Leadership Journal

Job titles in churches keep getting more interesting. In the old days, they were simply labels: pastor, associate pastor, youth pastor. Now there are worship architects, lead directional shepherds, experience producers, and chief spiritual officers.

I'll give you another possibility: teacher of the nations.

Yes, you.

Could mean a raise.

It comes from a new book by Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today. I'll give you a dumbed-down version in a nut shell, although the book itself is a dumbed-down version of what will eventually be a much more technical work on epistemology designed for professional philosophers. So this is several iterations less intelligent, kind of like the third Michael Keaton clone in Multiplicity.

The book deals with the loss of moral and spiritual knowledge today. Actually, it doesn't argue that we don't have moral knowledge. People generally know that random cruelty is wrong and that babies deserve to be loved. What we have lost is confidence in the idea of moral knowledge. We have come to think of knowledge as something that can be established only by science. Physics and chemistry are fields where knowledge is possible; we think of values as established by preference or feeling or tradition.

"Don't impose your values on me," we'll say, though we do not say, "Don't impose your zoology or algebra or calculation of interest rates on me."

In some circles, the notion of any kind of knowledge at all is suspect. However, the reality is that we cannot live without knowledge. Knowledge is the representation of truth, arrived at by appropriate measures, that enables us to deal with reality. No one willingly goes to a car mechanic who lacks knowledge. We want a mechanic who knows how to fix cars. The same is true of heart surgeons and gardeners and anyone else whose work we take seriously. We always demand knowledge when we have to deal with reality. And with knowledge comes authority and the responsibility to guide other people.

But where do we go when we need to learn how to live?

Dallas writes of how our institutions of higher learning no longer claim to be places that teach people how to live wisely or well. There are no "departments of reality" or "departments of becoming a good person."

The fundamental questions of life are, What is real? What is virtue? Who is well off? Who is a good person? And how does one become a good person?

These are questions about which it is widely assumed in our day that there is no knowledge; there are only beliefs or preferences.

Yet we are starved for answers. More than ever it is true today, "my people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge." Our mothers used to tell us, "You know better." And we do. We know—don't just believe—that human beings are of inestimable value. We know that love is our highest calling. We know—don't just believe—that right and wrong stand on their own quite apart from any individual's preferences.

So where can people turn to knowledge about the questions that matter most? Not to universities, not to media, not to pop psychology, not to corporations. That doesn't mean that many people in these fields are not wise or good. But they are not fields that claim to present knowledge about what we most need to know.

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