Dionysus on a Bike

Proverbs 3:5-12 – 5/5/2026

Trust in the Lord with all your heart,
and do not rely on your own insight.
–Proverbs 3:5 (NRSVue)

For the Lutheran and indeed for the Christian, we are to rely on God’s will and wisdom as superior and more conducive to flourishing than our own fallen human wisdom. We lack the knowledge of a God who understands the world from the eternal perspective of the creator. Even when we know what we want, what we think is best, our limited perspective often prevents us from knowing with certainty what actions lead to the good outcomes we desire. Often we do not even know what we want or what the best outcome would be, let alone how to get there. We often lack the wisdom to know what it is we want to want, what it would be good for us to desire. This leaves us in situations where our own insight and self-knowledge leaves us with indecision and no criteria for making a decision.

God’s will, the Christian claims, is able to overcome the limitations of human will. Where we cannot see what it is what we should want or how to bring about the good we know we want, the power and knowledge of God, combined with God’s love for us, puts God in a position to know how it is we are to live our lives. In other words, God has the wisdom we lack.

God’s knowledge raises many philosophical issues, but I want to concentrate on two of them here. First, what is it for God to know something? For a human being to know something is to have a conscious attitude of belief, a degree of certainty, and a set of reasons for assenting to some truth. Does God have conscious states in the same way humans do? Does God have beliefs? Does God reason in a way that is similar to the way humans reason? For all of these questions, I have to answer “I don’t know, and I suspect not.” We cannot know what God is like outside of our human categories, and given how we conceptualize God as transcendent, it seems unlikely that how we understand our own minds and knowledge applies to God. However it is that God knows, it probably is quite different from how we know.

Second, even if we presuppose that God has knowledge in some sense, the wisdom we lack, the problem remains of how we are to know what it is God knows, as it pertains to how we are to make choices and make relative evaluations between competing visions of the good. Today’s lectionary reading from Proverbs councils the reader to “trust in the Lord” and not to “rely on [one’s] own insight.” This seems straightforward enough. We lack sufficient wisdom to live well, whereas God has such wisdom. Why wouldn’t we want to trust that wisdom when offered to us?

Where are we to get that knowledge of God’s wisdom? What is our mode of access to it? God’s will is not immediately apparent. We do not have some faculty to discern a will that’s truly God from one that just seems like God to us. The Lutheran, along with many Christians, sees two main sources of the wisdom to know how to live a life, Scripture and the Holy Spirit. Scripture, however, is not a univocal text. It does not have a single unified vision of the good, except perhaps at a level so abstract that it is not useful in concrete situations. The problems of interpreting a polyvocal ancient text that was written to communities much different than our own in time, place, understanding of the world, and culture mean that applying a biblical perspective to our contemporary situation is a less than straightforward endeavor. As such there are multiple contradictory understandings of what Scripture dictates that are possible. There is not one single way that the Bible calls us to live. Competing, plausibly valid interpretations can always be made, and when the Biblical text is approached on its own terms, it cannot be used straightforwardly as a guide for living or aiming for the good.

The Lutheran has one further source for the knowledge and wisdom the we lack and long for and that Proverbs says we are to find in God, the Holy Spirit. The Christian—the human person—is not alone, left to their own devices; they are filled with the indwelling of God’s self, the third person of the Trinity. The Spirit’s movement in our own spirit is supposed to direct us to the wisdom that we lack and that Scripture gestures toward but cannot fully point the way.

The problem here is an empirical one. There are hundreds of millions of Christians around the world. Except at the most abstract level with statements like “Follow God’s will”, there is no agreement whatsoever about what wisdom dictates, what the best way forward is that is in accordance with God’s will. We may agree, for example, that murder is wrong, taking seriously the commandment that forbids it. Where this agreement about this general principle, even among Christians there is profound disagreement about what following this commandment amounts to. All sides claim to understand the command in an authentic way that reflects the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, guiding them to the wisdom of God that would elude them without the Spirit. From this it follows that not everyone who sincerely claims to be following the Spirit can be correct that they are indeed following the Spirit. When deeply opposed and contradictory visions of the Good are held by equally committed Christians who believe they are being led by the Spirit, it follows that not everyone who believes they are following the Spirit is indeed doing so.

Given this fact, we are left with the glaring problem, how do we determine whether we are following the Spirit or not? How do we distinguish between really following the wisdom of God and merely think that we are, when we are actually following our flawed reasoning? There is no way we can know. We must simply take a leap of faith on the basis of our most sincere and honest appraisal of what God commands, of what the Good demands. Here, as ever, we are left with a problem of knowledge, since we cannot be sure we are distinguishing the real Spirit from that which we simply think is the Spirit, it follows that we simply cannot know. We cannot know for sure.

With this, we are right back where we started. How do we live a life? How do we know what to choose? The lesson of this reflection is that we cannot know. We can only think we know, believe that we know, be convinced that we know. So how then to choose with all of this uncertainty? How are we to choose given that we are unable to know if we are following the wisdom of the Spirit? It seems we must face two things here: we must trust, even where we cannot know. Though knowledge eludes us, we have to follow the Good where it seems like it is to us given our best attempt to follow what we take to be the inspiration of God with us. To do this, we must make a choice, a choice to follow a principle. For the Christian, this principle is the Gospel, and the Gospel, as far as I can tell, is a message of radical love. The Christian, or anyone for whom a message of loving others is appealing as a way forward, can always made the leap of faith to trust that love is the way and then the hopeful risk to judge what actually is the way of love in given concrete situations.

Though polyvocal and containing a multitude of complex perspectives and conflicting voices, the Bible, especially the Gospels’ accounts of the life, death, ministry, and teachings of Jesus point toward self-sacrifice and care for the needs of the other in compassion as the heart of the Gospel. The leap of faith the Christian and those similarly oriented must make is to trust the lead of love, taking the paths that tend toward loving care of the self, the other, and all the earth. Knowing what actually is loving toward all is certainly not always straightforward, but at least here we can begin to find criteria to distinguish between that which claims to be from God’s indwelling inspiration and that which only pretends to.

We can never know; we might always be wrong, and so the weight of choice lies upon us. We can take comfort from knowing that we have promises that love of others is its own reward, that we love not to earn the good things that come to us or to make up for our shortcomings or failings. We love simply because we love, that ultimately is what it is to be Christian and what it is to follow the council of the Proverbs passage in today’s common lectionary readings.

All of this means that we cannot escape the hard questions, the questions of what world we are aiming and hoping for, how we should organize our civil society, and how we should relate to others in our community and respond to inequality and injustice. The Christian gains little certainty or escape from the necessity to choose, even with the guidance of Scripture and the indwelling of God’s Spirit. We only have the command and the promise that the way of Jesus as the way of love is better than anything else we could choose. That requires a leap of faith because the world often doesn’t look as though love is the best way forward, the wise way forward. Choosing then is risk and a gamble, a dice roll done in hope. We can base that hope on many different things, the Christian and those like them, simply bases that hope on placing love as the highest value.

Further Reading:

My Dissertation on Nietzsche’s Theory of Knowledge expressing a similar skepticism from another perspective

Kierkegaard’s Works of Love and Fear and Trembling