The genius of Dallas Willard's new book, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge (HarperOne, 2009), is its explanatory power for many of the ills of contemporary Western society.

Willard, a longtime philosophy professor at the University of Southern California and author of such works as The Divine Conspiracy and The Spirit of the Disciplines, says the moral confusion we see today stems from one uber-problem: "the trivialization of faith apart from knowledge and … the disastrous effects of a repositioning of faith in Jesus Christ, and of life as his students, outside the category of knowledge."

Our problem, then, is epistemological: What do we know, and how do we know it? Willard says that to actually claim that you possess real but not exhaustive knowledge on a moral issue (what Francis Schaeffer called "true truth") is a scandal in the modern world. Relativists see certainty as a trip-wire for arrogance and extremism, and uncertainty as a recipe for tolerance and peace. The post-9/11 fulminations of New Atheists such Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, who label all religions as potentially dangerous, are evidence for Willard's thesis. Better to claim ignorance—and more humble, too.

Yet knowledge need not provoke violence. Willard says rightly that sin is integral to the human condition and is not a specifically religious malady. Sometimes knowledge even sparks humility. And when do we actually possess knowledge, according to Willard? "We have knowledge of something when we are representing it (thinking about it, speaking of it, treating it) as it actually is, on an appropriate basis of thought and experience."
  
Once-hallowed religious beliefs, Willard says, have been relegated to the intellectual sidelines as a result of the post-Enlightenment struggle between what he calls "traditional knowledge" and secularism, which claims the mantle of knowledge without warrant and which rules in institutions of higher learning—even Christian ones—as the areas of human life that do not fit the "secularist story" multiply. As a result, knowledge disappears, and the vacuum is filled by others.

"In the context of modern life and thought," Willard says, Christians "are urged to treat their central beliefs as something other than knowledge. Those beliefs are to be relegated to the categories of sincere opinion, emotion, blind commitment, or behavior traditional for their social group." When this happens, Willard says, Christians cannot influence society for the good. Only knowledge, as opposed to mere belief, commitment, or formal adherence, conveys the right and authority "to act, to direct action, to establish and supervise policy, and to teach."
   
Here is recent news event that illustrates the brilliance of Willard's diagnosis.  This past spring Notre Dame's decision to award President Obama an honorary doctorate did not sit well with many alumni and friends of the university, who rightly pointed out that Obama's pro-choice policies contradict clear Catholic teaching (Notre Dame is a Catholic school). While supporters, including the university president and most students, defended the action on the basis of tolerance and diversity, visiting scholar Francis J. Beckwith pointedly noted that the real issue is epistemology:

Unless the university does not believe that the Church's understanding of the moral law is true and knowable, it can no more in good conscience award an honorary doctorate of laws to a lawyer who rejects the humanity of the proper subjects of law than it could in good conscience award an honorary doctorate in science to a geocentric astronomer who rejects the deliverances of the discipline he claims to practice.

At some point, a Christian university must recognize that the truth it claims to know matters, even if the truth is unpopular, and even if the propagation and celebration of that truth may put one's community at odds with those persons and centers of influence and power that dispense prestige and authority in our culture.

So what is Willard's cure? He says, first of all, that Christians cannot hope to return religious knowledge to its rightful place in society unless they believe in it themselves. So the professor—an expert on German philosopher Edmund Husserl's work, Logic and the Objectivity of Knowledge—attempts to convince us of what we should already know, namely, that God exists, and that miracles (including Christ's resurrection) are possible, even likely.

Willard gives a welcome reminder that Christian truth represents the universe as it really is--in other words, knowledge. 

Willard moves on to "Knowledge of Christ in the Spiritual Life." His key point: "Those who do know Christ in the modern world do so by seeking and entering the kingdom of God." This is a knowledge based upon commitment. Here Willard distinguishes between two kinds of knowledge, knowledge by description and knowledge by acquaintance. We know Christ when we acquaint ourselves with him and with his people.

Willard ultimately gives the task of repairing the breach in knowledge to pastors, defined by him more broadly than as shepherds of local congregations. Pastors, Willard says, are "those who self-identify as spokespeople for Christ and who perhaps have some leadership position or role in Christian organizations."

Acquiring the knowledge they will need for such an expanded role—as teachers of the nations—will require a growth of duties and horizons that will challenge the abilities and calling of many pastors today. Still, a little knowledge can still go a long way.

It is hard to see how the social and personal transformation that we all desire can come to pass without a revitalized and vibrant church. But if the church can get a few more with the range and passion of Dallas Willard, that can't be bad for the kingdom of God.

This Father’s Day, if your family has experienced some form of parental alienation, Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse invites you to consider if reconciliation is possible.

"America has been in the grip of a gender ideology that says that no matter what the question, the answer is, blame the man. In spite of the media attention to “deadbeat dads,” many fathers make their child support payments and want to spend more time with their children. Many Americans do not realize how often mothers prevent their children from seeing their fathers.

