The word for the day is Knowledge, and in your notebook, I believe it says Lecture Four and that should be Lecture Five and at the top of your page it says Salvation is a Life—that’s the theme that we are working on. The heading is Knowing Christ Today: The importance of Knowledge—Not Just Faith for Spiritual Growth and Spiritual Teaching.
Now, I am going to be talking more about how people understand faith today and the one word to describe how faith is thought of in our world today and unfortunately in many of our churches and by many Christians is dismissive—dismissive. Faith is dismissed. It is put in a category apart from life and, it is made something optional, something that is a matter of will. If you can make the leap; it’s presented as a leap—then you will have faith and you have a lot of people very condescendingly will say, “Oh, I wish I had faith like you, but I just cannot make the leap.” You’ve probably heard that. That’s dismissive. That’s a way of saying faith is some peculiar, quirky little thing that some people do have and maybe they have it because of the tradition they were raised in—and you should respect diversity unless it happens to be a Christian and then diversity runs a little thin all of a sudden. But faith is treated as a category for some people. Another thing that follows from the dismissive way that faith is treated is people want to say they are all the same. All religions are the same. The only way that anyone could say that is if they thought they didn’t matter and if that’s true, well, then they are all the same. Anyone who knows any two religions knows that they are not the same and so usually it’s an ignorant person who says they are all the same. They don’t know what is taught by the religions—certainly not what is taught by Christianity.
So, let’s have a couple of verses to start with and we will go with the old book. [3:55] Isaiah 5—Isaiah lived through a period, which is, remarkably, like our own. And he’s talking about the condition of how people are living in that day in Isaiah 5 building up to this, “Woe to those who rise up early in the morning that they may pursue strong drink. Who stay up late in the evening that wine may inflame them.” Verse 12—“their banquets are accompanied by lyre and harp, by tambourine and flute and by wine but they do not pay attention to the deeds of the Lord, nor do they consider the work of his hands. Therefore, my people go into exile for their lack of knowledge.” Not faith. Knowledge. Now, the most famous verse on this is Hosea 4:6. You all know it, but it might help to just look at the context a little bit because it is essentially the same one that Isaiah is talking about. Hosea 4—he’s talking about the condition of society, verse 1 in chapter 4—“listen to the word of the Lord for the Lord has a case against the inhabitants of the land because there is no faithfulness or kindness or knowledge.”—knowledge of God in the land. There is swearing, deception, murder, stealing, and adultery: does that sound like any society with which you are familiar? “They employ violence; therefore, the land mourns. Everyone who lives in it languishes.” And then he goes onto say in verse 6 after describing this lugubrious situation, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge”—because they have rejected knowledge. One way of not having knowledge is to reject it and this is fundamental now to what we are going to be talking about in this hour. “You have rejected knowledge. I also will reject you from being my priest since you have forgotten the law of your God, I will forget your children.” Knowledge. It didn’t say my people perish for lack of faith. Did they have a lack of faith? Yes, they did. Why did they have a lack of faith? For lack of knowledge. Biblical faith is always environed in knowledge. Biblical lack of faith is always environed in the rejection of knowledge. The ideal for human life is to believe what you know. That’s what you want your electrician to do. You want him to believe what he knows. You would like for your surgeon; possibly even your automobile mechanic to believe what they know. Now, sometimes they don’t know, and they have to do something, and they commit themselves to a course of action without knowledge. That’s not your prime condition to be in. And then there is the question of why they don’t have knowledge. So, maybe your automobile mechanic is confronting a new kind of car that he has never learned or maybe he is just lazy, and Mr. Goodwrench is Mr. Badwrench because he hasn’t done his work. We say, “Do your homework.” What does that mean? That doesn’t mean to pump up your faith. It means find out. Get some knowledge. Learn. Knowledge is absolutely crucial to human life, and I want to give you a way of understanding it now that will help us see more about why it is so crucial, and we have to have knowledge of knowledge, as it were. I can never figure out why I can’t get my muscles to do this in the right direction; it takes a little jiggling to get it there. So now, try not to worry about philosophy and all of that sort of thing: just think about knowledge as a human reality. The situation of knowledge in our culture generally is one that we may have time to talk some about but it’s really important to understand that. It pulls knowledge out of ordinary life and tries to make it something that is esoteric. Knowledge is not esoteric; it is not rare. It is very common. Now my description here—I’m sorry it’s so faint—but knowledge; we have knowledge. Knowledge is our ability to represent things as they are—which means talk about them, think about them, deal with them and in the background of this is again this idea of interactive relationship. How do you get knowledge?