While working on the first draft of Knowledge for the Love of God, I didn’t have a contract. Idiosyncratically, I don’t like to sign a contract until I’ve got a complete manuscript. If you’re new to book publishing, some insider baseball: publishers don’t like proposals involving completed manuscripts. I learned this fact the hard way, and still find it very weird. My solution: just don’t tell them the manuscript is done. “I’ve got three chapters here for you. And sure thing. I can most definitely deliver a complete manuscript in the next 15 months,” I say. I mumble-cough the next bit: jus’-gimme-fi’teen-secs-to-get-this-here-file-attached…

So I didn’t have a contract as I was writing. But I did have the title. I’m still happy with it. The best titles have multiple meanings, and this one does.[1] Bonus points to those who can find them. Comments are open.

Another thing I didn’t have until the very end was a complete answer to the question implied in the title: what is knowledge for? I sensed that I hadn’t yet fully grasped the thing, or the details anyway, with anything like satisfactory clarity. I could say knowledge was for the love of God, but I couldn’t say how knowledge was for the love of God. But I knew that what I had to say didn’t get all the way to the finish line veiled in the foggy distance.

This sort of worry — that you haven’t quite gotten the whole picture — is typical of writers, I think; it’s anyway typical of me. And so most days I chalked the concern up to irrational self-doubt.

Turns out the doubts weren’t irrational. The culminating movement of the book, which in the book’s final form begins in chapter 6 and finishes in the Epilogue, came only as I finished drafting. When I began, and indeed until almost the end of my work on the book, it was only the beginning of chapter 6 that I imagined to be the conclusion. It wouldn’t have been a satisfying end.

Anyway, that not-good-enough end is still an important part of the book. It’s the claim that knowledge is a gift from God intended for two interrelated goals: prompting us to worship and forming our character.

I stand by this idea.

The Scriptures are replete with the idea that understanding who God is and what He has done, especially in relationship to us, are meant to motivate us to worship. This is why the preface to the Ten Commandments is a reminder of God’s saving work:

I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. (Exodus 20:2)

God is calling His people into worship, organized around the Law — the first two commandments are about more than Israel’s corporate worship but certainly not about less — and God’s salvific work is meant to prompt and animate their whole-heart devotion.

The Psalms pick up this theme. Psalm 100, for example, invites its hearers to “make a joyful noise,” to “come into his presence with singing,” to “enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise.” And why should we do this? Because of things we know:

Know that the LORD, he is God!

It is he who made us, and we are his;

we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.

...

For the LORD is good;

his steadfast love endures forever,

and his faithfulness to all generations.

These reminders of who God is and what he has done — indeed, our knowledge of these things — is meant to prompt our hearts to worship God with all of our hearts.

Or consider Psalm 136, which is framed by twin calls to “Give thanks to the LORD/the God of heaven” and filled with the story of Creation and God’s salvation, repeating in each verse,

for his steadfast love endures forever.

The reminders of God’s steadfast love call us to thanksgiving, that is, to a posture of praise and worship.

Knowledge prompts worship.

Knowledge also is crucial to our spiritual formation. Paul makes this clear in Romans. He is explicit in Romans 12, where he claims that the renewal of our minds — the knowledge of God and his good, pleasing, and perfect will — is the fount of our transformation into Christlikeness. And it is implicit in Romans 1, where Paul traces the devolution of individuals and culture from the exchange of the truth for a lie.

Knowledge is an ineliminable ingredient in our formation.

Of course, also clear there in Romans 1 the connection between knowledge and worship. The exchange of the truth of God for a lie immediately prompts the worship of created things rather than the Creator.

I won’t belabor this point, but of course our formation and our worship are likewise interconnected. In some ways, these two things are difficult to disentangle in a meaningful way. What a person worships is the center of his or her life. And a person naturally forms around what he or she worships. There’s loads to say here — and perhaps I’ll say more of it down the road — but we’ve got enough for now. The connection between knowledge and worship is interdependent with the connection between knowledge and formation.

