Taste and See. . .

“What we observe is not nature itself, but nature as exposed to our method of questioning.” Werner Heisenberg

Heisenberg’s observation would be just as true if we removed the limiting term “nature” and replaced it with “reality.” Either way it is a reminder that the answers we find in any inquiry are in part determined by ourselves as questioners. The imagined objective perspective is at the least not omnipotent, and is in fact shot through with subjective interests. In the end we only ask the questions that interest us.

Michael Polyani noted half a century ago that these questions are inextricably caught up in a community of inquiry, and with that community, a tradition of inquiry. 

This is obvious if one reads almost any work in modern physics. I have recently undertaken a genealogy of the quest to understand scientifically the origin of the universe. Reading over a variety of works by Steven Weinberg, Stephen Hawking, Adam Frank, Carl Sagan, Richard Jastrow, and many others I have gradually built up a chronology of observations, experiments, technologies, mathematical systems, and scientists and mathematicians necessary to arrive where we are today in our understanding of nature. Scientists are still far short still of grasping the origins of the universe, or defining the whole or reality. Indeed, the physicist Marcelo Gleiser, among others, has made this point explicitly in his book Island of Knowledge. 

Still, it is an amazing tradition. These inter-twined genealogies within the scientific community of inquiry stretch back thousands of years, frequently looping back on themselves as mathematical curiosities and inexplicable observations became, in a new context, building blocks of new theoretical frameworks. What makes those curiosities and observations available is that they are remembered and handed down in the traditions of the community of inquiry. 

These communities of inquiry have three other critical characteristics. First they are self-limiting. Younger members are steered away from dead ends and questions that have proven fruitless, or outside the interest of the community. Members learn which tools, which methods of questioning, are appropriate to what is being studies, and which are not. And members of the community thus learn which lines of inquiry bear fruit, and seeing their own participation in the community bearing fruit they participate in the communal sense of significance. 

Participation in the community also generates a sense of identity for members. The pursuit of knowledge in a multi-generational setting, marked by rituals of initiation and progression, draws members into a shared sense of who they are as persons. Doing science in the company of those engaged in the same pursuit creates a sense that one is a scientist. Similarly joining in the work  of a community of scholarship in a field like the humanities creates a sense that one is a scholar.

Finally, that acquired identity, in relation to long tradition, the pursuit of significant questions, and the presence of community generates meaning. To be a member of a community of inquiry is to know who one is and to know that one’s life pursuit, and thus life, has meaning beyond one’s own personal existence.

It is useful to consider the Church as a community of inquiry into that aspect of reality called God. It is self-limiting in object and method, understanding that faith, its particular way of knowing, is appropriate to understanding God. It members gain a sense of identity through both participation and rituals of initiation. And as they participate in and contribute to the tradition of knowing and knowledge within the community they find meaning. 

But before drawing too close a parallel with science or the humanities we should acknowledge that the appropriate instruments of faithful knowing of God are significantly different from those of science or the humanities. In the Christian Church the encompassing way of knowing is faith in God, and the primary tools for knowing are the worship of God and attentively listening to God’s Word. The theological disciplines are subsidiary communities, specializing in particular (usually rational and evidence based) lines of inquiry. What are generally called denominations are also subsidiary communities, each pursuing distinctive lines of inquiry in the belief that its approach will somehow be key to knowing God. 

If we consider science or the humanities as communities of inquiry that generate their own sense of significance, identity, and meaning we’ll understand that the Church really doesn’t have anything to add to them. Nor do they possess gaps that we can fill. They are already self-limiting in ways that exclude the reality into which we inquire. Similarly the Church doesn’t have gaps that they can fill. As a community of inquiry we are also self-limiting; we inquire into God as revealed in and through faith in Jesus Christ. Even if we share a common interest in nature and humanity through our interest in nature and human history as realms of revelation, our way of knowing, faith, inevitably demands different tools and leads us to a different form of knowledge.  

The integrity and coherence of these communities of inquiry, including the Church, does not mean that any of these communities of inquiry is complete in terms of its efforts to understand reality. For this reason each should “evangelize” the others with what it comprehends thus far in its inquiry. At the same time each must recognize that fully entering into that knowledge requires not merely reading reports on the results of their inquiry, but actually entering into the community. Ultimately it requires conversion, although in this case belonging to multiple communities is possible because none of the communities excludes (or should exclude) claims to know, or of the means of knowing, of the others if it acknowledges its own limitations.

To know nature as a scientist knows nature requires joining in the scientific inquiry. The same is true of knowing humanity as a scholar of the humanities knows humanity. And finally the same is true of knowing the reality of God. If it is to be taken seriously, and take itself seriously Christian evangelism cannot be just “listen to what I’ve learned.” 

Even if those from outside the Christian community find its reports about God credible they won’t really comprehend their meaning in the sense that Christians do. They will be like an amateur follower of science; someone like myself reading Scientific American or some other popular work on science but not engaged in theory, experiment, analysis, and new theorizing. Or they will be like the reader of novels and biographies and histories who hears and enjoys what they say but never delves into the critical task of placing them in larger and larger interpretive frameworks. 

So the evangelistic offer of the Christian to the non-Christian engaged in a different community of inquiry, or no such community at all, is not proofs of the truths we’ve learned. A person who hasn’t used faith as a means of knowing and the tools of worship and the Word is in no more position to judge the truth of the claim that Jesus is the Christ than I am to judge whether string theory, or holographic theory is an adequate theoretical framework for explaining all natural phenomena. 

However, the person whom we address with what we know may well have, in the pursuit of the knowable in their community of inquiry, come to that borderland of the unknowable, The intellectual location at which the mysterious, the transcendent inquires of us and calls to us to know as we are known. In that borderland our particular means of knowing, faith, becomes comprehensible. It is not something that we as humans deploy to satisfy the questions we ask. It is rather a response to a call from the deepest and most comprehensive source of reality to listen in new ways and see with new eyes.  

To that person our evangelistic offer is to join us in our community of inquiry, long practiced in hearing and responding to that call. To them we say: “Taste and see that the Lord is good.”