Introducing Loving to Know

Against a brooding, wine-dark backdrop, what’s going on in the painting is at first difficult to make out. A spotless white tablecloth rewards an unseen light source, showcasing a meal in the offing. Then you see Christ the Lord, facing you, eyes closed in prayer, hand outstretched, giving thanks over the meal. Then gradually, first one, then another, disciple, and a third, a server, materialize around the Christ. Finally, it dawns on you that all three of them are registering a surprising recognition that is standing everything they thought they knew, including reality itself, on end. One man has spread his arms like an eagle, his fingers like a fan; he looks about to take off. The server has the look of one who is saying, what the heck is going on here? Who is this guy? It takes you a little while to make out Man #3, even though he is closest to you. Gradually you see that he has lurched forward in his chair, gripping its arms while he rivets Jesus’ face in eye-opening recognition. And is not the side of the table nearest you, and brilliantly inviting, entirely open for you to pull up a chair? Thus far Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus.

This painting adorns the cover of my forthcoming book. Cascade Books’ Cover Designer Matthew Stock has set just below it, against a wine-dark backdrop, “Loving to Know,” in regally pale-gold letters that resonate with the Savior’s glowing face. Other bands of color and colors of fonts pick up darker and lighter hues of the painting. I fervently hope this book may be released the week after Easter!

In Loving to Know: Introducing Covenant Epistemology, proclaims the back cover, I argue that “all knowing takes the shape of interpersonal, covenantal relationship. Rather than knowing in order to love, we love in order to know….all knowing is best understood as transformative encounter.”

People who have read my earlier Longing to Know (Brazos, 2003) will recall that the Emmaus disciples offer the best-ever instance of the Oh! I see it! moment. Acts of coming to know often involve that sudden, surprising recognition—life-transforming recognition. Addressing people considering Christianity who have questions about knowing, Longing to Know argued that “knowing God is like knowing your auto mechanic.” Loving to Know advances to develop my full-fledged epistemological proposal, effectively arguing for the converse: knowing your auto-mechanic, or anything else, is like knowing God. The Emmaus journey and divine self-disclosure over the bread and wine are promoted, from the best of examples, to the very paradigm of all knowing.

There are hints of interpersoned reciprocity about every knowing event. In a moment of insight, reality graciously and breaks in, catalyzing our personal change more than offering answers to dispassionate questions. In the darkness prior to that self-disclosure, we nevertheless bind ourselves covenantally to begin to live life on the terms of that which we do not yet know. Anticipative half-understanding is the tenor of the trajectory that is our lives. As such it is, in Simone Weil’s pearl of a designation, a “form of the implicit love of God.”

Honoring the personal about knowing enjoins us to invite the real, in love binding ourselves to that which we do not yet fully know. Covenant epistemology commends a life-wide posture of love, of learning in order to be apprehended. It will make us better at knowing—from business and free throws to Christian discipleship, from scientific research to making a roux or training a puppy.

In these weeks of Lent, we wait with the Lord, mourning for a while in the dark before his revelation as the risen Conqueror of death itself. In these weeks, Loving to Know awaits its public disclosure. In all of our not-yet knowing, we wait in the half-dark of risky hope and love. It can be a journey, in conversation, during which, we may later testify, our hearts were burning within us. When insight dawns, the glad recipient may well see—covenant epistemology enjoins us to see—that what we were waiting for, in some way, was our Lord. “So! It is You!”

(This post first appeared on commongroundsonline, 3/21/11