The Virtue of Being Known

Theological Virtues

Sometime next fall, I hope to hold in my hands an actual copy of Walking the Theological Life, a book I wrote over the past year or so. It’s a look at the lives of a few biblical characters and way we find ways of knowing God through them. In Sarah, we see the theological virtue of laughter. Jacob teaches us something about knowing God through wrestling. Mary demonstrates a virtue of pondering, and Isaiah the virtue of being undone. In short, I’m trying to offer folks who are concerned about knowing God – theology students, pastors, and others – an approach to theological methodology that turns to virtues, rather than mechanics.

When I say virtues, I don’t have in mind a kind of flawlessly pristine uniformity of

thought or behavior. Many of the figures I’ve examined are anything but examples of moral virtue (e.g. Moses was a murderer and Sarah treated Hagar horribly). But there is something in their responses to the divine that our ancestors thought was not only worth preserving, but also encoding into the logic of our faith. In canonizing these stories, it’s almost as if they’ve said to us, “Don’t overlook this response. I know that person isn’t morally flawless, but neither are you, and you could probably learn something about how to know God from what happened there.”

In a series of posts, I want to offer brief reflections on the theological virtues I’m finding in these figures. These are little previews of the book, and if you’d be interested in joining the launch team, please let me know!

Our partners on this journey will be:

Jeremiah – On not Knowing How to Speak

Jacob – On Wrestling

Sarah – On Laughing

Moses – On Morality

Miriam – On Courage

Isaiah – On Being Undone

Mary – On Pondering

John the Baptist – On Standing at the Edge

The Woman at Jesus’s Feet – On Love

Thomas – On Doubting

Martha and Mary – On Grieving

Nicodemous – On Theology at Night and Leadership in the Dark

Jeremiah – On Not Knowing How to Speak

The beginning of Jeremiah’s prophetic epic begins, not with a call, but with a reminder: “Before I formed you in the womb, I have known you” (Jer. 1:5). It’s an odd way to begin a prophet’s story, mainly because prophets are known for how they speak – they are known for their words. But Jeremiah exhibits a different kind of virtue. He is the one who says, “I do not know how to speak…” (Jer. 1:6).

A twofold vision of theological virtue emerges: 1) Jeremiah is known before he will know and 2) He begins with a confession that he doesn’t know how to speak.

On Being Known

Theology sometimes gets a reputation for being a quest to know about God. I’ll admit that there was a nearly mystical allure to theology when I was just starting out. It looked to me like the theologians were the ones who had broken through the dross of the mundane to a glorious and hidden knowledge of God that wasn’t available to just everyone. I’d later find Plato hiding behind that myth, far more than Jesus. At any rate, theology was about gaining knowledge – about knowing.

It was also about taking that knowledge and wielding it in some way. Once I had the theological knowledge, I thought, I could do something with it, as if I had taken that knowledge in hand, placing it under my control.

That method, I think, has been used in some profoundly troubling and harmful ways. The headlines are filled these days with folks who have taken knowledge of God under their control and used it in service of their purposes. In some circles, that kind of method is even seen as a virtue.

Jeremiah, however, exhibits a kind of virtue that I’ve found to be far more helpful in theology. His virtue is being known by a living God before setting out on a quest to know.

The presence of this story in our biblical canon is a refreshing critique to the forms of theology that seek to know about God so that we can somehow employ that knowledge in constructing a kingdom of our own making. We can advance our causes, make our arguments, and generally take theology in hand as a tool or weapon. Jeremiah’s reminder to us is that we are known by God before we are called to speak. In him, we detect no bloviating sense of, “Let me tell you!” Rather, in his life we find something like, “I don’t know how to speak…but I am known by God.”

Jeremiah reminds me that long before I can know anything about God (even before I was in the womb!), I am known-by-God. That has to humble me. It slows me down to marvel at the reality that I am known before I am called to know, and especially before I am called to speak.

The opening lines of Jeremiah’s prophecy are a birthing suite for the virtuous work of knowing and being known in the task of theology. What is born out of his words is not an attempt to know for the sake of mastering but an invitation to first be known by God. As Jeremiah has it, the beauty of God is no set of hidden facts that, once unveiled through inquiry and observation, can be held in our hands as we would possess an idol of wood or bronze. We are known, rather, by a living God. Before we speak about God, before we put pen to paper or utter a single word, there is this: we are known by God. We could say it another way: before theologians set out to know God, they are known-by-God.

The beginning of the theologian’s quest to know God is in being known by God, placing all of us in a posture of epistemic humility and prayerful wonder. For the theologian, this posture even gestures to the beginning of a method. We begin by acknowledging that God knows us. We sit with that, we wonder at that, and it begins to suggest to us a way of doing our work. We are searched and known, to borrow the language of the psalmist (Ps 139:1). Our motivations, our gifts, our biases, our fears, our anxieties, hidden and unveiled, bravely acknowledged or naively undetected—all of that is taken up in the way God encounters us, knowing us. How might this shape the kind of theology we do? How might this move theology from the quest to acquire information about God for the sake of having answers and reorient it toward a kind of awareness that we are known by God first and beginning from there? What if we approached the work of theology by acknowledging the reality that the God we want to know is the one who knows us first? How might adjusting our way of knowing from first being a knower to being known shape the kind of theology we do?