Biblical Knowing: A Scriptural Epistemology of Error

by Dru Johnson, Craig G. Bartholomew (Foreword)

With major themes like "the knowledge of good and evil," "knowing that YHWH is your God," knowing that Jesus is the Christ, and the goal of developing Israel into a "wise and discerning people," Scripture clearly stresses human knowledge and the consequences of error. We too long for confidence in our understanding, the assurance that our most basic knowledge is not ultimately incorrect. Biblical Knowing assesses what Israel knew, but more importantly, how she was meant to know--introducing a comprehensive Scriptural epistemology, firmly rooted in the Scripture's own presentation of important epistemological events in the story of Israel. Because modern philosophy has also made authoritative claims about knowledge, Biblical Knowing engages contemporary academic views of knowledge (e.g., Reformed Epistemology, scientific epistemology, Virtue Epistemology, etc.) and recent philosophical method (e.g., Analytic Theology), assessing them for points of fittedness with or departure from Scripture's own epistemology. Additionally, Biblical Knowing explores what proper knowing looks like in the task of theology itself, in the teaching and preaching of the church, and in the context of counseling.

Dru Johnson is an Assistant Professor of Biblical Studies at The King's College in New York City. He is also the Templeton Associate Research Fellow in Analytic Theology at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, Israel.

Genres: Theology, Philosophy, Christian

266 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 21, 2009

About the author

Dru Johnson (PhD, University of St. Andrews) is Templeton Senior Research Fellow and director of the Abrahamic Theistic Origins Project at Wycliffe Hall, University of Oxford. He is also a visiting professor at Hope College, director of the Center for Hebraic Thought, editor of the Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Biblical Criticism series, and cohost of the OnScript podcast. His books include Biblical Philosophy and Human Rites: The Power of Rituals, Habits, and Sacraments. Johnson splits his time between Holland, Michigan, and Oxford, England.

Reviews

[Dan Lawler · Rating 2 out of 5]

It Takes a Village (to know God)

The author attempts to explain how we are able to know God beyond just reading about Him in the Bible. There is no more important issue facing the church and the world today. Unfortunately, he gets it completely and perilously wrong. What is offered is yet another attempt to reconstruct Christianity on a postmodern foundation. The emergent church (may it rest in peace) would have loved this book.

The rallying cry of postmodernism is the "rejection of modernity." What replaces modernity remains up for grabs, but everyone seems to agree that Enlightenment era rationalism and empiricism now belong on the ash heap of history. The problem is that Enlightenment thinking was perceived as the foundation for science, and God forbid we give up science. So along came Michael Polanyi who held out a sliver of hope that science might yet be saved in postmodern times, and the author thinks that what’s good for science is good for God too. As stated in the Forward, "the hero of the book is Michael Polanyi, whose work Dru finds congruent with what he finds in Scripture." (Location 67.) The author states there is no difference in the mode of knowing between Scripture and science, and the process by which one knows God is the same as learning the chemical periodic table. (573, 3523.)

In order to know, one must "listen to the accredited prophet and perform his instructions," and this is "fully commensurate with Polanyi's scientific epistemology." (2511-515.) In other words, just do what you are told by the authorities, then and only then will you see the wisdom of their words. It does not take a rocket scientist, or even a degree in philosophy, to see the manifest problems with this view, not the least of which is the problem of authority.

Postmodernism’s own proponents recognize what Jurgen Habermas called its "legitimation crisis." As postmodernism has no objective standards, what constitutes truth and reality subjectively lie in the eye of the beholder. Everyone gets to interpret the world as they see fit, and the most you can hope for is to find a community of like-minded believers who share your view of things. The postmoderns call this your interpretive community. Like many communities, it has its own police – the "interpretive police" – who serve to protect and enforce the prevailing interpretations of the authorities within the community. Knowledge is now reduced to what those in authority say it is, hence Michel Foucault’s aphorism "power is knowledge." And truth, according to Richard Rorty, is whatever your communal peers let you get away with saying.