—by interacting with the things you have knowledge of, but we will come back to that later. The basic idea is you have knowledge. Knowledge is your ability to represent things as they are on an appropriate basis of thought and experience. That’s knowledge and depending on if you are an expert in a field, of course, you have the capacity to represent things as they are and if you are, for example, a lawyer, Oliver Wendell Holmes said the job of a lawyer is to predict what the court will do. Not a bad description but there needs to be a lot more said about it than that. But, depending on your field, if you are an electrician or whatever you are, you operate on the basis of knowledge. And that knowledge is your ability to represent things as they are on an appropriate basis of thought and experience. Now, what is appropriate? Well, it depends on the subject matter. The appropriate basis is related to the kind of thing we are talking about. Now, Hosea and Isaiah—they are talking about the law—knowledge of the law of God. But the law of God in turn is about God and the realities of human life and it can constitute knowledge so some people just have knowledge of the law and they don’t have knowledge of what the law is about and that’s a great threat to people who are teachers in religion—is to have knowledge of religious traditions and customs and laws and all of that but not have knowledge of what they are about. [12:50] This is the difference between the Scribes and the Pharisees and Jesus—the Scribes and the Pharisees had lots of footnotes. Jesus knew the reality He was talking about. And so, for one, it was well Rabbi such and such says so and so, and Rabbi such and such says so and so, and so forth and so on. They had knowledge of that discourse that went on around the law, but they had lost touch with what the law was about. And Jesus comes and He talks about what the law is about. Then He puts the law in its proper place in relation to that. He says, “I have come to fulfill the law.” How do you fulfill the law? You have got to come to terms with what the law is about. You hear me say all of the time—you fulfill the law by becoming the kind of person who would naturally do what the law says. But that requires you have knowledge of God, of His Kingdom and so on.
Knowledge involves truth. [14:06] And a thought or a teaching or an idea is true if what it is about is as that thought, or statement represents it. I know this is a little hard on you but try to get these ideas down. And, of course, if you want to dodge the truth, you say, “Well, what is truth?” That was Pilate’s tactic, you remember; he didn’t want to deal with the truth, so he said, “What is truth?” So, if you say to your child, is it true that you took the cookies? And they say, “Well, what is truth?” [Laughter] They are not going to come to grips with it or they are going to try to evade it or avoid it. So, knowledge involves truth; you can’t know what isn’t true. Now, coming to know truth is often quite difficult. Depending on the subject matter, knowing what truth is not difficult but it’s scary. The thing that scares people about truth is it is totally unyielding. It says in effect, I don’t care what you believe; I don’t care how you feel about it; this is the way it is. You say, “Well, I don’t like it.” Well, okay, you don’t like it. Lump it because it doesn’t compromise. It doesn’t say, “Ok, well, since you don’t believe it, I’ll change.” It doesn’t say that and that’s a part of the way God has made the world is that we can evade in our own minds the truth, but the truth does not change. What I am saying to you today, you probably know is generally rejected by the order of the world except in certain cases. There are cases in the law and law enforcement and in some other areas and you still have people in journalism occasionally who will say they are trying to get at the truth. Generally speaking, truth is now not regarded as something that is there and you have to come to terms with. And that is because, truth and desire conflict. [16:53] Desire never limits itself to what is true. It thinks what I want. I want such and such. Well, but you know, things aren’t that way—well, I want it anyway. Maybe I can twist it and turn it in this way or that and I can get by somehow. So, we need to have these ideas down of knowledge and truth. [17:23]
