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Biblical Knowing: A Scriptural Epistemology of Error, by Dru Johnson
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With major themes like "the knowledge of good and evil" "knowing that YHWH is your God" knowing that Jesus is the Christ, and the goal of developing Israel into a "wise and discerning people" Scripture clearly stresses human knowledge and the consequences of error. We too long for confidence in our understanding, the assurance that our most basic knowledge is not ultimately incorrect. Biblical Knowing assesses what Israel knew, but more importantly, how she was meant to know-introducing a comprehensive Scriptural epistemology, firmly rooted in the Scripture's own presentation of important epistemological events in the story of Israel. Because modern philosophy has also made authoritative claims about knowledge, Biblical Knowing engages contemporary academic views of knowledge e.g. Reformed Epistemology, scientific epistemology, Virtue Epistemology, etc. and recent philosophical method e.g. Analytic Theology assessing them for points of fittedness with or departure from Scripture's own epistemology. Additionally, Biblical Knowing explores what proper knowing looks like in the task of theology itself, in the teaching and preaching of the church, and in the context of counseling.
- Sales Rank: #550974 in Books
- Published on: 2013-04-22
- Released on: 2013-04-22
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x .66" w x 6.00" l, .80 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 264 pages
Review
Dru Johnson attends carefully to Scripture to elucidate the dimensions of human knowing it exemplifies throughout. He compares biblical knowing favorably with scientific epistemology in a Polanyian vein, and he contrasts it with the myopic preoccupation with propositions in Anglo-American analytic philosophy. Johnson taps his multi-disciplinary expertise to bring Christian scholars a valuable study that itself calls us to listening and participation in order to see a broader reality.
--Esther L. Meek
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Geneva College
Dru Johnson's Biblical Knowing is a superb introduction to the latest currents in scholarship seeking to elucidate the philosophical content of Scripture. Johnson focuses on biblical approaches to human knowledge, arguing that Scripture shies away from propositional affirmations in favor of phenomenal experience as constitutive of knowledge. In doing so he defends rigor and clarity as biblical values, but boldly insists that these can be no less present in biblical stories about gaining knowledge than in the discursive arguments of later traditions. This is an excellent work that deserves careful attention, opening up new horizons in both philosophy and biblical studies.
--Yoram Hazony
author of The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture
Biblical Knowing makes a significant contribution to a fresh opening up of the relationship between Scripture and philosophy. This is no easy task, requiring the author to navigate philosophy, biblical studies, and theology. Dru does this masterfully. The result is a lucid, accessible text, and yet one that makes an original contribution. It is the sort of book that I have been waiting for when teaching epistemology and I suspect that many professors will have the same experience.
--from the foreword by Craig G. Bartholomew
H. Evan Runner Professor of Philosophy
Redeemer University College
Biblical Knowing is a welcome work to a revitalized field of knowledge.
--Arthur J. Keefer, Convenant Theological Seminary, as published in Journal of Theological Studies --Wipf and Stock Publishers
About the Author
Dru Johnson is an Assistant Professor of Biblical Studies at The King's College in New York City. He is also the Templeton Associate Research Fellow in Analytic Theology at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, Israel.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Interview with the author
By David George Moore
Dru Johnson is an assistant professor of biblical studies at The Kings College in New York City. The following interview appeared on Scot McKnight's Jesus Creed. It revolves around Johnson's book, Biblical Knowing: a Scriptural Epistemology of Error.
Moore: I know that Biblical Knowing is a rework of your doctoral work. Would you tell us a bit how you got interested in this study?
Johnson: Originally, I was going to do doctoral work in social psychology. I enjoyed research design, statistical analysis, and the way scientific constructs attempt to capture human behavior. In a sudden turn of events, I ended up going to seminary instead and read Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge in my first year on the advice of a fellow seminarian. As I read Polanyi, he was addressing all the things about science that I was most interested in, what philosophers call the epistemology of science. Moreover, everything Polanyi said seemed intuitively correct to me, but none of it was ever discussed when I was studying psychology. I wondered, “Why had I never heard any of this before.”
Fast-forward seven years; I had completed an M.Div. at Covenant Theological Seminary and an M.A. in analytic philosophy at the University of Missouri—St. Louis. I had developed a profound love for Scripture and some philosophical training to boot, but I could not find anyone who was doing exegetical work on the epistemology in Scripture itself (for good reason, as it’s fraught with pitfalls). A mentor—Dr. Michael Williams at Covenant—challenged me to quit talking about my epistemology as if it were biblical and do the hard work of showing the epistemology in Scripture.
