To know the world in the biblical sense, is to know the world (and of course all constituent parts of the world) with a deep kind of knowing: radically embodied, embedded and intimate.
An epistemology is a theory of knowledge. Most Western epistemologies are predicated on the erroneous enlightenment doctrine that one can stand at a separate enough distance from the thing the would-be knower is trying to know to derive some semblance of objective knowledge. To know the world utilizing an epistemology based on this doctrine is pure folly, for as Sting, Bruce Springsteen, and Michael Jackson sang to us in unison all those years ago: we are the world.
To know the world in the biblical sense is a deep and dirty kind of knowing that produces corrupt and beautiful data. It is a knowing that happens among a community of other knowers and so it is a knowing that includes other knowers knowing you– a knowing and a being known. It is a knowing that confuses distinctions between subject and object. A biblical epistemology–knowing the world in the biblical sense–is an epistemology of love.
An epistemology is a theory of knowledge. Most Western epistemologies are predicated on the erroneous enlightenment doctrine that one can stand at a separate enough distance from the thing the would-be knower is trying to know to derive some semblance of objective knowledge. To know the world utilizing an epistemology based on this doctrine is pure folly, for as Sting, Bruce Springsteen, and Michael Jackson sang to us in unison all those years ago: we are the world.
To know the world in the biblical sense is a deep and dirty kind of knowing that produces corrupt and beautiful data. It is a knowing that happens among a community of other knowers and so it is a knowing that includes other knowers knowing you– a knowing and a being known. It is a knowing that confuses distinctions between subject and object. A biblical epistemology–knowing the world in the biblical sense–is an epistemology of love.