Loving to Know: Covenant Epistemology
An Excerpt
Introduction
This is a book about how we know.
Knowing is something we all do all the time. Most of us think we are pretty good at knowing throughout our experience. So it asks a lot of the reader to accept that a tome on this subject is worth reading.
Further, this book claims that something has infected our knowing that thwarts it, yet it is something people generally do not recognize. So to prove its value, the book first has to convince you of the reality of the need. To do this it must move upstream in a strong current of a certain popular savvy about knowing.
Quite possibly to reduce the appeal even further, some would say, this discussion has to be philosophical. How we know what we know is a philosophical question, and the topic is called epistemology. This book represents my own creative epistemological proposal.
I am one of those odd people who think that epistemology is almost the most important and practical thing everybody needs to consider. This calling compels me always to try to acquaint everybody with philosophy, and to talk about these hard-to-express matters in a way that invites everybody to indwell and be shaped by them.
On the other hand, I have every confidence that plenty of ordinary people are odd, if I am, in feeling that epistemology matters. Even if we haven’t known that it is epistemology, we have realized many times that something related to knowing is gumming up the works of our lives. Because we haven’t known what it is nor had the tools to begin to cope with it, the problems have continued to plague us. Epistemology is important to all of us.
Professional, in-house, philosophy inadvertently locks up its treasures rather than winsomely adapting them for the rest of us. The onus placed on guild language means that philosophers seeking to speak with the uninitiated have to revoke the guild. So be it; while I respect the value of formal philosophical exchange, I feel no lockstep loyalty to guild language. If all people actually live responses to philosophical questions such as how we know, then philosophical proposals should expressed for ordinary people as their audience.
But then, for people with no previous philosophical awareness raising, which, sadly, is the vast majority in the United States, tackling a popular philosophy book like Loving to Know means exercising courage to enter into some discussions in which they feel the discomfort of half-understanding. Hospitably welcoming beginning philosophy students is what I love best to do. But I repeatedly tell them: you have to learn to be okay with half-understanding. Thicken your skin! Hear my encouragement! Philosophy is difficult, and it isn’t that you lack the capacity or the need to study it. It tackles life’s most fundamental orientations, the commitments that shape our very language and rationality; so of course it is difficult. But it is also deeply valuable and practical. It has widespread personal and cultural impact. I once thought proficiency in the discipline would eliminate my own half-understanding; instead, I learned to thicken my skin. And once you get acquainted with my epistemological proposals, you will see why I am confident that half-understanding is nevertheless productive.
I believe that the separation between guild and street in philosophy is itself in part a result of the very problem this book labors to identify and heal. To write a guild-approved epistemology is to perpetuate the problem rather than offer the subverting cure. So I take an approach that invites in the uninitiated as its primary audience. And though we have philosophical discussions, and though I believe them to be expert philosophy critically valuable for the guild, the conversation stays ordinary. Kitchen table philosophy.
Professional philosophers may well find this disappointing. I hope they will see that the book’s approach reflects its epistemological proposal. It should not be seen as sub-par so much as creatively subversive. But to see that involves personal investment, formation, in this epistemology. Consonant with the epistemology it commends, this book offers a case that is intrinsically a practice. So, again on the other hand, I am confident that for this very reason this book offers philosophers, and scholars generally, a critical contribution to the professional conversation and to academic training.
This book proposes that we take as a paradigm, of all acts of knowing, the unfolding, covenantally constituted, interpersonal relationship. The book itself is the journal of my own unfolding coming to know, my search for “the face that will not go away.” I have tried to reflect both of these things in the structure of the book itself: it unfolds, conversation by conversation, foray by foray. I do this both for integrity’s sake, to prompt readers’ feel of the thing, and to invite you into the conversation.
So I have taken some creative liberties with the expected timeless linearity of books and arguments. Most noticeably, I characterize my probing engagement of others’ work as successive conversations. Conversations are interpersonal exchanges typified by deep, indwelling listening, and then by a response in which the thoughtful participant creatively melds insights gleaned with others previously acquired. And by conversation I do not mean noncommittal, information-passing chit-chat; I have in mind conversations in which we assume the posture of mutual submission with a loved and trusted friend whom each invites to speak into their lives.
