The Book That Made Your World
by Vishal Mangalwadi
One of the most laudatory modern attempts to spotlight the outsized impact the Bible has had across time and cultures is Vishal Mangalwadi’s The Book That Made Your World; How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization. Throughout, Mangalwadi ably demonstrates that the biblical worldview emerges as the critical and unmistakable source of the unique vision of Western thought, values, and institutions. He documents that the Bible, understood to be the revelation of God to humanity, provided the basis for an admittedly imperfect but nonetheless remarkably humane society. It was, above all, a civilization in which truth was understood to be real, where the collective pursuit of virtue shape behavior, and the redemptive work of God and the person of Jesus Christ provided a radical and
historically verifiable transforming response to the abyss of human selfishness, corruption, and sin.
Mangalwadi’s monograph provides a veritable trove of benefits for the pastor and Christian leader alike. Even his chronicling of the erudite scholarship over the decades underwriting the theme of his book makes this labor enormously valuable. In an age of soaring and multivariate ignorance, having a record of the remarkable data standing against the modern hubris of ridiculing or dismissing the Bible is much appreciated. Consider the following about Benz;
What accelerated Western technological progress in the western middle ages? The
above question was the topic of a 1961 Oxford symposium on scientific change,
spearheaded by Alistair Crombie. The best answer was given by Marburg historian
Ernst Benz, who published a seminal essay in 1964, Fondamenti Christiani della
Technica Occidentals - the essay demonstrated that "Christian beliefs provided the
rationale, and faith the motive energy for Western technology." Benz had studied and
experienced Buddhism in Japan. The anti-technological impulses in Zen led him to
explore whether Europe's technological advances were somehow rooted in Christian
beliefs and attitudes. His research led him to the conclusion that the biblical worldview
was indeed the key to understanding Western technology. Many scholars have
reinforced, expanded, and qualified this thesis. For example, Robert Forbes of Leyden
and Samuel Sambursky of Jerusalem pointed out as early as 1956 that technology
arose because Christianity destroyed classical animism.
Or this…
Scholars Paul Sabatier, Wallace Ferguson, Charles Trinkaus engaged in approximately
a century-long research into primary sources culminating in a two-volume work by
Trinkhaus, entitled In Our Image and Likeness; Humanity and Dignity in Italian Humanist
Thought. He concluded that although Renaissance leaders read, enjoyed, quoted, and
promoted Greek and Roman classics and Islamic scholarship to some degree, their
peculiar view of human dignity came straight out of the Bible in a deliberate opposition
to the Greek Roman and Islamic thought.
Mangalwadi brings the argument to the reader, first quoting a known 20th century atheist then responding;
"Inspired? The Bible is not even intelligent..."; (Militant atheist E. Haldeman-Julius
(1889-1951) He said "the Bible was irrational and full of absurdities and contradictions." Historians, on the other hand, tell a different story. In the Oxford history of Medieval Europe, editor George Holmes wrote; "the forms of thought and action which we take for granted in modern Europe and America, which we have exported to other substantial portions of the globe, and from which indeed, we cannot escape, were implanted in the mentalities of our ancestors in the struggles of the medieval centuries"; (when the Bible was shaping the thought processes of Christendom).
Likewise Edward Grant pointed out in his book God and Reason in the Middle Ages that
during the latter middle ages AD 1050 to AD 1500, the Bible created A peculiar religious person, called the school man or scholastic. He used logic as his primary
tool to study Divinity. No earlier culture had created such a rational man with the
intellectual "capacity for establishing the foundations of the nation state, parliaments,
democracy, commerce, banking, higher education and various literary forms such as
novels in history." The scientific, technological, military, and economic success of the
West came from the fact that it became a thinking civilization. Was this cultures
emphasis on rationality a coincidence of history? Or did the Bible promote rationality
because it informed the West that the ultimate reality behind the universe was the rational word or Logos of a personal god? It was not, as Indian sages thought, primeval
silence, senseless sound or mantras, energy, or in personal consciousness.
Mangalwadi freely compares and contrasts as this is crucial to build his case. He also tests and rejects certain popular alternative explanations to his thesis.
Many in the west followed atheists like Julius in rejecting belief in a rational creator. It
did not occur to them that rejecting the Bible's God might undermine the West's
confidence and reason; that it might force their universities to conclude that rationality
cannot be intrinsic to the universe; that atheism would make reason a chance product
of blind chemistry; that logic will become an accidental and dispensable product of
Western culture, losing its authority to subject all viewpoints and all cultures to its
rules. Some people think that an accident of history, the printing press, made the West rational. It's true that the easy availability of books helped to disseminate the ideas generated during the Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment. But if the printing
press was the secret, then Asia should have led European thought by centuries. The
Chinese had invented the printing press hundreds of years earlier. By ad 972, they had
printed 130,000 pages of the sacred Buddhist writings, the tripitakas. Korean printers
invented movable metal forms at least two centuries before the German Gutenberg
reinvented them in AD 1450. Why didn't printing reform China or Korea? Printing and books did not reform my continent because our religious philosophies undermined reason fundamentally. (77-78)
Mangalwadi also takes the reader through the development of India into the modern era, he is at his best when he discusses the great debt India owes the Christian biblical philosophy of life brought by the herculean missionary endeavor. He also does not sugarcoat the missteps and issues committed in those transition years. The Book That Made Your World should be on the shelves of Christian leaders and influencers across the vocational and volunteer spectrum. It is a subversive piece of researched work against the contemporary notion of cultural equivalence as well as a evidenced-based case for the timeless wisdom of taking your Creator’s messages about origin, meaning, morality and destiny seriously.
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