The author fully endorses this communal creation and enforcement of truth: knowledge comes to us "second hand on the authority of a community of people"; "community standards of accreditation take priority" over an individual's knowledge, and; "competing interpretive frameworks must be adjudicated within the community." (3245, 3261, 3282.) To know God or the periodic table or anything else, one must "genuflect to an authenticated authority and participate in the life of a community of disciples." (5226.) The author criticizes renowned philosopher Alvin Plantinga because he "neglects the communal nature of epistemology as a core function of all knowing." (4268.)

The goal of knowing is to become a "skillful knower" and a critical knowledge skill is the ability to discern the "authenticated voice." (1618, 3237.) Here is yet another colossal and insoluble problem with the author's postmodern epistemology. The author notes that the authentication of biblical prophets appears to be circular. The Israelites understood the signs of Moses meant he was a prophet of God "because Moses told them what the signs meant." We must trust the interpretation of the prophet’s signs "based on the prophet’s instructions about how we should understand the signs." (2154, 2196.)

The author's solution to this problem of authentication is not only circular itself but ends up collapsing his entire epistemological construct. The author says we must first listen to and obey the prophet's voice before we can know whether the prophet should be listened to and obeyed. (2224.) This defeats the whole purpose of authentication, which is to avoid error by discerning beforehand whether or not any given authority should be listened to and obeyed in the first place. Indeed, the author claims that the only way Adam and Eve could know whether the Serpent was a deceiver was to first listen to and obey what it said. (1448.) This is literally a matter of life and death.

You could be drinking the Kool-Aid in Jonestown or burning in Waco before realizing that Jim Jones and David Koresh were psychopaths and not prophets of God. Yet all those poor folks followed the author's epistemology to a T: they participated as disciples in an interpretive community that genuflected before an authenticated authority, and in learning the skill of authentication themselves, they first listened to and obeyed the authority's instructions.

Like most postmodern writers, the author exempts his own instruction from postmodernism's hallmark skepticism that is applied to everyone else. The author provides nothing in the way of authentication besides his PhD examiner who wrote the book's Forward and calls the work "impressive." Set against this is the author's statement that "a prominent Christian philosopher once warned me that any attempt to derive a philosophical view from the Scriptures is a fundamentally asinine attempt." (1311.) Conveniently for the author, his epistemological process requires that we first listen to then follow his instruction before discerning whether its worth listening to or is fundamentally asinine. Thanks, but no thanks. Life is too short to follow every proclaimed authority down the rabbit hole, and the authentication process may end up shortening it a lot more.

[Dave Courtney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Johnson lays out his thesis with clarity in the introduction. He writes,

"The Christian Scriptures could be theologically described as beginning and ending with an epistemological outlook. The first episode of humanity’s activity centers on the knowledge of good and evil. The final stage of humanity is pictured by Jeremiah as a universally prophetic and knowing society: “And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord” (Jer 31:34). What happens to knowledge in between?"

What happens to knowledge in between formulates the necessary question that allows him to move more distinctly into exploring the distinction between proper knowing and error (knowing wrongly). If this triggers resistance to such hard and fast polarities/dichotomies, it's worth noting that the book is not about dogma (that is, laying claim to right and wrong in a propositional sense) but rather about how we know, or ways of knowing. And one of the essential claims of Johnson is that we know through story, both in its telling and in its embodiment within the ebb and flow of our lives as participatory agents within that which we become knowers of. In short, to know something proper is to live it. He writes, "As we follow the story and language of knowing and error, knowing looks more like a process than a mechanism that yields a product called knowledge."

I would categorize this as narrative theology, with a heavy emphasis on philosophical and analytical approaches, the latter which gets reclaimed and reformulated from what he perceives are some naturally ingrained limitations to speaking of proper knowledge inherent within analytic theology. In this way the book is dense and scholarly. It takes some time and investment. But I do think the thesis bears out the potential for simple, real and applicable truths regarding how knowledge fleshes itself out in our lives in a practical way. As Johnson suggests in the early going, this is about biblical knowing, but this biblical knowing maps on to scientific realities that easily apply to all discussions of knowledge.