Moore: Can you give us a 50,000 foot view of your book’s big theme(s)?
Johnson: Biblical Knowing most basically pursues the question of the Scripture’s own view of knowledge: what does it mean to know well? Because I have been persistently un-persuaded by current theories of knowledge in analytic philosophy (the most popular type of philosophy in the Anglo-American world), I wanted to find the basic waypoints of knowing in Scripture and compare them to the work being done in philosophy.
What I found is unsurprising to most Christians: To know well means recognizing the authoritative voices whom God has authenticated to the community—in Scripture, this is usually Israel’s prophets—and then enacting the directions they prescribe. It’s similar to finding an authoritative golf coach (e.g., authenticated PGA golf pro), but then you also have to obey her instructions if you want to know how to drive a golf ball well. Failure to recognize the correct authorities or follow their instructions leads to erroneous knowing.
Moore: As Christians, we believe that the Bible and Jesus Christ are the two “special” means of God’s revelation to us. But even though the Bible is a major means in knowing God, does that assume we simply have to figure out what its words and propositions represent?
Johnson: If by “we,” you mean “the church” and not merely individuals figuring it out, then yes, in a way. It’s similar to the discussion of Torah. If you think the Torah is a list of rules, then you are just doing the math of life with the Torah's legal calculus. However, if Torah is instructing us on how to see the world, then we have to embody its directions, as the instructions of the prophets in order to see what is being shown to us. The chapter where I address propositions in philosophy (Chapter Seven “Broad Reality and Contemporary Philosophy”) shows them to be misplaced in the biblical scheme of knowing. I argue that propositions, which are something like “facts,” aren’t the thing to be known, but act as our conventional linguistic tools to help us know.
Embodying the guidance of Scripture disposes us to see what is otherwise unseen to us. Polanyi compares it to being able to read an X-ray. An X-ray contains no propositional “facts” in the sense that it cannot be true or false. Despite this, if you practice a certain way of looking at X-rays, under the guidance of an expert radiologist, you will be able to see something in an X-ray film that you would never see apart from embodying the radiologist’s directions.
Moore: We are subjects not objects. That does not mean we are doomed to subjectivism, but it does remind us, as your book does so well, that social connections are indispensable to how we know truth from error. Unpack that some more for us.
Johnson: This is why I think that scientific knowing makes such poignant points of contact with knowing in Scripture. On our own, subjectivism mires our knowledge in the foibles of relativism and whatever we can get out of the sobering effects of reality (e.g., pain, death, love, art, etc.). However, in order for scientific knowledge to be considered “scientific,” it must be practiced and habituated in a community of knowers who use language and theoretical models to basically ask, “Do you see what I see?” When a community gets together and says, we see something here through our shared practices in reality and our trust in each other, then it is considered “scientific” knowing. In Scripture, humanity is not left to figure things out on their own, but the community of Israel is called to collectively inspect reality according to how God has created and what he has done for Israel.
Two aspects of this process are essential. First, prophets are clearly authenticated to Israel and she must be guided by them. Second, reality must be allowed to intrude and shape Israel. The famines and wonders of God are external realities that Israel is meant to collectively see as intruding communiqués from God. Many of the prophets are caught chastising Israel because she only murmured about the awesomeness or difficulties of God’s acts, but like the Pharaoh of Exodus, didn’t see them a signs with transcendent meaning.
The biblical examples of knowing well includes communities that submit to proper guides (i.e., the prophets), embodies his/her instructions, and allows objective reality to shape their judgments. Importantly, God’s historical acts and prophetic directions are also considered to be part of that external reality that should be allowed to intrude upon and shape their judgments.
Moore: My own introduction to Polanyi came from reading Longing to Know by Esther Meek and Proper Confidence by Lesslie Newbigin. What benefit do these two books offer to Christians?
Johnson: I read Polanyi about a year before meeting Esther Meek. I quickly became friends with her and took a course on epistemology from her, where I was assigned Lesslie Newbigin. First, Esther has been a mentor and transformative influence in my life since my days at seminary. Second, she is an excellent communicator and has distilled some of the best thinking of Michael Polanyi into crystalic prose. I still am amazed at how she can translate Polanyi (and her doktorvater, Marjorie Grene) into writing that is so approachable. Both Polanyi and Grene were amazing minds and very dense reading, which requires re-reading to be understood. In fact, I often see Polanyi show up in the footnotes of authors who don’t really understand what Polanyi was doing with his tome Personal Knowing.
