But I Can’t See Him

To know Christ is to know his benefits, and not, as [the scholastics] teach, to contemplate his natures and the modes of his incarnation. Unless you know why Christ took on flesh and was crucified, what is the profit of knowing historical facts about him? Or is it enough for a doctor to know the shapes, colors, and features of herbs, no matter that he does not know their inherent power? Just so, we must come to know Christ, who has been given to us as our remedy. -Philip Melanchthon Loci Communes

I’ve found that corralling a three-year-old at church requires all the tools at my disposal, and it occasionally pushes me to experiment with new approaches. A few weeks ago, as my daughter fussed and fumed, I decided to try some theology: “Hey, we’re going to sing to God now, because we’re in his house.”

To which my daughter, after a moment of looking about with a puzzled expression, responded by stating what is perhaps the fundamental theological problem: “But I can’t see him.”

Eliciting good behavior from children is not, unfortunately, the only endeavor complicated by God’s invisibility (and inaudibility and intangibility, for that matter). Often enough, it makes the interpretation of biblical passages less than completely straightforward. Take, for instance, the well-known passage from Philippians 3 in which Paul recounts his past achievements before writing them off as “rubbish” compared to “the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (Phil 3:8). While speaking of his own experience, Paul clearly wants the Philippians to adopt his own priorities as their own (cf., 3:17). He does not, however, explicitly spell out what it means to “know” a person who is generally invisible and inaudible. For Paul, knowledge of Christ is closely connected with experiencing “the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings” (3:10), but the import of these ideas is not immediately obvious either.

Still, obtaining this knowledge is paramount to Paul, so it’s worthwhile to explore what it could mean to “know Christ.” Over the last couple of decades, analytic philosophy has taken a newfound interest in describing what qualifies as “knowledge of persons” or “interpersonal knowledge.” Previously, the analytic tradition had rarely spoken on this topic, since this kind of knowledge was not considered “propositional” in nature (i.e., it was not thought to be “knowledge about” anything in the world), and therefore not amenable to philosophical investigation. Some philosophers have countered that knowing a person actually is acquiring “knowledge about” her, but knowledge gained in a highly specific way. In particular, David Matheson proposes that we know a person when they reveal “personal information” specifically and intentionally to us — when they divulge their likes, dislikes, or what they value or fear.

By contrast, some thinkers have embraced the idea that knowledge of a person falls into a completely different epistemic category than “knowledge about” her. For philosopher Matthew Benton, interpersonal knowledge is not dependent on knowing anything about another person, but is instead achieved when we make “causal contact” with her in such a way that we treat her, and are treated by her in return, as a “subject.” Acknowledging another person as a subject involves paying the kind of attention and using the forms of address (i.e., “you”) appropriate to someone who possesses the kind of interior life we ourselves experience.

I find Benton’s account fairly plausible — particularly its emphasis on the reciprocity of interpersonal knowledge. (It’s strange at best to say something like, “I know her, but she doesn’t know me”). If we accept it as a kind of working hypothesis, can it help illuminate what it could mean to “know Christ Jesus my Lord”? In other words, does it work when applied to the case of an invisible, inaudible, and intangible person?^[1]

Setting aside for a moment Benton’s criterion of “causal contact,” it’s apparent that when Christians pray, they are at least attempting to treat Christ as a “subject,” that is, as an individual who makes conscious decisions. But there is a problem in identifying something in our experience that counts as Christ intentionally interacting with us. Paul may have seen the risen Christ, but I certainly have not, nor have billions of other Christians. On the other hand, like many other believers I have experienced impulses to perform some action, “nudges” to say a particular thing, twinges of comfort or conviction that all certainly seem to have originated outside of myself. I have also sometimes felt what I took to be the presence of Christ in the words or actions of other (ordinary) human beings. These experiences, however powerful and formative, are much weaker than a direct experience of the risen Christ in bodily form. Accordingly, it is that much harder to know that it was Christ who was communicating with me, as opposed to (say) some deeply-rooted wish-fulfillment mechanism in my own psyche.

Interestingly, Benton specifically raises the possibility of interpersonally knowing God, but points out that the problem is knowing that you know him. Here, Benton’s idea of “causal contact” could prove helpful. His account requires some degree of “causal contact” for interpersonal knowledge to exist; in other words, you must somehow affect the other person’s experience, however slightly or insignificantly, and they must affect yours, before you can say that you “know” that person.

While Benton is concerned with establishing the bare minimum conditions necessary to know a person, Paul pretty clearly has something much deeper in mind when he speaks of knowing Christ. In general, the more intimate a relationship between two people, the greater its degree of “causal contact,” that is, the more it changes or influences them in terms of their thought patterns, values, use of time, ambitions, and so on. This reality is reflected in everyday phrases like, “They’re a bad influence on him,” or, “Knowing her has definitely changed me for the better.”

Knowing Jesus (with the intimacy that Paul desires) would therefore presumably change the believer in identifiable ways, with the extent of this growth being more or less dependent on the length and depth of the relationship. These changes could serve as evidence that the believer “knows” Jesus in Benton’s sense, which is to say that their experiences of being guided, comforted, or convicted really do come from him.

To know Jesus, in other words, is more than an propositional understanding of facts about Jesus, whether it be something as superficial as what he looked like or the basic timeline of his life. For Paul, true knowledge of Jesus entails something deeper, more costly, and more enlivening. To know Christ is inseparable from becoming something different than what we once were.

Taking a cue from Philippians 3, knowledge of Christ seems to have a kind of inverse relationship with “confidence in the flesh,” i.e., trying to make a case for our acceptability as human beings on the basis of personal achievements and attributes. In practical terms, knowing Christ takes off some of the relentless pressure to “be somebody,” which frees us up to live the kind of life Paul had envisioned earlier in the letter: “Do nothing from selfish ambition or empty conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves” (Phil 2:3). Paul goes so far as to identify this “looking to the interests of others” with having the same mind “as was in Christ Jesus” when he gave himself for the world in obedience to God. The more we think about and act for the good of the people around us, the more our knowledge of Christ is evident both to ourselves and to others.

The basic problem that confronts my three-year-old still sometimes troubles me, and, I suspect, most believers. Claiming to know an invisible person can feel strange or, on bad days, downright delusional. But, on occasion, I can actually understand what Kierkegaard meant when he wrote that “the lover, who forgets himself, is remembered by love. There is one who thinks of him, and in this way it comes about that the lover gets what he gives.” But the one being remembered comes before and enables the self-forgetfulness (at least in my case); it feels personal, because it is. It comes from one who can be known, at least in part, and who promises that one day we will know him as he knows us.