Alright, then. Knowledge prompts worship and is a crucial ingredient in our formation. Pretty good, right? I thought so, and in many ways still do.

The challenge is that I didn’t quite see what these two purposes had to do with love.

The fog began to lift when I realized that the sort of knowledge I’ve been talking about — knowledge about God and His works — was connected to another kind of knowledge — knowledge of God. What I mean is that what the human heart ultimately longs for and needs isn’t mere knowledge about God. This is the sort of thing that I think James so terrifyingly warns against. Oh, really? You believe? Even know? So do the demons!

What the human heart longs for and needs is intimacy with God. It’s the sort of interpersonal knowledge I talked about in “The Crisis of Empathy.” Thing is, though, you can’t know someone in that interpersonal way without knowing about them.

This connection between knowledge about and knowledge of is kinda obvious once it’s pointed out. Take the knowledge I have of the love of my life, my wife, Jamie. I know my wife in that interpersonal, knowledge of way. We’ve been married for almost twenty-one years now, and have been a couple for well over half our lives. If there’s anyone in the world I have a close interpersonal relationship with, it’s her.

But now imagine that we just met, and after I insist that Jamie and I are interpersonally close, that I know her, you began asking me questions about her. And to each of your questions, all I can muster is shrug emoji.

“What does she hope for your children in the next five years?” “Beats me. Haven’t asked.” “Is she looking forward to being an empty-nester?” “No clue.” “Does she have career goals?” “Ummmm…”

“What’s her favorite food?” “…” “What color are her eyes?” “Nothin’.” “How old is she?” “Maybe around my age?”

I take it you would grow increasingly skeptical that we were as interpersonally close as I had claimed. And rightly so. Depth of interpersonal connection isn’t reducible to a knowledge of various facts about a person. But knowledge of another does require knowledge about them. That’s why the claim to know a person who we know nothing about is so ridiculous. We need more than knowledge about someone for interpersonal intimacy, but we definitely do not need less.

More, not less.

So that’s the first thing that diminished the fog: knowledge of requires knowledge about.

The fog more or less disappeared when I asked a couple theologian friends for a theology of worship. It turns out that the best theology has to offer is a fairly simple account of Christian worship: worship of God is consciously presenting oneself to God, as His, as a creature. Here, for example, is Augustine:

To this God we owe our service — what in Greek is called latreia — whether in the various sacraments or in ourselves. For we are his temple, collectively, and as individuals. For he condescends to dwell in the union of all and in each person. … When we lift up our hearts to him, our heart is his altar. We propitiate him by our priest, his only-begotten Son. … We vow to him and offer to him the gifts he has given us, and the gift of ourselves. … We offer to him, on the altar of the heart, the sacrifice of humility and praise, and the flame on the altar is the burning fire of charity. To see him as he can be seen and to cleave to him, we purify ourselves from every stain of sin and evil desire and we consecrate ourselves in his name. For he himself is the source of our bliss, he himself is the goal of all our striving. By our election of him as our goal…we direct our course towards him with love (dilectio), so that in reaching him we may find our rest, and attain our happiness because we have achieved our fulfillment in him. For our Good, that Final Good about which the philosophers dispute, is nothing else but to cleave to him whose spiritual embrace, if one may so express it, fills the…soul. (Book X, chapter 3)

Augustine’s point, which he goes on to emphasize still further, is that worship isn’t a step along the way to communion with God. Worship is communion with God.

Notice also what Augustine recognizes: like the people of Israel, right worship involves an understanding of what God demands of us, and it involves our formation. (Whether he is always right about what those demands are is not a question I will take up here!)

Our knowledge about God and His works is intended, through its interconnected work of prompting us to worship and forming us spiritually, to drive us deeper into the life of God. God’s life is, of course, ours. Our knowledge about God helps to find His house, noticing the clues to His whereabouts along the road, and to knock on the right door in the right way, a way that befits our creatureliness, with humility and reverence, awe and dependence.

If we can find God’s house, the temple of the Most High, and if we will simply knock, he will receive us in love, as a Father who already loved us.

This is what knowledge is for: it is for love.