I recommend all of Esther’s books to almost everyone I meet. Her new book A Little Manual for Knowing is a perfect 100 page précis of her work on Polanyi and I highly recommend it! Murray Rae, Trevor Hart, and T.F. Torrance above all have sewn Polanyi’s thinking into their theology and popularized him along the way.
When I first read Lesslie Newbigin, I didn’t know enough Christian or World history to make all the connections that he was spinning together. I was a high school fail-out, a fairly new Christian, and a non-humanities and unread psychology major. Needless to say, seminary was an intellectual jolt for me. I’ve recently gone back and re-read Newbigin’s several times, and like a great novel or movie, I see more and more each time. Like Meek with Polanyi, Michael Goheen has been a very useful popularizer of Lesslie Newbigin. Overall, it is painful to see such transformative thinking as Polanyi, Grene, and Newbigin go unnoticed or misunderstood by most academic theologians, philosophers, and scientists today.
Moore: Many Christians make a radical distinction between knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge is what we “know” while wisdom is what we “do.” Interestingly, the book of Proverbs puts knowledge and wisdom in closer proximity. We are told that the wise person “increases in learning.” (Prov. 1:5) It seems quite clear there is a limitation to how much we can do if our knowledge base is neglected. Speak to this important synergy of wisdom and knowledge.
Johnson: In a recently completed research project on ritual epistemology in Scripture, I tackle the knowledge/wisdom binary head on (Rite to Know, forthcoming). Hence, my thoughts have developed a bit more beyond what I constructed in Biblical Knowing, where I restricted myself to the aphoristic nature of wisdom literature such as Proverbs or Ecclesiastes.
Basically, Scripture sometimes conflates the terms knowing and wisdom together, and at other times they seem to be on a continuum. Either way, I believe the old construct that I learned in the church—”Knowledge is knowing what’s true, but wisdom is knowing what to do.”—is incorrect. Wisdom is not applying knowledge content to a real world problem. Wisdom, as developed in all of Scripture, is a skilled discernment that sees beyond the superficial circumstances. It is a transcendent vision, like the police officer who “knows” when someone is lying or a counselor who can see abuse patterns in a person’s past experience, even though the person never alluded to abuse. In a similar vein, the prophets were called “seers” before they picked up the name “prophet.”
In essence, Scripture’s depiction of wisdom acknowledges that everyone is looking at the same situation, image, or data, but some are skilled to discern what others cannot see—such as a hairline fracture or a collapsed lung in an X-ray. Hence, wisdom must be habituated and we must be guided to see what was there all along. I argue in my chapter on Mark’s Gospel that this is exactly what Jesus was attempting to do with his disciples, though it admittedly does not appear successful in Mark. He promised that the disciples would be able to see that going to the Gentiles, healing, teachings, suffering, and crucifixion are all part of the “mystery of the kingdom of God” (Mark 4:10–12). Everyone sees the same events, the same data, but the disciples need to be able to see how it all coheres to one big mystery.
Moore: You wisely remind us that we are “embodied” beings. Having flesh and blood is critical to how we know what we know, isn’t it?
Johnson: I hate to say this, but my entire next book (Rite to Know) is dedicated to ritual, philosophy of the body, and epistemology in Scripture. There, I make a strong case that not only are our bodies required for knowing, but that our sense of philosophical reason itself derives from our bodies. Hence, sacraments are not what we do because we have beliefs about them. Rather, rituals in Scripture are a means of forming us in order to dispose us to see what God is showing us. Again, I make the case that this is exactly what happens in scientific knowledge too—bodies, community ritual, guidance, logic, and more are strategically employed to make the scientific enterprise efficacious.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Clear Thinking about "Saving Faith"
By John Samsvick
Dr. Johnson's critique of modern analytic epistemology, with its narrow focus on propositional knowledge, will help those who believe that much of evangelical theology is in bondage to a similar understanding of the Gospel and "saving faith". He attempts to demonstrate that Scripture presents knowledge as a process which begins with authenticated prophetic voices claiming to declare the will and purposes of God. Knowing requires our acknowledgement of these authoritative voices and a participating submission to those who guide us. From the pattern observed in the Bible, this participation is under the guidance of Scripture and the Holy Spirit as we seek to enact and live out what is required, Johnson refers to two critical events of the Bible story to illustrate his theme. Moses and Aaron have explained to the people the Lord's purpose of deliverance; 'And the people believed...'. Johnson notes."Calvin argues against Israel's propositional belief as conclusive evidence of her knowledge. For Calvin actions must accompany the belief. 'But we shall presently see how fickle and infirm was their belief. It is plain...that it was without any living root' " . Calvin's judgement about Israel's "belief" may be applied to Peter's confession "You arr the Christ". This propositional "knowledge" did not embody the depth of Jesus self-consciousness: "For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many". "How fickle and infirm Peter's belief" was demonstrated by his actions, his passionate rebuke of his Lord for prophesying suffering, rejection and death for the Son of Man; and by implication, for himself and all who would follow Jesus (Mk.8:34). In a quote from Lesslie Newbigin, Johnson offers a simple summary of his thought: "We need to learn to know God as he is. There is no way by which we come to know a person except by dwelling in his story and becoming a part of it".
