Book Review: Vishal Mangalwadi, "The Book That made Your World," Thomas Nelson, 2011.

Review:

Vishal Mangalwadi is an Indian, born and educated in the great Hindu universities of India.  He says: “At a young age I started stealing and lying”; he couldn’t break himself of those “bad words and actions.” (p.38)  When he heard that Jesus Christ came to save sinners, he received Christ’s forgiveness and became a Christian.  But his faith was severely tested in Hindu university.  He studied Indian philosophers, Buddhist teaching, “queried the Quran, and finally returned to the Bible which I had already read to see if it actually was God’s revelation” (p. 45).  He decided it was.  After studying at the Swiss L’Abri, he returned to India.  “In 1976, my wife and I left urban India to live with the rural poor outside the village of Gatheora” (p. 60).  Their goal was to incarnate the love of Christ and a biblical worldview through serving their Hindu neighbors.  

The thesis behind Mangalwadi’s book is clear in his subtitle: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization. As he contrasts Greek, Roman, Indian, Islamic and Western civilizations, he asks the reader: Why did the West gain ascendancy?  He traces the answers back to the influence of the Bible, particularly since the Reformation, as he uncovers the implicit assumptions on which modern Western civilization has been built.  His book provides an impressive sweep of world history and religious thought. 

Here are a few of his conclusions:

            The secret of “the dramatic rise of the West” is in the emphasis on human dignity….3000 years of Hinduism, 2600 years of Buddhism, 1000 years of Islam and 100 years of secularism had collectively failed to give them (his Hindu neighbors) a convincing basis for recognizing and affirming the unique value of a human being..,  “Even the Marxists considered individuality to be a bourgeois concept…The Bible gave a radically different view of self, created by God in his image” (pp. 59-60, 72, 74, 46).

            “Jesus calls us to change the world in its moral, religious, social, economic and political darkness through His light. This is in contrast to the determinism and lack of meaning and eternal significance for men in other worldviews” (p. 48).  Mangalwadi cites John Wesley’s reformation influence in England and Europe as an example of Biblically inspired social emancipation.  “He understood the Bible demands that individual conversion should lead to changes in society” (p. 267).  “The Biblical revival changed history by transforming the character, words, thoughts and deeds of men and women” (p. 273).  Restoration of the authority of the Bible in the English world amounted to a civilization finding its soul” (p. 270).

            “The Bible promoted rationality because it informed the West that the ultimate reality behind the universe was the rational Word (logos) of a personal God…  It says the way to know truth is to cultivate our minds and meditate on God’s Word. These theological assumptions constituted the DNA of what we call Western civilization” (pp. 78, 82)…  The West cultivated the intellect whereas in Hinduism the goal is to empty my mind of all rational thought, to transcend thinking (p. 91).

            “Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim kingdoms did not exist to serve people. The people existed for their rulers, not for the glory of God” (p. 113)  “Compassion is a unique Biblical trait that has created caring societies that reach out to help needy people…The Benedictine monks imprinted on the Western consciousness the idea of humility and service as the true means of greatness. This idea became a defining feature of Western civilization. It is the opposite of the Asian idea that lesser beings must serve the greater” (p. 306)…Islam had great physicians from the 9^th to the 15^th centuries. “With this tremendous heritage Islamic civilization could have gone on to develop modern medicine [but] it failed to capitalize on its assets because it preferred to follow a military hero – Muhammad – in place of a self-sacrificing Savior, Christ.  Consequently the Islamic tradition could not liberate Muslims from the classical pursuit of power. It could not glorify self-giving service as a superior virtue }(p. 308)…[Similarly, despite India’s 3000 years of medical advances]  Indians did not create modern medicine because their doctors required surrender of the mind; the caste system kept millions from proper health care; females were considered second class so their death didn’t matter, and karma taught that suffering was cosmic justice (p. 316).  By contrast, “Jesus made love the supreme value of the kingdom…He came to serve, not to be served” (p. 134). This created the model of self-sacrificing servants.  “The Reformers paid with their lives to make the biblical idea of equality a foundational principle of the modern world” (p. 146).

“At the heart of the Great Awakening was a revival of personal piety.  Its social consequences were far-reaching. It led to grassroots intellectualism …The Bible inculcated a sense of responsibility for all human souls…It was the key to American character” (pp. 379, 381).

Mangalwadi says that the Bible has also been responsible for a moral base that undergirds western civilization. “Peter Eigan, Transparency International’s chairman in 2002, considers corruption to be a major roadblock to development… The empirical data says that countries most influenced by the Bible are the least corrupt” (pp. 253-256).   “Is the gospel merely religious rhetoric?” he asks. “The testimony of history is that Christendom was as corrupt as any other part of the world until it recovered this biblical gospel during the Reformation—(in the gospel Jesus cleanses us from the inside making possible inner self-government, socio-political freedom, and clean public life)” (p. 259). 

Although Mangalwadi consistently upbraids secular historians for stripping the record of the effects of the Bible on western civilization, he closes his book equally upbraiding contemporary American secular society for undermining many assumptions implicit in a biblical worldview.  He warns that America is in danger of “losing its soul and when that happens, the sun will set on the west as a civilization of power and dominance… As brilliant but amoral graduates from secular universities such as Harvard gain control of America’s economic and political life, the world has every reason to cease trusting America…Appealing to a ‘clash of civilizations,’ non-western cultures are returning to traditional worldviews…goodness and trust are being replaced by debauchery and depravity….

“Hope and confidence that the human spirit can overcome obstacles were defining features of modern Western civilization. But now the secular West is unsure if the human spirit even exists…Its universities now claim that history can be nothing but a point of view…They assume that man is merely biological, that there is no One out there who cares enough to reveal saving truth. Billions are descending from freedom and dignity into fatalistic despair” (p. 372).   

Mangalwadi closes with this admonition:

“The issue is not whether there is hope for the West, but whether the West has the humility to return to revelation, whether it can recover the faith that generates hope” (p. 372).

A poignant challenge from East to West by a scholar who has lived on both sides of the world!

                                                      Reviewer: M.L. Codman-Wilson, Ph.D.    2/9/12