Per Caritatem

By Dru Johnson

If we consider the implications of Part I and II, then we must come to terms with knowing as a fundamentally personal act that is skillful, embodied (even cognitive acts of knowing), and situated in space and time. Knowing is personal as a fiduciary relationship with the known. In other words, you have to commit yourself to knowing in order to know. That means that epistemology is a risky endeavor on all fronts, even knowing the truths of and from God. And this is what we find in the scriptures.

I find that Luke is a clear case of intentional epistemology in biblical literature. In the introduction to the Gospel, we are told that Luke intends for us to have “…certainty concerning the things you have been taught (1:4)”[1] By the time we arrive at the end of Luke’s Gospel (never mind the retelling in Acts 1), what do we find? Do we find a scene that instills in us utter certainty in what we have been taught? Not really.

What we find is a mystified and bumbling group of disciples hanging onto the only thing they know at that point: the resurrected Jesus. The disciples barely understood from whence they had come and were apparently blind as to what will happen next, despite numerous foretellings. This depicts most of the epistemological life of characters lauded as faithful in the sacred texts: confused, trying to make it work their own way, yet still hanging on to what God has promised through them.

Any explanation that is faithful to the epistemological life of the biblical narrative will have to dispense with strictly propositional views of knowing. While Polanyi was probably not a convicted believer of Christianity, his epistemology dovetails nicely onto the biblical model of knowing.[2] This is why theologians of many stripes have picked up on Polanyi’s epistemology.[3]
Why is this epistemology becoming more attractive in the prolegomena to theology? I personally think that the intellectual haut and desire for domestication in theology has worn off. There is a deep dissatisfaction with the mining of scriptural propositions for some absolute sense of certain propositional knowledge. And I do not believe this is what God gives as his pattern for assuredness in the text.

Consider Abram’s interaction with YHWH in Genesis 15. In verse 8, Abram directly and brazenly asked, “O Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it [the land]?” To understand biblical epistemology, we must pay careful attention to God’s answer here. God does not say anything! He does something. He performs a self-maledictory oath ceremony and doesn’t even let Abram participate.

Again, knowing cannot be captured in propositions here and this is an instance where we would really want propositions to soothe our Enlightened nerves if we were Abram. But what could God possibly say at that point to “prove” anything to Abram? He had already begun by previously saying, “Hey, I’m the God who brought you out of Ur.” The point is, for theology and for philosophy of religion, a Judeo-Christian approach to epistemology must be able to account for the kinds of examples above. Our epistemology must be able to speak of confidence when you feel like nothing is as you thought it would be (re the disciples in Luke 24). It must also be able to engage the idea that some of the most preeminent knowing is not propositional and could never be propositional (re the self-maledictory oath of Genesis 15).

So we must sincerely consider whether it is prudent to attempt the adaptation of rigorously propositional theories of knowing onto a narrative that clearly doesn’t depict knowing in a propositional framework. If we take the time to trace the trajectory of “Peter coming to know that Jesus is The Messiah” through the historical texts, we would see that propositional accounts are going to fail us. We might end up asking questions like, “Does Peter know that Jesus is The Messiah at the transfigurative account?” While this appears to be a reasonable course of inquiry, it truly fails to capture the complexity of the situation.

At the Transfiguration, Peter is still trying to put all the pieces together; to connect the dots. Even if we answer, “Yes” to our question, there is evidence to suggest that Peter still has not connected the dots up into Acts 15 and beyond. As I stated in Part II, all courses of inquiry initially ask the wrong questions. So theology must also realize the bad questions it has asked.

Just think of when people have come and demanded an answer from you to one of their questions. They ask you to “prove” the Trinity or, “Just tell me yes or no: Are the body and soul one thing on not?” Nietzsche berates this type of thinking and I tend to agree that the reason these kinds of inquiry miss the point is that they do not seek to enter the narrative; or trajectory of knowing, if you will. There is no submission to authority. It is artificially looking at knowledge strictly from only the knower/known perspective. By answering “yes” or “no”, have you really ever helped someone to come to know something (as I ask a rhetorical “yes or no” question)? Theology must also enter the narrative and the task of theology has the same structure of knowing: knower, known, authority, subsidiary particulars, proximal/distal focus, points of illumination, and more. I will have to leave it at that for the role of Polanyi’s epistemology in the task of theology. I hope it is enough to tease those who are interested into pursuit.

Finally I want to speak to the structure of doubt itself. Doubt, in popular Christianity, is usually thought of negatively. Consider the negative connotation of Doubting Thomas.[4] Polanyi’s epistemology doesn’t allow for purely abstract claims, so a proposition P, should actually be stated, “Dru Johnson asserts P”. In the same light, there is no such thing as pure doubt or skepticism. Trevor Hart, from the University of St. Andrews, summarizes Polanyi this way: “Thus every doubt has a fiduciary structure and is rooted in a set of faith commitments which for so long as they support the doubt, cannot themselves be doubted.”[5]

The critical/skeptical view assumes that we can critique, or be skeptical of an idea, without any commitments. I can just use this trump card called “reason” to doubt your view and my doubt is merely a skeptical view towards your beliefs. Polanyi thinks this is fundamentally mistaken. There is no such thing as an ESPN World Championship of Faith Commitments Poker Game. We don’t get to see all the hands from the removed view of a spectator. The reality is that we are all playing the game. We are all holding a hand both dealt to us and reshuffled by us. In order to be critical or skeptical of another hand, another worldview, we must simultaneously AND unflinchingly believe in our current hand.

If this is true, then we must also reorient our common notion of doubt away from biblical phraseology such as “hardening the heart” or “turning from God” and toward the usage in John 20. The actual counsel that Jesus gave to Thomas in John 20 was, “Do not disbelieve (apistos), but rather believe (pistos).” Jesus does not admonish doubt as a purely skeptical disposition towards some proposition. Thomas, at the very least, demanded something more substantial than a mere proposition (re pierced hands and side). And as Jesus accommodates Thomas’ request, he gives Thomas a nonpropositional experience that could never be articulated with effect.
Doubt, under Polanyi’s and the scripture’s epistemology is a seedbed of belief. It is not the slippery slope to wrath and condemnation. This has immense implications for apologetics and Missiology, but we will have to leave it lay.

Notes
[1] In a post-Enlightenment world, it is still befuddling as to why an English translator would render the Greek asphaleian as “certainty”. The term actually means something closer to “firmness” or “confidence” and the narrative bears out the true intention of such a statement.
[2] Some will see this as a paganizing of The Faith, but I would side with Francis Schaeffer who would most likely commend to us that this legitimizes The Faith. The truth is faithful inside scientific frameworks or anywhere else.
[3] E.g. John Frame, Trevor Hart, Kevin Vanhoozer, Alasdair MacIntyre, and also there is much similitude in the Roman Catholic thought of Karl Rahner and Bernard Lonergan amongst others. I am not sure if Stanley Hauerwas is intimately familiar with Polanyi, but his idea of narrative theology is certainly commensurate with Polanyi.
[4] I believe that Thomas was being the faithful disciple in his challenge in John 20. There is, at least, the ability to misread and misapply this passage.
[5] Trevar Hart, Faith Thinking, 58.