For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
Nothing will teach you about your mechanical ineptitude quite like buying a new house. This was Cameron’s unfortunate discovery as he began to explore the dustier recesses of his new home. Exhibit A: The decrepit toilet in the master bathroom requiring immediate replacement. One text later and a trusted friend showed up with a box full of exotic tools that may as well have been torture devices for all Cameron knew. “It’s really pretty simple,” said the friend as, wielding a wrench, he performed an operation that seemed a stone’s throw away from nuclear fusion or brain surgery. Cameron “helped” by handing tools to his friend and holding the new commode in place as it was painstakingly lowered onto its rim of fresh beeswax.
Despite the advice of friends and family to simply consult the plethora of YouTube tutorials, Cameron’s attempts at DIY solutions to basic home projects remain abject failures. Why? The question is deceptively simple. With our unfettered access to reams and reams of information, shouldn’t we be able to solve most of our problems? Shouldn’t expertise be obsolete or, at the very least, as common as free Wi-Fi access? And shouldn’t Cameron be able to do much more than hand tools to a friend? Shouldn’t he be able to, say, add a new wing onto his home?
We need a philosopher to tell us about the limitations of those YouTube videos. Specifically, we need the help of Hungarian polymath Michael Polanyi. Polanyi’s day job was as a chemist, but his lasting contributions are in the field of epistemology—a hideous word for the formal study of knowledge that promptly scares away most nonacademics. In truth, this field is deeply practical; it seeks to understand how we know what we know.
Polanyi is particularly concerned with all of our knowledge that evades precise description or articulation. In his own words his project takes shape by “starting from the fact that we can know more than we can tell.”1 Take, for example, the fact that most of us are much better at recognizing faces than we are at describing them. Guiding the artistic vision of a police sketch artist is much more challenging than picking out a face in a police lineup. Try describing a friend’s face without looking at any images or photos and you’ll have a feel for this confounding rift between what we can know and say. Many of us experience a similar confusion when we’re asked to say passwords out loud, give detailed directions to a familiar destination, or offer clear verbal instructions for a family recipe that’s as old as your mom’s faded oven mitt.
But it’s not just that we know more than we can say. Some of the most breathtaking feats of human skill and ingenuity, whether they involve paints, power tools, athletic gear, or musical instruments, seem utterly beyond the reach of words. This certainly seems to be the case when world-class athletes try to explain their dazzling performances. David Foster Wallace offers a striking example in his review of tennis prodigy Tracy Austin’s sports memoir, Beyond Center Court, a book that purports to give its readers an intimate tour of what it’s like to be in the kind of mental zone that most of us can only dream about. According to Wallace,
Explicitly or not, the memoirs make a promise—to let us penetrate the indefinable mystery of what makes some persons geniuses, semidivine, to share with us the secret and so both to reveal the difference between us and them and to erase it, a little, that difference . . . to give us the (we want, expect, only one, the master narrative, the key) Story.2
But the sad truth is that “great athletes usually turn out to be stunningly inarticulate about those qualities and experiences that constitute their fascination.”3 Polanyi may be philosophically dense, but he’s one of the few people who can deliver on Tracy Austin’s promises and unlock the hidden dimensions of her skill and ingenuity. Unlike Wallace, he doesn’t need an inane sports memoir to confirm that someone like Austin knows much more than she can say. In our era of social media scrutiny and instant celebrity access, many of us experience daily the marked discrepancy between brilliant performances and “stunningly inarticulate” performers who should probably have their phones confiscated by their publicists.
The people who make how-to videos on YouTube may not be decorated athletes, but they still know more than they can say. What remains unseen and largely unsayable, of course, is the intense regimen of practice and habit formation that requires these people to submit as apprentices to the authority of a trusted master, and to learn by example. In a word, what lies behind their prowess is a tradition.
In his perceptive profile of Parts Unknown host and celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, Patrick Radden Keefe points to the stabilizing role of the tradition of jujitsu in Bourdain’s nomadic existence: “He had always loved the kitchen because it was a tribe, and in jujitsu he had found another sweaty, grueling activity with its own hierarchy and lingo, a vocabulary of signs and symbols that would be impossible for an outsider to understand.”4 It’s impossible for an outsider to understand because the only way to fully comprehend it is to submit to its traditions—the legacy of habits and signs that have been passed down through the ages. It’s the reason that Bourdain could step onto mats all around the globe with perfect strangers, enter into the visceral intimacy of physical combat, and still feel a bond that withstands all social and cultural boundaries. You might say that jujitsu was his church.
Polanyi’s description deftly captures the hidden dynamics of a tradition,
To learn by example is to submit to authority. You follow your master because you trust his manner of doing things even when you cannot analyze and account in detail for its effectiveness. By watching the master and emulating his efforts in the presence of his example, the apprentice unconsciously picks up the rules of the art, including those which are not explicitly known to the master himself. These hidden rules can be assimilated only by a person who surrenders himself to that extent uncritically to the imitation of another.5
Cameron’s friend’s seemingly effortless hammer swings were preceded by numerous other hammer swings, many of them inaccurate and clumsy. The grueling day-in and day-out of constant practice brought the needed refinement to his motions. He was born into a family and a community with a legacy of skilled craftsmanship, and this rich tapestry is part of the invisible force behind his enviable proficiency with tools—part of the reason he’s “good with his hands”—another infuriatingly simple phrase that’s about as helpful as the star athlete’s “I just got out there and did my best.” By watching his dad (the master craftsman) and then making the slow trek from theory and observation to practice, he was able to develop a skill that remains as useful as it is inscrutable. While he can offer a set of rigid instructions on replacing a toilet, he can’t distill an entire tradition into discreet chunks of information. Nobody can. For the most part, YouTube handymen and women are speaking to people within their tradition. Naturally, there are varying levels of experience and skill among their audience members, but they’re still speaking to the initiated—to people with callused hands. Lacking his friend’s rich tradition, Cameron gleans mostly static information from these videos. True, he can learn, but he’ll need more than information to do so. He’ll need a master and a tradition.
