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2004-05-04 issue:

What do you know?

Gnosticism, sex and postmodern philosophy

by Gordon Houser

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Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.—1 Corinthians 8:1b

Greetings come in all shapes and sizes. Years ago I worked with a guy who greeted me with, “What do you know for sure?” I thought up different answers. I often said, “Not much,” which dismissed the question while actually stating the truth. Once I said, “Two plus two equals four.” (Although in base three it equals 11.) Another time I gathered my courage and said, “I am fearfully and wonderfully made,” quoting Psalm 139 and trying to bear witness to my faith.

Trouble was, this guy was just saying hello. My knowledge didn’t matter much to him. How I treated him was likely a different matter.

Those familiar with the Enneagram—a tool for understanding one’s personality, including one’s strengths and weaknesses—will know something about me when I tell you I’m a five. You will know, for example, that I’m drawn to knowledge. The need to know things is both my strength and my weakness. It helps me be curious about people and understand them better but at the same time want to withdraw from them so that I can get to know other things.

Know-it-alls can be good sources for information, but no one likes them. To most people they’re stuck up, pretentious. To other know-it-alls they’re also competition.

When Paul wrote to the church in Corinth (at least the first of his letters that we have), he had to deal with know-it-alls. These people were proud of what (and who) they knew. Some were members of the Paul party; others belonged to the Apollos party, the Cephas party or the Christ party (1 Corinthians 1:12).

Gnosticism: Their attraction to knowledge may have had something to do with Gnosticism (from the Greek word “gnosis,” meaning knowledge), which emphasized secret knowledge. Paul points out to them that such knowledge is not all it’s cracked up to be. He writes that God has made foolish the wisdom of the world (1:20b).

Throughout this letter Paul mocks their “knowledge.” He uses the refrain, “Do you not know?” (perhaps better translated, “You know, don’t you?”), then shows how their knowledge has not helped them be a church that expresses unity or love for one another. Their knowledge puffs them up with pride (8:1). Instead, says Paul, they should exercise love, the greatest of the spiritual gifts (13:13).

I’m all with Paul in chastising those Corinthians. But I get uncomfortable as I realize I share some of their foibles. I may not eat food sacrificed to idols (which is fine, says Paul, as long as you’re not leading your fellow believers to do it against their conscience), but I may take part in some cultural activities I feel free to do while looking down on others who do not feel that freedom.

This suspicion of knowledge goes way back, clear back to the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve were allowed to eat freely of every tree except “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2:17). And we know what happened.

Solomon had great knowledge and did much for God. But then things fell apart, and a generation later the kingdom split in two.

Sex: The Bible also has a different take on knowledge. The word is used to describe the intimate act of lovemaking. Adam “knew” Eve, and she conceived and bore Cain (Genesis 4:1). This is the kind of intimate, loving knowledge we are called to have with God, one that goes to the core of our being.

This is what the Corinthians were missing. Rather than sharing the Lord’s Supper as a meal of thanksgiving in remembrance of Jesus’ death, some of them eat ahead so that they don’t have to share their food with their brothers and sisters, while others get drunk (1 Corinthians 11:21). Communion is to be an intimate act of love that reflects our Lord. In their pursuit of knowledge, the Corinthians had not learned this.

I understand some of this because of books I’ve read. But I can’t understand the intimate knowledge the Bible talks about without experiencing it. And this knowledge is not simply about sex. Rather, as Ronald Rolheiser writes in The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality (Doubleday, 1999), it’s about “a wholeness that, at some dark level, we know we have been separated from.”

Rolheiser distinguishes sexuality, which he calls “sacred energy,” from having sex. “A mature sexuality,” he writes, “is when a person looks at what he or she has helped create, swells in a delight that breaks the prison of his or her selfishness, and feels as God feels when God looks at creation.”

That word “selfishness” jumps out at me. Knowledge that puffs oneself up is a meager, loveless knowledge. But knowledge shared in love, one that creates something beautiful, is good. It builds up the community, including oneself.

The Corinthians seemed to be looking for ways to distinguish themselves from others. But the intimate knowledge to which God calls us joins us to the community of God’s people and invites others to enjoy that love.

Postmodern philosophy: The history of knowledge has led to many people thinking they can solve problems strictly through reason. This idea, labeled modernism by some, promotes human knowledge as autonomous, i.e., humans can arrive at universally valid truths once they are free from the authority of any dominant texts or traditions. According to this “Enlightenment project,” reason rules, and religion goes out the door.

In an article in The Christian Century (“Blind Spots: Christianity and Postmodern Philosophy,” June 14, 2003), Merold Westphal, a professor of philosophy at Fordham University, looks at postmodern philosophy, which critiques modernism. Such a critique is in sync with the Bible, which says human wisdom is foolishness (1 Corinthians 1:25).

Westphal writes that in the Bible, instructions about how we should live are not based on human reason but on revelation from God. The biblical writers are not modernists who try to base their instructions on what is reasonable and universal among humankind. Instead they say, “This is the word of the Lord.”

While some say postmodern philosophy reduces Christianity to “a tribal religion of those who happen to belong to a particular culture,” Westphal points to the apostle Paul to refute such a notion. Modernism wants to reduce all faith to sight, but Paul insists that “we walk by faith, not by sight”    (2 Corinthians 5:7).

“For Paul,” Westphal writes, “the bold and universal proclamation of the gospel does not require absolute knowledge as its legitimizing backup. That task can be left to the Holy Spirit.” Westphal goes on to mention two errors to be avoided in relation to postmodern philosophy. The “conservative” error insists against the evidence that it possesses an absolute knowledge. The “liberal” error assumes that since the church and its theologies are relative, the gospel is merely a cultural artifact.

We cannot prove God on a piece of paper. God is not a theorem but a person. The question thus becomes not what you know but who you know. We can know God’s love intimately by experiencing that love in a multitude of ways. And, Paul says, we can proclaim that love and live it, for love is “the greatest of these” (1 Corinthians 13:13).

The question I’m left with is whether I’ll use my (alleged) knowledge as a weapon to try to prove someone else wrong or admit I don’t know much and try to learn what God may want to teach me, especially about loving others.

Next time someone greets me with, “What do you know?”, perhaps I’ll smile and say hello. Or perhaps not. I don’t know.

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