As Christians and church leaders, we’re forever on a quest for understanding—God, ourselves, our context, the Bible, each other. But we rarely stop and think about the way we do it.
After reading Christian philosopher Esther Lightcap Meek’s A Little Manual for Knowing, I built a church staff retreat around reflections from the book. It became an opportunity for us to reflect on our approaches to such questions as:
- What does it look like to fill a new role?
- How do we decide what the people of our church and community need?
- What does it mean to be a faithful spouse and parent?
- What decisions should I make about the future?
- How do I know how to answer questions from those I disciple?
- What does it mean to serve as a family?
- What does it mean for Christ to be the center of all we do?
- I’m sensing a new direction coming in my life. Is God in it?
- How do I choose where God is leading this church?
We didn’t all walk away with answers, but we all walked away with affirmation and tools for new ways of understanding ourselves and the work of God. We were invited into a process of listening and learning that had the power to shape us.
Recently, I was honored to have a conversation with Meek, who is a writer and professor of philosophy at Geneva College, and visiting professor of apologetics at Redeemer Seminary in Dallas, Texas. – Mandy
Mandy: The moment I heard your phrase “loving in order to know,” I loved it—even though I didn’t know what it meant. Could you sum it up for us?
Esther: We generally think that knowledge is information. It’s not that knowledge isn’t information, but “knowledge-as-information” is a posture that we ought to reconsider. The best knowing comes from loving in order to know.
We don’t collect information and then decide whether or not we love. We don’t get information right if we don’t love first. This is because knowing that invites understanding involves covenantal relationship. That starts with love, and then pledge. So in the loving in order to know approach (what I call “covenant epistemology”), the knower/yet-to-be-known relationship is more like a relationship of persons where you’re getting to know somebody. Like in a wedding—you covenant to, and in advance of, what you do not yet know, in order to invite it. There’s the intimacy of relationship.
How have you seen people practically apply this?
One of my favorite stories came from a recording engineer. He said, “Because of your work I do my job better, faster and have more fun.” He told me he had been working on the knowledge-as-information approach. As a perfectionist he figured that, when working on a record, his job was to perfect each track; and when he put it together he would have a perfect result. But instead, he learned that he needed to indwell each track as part of a larger pattern. That released him to confidence, and artistry, and a better product.
I had someone else see the potential for a business seminar, which I went on to develop. I know of a church that used it for Lent as a church discernment process. Noted therapist Dan Allender (Professor of Counseling Psychology at The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology) recommends the Little Manual as a guide in making decisions. He actually invited me to practice on him in front of an audience about his own life change!
Part of my agenda with A Little Manual for Knowing is to help people see that knowing works this way in every field. I think it’s significant to say that how you do spirituality well and how you golf well are similar. This similarity of “knowing ventures” offers pastors and laypeople a genuine connection of respect.
Has this philosophy grown from your own story?
Yes. I grew up in a Bible-believing family and church, and knew all the biblical answers in a certain theological tradition. But as I moved into my middle school years, I had two burning questions: “How do I know that God exists?” and “How do I know there’s a material world outside of my mind?” I was a baby Cartesian! (Everybody in the modern west is.) But I thought having those questions was sin, so I never voiced them.
In high school, I read Francis Schaeffer and realized that my questions were not sin, they were philosophy. That fired my imagination—but I didn’t know you could study philosophy. When, in college, I found out that you could, it took me 12 hours to decide that was what I needed to do. Then my whole search became philosophical, but I was still searching for the same thing.
During my Ph.D studies, someone gave me Michael Polanyi’s book, Personal Knowledge. He had this sentence that he repeated frequently but never really developed: “You know you have made contact with reality if you have a sense of the possibility of indeterminate future manifestations.” That’s how someone who has made a discovery is convinced that they’ve made a discovery—sensing future possibilities that you cannot currently name. That sentence was the water of life to me. What you have is a sense of possibility.
“Our choice is also a choice about how we want to see life. Is a vision of life, of reality, as finally about love and shalom something that we can believe? Or are we compelled to think that ultimately reality is personless, meaningless, chaotic, warring?” -From A Little Manual for Knowing
If you listen to scientists, or even just someone who is making a new friend, they say the same thing—it’s a hope that you cannot name at the point when you say, “Hey, this is significant.” The same thing works with a clue. How do you know that something is a clue? At the point that you can confirm it’s a clue, you’ve solved the mystery! But then you no longer need to rely on it as a clue.
I ended up writing my dissertation on Polanyi’s sentence. In it, I was still trying to crack my own crazy question: “How do I know there’s a material world outside of my own mind?” Polanyi’s sentence was the only thing I ever found that gave me a clue. In my earlier book, Loving to Know, I tell how I connected that magical sentence about indeterminate future manifestations with the signature of God.
