Is the Bible a Textbook?

John W. Robbins

”In Adam’s fall we sinned all” was the first line of the first textbook printed in North America, the Puritans’ New England Primer. Russell Kirk, writing in The Roots of American Order (Open Court, 1974), remarked on the position of the Bible in early America:

In colonial America, everyone with the rudiments of schooling knew one book thoroughly: the Bible. And the Old Testament mattered as much as the New, for the American colonies were founded in a time of renewed Hebrew scholarship, and the Calvinistic character of Christian faith in early America emphasized the legacy of Israel (45-46).

Daniel Boorstin, in The Americans: The Colonial Experience (Random House, 1958), pointed out that “For answers to their problems, they [the early Americans] drew as readily on Exodus, Kings, or Romans, [sic] as on the less narrative portions of the Bible” (19).

The Bible was the textbook of early America, as it has been for Christians throughout the centuries. Today, however, it is fashionable and sophisticated to assert that the Bible is not a textbook of biology, or of politics, or of economics, or of whatever discipline the sophisticate happens to be considering. Perhaps, implies the sophisticate, in the ignorant days gone by, the Bible was sufficient for learning, but in our advanced technological age we must turn to other books in order to supplement the Bible. “The Bible is not a textbook of….” is now a cliché that is usually uttered with an air of finality and profundity. The unspoken implication is: Who would be so ignorant or so foolish as to believe that the Bible is a textbook of anything, except, perhaps, of personal piety?