My argument unfolds conversation by conversation, the way a group of close friends on a lengthy walking tour venture might walk for awhile next to this one or that one of the group. Then, as those hikers might take stock together around a campfire at the end of the day’s journey—also as on a hairdresser adds pieces of hair round by round in corn rows or French braids—so at chapters’ ends I interweave the gleanings of each fresh conversation with the ones before.
I see my personal understanding as a growing string of such conversations. I have moved from one to the next to mature my lived orientation to life. Loving to Know, in a significant way, just is my intellectual autobiography. I want to model the actual practice of it as the coming to know that this epistemology commends. And while these particular conversants may not be the most acclaimed philosophers or theologians, and they may not be widely known, in presenting my own learning with them, I am intentionally modeling the delightful particularity of any thoughtful person’s “being on the way” to knowing. I am showing, as Ludwig Wittgenstein said memorably, “how to go on.” Indeed, I am arguing that this being on the way with friends is the essence of my epistemological proposal.
In addition to the main conversations, I have invented “textures,” and interwoven them with the text. A texture is an excursis, a foray; it goes at the matter from a different direction, or from it to venture in a fresh direction. I want there to be interweaving, but not so tightly as to create a homogeneously smooth product. Like handmade paper or a roughly woven tapestry, the gritty pieces add earthy reality to the thing. Both of these strategies are meant to subvert the very defective approach to knowing that this epistemic proposal hopes to challenge and heal.[1] The textures also offer sabbathlike, rhythmical, interludes to break the intensity of sustained argument. Long journeys require rests and side excursions.
Adding to the variegated nature of this odd book on epistemology is the fact that its culminating chapter is “an epistemological etiquette” that compends concrete ways that we, in our efforts to know, “invite the real.” As text, the etiquette is distinctive because it is at once a meditation and a catechesis to form aspiring covenantal knowers.
So readers will do well to pattern their reading of the book on the book’s own structure. It perhaps may be best read episodically over a period of time. It is of course best read in conjunction with the reader’s own coming to know, and in concert with the readers own friends in learning. I have supplied questions for discussion of each chapter and texture.
Readers of my former book, Longing to Know, will find Loving to Know different and similar. This book represents the further development of my covenant epistemology, promised in a footnote in that one. It takes the epistemic proposal that drives Longing to Know and advances it into the personal—the interpersoned, as I will call it. Knowing works the way I have described it in that book because its telltale features are fraught with the interpersoned.
Plus, the focus of this book is different: written for people considering Christianity and struggling with questions about knowing, Longing to Know addressed the specific question, Can we know God?, by talking about how we know anything at all. I argued that knowing God is like knowing your auto mechanic: it is an ordinary act of knowing (distinct for its life-transforming impact!). Knowing knowing makes better sense of knowing God, along with knowing anything at all.
Loving to Know, by contrast, is written for anybody wanting think more deeply about knowing—for whatever reason, from living well and Christian discipleship, to professional excellence, and academic and philosophical scholarship. I try to speak in a way that welcomes all and excludes none. I am hoping that you will sense that this conversation is with you, along with others.
Longing to Know applied a general approach to knowing to a very specific question. Many readers also saw that the general approach to knowing applies in every corner of their lives—that is part of the way the very specific question is dealt with. This book expounds the general approach to knowing in its further developed version, suggests the wide range of its applications and implications, and shapes the reader to pursue implementing it wherever knowing happens.
Longing to Know has its own contrived structure; Loving to Know has a different one. And where the first book’s chapters were short—bathroom reading, as I thought of them at the time—this book’s chapters are the length of a seminar reading assignment. Taken as a whole,Loving to Know constitutes the bulk of a single course’s reading list. In fact, it is my text in my course, Christian Understanding of Life.
Playing off the driving analogy of the last book, that knowing God is like knowing your auto mechanic, in this one I argue that knowing your auto mechanic is like knowing God. I want to say that the kind of transformative interpersoned, face-to-face encounter and communion that all of us experience in the richest moments of our lives affords us the best paradigm of all knowing. For Christian believers, it is knowing Christ in communion that best captures the dynamism of knowing well in every corner of our lives and pursuits. I tap into a biblical theological vision; but for the best theological reasons, along with other sorts of reasons, I insist that covenant epistemology describes knowing for, and is commendably employed by, both people who know God and people who don’t see themselves that way.
One spring I inherited the care of a wildbird from one of my students. Bandit, a cedar waxwing, fallen from his nest, had been rescued by my student and his family. Soon after, a well-meaning housesitter had clipped his wings. At the point that Bandit took up with me, his one wing looked virtually non-existent, and he could not fly. He looked simply horrible.
