Canter Bridge

The alienation of knowledge from loving action in the life of human beings and human communities is hardly a modern problem. Yet the systematic divorce of ‘mind and heart’ or ‘heart and head’ arguably is.

Only a post-Descartian distinction of the knowing being from the object of his or her knowledge could become the breeding ground for the dualism the has become received truth for generations of Bible readers who promptly project such epistemological nonsense back onto its pages.

2 Peter understands a less sharp-edged immature love and tilts its ladder of virtues in the direction of culminating love. Having urged that faith be complemented by excellence, the writer now urges the completion of excellence by its appropriate centering within the frame of knowledge.

Knowledge is not an uncommon quality of the human adventure in the pages of this short letter. In fact it is quite frequent. Almost always Christ is its object. That is, the knowledge that merits attention is a knowledge of Jesus. It is of course a profoundly subjective exercise to know a person. Yet the language will hardly allow us to reduce such person-to-person knowledge to the subjective, the experiential, or—as matters are far too easily put—the heart.

Rather, the authors of the biblical letters can argue with considerable fervor over matters of fact, claims and observations that are either true or not true regarding an individual in question. When that person is Jesus Christ, the stakes are even higher and, therefore, the rhetorical battle lines drawn even more severely.

One does not simply know a person without accessing in the act a considerable inventory of essential facts about the beloved.

So the Petrine list of virtues. If faith must be improved upon by excellence, so does excellence long to be brought forward into that venue where knowledge—personal, factual, comprehensive—has its way.