Now, let’s look at this a moment. Knowledge conveys the right and responsibility to act, to direct action, to formulate policy and direct its implementation and teach. Nothing else does that. Within limited context of a certain cultural setting, you can depend upon your position to convey your right and responsibility to teach, but you may be teaching what is false. Your authority that comes from your position does not guarantee that you are conveying knowledge. Everyone knows that. Authority based on position or power does not convey these rights and responsibilities. Though individuals and groups can try to claim the authority. But when they try to claim it, they never say, “I am teaching you this because if you don’t accept it, I will knock your head off.” That’s never presented. They always claim knowledge. The Nazis claimed knowledge. They never said, “We just don’t like the Jews.” They claimed to give knowledge of who the Jews were and what they deserved because of who they were and that’s because of this simple fact. Nothing else does that. Faith doesn’t do it. Power doesn’t do it. Authority doesn’t do it. And we all know that authority stands under the judgment of knowledge and what happened in the history of the Christian church was, in the early or late Middle Ages, it was found that a lot of things that it had claimed on the basis of knowledge were false. And so, its authority withered under that and in some respects that gave rise to new religious movements, but more importantly, it gave rise to a different picture of authority. Let me ask you, “What is THE authority in our culture?” One word. Science—even though there isn’t such a thing—it is still the authority that people appeal to. Very often, they don’t want to say that its knowledge. They say its scientific and then you have another authority. That authority claims to have the right and responsibility to act—direct action, formulate policy and so forth. Now, often people don’t even say science, they say research. The significance of that for what we are talking about here is very great because the effect of that is to push those who speak for Christ and Christ Himself aside and say, “They do not have the right and responsibility to act—direct action and so forth.” They don’t have that. And one expression of that is what we call the separation of church and state. Why do we want to separate church off? Well, because they don’t have knowledge. What do they have? Faith. Right? Are you picking up on how this structure develops now because it’s really important because it affects how you think about your faith and how you present the teachings of Christ in our world. If the teachings of Christ were regarded as knowledge, we would no more talk about the separation of church and state than we would talk about the separation of Chemistry from state. Imagine someone getting up a movement to separate chemistry from state? Can you imagine that? Or surveying from state? Or trigonometry from state? That doesn’t come up. Now, what you need to understand is that until very recently, that was true of Christian teachings in North America and much of Europe—that what was taught was regarded as knowledge. So, for example, it was common in many of the larger cities to publish word for word an outstanding minister’s sermon in Monday morning’s newspaper. Did you know that? Why was that? Well, it wasn’t just because they wanted to hear this particular individual fulminating about his faith. It was because it was assumed that this person was communicating essential knowledge. And that’s how all of these people in the history of the church—whether Catholic or Protestant—they thought about it that way. That was true well up into the 1900’s. It was assumed that a Christian speaker or presenter or teacher was conveying essential knowledge about life and because of that, they had this right and responsibility and if you acted on the basis of it, or directed act, well, everybody thought well, you could get it wrong but basically it was a body of knowledge. [23:31]
Now then, let’s distinguish knowledge from belief, commitment and profession. And this is all in the book, Knowing Christ Today, but we need to just refresh our minds on it a little bit because when we are talking about the spiritual life and spiritual formation, the questions are, “Are we dealing with knowledge? Are we dealing with knowledge?” Now, that is relevant to the issue of morality and character and because religion has shifted out of the domain of knowledge in the public mind, guess what has followed it? Morality and character—not treated as if there was a body of knowledge about these things. You can train people in certain ways, but it isn’t a matter of knowing something when you affirm, for example, that honesty is an admirable, moral feature of an individual. You can still try to say that its advantageous and you can get a discussion of that, but It doesn’t have anything to do with being a good person or not. See, that’s what morality has to do with, is “Who is a good person? Who is a good person?” And, from its inception in Plato and Aristotle, that’s always been the issue but even that has now dropped out of conversation. We still have to deal with what is a right and wrong action but really can’t come to agreement about that and so, most of our moral issues move into legal and political areas. We can still vote, and we can get a judgment from the courts, but that’s a different matter than whether or not someone is a good person. The idea of good person disappears from the area of knowledge along with the idea of whether or not religion brings knowledge of God and reality. [26:02]
