the cosmos is watching

When I was about 12, the people I most could not stand in life were other kids my age who acted like know-it-alls. Ironically, I think the main reason they bothered me so much was because I was convinced that I knew it all—or at least knew better than they did—but I didn’t have the skills to assert my voice with confidence. I felt a strong sense of injustice that the people who pretended to know it all were the ones being heard, and I—the one who, in my view, actually knew it all—was being ignored or passed over.

Oh, 12. It’s not an age I miss.

What I do miss sometimes is the certainty of being right. Being sure that my perspective is the best one, that I’m the one who has considered all the contingencies, that I can righteously claim that if Jesus were to come comment on XYZ topic, He and I would be pretty well aligned. The older I get the less space there seems to be for self-righteous self-certainty. I think I expected the opposite.

I recently read this quote from Anne Lamott: “The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.”

That quote makes my evangelical bones shiver a little. Didn’t I take half a dozen “spiritual gifts quizzes” that told me I had the gift of faith—precisely because of how I answered questions about certainty? It was never hard for me to believe what I was supposed to believe, and to also believe that I was 100% right. Did that make faith my spiritual gift? Or might my certainty have been a spiritual handicap?

To ask the questions differently: Has my spiritual gift atrophied as I’ve grown older—despite the fact that my walk with Jesus has grown in length and depth—because I’m less of a know-it-all at 31 than I was at 12? Or was I mistaking my propensity to take refuge in knowledge as an unalloyed strength, when it is sometimes my Achilles heel?

Looking back across the churches I’ve lived in over the last few decades, my sense of injustice is still a little bit activated—no longer because I’m convinced I’m the one who really knows it all, but because I think we as a collective may have a know-it-all problem.

Like I measured my “gift of faith” by how much certainty I had, many Christians and congregations measure the genuineness of people’s faith by what they factually “know.” Rather than placing the value on knowing Christ and Him crucified (experientially and actively, as well as propositionally), the unspoken litmus tests for these churches sound more like end-of-year school examinations. How well do you know (and can you spontaneously rehash) your specific church’s statement of faith—right down to its stance on the controversial culture war issues of the day? That’s how we know if you’re a real Christian. That’s how we know if you belong here.

Add to this the fact that all different denominations or non-denominational churches will have a slightly different set of these implicit test questions, and a different set of answers to them, and it’s no wonder the know-it-all problem in Christianity has become a unity problem as well. We are a movement shattered into a million shards.

If the goal is Jesus, then what truly matters is knowing Jesus, recognizing His voice, and faithfully following His lead. But if the goal is being right (and displaying how right we are), we will struggle mightily to exercise our faith in a way that makes space for the Spirit of God to do His work in us and in the world.

When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. I came to you in weakness and fear, and with much trembling. My message and my preaching were not with persuasive words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith would not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power.

1 Corinthians 2:1-5

I believe this is one reason why moving into the Anglican tradition has been such a relief for me. We say the Nicene Creed together every week before we participate in communion, and all the rest we discuss amicably, over coffee and snacks or a feast with mulled wine, as the less-than-primary issues they are.

When Jesus was about to face Pilate, and with him the powers and principalities of darkness, His prayer to the Father was “that they [believers] may all be one; even as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent Me” (John 17:21).

Unity within the Church, and between the Church and the Trinity, is our testimony to the cosmos. All of Creation and its inhabitants are watching.

Do we look anything at all like the One we claim to represent?

to be

A professor and philosopher named John Vervaeke has developed a framework called the “4P Metatheory of Cognition.” He uses four terms to explain four different ways we measure what we know and how we know it: Propositional knowledge, procedural knowledge, perspectival knowledge, and participatory knowledge. I have been thinking about these four terms a lot and how they relate to our faith. Read part one here, part two here, and part three here.

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I’ve been sitting with the final “P” in the 4P Metatheory of Cognition for several weeks now, not quite ready to put my thoughts into words. In fact, I don’t think I’m ready now, either, but as a written and verbal processor, just sitting down and doing it is probably the only way I’ll ever get closer.

To know by participation is somehow both the most basic and the most profound form of knowledge in Vervaeke’s framework. It’s the ultimate state of childlikeness: even the tiniest newborn babies, before they know anything through proposition or procedure or perspective, know just by being. They simply are, and that is all. And they are so completely that it’s several months, at least, before they have any idea that they’re actually a separate being from their mother.

This knowledge is unclouded by fluctuations of feeling, nuances of experience, differences in technique, or debates over terminology. It’s entirely pure and innocent, defined by the Known instead of the knower. The perfect embodiment of a branch abiding in the Vine, without which it has no life, no fruit, no identity, no meaning, no anything.

In a world we struggle to describe without terms of emotion, action, or fact, it’s incredibly hard to describe what it means to just . . . be. Particularly to be as a form of knowing, which we tend to think of as more of an action or activity than a state of existence.

And yet participatory knowledge isn’t passive or idle. It’s “experiential and co-creative,” leading to growth and engagement and relationship in a way that can’t be helped. Something like tending a garden in Eden must have been: Perfect conditions, perfect soil, pure sunlight, ideal moisture, flawless weather, no weeds or pests. Flourishing wouldn’t be a matter of strain and effort for seeds and plants there—no, in those conditions, they couldn’t do anything but flourish.