Nevertheless, many Christian parents believe those YouTube videos are enough. That is, they believe that information alone can secure the stability of their kids’ faith. We’re calling this misconception the “information saves” mindset, and the thinking goes something like this: if we do all that we can to ensure that our children have all the necessary information about Christianity, then the rest of their lives will fall into place. They will be able to answer their atheist professor’s loud objections to their faith. They will resist the manifold temptations that come their way. They will get plugged in to the right churches, and they will stay in those churches.
But information alone, no matter how accurate and precise, can no more form Christian disciples than YouTube tutorials can form carpenters. And the missing pieces are the same: the master and the tradition. Christians who wish to give nothing more than intellectual lip service to Christ are a bit like musicians who only read sheet music but refuse to play any actual instruments. From carpentry to Christianity, education is always an expansive endeavor, one that involves the whole person. It always moves beyond theory to practice.
James K. A. Smith sounds a lot like Polanyi in his helpful overview: “An education, then, is a constellation of practices, rituals, and routines that inculcates a particular vision of the good life by inscribing or infusing that vision into the heart (the gut) by means of material, embodied practices.”6 Joining your dad in the kitchen to learn the subtleties of a cherished family recipe, shuffling forward on your march to take Communion on a Sunday morning, practicing a song on the piano until its melody is practically part of your DNA, experiencing your child’s baptism: these are all embodied practices that aptly demonstrate that learning goes way beyond the mastery of information. Along with his wedding, Cameron counts the blinking look of astonishment on his children’s faces as the baptismal waters touched their heads as the most beautiful moments of his life, and, as any parent in this position will tell you, the experience is much more than intellectual.
And yet many parents continue to believe that the longevity of their child’s faith depends on the right books, curriculums, conferences, or podcasts. One well-meaning mother recently told us that her teenage son gets to enjoy a litany of “edifying” podcasts whenever he’s a passenger in her car. “Teachable moments with my captive audience,” as she says. We’re not disparaging any of these resources, of course. Used properly, they can help to cultivate a more robust understanding of the Christian worldview. When they’re seen as ends rather than means, however, these same tools can become distractions at best, obstacles at worst. After some conversations with this lady’s son it quickly became apparent that he had zero interest in any of these extensive podcasts, and that he regarded the lengthy excursions with mom as nothing more than a teeth-gritting test of endurance. Needless to say, this captive audience member wasn’t taking any notes.
In this sense many Christian parents implicitly disagree with Blaise Pascal’s famous dictum that the “heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.” Instead, they opt to prioritize mind over heart.7 Despite its fame, Pascal’s quote doesn’t take care of itself. Without context it seems to be an eloquent expression of the law of most Disney movies—namely, “follow your heart.” Pascal is wiser than that, though, and the philosopher Peter Kreeft can help us to see the profundity of his holistic understanding of the heart:
We all know that a friend who loves you deeply knows you more adequately than a scientist who only studies you as a specimen. A psychologist is someone who knows about you; a friend is someone who knows you. Other languages than English make this clear: the distinction between wissen and kennen in German, savoir and connaître in French.8
How many of our kids know all about Christianity but don’t know Christ? As Pascal has it, the vision of the heart is not unlike the knowing glance of a trusted friend. This is knowledge by acquaintance rather than mere propositional knowledge. The only way to truly know anything or anyone is to move beyond description to an experiential level.
Think of the awkward social dance that starts at the beginning of a friendship. There’s a reason so many comedies, romantic and otherwise, zero in on the clumsy motions of this dance. Our faltering steps toward intimacy are as funny as they are touching. Let’s call this clumsy back and forth the friendship dance. The friendship dance is all about the things we love rather than our intellectual commitments. We’re much more likely to ask our new dance partner about what they like doing (eating, listening, watching, etc.) because we instinctively know that their habits, hobbies, and routines will tell us all about who they are. A sociologist will hand you a survey, but someone trying to get to know you will ask you about which songs you jam out to in the car while you’re heading to your favorite coffee shop. Practically speaking, if you want to do anything with someone else, you have to locate common interests. If you hate disc golf, for instance (guilty), that may pull you off the dance floor with certain folks before the friendship can even get started.
There’s a very real sense in which someone’s love of fly-fishing or Dungeons and Dragons will tell you more about who they are than a survey of their supposed intellectual commitments ever will. People will offer all sorts of knowledgeable advice on healthy eating habits, for instance, but if you want to know what they think, take a look in their fridge. A key aspect of the Christian life involves bridging the gap between the head and the heart. Mere information can’t perform the vital service of reforming our desires, of bringing us to the place where our desires match our virtues. James K. A. Smith says,
Being a disciple of Jesus is not primarily a matter of getting the right ideas and doctrines and beliefs into your head in order to guarantee proper behavior; rather, it’s a matter of being the kind of person who loves rightly—who loves God and neighbor and is oriented to the world by the primacy of that love.9
We cannot love anything rightly unless we move beyond mere information. Cameron can watch all the online tutorials he wants, but until he picks up a hammer and develops some calluses of his own, his knowledge will remain purely theoretical. Information is necessary but not sufficient. Similarly, if Christian parents want to help cultivate spiritual maturity in their children, they need to do much more than instill correct thinking; they need to introduce their children to the Master and the tradition—to Christ and his church.