Ok, so, let’s talk a moment about belief. We talked about that already but just to say again, you believe something when you are ready to act as if it were true. That is why belief is so important in following Christ because if you believe in that sense in Christ, you are going to act as if what He said and did was true. When He says, “Repent for the Kingdom of the Heavens is at hand.” You say, “OK, it’s true; I believe.” So, you begin to act as if that were true. That’s a process that you will go through, but you have to start somewhere, and the teaching is, “Start where you are, accept the fact that the blessing of God is available to you where you are because of the goodness of God and because of Christ’s presence in the world.” You can start there. You don’t have to change everything. Come as you are. We all know that part of the story and that’s an unbelievably important part of the story. No one is left out because of where they start. Anyone can find. That’s basically the lesson of the Beatitudes is they are proclamations of the Kingdom, and they say, “no matter what condition you are in, how you are classified, God is there.” His Kingdom is there, and you can trust it and you will find it real. So, now that’s the issue. Does anyone have knowledge of the Kingdom of God? And someone says, “Well, Jesus does.” Jesus is a man of knowledge. Now, on the basis of that knowledge, you can decide what you are going to do about it, and you can, with help, which is available; you can begin to act as if it were true. Did God really hear? Well, if you—now, if you have knowledge of it and perhaps you think that Jesus brings you knowledge of that and you say, “Well, I have knowledge of it, so I’ll act as if it were true.” Now, you don’t have to do that. See, one of the things about knowledge the way God has set things up in creation is you do not have to accept knowledge. Knowledge will not jump down your throat, and you can omit it if you wish and, in this country, we have millions of young people who omit knowledge of mathematics. They don’t seek it. Knowledge has to be sought. You have to want it. If you don’t want it, you don’t have to have it. You can reject it. Now, that is characteristically what the scripture is talking about in Hosea and in Isaiah and perhaps most well-known to you is the statement in Romans 1 and we need to look at that. [29:25] The statement in Romans 1 about knowledge of God—here’s what Paul says. “The righteousness of God is revealed in the gospel from faith to faith”—that is—you implement the faith you have, and you will get more—but then in verse 18, “the wrath of God is revealed from Heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men”—now, watch this—“who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.” They suppress the truth. They don’t want it out. They don’t want to accept it. Why? Because if they accepted it, they wouldn’t get to do the unrighteous things that they want to do. “Because that which is known about God is evident among them.” Knowledge of God is not inaccessible. “For God made it evident to them for since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen.” Now, of course, the system of secularity and secular education says, “Oh, no that’s not true. God is not evident.” Because that system is based upon doing what human beings want, not what God wants so they reject Him. Now, watch! “For since the creation of the world, His invisible attributes, His eternal power, His divine nature and that’s, in short, the Kingdom of God have been clearly seen, being understood through that which is made so that they are without excuse for even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God. Who did they honor? They honored themselves. “Or give thanks but became futile in their speculations.” When you move your beliefs away from knowledge, then you have speculations and you wind those out of your head or out of your mind, I should say, and you put them in the place of reality and the secret is they will always have a way of pandering to the supremacy of the human over God. They became futile. What does that mean? That means it doesn’t go anywhere. It doesn’t go anywhere because it is not tied into reality. The advantage of truth is that it enables you to interact with reality in its own terms. That’s what truth is given to us for. [32:18] Truth allows us to deal with things that are not