We Protestants need to recover a view of knowledge that transcends what we are inheriting today — how we view doctrine and facts. We’ve inherited a positivist view of knowledge that the ancients would describe as merely nous or scientia.
The medievals and the Reformed saw this as mere historical knowledge and not true knowledge of God that comes through faith. This was equated with the knowledge of the eyes/sight. True knowledge of God which crowned the faithful was sapiential and worshipful — beatific.
It was a heartfelt trust that was identified with the crown of the head, called the apex mantis. This higher knowledge that transcended reason but in no way denied it was the practical knowledge of God that can only receive and adore.
This knowledge according to Aquinas was an ecstasy that overcomes the soul and transforms it in the light of the Beloved. This knowledge is the true union of the believer with God in Christ by the Spirit.
This ecstasy and sapiential knowledge is beatific and what the Reformers equated with True Faith. Without this ecstatic vision of God in Christ there is no fruit of the Spirit, no real faith in God and all that exists is historical faith in mere facts, external to us.
You see this kind of ecstatic language all over the Puritans and Reformed scholastics. The unction of the Holy Spirit was essential for the minister and the elder and the heart that desires the transforming love of God in Jesus.
This ecstasy is to be preeminently felt and experienced in the Divine Service and especially in the Eucharist according to Aquinas. This language of God’s descent by the Spirit and ascent in the Supper is all over Bonaventure and subsequently in Calvin’s view of the Supper.
This kind of knowing is the true end of theology and is why the Reformed scholastics said theology was primarily a practical science that was not merely objective and static knowledge but it involved the whole soul and mind — especially the Apex Mantis.
Martin Buber would describe this relationship as an I- Thou rather than the I- It of Positivism and modernity. Paul Ricouer would call this intersubjectivity Onself as Another.
This knowledge seeps into the ethical imagination and allows one to be transformed by the new vision of God and his world and our being in it.
Without this kind of transformation of the ethical imagination through a kind of sapiential, divine ecstasy, faith will be without good works and show itself to be merely historical. It will never become heartfelt trust and adoration.
This ecstatic view of knowledge and the imagination is critical to recover in today’s status quo nihilism and disenchanted social imagination.
This lack of transparency when understanding faith has left Protestantism in a constant debate between the contemplative life and the active life, faith and works, etc. and knowing how to relate them.
Without this beatific view of true knowledge, faith fails to transform and leaves doctrine cold and dead. Without this kind of knowledge, works are zeal without knowledge. Without the passion and ecstasy, we find a form of godliness but denies the power of the Spirit.
