(16) The Nature and Importance of Self-Knowledge

John Calvin opened the "The Institutes of the Christian Religion." With the statement:

"True and substantial wisdom principally consists of two parts, the knowledge of God, and the knowledge of ourselves. But, while these two branches of knowledge are so intimately connected, which of them precedes and produces the other, is not so easy to discover."

The statement is hardly intelligible to modern Western people, steeped as we are in the concept that knowledge is power and has to do with our ability to manipulate the environment in the interest of our control over it. But Calvin was on target. He was saying that you can not know who you are unless you know who God is, and that knowing yourself and knowing God are the two most important components of true wisdom.
Most of us spend most of our time trying to prevent our neighbors from seeing who we really are. We do this because we want them to love and respect us, but we aren’t at all sure that they will do that if they see us as we see ourselves. What is even sadder is that most of us spend most of our time trying to avoid facing up to the fact of who we really are – image bearers of the living God and responsible to offer up our entire lives to Him in response to His loving self-giving to us in the creation, Scripture, and Christ. If we were to face up to who we are by creation, we would have to answer the Lord at each step and in each moment, and our sinfulness makes us both afraid of and lazy toward this most promising and joy-filled of all callings.
The call to know ourselves echoes down the halls of time ever since God walked in the Garden and queried, "Adam, where are you?" Adam had an identity problem, not a geographical one! The way things ought to be and can be is, by contrast, clearly demonstrated in our Lord’s life and testimony. He knew who He was because He knew who His Father was. (John 7:28-29; 8:54-55; 17:25) And because of this, he understood all people with a penetrating but compassionate perception that struck them as miraculous. (John 2:24-25)
Since the beginnings of modern philosophy with Rene’ Descartes, Western man has a special way confused knowledge with the ability to control the environment, physical or human. C.S. Lewis points out in the Abolition of Man that science and magic began together in early modern times and had the same objective – the power to control the world. Magic sickened (it is reviving currently!) and science throve, but with the unchanged objective of power to manipulate for ends that were rarely examined in the light of God’s will and man’s lasting benefit. The knowledge sought in this way for personal power is not true knowledge in the Biblical sense.
The most important kind of knowledge, then, is really self-knowledge. Socrates showed "the work of the law written in his heart" (Romans 2:15), but he lacked the knowledge of God which would have made his goal attainable. The misdirection of modern man is revealed in the intensity with which he pursues and neglects the effort to know himself – and so love himself – in order that he may know and love his neighbor and his God. For true knowledge and true love are inseparable (cf. Ephesians 3:19), and the great commandment to love God, neighbor, and self inevitably entails an obligation to know we are, who our neighbors are, and who God is. To avoid this sort of integrated, whole-hearted living, we have settled for a split world where we know God in the spiritual area and forfeit both the knowledge of Him and of ourselves in the "natural" area where most of our living is done. This is a concession to idolatry that can only cause us loss and disappointment.

(17) Knowledge Is Revealed

Closely entwined with the concept above is the concept that knowledge is revealed. Here we often make an artificial and incorrect distinction between spiritual knowledge and natural knowledge. We believe that the awareness of our sins and of God’s forgiveness is a gift from God, revealed to us by the Holy Spirit. But we believe that the ability to repair a carburetor is a strictly rational thing, unrelated to God or to revelation. Here is our dualism again. Reared in a world that thinks reason can solve all problems, we are torn between our background in that world and our realization that God has indeed broken through to us in our conversion. So we settle for a split world and, unconsciously, give place to the idol of autonomous human intelligence in one area while we serve God in another. It’s a bad compromise!
A moment’s reflection will show why this won’t do. If we "live and move and have our being" in God (Acts 17:28), then even our most seemingly objective knowledge is enabled and sustained by Him. No knowledge is autonomous; it is only we in our sinful delusion of independence who imagine it so! God made and upholds all things by His Word, even our reasoning powers. Without His unfailing, faithful sustenance of our minds, we could not know a single thing. In this sense, all knowledge is dependent or revealed. The idea is included in, but not exhaustive of, our Lord’s promise that the Holy Spirit would guide us into all truth.
But there is a problem here. What about all the knowledge that non-Christian research has covered (and the vast majority of research has been non-Christian). Is that revealed too? In the sense that all researchers are upheld by God’s Word in their efforts, their discoveries are revealed also. One of the awful surprises of the day of judgement will be that no man’s thinking has been in any final sense independent of or unsupported by God. However, insofar as research is done in the service of the supposedly independent power if human reason, it is idolatrous and therefore condemned to ultimate failure, or fruitlessness. Like Sisyphus, autonomous reason can never reach its goal, never can solve its problem in a final way. Only within the Biblical framework of a Christian worldview can we begin to use aright the products of our research, and even then we, at best, "see through a glass darkly."

(18) Knowledge Is Based On Faith

When Hebrews 11:3 says, "by faith we understand that the world (the ages, in Greek) have been framed by the Word of God," it is speaking to a wider world of understanding than that of Christian scholarship. All knowledge is faith-based. Faith and understanding are always inseparable. Because man is made in the image of God, he is continually directed by his heart, which is oriented in a subconscious but dependent relation to either the true God or to some false god selected from within the creation. All human understandings thus rest on faith. We see "facts" only in the light of our heart commitment. Being possessed by people, facts are never neutral or genuinely objective. One need only consider the sometimes diametrically opposed accounts of an accident to see this. Each participant in the accident sees it from his or her own perspective and when it comes to allocating blame, they may be poles apart. Yet each may be convinced of his or her own objectivity and honesty. The same thing holds true of all knowledge.
It is important, then, in reading a book or listening to a speaker, to try to get some idea of his starting point, his worldview, his presuppositions. For these will affect profoundly his statements about the subject under discussion even though he may claim the most rigid objectivity. Knowing without faith is no more possible for us than physical life without breathing.

(19) Knowledge Is Partial and Slanted

It follows from the above that knowledge on this side of heaven is always partial and often slanted. Our frequently unrecognized partiality to some underlying viewpoint or other makes it slanted, and the sheer complicity and mystery of the creation make it partial. We "know in part and we prophesy in part." "Knowledge," Paul tells us in I Corinthians 13, "shall be done away." All of our present understandings are probably in for a fairly fundamental restructuring when we finally enter into the presence of God and know as we are known.
This is not a plea for some kind of Christian agnosticism. Luke indicates in the preface to his gospel that he had traced accurately from the first the things of which he wrote in order that Theophilus could know with assurance the things about which he had been taught, i.e. the life and teachings of Jesus. But it does not mean that humility and openness are not appropriate virtues to cultivate. We need not only to recognize how little we know (before we correct each other or dogmatize with pontifical assurance); we need also to remember how prone we are to see things in the light of our own interests. This is the very opposite of love, which is concerned equally with our own and our neighbor’s best interests. So we are brought back continually to Paul’s admonition to humility in Philippians 2, "Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus." We need also to be open in the sense of willingness to restructure our perspective in the light of the Word of God rather than to cling tenaciously to our tradition, right or wrong. Since we all fear and shun growth, because it beckons us beyond the boundaries of our present state, we are much more comfortable with an established tradition that prescribes our actions and thoughts in detail than we are with the openness and responsibility called for in the Scriptures. But this was exactly the problem if the Pharisees, who used their interpretation of Scripture to buttress their rejection of Christ. Hence He accused them of teaching their tradition rather than the Word of God. Their breed has not disappeared from the earth, and we who claim to believe an infallible Bible are probably most in danger of reincarnating them.

Editor: Al Greene