How do you prove an X-ray shows cancer ?
By being trained by those with authority to decipher the image in order to see it.
Just so, liturgy trains us to see the Truth of God, it forms us into the type of people who can perceive the signs of transcendence all around us.
Part of the reason we lack faith is because of "untaught bodies," not just "untaught minds.
This is a portion from Biblical Knowing: A Scriptural Epistemology of Error
In it Knowledge is not portrayed as an object that one attains, but it is akin to a path that a subject can enter (or refuse to enter), it is to be committed to a direction, not an explanation), here :
"Take a long look at this X-ray film.35 In it, the bullet that wounded President Theodore Roosevelt can be seen. Actually, the bullet cannot be seen by just anyone. While anyone can see something, we want to know exactly what we are seeing. If it were not for the physician, Dr. Hochreim, trained to read radiographs who also knew the historical context of the X-ray film (i.e., it was to get a look inside Roosevelt’s chest) and marked the film for us, we would only see the bare outline of what we presume to be someone’s chest.
Likewise, Scripture records instances where characters are taught to see in a way that they would not have been able to do without the training. Man’s discovery of woman as his proper mate is one such episode.
Knowing requires a guide, an interpreter, to teach us how to see.
Notably, God does not fashion woman and commend her compatibility to the man. Instead, God leads the man through a process by which the man himself comes to know what is and what is not his appropriate mate…
God can coach the man to see what is already before him, as a physician could coach us to see the crucial particularities of an X-ray, which would otherwise appear to us as a two-dimensional duo-tone flummox. Man cannot discover autonomously, and he needs God to guide him in his discovery.
Thus if we ask, “How does the man know this creature is his suitable mate?” the answer from the story is something other than a proposition, an axiom, or Kantian synthetic a priori. The man’s exclamation appears to derive from an embodied sense of fit, a sight.
This knowledge of the fittedness of woman is both discoverable and revealed without an articulated propositional analysis. It is the man’s own body that knows the reason for the exclamation “At last! Bone of my bone . . .”
It appears to be divulged through performing some action. Because this act of knowing is a process, it is inherently bound in place and history, not the metaphysical abstractions of space and time, which appear as inextricable features of creaturely knowing. Participation in the act of knowing ends in discrete points of illumination, of revelation.
…man comes to know woman as his proper mate, but that he is also aware that this knowing is a quest and he intentionally participates by embodying that quest.
…“embodying a quest” is just another way of saying that he enacts the process of knowing itself by participation.
Because man appears to know through his body and is aware of the movement from not knowing toward knowing, we say that knowledge is revelatory.
This term simply acknowledges that a situated creature comes to know through a process that unfurls in a particular place and personal history, not the nebulous abstractions of space and time. It makes knowing a fundamentally historical function.
Sacramental knowledge is where embodied actions are mediated through outward visible signs that are united to the thing signified….that symbolically represents knowledge.
For instance, because we have the skill that enables us to know that “2 + 2 = 4,”77 we can sacramentally exercise that skill by adding two pieces of pie to the two that we already have in order to reach a total of four.
This trite and provisional example becomes less parochial when one considers the possibility that all human activity is embedded in and expressive of our skilled knowing….that knowledge not only requires participation in order to know, but is also symbolically acted out.
Throughout the Scriptures, we will see that the knowledge urged to the reader as normative and proper is the kind upon which one must act. Additionally, as in the garden, sacramental action exhibits either proper participation in the epistemological process or error. Hence, knowing the woman’s suitability is not captured only by the proposition, “She is bone of my bone . . .” The man’s knowing is sacramentally expressed in matrimony and the union of their flesh.
….knowing requires an obliged commitment between the knower and the prophet-like voice in order to know what is being shown to him. Both parties must commit and knowledge is a process, where an authenticated authority leads the knower to the known through a fiducially bound relationship, and both must be committed to the process.
Knowledge can come through the body and our embodiment even shapes and enables our understanding of abstract concepts, such as the way in which the man’s journey to knowing his proper mate includes animals."
By being trained by those with authority to decipher the image in order to see it.
Just so, liturgy trains us to see the Truth of God, it forms us into the type of people who can perceive the signs of transcendence all around us.
