Knowledge for the Love of God

Why Your Heart Needs Your Mind

Timothy Pickavance

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781467464444
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

What is the role of the intellect in the life of faith? 

Jesus commanded us to love God with our minds—but why? Isn't simply believing enough? Confused on this point, many Christians choose to focus only on the role of their hearts in shaping their faith and consider that adequate. Some Christians go even further, arguing that knowledge exists in  opposition to faith—that one must choose either the truth of science or the truth of the Bible. 

The reality is that our formation into Christlikeness relies heavily on our minds and that Christian belief is about thinking more, not less. Far from being a threat, the intellect is central to faith—so long as it is treated as an instrument of worship rather than as the  object of worship.  

Knowledge for the Love of God is for followers of Jesus needing to better understand the crucial connection between faith and rationality. Timothy Pickavance shows how learning about who God is and what he has done, is doing, and will do draws us closer to him—just as in any relationship. With stories from his own experiences wrestling with this aspect of faith, Pickavance relates a compelling vision of how cultivating the intellect strengthens our Christian worldview, helps us gain freedom in Christ, and enables us to love God with our whole being. Discussion questions at the end of each chapter make this a book to be fruitfully shared among fellow believers desiring a deeper faith—one of heart, soul, strength, and  mind.

Part One

Knowledge

CHAPTER 2

Does Jesus Really Care about Knowledge?

My goal is to offer some tidbits about knowledge in the hopes that Christians might use them to follow Jesus more ably and more radically. The first question must then be: What is knowledge, anyway?

Lurking nearby is another, deeper question about why knowledge matters. Recall Gandhi’s assertion that all religions are really aligned in the most important respects. And the claims of Harris and Dennett and others that religion is a serious problem for the world. Related to these ideas is the idea that one’s intellectual life doesn’t really matter to one’s religious commitment. I said a little bit about this in chapter 1, but I’m compelled to say more. This is one of the issues I was wrestling with—not consciously, but it was there—during that crisis period in 2006.

But I’ll start with a seemingly separate issue.

Here’s a confession: my wife and I used to watch this reality show called The Bachelorette and occasionally its older sibling The Bachelor. I feel sheepish making this public, since folks will probably be driven to question our moral compass. I can’t say I’d blame them! Since no doubt none of the readers of this book will have ever watched even a minute of such inanity, here’s how the show works. Over the course of a season, a single woman—the bachelorette—dates a group of men simultaneously. She starts with twenty-five or thirty, and through the weeks she whittles the field down, handing out roses to designate those she desires to keep on as contenders. They go on elaborate dates, all over the world, sometimes in groups, sometimes one-on-one. And in the end, after just a couple of months, she chooses one man, with the idea that he will, right then and there, get down on one knee to propose.

The Bachelorette is fascinating for a number of reasons, but I’m interested in the conscious deliberations of the bachelorettes. In every episode, the producers put the bachelorette alone in front of a camera to talk about how she’s going to make her choice.

Hannah Brown was the fifteenth bachelorette, and she deliberated like every bachelor and bachelorette before her. One of the men on Hannah’s season was Luke P., and Luke clashed wildly with the other contestants and in some ways with Hannah herself. But Hannah was smitten with him nonetheless. Around fifteen minutes into the fifth episode of that season, Hannah says, “The guys [the other contestants] might not understand, not get it. But Luke P. is still here because my heart wants him to be here. My head doesn’t always want him to be here. It makes it really difficult to know what’s the best decision to make. We know we have crazy chemistry, but there are red flags.” Later, around fifty-six minutes into the episode, as Hannah and Luke are headed for a one-on-one date, she confesses to the camera: “I’m really excited to see Luke. But I think I have a lot of anxiety about today. There’s no denying the connection that we have. There’s also no denying that there are red flags … everywhere.” She even admits around minute seventy, “I want to not like him”! So how does that one-on-one date go? It is an unmitigated disaster. Luke doesn’t mollify Hannah’s concerns, and in some ways he makes things worse. But guess what: Luke is still around for episode 6. Hannah’s “heart” trumps her reasons for wanting to let him go. In the battle of heart and head, Hannah chooses heart.

Our culture agrees with Hannah. We oppose minds and hearts and at the end of the day go with our hearts. In these deliberations, a bachelorette like Hannah so often has all manner of reasons to choose one person but winds up ignoring those reasons and going with her “heart” or “gut.” This points to a couple of things. First, we tend to think that our heart can’t be swayed by what’s going on in our mind. And second, we think the real guide to life is our heart, not our mind.¹

Many churches teach, sometimes only implicitly, this heart-head conflict right alongside the culture. (Diagnostic question: does your church talk about education as an act of worship?) We downplay the life of the mind, worried about the danger of a disembodied sort of faith, separated from the world, more concerned about truth than love, failing to live out our faith in embodied ways like acts of mercy and service. This concern is well-placed in a certain sense, but I fear it misses the mark, and dangerously so. When we think this way, we wind up reasoning like the bachelorette, unmoored from facts about what’s good and bad, disconnected from the great truths about God, ourselves, and morality.

