Dwelling in willful unknowing
Culture & Arts
Post Date:
August 20, 2026
Dwelling in willful unknowing
BOOKS | James K.A. Smith loses the thread of certainty
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James K.A. Smith, professor of philosophy at Calvin University, has gained quite a following from his books and essays that explore the intersection of Christianity and culture. Now, after experiencing a midlife depressive crisis, he’s written Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark: Mysticism, Art, and the Path of Unknowing (Yale University Press, 256 pp.).
In this book, professor Smith advocates abandoning the search for philosophical certainty in favor of a mystical non-knowing, of dwelling in the dark with God, claiming that his pursuit of certainty through reason, the archetypical aim of his profession, let him down. He suggests we learn more from mystics than from philosophers or theologians.
Smith embraces the tradition of mysticism which claims that God is beyond words and thought. But the problem is that we then lose all divine revelation and the possibility of a meaningful relationship with God. We also lose doctrinal discernment, as is evident when Smith claims that mysticism leads to union with God. But union with God is only possible through faith in the knowable Mediator, Jesus Christ. As Francis Schaeffer wrote, “You cannot have a personal relationship with something unknown.” The idea of the Absolute as unknown is found in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Daoism but not in orthodox Christianity.
Knowledge gets pitted against humility. One might pridefully pursue knowledge and play the academic game, but humility and the pursuit of knowledge aren’t antithetical. Graduate study and academic pursuits have not been soul-killing to me. In fact, intellectual humility should be the pathway to knowledge. Scripture encourages study in order to know God, to understand the Bible, and to defend the faith (Ecclesiastes 12:9–11; 2; Timothy 2:5; 1 Peter 3:15). Smith, however, offers few biblical references, but plenteous quotations from mystics, especially the anonymous author of 14th-century The Cloud of Unknowing. He even disparages rational consistency as inadequate for mystical knowledge, and one is hard-pressed to find the gospel clearly stated anywhere either.
G.K. Chesterton warned against the error of unknowing that Smith advocates back in 1908 in Orthodoxy: “But what we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. ... The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt—the Divine Reason.”
Smith is right to advocate the arts and spiritual reflection and to remind us that “we see through a glass darkly.” But to denigrate reason and certainty is a mistake. When my first wife Becky and I were enduring the crucible of her dementia, we often did not feel God’s peace. However, we knew—given our many years of study and writing—that Christianity was objectively true, because of all the evidence in its support and the case against non-Christian worldviews. We did not know why a brilliant woman would fall prey to a terrible disease robbing her of everything. However, we knew the One who knew. That made all the difference. I will not give up that certainty for any “great cloud of unknowing.”
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Douglas Groothuis is an apologetics professor at Cornerstone University and author of 20 books, including Christian Apologetics and Beyond the Wager: The Christian Brilliance of Blaise Pascal.