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.

truth and beauty

I wish I had music in my soul. It seems easier to put voice to it all that way, to put the hard unbeautiful words into some beautiful form that goes down easier. You can say more while saying less and the critics are too busy nitpicking the sound to go hard against the lyrics.

Plain words in a plain paragraph form, like this, leave nowhere to hide. I tell you what I think and wait to be torn to shreds for it. I write prose for the same reason people write poetry, but without the poetic form to excuse my emotion as “art.” Mine will be dismissed as the emotions of a weak vessel, but if this were a song the emotions would be considered its life force.

The feelings are allowed in art.

No wonder art has lost its place in church.

There’s at least some small exodus from Evangelicalism, Inc., with its warehouse buildings and windowless sanctuaries, back into traditions that lean into rhyme, rhythm, color, and beauty along with the truth. To my surprise, I have joined it.

If you follow my life in a timeline of the churches I’ve been part of, you’ll find that I followed the light: from four different windowless warehouses with bare walls to migrating into the well-lit foyer to, finally, sitting down every week in a cozy former synagogue with tall windows down each side, sunlight pouring generously in. There are small reproduced paintings in between the window frames depicting various Biblical scenes, and colorful banners hang on the walls. The altar is draped in rich fabric according to the liturgical season. Candles flicker. It’s humble, and it’s beautiful.

The feelings are allowed in beauty.

Truth and beauty are two of my highest values, but they’ve always felt at odds with each other. In this culture, we use phrases like “the awful truth” or “the ugly truth”—the thing nobody wants to hear, but somebody has to be brave enough to say. Those who offend with the truth get recognition. For several years, I tried this tactic on for size in my own writing, and it worked; it got a lot of comments and shares and traffic. It felt like I was doing something that mattered.

But it was ugly. Marked by pride, flattery, ego, and conflict. Even if everything I wrote was true, very little of it was honest.

Honesty is where truth and beauty find overlap.

The feelings are allowed in honesty.

In the realm of Christianity I’ve spent the most time in, there is this unspoken idea that the only really-true truth is the one that has been stripped of every element of life. “Real” truth, Truth with a capital T, should sound like a mathematical fact or a scientific law: black and white and unarguable and entirely dismissive of complicating factors like God or relationship or humanity.

Any emotion or soul or spirit—even the Holy Spirit Himself—renders a truth-claim suspect.

It’s idiotic, really. We were made human, in the image of God, only to attempt to become robots in how we discern what is true. We’ve made a sort of idol out of certainty—out of being able to believe a “fact” simply because “God said so,” without regard for the creative evidence both within us and without us that screams our facts are at best incomplete. Our truth is not honest.

If we are honest, humans were created for beauty. Humans are wired for emotions. Humans thrive in relationship. If we’re honest, relationships and emotions are some of the messiest and grayest areas of life. You can’t slap a mathematical fact or a scientific law on any of it. It’s just too unpredictable.

To me, that’s why it’s beautiful.

It’s a glimpse of God at work—glorious, fierce, incomprehensible. It’s a reminder that I am not in control and I don’t get to tell Him who He is. It’s walking under the trees in a whipping wind while the sky roils with thunderheads, or lying in the grass with the sun on your face and the thin buzz of honeybees all around. It’s the familiar rhythm of spring rolling into summer or the phases of the moon, punctuated by the chaos of invisible solar storms or devastating natural disasters.

There is order and there is chaos. There is truth and there is beauty. There is body and there is emotion. There is what we know and a whole universe of what we don’t know at all.

Honesty—the space where truth and beauty overlap—is what I see at the heart of the exodus from warehouse to window-light. I, for one, am worn out by robotic certainty and “the ugly truth,” because I know that the honest truth, the truth that holds space for the divine as well as the human, is beautiful.

God is beautiful and the maker of beauty. God is true and the standard of truth. My job, as His image-bearer and witness, is honesty.

on -ologies

I didn’t always know I wanted to be a parent. In fact, for the first 25 years of my life, I didn’t want to be a parent, and I felt some shame about that as a young Christian wife. I jokingly credit my change of heart at age 25 to the good old-fashioned biological clock, but maybe there was a nudge of the Holy Spirit in it as well, because it turns out that having kids has changed my life (shocker!).

