One of my favorite verses in Scripture might seem like a strange verse to have as a favorite, I Corinthians 8:2:
If anyone thinks he knows something he does not yet know as he ought to know.
It took a long time for me to appreciate and truly value my ignorance. The tendency of our younger selves is to think we know way more than we actually do. My younger self, probably in my twenties, came across the cliché, “the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know.” It slowly dawned on me after two or three decades how true that cliché really is. God has blessed me with an insatiable curiosity to learn, and by this point into my seventh decade of life, I know a lot, especially compared to normal people. As I’ve grown in my knowledge over the decades, the cliché has become increasingly profound in its implications for my life, as I will try to explain.
First the word epistemology. It means the study (ology) of knowing (from Greek episteme, “knowledge”). We might think our knowing is straight forward and obvious. It is not, at all, as you quickly learn in the history of philosophy dealing with epistemology. For Christians and orthodox Jews, we’re taught in Scripture that knowing is possible and real, not in the least problematic. In fact in Scripture the word know and its variants is used between 1163 (NIV) and 1362 (ESV) times. That’s a lot of knowing! So Paul’s approach to knowledge is not calling for any kind of skepticism, that we can’t know anything. Quite the contrary. Before I get to the context; I want to share my inspiration for this post.
In this video Jordan Peterson and a handful of other scholars discuss the book of Exodus. These are two hour plus discussions that took place over a week early last year. Near the end and at approximately two hours and fourteen minutes, he says the following in the context of the passage about Moses and the burning bush (Exodus 3):
From the Sermon on the Mount, being poor in spirit means being brought low enough to be humble enough to be ready to receive. It’s a reference to pride, and a call to a particular kind of humility. He decided you could be friends with what you didn’t know. If you were the former, you try to prove your point all the time. Once you realize the depths of your ignorance, and what you don’t know is inexhaustible, and my troubles are inexhaustible, I better have an inexhaustible source to call on, and I can certainly call on the inexhaustibility of my own ignorance. It reverses everything because all of a sudden what you don’t know is your greatest hope because you can open up the landscape of revelation to what you don’t know.
I love that phrase, “the inexhaustibility of my own ignorance.” It’s so Jordan Peterson, and so true! The reason is that all knowledge, every single thing that can be known is of, from, and to God, as Paul says, “For from him and through him and for him are all things.” That means it’s a bottomless ocean in which we get to swim literally forever. And as Peterson implies, all knowledge is revelation, something given to us by God, and when we know this, in our seeking knowledge and learning we’ll be like the proverbial kid in candy store. It will be fun and thrilling and exciting, and so very gratifying. And unlike candy, we can never get enough.
Getting back to Paul. When we “think we know something” we shut ourselves off from “the landscape of revelation” (i.e., all of reality), as if somehow we own or possess knowledge like it’s ours, almost as if we made it up! Which gets us to where the rubber meets the road—love. Most Christians when they think of this chapter don’t think of verse 2, but think of the phrase, “knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.” This is an excellent example of why taking Scripture verses, or part of verses, out of context is a good way to distort it’s meaning. It has turned too many Christians into anti-intellectuals as if knowledge in itself is bad. In chapter 8 Paul is discussing the problem of food sacrificed to idols, a big issue in the thoroughly pagan port city of Corinth. Here is how Paul introduces the context of his remarks:
Now concerning food offered to idols: we know that “all of us possess knowledge.” This “knowledge” puffs up, but love builds up. 2 If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know. 3 But if anyone loves God, he is known by God.
There is no question, we can know the theological reality of the unreality of idols. They, the gods to whom the animals are sacrificed, do not exist. Our knowing that, however, doesn’t mean we are superior to those who believe they are real. That knowledge doesn’t have to “puff us up”. And our being known by God is infinitely more important than anything we can know.
Everything turns on what we do with our knowledge. We only possess it because it objectively exists outside of us. As I said, we don’t own it, it’s not ours. And since we didn’t create our brains or nervous systems or body, or anything else, how can possessing it make us think we’re any more special than anyone else? Everything we have, including our knowledge, has been given to us and is to be used in the service of others. As Jesus told us, if we really want to find our lives, and to have life that is really life, then we’ll lose our life for his sake. And that means like him, who did not come to be served but to serve, we also exist to serve others.
Who Doesn’t Want to be Right? And the Curse of Absolute Certainty
I heard this phrase not too long ago from a friend about an acquaintance of his who asked him this question. It was of course a rhetorical question, the answer as obvious as the question is silly. No, I want to be wrong. Yes, of course I want to be right, but I was deeply ambivalent about the question itself; it just didn’t sit right with me. Which brings me to a conviction about knowledge I’ve developed over the years and a certain kind of very knowledgeable person. I wouldn’t call them know-it-alls because they aren’t arrogant or unpleasant people. They don’t “look down their noses” at others. In fact quite the opposite. They want to help others and are generous with their knowledge. What was it about such people that rubbed me the wrong way? They embodied that answer to the question: they believe they are absolutely right! And they are absolutely certain about it! That, I fear, is a dangerous place to be.