His former family, I noted in the exchange, would pick him up in their cupped hands to carry him around, and playfully called his fluttering struggle “break-dancing.” Early in my time with Bandit, I did the same. I was quickly smitten with this bird; in fact, the love began when that student first told me of Bandit, before that student or I realized that I should inherit him.
I attended carefully to that little bird. In so doing, I figured out what he loved and what he hated. I discovered that he wanted always to see my face (waxwings are group birds; I was Bandit’s group!). I learned, through close proximity, that he abhorred loud machine noises. I discovered that he ate, not seeds, but fruit (80%) and bugs (20%). Never was he so happy as when I made fruit salad! And I figured out that he was happiest to be carried around on a stick, rather than in my cupped hands. All I needed to do to “recover” him from wherever he happened to be was to stick out the stick, and he hopped on to it jauntily, with no “break-dancing.” I figured out that, if you are a bird, having your flying feathers touched or petted is definitely not a good thing. It would be like bending the wings of a jet, or cutting the veins of a human. I learned what he was saying in the rich variety of his chirps. I lived life on his terms, scavenging my neighborhood for wild berries, throwing a diaper over my shoulder so I could keep him near. A few people thought I was crazy. But I was also somehow finding myself reflected in his gaze, and actually understanding God better.
Over that summer on the stick, and on my shoulder, Bandit regrew his rich chestnut feathers (I fell in love with the color brown), including his crest, and the signature yellow tips and red “wax drop” that gives the species its name. One day in September, after 20 minutes on my shoulder as I sat on my deck, when I was not expecting it, Bandit took off and flew, straight and true, to the woods behind my house. Not only Bandit had changed; I had changed as well. It had been a mutual healing.
That is covenant knowing; thus it offers a concrete example of what I want to describe and recommend in this book. You may think that you need no book guidance to know a wild bird. Why you do is the question with which this book begins.
Knowing is something we all do all the time. Most of us think we are pretty good at knowing throughout our experience. So it asks a lot of the reader to accept that a tome on this subject is worth reading.
Further, this book claims that something has infected our knowing that thwarts it, yet it is something people generally do not recognize. So to prove its value, the book first has to convince you of the reality of the need. To do this it must move upstream in a strong current of a certain popular savvy about knowing.
Quite possibly to reduce the appeal even further, some would say, this discussion has to be philosophical. How we know what we know is a philosophical question, and the topic is called epistemology. This book represents my own creative epistemological proposal.
I am one of those odd people who think that epistemology is almost the most important and practical thing everybody needs to consider. This calling compels me always to try to acquaint everybody with philosophy, and to talk about these hard-to-express matters in a way that invites everybody to indwell and be shaped by them.
On the other hand, I have every confidence that plenty of ordinary people are odd, if I am, in feeling that epistemology matters. Even if we haven’t known that it is epistemology, we have realized many times that something related to knowing is gumming up the works of our lives. Because we haven’t known what it is nor had the tools to begin to cope with it, the problems have continued to plague us. Epistemology is important to all of us.
Professional, in-house, philosophy inadvertently locks up its treasures rather than winsomely adapting them for the rest of us. The onus placed on guild language means that philosophers seeking to speak with the uninitiated have to revoke the guild. So be it; while I respect the value of formal philosophical exchange, I feel no lockstep loyalty to guild language. If all people actually live responses to philosophical questions such as how we know, then philosophical proposals should expressed for ordinary people as their audience.
But then, for people with no previous philosophical awareness raising, which, sadly, is the vast majority in the United States, tackling a popular philosophy book like Loving to Know means exercising courage to enter into some discussions in which they feel the discomfort of half-understanding. Hospitably welcoming beginning philosophy students is what I love best to do. But I repeatedly tell them: you have to learn to be okay with half-understanding. Thicken your skin! Hear my encouragement! Philosophy is difficult, and it isn’t that you lack the capacity or the need to study it. It tackles life’s most fundamental orientations, the commitments that shape our very language and rationality; so of course it is difficult. But it is also deeply valuable and practical. It has widespread personal and cultural impact. I once thought proficiency in the discipline would eliminate my own half-understanding; instead, I learned to thicken my skin. And once you get acquainted with my epistemological proposals, you will see why I am confident that half-understanding is nevertheless productive.