James Denney, noted Scotch pastor and theologian (the great "defender of 'objective atonement" in the last century) has stressed these personal and relational aspects of Christian epistemology in his Cunningham Lectures, 'The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation', "where he emphasized the eternal love of God bearing sin as the originating 'objective' source of the atonement, and the experience of being reconciled as the originating 'subjective' source of Christian faith". (J.M. Gordon-A Biography). Denney argues: "In the experience of reconciliation to God through Christ is to be found the principle and touchstone of all genuine Christian doctrine: whatever can be derived from this experience and is consistent with it is true and necessary; whatever is incompatible with it lacks the essential Christian character." Gordon notes that "what disconcerted the first readers of 'Reconciliation' was the way Denney based the argument on experience. He gave primacy, not to doctrine (propositional truths), nor to the biblical text or its application, 'but to these as interpreted by the evangelical experience of being reconciled to God' ". (Gordon remarks: "Almost all reviewers took issue with the authority Denney conferred on experience as a primary datum in theological construction...and the privileged authority of personal spiritual experience"). Now why did Denney think as he did? Gordon lets Denney explain: "The basis of all doctrine is experience and...it is to the fact and experience of reconciliation, not deductions, that we owe the very idea that God is love...We know immediately the only things of any consequence: that sin is rooted in our nature so deeply, so congenital and powerful, that we cannot save ourselves; and on the other hand, that God has made us for Himself, , and has never left us without a witness in our consciences, so that the possibility and hope of reconciliation are not precluded". Gordon stresses another major concern of Denney's, that "in any theory of atonement, personality gets something like the place which is its due". Denney believed that this was one of the great achievements of the Reformation. "What it did was to expel 'things' from religion, and exhibit all its realities as persons and the relations as persons". This notion helps explain why Denney chose 'reconciliation' as the controlling metaphor for atonement in his final major work. "The powerful and recurring emphasis on the eternal love of the Father as the fundamental reality of he universe, rendered all abstract, mechanical, legal. that is, impersonal, categories inadequate to the New Testament doctrine and Denney's own experience".
This writer undertook a review of Johnson's book on Biblical Knowledge because he believed Johnson is dealing with what he would describe as the epistemological error which holds much of the evangelical world in thrall. a commitment to "saving faith" as a form of "propositional knowledge". More than 50 years ago, a leading evangelist responded to the many letters he was receiving from people converted at his meetings, people who lamented their lack of assurance or joy in their salvation. His initial reply, in a best selling book, was a mild rebuke to his respondents, and his explanation to his readers of the problem: "They are confusing faith with feeling". He proceeded to explain that we are to use our God given ability to "believe"; for Christians this means having "faith" in two fundamental "facts", that Jesus is the Son of God and that he died for our sins. Exercising this "believing assent" puts us right with God. We are "justified by faith".
Gordon shares with his readers a hymn couplet from John Wesley's "Jesus Lover of My Soul" a couplet which he believes is "a clue to what generates the passion and drives the argument of Denney:, "When we really see Him and virtue goes out of Him to heal us, we cry irrepressibly, "Thou O Christ, art all I want; more than all in Thee I find.' We do not stay to ask what He can do for us; what He is--not according to a doctrine of His person, but in the rich and simple reality we see in the evangelists--is enough for us. HE is our peace. The whole promise and power of reconciliation is in Him, and we know without proving that He can bring us to God and save to the uttermost."
James Gordon , filled with Denney's spirit concludes: "This was Denney, the preacher theologian, preaching his own experience so far as he could grasp it, more than once conceding that ultimate realities defy systems of thought'...'we do not stay to ask...we know without proving' "..
6 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Game Changer.
By Davar
Of the hundreds of books I have bought from Amazon, this is the only book I have ever offered a review. I do so now, because I believe that it deserves more attention than any other work I have crossed.
It should be incorporated as a required philosophical reading for Seminaries and drafted into a required course for the philosophy program of Christian liberal arts universities.
Although I would recommend this book to anyone, I am particularly concerned that it reach the hands of student's and be taken seriously by academia. Simply put, this book needs to be read.
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