Two Different Kinds
of Knowledge
My sister-in-law, Erin, worked at a Lifeway bookstore in Denver, Colorado, when she was in high school. One year, a local church was hosting a famous Christian singer for a concert. There’s a good chance that if I said his name, you’d know whom I was talking about.
Anyway, Erin, her brother, and several other Lifeway employees had been enlisted as stagehands for the concert. They were thrilled at the prospect of being so close to this celebrity and brought posters with them from the store to ask him to autograph. They were almost starstruck. They knew all about this singer. They knew the words to his songs. They knew the stories of his life—at least the stories he’d shared in songs and interviews. They knew quite a lot about him.
But as they would discover on the night of the concert, they did not know him.
Which is to say, they had no relationship with him and actually had not an inkling of who he was as a person. Before I continue, I should qualify what I’m about to say with the acknowledgement that this singer must have been in the middle of a grueling tour and who knows what else was going on in his life. But what Erin and her colleagues discovered that night was a man very different from the gentle and yearning persona of the albums they’d listened to. He was frequently barking demands at his assistant. He did not even acknowledge them as he absentmindedly signed their poster, except to ask for a bottle of water. Needless to say, they went away from the concert that night disenchanted….
In some languages, there are two different verbs for the verb “to know.” One verb is for intellectual knowledge, knowing about something. The other verb is for relational knowledge, which is actually knowing someone through experience. For example, you might know who Chip and Joanna Gaines are, which is to say, you might know about them. But that would be different than knowing them. Than actually seeing them outside or beyond the confines of their expertly crafted brand and knowing something about their hearts, their genuine hopes or fears, joys or sorrows. (As it happens, my brother served a church just a block away from their studio in Waco, Texas, and he says they had a reputation for being genuinely lovely people.)
Knowledge Versus Love
Today’s scripture gives us a snapshot of an ancient dilemma. In Corinth and elsewhere in Rome, it was common for banquets and other civic gatherings to be hosted at the local temple, and the meat served there would be from the recent sacrifices to the local gods. As you can imagine, this puts Christ-followers in an awkward position. Let’s say you get an invitation from some friends to attend a wedding or a funeral or a baby shower. If you go, you may find yourself offered meat that has been sacrificed to gods you don’t believe in. Do you eat it?
Clearly some Corinthians are eating the meat. Paul gives voice to their reasoning in today’s scripture. “No idol in the world really exists,” they say (1 Cor 8:4). “There is no God but one” (1 Cor 8:4). In other words, they know better. They know that these meat sacrifices are ultimately meaningless; they are offered up to gods who don’t exist. As they see it, the meat is not defiled. So why let it go to waste?
What fascinates me is that Paul never says whether they are right or whether they are wrong. Because, for Paul, the real issue is not who is right or who is wrong. In fact, what concerns Paul is this very attitude of determining rightness and wrongness. Immediately after introducing his topic—“now concerning food sacrificed to idols” (1 Cor 8:1)—he launches into what seems an entirely different discussion: knowledge and love. He presents them as opposites. He says our faith is not aimed at knowledge, at knowing what’s right. It is aimed instead at love, at building up.
To make his point, Paul says that “the necessary knowledge” is not actually about anything we claim to know, but rather about living in God’s love and being known by God (cf. 1 Cor 8:2-3). I think back to the two verbs for “to know,” one about intellectual knowledge and being right, the other about relational knowledge and being connected. And I think Paul is saying that, if we want to talk about knowledge as a good thing, then we should be talking about the second kind, the knowledge of love, the knowledge of a person through relationship and care.
Of Rights and
Responsibility
If we went through today’s scripture and put quotation marks around the word “knowledge” every time it appears, I think we would hear Paul’s tone voice even more clearly. Generally, he refers to knowledge not as a good thing, but as a dangerous thing, as an attitude or way of living that may in fact do great harm to others. “By your ‘knowledge’ those weak believers for whom Christ died are destroyed,” he says (1 Cor 8:11). In other words, when you eat food sacrificed to idols, there are other Christ-followers who have grown up in this culture of idols, and they will be confused by your actions. They will think, perhaps, that you are acknowledging other gods and that they might do so too and that Christ is not the sole way and truth and life—and so “by your ‘knowledge’ those weak believers for whom Christ died are destroyed.”
