A LITTLE KNOWLEDGE…..
SCRIPTURE: Psalm 19:1-4; 7-9; 14
John 8:21-33
In Ingmar Bergman’s powerful film about a crisis of faith, The Seventh Seal, a knight, Antonius Block, is returning from the Crusades in despair and with little faith or anything to believe in. He finds himself playing a chess game with Death in order to prolong his life and his search and in the hope of doing one good thing to benefit humanity before Death wins out. He goes to a confessional, not knowing that it is Death himself behind the curtain, and in his anguish he cries out:
I want knowledge, not faith, not supposition but knowledge.
I want God to stretch out His hand to me, reveal Himself and speak to me.
Death responds: “But He remains silent.”
The knight continues:
I call out to Him in the dark but no one seems to be there.
No one can live in the face of Death knowing that all is nothingness.
We can identify with Antonius Block’s desire to know, can’t we? We want things to be made plain; we want assurances and guarantees. If somehow you or I feel that God has never made Godself truly known to us, then what is the real value of our faith?
That’s why, I think, The Seventh Seal made such an impact when it was first released in 1957 and still reverberates today as an examination of doubt and faith. It made Bergman’s international reputation, and it is still regarded by many as one of their favorite Bergman films. I can still remember the first time I saw it in 1961 in the basement of a Protestant refugee organization in Paris called CIMADE, where I was watching it with French sub-titles! But I could understand enough that the power of the images and the concepts came through. At one level the movie just drips with despair, as it takes place in the context of the black plague, and death leads off all the principal characters in the end. But at another level it is filled with much hope, as Jof and Mia and their small child (a clear reference to the Holy Family) are given a chance to go on living and indeed find a meaningful life. This is the one good deed that Antonius Block has managed to do before Death does lead him away.
But the knight has still not found the knowledge that he seeks. And down through the ages people have constantly wanted that same assurance of knowing. So, we have sought for proofs of God’s existence. Medievalists like Thomas Aquinas thought they had found those proofs, only to have later generations in the Age of Enlightenment and the logical positivists of the 20th century demonstrate that they were based on faulty assumptions. Science, with its emphasis on hard data and knowledge that comes from experimentation and re-checking hypotheses, has kept faith’s feet to the fire by insisting that the assumptions of faith need to be demonstrable by viable proofs. The response of some believers has been a kind of “hunkering down” – a riff on the old Tug McGraw cry, “Ya gotta believe!” – that faith itself is sufficient – that all you have to do is believe strongly enough – that it’s not necessary to know that God is there in the sense of having proofs of God’s existence.
But that’s not sufficient for us, is it? Somewhere in the nexus of faith and knowledge is where we find ourselves. We strive to hold onto a faith that is as strong as the “rock of ages”, but we also want to look at the age of rocks and find God in the evolutionary growth of our world. That’s why the current controversy between evolution and creationism is so emblematic of the seeming clash between faith and knowledge. It’s a conflict that ran throughout most of the 20th century and continues in our own time unabated. It’s a clash between the mind-set that says, “I believe that the Bible says God created the world in seven days, and that’s all I need to know or think about,” and the desire to be constantly seeking the reality that "God still has more truth and light to break forth from God’s Holy Word," as Pastor John Robinson said in sending the Pilgrims off to the New World.
The collision between these ways of approaching the world is well illustrated in Lawrence and Lee’s play “Inherit the Wind”. The lawyer, Henry Drummond, who is defending a young school teacher who has been teaching the theory of evolution, in his frustration at not being able to call expert scientific witnesses, finally calls his opponent, Mathew Harrison Brady, as an expert on the Bible, to the stand. At first Brady is adamant in espousing his belief in the truth of the Bible and only the Bible – “faith is the important thing,” he says. Drummond responds by asking, “But then why did God give humans the power to think?” When Brady quite confidently quotes Bishop Ussher that the world was created in 4004 B.C. and not millions of years ago as evolutionists say, since the world was created in seven days, Drummond pushes him: “Was that a literal, 24-hour day? – there wasn’t any sun, how could it be measured?”, and he finally gets Brady to admit that it could have been longer than 24 hours – perhaps even 10 million years! When Drummond asks Brady what he thinks about that, Brady replies, "I do not think about things that...I do not think about!"
There in a nutshell is the problem with what I like to call “naked belief” – that is, belief at the cost of all rationality and in the face of conflicting evidence. God did give us the ability to think for ourselves – to seek for answers to even the most troubling of questions – to try to discover for ourselves the kind of knowledge Antonius Block searches for. The ability to think is what sets us apart from all other creatures on this earth, and it is what has led to human progress (in spite of all the destructive elements that are a part of our thought processes as well). Would a loving, creating God really have given us this kind of ability if that same God had not wanted us to use it?
