As I mentioned in my last post, I have been reflecting on 2 Peter 1: 5–10. Since this blog is a new venture for me, I planned to spend a bit of time with this passage because it is a good introduction to where I am coming from. If you get this, and you like it, you will probably enjoy my posts. If you don’t or you disagree, I’m sure I’ll annoy you terribly.

For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith virtue, and to virtue knowledge. . .”

 In my last post I focused particularly on the word ‘virtue’.  In this post, as promised, I want to look more closely at the order presented in this verse. I don’t yet know how far into these things most people read, so let me put this right up front: I think that all too often we get the order mixed up. It doesn’t say that we should add faith or virtue to knowledge, but that we should add knowledge to faith and virtue.

Believe so that you may understand

 The first way we get mixed up is when we want to subordinate faith to knowledge. There seems to exist the notion that only that which can be proven empirically is worth believing. But this totally ignores the fact that some things are not known cognitively as much as they are known intuitively. Faith does not always or necessarily mean being prepared to accept the ridiculous; nor does it mean being prepared to accept a proposition on less evidence. Rather it means being willing to accept something on a different kind of evidence. When Jesus appeared to his disciples after the resurrection, all believed except for Thomas. Thomas needed proof and demanded to be able to touch the nail marks. When he received this tangible proof, in fairness, he did believe. But Jesus commended the type of faith that believes without the proof that Thomas demanded. It wasn’t that Jesus was asking the disciples to believe without proof. But the proof that was sufficient for the other disciples was their trust in Jesus’ character and his words.

 I recall a number of years ago in a university group called Students for Christ, we had a young man coming along to our meetings who appeared to be close to making a decision to become a Christian. One night after a meeting he came to speak with me. I don’t remember his exact words, but he had reached the point where a ‘leap of faith’ was all that was separating him from beginning his walk with God. “I have so many questions,” he said. And he began to list them, one after the other. I was sorely tempted to begin answering them as best as I could, one by one. But this would have been a mistake. Luckily the Holy Spirit stopped me. I explained to the young man as best as I knew how, that his questions did have answers and that he would find them, but that he was far more likely to do so after he had decided to entrust his life to Christ. What I had said falteringly and in many words St. Augustine said in just a few: “Believe so that you may understand.” Anselm’s (more) famous dictum extends Augustine’s principle: “Faith seeking Understanding.”

 If we make our faith conditional upon having all of our questions answered, then it is not really the type of faith that Christ commended—a declaration of trust in his person leading to a fully surrendered life. That is why any attempt to make sense of life apart from the foundation of faith in God is doomed to failure. And that is why the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, a knowledge that is devoid of faith and ambivalent to virtue, is ultimately futile.

 Practice what you preach

A second mistake that we make is elevating knowledge at the expense of virtue. Did you ever hear a kid in primary school come out with “Don’t you even know that?!” Perhaps you remember saying it (I think we all have). Ever since Eden, knowledge has been a kind of currency. Knowledge is power, as the saying goes. But what is the usual response to the primary school classic? “Yeah. . . of course I do. . .” the child is tempted to lie because they would rather have knowledge than virtue.

The trouble is that the elevation of knowledge—dare I say, the worship of the intellect—often leads to overstating what is or what can be known. Call me post-modern, but I have played the academic game long enough to suspect that way too many claims that begin with “We now know that. . .” are just such overstatements—a stubborn refusal to admit that the intellect too is damaged by the Fall. But isn’t it interesting to note what is damaged first? Faith in God’s character (“Did God really say?”) followed by the virtue of obedience. Adam and Eve gained knowledge, true enough, but the knowledge that they tripped over faith and virtue to gain was only partial and was now the knowledge of a world that had been broken by their Sin. Our very capacity to know truly is directly affected by our obedient faith.

I am not saying that we should not seek knowledge. We should. In fact the very point of 2 Peter 1:5 is that we should strive to attain knowledge. I’m just saying that we should put knowledge in its proper place—behind faith and virtue.  Because, while faith without works is dead, knowledge without virtue simply ‘puffs up’ rather than ‘builds up’ (1 Cor 8:1).