Perhaps one of the most significant aspects of knowledge that I gleaned from this work is that all proper knowing stems from listening. "Listening is the fundamental priority when it comes to knowledge... to whom we listen determines what we can know." Now, it's clear that such a phrase has the potential to feed harmful relationship structures based on power and abuse. But Johnson's interest in tabling this idea is two fold- it us the primary narrative pattern that we find in scripture and the primary relational pattern that we find in the world at large- we know proper and in error in relationship. "Even where “knowing that” is stated in the biblical texts, it is often stated in terms that are explicitly covenantal or resemble covenantal relationship... So “knowing that” is contingent upon knowing-in-covenant-relationship."

In a similar vein, Johnson sets listening in line with scriptures use of other primary organs- seeing and hearing. Who or what we listen to determines what we are able to see and hear. In this sense knowledge is a much more holistic notion than mere modern rationalist appeals to propositional facts tend to allow. "Getting it right is not the antithesis of getting it wrong. Rather, knowing happens when we simply get it. Getting it (whatever it might be) connotes a process that ends in an intuition, insight, or even a knack for seeing something... we either get it wrong or we are on the path to getting it." This underscores how and why error is actually important to proper knowing, as we move towards getting it right through experiencing what is error. "Error is not insufficient information nor is it being wrong." This is the essential function, it would seem, of the human experience. "For Kierkegaard, the epistemic goal is to be “released from the bondage of untruth” and “to learn the Truth.” This is not “a matter of assenting to a series of propositions about God, but rather, existing ‘before God... our very being transforms through penitent change (i.e., metanoia) by the revelation of the Truth of Christ... learning Christ” is not just learning principles or maxims, rather, it is transformative and incommensurate with the former way of existing." This fits with his appeal to diachronic approaches to knowledge, elevating it to the realm of narrative. Relationship, the context of our listening, is lived not propositioned. And from this we come to know properly that which we are living. Here proper knowing challenges tendencies to reduce knowledge to momentary facts detached from narrative. "While the passion of the scientist can correctly guide her, it can equally create an unwillingness to submit to an authority or external reality."

I really liked how Johnson unpacks the narrative framework of the Biblical story as an invitation to "know". This was super helpful to me as so often interpretations of Genesis, the narrative starting point, reduce knowledge either to something evil, to some kind of a test underscoring our depravity, or as a distinguishing between human limitations and God's Sovereign all knowing nature. What Johnson argues for is a theological approach that is close to my own heart- particpationist theology. And having Genesis 1-3 presented as an invitation to know helps to integrate the rest of the story with so much clarity and awareness. "Awareness that one is on a path to knowing speaks to the non-stative nature of knowledge: that it is ripe with hope and expectation that must come to fruition in some recognizable way."

[Derek Kreider · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was pleasantly surprised by this book. I thought epistemology would be fairly straightforward, but the author uncovered a part of knowing that I've been identifying as more and more central to the Christian life - community. He does a great job showing how "brute facts" are not how we come to know things. Propositions are like me pointing a finger, or like bits sitting on a hard drive. They contain information only so long as the listener has context - garnered through social interactions and by listening to trusted authorities. And even then, that knowledge only REALLY becomes true knowledge (erroneous or true knowledge) as the authority's ideas or instructions are put to the test through action.

[Mark Nichols · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful book outlining a simple yet effective model for epistemology, revealed in the Bible yet readily applicable to everyday life. Johnson writes that:

"the Scriptures insist over and again that walking by faith means: 1) recognizing the docents through whom God speaks and listening to them alone, 2) embodying the actions they prescribe, and 3) looking at what they are showing us."

Johnson, D. (2013). Biblical Knowing: A Scriptural Epistemology of Error (p. 3). Cascade Books: Eugene, OR.

the book illustrates this pattern repeatedly from biblical examples. Very enjoyable, very sound.