Part of the reason we lack faith is because of "untaught bodies," not just "untaught minds.
This is a portion from Biblical Knowing: A Scriptural Epistemology of Error
by Dru Johnson.
In it Knowledge is not portrayed as an object that one attains, but it is akin to a path that a subject can enter (or refuse to enter), it is to be committed to a direction, not an explanation), here :
"Take a long look at this X-ray film.35 In it, the bullet that wounded President Theodore Roosevelt can be seen. Actually, the bullet cannot be seen by just anyone. While anyone can see something, we want to know exactly what we are seeing. If it were not for the physician, Dr. Hochreim, trained to read radiographs who also knew the historical context of the X-ray film (i.e., it was to get a look inside Roosevelt’s chest) and marked the film for us, we would only see the bare outline of what we presume to be someone’s chest.
Only by the guidance of Dr. Hochreim’s marks and notations can we see it. The real test of our ability to read a radiograph is when we are presented with instances of X-rays that we have never seen and can accurately diagnose according to our ability to discern. But that level of skill to read X-rays requires hours of expert coaching without which we would not be able to see what is before us.
Likewise, Scripture records instances where characters are taught to see in a way that they would not have been able to do without the training. Man’s discovery of woman as his proper mate is one such episode.
Knowing requires a guide, an interpreter, to teach us how to see.
Notably, God does not fashion woman and commend her compatibility to the man. Instead, God leads the man through a process by which the man himself comes to know what is and what is not his appropriate mate…
God can coach the man to see what is already before him, as a physician could coach us to see the crucial particularities of an X-ray, which would otherwise appear to us as a two-dimensional duo-tone flummox. Man cannot discover autonomously, and he needs God to guide him in his discovery.
Thus if we ask, “How does the man know this creature is his suitable mate?” the answer from the story is something other than a proposition, an axiom, or Kantian synthetic a priori. The man’s exclamation appears to derive from an embodied sense of fit, a sight.
This knowledge of the fittedness of woman is both discoverable and revealed without an articulated propositional analysis. It is the man’s own body that knows the reason for the exclamation “At last! Bone of my bone . . .”
It appears to be divulged through performing some action. Because this act of knowing is a process, it is inherently bound in place and history, not the metaphysical abstractions of space and time, which appear as inextricable features of creaturely knowing. Participation in the act of knowing ends in discrete points of illumination, of revelation.
…man comes to know woman as his proper mate, but that he is also aware that this knowing is a quest and he intentionally participates by embodying that quest.
…“embodying a quest” is just another way of saying that he enacts the process of knowing itself by participation.
Because man appears to know through his body and is aware of the movement from not knowing toward knowing, we say that knowledge is revelatory.
This term simply acknowledges that a situated creature comes to know through a process that unfurls in a particular place and personal history, not the nebulous abstractions of space and time. It makes knowing a fundamentally historical function.
Sacramental knowledge is where embodied actions are mediated through outward visible signs that are united to the thing signified….that symbolically represents knowledge.
For instance, because we have the skill that enables us to know that “2 + 2 = 4,”77 we can sacramentally exercise that skill by adding two pieces of pie to the two that we already have in order to reach a total of four.
This trite and provisional example becomes less parochial when one considers the possibility that all human activity is embedded in and expressive of our skilled knowing….that knowledge not only requires participation in order to know, but is also symbolically acted out.
Throughout the Scriptures, we will see that the knowledge urged to the reader as normative and proper is the kind upon which one must act. Additionally, as in the garden, sacramental action exhibits either proper participation in the epistemological process or error. Hence, knowing the woman’s suitability is not captured only by the proposition, “She is bone of my bone . . .” The man’s knowing is sacramentally expressed in matrimony and the union of their flesh.
….knowing requires an obliged commitment between the knower and the prophet-like voice in order to know what is being shown to him. Both parties must commit and knowledge is a process, where an authenticated authority leads the knower to the known through a fiducially bound relationship, and both must be committed to the process.
Knowledge can come through the body and our embodiment even shapes and enables our understanding of abstract concepts, such as the way in which the man’s journey to knowing his proper mate includes animals."
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