present to us. In our senses, they are not there before our faces, but we can deal with them as they are because we have true beliefs. True beliefs are like the siting mechanism on a rocket or a gun. If it is set right, then you hit the target. If it is not set right, then you hit something else. That’s the way truth is. Now, you know that because life runs on that. That’s why knowledge of truth is so important and it’s not esoteric. Anyone who is cooking a meal or driving to work operates in terms of truth. That allows them to deal with what is not present in terms of reality. Now, you say, what is reality? Reality is what you can count on. It’s what you run into when you are wrong. There is various way of describing it without getting too philosophical about it. [33:32] It is what resists your will. Reality is the stuff that actually has the properties in terms of which you think about it. [33:46]
Now, what happened? Rejection of knowledge—you can reject knowledge. [33:54] You don’t have to accept it. You can build your life around falsehoods, around what you want and even though you may have beliefs that you are wrong, you can go on your course. That’s a part of what is involved in being a human being. [34:16]
Well, there are some other things we need to mention. One is commitment and the last one is profession, and we need to know all of those because all of those play a role in how we think about the spiritual life and about the Kingdom of God. You can commit yourself to things you don’t even believe. You can commit yourself to things you don’t even believe. If you are lost in the woods, you may not have beliefs about which direction you go but you may think you have to go some direction and so you say, “Well, I think I’ll take this one.” And sometimes we have to do that because we need to act, and we don’t have beliefs, and we don’t have knowledge. Again, that’s a part of the human condition and sometimes we have to do that and if we do it, then it will be helpful if we have knowledge of God—if we have trust in God. But many people today identify Christian faith with blind commitment. That is just a leap in the dark and many Christians do the same thing, and I am going try to talk you out of that as much as I can in the rest of our sessions today. [35:45] Because what I am going to want to say to you is, “commitment can be okay, can be necessary; it’s an act of the will, you’ve got to do something; you don’t know what to do, you don’t even have any beliefs about it, but you have to act.” But, if you do that, I will hope that you would do that in the context of a faith grounded in knowledge. [36:13]
Now then, finally, you have profession, and you can profess things you are not committed to that you don’t believe and that you certainly don’t know. This is very dangerous, because in human life, pressure often, threats of death or harm are met with professing things we don’t believe. [36:40] In countries around the world: in maybe a business or a political movement, or perhaps in a church, you have people professing things, which they don’t believe. And some people baptize into the Christian church upon the profession of faith, upon your profession of faith. Now, when you ask the question, “How do we get a culture like ours in which nominally multitudes—the greatest percentage are Christian, but they don’t act like Christians? Well, you are asking the question, “How do people get into the church?” “How do they come into the church?” For the most part, they come in by profession. Now, this has a lot of interesting variations. For example, you have groups that bring people into the church on the profession of parents to raise them as Christians. Sometimes within that system you have confirmation. That is often a wonderful thing. I have known many people that their confirmation was absolutely life changing thing, and they really entered the kingdom. [38:22] It depends on how it’s done. Or you have the system of coming forward at an invitation. Again, some people, that’s life transforming but I think the figures that the Billy Graham Association gives out of the people who come forward at an invitation, two out of three are never seen again in the church. Now, how did that happen? They heard a message, and they accepted what they were told and now they are fixed. Right? Now we go back to our last session talking about how you understand salvation. If you know the history of religion in America, you know that that is a recently new way of doing it. People who don’t understand what was done in the meetings of Charles Finney, for example, who started the system of the invitation or later on in people like Spurgeon or Moody or even Billy Sunday. They don’t understand how that worked. They think that, well, this is the way Paul and Jesus did it. Right? But, of course, they didn’t do it that way. The decisions that were reached were on an entirely different basis—usually a basis of preaching to people for a period of time and generating tremendous pressure of conviction. That was standard. Mordecai Hamm, for example, the evangelist under whom Graham himself was converted would preach for a week or weeks before he gave anyone a chance to make a decision. Now we don’t do that because after all they might leave the meeting and be run over by a bus and go to hell. Right? So, we want to get ‘em fixed up. You see, the view of salvation affects what we understand about commitment and profession, and we actually have come to teach people that on the basis of their profession, they are now born again. And you will hear people told that over and over and of course, sometimes that actually happens. [41:12]