While food sacrificed to idols is an ancient and distant concern, seemingly unrelated to anything we experience, Paul’s underlying point is perhaps more pertinent than ever. For Paul, “knowledge” is an attitude of rightness that destroys community. Does that resonate? In this upcoming election year, our world will be flooded with declarations and debates and denunciations that are all based on “knowledge”—on this attitude of rightness. I am treading lightly here. (Please know that, from what I say, you can take what sounds true and helpful and leave the rest.) Our culture has become especially individualistic and consumeristic, and the sacred value that guides it is a person’s “rights.” Which is to say, the right to live the way we want (as long as we’re not hurting others): the right to buy what we want, to have the health care that we want, to drive what we want, to build the kind of house that we want, and so on. The American dream is an individual’s dream, underwritten by rights that are almost completely unrestricted.
It’s not a bad dream as far as it goes. It’s just that, for Jesus, for Paul, it goes nowhere near far enough. It is not the kingdom of which Jesus dreamed; it is not the kingdom that Paul proclaims in today’s passage. In the kingdom of God, the sacred value is not rights but responsibility. The sacred value is not being right but being in relationship. The “necessary knowledge” (and here I hear Paul through gritted teeth, saying “If we must use the word ‘knowledge’ then let’s use it this way”)—the “necessary knowledge” is not knowing about things but knowing people through encounter and through a spirit of care.
Bearing Hope in a
Polarized World
Paul doesn’t issue the Corinthians a verdict on who is right and who is wrong. He redirects them from their preoccupation with rights and back to their responsibility for their neighbor. “Take care,” he says, “that this liberty of yours”—that is, this right to eat whatever you want—“does not somehow become a stumbling block” to others (1 Cor 8:9). And he models the way that he espouses, as he gives up his own right, saying, “If food is a cause of their falling, I will never eat meat” (1 Cor 8:13).
Today’s scripture strikes me as precious instruction for us who live in what seems an increasingly polarized world. I’ve read reports that the polarization in our society is actually more emotional than ideological. That is, people are increasingly coming to see their opponents not as having different perspectives but as simply untrustworthy and unlikable. It’s not that they disagree with them. It’s that they dislike them. Needless to say, this is not “the necessary knowledge.”
But as a follower of Christ, I can bear light in the dark. I can declare the good news of a different world, the kingdom, in deed and in word. And today’s scripture is a helpful reminder for how I might do that. The question that should motivate me in my life with others is not, “Am I right?” but, “Am I in relationship?” The “necessary knowledge” is not knowing the facts, but knowing and caring for the heart of the other.
An inspiring motto that circulated among the earliest Christ-followers in northern Africa was this: “We do not speak great things but live them.”[1] The fragrant aroma of Christ in our world is not what we know but how we live. Early Christ-followers made a name for themselves not based on a leader or agenda that would employ the force of law to protect their interests, but based on the way they cared for others. How in plagues they took in the sick rather than kicking them out onto the street. How they offered burials for the poor who could not afford them. How they conducted themselves patiently in business transactions, not bringing suit against their business associates. Their spirit was not a defensive one, but rather a sacrificial one. They had no power to protect, only love to share. Their knowledge was “the necessary knowledge,” the knowledge of their neighbor and their neighbor’s heart and need.
This year of the election is, as Jesus might have put it, a plentiful harvest. It is a special opportunity to show how we are different, to show the hope we have in Christ who knows and loves us all.
As our ancestors in northern Africa said nearly two thousand years ago, so may we be able to say: “We do not speak great things but live them.”
Prayer
Whose care we know in Christ
Who died for us all—
Help us to unlearn
Habits of rightness,
Attitudes of knowledge and control
…
That we might take on the easy yoke
Of Christ’s gentle and humble heart,
And that our care for others
Might bear witness to your life-changing love.
In Christ, who builds up others: Amen.
[1] Alan
Kreider, The Patient Ferment of the Early Church (Grand Rapids: Baker,
2016), 14.
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