We are delighted that Bobby Gross, author of Living the Christian Year and who has contributed previous series during Lent and Advent, has agreed to write a new series of Lenten reflections on the theme of humility.
“I could be wrong.”
These are the words of someone with humility about what they think and how they think. To say them is to acknowledge that we are fallible in our intellectual faculties and that we cannot be fully certain that what we know to be true and right is true and right. We might do well to adapt the honest plea from the father seeking healing for his possessed child in Mark 9 (“I believe, help my unbelief”) and say: “I know, help my unknowing.”
Continuing the theme of this blog series, “Lenten humility,” I want to reflect this week on the virtue of what we might call epistemological modesty. To our litany of the human condition—bodies subject to deprivation and death, souls stained by moral corrosion, lives vulnerable to unpredictable circumstances—we can add fallible minds when it comes to knowledge and truth and understanding of God.
Didn’t the psalmist declare: “How weighty are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them!” (Psalm 139). Didn’t the prophet convey God’s warning: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways; for as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isaiah 55). Didn’t Jesus exult in prayer: “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants.” (Luke 10). And didn’t Paul dramatize the limitations of human knowledge: “Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom…” (1 Corinthians 1).
Our ability to apprehend spiritual reality is woefully inadequate; we can only know something of God and his ways because God chooses to make such things known to us, which he does in a multiplicity of ways. Even then, at best we “see through a glass darkly” or “in a mirror dimly” (1 Cor. 13). Our knowledge (and articulation) of God ever remains partial, provisional, and prismed through our cultural, linguistic, historical, and social situatedness. To readily acknowledge this befits a theological humility.
When it comes to scientific knowledge, we tend to assume that it is different, ascertainable in a way that metaphysical knowledge is not, given the empiricism that underpins its methodology. Hence the facile and flawed distinction often made between facts and values, objectivity and subjectivity, reason and imagination.[1] But even in this part of the academic realm, the most responsible scientists acknowledge when the current consensus comprises a prevailing hypothesis or theory, subject to further confirmation and ongoing questioning. The history of science is a story of one explanation of reality challenging and displacing another, as in physics, for example, quantum mechanics (Dirac) superseding classical mechanics (Newton) yet remaining in unresolved tension with the theory of relativity (Einstein). Thus, for all our astounding progress in scientific knowledge, there rightly remains a kind of humility baked into the enterprise: “We could be wrong.”
On the other hand, with unfounded hubris, some scientists brazenly dismiss the validity of all claims to knowledge that fall outside the bounds of scientific materialism. On this lack of humility, the novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson comments incisively:
So imperious is the materialist approach to reality that it considers whatever it cannot capture by its methods as effectively nonexistent, for example, the human self, the human mind. It marginalizes to the point of disappearance things we generally consider abstractions, for example, justice, wisdom, beauty. The theologian may and must grant these even an especial reality.
She mischievously compares the theologian to the scientist, intimating the vast complexity of reality:
And as much as I respect science and its methods, here the theologian can claim a great advantage, conceptually speaking. She need not struggle to breathe life into a purely materialist cosmos. She need not attempt a grand unifying theory out of the heterogeneous parts of known reality. She need not leave unaddressed the fact of the extraordinary role of human consciousness in the cosmos, of which physics is one great instance.[2]
While we all pay some degree of attention to theology and to the sciences (as we should!), most of us are not professionals in either realm. But all of us acquire and use knowledge about the world around us: how things work and what’s going on and how to navigate life. In that sense, we pay much attention to history, culture, politics, human nature, current events, social issues, medicine, economics, the arts, spiritual matters, and ideas in general. We want to know what is true and right and wise (as we should!).
But how confident should we be about what we think we know? Two factors should give us pause: our innate human fallibility and our current knowledge environment.