So, now we have a range of things, and we have to think about how we stand in our world. What do we bring to our world? Do we bring knowledge or something else and again, our theology becomes heavy weight on us pushing us towards a view of being a Christian that has no connection with spiritual formation, or I would rather just say, spiritual growth because that’s what it’s about. And so now then, it’s an uphill battle even within Christian circles to begin to say, “Let’s do this. Why do this? Why? What’s all the fuss? I don’t have to be a disciple. I’m already saved. That’s all taken care of so I’m just enjoying life until I get to move upstairs.” So, this is a serious issue, I think, in trying to understand our circumstance today and it takes the form of not just, “Does God exist?” though I want to come back to that this afternoon and talk about that at greater length because it’s quite amazing that you would have groups of people who assume that they don’t know that God exists. [42:55] For most of them, they don’t because that knowledge has never been provided to them. [43:05]
How do we perish for lack of knowledge? We want to talk about that a bit now. How do we perish for lack of knowledge? Hosea and Isaiah were talking in pretty straightforward terms that if you did not know the law of God, you would get cross wise of how God works and the reality you are living in would crush you and for them, it was always a matter of the survival of the nation of Israel. That nation would perish for lack of knowledge. Do nations perish? Yes, they do. If you know anything about history, you know that nation after nation perishes. Most of the ones that were very prosperous thought they would never perish. You remember, Hitler set up something called the “Thousand Year Reich.” Well, it didn’t last that long, you know because it was not according to knowledge and certainly was not according to God and the knowledge of the law of God. It was crosswise of that and of course, he knew about Christianity, and he understood it to be something that could be disregarded or used. He tried to use some of it. And there were very few people, like Pastor Nemolar and a few others who had knowledge, and they stood on the knowledge, and they opposed Hitler because they were a part of—the Thousand Year Reich was supposed to be the Millennium, of course but they knew the Kingdom of God and its reality and because of that, they had faith based on knowledge. Now, I want to illustrate the connection here by stories that you are very familiar with. Abraham went out not knowing where he was going. Was that blind faith or was that faith environed in knowledge? Abraham did not know where he was going but he knew God and he knew God was with him and he knew God was going to watch over him and take care of him and that was the faith based in knowledge. That’s always the case. When Paul says, “That I may know Him” and lays his life on the line for Christ, he’s doing that on the basis of his knowledge of Christ which he expresses by saying, “I know whom I have believed.” Now, if you can hold on to that language, you see, that gives you the perfect expression. “I know whom I have believed.” Now, belief will carry you beyond knowledge and many times, we don’t know things though we have a basis in knowledge, we have faith, and we step out in faith as we say. That’s always to be “environed in knowledge” and that’s the Biblical pattern. If you watch Jesus, it was His knowledge of the Father—His knowledge of the Kingdom that allows Him to venture to the cross with confidence because He had the knowledge. It allowed Him to trust His work to a bunch of knot heads. And it’s very lovely to watch how He worked with them and how He sent them out and said, “Go do what you have seen me do—preach and manifest the Kingdom.” It is always striking that He did not tell them to teach. In order to teach, you have to know something. In order to manifest and proclaim, uhhhh, faith will do. It will have a basis; they knew Jesus and so, when He tells them to go out, then they can go out and they can venture and they can come back and report and say, “You know, even the Devils are subject to us through your name.” That’s the occasion where Jesus, one of the few places in the Bible, where it talks about Jesus’ rejoicing; He literally jumped up and down for joy. Now, why? You see, He ventured in faith to entrust what He was doing to