to feel
/A professor and philosopher named John Vervaeke has developed a framework called the “4P Metatheory of Cognition.” He uses four terms to explain four different ways we measure what we know and how we know it: Propositional knowledge, procedural knowledge, perspectival knowledge, and participatory knowledge. I have been thinking about these four terms a lot and how they relate to our faith; this will serve as the framework for a four-part series leading up to The Bible180 Challenge 2025. (Nearly 600 people have already joined the wait list to read with us! I can’t wait!)
Read the first post in this series here, and the second post here.
The third term in Vervaeke’s theory is where—for me, at least—things get interesting: perspectival knowledge.
Most of Christianity is very comfortable with knowing and doing. Reciting a creed is, in many traditions, a weekly portion of the liturgy; and what is the Christian faith if not doing something, by following Jesus and obeying God’s commands?
But we often put a hard stop on the next step of knowledge, which I’ll summarize as feeling.
In fact, I would venture to say that for most of my life, I’ve measured the rightness of my knowledge by how well-stripped it is of feeling. Knowledge, I thought, ought to be purely objective, pure logic. We assent to what is true because it’s true. We do what is right because it’s right. To hell with feelings, those deceptive devils!
But as I meditate on the different ways we can know, I begin to see perspectival knowledge not necessarily as a baser, more carnal kind of knowing but as a deeper, more real kind of knowing. If we began with knowing in theory (propositional knowledge) and then stepped into knowing in action (procedural knowledge), the next natural movement in the progression is toward knowing in perspective; knowing from having felt something related, or walked in similar shoes. If we’ve learned the “what” and the “how,” this is the “what it’s like.”
To return to the example of previous posts: How does my perspective as both a child and a parent inform my knowledge of God as my Heavenly Father? How does knowing what it’s like to have children of my own change the way I approach this doctrine?
I can hear my inner 30 years of history with the proposition-heavy, Sola Scriptura church protesting already: “What does it matter what it’s like for me—a fallen person—to be a parent? How can that possibly have any bearing on what it means for God to be a Father? How can using my own flawed and limited experience to understand the truth be anything but corrupt?”
To which I gently respond:
God did not have to portray Himself primarily as a father (or mother, as He also sometimes does in Scripture). He could have chosen Ruler, Dictator, Sovereign, Bully, Friend, or literally anything else He wanted. The terminology is for our benefit, not His. He knows who He is; His choice of characterizations is designed to help us, in our much-smaller human worldviews, understand some measure of Himself.
And He chose to portray Himself as a parent of children—not just of His only begotten Son, but also of the human race He created in His own image.
I don’t know what it’s like to be God—omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, or omni-anything. But I know what it’s like to be the mother of two young children, whose care is my greatest responsibility and whose discipleship is my highest calling.
In motherhood, I’ve found that I know what it’s like to love someone else so completely and viscerally that you would suffer or die to rescue and protect them, as God has done for us. His sacrifice seems perfectly fitting for a father on behalf of His children; the delightfully surprising part is that I’m His child, not that He would do such a thing.
In motherhood, I’ve found that I cannot assent to certain doctrines. Knowing God as my Father through the lens of knowing what it’s like to be a mother has, for example, taken the theology of hyper-Calvinism off the table. It would be morally abhorrent, not to mention beyond unnatural, for me to choose only one of my children as my own while completely and permanently rejecting the other. And I don’t think I am more moral or more in tune with nature than God, the Creator of both humanity and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil from which my ancestors ate.
In motherhood, I’ve found that I learn more about how to be a child with childlike faith daily. My daughters show me tremendous trust and dependence day in and day out. They find peace, love, and joy just by being with me and learning from me. This is what it looks like to live as a citizen of the kingdom of heaven!
In feeling—in knowing what something is like—we not only know deeper, we step closer to childlikeness. Though a toddler may be cognitively incapable of assenting to abstract doctrines and a baby may be physically incapable of acting out their faith, both can feel and make connections to their own experiences. That’s why storytelling and role-playing are such effective teaching tools across peoples and generations. They are the exact same tools God uses to teach us His immense truths in Scripture.
The Bible is sacred, ancient, complex, and profound. But it’s also a story in which God has often assumed the role of Heavenly Father, making space for us to step into the role of His children. This is intentional. It allows us to come to the Scriptures safely from our human perspective and learn more than a creed and more than a set of commandments.
It allows us to learn who He is, on His own terms.