I realized all along that my search for truth had been God wooing me. Now I’m practically intoxicated with reality.
I can hear the joy in your voice.
What we need to do is find where people are excited and blow on that like you would blow on a coal. Care invites Reality. So if you’ve got a dead, wooden person who is besmirched by the two-dimensionality of the modern west, there’s nevertheless got to be something they’re excited about—it might be horses, or knitting. What you need to do is “blow” on the coals of what they care about. You can help them spread that love to all their other knowing.
What we need to do is find where people are excited and blow on that like you would blow on a coal. Care invites Reality.
But this feels so unlike all the ways we’ve been taught to learn.
Absolutely! The academy’s default is knowledge-as-information. But as Jesus said, “If you want to know the truth of what I’m saying, you have to do what I say.” There’s no guarantee that the authoritative word is going to make sense to you unless you do what it says.
This is so different from how we’ve been taught to learn in our culture. How do we overcome so many shaping influences?
There’s always somewhere you can find knowing happening in the right way.
Here’s how it happens all through education: great teachers. Teachers need to see that the educational ingredient that makes the most difference is themselves. What teachers teach is themselves. Because of the knowledge-as-information approach, we tend to think of the passion that the teacher brings as an add-on. It’s really the heart of the matter.
That’s true for pastors as well.
Yes! The good news about this is that once you start to get covenant epistemology, it’s retro-active. Any teacher or any class plants seeds. Because knowing is transformation, more than information, those seeds can come to life at any time. It’s like when Joseph, in Genesis, says, “You meant it for evil but God meant it for good.” We’re continually, in God’s grace, reinterpreting and seeing fresh patterns that go back and redeem things from our past. What you want, when you’re looking for an authoritative guide, is someone who loves the subject and who loves you.
For pastors tempted by our performance culture, sometimes it feels like the congregation is an audience to perform for—or critics to convince—as opposed to people to love. How do we guide and love?
People who are transformed to understand that knowledge is transformation then spread transformation to others. It gently disarms and subverts. It’s winsome. It restores people to themselves. You’re inviting people into wholeness as humans. This is fundamentally human. But it’s also fundamentally divine.
How have you seen people who have taken on your approach become better at experiencing God?
If one is going to come to God through scripture, one needs to realize that the bible is not information. When your mother says “Clean your room” you don’t say “True or False,” you say “Yes Ma’am.” Because we have this information model of knowledge, we mistakenly think that the first thing we do with scripture or a sermon is collect information. What we need to see is that we’re in the presence of an authoritative guide and so what we need to do instead is love and pledge. We need to do that before we even understand.
If we’re going to treat scripture as the place where God comes, we can’t be in information mode. Information mode is about control and power.
If we’re going to treat scripture as the place where God comes, we can’t be in information mode. Information mode is about control and power. We just assume in the western tradition that if you get down to the bits of something, you’re down to the real deal. It’s not that collecting info is bad—it’s bad if that is your vision of knowing. Starting with a commitment to love actually does information better. Pledging yourself to the yet-to-be-known renders diligent information collecting a meaningful overture of love.
Do different people “love” and “pledge” in different ways?
I think so. Inviting the real involves a kind of etiquette. If reality is person-like, how do you behave properly in order to woo it? You don’t go in and help yourself. You must let it come to you.
So how do you welcome it? I do think it at least partly depends on the person. There are some strategies that we find that work for us. For me, personally, it’s delight. That’s my middle name! I’m a very excitable, childlike person. So I’m liable to be bouncing around in awe of just a flower. That’s childlike delight. I don’t think of myself as “having expertise.” I often feel like a bumbling teacher when it comes to articulating things. But I’m ecstatic about my subject and I’m ecstatic about my students. And they know it. It seems to me that they blossom in my delight.
In a post-modern culture, how do we acknowledge our subjectivity while affirming truth?
Well, covenant epistemology gives us an innovative, fresh, positive, third alternative to both modernism and post-modernism. It’s not that our subjectivity keeps us from reality. Instead it’s the very thing that launches us into reality. When we think knowledge only involves the things we’re consciously focusing on, that means that knowledge has to be articulated. We think everything else is subjective. But there are other ways to know, that can’t be expressed or communicated as information—like the balance you keep while riding your bike. It’s “subsidiary.” It’s inarticulable, and it’s personal, but it is hardly subjective. It is palpable and trainable and capable of immense expertise and artistry. Your embodied subsidiaries are the very thing that allows you to love in order to know.
This is what it is to be human. We are vantage points in the world.
Mandy Smith serves as lead pastor at University Christian Church in Cincinnati, Ohio, and is the author of Making a Mess and Meeting God: Unruly Ideas and Everyday Experiments for Worship