Sadly, our approach is often to drill propositions and force procedures, eking meager fruit from exhausted and resentful plants, instead of feeding the seeds first on a pure and cloudless relationship with the Lord, using perspective as a bridge back to that childlike state when needed, and allowing the desire for greater wisdom and understanding to grow naturally.

What does this mean for how we walk with Jesus, how we understand the Gospel, how we operate in the church?

I wonder if it means letting go of some of our extremely individualistic approach to faith and embracing the fact that we are interdependent on one another and on the core Vine for our life and fruitbearing. The health of one of us affects the state of all of us.

I wonder if it means changing the focus of our church gatherings, away from lengthy propositional sermons and toward the communion table where we meet together with Jesus and wash in the water of the Word.

I wonder if it means releasing our grip on being “right” about every little theological debate and opening our hands and hearts to the big-picture vision of the Triune God to reopen the gates of Eden and spread His upside-down kingdom over the face of the earth.

to feel

A professor and philosopher named John Vervaeke has developed a framework called the “4P Metatheory of Cognition.” He uses four terms to explain four different ways we measure what we know and how we know it: Propositional knowledge, procedural knowledge, perspectival knowledge, and participatory knowledge. I have been thinking about these four terms a lot and how they relate to our faith; this will serve as the framework for a four-part series leading up to The Bible180 Challenge 2025. (Nearly 600 people have already joined the wait list to read with us! I can’t wait!)

Read the first post in this series here, and the second post here.

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The third term in Vervaeke’s theory is where—for me, at least—things get interesting: perspectival knowledge.

Most of Christianity is very comfortable with knowing and doing. Reciting a creed is, in many traditions, a weekly portion of the liturgy; and what is the Christian faith if not doing something, by following Jesus and obeying God’s commands?

But we often put a hard stop on the next step of knowledge, which I’ll summarize as feeling.

In fact, I would venture to say that for most of my life, I’ve measured the rightness of my knowledge by how well-stripped it is of feeling. Knowledge, I thought, ought to be purely objective, pure logic. We assent to what is true because it’s true. We do what is right because it’s right. To hell with feelings, those deceptive devils!

But as I meditate on the different ways we can know, I begin to see perspectival knowledge not necessarily as a baser, more carnal kind of knowing but as a deeper, more real kind of knowing. If we began with knowing in theory (propositional knowledge) and then stepped into knowing in action (procedural knowledge), the next natural movement in the progression is toward knowing in perspective; knowing from having felt something related, or walked in similar shoes. If we’ve learned the “what” and the “how,” this is the “what it’s like.”

To return to the example of previous posts: How does my perspective as both a child and a parent inform my knowledge of God as my Heavenly Father? How does knowing what it’s like to have children of my own change the way I approach this doctrine?

I can hear my inner 30 years of history with the proposition-heavy, Sola Scriptura church protesting already: “What does it matter what it’s like for me—a fallen person—to be a parent? How can that possibly have any bearing on what it means for God to be a Father? How can using my own flawed and limited experience to understand the truth be anything but corrupt?”

To which I gently respond:

God did not have to portray Himself primarily as a father (or mother, as He also sometimes does in Scripture). He could have chosen Ruler, Dictator, Sovereign, Bully, Friend, or literally anything else He wanted. The terminology is for our benefit, not His. He knows who He is; His choice of characterizations is designed to help us, in our much-smaller human worldviews, understand some measure of Himself.

And He chose to portray Himself as a parent of children—not just of His only begotten Son, but also of the human race He created in His own image.

I don’t know what it’s like to be God—omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, or omni-anything. But I know what it’s like to be the mother of two young children, whose care is my greatest responsibility and whose discipleship is my highest calling.

In motherhood, I’ve found that I know what it’s like to love someone else so completely and viscerally that you would suffer or die to rescue and protect them, as God has done for us. His sacrifice seems perfectly fitting for a father on behalf of His children; the delightfully surprising part is that I’m His child, not that He would do such a thing.

In motherhood, I’ve found that I cannot assent to certain doctrines. Knowing God as my Father through the lens of knowing what it’s like to be a mother has, for example, taken the theology of hyper-Calvinism off the table. It would be morally abhorrent, not to mention beyond unnatural, for me to choose only one of my children as my own while completely and permanently rejecting the other. And I don’t think I am more moral or more in tune with nature than God, the Creator of both humanity and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil from which my ancestors ate.

In motherhood, I’ve found that I learn more about how to be a child with childlike faith daily. My daughters show me tremendous trust and dependence day in and day out. They find peace, love, and joy just by being with me and learning from me. This is what it looks like to live as a citizen of the kingdom of heaven!

In feeling—in knowing what something is like—we not only know deeper, we step closer to childlikeness. Though a toddler may be cognitively incapable of assenting to abstract doctrines and a baby may be physically incapable of acting out their faith, both can feel and make connections to their own experiences. That’s why storytelling and role-playing are such effective teaching tools across peoples and generations. They are the exact same tools God uses to teach us His immense truths in Scripture.

The Bible is sacred, ancient, complex, and profound. But it’s also a story in which God has often assumed the role of Heavenly Father, making space for us to step into the role of His children. This is intentional. It allows us to come to the Scriptures safely from our human perspective and learn more than a creed and more than a set of commandments.

It allows us to learn who He is, on His own terms.