to do
/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!)
The second term in Vervaeke’s theory is procedural knowledge.
If I went to Bible school for the acquisition of a creed at age 18—to learn how to assent to a proposition like “God is my Heavenly Father”—then I went to church for my entire life, in substantial part, to gain some understanding of what being a child of God actually looks like. The how-to. The procedure.
Procedural knowledge is a step deeper than propositional knowledge because it requires more of me: I have to do something, not just assent to something. At the same time, it’s also a notch less complicated in that it doesn’t require as many higher-order cognitive skills. A brand-new baby may not know how to do much beyond what their instincts demand, but an older baby quickly learns cause and effect, following simple steps to get the thing they want.
The beauty of procedural knowledge when it comes to something like “God is my Heavenly Father” is that we all know something about how to be a child (although those of us blessed with good parents and happy childhoods might find this procedural knowledge more accessible than those who weren’t). As children, we were dependent on two people with more power and capability to provide for our needs; we were at the mercy of those two people to be good to us, because we had no recourse if they were not. We ate what they fed us, we did what they told us, we lived where they moved us.
If we learned the “how-to” of being children well, particularly from parents who taught us well, then the leap to being children of a Heavenly Father is not a difficult one. It’s easy to see how assenting to the proposition that God is our Heavenly Father is given legs to stand on when we take that knowledge into our actions: when we depend on Him, trust His goodness, follow His lead, and obey His commands.
My brothers and sisters, what good is it if people say they have faith but do nothing to show it? Claiming to have faith can’t save anyone, can it? Imagine a brother or sister who is naked and never has enough food to eat. What if one of you said, “Go in peace! Stay warm! Have a nice meal!”? What good is it if you don’t actually give them what their body needs? In the same way, faith is dead when it doesn’t result in faithful activity.
Someone might claim, “You have faith and I have action.” But how can I see your faith apart from your actions? Instead, I’ll show you my faith by putting it into practice in faithful action.
James 2:14-18
It’s far easier to show what we really believe through how we behave than through what we claim or recite. Propositional knowledge is all well and good, but procedural knowledge will prove—or disprove!—our sincerity every time.
This can be deeply challenging for those who are prone to guilt and shame, for those who don’t have a positive experience of being a child to fall back on, and for those who have a strong fear or aversion to the idea that they can play any active role in their own faith. In such cases, it can feel a lot safer to stay in the world of propositions, where the knowledge can stay primarily theoretical and intellectual and grown-up.
Maturing into the deeper and simpler knowledge of a child might seem extremely uncomfortable. It is for me, often. My brain is my safest place: logic, analysis, and objectivity are there. But so is my inner scribe, Pharisee, and scholar of the law that makes it so terribly hard to enter the kingdom of heaven like a child.
Let me only remind you that when you were a child, your child-ness was defined by your immovable position in the family, not by how “good” you were at filling the role. Flawed though they were, your parents didn’t exchange you for someone else when you disobeyed, disrespected, or distrusted them. You were, and are, always their child—an unchangeable status that you could reflect more perfectly or less perfectly on any given day.
So it is with being a child of God. We are adopted into His family to share in the inheritance of His Son. How we live may reflect how much (and how accurately) we believe that, but never the effectiveness of what He has done to give us this status.
As we prepare to read through the Bible in 2025, may the very act of reading the Scriptures each day become evidence to you of what you know and believe: Not that you have attained a perfect theology (because no one has), but that you are doing what you know.
Like my mostly-still-nonverbal 17-month-old, who tells me she wants a snack by crying and running to the kitchen, you are a little child asking your Father for the food of His Word every day—by simply opening it and reading.
