[Jonathan] Edwards got that knowledge of evil from outside the Bible, and it informed biblical teaching about Satan’s horrible, fiendish, devastating, murderous rule over his people ”” all the while making them think they are having fun.
Now, in my case, I just finished listening to all three volumes of William Manchester’s biography of Winston Churchill, about 1,000 pages each. What an education in reality, insights into natural challenges of leadership, insights into the horrors of war, insights into the fickle nature of public approval, insights into sexual insanity of upper-class philandering, insights into the complexities of what justice looks like in public policy, insights into the value of never giving up, though there is enormous opposition, and on and on and on. What an education.
I was learning reality. I wasn’t learning my morality. Books didn’t teach morality. I wasn’t learning my morality. I get that from the Bible. I was gaining awareness of realities that come from life experience, except I don’t have any life experience of being in war. Things that are and what they are like, that is what I found. In other words, I was enlarging the raw material of reality which the Bible assumes and interprets for me when I bring it to my reading.