The problem of absolute certainty, what I call a curse, goes back a long way in the philosophical discussion over epistemology. It’s a curse because it’s a lie, a result of sin, that finite creatures can have knowledge of an absolute sort. A certain pious French philosopher and mathematician is responsible for this virus making its way into the bloodstream of Western culture. I refer to him a lot in my writing because this is such a critical topic in our war against secularism. His name is René Descartes (1596-1650). There was a growing skepticism in the 17th century, and he was determined to do something about it. The problem was that his answer was to insist that knowledge of an absolute sort was possible for human beings based on their reason, that man’s rational capabilities could achieve absolute certainty. He started his journey to this conclusion by doubting everything that could be doubted, and discovered the only thing he could not doubt was his existence. How did he arrive at this conclusion? His own thinking. So he made famous the phrase in Latin, Cogito Ergo Sum, or I think therefore I am, and became the father of modern philosophy. In the history of Christian Western civilization this was a disaster of biblical proportions.
You may think I’m being hyperbolic, if not melodramatic, and I’m overstating the negative implications of a statement that is self-evidently true. You might reply, of course I can think so therefore I must exist, but can you really know that? Be absolutely certain of that? When you trace intellectual history from Descartes to the present day, you quickly learn it is not at all self-evidently true. In a hundred years it led to the skepticism of David Hume (1711-1776) who concluded reason alone leads us to a dead end where knowledge isn’t possible at all. He was not happy about this, in fact quite depressed, but he had to be honest. Very few people in the history of philosophy were that honest, but eventually there was another who turned out to be the greatest prophet of the horrors of the 20th century, Friedrich Nietzsche. According to Walter Kauffmann in his biography of Nietzsche, he says things in his writings that abound in prophecies of doom:
If the doctrines . . . of the lack of any cardinal distinction between man and animal . . . are hurled into the people for another generation, if mankind realizes the unique worth of the human being has evaporated, and that no up and down remains, and if the tremendous event that we have killed God reaches the ears of man—then night will close in, an age of barbarism begins, and there will be wars such as have never happened on earth.
Next to this paragraph in the book I wrote, “The 20th Century!!!”
It is important to understand that it is not just skepticism that caused the barbarism of the 20th century, but the reason for it—the death of God. Nietzsche lamented this, but as a convinced atheist he believed God wasn’t an option for man because, well, God didn’t exist. So he believed human beings needed to create another moral foundation for civilization. Good luck with that! The moral foundation of Christianity, that “slave religion” as he called it, was gone, and the vacuum was going to be filled by something. It was the horrific paganism that Judaism and Christianity saved the world from, this time in the form of secularism. Enlightened man could no longer believe in the gods, but he could believe in himself! How’s that workin’ out for him?
The Only Source of Knowledge is God
What happened with Descartes was the idea that our knowing could start with ourselves, and then move out from there. No it can’t. The reason is that we are not God, which is shocking to learn for many sinners. What do you mean I’m not God? Of course I am. I get to call the shots in my life. I get to determine what is right and wrong for me. I determine my own meaning. The result of such thinking is that in America in 2022 a record number of people killed themselves, around 50,000. How many more tried? Add to this the dysfunction of broken marriages, dangerous and dilapidated cities, depression, and one could go on.
The solution is to start with God, and to accept we don’t know squat no matter how much we know. I remember Chuck Swindoll saying at a service when I went to his church in southern California say if you think you’re indispensable, put your hand in a bucket of water and pull it out. How quickly the water fills the space is how indispensable you are. The Westminster Shorter Catechism’s Question number 1 asks the most important question of our existence: “What is the chief end of man?” What is the purpose or telos of our existence? The answer: “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” The reason there is so much misery in the world is because secular man thinks his chief end is to glorify himself and enjoy himself till he goes into the ground and rots. Well, that’s inspiring! The problem as we see all around us, there is no joy in that.
The beauty of Christianity is that God really does want us to be joyful, to enjoy life, to take pleasure in whatever we put our hands or minds to, whatever we create, whatever we experience. I’ve never liked the word happiness because I don’t know what it means. Joy, by contrast, communicates satisfaction, fulfillment, like seeing your newborn child for the first time. That is joy! Seeing indescribable beauty in nature, or hearing it in music, or marveling at your tastebuds as you experience the sweetness of an apple. Even our fleeting accomplishments can bring us joy if they are pursued in Christ, and we know they really don’t matter at the end of the day. Only He matters! That is the road to using all we have to God’s glory, including our knowledge, in love and service to others because we do it all for Him, to Him, and through Him. That is the only source of true fulfillment, now and forever.
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