There is a universal distinction in Indo-European languages between knowing about a fact and knowing personally, between
1 wissen (saber Spanish, savoir French, scire Latin) and
2 kennen (conocer, connaître, cognoscere).
“Science” from scire “to know” is analytic. The root meaning of “science” is to “cut up,” so it is about knowledge by analysis, not synthesis. In fact the word “shit” in English comes from that same root, because excrement is “cut off” from the body.
Enlightenment rationalists used experiment and reason, both of them in an impersonal non-commital sort of way, being suspicious of the mystical– divorcing as it were “experiment” from “experience.” They had important axioms: Truth should be able to be interpersonally verified, and the universe is knowable because God is good and wouldn’t deceive our senses and reason. But truth without Truth led to deism and onward down to atheism.
“I cut open the body and I can’t find the soul.”
“Did it ever occur to you that the very cutting destroyed the soul?”
Micah Tillman reminded me again of this distinction in his blog today, where he comments on the familiar fact that pisteuo in Koine Greek means both faith and faithfulness.
1. faith, of the mind, analytic, held at arm’s length intellectually;
2. faithfulness, of the deeds, synthetic, embraced personally. “Cognoscere” is to about “personal knowledge,” to use Michael Polanyi’s term, and personal commitment.
Contrast Jesus before Pilate:
1 truth, academic, according to Pilate;
2. Jesus the Truth, personal.
Hear C. S. Lewis in his essay “Is Theology Poetry?” in Weight of Glory: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen:”
1. “not only because I see it” (analysis and experimental observation), but
2. “because by it I see everything else” (commitment).
Michael Ward has a great new book, Planet Narnia, about C. S. Lewis’s childrens’ stories. (A great review by N. T. Wright is here. ) In Planet Narnia Ward tells us that C. S. Lewis distinguished between
1. looking at a beam of light; and
2. looking along a beam of light.
(The C. S. Lewis quote is here in context.) Don’t just analyze the light; allow the light to serve its telos.
I was already prompted to think about this over the past weekend even before Micah’s blog entry. My first prompt was reading a fresh accurate translation of Exodus 20:3Exodus 20:3
English: World English Bible - WEB
3?You shall have no other gods before me.:
“Thou shalt have no other gods between your face and Mine.”
The Hebrew for “before me” also means “in my face.” The traditional translation imagines (analytically) gods lined up along a line. Elohim is first; all the others rank distant seconds. This new more personalistic translation (thank you Thom Gardner) suggests that even in the Ten Words, God intended personal relationship not just legalistic obedience.
My second prompt was yesterday while I was listening to the Easter sermon at my church–a sermon on Romans 10:9Romans 10:9
English: World English Bible - WEB
9?that if you will confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved., the very verse I was reading when I first trusted Jesus. There you have the 1-2 punch:
1 believe in your heart that Jesus resurrected (faith), and
2 confess with your mouth (faithfulness).
In my Ph.D. dissertation in 1979, I reviewed the artificial intelligence (AI) literature to find out how proponents of “strong AI” would ever bridge the gap between “knowing about” and “knowing personally.” The best that they could come up with– the best that they still can come up with 30 years later–is that personal knowledge is “precompiled” knowledge. But precompiling “X causes Y to die” into “X kills Y” does not bootstrap us nearly far enough up the “information pyramid” from mere data to wisdom:
As St. Agustine says, “believe that you may know.”
Get Wisdom. You can only get it by personally being committed to Him, for Wisdom is a person, not a proposition.
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