The problem is that our hearts can deceive us no less than our minds. We not only love with our hearts, but we hate, too. If we indulge our hearts without ordering them with our minds, we can sow injustice and strife in our surroundings and give ourselves over to the evil within. Or if we feel nothing in particular, we simply ignore or remain apathetic. The mistake of disconnecting our minds from our hearts is disastrous. It leads us to reason about how to live like the bachelors and bachelorettes do. And therefore, when we don’t feel particularly warm and fuzzy about Jesus, we don’t follow him, even if we know the truth. Jesus wants something better for us!

Unsurprisingly, then, Jesus calls us to love God with everything we are and have, with our heart, mind, soul, and strength (Mark 12:29–31; cf. Deut. 6:4–5). But, maybe most salient to the point I’m trying to make, the Scriptures refuse the idea that our minds are utterly distinct from our hearts. Rather, our minds are a faculty of our hearts. Hearts are more than minds, but they aren’t less. This is the beginnings of an answer to this chapter’s question. Why does Jesus care about knowledge? Because he cares about our hearts.

Jesus was an expert in the Hebrew Scriptures—what we now call the Old Testament. They were his Bible. No surprise, then, that he would include the mind in his characterization of what it looks like to love God with everything we are. The Scriptures he cherished did not separate the life of the mind from life with God.

The Hebrew word translated as “heart” in the Bible is lēb (most often pronounced like the first syllable of “levy”). It appears hundreds of times in the Old Testament, and usually is meant to pick out the whole of a person. But in many cases it’s more specific. Sometimes it refers specifically to things like emotions and desires, or what our culture would call our heart. In others it’s picking out the will (our faculty of decision-making). But more often than either emotions and desires or will, lēb refers specifically to the intellect. The Old Testament, in other words, conveys, in the very words it uses to describe to us the idea that we cannot separate our minds from our hearts, that our minds are as central to us as our emotions and desires. Our heart, our lēb—our self—is more than our mind, but definitely isn’t less.²

To perhaps belabor this point a bit, the nuances of lēb are not the only way the Hebrew Scriptures imply that hearts and minds are intertwined. The connection between the life of the mind and life with God is all over the pages of the Old Testament, both explicitly and implicitly. The explicit ways are easy enough to find. Everyone should look for themselves! But here’s an implicit way, or maybe a way on the border between implicit and explicit. The story of Israel is the story of Abraham’s family. That story is one that revolves around the faithfulness of God in spite of the unfaithfulness of his people. Over and over again, Israel turns away from God and toward idolatry and other sins, and over and over again God remains faithful to his people and reestablishes his relationship with them. God even has the prophet Hosea marry Gomer, who is either a literal prostitute or at least strongly inclined to promiscuity. God mandates Hosea and Gomer’s union as a sort of icon of God’s relationship with Israel.

Here’s the thing to notice, and it runs throughout the Old Testament: Israel’s unfaithfulness is rooted in her forgetfulness. God anticipates this problem. During Moses’s final sermon to the Hebrews, just before his death and their entry into the Promised Land, Moses says this: “Only be careful, and watch yourselves closely so that you do not forget the things your eyes have seen or let them fade from your heart as long as you live. Teach them to your children and to their children after them.… Be careful not to forget the covenant of the LORD your God that he made with you” (Deut. 4:9, 23). Israel doesn’t exactly heed Moses’s charge. Take, for example, Israel’s reaction to the death of Gideon: “No sooner had Gideon died than the Israelites again prostituted themselves to the Baals. They … did not remember the LORD their God, who had rescued them from the hands of all their enemies on every side” (Judg. 8:33–34). As that passage makes clear, this isn’t the first time Israel forgot, and it wouldn’t be the last. Forgetfulness leads to unfaithfulness.

Faithfulness is, of course, a matter of the whole heart. But forgetfulness is a matter of the mind. No doubt Israel’s problems (and ours) are more than cognitive and intellectual. Forgetfulness of this sort is moral and volitional. It is, in short, a holistic spiritual problem. But why think that fact makes forgetfulness not a matter of the mind? Forgetfulness may involve more than the mind, but it can’t involve less. So you simply cannot separate minds and hearts. There’s really no space between, as Moses puts it, forgetting what your eyes have seen and letting it fade from your heart.

To repeat: Jesus cares about knowledge because knowledge is a matter of the heart. When I talk about knowledge, I’m talking about the heart. About love. We cannot deliberate like the bachelors and bachelorettes! (Incidentally, this is the first key to unlocking the mystery of what was wrong with me in 2006. More on that later.) There’s much more to unpack here, and we’ll get there. But first we need to delve into the issue of what knowledge is. To get more specific about why knowledge matters we need to understand just what we’re talking about.

