“Serious and thoughtful Christians today find themselves in a quandary about knowledge, on the one hand, and religious belief and practice, on the other. It is a socially imposed quandary. In the context of modern life and thought, they are urged to treat their central beliefs as something other than knowledge — something, in fact, far short of knowledge. Those beliefs are to be relegated to the categories of sincere opinion, emotion, blind commitment, or behavior traditional for their social group. And yet they cannot escape the awareness that those beliefs do most certainly come into conflict with what is regarded as knowledge in educational and professional circles of public life. This conflict has profound effects upon how they hold and practice religious beliefs and how they present them to others.

“Those effects are most clearly seen, on the public stage, in the repositioning of Christian teachers and leaders during the last century. They have been left to preside over the rituals of one or another cultural subgroup that, from the viewpoint of received knowledge, is nothing more than a sociological phenomenon — an ‘opiate’ of certain people-having nothing to do with knowledge of a reality with which all human beings must come to terms. This means that Christian teachers are left in the position of trying to coax and wheedle people into professing things and doing things by some means other than providing them knowledge of reality — hoping, perhaps, for ‘divine lightning’ to strike their souls and bring them around.

“The perceived gap between what is counted as knowledge and the offerings of Christian teachers is a reflection of the worldwide acceptance of the science and technology of the Western world, but not of the Christian framework of knowledge that gave rise to it. As Anglican theologian Lesslie Newbigin remarks, however: ‘No faith can command a man’s final and absolute allegiance, that is to say no faith can be a man’s real religion, if he knows that it is only true for certain places and certain people. In a world which knows that there is only one physics and one mathematics, religion cannot do less than claim for its affirmations a like universal validity.’

“A natural outcome of this felt tension between the central things Christians believe and what is accepted as knowledge of reality is the destabilization of belief and practice. Belief as mere belief — ‘my personal opinion,’ as we now ritually say — is already unstable in its own right. As Plato noted long ago, it tends to waver, to come and go, especially when concerned with the more abstract and ultimate issues of life. And that in turn makes character and action based on those beliefs hesitant and variable at best, unsuiting us for steady engagement with the realities (and disengagement from the nonrealities) that we have to deal with. Steadiness in belief and practice then comes to depend upon mere willpower, often taking the form of encrusted close-mindedness or harsh dogmatism. Belief and practice are sustained at great price, if at all. The isolation of faith from knowledge is, accordingly, one major source of the painful difference between what people profess and how they act that is so frequently seen in Christian circles — but, to be accurate, also in humanity at large. This is often thought of as a failure of will or sincerity, but in fact it goes much deeper — it is a matter of whether will and choice are founded on knowledge or the lack of it.

“This difficulty is not to be overcome by cultivating or manipulating feeling and emotions, by the practice of ritual or art, or by trying harder to believe and act as we think we should. ‘Just put your hands over your eyes and believe,’ as some have said. Nor is it overcome by miraculous injections of divine inspiration and upholding from time to time. All of these may have some place. But the problems created by belief without knowledge, or belief in opposition to knowledge cannot be dealt with in such ways. Belief cannot reliably govern life and action except in its proper connection with knowledge and with the truth and evidence knowledge involves.

“The relationship of religion to knowledge has become severely misunderstood and distorted over the last two centuries. In particular, it has become the accepted view that religion stands free of knowledge, that it requires only faith or commitment. In some quarters great faith has become equated with a belief or commitment that manages to sustain itself, with great effort, against knowledge — or at least with no support from knowledge. Faith is then regarded as essentially a kind of struggle. Some speak of the ‘lonely person of faith’ as an admirable but odd manifestation of heroic willpower.

“In fact, such an interpretation of faith is only one part of the larger contemporary picture in which life and action are seen as fundamentally irrational — totally governed by feelings, traditions, force, ‘willpower,’ and blind commitment. The significance of this picture for our contemporary life as a whole is profound. Like gravity in the physical realm, that picture pervasively influences and guides our thinking and acting — even without any specific awareness of it. In religion its effect upon practice is to restrict the foundation of devotion to will and feelings, with no thought that it is based, wholly or in part, upon knowledge of how things really are. In the social context it leads to mutual incomprehension between disagreeing parties, the inability to seek or find common ground, and suspicion, fear, contempt, and hostility. These are now the persistent undertone of our society and especially of its political discourse, frequently involving religion.”

— from Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge (HarperOne, 2009)

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