Kreitsauce's Musings

Many years ago, Thomas à Kempis made the observation that became the title of this post. Truth must exist in order for us to really know anything. If there is no such thing as absolute truth, if right and wrong don’t exist, we can’t really know anything. What exactly is knowledge? How do we know anything?

Some things are not prerequisites for knowledge. Absolute certainty isn’t. You don’t have to be completely confident in what you know in order to know it. Think of a person who is learning to ride a bike, or give a monologue in a speech class. They may not feel like they know it. They may not know how they know it. But, time and time again, a child learns to ride his bike, a freshman in college manages to pull off a speech.

Frankly, there aren’t many things in this life that you and I can say: “It’s impossible for me to be wrong on this.” We’re pretty much limited to math, some basic logical principles, and some experiences when it comes to having proof for things and being absolutely certain. In other words, we don’t have to remove all doubt and defeat all counter-arguments in order to say that we know something. Absolute certainty is a good thing, but it is not a necessary thing. Secondly, knowing “how you know” something is not a prerequisite for Knowledge, but I’ve already mentioned that in another post.

Now we turn to what knowledge is, and we discover that there are three different types of knowledge. At the most basic level, there is awareness. A baby is aware of feeling secure or perhaps a cat on a table, but she doesn’t necessarily have a true understanding of what security is or even what a cat is conceptually, nor does it have the linguistic skills to even explain how it feels or say the word “cat.” It can see and experience both without going any further. Some knowledge is this sort of “awareness” knowledge. It can be experienced and observed, but that may be all. Secondly you and I may have skills that are based on knowledge; we have know how. We can take our awareness and observation and do something with it to interact with reality. Finally, there is propositional knowledge. This sort of knowledge is believing something to be true because of reason and logic.

How can I know anything about Christianity to be true? I can be aware of truth even if I don’t know everything about that Truth with certainty, interact with truth, and – primarily- believe it because the Bible is replete with propositional knowledge that is both logical and reasonable.

Hosea 4:6 says: “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children.”

Notice that God doesn’t say that His people don’t have faith. He says that they have rejected the knowledge necessary to grow faith. Knowledge requires a combination of reason and experience to interpret reality, and Christians need to learn to be confident that the Bible explains reality very well. When we say “belief” these days, do we mean “I hope it’s true”? Do we think of “faith” as being inferior to “fact”? I hope this isn’t the case, because that’s not how Christians have behaved historically. In some cases, faith and fact are identical. This is what I mean when I say that there is a difference between faith and “blind” faith.

While I don’t agree with everything that Michael Green believes, his book Evangelism and the Early Church is quite interesting. It’s a short history of the first four centuries of Christianity and how early Christians evangelized the lost. One of the three factors that he states is one that is largely missing in today’s church: a persuasive theology. We have theology and we have persuasion of various sorts (evangelistic meetings and ministries, apologetics, etc.), but we don’t combine the two anymore. When is the last time you heard someone bother with theology in a salvation presentation?

Our emphasis today is very different. In every other area of knowledge, we exalt professors and professionals, but in Christianity we exalt the megachurch. These pastors- many of whom teach very little doctrine- are invited to interviews, write books, and produce “teaching” material, but they are simply not qualified because of their lack of doctrinal teaching and training to speak authoritatively on Christian matters. Popularity supersedes quality.

On the other hand, there are some who are adamantly against using reason and theology (apologetics) to make a case. How different we are from Justin Martyr who wrote in his First Apology this attempt to persuade Emperor Hadrian to convert:

Reason requires those who are truly pious and philosophers should honor and cherish the truth alone, scorning merely to follow the opinions of the ancients, if they are worthless. In these pages we do not come before you with flattery, or as if making a speech to win your favor, but asking you to give judgment according to strict and exact inquiry- not moved by prejudice or respect for superstitious men, or by irrational impulse.

That’s the kind of faith Christians need to have: Faith based on Reason. The Bible is a reasonable Book. Our worldview must be reasonable as well. Our interpretation of experience must be based on reason. It isn’t that I believe that man’s reason is the measure of all things. I simply believe that it’s time we realized that the knowledge of the Holy truly is understanding.

If that’s the case, what are the implications for us if we reject knowledge? Could it be that our nation and American Christianity are both on the path to destruction simply because we refuse to seek knowledge and a faith made firm by reason?