A distinction is in order. There are two ways of knowing to keep an eye on. One way is knowing that something is true. Each of us knows all manner of things in this way. My children Lyle and Gretchen, for example, know that 2 + 2 = 4, that Jamie and I love them, that they were born and raised in Orange County, California, that China isn’t the United States, that riding a bike without a helmet is dangerous, and that kicking puppies for no reason is very, very bad. All these are items of what we philosophers call “propositional knowledge.” Propositional knowledge is knowledge about facts or states of the world from a third-personal standpoint. Propositional knowledge is knowledge from the “outside,” as it were, in that it needn’t involve any intimate or personal relationship with the thing known.

The second way of knowing is what we philosophers call “knowledge by acquaintance.” It’s knowledge of a thing that’s (more or less) direct and unmediated. In this sense, my children know me but don’t know Abraham Lincoln, even though they know a lot about him. Lyle and Gretchen know one another, and I know my wife and my own father, and each person knows his or her close friends. We know by acquaintance much of our own minds and wills. We even know our houses and cars and pets and favorite keepsakes in this way. But neither of my children knows my paternal grandparents by acquaintance, since both had passed away before either of my children were born. Nor do my children know the homes I grew up in or Jesus’s apostles or any of the other folks they’ve only read about. Lyle and Gretchen might have propositional knowledge about these people and things, but they don’t know them.³

Vitally, what God most wants for us is to know him by acquaintance. He doesn’t want us merely to have loads of propositional knowledge about him. He wants us to know him. That’s really what God offers us in the gospel: knowledge of God in all his Trinitarian glory. This is what Peter is talking about when he commands us to “grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (2 Pet. 3:18). Grow in your knowledge of Jesus, Peter says, not knowledge about Jesus. As it happens, I’m going to spend most of the remainder of this chapter discussing propositional knowledge. That may seem like an odd strategy! But understanding the nature of propositional knowledge is required preparation for seeing why propositional knowledge is essential for receiving the knowledge of God offered in the gospel. Acquaintance with God cannot be disentangled from knowledge about God.

Plato was an incredible Greek philosopher who was born in the fifth century BC and died in the middle of the fourth. Socrates was Plato’s teacher, and Aristotle was his student. So he’s sandwiched between the two other figureheads of the birth of Western philosophy, and really Western culture. Most of what we know about the thought of Socrates, in fact, we know through Plato’s writings.

Plato, at various moments in his writings, was concerned with marking the difference between true belief on the one hand and knowledge on the other. For example, here’s what he says in a book called the Meno:

True opinions [or beliefs], for as long as they remain, are a fine thing and all they do is good, but they are not willing to remain long, and they escape from a man’s mind, so that they are not worth much until one ties them down by (giving) an account of the reason why.… After they are tied down, in the first place they become knowledge, and then they remain in place. That is why knowledge is prized higher than correct opinion; knowledge differs from correct opinion in being tied down. (97e–98a)⁴

What’s going on here? We can think of Plato’s definition of knowledge as reasonable true belief. In other words, Plato is suggesting that in order to know that something is true, we have to believe it, it has to be true, and we have to have good reasons for believing it’s true.

Here’s an illustration. My children both know that I love them. So if Plato is right, three things must be the case. First, it has to be true that I love them. I can attest to this, so that’s settled. Second, each of them has to believe that I love them. A person just can’t know something without believing it. And both Lyle and Gretchen do believe that I love them. And third, they must believe this about my love reasonably. Reasonableness is a bit more complicated, but the basic idea is that you have good reasons or evidence, or a solid foundation for, your belief. I’ll discuss the myriad ways you can get this sort of thing in chapter 4. But in this case, Lyle and Gretchen have rather overwhelming evidence for their view that I love them. I tell them both that I love them, and they both know that I’m not prone to lying. (Gretchen used to get playfully annoyed by me telling her I loved her over and over again, especially just before bedtime.) And I hope I’ve shown them both over the years that I love them as well and in lots of different ways. I mean, I’ve endured both Disneyland and Pictionary just for their sakes. These various evidences are appropriate ways to observe and experience love, and as such, they provide a solid foundation for my children’s belief that I do, in fact, love them both. So Lyle and Gretchen believe a truth in a reasonable way. That’s knowledge!

What Plato said has influenced and informed hoards of other thinkers over the last 2,500 years. Take Dallas Willard. Willard was a philosophy professor at the University of Southern California, which is all the more impressive in light of the fact that he made significant contributions to the renaissance of attention to spiritual formation in evangelical Christianity. That’s not something most USC philosophers care much about! According to Willard, knowledge is “the ability to represent a respective subject matter as it is, on an appropriate basis of t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Lee Strobel
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• Part One: Knowledge
• Part Two: Knowledge and Life with Jesus
• Part Three: Complications
• Epilogue
• Notes