Self-Help Classics

The way people view the Bible usually falls into one of three categories: a sacred religious text; a vast historical work; or a collection of great stories. But our attachment to these tired slots of can prevent us from seeing it anew as a collection of ideas, ones which helped to create our concept of what a human being might be. Here we will look at a few of those ideas.

Progress

It is easy to forget just how much the Oid and New Testaments are responsible for the world we live in today. In his book The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed The Way Everyone Thinks and Feels, Thomas Cahill wrote:

Without the Bible we would never have known the abolitionist movement, the prison-reform movement, the anti-war movement, the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the movement of indigenous and dispossessed peoples for their human rights, the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, the Solidarity movement in Poland, the free-speech and pro-democracy movements in such Far Eastern countries as South Korea, the Philippines, and even China. These movements of modern times have all employed the language of the Bible.

Perhaps the crucial change in the way we think that the Jews gave us was the idea of progress. In ancient times, time was invariably seen as cyclical; the great creation stories were so important to these early cultures’ understanding of themselves that little attention was paid to the future. The idea that tomorrow could be better than today was alien. There were many Gods, but being impersonal and capricious, none had any particular vision for the human race.

This changed with the direct revelation of the commandments through Moses on Mount Sinai. Though this new singular God was to be feared, it was a God who not only always had our best interests at heart, but had a long-term vision for His people. It was the God who led the Jews out of slavery in Egypt to the Promised Land, who would work through history in order to create his own end - the God of progress.

Though we take it for granted today, this progressive ‘world-view’ has defined Western culture, and been adopted by nearly all non-Western cultures too. It is, as Cahill says above, the force behind all the great emancipation movements which, often employing the language of the Book of Exodus, grew out of the thought that ‘it does not have to be this way’. This thought is also the light that guides most of the self-help literature.

The Power of Love

If the Old Testament has been the inspiration of groups through the millennia, the New Testament became a symbol of personal salvation. The Old was revolutionary because it put new emphasis on the individual, but the New took this to its logical extreme by saying that individuals could not only change the world, but had a duty to. Its challenge to transform the world in God’s image, using Jesus as the example, made it a manual for active love. Again, a love that heals and creates – like progress – is something totally taken for granted now, barely needs mentioning. But as Welburn put it in The Beginnings of Christianity:

Love is the revelation of God to the individualised, self-conscious man, just as power and wise order were the revelation of God to ancient, pre-self-conscious humanity.  

The Bible’s theme of the power of love marked a new era of man. On his way to Damascus to help suppress the Christians, Saul of Tarsus was ‘blinded by the light’. This wonderful story of personal transformation illustrated the strange new idea that love could be stronger than position or power.

Faith

The collections of deities that preceded the Judaic concept of One God were mostly reflections of human desire. If you didn't get what you wanted, it was obvious the Gods were displeased with you. Moses’ God was more complicated, often requiring the faith of the worshipper in order to fashion His ends and demonstrate omnipotence. The Judaic and Christian God became one not simply of creation and destruction, but of co-creation.

Look at the story of Abraham: told by God to go to a mountain to make a sacrifice, he does so only to realise that the sacrifice will be his only beloved son. Amazingly, he is willing to go through with it. At the last minute God has him replace the boy with a ram caught in a nearby bush. Abraham’s success in this incredible test of faith is rewarded by his having generations of descendants living in prosperity. Yet it is not simply a test in allegiance to God, and not just about Abraham. Humanity itself has passed a test: we could choose to no longer be animals quivering with fear, tied to the physical world, but could reflect God in becoming beings of calm faith.

From the Bible we also get the idea that we (as ‘God’s offspring’) can accomplish anything. Norman Vincent Peale, the Minister who wrote The Power of Positive Thinking, was chastised by fundamentalist Christians by promoting this ‘self-faith’, but he understood it to be a foundation stone of personal development. Without his best-sellers telling people that ‘faith power moves mountains’, millions would never have turned to the Bible at all as a source of inspiration.

The Bible and Individuality

Other religions and philosophies had seen the world either as an illusion or a drama in which we played a role, but Christianity, by making the individual the unit by which the world would develop and fulfil its potential, made history important – it became the story of humankind’s efforts to create heaven on earth.

Above all, Christianity freed the believer from having to accept their lot in life. It was profoundly egalitarian: men were no longer captive to other men, nor to capricious gods, ‘the fates’ or ‘the stars’. This emphasis gave people the groundbreaking idea that they could no longer be defined by things such as class, ethnicity or lack of money.

The revolutionary opportunity of the Bible, particularly the New Testament, was to see and understand the ‘incommunicable singularity of being which all possess’ (Teilhard de Chardin). While the broader vision of the Bible is the creation of a community of man, it can only be one in which each person has the opportunity to express this singularity to the full. Whatever you think of him, this belief is what fired Pope John Paul to be so strongly anti-communist - it was a system willing to sacrifice a person’s uniqueness to some larger community.

Final comments

The Bible does deserve to be seen with new eyes. We no longer have to see it as the Bible of original sin and sacrifice that spawned a heavy church hierarchy and holy wars. We should be reminded of the Book’s simpler messages of compassion and fulfillment and refinement of ourselves, a morality requiring no imposition on others.

In Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore had this to say:

I suggest that a person who turns to the Bible as a compendium of insight into the nature of the soul does not need psychology. Generally, psychology is more abstract, less imagistic, more scientific, and less poetic than the Bible, and therefore has less promise for care of the soul…For the fundamentalist, the Bible is something to believe in; for the soul it is a great stimulus for the religious imagination, for searching the heart for its deepest and most exalted possibilities.

Though fascinating as a historical holy book with great stories, we should do the Bible justice by remembering that, amidst the many excellent self-help works based on psychological science, the Bible is the original manual for personal transformation. It contains tried and tested ideas for helping us to imagine and fulfil 'our most exalted possibilities'.

Source: 50 Self-Help Classics: 50 Inspirational Books To Transform Your Life by Tom Butler-Bowdon (London & Boston: Nicholas Brealey)

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