. He “taught” them. All this might be called a superficial play upon mere words. But we may go further and discover that the method of Jesus was the method of the teacher. He put his effort into other lives in order that these lives might, within their various limitations, duplicate his own. His work was largely devoted to the preparation of a select few. Often he left hundreds and thousands that he might be alone with Twelve. He poured himself into his disciples, his scholars. He thus did what every true teacher must do: He committed the cause of his life to those whom he schooled into faith and character and power.

Nor did the teaching method halt here. The good teacher makes the things of the earth serve as approaches to the highest developments. This Jesus did supremely. Long before men made “nature study” an educational fad, Jesus made it an ethical and spiritual service. He pressed flowers, mustard seeds, grapes, wine, thistles, corn, figs, into the lessons of his roving school. He made nature study so effective that along a path of lilies men walked to God. When it was necessary to individualize in order to come to this high result, Jesus took up that burden of teaching. His school, like all other schools since its day, enrolled “a son of thunder.” It took the love that suffered long to make John, the son of thunder and lightning and vaulting ambition, into the son of tender love. It took the patience that knows no failure to change the shifting sand of Simon’s nature into the rock of Peter’s character. All these considerations will convince us that we may go to Christ with the pedagogical, as well as with the religious motive. We do not wonder that a man should have crept to him in the darkness and should have said, “We know that thou art a teacher.”

There is yet another side of the subject that calls for emphasis. The Bible and Jesus give the ideal of the intellectual life, an omniscient God. The God who is perfect in character is often lifted before us. We hear the voice saying, “Be ye holy; for I the Lord your God am holy.” Yet we interpret the call narrowly. Christ has come to us with the call to purity. To the attentive he comes just as truly with the call to knowledge. He has given us a gospel for the body, and that gospel teaches that drunkards and other defilers of the human temple of God cannot inherit his kingdom. He has given us a gospel for the spirit, and that gospel commands that the inmost realm of life be given to his sway. He has likewise given us a gospel of the mind, and that gospel cannot be omitted from the fullness of the blessing of Christ. The God revealed in Christ knows all things. He counts the hairs of our heads. He marks the petals of the flowers. He notes the fall of the sparrows. He is all-knowing and all-wise.

Even though the ideal be a staggering one, we are still told to be like God. Some day we shall appreciate more the duty that speaks to us in Jesus’s revelation of an omniscient God. As yet we hardly dare press to its full meaning the call implied in that revelation. We have said that the man who neglects and stunts and poisons his body is a sinner. We have said that the man who dwarfs and represses his spirit is a sinner. Are we ready to say that the man who gives his mind no chance, the man who fails to move on to the ideal of an omniscient God, is likewise a sinner? Is God’s perfect spirit a goal for his children, and is God’s perfect mind removed from our vision of duty? If we are to start on the endless march that leads to the purity of God, are we freed from the obligation of starting on the endless march that leads to his knowledge? We may shrink from the conclusion that is here involved; and our shrinking may be only an added evidence that we have omitted one element from the divine ideal.

Just here we are struck with the consciousness that we shall need some great dynamic, if we are ever to start toward this unspeakable goal. Evidently we have not reached the last thing in Christ’s relation to education. Confucius was a great teacher, but his system has not produced schools. Mohammed was a great teacher, but his system has left his followers wallowing in ignorance. Though Mohammedanism has proclaimed an omniscient God, somehow that beacon on the infinite height has not coaxed the Turk on to its shining. Mohammedanism has offered the ideal, but it has lacked the power. On the contrary the system of Jesus seems to have had a genius for diffusing education. It has been a vast normal school. The purer and freer and more spiritual its form, the mightier has it been as an educational force. If we list the nations of the earth in classes with reference to literacy and illiteracy, we shall find that the farther the nations are from the Bible, the more dense is their ignorance. We shall find, too, that where the people are the freest in their relation to the Bible, there the ignorance is least. Plainly the Bible with its crowning revelation in Christ does furnish something of a dynamic toward education. The school has been the inevitable companion of the church. This is because the church, in addition to giving a list of inspiring examples, and in addition to lifting up the uttermost ideal, has also emphasized an obligation under the leadership of the ever-present Spirit. It remains to show the nature of the obligation which the Spirit has enforced with reference to knowledge. Perhaps this can be done more clearly by taking the attitude of the Scriptures toward slavery as illustrating their attitude toward ignorance.