Now I am fully aware that this problem can go both ways: Custodial parents, whether mothers or fathers, sometimes prevent their children from seeing their other parent. Custodial parents, male or female, sometimes pit the children against their other parent. Having said this, however, our focus on this particular site at this particular time is to encourage healing for the broken father child bond. After all, it is Fathers’ Day. But families who have suffered from a father alienating his children against their mother can find help and healing here as well.

We also are aware that in some families, one of the parents really was a problem. The mother may have had good reasons for keeping a truly abusive father away from the kids. But if you honestly can’t remember any genuinely abusive behavior, if you have heard one parent consistently denigrate the other, we encourage you to reconsider your opinion of that absent parent.

Click the link below to find our more about the Ruth Institute Father's Day Reconciliation Proposal
http://www.ruthinstitute.org/fathersday/index3.html

The modern epistemological crisis has its roots in the wrong solution to an age-old question: How can we achieve certain knowledge?

The age-old problem that causes the age-old question is something we experience every day, the very human limitations of human knowledge. We think we know something—the real character of our next-door neighbor, the actual state of the economy, the identity of a person we see across the street—but then we find out we were mistaken. This experience occurs on grander scales. A cherished scientific theory runs aground on new facts. An indisputable account of some particular historical event suddenly, with new evidence, becomes disputable.

There are three general responses to this experience of the fallibility of human knowledge. The first is morbid skepticism where we believe that since we make mistakes, then everything we “know” could very well be mistaken, and so there is nothing certain at all.

A second response—which is right and proper—is to realize, in humility, that human reason is human. We are above the animals in being able to know, and we really do know many things, but the magnificent complexity and depth of reality ultimately exceeds our merely human understanding. This humble response is actually an implicit recognition of a wisdom that does understand the magnificent complexity and depth of reality, divine wisdom.

A final response, offered in the 17th century by philosophers such as Rene Descartes and Benedict Spinoza (and still with us today), is the one that led to the modern epistemological crisis. These eminently modern philosophers attempted to create an absolutely certain science so that human wisdom could be transformed into something like divine wisdom, where all doubt, confusion, error, and disagreement would be removed. This response promises that “We shall know as gods.”

How did it try to make good on that promise? By asserting that the one area of human knowledge where we do seem to have absolute certainty, mathematics, is the only real knowledge, and every other claim to knowledge is merely personal opinion. As a result, our knowledge of morality, politics, aesthetics, and most importantly, religion were all relegated to the realm of merely subjective preferences or irrational expressions of the will or emotions. Our current “crisis” of knowledge is the direct result of declaring almost all of our everyday experience of knowing things to be merely subjective. The crisis in religious knowing is the direct result of declaring that religious knowledge, being entirely non-mathematical, is not even good enough to be false. We can count the various religious opinions, but none were any better or worse than any other.

Dr. Benjamin Wiker

Related Past tothesource Articles

The Importance of Fathers this Father's Day
http://www.tothesource.org/6_16_2004/6_16_2004.htm

Professor Willard's Advice to Graduates
http://www.tothesource.org/5_18_2005/5_18_2005.htm

Answering Life’s Big Questions

The question of what counts as knowledge takes on profound importance as Christians answer life’s big questions: What is reality? Who is well off? Who is a really good person? How does one become a genuinely good person? Willard urges Christians to have confidence in the uniquely Christian body of knowledge as a trustworthy source of answers to life’s big questions.

“Jesus and his followers have provided answers for billions of people, answers that meet the tests of life and rise above the impositions of our origin and social setting. Presently we are in a time when his right and authority to answer them are radically questioned….Only if we ask it and answer it by knowing him and knowing what he says to be true can we move beyond mere belief or commitment or profession. Only so can we place, with him, a firm hand on the progress of life toward what is good supported by what is real.”

Willard warns that the quest for answers to these four questions leads to the even more pressing and controversial question: How do we know which answers to the four questions are true?

"In current open societies, such as in America, there is a constant struggle over 'who has knowledge' concerning the burning issues of private and public life. Religion (or 'tradition') and Science (or 'research') are constantly invoked on one side or the other, usually in the midst of blinding confusions and contempts.

Like people in Elijah's day, as we noted, we limp around on incompatible allegiances. Our social and political institutions are 'double-minded.' 'In God we trust' and 'under God' become points of bitter contention among our citizens. what we learn in the classroom and what we hear in most churches and in discussions of public policy simply do not fit together, if they have any connection at all. It's not just an issue of 'evolution' versus 'creation,' as is often thought. Those are actually surface matters. The underlying issue is the question of how or whether we know things of various kinds, especially at the worldview levels that govern all the lesser points of belief and practice. If there is no knowledge at those levels, humanity is permanently adrift and at the mercy of force and chance. Modernity has, after centuries of struggle, found no credible answers to the basic questions of life. As it turns out, the universities, our primary institutions of research, simply have no intellectually responsible responses to those questions. That is a fact anyone can verify."

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