I believe that the separation between guild and street in philosophy is itself in part a result of the very problem this book labors to identify and heal. To write a guild-approved epistemology is to perpetuate the problem rather than offer the subverting cure. So I take an approach that invites in the uninitiated as its primary audience. And though we have philosophical discussions, and though I believe them to be expert philosophy critically valuable for the guild, the conversation stays ordinary. Kitchen table philosophy.
Professional philosophers may well find this disappointing. I hope they will see that the book’s approach reflects its epistemological proposal. It should not be seen as sub-par so much as creatively subversive. But to see that involves personal investment, formation, in this epistemology. Consonant with the epistemology it commends, this book offers a case that is intrinsically a practice. So, again on the other hand, I am confident that for this very reason this book offers philosophers, and scholars generally, a critical contribution to the professional conversation and to academic training.
This book proposes that we take as a paradigm, of all acts of knowing, the unfolding, covenantally constituted, interpersonal relationship. The book itself is the journal of my own unfolding coming to know, my search for “the face that will not go away.” I have tried to reflect both of these things in the structure of the book itself: it unfolds, conversation by conversation, foray by foray. I do this both for integrity’s sake, to prompt readers’ feel of the thing, and to invite you into the conversation.
So I have taken some creative liberties with the expected timeless linearity of books and arguments. Most noticeably, I characterize my probing engagement of others’ work as successive conversations. Conversations are interpersonal exchanges typified by deep, indwelling listening, and then by a response in which the thoughtful participant creatively melds insights gleaned with others previously acquired. And by conversation I do not mean noncommittal, information-passing chit-chat; I have in mind conversations in which we assume the posture of mutual submission with a loved and trusted friend whom each invites to speak into their lives.
My argument unfolds conversation by conversation, the way a group of close friends on a lengthy walking tour venture might walk for awhile next to this one or that one of the group. Then, as those hikers might take stock together around a campfire at the end of the day’s journey—also as on a hairdresser adds pieces of hair round by round in corn rows or French braids—so at chapters’ ends I interweave the gleanings of each fresh conversation with the ones before.
I see my personal understanding as a growing string of such conversations. I have moved from one to the next to mature my lived orientation to life. Loving to Know, in a significant way, just is my intellectual autobiography. I want to model the actual practice of it as the coming to know that this epistemology commends. And while these particular conversants may not be the most acclaimed philosophers or theologians, and they may not be widely known, in presenting my own learning with them, I am intentionally modeling the delightful particularity of any thoughtful person’s “being on the way” to knowing. I am showing, as Ludwig Wittgenstein said memorably, “how to go on.” Indeed, I am arguing that this being on the way with friends is the essence of my epistemological proposal.
In addition to the main conversations, I have invented “textures,” and interwoven them with the text. A texture is an excursis, a foray; it goes at the matter from a different direction, or from it to venture in a fresh direction. I want there to be interweaving, but not so tightly as to create a homogeneously smooth product. Like handmade paper or a roughly woven tapestry, the gritty pieces add earthy reality to the thing. Both of these strategies are meant to subvert the very defective approach to knowing that this epistemic proposal hopes to challenge and heal.[1] The textures also offer sabbathlike, rhythmical, interludes to break the intensity of sustained argument. Long journeys require rests and side excursions.
Adding to the variegated nature of this odd book on epistemology is the fact that its culminating chapter is “an epistemological etiquette” that compends concrete ways that we, in our efforts to know, “invite the real.” As text, the etiquette is distinctive because it is at once a meditation and a catechesis to form aspiring covenantal knowers.
So readers will do well to pattern their reading of the book on the book’s own structure. It perhaps may be best read episodically over a period of time. It is of course best read in conjunction with the reader’s own coming to know, and in concert with the readers own friends in learning. I have supplied questions for discussion of each chapter and texture.
Readers of my former book, Longing to Know, will find Loving to Know different and similar. This book represents the further development of my covenant epistemology, promised in a footnote in that one. It takes the epistemic proposal that drives Longing to Know and advances it into the personal—the interpersoned, as I will call it. Knowing works the way I have described it in that book because its telltale features are fraught with the interpersoned.
Plus, the focus of this book is different: written for people considering Christianity and struggling with questions about knowing, Longing to Know addressed the specific question, Can we know God?, by talking about how we know anything at all. I argued that knowing God is like knowing your auto mechanic: it is an ordinary act of knowing (distinct for its life-transforming impact!). Knowing knowing makes better sense of knowing God, along with knowing anything at all.