In part, at least, this is why today – as we do every year in September – we start to hold classes in our Church School – offering to our children Christian Education. For those whose mind-set is closer to that of “naked belief”, “Christian Education” is almost an oxymoron. The very definition of education is that it helps us to think. Christian Education is no different; it is not just a matter of memorizing Bible verses or learning the names of heroes and heroines from the Old Testament or being able to recite the 23rd Psalm. No, at its best Christian Education assists us in examining our faith – taking it out, holding it up to the light, seeing where it is inadequate and where we need to grow. Last Sunday Grace, Gina, Glenda and I were talking about the adult Christian Education classes that were held this summer before church where Kay lifted up women of the Bible, and those who were gathered talked about how the experiences of these women illuminated their own experiences. By looking at what people of faith from the Bible did and thought and feared – how they doubted and worked through their doubt – we are enabled to work out our own fears and doubts and become stronger believers as a result. Christian Education is one of the most important activities for the church to be about, and it is such because it helps us to think and to reason, not just to affirm a passive belief system. God loves an honest doubter – if that person is willing to put their doubt to the test by sharpening it on the whetstone of reasoned discourse. The sermon title, as you probably guessed, is a play on the old bromide “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing”. For us – for all those involved in Christian Education – this is true in a slightly different sense: we always need to seek for more knowledge, and too little knowledge leads to the danger of an inadequate faith.
For faith, you see, is always seeking after knowledge. That’s where Antonius Block gets it wrong – it’s not a matter of “knowledge” OR “faith”; rather, when faith has been formative for us we continue to push its edges, continue to say, “But I need to know more,” continue not to be satisfied with just hanging onto the faith of our fathers and mothers. That wonderfully affirming Psalm that Marjorie read for us this morning offers paeans of praise to God’s glory in creation, and it shouts that the very heavens are telling the glory of God. But it goes right on in the next verse to say, “Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge.” In the very act of creation God pledges that we can have knowledge about that creation and about our place in it. “The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul; the decrees of the Lord are sure, making wise the simple.” We are intended, the Psalmist is saying, to grow in knowledge and understanding of our faith. This is what God offers to us in God’s mighty act of creation.
Faith seeks after knowledge. And when both our faith and our knowledge are deepened, this leads us into wisdom – which is the union of faith and knowledge. There’s that wonderful image at the very end of “Inherit the Wind” where Henry Drummond picks up the Bible in one hand and Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species in the other, weighs them both for a moment, and then slams them together and walks out. Here Drummond is demonstrating wisdom – the wisdom of understanding how belief and the search for knowledge interact and enhance one another.
The ancient Greeks actually had a Goddess of Wisdom – Sophia – who is also seen by some in the Judean-Christian tradition as the feminine principle of God. In Greek mythology Sophia has a great love for human beings and is constantly working to try to help them become better. Here are some of her traits: righteous, loving, communicative, knowledgeable, creative, protective, giving, and truthful. In other words, to come to wisdom is to manifest those characteristics that most of us would really like to share with others. The fusion of faith and knowledge, which leads to wisdom, helps us to become the kind of human beings we would like to be.
Another web site about Sophia says this about her: “Sophia was also the mother of Faith, Hope, and Charity. They are Sofia’s gifts to us, gifts that can overcome the despair, confusion, and suffering that frame human life. Sophia reminds you that clear vision and understanding line the path that leads to the discovery of the meaning of your life.” The wisdom of Sophia shows great concern for all that is happening in the world today, and it seeks to keep things in balance for us.
Now, I realize that this is all based on ancient mythology and so it may not seem that relevant to our struggles with faith and knowledge today. But somehow it seems to me that wisdom as a goal to strive toward as a way to combine our seeking after faith and our struggling toward knowledge is not thought about too much today – and that’s too bad. Another ancient writer who wrote the Wisdom of Solomon – one of the books of the Apocrypha, which appears between the Old and the New Testaments in many Bibles – extols the value of wisdom in these words (using The New English Bible translation):
For in wisdom there is a spirit intelligent and holy, unique in its kind yet
made up of many parts, subtle, free-moving, lucid, spotless, clear,
invulnerable, loving what is good, eager, unhindered, beneficent, kindly
towards (all), steadfast, unerring, untouched by care, all-powerful, all-
surveying, and permeating all intelligent, pure, and delicate spirits. For
wisdom moves more easily than motion itself, she pervades and
permeates all things because she is so pure….. She is the brightness that
streams from everlasting light, the flawless mirror of the active power of
God and the image of (God’s) goodness. She is but one, yet can do
everything; herself unchanging, she makes all things new; age after age
she enters into holy souls, and makes them God’s friends and prophets,
for nothing is acceptable to God but the man (the woman) who makes his
(or her) home with wisdom. (7:22-28)
The mythology surrounding Sophia and the writer of the Wisdom of Solomon are wishing for us the kind of joyous freedom that comes from living in the wisdom of God. That, too, is what Jesus wishes for his disciples. John 8-31-32 is one of my favorite verses in all the Bible as Jesus says to his disciples who are not quite getting who he is or what he is saying about their ultimate destiny, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” You will know – you will have the knowledge that Antonius Block thinks he does not. But so much more importantly: this knowledge, this faith, this wisdom will give you the freedom to be all that God wants you to be.
“I
want knowledge, not faith…” the knight cries. But these are not opposites.
You have been given what you need, and in both knowledge and faith you have
found wisdom. Take the wisdom God offers to you…and be free!
Amen.
Dave Pomeroy
First Congregational Church/United Church of Christ
Las Vegas, NV
September 17, 2006