2015-16 Theme: Abound
By Todd Pickett
In an affectionate opening of his letter to the Philippians, Paul’s thanksgiving for their “participation in the work of the gospel” is followed by a substantive and powerful prayer for them. He writes, “it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God” (Phil. 1:9-11).
This year’s theme—“ABOUND”—points back to Paul’s prayer and forward to our hope for this year. The words of this prayer are expansive and rich. Its focus is, in part, ethical (that Christians would have “knowledge and discernment”) in part sanctifying (that Christians would be filled with “fruit of righteousness”), and ultimately glorifying—that this would all redound to the “glory and praise of God.”
Paul’s petition, in particular, is that the Philippians’ “love may abound more and more in knowledge and discernment.” Paul has in view here “a knowledge that cultivates love.” The letter to the Philippians will emphasize the importance of knowledge again and again (“consider,” “notice,” “think rightly,” “reckon”), and while this idea conjures in us notions of teaching and study, Christian knowledge is not restricted to what we might call “intellectual activity.” Rather, those with a deep knowledge of the faith come to it relationally and interactively. Jesus, in his own prayer in the upper room, will say such knowing is a kind of life: “This is eternal life, that they may know you, the only God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou has sent” (John 17:3). It comes through the body’s obedience and training. It comes through worship, the beholding of Christ himself. It comes through relationships within Christ’s body, the church. And, of course, it comes through the work of the Spirit—which is why this is a prayer.
As we study Philippians this fall and consider Paul’s prayer this year, this is one of the questions we should consider: what kind of knowledge or what manner of knowing might cause our love to “abound more and more”? How can our pursuit of knowledge cultivate love (rather than “puff up”)? It is a most appropriate question not only for a university, but also for a community guided by the commands to love God and neighbor. As Paul writes to Timothy, “the goal of our instruction is love from a pure heart, a good conscience and a sincere faith” (I Tim. 1:5). While that command is written to a church, it is equally the goal of the arm of the church that we call the Christian university. Paul’s prayer is, then, our prayer, too. “Lord, may our love abound more and more with knowledge and discernment, so that you, God, would be seen, glorified and praised. Amen.”
Description
In the epistles first eleven verses, Paul opens his heart of prayer to the Philippians, writing that “thanksgiving” and “joy” fill his heart each time he remembers them before God (vv.3-4). There are some solid reasons for Paul’s affection. The Philippians had responded with much generosity even in their poverty when they had heard of the needs of Jewish Christians in Jerusalem. Paul later was able to deliver this financial gift to Jerusalem in person, and by their part in this gift, the Philippians helped Paul demonstrate that the cross-cultural expansion of the gospel to Gentile regions and people was not an abandonment of the Jews. The Philippians had also managed to contribute a generous gift to Paul, sustaining him in his imprisonment (from which he writes). These Philippian acts of love and support were for Paul a “defense and confirmation of the gospel” (v. 7) for which he worked. With this in mind, “he holds them in his heart” as partners (“partakers”) in the grace of God that is empowering them all. Paul’s affection for this church is so clear it has led one commentator to call them “Paul’s favorite.”(2)
His heart of prayer for them is picked up again in verses 9-11, from which we draw this year’s theme,Abound. In these verses, Paul adds a petition to his notes of gratitude and celebration. He prays that their “love may abound more and more with knowledge and all discernment” (v.9).
Should we sense in this prayer a note of correction or rebuke? (3) Does Paul pray this because the Philippians lacked such love? We do know from 4:2 of a dispute between two members, Syntyche and Euodia, and Paul perhaps worried that factions might form and destabilize the community’s unity. Also, it is clear that false teachers (Judaizers) who sought to undermine Paul’s proclamation of the gospel in other churches might soon be in Philippi to fracture the community’s faith there (Phil. 3:2ff.) And surely, the suffering and stress the first century church experienced both in its poverty and in the unpopular (and to Gentiles, still Semitic) cause of Christ could lead to dissension among them or in animosity toward God himself (“grumbling and disputing,” 2:14).
