Epistemological Epiphanies

Don’t run away! I promise this won’t be deeply academic, it’s just that those are the word of the week for me and they happened to collide on my drive to Ohio Sunday afternoon.

Epistemology is how we know what we know, or the system/method by which we discern what is true. If, for example, you only trust what you have personally experienced with your five senses, you fall into an epistemological system called “empiricism.”

An epiphany is an insight that changes us (in small or large ways) that seems to come from within though often with a triggering experience that happens to us. Most of us would call these “AHA!” moments.

I had two epiphanies on my drive, one precipitated by the other. The first is that I haven’t made headway on the conversion of my dissertation into a book yet because I didn’t have the first piece of the puzzle necessary for changing it into a general audience book. It turns out that I can do less rewriting and more revising if I add an entire new chapter at the beginning about epistemology: how scientific exploration and experimentation are a different way of knowing from belief systems, and not only are these two different ways of knowing, they are ways of knowing about different things entirely. Stephen Jay Gould called them “non-overlapping magisteria,” though I think he exaggerated the degree of separation somewhat.

That epiphany came because I had graded the epistemology papers for the philosophy class on Friday and Saturday, so I had reviewed that section of the text book. That first epiphany, in turn, led to the second epiphany about why the opportunity to be the teaching assistant happened when it did, and this is the “God moment” kind of epiphany: I needed to be reminded about epistemology to make progress on the book, and what better way than to use the gifts and skills I have as the way to come to that realization?

Epiphany, by the way, is a word of the week in my life because I’m currently in Oberlin, Ohio, at the annual gathering of the Regional Theological Education Consortium of the United Church of Christ, where our prototype online course experience is about the texts for Epiphany season. I’ve been privileged to be on the steering committee for RTEC and on the planning team for this event. There are some awesome people making theological education accessible for all those who are called to serve God’s church without attending a seminary-based degree program. There are equally talented people working in seminaries, of course (and I get to do both, so the privilege is doubled for me)!

I won’t make my first deadline of Thanksgiving for a book proposal, but now that I have a trajectory for the first and subsequent chapters and a somewhat less daunting task ahead, I hope to keep to the Easter deadline for having the manuscript finished, with a January 31 revised deadline for the proposal. I’m okay with that. I trust that the timing will work itself out so that all will be well in God’s time.