It’s not about what you know

I reckon there are about 500 books in my office.  I don’t think this is excessive.  They take up less than half the wall space.  “Have you read them all?”   It’s one of those questions I get asked so often that I now have a stock answer:   “I’m more worried about the books I have not read.”

I mean it.  My books are mostly theology, politics, history and and biography.  I don’t know nearly enough about economics, philosophy or astronomy.  I’m ashamed to say I’ve read less than one fiction book per year of my life.  The vast majority of these volumes are written by blokes.  A very few are translations.  All of them bar two are in English.  

And then there are the comprehension issues.   “Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them—never become even conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?”  (Though to the capacious and creative mind of C.S.Lewis.)   How much less so mine?

The internet only makes it worse.  The sum of human knowledge in my phone.  Variously curated by both titans and twits of wisdom and wordsmithery.  Where to start?  I guess this is just the adult version of FOMO.  I feel profoundly uncomfortable in my ignorance – particularly as some folks look to for guidance. 

Reading Ecclesiastes recently, it occurred to me that this is not a new feeling.  “Of the making of may books there is no end and much study wearies the body”.  The writer of Ecclesiastes (earliest copies c3rd BC, probably written much earlier) was old enough to have seen generations come and go and rulers rise and fall.  He wouldn’t have read as many codices as me because they had not been invented, but he seems to be a learned and keen observer of life, love, economics and politics whose writings have connected across cultures over millennia.  Unquestionably smarter than I, and equally frustrated with his limitations.      

So what was his prescription?  “Now all has been heard, here is the conclusion of the matter: Fear God and keep his commandments”.  Cenuturies later, St Paul (another world-changing intellect) commenting on his own prodigious learning put it thus:  “I consider everything [learning, religious training, ethnic heritage] a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus”.   These Jewish geniuses realised that it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.       

God has revealed enough of himself for us to know him… and to live a life compatible with him, other humans and the planet.  We are created to fill the earth and subdue it to the best of our ability with the cumulative knowledge and tools at our disposal, but we are not required to know everything.  Just him.  Which is a relief to me. 

I have read most of these books, but I still can’t tell you much about anything. I can tell you how to know God if you’re interested though.