However, Paul’s sincere gratitude for them in his opening lines suggests that the Philippians dopossess great love. Paul’s petition here seeks only to encourage the growth of that love. Paul’s use of the word “abound” (a favorite that appears four times in the letter) has a sense similar to the English word: that of overflowing, of gathering fullness, of growing richer and richer, and of almost limitless growth. This word (perisseuo) does not require Paul to add the phrase “more and more”—it already has the sense of continual overflow—but his addition of this underlines how central love abounding is to Paul’s heart for the church. This emphasis brings to mind his prayer for the Ephesian churches. There he prays that they “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” (Eph. 3:18-19). These Ephesian believers, like we ourselves, presumably believed in or “knew” the love of Christ already. This does not prevent Paul, however, from asking for a radical expansion of this love. Indeed, the he prays for their “strength” (Eph. 3:16) to grasp such love. This strength, however, is not characterized by force or intensity but by capacity--like lung capacity. In this case, it is heart capacity. Paul prays for their capacity to admit more and more of Christ’s love into the places of the heart that do not fully know and trust it, a knowing that “surpasses knowledge” and fill them with the “fullness of God.”
Personal Knowledge
Of course, Paul’s prayer for the Philippians is that such love would abound more and more “in knowledge and discernment.” This prayer in Philippians closely mirrors almost phrase for phrase Paul’s prayer in Col. 1:9. There, Paul prays for “wisdom” and “understanding” (sophia; sunesis) while here in Phil. 1:9, the pairing is “knowledge” and “discernment” or “insight”(epignosis; aisthesis). “Knowledge” (epignosis) appears 15 times in Paul’s letters, and refers usually to what we might call knowledge of spiritual or “religious” matters—God, Christ, the cross, sin, etc. (O’Brien 75). Terms like these are rich and multifaceted, and our grasp of them is complicated by images of knowledge and learning from our highly developed educational and institutional contexts. It is safe to say, however, that the “knowledge” referred to here and elsewhere in the NT is not primarily that which is transmitted through academic reading, study and research. (First century literacy numbers, though hard to confirm, would certainly be quite low—typical estimates are that perhaps 10% of the population could read.) Rather, it is more primary and personal than that. “Its primary sense is not so much a codified ‘knowledge about’ something, but rather the kind of ‘full,’ or ‘innate’ knowing that comes from experience of personal relationship” (Fee 100). “It is a comprehensive sense of knowing through Christ in an intimate way.” (O’Brien 76). Knowledge in the Scriptures is something received relationally and interactively as we engage with God in obedience, prayer, worship practices, the “fear of the Lord”, and includes whatever self-knowledge, repentance and trust is necessary as we walk with Him. Contemporary philosophers would call this personal (or implicit) knowledge. Its foundation is the relational knowledge of a person--a knowing that surpasses knowledge (as Paul writes in Eph. 3:16). Paul will say later in Philippians that he counts all as loss when compared with “knowing Jesus Christ” (the person) whose resurrection power he wants to “know” (experientially) (Phil. 3:18). Although there are places in the Scripture where to know something can mean objective information, Robert Saucy writes, “the most significant use of ‘know’ refers to knowledge derived from a personal encounter with the object, so that what is known is actually experienced by the knower.” (4)
Desire and Discernment
Knowledge is linked in the same breath here with “insight” or “discernment” (aisthesis). This is this word’s only appearance in the NT, but from its use in secular Greek and in the LXX, it connotes wisdom and understanding—a more specific form of “knowledge” that reaches out into world in which we must live, move and act. (Again, the pairing in the parallel Col. 1:9 prayer is “wisdom” and “understanding.”) This knowledge is manifest in our speech and behavior, our ways of both being and moving in the world. And its key ingredient is love. Paul’s prayer is that “love would abound in knowledge.” His prayer does not appear to ask that discernment would be added to love, in the sense of adding information to our desire to love. No, we have seen that knowledge here is not just or even primarily information. Rather what Paul has in view here is “a knowledge that cultivates love” (Silva 50). This makes sense if “knowledge” here is of the kind that comes from personal engagement with the God of grace. In Eph. 1:8, Paul writes that the “riches of his grace” has “been lavished upon us” (“epiperisseusen,” abounded to us). If this is the sine qua non of our knowledge of God, then our discernment and insight must abound with and by formed by His love.
In these verses, therefore, desire—the telos or end to which our hearts move--becomes critical to discernment. In other words, without a heart of love, we cannot claim to have godly discernment, insight, or wisdom. The following purpose clause in Phil. 1:10 helps us here. Paul prays for love abounding “so that you may approve what is excellent.” “Excellent” here carries the idea of discerningwhat really matters (Fee 101). What matters is a matter of what I perceive as significant—something thatweighs more with me. Like concrete matter itself, it is something whose significance I feel. This “discernment” or “insight” here can be thought of as “ ‘tact’ or the ‘feeling for the actual situation’ at the time” (O’Brien 77). God’s love gives me a “feel” for things, without which I cannot be said even to see things rightly. Another way to put it is in terms of “value.” What we feel amounts to our evalu(e)ations of situations—what matters and what doesn’t, what we see as valuable and what we don’t. To abound in love, in other words, is to truly feel/value a person or thing, to love what God loves. This is perhaps why “insight” is a good translation of aisthesis, for the affect or desire of love allows us to see/feelthings as God does (in our finite versions) so that we might choose and act lovingly in whatever situation in which we find ourselves. Someone to whom a love for the urban poor matters will know the city and its people in a different way than someone who does not. Someone who has come to know Christ’s humility personally will know and sense (or at least wonder) how his relative position of power is affecting others. Love will lead us to such knowledge.