When Jesus faced his audiences he looked upon men who were in bondage as well as upon men who were in ignorance. It is frequently said that Christ did not attack slavery. In the days before the war the biblical literalist, who believed in freedom, had a hard time with his Bible. He found that the Bible did not condemn slavery, but that the Bible did give concerning it certain regulations. The pro-slavery orators made good use of the letter to Philemon. The people who believed in human liberty, and who likewise believed in a mechanical and verbal theory of biblical inspiration, passed through intellectual agony in the period of anti-slavery agitation. If human bondage was the sum of all villainies, why did not Jesus condemn it with unsparing invective? Why did not the apostles enter upon an immediate crusade for its downfall?

The answer is that Christ in the deepest way did condemn slavery, and that the apostles in the realest way did begin their crusade. They gathered no visible army, and they enforced no written statute, but Christ stated and his followers promulgated a conception of humanity that prophesied the melting of all chains. Usually the claim is that the Golden Rule was the primary foe of slavery, but the Golden Rule is of little force, apart from that doctrine of human personality that pervades the New Testament. Give that doctrine power, and it would refuse to live in the same world with slavery. That doctrine, under a Captain, was a delivering army. That doctrine, under a King, was an Emancipation Proclamation. The Golden Rule had been given in negative form by Confucius, and it went to sleep in his maxims. That rule had been uttered negatively by Plato, but it nestled quietly in his poetry. Hillel approached the positive statement of the rule, but he does not get credit for being its author. The glory of a truth lies with the one who gives it power. Jesus made the Golden Rule leap to its feet. He turned it into a most effective traveler. It praised God on its wide journeys. It began to work wonders.

That work was slow, but it was both sure and thorough. The Rule had power behind its saying. At length the Spirit carried that gracious weapon over the seas and laid it in the hearts of Clarkson and Wilberforce. Soon the English flag floated over freemen everywhere. Again the Spirit carried the doctrine over other seas and lodged it in the hearts of Lovejoy, Phillips, and Garrison. Directly four million sable faces were glowing with the light of liberty. Jesus had said, “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.” The word had essentially a spiritual meaning, but it was worked out, also, in a splendid literalness. The Son made men free, not primarily by the force of law, nor yet primarily by the violence of armies, but rather by the conquest of disposition. The honor of the victory is with the Bible theory of humanity, made strong with the power of Christ.

Now what the truth of the Bible did in tearing down slavery, it is continually doing in routing ignorance. The connection is subtle, but it is vitally real. The doctrine of personal responsibility is atmospheric in the Bible. It is equally comprehensive. Men are held responsible for their bodies. Drunkenness, adultery, and all forms of sensuality are condemned. This is at the bottom of life. But at the top of life firmer stress is placed. The spirit of man is made a field of reckoning. The divine dominion over motive is strongly asserted. And that comprehensive responsibility claims the mind. The first great commandment of the new dispensation is that we must “love God with all the strength, with all the soul, with all the mind.” Men may differ about the precise meaning of the mind’s love for the Lord, but the Christian sense of duty has asserted it in strange fashions. From vast revivals young men and women have gone forward intellectually and have sought the higher education. Conversion has set free their intellects and has made them feel the duty of intellectual development. The pressure of the Christian ideal has been on them. They have answered the call of the God who is infinitely good, and they must now answer the call of the God who is infinitely wise. An elusive intellectual law is written sure and large in the code of the Great Kingdom. It is as certainly a commandment of God as if it had been thundered among the crags and lightnings of a new Sinai.

The conviction of the church at this point has not always come to definition; nor has it always risen even to consciousness. For all that, it has risen to practical life and has struggled always for outward expression. Feeling that the empire of God is over all of life, man must submit his mind to the divine rule. Hence it follows that the man who is intellectually lazy, as well as the man who is intellectually dishonest, is a sinner. This statement may shock those who have a surplus of caution, but these may reassure themselves with the conviction that any theory may be fearlessly accepted, if it brings us face to face with God at any point of our total life. The failure to follow this biblical idea has brought a penalty always. No denomination that has fought or slurred education has led a large and victorious life; on the contrary it has invariably become one of the fading and dwindling forces of God’s work. The God of wisdom is evermore against the promoters of ignorance. So do we find that, by the examples of its greatest characters, by the life of its Greatest Teacher and its ruling Lord, by the vision of its supreme ideal, by the assertion of its inclusive theory of consecration, and by the divine dynamic which it brings to bear upon the mind, the Bible has become the steadfast friend of proper education. It has opened the doors of countless schools and has bidden the children of men to enter the portals of learning with the assurance that all truth is of God.

