How Do We Know Anything At All: Reflections on the Fray, Ephesians, and the Life Lived In-between

Got a life, and it’s my first time living
Got eyes, but that don’t mean I have vision
Some days just getting through is winning
Some days you just say good riddance

Got a heart, but it’s my first time feeling
Got a floor that used to be my ceiling
Some people have a way of reaching
All the parts you have a hard time seeing

Funny how life’s a coin with two sides
Breaks you and loves you at the same damn time

• Songs I’d Rather Not Sing (The Fray)

“For we cannot do anything against the Truth, but only for the Truth.”

• 2 Corinthians 13:8

Days off mean giving space to sitting with my thoughts

Been thinking about this question this morning- what is knowledge. How do we know what is true.

Is knowledge facts? Data points? Information?
Or is knowledge something other? Does knowing something need another category to give it proper definition?

And if it is something other, how do we attain this knowledge? Or more to the point, how do we attain this knowledge in a way that matters? That can make sense of this thing we call Reality, or Life?

As the lyrics cited above suggest, it seems intuitive to say that sight reduced to its purely material (biological) function can be applied in a way that even someone who sees in the biological sense is capable of not actually seeing a true thing at all. It’s not a stretch to say we think of a biological brain in the same way. We “think” in these terms all the time.

It’s a question N.T Wright brings to the table in his book The Vision of Ephesians, unpacking Paul’s grand prayer at the end of chapter 1 for his readers to “know.” A prayer that follows 1:3-14, which is best heard as a single thought (with no breaks), expressing a “combined, glorious shout of praise.” (page 17) A brief section that works to  ncorportate the “whole” of the story into that grander vision.

To that end, here Paul isnt speaking about propositions, but rather actual experience of capital R “Reality.” In fact, a direct phrasing in this passage connects this to “the eyes of the heart,” the seat of a persons knowledge in the ANE. As 1:18 states, this is what enables knowing, and such knowledge is what enables hope. Or in the three fold focus of the prayer, this is what brings us to the interconnecting themes of hope-inheretence-power, which work to bind the bigger picture together. Which, as Wright helps flesh out, flow from the three central texts the prayer is evoking and pulling from- Psalm 110, Isaiah 11, Psalm 8. Wright makes the further point that part of this grand vision is the way it uses these textual references to attach the narrative of Jesus to the Temple imagery that dominated the Judean context. In this sense, it is not a picture of us excaping this reality to go somewhere else, but of God taking residence in this creation. The concept of “filling the earth,” which IS the temple, and further filling us (being “in Christ”) through the indwelling of the Spirit as image bearers placed within the temple. In this imagery we find the movement of the story. It is about the space beging prepared for God to come down and dwell within. This is what the sacrificial imagery was all about-purifying the space from the pollution of Sin and Death so that God might be made known through this presence in the temple (and in the larger narrative, creaiton and in the lives of God’s image bearers).

Similar to how the above lyrics lean into the language of living and feeling in describing a world that is otherwise incoherent. We indwell this life in the same way. To know God is to participate in this Reality, the question being whether we do so in hope (the victory of God over the enslaving Powers of Sin and Death), inheretance (the promise of new creation), and Power (the rule of God through the outpouring of the Spirit). Without this, what we have is a world that lifts you up and breaks you down and leaves you stranded inside its grand illusion of a life.

Sometimes feeling like winning
Sometimes feeling like saying good riddance

This is the heart of Paul’s vision in the letter to the Ephesians, which is actually a letter, as Wright points out, which was meant not for a single community but to be circled and cycled through the different communities and the generations that would follow;

“I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheretence among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greateness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power.”

(Ephesians 1:17-19)

If, as Wright suggests, we think of the Pauline letters as rooms in a house, Galatians becomes the kitchen where the important things are getting practically fleshed out in relationship to Jesus, the Judean and Gentile communities, and the Church, Romans is the formal dining room where everything is eventually properly layed out in specific fashion as part of a fully cooked and orchestrated meal of ideas and convictions, the letters to the Corinthians are the bedrooms and living rooms where discourse and infighting and regular patterns of living happen inbetween, and Ephesians would be that room tucked away at the back of the house looking out and away across the sea (perhaps with an after dinner drink), reflecting on the entire journey.

In working on my life story over the past couple years, one thread that opened up is the fight that has followed me all my life, to know that what I believe is in fact true. Behind this of course is the idea of fear, but for me it has never been a fear that what I believe isn’t true, as though I need to protect some dogma. Rather, in a paradoxical sense it is a fear that my life (my choices, my repsonses) doesn’t reflect what I believe to be true. It is about whether there is integrity between my actual partcipation in this world and the knowledge I am naming as true. For this relationship to reflect something rational and logically coherent.

Which of course requires knowledge of what is true, but examining that inherent need imbedded in me, a need that has often found me on the outside and isolated from the different collective circles in my efforts to “critique” all social constructs (and indeed my perpetual rejection of all social constructs, like the good cynic must always engage). I have come to realize that the only way to really know something is to live it. All else are disconnected facts and data that cannot say anything at all about this world we are embodying. To this end i have come to adopt what is called participationist philosophy/theology. When it comes to what we know, we don’t live in a world reduced to information, we live in a world where knowledge is an embodied practice

And if there is a way to understanding why this need has haunted me all my life, it is in the notion that life itself hinges upon this reality. Regardless of how we play with different ideas, a life sees truly only through the sort of belief that enables participation.

Which is really the tension. We stake our lives on what we believe we know, and yet the only way into such knowledge is to live it. Thus is the conundrum, made all the more maddening by the fact that we must participate in a word that lifts up and destroys as it goes. Thus, as Wright fleshes out in his book, why the best word for faith is trust. A trusting allegiance defined through participatory language that always must be risking something. We can call that something “a life.”

To push that further- such knowledge means participating in a given story about Reality. Thats what a life reveals, is a story. The same life that can only be truly understood through that storied lens. And for me, I have always felt driven to seek a story that makes sense of the world i am participating in. Anything else is to render it lost.

And to be honest, the older I get the harder that participation becomes.

A final thought to this end. In the second Corinthians passage quoted above, one might be tempted to read Truth in propositional terms. And yet this would miss the point. The Truth being referenced is participatory. As the larger passage suggests, the Truth is the claim that Jesus Christ is in you through His participation in the flesh, thus handing us a particular Reality we are then enabled to “live” into. That is the call the letter is reminding its readers of. Which is precisely what unfolds within that grander vision of Ephesians Wright is exploring as well;

“Paul expounds what is true of the Messiah in biblical and Judean thought, in order that he may urge his readers to realize that if they are in the Messiah then all this belongs to them as well.” (page 32)

What is true for the Messiah will be true for those participation “in Christ.”

This is intuitive, I think, to how any and all knowledge works. This is in fact what Martin Shaw’s recent book Liturgies of the Wild is all about as well, a book I recently finished (and loved). In a world that has largely redefined what it means to know in the reductionist terms of “information,” humanity’s need for an embodied story pushes forward. Perhaps the reason that can seem fearful (at least to me) is because it’s a much more difficult thing to control. In fact, unlike a world reduced to information it can’t be controlled. One might say thats what affords belief it’s power