His followers. Did He know what would happen? Now, here again, you have to watch your theology. I don’t think He knew what would happen, but He found out and that’s what made Him jump for joy was the realization that ordinary, knot-headed people could actually do this, and they would learn as they went along, and they would become teachers. The project of overcoming evil with good within human history depends upon the capacity of human beings to step into the kingdom and to have knowledge to communicate to others on the basis of which they acted and they saw things happen and Jesus could then say, “Upon this rock”—the acknowledgement of Him—“I will build my church”—and no matter what gets thrown at it, it will win. That’s knowledge. That’s knowledge. And you see how important it is that this has been taken away [he points to the board]. If you want to see faith and knowledge perfectly joined, there is nothing better than good old David and Goliath. You see, when David went out against Goliath, he went out in faith. He believed something and acted as if it were so. That faith was based on knowledge and when people told him, “You can’t do this.” He said, “Well, sure I can.” And he sighted knowledge in the strict sense of interactive relationship. So, do you remember what he told them? He said, “Well, you know, I keep sheep. I keep sheep and the lion came, and the bear came, and WE took care of them. He understood fully; he didn’t do it. See, he had knowledge of God acting with him to accomplish things he couldn’t accomplish on his own. And on the basis of that, he said, “This guy is just another puff of wind” and he couldn’t understand why all of the others were hiding in the bushes. But, of course, they didn’t have the knowledge that he had. His knowledge of acting with God led him to act in faith with reference to Goliath. The other people hiding in the bushes—they thought the answer might be armor and so they tried to load David up with that and of course, he said, “I can’t do anything with this stuff.” So, he does what he knows, and God acts with him. That’s the pattern.
Now, that’s Paul; that’s the church at Antioch and Syria. They are serving. They are learning. A wonderful story about how God is moving; now this, you recall, is the first place they were called Christians because they had run out of Jews and up to that point, they could call them Jews. Now then the non-Jews are coming in and they have to get a new name for them. So, it is disciples who were first called Christians. That’s the biblical understanding of the Christian is a disciple. That was a clear status. In that world, they knew what that was. And now they give them another name that has the connotation of Christ in it because Christ is not there visibly and now the Christian movement is off and running. The word “Christian” occurs only three times in the scripture. Disciple—hundreds of times. And that is how it works. And you know, we have to understand that for our day but that is an understanding of knowledge as the content of Christian teaching. [53:14]
Now, here is what has happened, and we have to come to terms with this in our lives. “The historical displacement of the content of the Christian tradition out of the category of knowledge and into the category of mere ‘faith’ has destroyed the standing of the Christian teacher in contemporary society. Nothing is more important today than the recovery of the church as the unique purveyor of essential knowledge in response to the four great questions of life” which we have talked about with you. That is: What is real? Who is well off? Who’s a really good person? How do you get to be a really good person? Our world today is totally at a loss with reference to those questions because they have been given the answer and rejected it—sometimes not because they want to reject it but that’s the system that has come down and now, they are a part of that system. So, for example, in my setting—in some subsections of a profession, English Literature or other fields, a person who applies for a position and is identified as a Christian will be dismissed out of hand. Now, why? Actually, in many cases, it’s not because of an animus against the teachings of Christianity but out of the idea that if you are a Christian, your mind isn’t working well because the assumption is that being a Christian is not a function of knowledge. It’s a function of something else. If you are given a chance as a Christian in most of these situations and you have a chance to show that you are really a good worker at what you do, well, then, people will sort of pass it off because after all, teachers in universities are accepted as kind of crazy anyway. There is almost no nonsense that won’t be found in the mind of some elevated professor, but they do their work. See, that’s the key. The assumption in many people is that if you are a Christian, you couldn’t do your work because your mind isn’t working. If your mind was working, you wouldn’t be a Christian. See? Now, why is that? Basically, it is