The Bible renders education the service of inspiration, and it renders it the service of proper restraint. When any one faculty of human life becomes a monarch it always makes for trouble. Zeal without knowledge tends to breakage; knowledge without zeal tends to waste. The Bible does not make intellect all. Man has mind, and he must use that. Man has sensibility, and he must use that. Man has will, and he must use that. Man must get the truth out of his integral self rather than out of his fractional self. The man who does not use his heart and will in the gaining of truth is just as faithless as is the man who will not use his mind. Without attempting to use psychological terms with exactness, we may say that Jesus brought in the reign of the practical intellect, which gets truth from all there is of man. Even as truth comes not from the naked will of God, nor yet out of his cold thought, but rather out of the full nature of the Infinite, so truth finds man, not at some one point of his being, but in the glowing center of his whole life.

We may assert, also, that the Bible saves education from frigidity. Tennyson speaks of “the freezing reason’s colder part.” We all know the meaning of the phrase. Jesus put into the search for truth the mood of humility. The method of learning was obedience. Obedience is the organ of intellectual vision as well as of spiritual vision. The method of Jesus was not merely for the spiritual life, as men speak in their fragmentary way; it was a universal method. It takes humility to make the beginnings of a scholar, and weariness and shame of ignorance, and faith in an intellectual empire, and a high trust that the mind is made for truth, and the truth for mind. Ere we have done, we have a huge creed wrapped up in our intellectual processes. But the creed has been saved from its cold pride. The Bible says in one of its marginal readings, “Knowledge puffeth up; love buildeth up.” Knowledge alone may be swollen with pride, and the higher demand of the Bible would save from that disaster. This gives us the clue to more than one biblical sentence. There is a “science falsely so called.” There is a sense in which “not many wise after the flesh are called.” These implied warnings are not the cries of prejudice. They stand for the effort to touch learning with humility, which alone can save it from being distant and icy.

The good Book rescues education from a selfish inaction. There was a living and serving element in Jesus’s relation to the intellectual life. He did not deal in barren metaphysics or in helpless abstractions. His truth went to work. He fastened it to life’s burdens, and they were lifted. He dropped it amid life’s problems, and they were solved. He cast it against life’s temptations, and they were defeated. He attached it to life’s duties, and they were fulfilled. He sought those truths with which men had to dwell. He never attempted to set forth the essential mystery of things. He was no dealer in an intellectual cure-all. He spoke with authority and yet with reverent limitation. There was a great reserve in his explanations. Yet in the realm where men must live their present lives, Jesus gave enough truth to keep men busy all their days. Here again comes in the question of dynamic. Men sometimes prate about their “love of truth.” The intellectual life, like the religious life, may be guilty of cant. It takes more than an open mind to get the truth; it takes a working mind. Truth does not come to the passive man by way of transfer. One teaching of the parable of the virgins is that, while the coarser goods of life may be transferred, the finer goods of life must be won by spiritual effort. It takes dynamic to secure a real intellect. Perception may see a truth, but only inward power can use the truth. Jesus conferred that power. He gave us the truth in the doctrine about God. He gave us the way in the spirit of obedience. He gave us the life in the willingness to make the truth the servant of the world for the sake of Christ.

This leads us to the biblical idea of consecrated intellect. As we have often failed to indicate the sin of needless ignorance, so have we failed to point out the sin of an unconsecrated mind. All truth can be dedicated to Christ. His great call to-day is for more men with the highest culture placed under the thrall of his grace and under the guiding power of the Spirit whom he sends—more Luthers from Wittenberg, more Wesleys from Oxford, more Pauls from Gamaliel’s school; more men from all our modern seats of learning who will know that gifts of learning can be placed at the service of the King and that all science and philosophy and literature may be placed at the foot of the Cross. In the coming day of the Christian intellect

Mind and heart, according well
May make one music as before,
But vaster.