Certainly, we should be humble enough not to assume we can act instinctively and thoughtlessly because of our love. Rather, discernment on some matters often requires careful study and deliberation. In this process (what we might call education), if it is carried on in unceasing prayer and relationship to God, our discernment will be more likely to grow in love. However, as James K.A. Smith writes, “Our misjudgment is not usually a lack of propositional knowledge, but a problem of desire that has intervened with both our perception and our will to see things rightly. This is why our knowledge must be the kind that is very close to love” (ref?). Indeed, we cannot practically deliberate about the vast majority of things we do or say, and so we must not think of discernment as primarily those moments when we face decisions and have the time to “think through” the options. Rather, our moment-to-moment discernment is a result of “the nexus of loves, longings, and habits that hum along under the hood so to speak”—making discernment and insight something that originates from the heart (where the Hebrews understood the “mind” to be) (Smith, Imagining, 12). And whatever is in the heart, according to the sage in Proverbs, is what will flow out into our lives, whether we like it or not. Therefore, we are told to “watch over our heart with all diligence for from it flows the springs of life” (Eph. 4:23)(5). Paul is praying, in essence, that the foundation of our insight and discernment would be the cultivation (“abounding”) of love, a knowledge we grow in through a sanctifying personal (not necessarily private) engagement with God.
The Mind of Christ
Such a view of knowledge and discernment raises questions about the popular view of the mind, and the “mind of Christ,” in particular. If our lived-out knowledge and discernment are heavily influenced by deep, sub-deliberative ways of seeing the world in which our desires are key, than this should be true for what we call “the mind” as well. Notions of mind, even just in the Scriptures, are complex. However, in the Phil. 2 “hymn of Christ,” where we are encouraged to “have this mind among you which is yours in Christ Jesus,” the centrality of desire seems plain. By way of exhorting the Philippians to “do nothing from [the desires] of rivalry and empty conceit,” he lands on a key virtue of the mind of Christ: “humility” (2:3). His humility is described this way: Christ did not “count [consider] equality with God as a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant” (2:7). Upward mobility, we might say, that required reducing others was not something that mattered to him. Grasping is a common metaphor for selfish or greedy desire, and this seems true in this passage as well. Surely, Jesus may have been tempted (Satan literally tempted him to grasp at this in the wilderness, to bypass the downward, sacrificial journey he would have to take--which had to be tempting.) But the mind in his heart did not love this (he would wait for God to exalt him at the proper time, 2:9). The desire for self-glorification did not weigh (matter) as much in his soul, and the freedom from such desire was central to His mind--to seeing, acting and speaking at each moment according to what really mattered (what was “excellent”).
Mind and Character
In vs. 11, the conclusion of Paul’s prayer, he asks that the Philippians would be “filled with the fruit of righteousness.” What this phrase refers to is not crystal clear among commentators. Is the “fruit of righteousness” the righteous standing of believers as a result of their position in Christ, or is it the conduct that results from a love abounding in knowledge and discernment? Because this is a prayerfor the Philippians, and because of Paul’s decidedly relational desires for them, many commentators favor the latter. If so, then, Paul’s prayer is that the Philippians would exhibit the fruit of their redeemed, graced life, as they grow in love’s knowledge. Paul’s fruit of the Spirit are surely in the background here. Love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, gentleness faithfulness and self-control—all of these are of the Spirit in the sense that they characterize God’s Spirit. To be filled with these fruit is evidence that one knows God. Paul’s prayer, then, turns out to be a prayer for the Philippians’ continued sanctification—a love-filled knowledge that is of the kind that metabolizes well into fruit of the Spirit. Mind and character, knowledge and love, turn out to be so integrated as to be inseparable. And it is this sanctification, the growth of the mind in the heart, through Christ, that Paul says redounds to “the glory and glory of God” (v. 11).
