Love and Knowledge

“If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know.” – 1 Corinthians 8:2

My residency director was fond of speaking of the four stages of learning. The first is “unconscious incompetence”: you don’t know what you don’t know. The second is “conscious incompetence”: you know what you don’t know. The third is “conscious competence”: you know what you know. The fourth is “unconscious competence”: you don’t know what you know.

He liked to talk about this as it applies to learning cataract surgery, the bread-and-butter of ophthalmic procedures. You start off perhaps having seen one of these surgeries before, but without any real idea of all that is involved. Then you practice on a pig eye and begin to grasp what it takes to maneuver in a small, fluidic space, with hands and feet doing different things all at once. Then you operate on real people and get to a point where you feel like you know what you’re doing. Eventually you do it all without having to think over every tiny movement or step. He would draw these stages as a cycle, with the last leading back to the first, either as you break down what you know to teach others, or as you grow further in skill or knowledge. 

In this passage, Paul describes the tension between two of these stages: the people who know what they know, that idols aren’t real and thus eating food offered to idols is fine, and the people who don’t know what they don’t know, who from their past still view idols as real in some way and thus avoid such food. Interestingly, Paul doesn’t correct the folks in the first stage of learning here. He doesn’t begin lecturing on idols. He speaks to the group in that third stage. Be very careful, he says, when you know what you know. Because as soon as you think you know something, you really don’t know it at all.

For one thing, the fact that these stages of learning exist means that, even if you know what you know, there are probably a lot more things you don’t even know that you don’t know. But Paul’s bigger point is that love trumps knowledge. In that third stage, we can get stuck in our knowledge and forget this important fact. As we say to the kids often, “sometimes it’s more important to be kind than to be right.” Paul puts it so well when he says, “knowledge puffs up, but love builds up” (8:1)—to swell is to appear large and significant while remaining insubstantial in substance, while to build up is to achieve true and solid growth that will last. While “knowledge” leads to judgment and pride that ultimately destroys ourselves and others (8:11), love is what leads to life. Love is, ironically, what leads to the ability to be truly known and to truly know: “But if anyone loves God, he is known by God” (8:3). True knowledge starts with love, with loving God, and we must never forget this, wherever we are in our journeys of learning.