The Enlightenment Inheritance

Behind all of the institutional and structural failures is a deeper epistemic failure that the Western church has been living inside for so long that it has stopped recognizing it as a choice.

John 17:3 defines eternal life as knowing the Father and the Son — not knowing about Them. The word is ginosko: the knowing of personal acquaintance, of sustained relationship, of being known and knowing back. This is not the knowing of propositional assent. It is the knowing of presence, of abiding, of the kind of familiarity you develop with a person you have been close to for years, whose voice you recognize across a room, whose grief you can read before they speak.

The Greek philosophical inheritance that shaped Western theology split knowing from being. The Enlightenment inheritance that shaped Western culture made propositional knowledge — correct information assented to — the primary category of knowing. The result is a Christianity in which the right beliefs are the primary spiritual achievement, and the devotional life exists to support the correctness of the beliefs rather than the other way around.

Theosis cannot be transmitted in this framework because theosis is participatory knowing — knowing by being in, abiding in, remaining near to, not by correctly describing from a distance. The branch does not know the vine by accurately identifying the vine's species and describing its characteristics. The branch knows the vine by being on it, by receiving the life that flows from it, by bearing the fruit that the life produces. The knowing is the abiding. They are not separate activities.

A church formed by Enlightenment epistemology — in which the primary spiritual activity is receiving correct information about God — cannot teach theosis because the frame makes theosis incoherent. If knowing is assenting to propositions, the idea of knowing God by remaining near Him in poverty of spirit is not a richer form of knowing. It is an inferior one, an experiential supplement to the real knowing that happened when the doctrine was correctly received and assented to. The frame inverts the order. And the inversion is so deeply embedded in evangelical culture that most congregations cannot see it.