An Integrated Education
It is easier to know what kind of knowledge we want. It is scripturally-founded knowledge of God, self, salvation and sanctification. It is the biblically integrated pursuit of all disciplines. It is the God’s truth, wherever it is found. It is wisdom. However, since our loves are at least as crucial to faithful learning as content, we ought also to ask, how can we educate so that our knowledge abounds with love (and the fruit of the Spirit)? That is perhaps the question that Paul’s prayer raises for us in a Christian university. The answer in part will be to have the God of love ever before us in such learning, so that the end ortelos of love will form our practices of learning.
In Paul’s first letter to Timothy, he is concerned with false teaching and speculation making the rounds in Ephesus. His counsel to Timothy is to keep the instruction focused on the goal (or telos): “love from a pure heart, and a good conscience and a sincere faith (I Tim. 1:5).” Such love is not a sentimental thing. It has a firm center as well as soft edges. Paul firmly defends the gospel’s truth when he warns the faithful of the false teachers circulating among the early churches (Phil. 3:1ff). In the same letter, however, he also encourages the Philippians to be “of the same mind” (2:2)—perhaps to let love help them discern what really matters and what does not, when it comes to difference and disagreement. It is this discernment abounding in love (along with the other fruit of the Spirit) that will be evidence of knowledge that is true and truly gained under God. We know that Paul is skeptical of knowledge pursued apart from such an end. He puts it plainly: “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up” (I Cor. 1:8). How do we then pursue knowledge and discernment so that it is filled with and metabolizes well into love rather than mere ambition, humility rather than arrogance?
To study the book of Philippians this year in chapel points the way. To study in a spirit and atmosphere of worship is crucial to gaining knowledge that abounds with love. The development of the modern university has been a great gift to us. But higher education, having historically divorced itself from Christian ends, has bequeathed to us practices that in and of themselves have little room or regard for the formation of hearts and souls. Information, mastery, competency, productivity and personal success are the ends that have shaped modern university practices of research, teaching, and study. These are good so far as they go. However, in Christian universities where we seek knowledge done in ways that also form hearts, our ends are different. We seek not just mastery, but to be mastered; not just competency but an awareness of our need; not just productivity, but fruitfulness; not just personal success but the common good; not just information, but formation.
This means our educational practices must be different, or at least richer. We need countervailingpractices to insure that our teaching, research and study—most recently inherited from the world--do not go the way of the world. This is why worship is central to the pursuit of knowledge. While Christian universities are not the local church, they are an arm of the church, and it is just as critical that they are sites of worship where those practices are woven into the rhythms of learning. Where there is confession, there will be repentance from intellectual arrogance. Where there is thanksgiving, there will be a stay against knowledge’s exploitations. Where there is meditation on scripture, there will be an openness to the Spirit’s illumination. Where there is intercession, hearts and vocations will look for the common good. Where there is praise, there will be a growing trust in God’s power rather than our anxious efforts. Where there is learning with and before the Spirit of Christ, there will be knowledge abounding in love.
Such countervailing practices are not just found in chapels, of course. Every time that confession, thanksgiving, praise, listening, meditation, and a reliance on the Spirit undergird and are integrated into classes, there is worshipful learning. This is why Christian universities like Biola hire committed Christian faculty. There is a certain secular naiveté where it is believed that professors, regardless of their faith commitments, can properly teach Christian knowledge. If a developing mind is inseparable from the ends that drive it, then educators (those who “lead out” from the Latin edu-) must be those who pursue, model and integrate the formation of desire as much as they do their disciplinary content. This “education of desire” places Christian universities in the ancient Christian tradition of learning where the roots of the university lay.
Our theme verse this year is a prayer. We need the Spirit’s help. So it is our prayer this year that the Spirit would teach us how to pursue knowledge and discernment in “mind and character” so that our learning would abound in love and the fruits of the Spirit. And we pray, as Paul does, that that the sanctification of our souls through our learning would lead to the glory and praise of God.
(1) Moises Silva, Philippians: Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005) 50.
(2) Gordon Fee, Paul’s Letter to the Philippians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995). Both Silva (18) and Fee (99) say this is not because Paul considered the Philippians to lack love.
(3) Peter T. O’Brien, The Epistle to the Philippians: A Commentary on the Greek Text (NGITC) (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991) 74.
(4) Robert Saucy, Minding the Heart: The Way of Spiritual Transformation (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2013) 77.
(5) Robert Saucy described his most recent (and last) book, Minding the Heart: The Way of Spiritual Transformation, as one “seeking to understand the dynamics of Prov. 4:23.” In a reflective preface, he writes, “I came to see that the motivation and power for a holy walk with and the experience of new life come not from knowing the Bible and theology, or even trying to keep the commandments, but only from knowing God through a heart-to-heart relationship with Him, though Jesus, by the Spirit” (10).