because the teachers and leaders of the Christian movement have accepted that they do not work with knowledge. They are not bringing in knowledge. Well, what are they doing? Well, they are trying to get people to make decisions. And that’s the business of the pastor is to get people—as I said yesterday— to do things they don’t want to do because they don’t actually believe the stuff they profess. And often that is because it has never been presented to them as a body of knowledge. I hope that makes sense to you. Now, of course, you—I may be wrong. And that’s for you to decide because now you have to live with it. You have to live with it. You are living with it now. I have watched for years people in professions of all kinds—not just in the academic world—who have bought themselves into the idea that as Christians, they are slumming intellectually and they operate out of inferiority that undercuts their capacity to witness because they have this idea that witnessing is “soul-winning”—that is to say, witnessing is getting people to do something. Try another of my misguided slogans on—stop trying to get people to do things—give it up! Start teaching them and that will take care of what they do. But if you are in the business of getting people to do things—and that’s how many people think the work of evangelism is done—witnessing is a matter of helping people “know.” That’s why the word “wit” is in the word “witnessing.” Wit derives from the old German “vicen” and it has to do with knowledge. The old translation in King James, one passage, I think, in Corinthians, Paul says, “I do you to wit my brethren.” That is, I cause you to know. So, now, when we think about our own life and we are looking at these matters of spiritual transformation, we have to understand that this is not just an area of will and feeling. It is an area of knowledge. Knowledge is representing things as they are on an appropriate basis of thought and experience. So, if we are having trouble with prayer, for example, we don’t just keep trying. We ask for knowledge about prayer. If we are thinking about building a church, see, we don’t just get up a lot of energy. We operate on the basis of knowledge. And do you know what? People are hungry for knowledge. They are hungry for it. It’s in the nature of their soul to want to know. You watch this in little children. You offer to teach a little child something before it learns about school and they will come running. They love to learn until it becomes bad news, but even then, they still want to know. Coming to know is one of the deepest joys of the human personality and that is because it puts people in touch with realities that then they can live in terms of. [l:00:40]
So, just one further screen here if I can find it about how we should respond to this and that is—that we should become what Jesus told us to do—teachers of the nations. Now, I am using pastors here in a generous sense—spokespeople for Christ—and this is what he told us to do. Go make students. That’s our first move. Go make students. Surround them in a social setting which manifests the reality of the knowledge to be taught. That’s the second thing. That would be our churches but now we are thinking of them as gatherings of disciples. That’s a shift. And then, in that environment of disciples gathered in the reality of the kingdom, we teach them to do everything that Jesus said. Now, how would pastors do that if they didn’t think they were teaching knowledge? They wouldn’t. They would wind up back trying to get people to do things. And then they would teach and exemplify evangelism as trying to get people to do things. Think about the great missionary movements that went out in the 1800’s or for that matter, go back to Frances Xavier and Ignatius, why did they go out? To bring knowledge and that’s how they thought about it. Now, there is another whole side to this. I don’t have time to get into it now but is has to do with people who are afraid of knowledge because they think knowledge will make people arrogant. Let’s just say that the cure for arrogance is not ignorance. [Laughter] A wonderful—one of those one-page things some lady in the last edition of Christianity Today, and she was saying, “There is nothing wrong with being confident.” But see, she is addressing a situation in which Christians have been taught they shouldn’t be confident. That’s not humble. The answer to pride is not ignorance. One could wish that only people who know were arrogant. Couldn’t you wish for that? The cure is not ignorance but right knowledge of love. [1:03:50]
So, I know there are lots of problems like many people think knowledge is works. Knowledge can be as much of a gift of grace as faith but that’s the way it’s set up so there are lots of problems. I am out of time. I know there are just so many things to talk about and so perhaps we can get into some of them now.
Any of these things I’ve put up by the way, and you can’t see them, you are welcome to come up and copy them or anything you want to do with them.