Saturday, November 23, 2013

Christians, YOU are a People of Knowledge

Dallas Willard once said that the real battle going on in our time is over authority and authority is tied to knowledge. If this is true, over the last two centuries the Church has been forced to the sidelines (and at times voluntarily retreated). In the West knowledge was separated into two spheres. The realm of the sense perceptible and the realm of the spiritual. Effectively what has happened is that sciences were granted “real” knowledge and the Church was granted sentiment, values, faith. Thus pastors and Christians and the Bible don’t deal with realities except the realities of peoples’ emotional lives. And so, Professor Willard concludes, pastors are no longer in the “knowledge” business, they are in the “faith” business. Which basically means pastors aren’t relevant to the real world or the marketplace and we have slowly been edged out of significance in the public sphere.
            I for one am tired of being elbowed out of the public sphere. It is increasingly obvious that our communities are adrift. Do we imagine that ruling “faith” out of order in politicians or civil servants or volunteers is helpful? We’re requiring people to ignore half of the universe’s knowledge! Can any society continue to make progress down the road if the steering column has limits artificially imposed on it – such that it can only turn left but never right? Is it any wonder that we seem to be swerving from ditch to ditch?
            It is time for Christians to dig in their heels and refuse to be relegated to “sentiment”. How? First by understanding that the West’s bifurcation of knowledge into two spheres is not Biblical. We must see that the Bible is God’s divinely inspired Word. A word from an Intelligent Being to intelligent creatures. And what does this Word say about knowledge? “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.” Proverbs 1:7. In other words, intelligence and understanding don’t even start until we factor the existence and nature of our Creator and Redeemer into the equation. The recognition of God must be the first move in any pursuit of knowledge. According to the Apostle Paul, when people refused to acknowledge God they became “futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.”
            We’re now 150 years down the road of futile thinking – a foolish separation of knowledge. Modern advances in technology and the sciences would seem to suggest that the splitting of knowledge into two groups was the right move. But was it? Increasingly “scientific” knowledge is being used foolishly. And we see the silliness of making decisions without factoring God into the equation.
            So what are we to do?  Corporately, churches must no longer cede the realm of knowledge to others. We are in the knowledge business. Let us stop collaborating with those who slice apart the realm of knowledge and would forbid the Church from relevance beyond peoples’ emotional lives. How are we collaborating? By an over-emphasis in our services on sentiment and experience. Pastors must not restrict our study to a narrow sliver of the realm of knowledge. And each of us as Christians must accept that we are a people of knowledge. The Apostle Paul’s prayer for the Church is relevant for us today:


“And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.” (Philippians 1:9-11)

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