Alan Jacobs, professor of humanities in Baylor’s honors program, speaks to both of these factors in his insightful book How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds. After his own survey of books about thinking, he declares them all depressing because they provide “a wide-ranging litany of the ways that thinking goes astray—the infinitely varied path we can take toward the seemingly inevitable dead end of Getting it Wrong.” He then rehearses by name many aspects of our fallibility:
Anchoring, availability cascades, confirmation bias, the Dunning-Kruger effect, the endowment effect, framing effects, group attribution errors, halo effects, ingroup and outgroup homogeneity biases, recency illusions…a chronicle of ineptitude, arrogance, sheer dumbassery.[3]
Jacobs goes on to offer practical ways to cultivate a humble self-awareness in our own habits of thought. He gives guidance for navigating the turbulent cross currents of our current ecosystem(s) for acquiring factual information about the world.
These days, I feel the tug of two contrasting temptations: to double down on my sense that I see the world correctly (and that those who inhabit different knowledge spaces do not) and, conversely, to drift into a discouraged disengagement about the prospect of knowing what to believe about anything.[4] Both are dangerous.
Where does this frustratingly brief survey leave us?
On one hand, as creatures made in God’s own image, I believe we are endowed with knowledge-seeking and truth-apprehending faculties: curiosity, intelligence, reason, intuition, sociability, creativity, and spiritual receptivity. God intends for us to grow in understanding and wisdom of all kinds, most importantly, knowledge of him as the creator and sustainer of the cosmos, including each of us.
On the other hand, we are finite beings: we are limited in our intellectual capacities, we are susceptible to sin’s distortions, and we are embedded in historical and cultural contexts. We can know a lot about a lot of things, and we can also get a lot of things wrong, which is true of everyone around us. (Listening may be a key to wisdom here, both our willingness to listen to others with an open mind and our careful choosing of who we listen to, the most trustworthy.)
In 1 Corinthians 8, Paul takes up an ethical issue troubling the church community, whether they were free to eat food that had been sacrificed to pagan idols. Some “knew” it was wrong (it made them complicit with idolatry); some “knew” it was harmless (the idols were not real). Paul writes:
We know that ‘all of us possess knowledge.’ Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge; but anyone who loves God is known by him.
I don’t fully understand these verses, but I detect in them an invitation to humility: we don’t know as much as we think we do, we don’t know as much as God knows, and what we think we know can end up hurting others and dividing us from those we are called to love.
So, I will continue to say to myself, frequently: “I could be wrong.”
And I will continue to say to others, often, as I voice my convictions about what is true and right: “But I could be wrong.”
And during this season of Lent, I am saying to God, repeatedly: “I think I know, help my unknowing.”
[1] For an energetic defense of the imagination as a truth-bearing faculty, see Malcolm Guite, Lifting the Veil: Imagination and the Kingdom of God (Square Halo, 2021).
[2] What Are We Doing Here? Essays (FSG, 2018), p. 128.
[3] How to Think (Currency, 2017), p.12.
[4] To counter this latter bewilderment, I commend Jonathan Rouch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of the Truth (Brookings, 2021). Also see Bonnie Kristian, Untrustworthy (Brazos, 2022) for a treatment of the same concerns from a more explicitly Christian point of view.
Previous articles in this series:
Ash Wednesday and the Gift of Lent
Lenten Humility: Remembering our Creaturely Mortality
Lenten Humility: Admitting our Moral Culpability
Lenten Humility: Recognizing our Circumstantial Vulnerability
Bobby Gross is the author of Living the Christian Year: Time to Inhabit the Story of God (InterVarsity Press). Bobby has spent his career in campus ministry with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. He currently serves as Senior Field Director for the Graduate & Faculty Ministries division. For 13 years he served as VP and National Director for Graduate & Faculty Ministries. Originally from Columbus, GA, Bobby and his wife Charlene have lived in Miami (FL), New York City, and now Atlanta. He graduated from UNC Chapel Hill with a B.A. in American Studies and English Literature and did additional studies in theology at Regent College in Vancouver. Bobby served on the national board of Christians in the Visual Arts (CIVA) for six years. An admitted bibliophile, Bobby also writes poetry and collects contemporary art on religious themes.