to know
/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!)
Years ago, shortly after I graduated from Bible school and got married, I went down a rabbit hole of personal study on the concept of making disciples. I actually wrote a pretty substantial project on it—the bones of a book or Bible study one day, maybe—following the threads of Jesus’s last teachings to His disciples in John 15-17 and John’s expansion on many of the same themes in the letter of I John.
That project was the first time I put any words to the nuance and depth and manifold meaning available in our English verb, “to know.”
I went to Bible school because I wanted to know: I wanted to know what the Bible said. I wanted to know what God said. I wanted to know how it all worked and where the foundations of my childhood faith lay. I wanted to know, on the Bible’s own terms, everything I needed to know about being a Christian.
It was a quest for facts, a creed, a statement of faith.
This is what Vervaeke would call propositional knowledge, at the same time the most basic and the most complex form of knowing. Basic, because it’s so easy to communicate; complex, because it requires the development of higher order cognitive skills like language, judgment, and abstract thinking.
“God is our Heavenly Father” is a proposition. In just five English words you can claim to know something. I agree; God is our Heavenly Father. I know this to be true.
But suppose I said the same thing to my 4-year-old: “God is our Heavenly Father.” She might accept the statement, but does she now know anything? Probably not, or at least not until she peppers me with clarifying questions: “What is heavenly? How do we have a heavenly father? Whose father is He? Is God a person? Where is heaven?”
She has some language skills—maybe even above-average language skills—but she doesn’t have the life experience and cognitive development needed to place these particular words into a context that makes sense to her and accurately reflects their meaning. Even if she did, she wouldn’t have the abstract thinking ability to say that “God is our Father” and realize it means something very different when we say it about God than it does when we say it about Daddy.
Or suppose I said it to my 17-month-old: “God is our Heavenly Father.” She has enough receptive language to know what I mean when I say “Go get the block” or “Do you want a hug?” but “God is our Heavenly Father” probably just sounds like so much gibberish. It means nothing.
This leads me back to a passage I meditate on often now that I’m a parent:
People were bringing children to Jesus so that he would bless them. But the disciples scolded them. When Jesus saw this, he grew angry and said to them, “Allow the children to come to me. Don’t forbid them, because God’s kingdom belongs to people like these children. I assure you that whoever doesn’t welcome God’s kingdom like a child will never enter it.” Then he hugged the children and blessed them.
Mark 10:13-16 CEB
The specific Greek word for “child” used by Jesus in verse 15 is one that would normally be used for a very young child or an infant—certainly no older than age 7. Certainly not of the age required to propositionally know the facts about God’s kingdom in any meaningful way.
And yet we often place an outsized emphasis on this kind of knowing. We build denominations around very specific summaries of theology based on what we deem to be the facts of Scripture. We ask for a factual summary of the Gospel when we baptize believers or confirm new church members. We fill up every Sunday on propositional knowledge from long, detailed, verse-by-verse sermons. And that’s good. But it’s not all.
It reminds me of myself at age 3 or 4, when I “asked Jesus into my heart” and honestly thought I had a miniature bearded man living inside my body, eating the food I swallowed and walking in a garden of broccoli-crown trees. A fact like “When you are saved, the Spirit of Christ dwells within you” is totally inaccessible to the concrete mind of a preschooler. But according to Jesus, salvation is most available to those who have no capacity to understand such a fact.
As we prepare to read through the Bible in 2025, my hope is that our increasing propositional knowledge will not satisfy, but will lead to a hunger for knowledge that goes far deeper. Instead of learning more theological facts, more Bible verses to whip out as an end to conversation or debate, I pray we learn to let God’s Word take its place as the beginning.
A starting place for life as a New Creation.