Loving to Know, by contrast, is written for anybody wanting think more deeply about knowing—for whatever reason, from living well and Christian discipleship, to professional excellence, and academic and philosophical scholarship. I try to speak in a way that welcomes all and excludes none. I am hoping that you will sense that this conversation is with you, along with others.
Longing to Know applied a general approach to knowing to a very specific question. Many readers also saw that the general approach to knowing applies in every corner of their lives—that is part of the way the very specific question is dealt with. This book expounds the general approach to knowing in its further developed version, suggests the wide range of its applications and implications, and shapes the reader to pursue implementing it wherever knowing happens.
Longing to Know has its own contrived structure; Loving to Know has a different one. And where the first book’s chapters were short—bathroom reading, as I thought of them at the time—this book’s chapters are the length of a seminar reading assignment. Taken as a whole,Loving to Know constitutes the bulk of a single course’s reading list. In fact, it is my text in my course, Christian Understanding of Life.
Playing off the driving analogy of the last book, that knowing God is like knowing your auto mechanic, in this one I argue that knowing your auto mechanic is like knowing God. I want to say that the kind of transformative interpersoned, face-to-face encounter and communion that all of us experience in the richest moments of our lives affords us the best paradigm of all knowing. For Christian believers, it is knowing Christ in communion that best captures the dynamism of knowing well in every corner of our lives and pursuits. I tap into a biblical theological vision; but for the best theological reasons, along with other sorts of reasons, I insist that covenant epistemology describes knowing for, and is commendably employed by, both people who know God and people who don’t see themselves that way.
One spring I inherited the care of a wildbird from one of my students. Bandit, a cedar waxwing, fallen from his nest, had been rescued by my student and his family. Soon after, a well-meaning housesitter had clipped his wings. At the point that Bandit took up with me, his one wing looked virtually non-existent, and he could not fly. He looked simply horrible.
His former family, I noted in the exchange, would pick him up in their cupped hands to carry him around, and playfully called his fluttering struggle “break-dancing.” Early in my time with Bandit, I did the same. I was quickly smitten with this bird; in fact, the love began when that student first told me of Bandit, before that student or I realized that I should inherit him.
I attended carefully to that little bird. In so doing, I figured out what he loved and what he hated. I discovered that he wanted always to see my face (waxwings are group birds; I was Bandit’s group!). I learned, through close proximity, that he abhorred loud machine noises. I discovered that he ate, not seeds, but fruit (80%) and bugs (20%). Never was he so happy as when I made fruit salad! And I figured out that he was happiest to be carried around on a stick, rather than in my cupped hands. All I needed to do to “recover” him from wherever he happened to be was to stick out the stick, and he hopped on to it jauntily, with no “break-dancing.” I figured out that, if you are a bird, having your flying feathers touched or petted is definitely not a good thing. It would be like bending the wings of a jet, or cutting the veins of a human. I learned what he was saying in the rich variety of his chirps. I lived life on his terms, scavenging my neighborhood for wild berries, throwing a diaper over my shoulder so I could keep him near. A few people thought I was crazy. But I was also somehow finding myself reflected in his gaze, and actually understanding God better.
Over that summer on the stick, and on my shoulder, Bandit regrew his rich chestnut feathers (I fell in love with the color brown), including his crest, and the signature yellow tips and red “wax drop” that gives the species its name. One day in September, after 20 minutes on my shoulder as I sat on my deck, when I was not expecting it, Bandit took off and flew, straight and true, to the woods behind my house. Not only Bandit had changed; I had changed as well. It had been a mutual healing.
That is covenant knowing; thus it offers a concrete example of what I want to describe and recommend in this book. You may think that you need no book guidance to know a wild bird. Why you do is the question with which this book begins.
[1] Some great works of fiction are stories of journeys toward a great quest, into which particular adventures and story-telling is embedded. J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia are well-known recent ones; Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad are ancient ones. Another that comes to mind is Richard Adams’ Watership Down (New York: Avon Books (HarperCollins), 1972). Rabbit legend stories such as “Rowsby Woof and the Fairy Wog-Dog” interweave with the larger narrative. Loving to Know mirrors this time-honored episodic unfolding. Its distinction is that it does so as epistemology, and as essential to epistemology.