I probably say to myself at least once a day, “I can’t do this.” And I truly was not built for it. I’m extremely auditory-sensitive and my children are both very loud. Clara barely stops talking to take a breath from sunup to sundown, and Jane communicates each of her feelings in a different pitch of yell or shriek. My nervous system gets a workout every single day.

They don’t know it, but it’s through my two daughters that I have also found sanctuary for my soul—internal, quiet, rest.

How? Because they have shown me who God is.

All the years that I spent reading and studying the Scriptures before I had children were good and edifying, but all that propositional knowledge merely laid the foundation for finally experiencing what is true. In parenthood, I get the palest glimpse into the reality of God as a father who lavishes love on His children and a mother who gathers her chicks under her wings. The Gospel is no longer a one-dimensional story about how I can “get out of hell free”—it’s the good news of victory, that the Creator of heaven and earth has resoundingly defeated sin and death so that both realms can be united again as His kingdom and I can be part of it, because—what is this miracle?!—He wants me there.

I have met God the Rescuer, and He is good.

I have met God the Redeemer, and He is good.

I have met God the Nurturer, and He is good.

I have met the King, and to my amazement, He’s not a control freak. He’s not obsessed with punishment, retribution, or how my behavior reflects on Him. He is the Prince of Peace, gentle and lowly. He delights in me and the thoughts and reflections I share with Him the same way I delight in everything Clara and Jane are learning and doing each day.

Sometimes I think we get so lost in theology and terminology that we forget to look for God Himself, and hesitate to let Him be God when He colors outside our preconceived lines.

I understand it—the fear of being flippant with the truth, or defining who God is based on the narrow parameters of how we feel or what we experience. Those things can never give us a complete picture. But what can? Do we expect that any of us will find our picture of God to be perfectly accurate when we meet Him face to face, regardless of whether we know the “right” theology, soteriology, eschatology, or other -ology?

My hope for that day is that I’ll have more than a picture; I’ll have a relationship.

A picture might give me some facts so I can recognize Him when I see Him, but the relationship is what I can take deeper and deeper into eternity. The relationship is what transforms me into His likeness. The relationship is where everything I know to be true about Him actually becomes true in my life.

It wouldn’t do my children much good to be raised by a portrait of me. To know my philosophy on parenting or my stance on discipline or even a disembodied fact about how much I love them.

None of it matters unless they get to live in the reality of it, a living and breathing and dynamic two-way relationship.

The Bible depicts God’s connection with His children as that of a breastfeeding mother with her baby, and there are few relationships as real, experiential, and vital as the mother-baby dyad. Facts and depictions can’t feed, comfort, hold, warm, support, love, and sustain a life. The baby deprived of any of those experiences, let alone all, would fail to thrive.

Human experience doesn’t live on the pages of books or the lines of doctrine. And God doesn’t fit there, either.

I am reminded of the words of James that used to make me feel so uncomfortable:

But someone will say, “You have faith, and I have works.” Show me your faith without works, and I will show you faith from my works. You believe that God is one; you do well. The demons also believe—and they shudder.

James 2:18-19

Rather than contradicting salvation by grace, as my younger self often worried, these words underscore my point: Knowing a certain set of facts is not evidence of faith. I’d argue that most of the underworld knows a lot more information, and more accurately, about God than any human on earth. It doesn’t make them His disciples.

Facts and information don’t create disciples any more than they raise babies.

A friend of mine went through a multi-year health crisis which impacted her so much that she couldn’t do anything, including go to church or read her Bible or spend time with other believers. For several years she passed her days mostly alone in her room, with little more stimulation than the view of tree branches from her window.

But the Holy Spirit communed with her there.

Her story has led me to reflect on the substance of my own walk: I love the Scriptures deeply, but suppose all my Bibles and Bible study resources were suddenly no longer available to me?

In relationship with the Triune God, the Word-Made-Flesh would still dwell with me. God would still be Father to me. The Holy Spirit would still animate me.

All the -ologies in the world can’t compare with that.

“And the Father who sent me has given evidence about Me. You’ve never heard His voice; you’ve never seen His form. What’s more, you haven’t got His Word abiding in you, because you don’t believe in the one He sent.

“You study the Bible,” Jesus continued, “because you suppose that you’ll discover the life of God’s coming age in it. In fact, it’s the Bible which gives evidence about Me! But you won’t come to Me so that you can have life.”

John 5:37-40, The Kingdom New Testament