Christian Foundations for Faithful Thinking: Knowledge is Love
I have argued that all Christian thought is based on and comes from the reality of a Trinitarian God. Because the foundation of all reality is the Trinity, then knowing and truth are hypostatic koinonia. Furthermore, Truth is Personal because it is a Person. And if these premises are true, then it follows that true knowledge is love.
If knowledge is love, then the dichotomy between experiential knowledge and intellectual knowledge is resolved. The two are simply different expressions of the same reality. Nowhere is this is brought out more clearly than in the biblical euphemism for sexual intercourse: "knowing." Knowledge is deeply personal and experiential, but it involves the mind as well, as such experience is articulated and systematized. But so, too, is the intellect formative of experiential knowing as our experience is filtered through pre-existent cognitive grids. If knowing is loving, then Truth lives thoughtfully.
Love as knowledge, and knowledge as love also collapses the divide between kataphatic and apophatic discourse. It is true that God's essential being cannot be comprehended by the human mind (apophatic), and thus we are forced to speak of God as "not being" this or that. But because of God's love for us, and our love for him, we can come to experience the positive (kataphatic) reality of his gracious energies. We can say, positively, that God is love. But we cannot say, love is God. We are bounded by our human fallenness on one hand, and set free through theosis on the other. If knowing is loving, then Truth is revealed in the experience of mystery.
If knowledge is love, then Truth is allowed to transcend reason. As Kant so ably showed, the chief gift of reason is its critical nature. Reason can speak kataphatically only if it remains within its apophatic limits. Love causes reason to be ordered to investigation and reins in its exploration so that reason is both critical and faithful. If given full rein, reason devours itself through skepticism. But when united by love to the Person of Truth, reason allows Christian thought to be faithful.
Having explored these few foundational elements of Christian thinking, we are now ready to build on that foundation and trace some important implications for faithful thought.
[Next: Building on Christian Foundations for Faithful Thinking: Tracing the Implications]
Posted by Clifton at January 5, 2004 05:00 AM | TrackBack