Heart Knowledge Over Head Knowledge

My physics professor at North Dakota State University was brilliant. He stood in front of the 450- seat auditorium and performed complex equations, the chalk in his hand ricocheting shrapnel as he pounded on the blackboard to stress the answer. He used at least one whole stick of chalk during each lecture. But his genius was left on the board each day; I didn’t take it with me. He was so smart, but he didn’t know me well enough to know that I didn’t understand the formulas. After every class, I went back to my dorm room and pored over the text, trying to decipher the work on my own.

We can know a lot of information. We can have all of our facts straight, double- and triple-sourced. But we if we only act with our head knowledge, we miss the heart completely. We alienate people instead of hearing them. We push them away instead of drawing them close.

Theodore Roosevelt said, “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” Knowing a bit about Teddy, as his friends called him, I suspect he learned that bit of wisdom from experience. The twenty-sixth president was intelligent and well-spoken. His excitable nature allowed him only a few hours of sleep each night. He authored a multitude of books, traveled extensively, and researched obsessively. One could assume he would have been the smartest person in any room.

Theodore Roosevelt left his home in New York after the death of his wife and mother on the same day and came to the Badlands of Western North Dakota to ranch. Teddy was a city slicker through and through; he had tons of book knowledge but very little practical knowledge when it came to beef production on the northern plains in the late 1880s. Narratives record that the local ranchers thought him a fool at first. But the Harvard-educated, four-eyed city boy put his head down and learned from those grizzled ranchers, many of whom had no more than a cursory year or two of formal schooling. Teddy became one of them, a valued member of the community. He even joined a posse to apprehend men who had stolen a boat, eventually bringing them to justice.

Later in life, he led a regiment of soldiers in the Spanish-American war. Some of those soldiers were cowboys he had met on the northern plains. He often said, “I never would have been president were it not for my experiences in North Dakota.” As a lifelong North Dakotan, I take pride in his statement. But there was more to President Roosevelt’s experience in my home state than just playing cowboy. He learned the difference between head knowledge and heart knowledge. He learned that there was always more to learn, especially from people less educated than himself.

The apostle Paul was another learned man. As Saul, he not only enforced the Jewish laws, he made and interpreted them. He knew the Jewish scriptures; he knew the rules; he administered the punishments. Jews were cautious around him, and Christians feared him.

Then Saul became Paul on the road to Damascus. His life was changed by Jesus. Saul the enforcer became Paul the lover. When we read through his letters in the New Testament, one of the prevailing threads is love. Paul realized that his head knowledge meant nothing without heart knowledge. There is perhaps no better snapshot of his head-to-heart conversion than the first few verses of 1 Corinthians 13:

If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don’t love, I’m nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate. If I speak God’s Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, “Jump,” and it jumps, but I don’t love, I’m nothing. If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love. (1 Cor. 13:1-3 MSG)

In this season, it seems as if the whole world is divided. We are divided and divisive. We have a lot of head knowledge—we shout statistics and claims, we spew demands, we use fear and threats. Few of us are leading with heart knowledge. Few of us are loving and listening first.

I would like to think that this is a new problem, that this is only a twenty-first-century problem. But it isn’t.

In the fourth chapter of his letter to the Ephesians, Paul has to remind them to lead with heart knowledge and quit being divisive. “Get rid of all bitterness, rage, anger, harsh words, and slander, as well as all types of evil behavior. Instead, be kind to each other, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, just as God through Christ has forgiven you,” he writes (Eph. 4:31-32).

As people who claim to follow Christ, we are called to act like him. We are called to love our neighbor, care for the poor, comfort the grieving, feed the hungry, bring peace, and champion the marginalized. Jesus himself lectured those with head knowledge: “You’re hopeless, you religion scholars and Pharisees! Frauds! You keep meticulous account books, tithing on every nickel and dime you get, but on the meat of God’s Law, things like fairness and compassion and commitment—the absolute basics!—you carelessly take it or leave it. Careful bookkeeping is commendable, but the basics are required. Do you have any idea how silly you look, writing a life story that’s wrong from start to finish, nitpicking over commas and semicolons?” (Matt.23:23-24 MSG).

May we lead with compassion and love. May we lead with our hearts. May we lead like Jesus.

Annie Carlson is rooted like a turnip to the plains of North Dakota where she raises great food, large numbers of farm animals, and three free-range kids with her husband. You can find her with either a book or knitting needles in her hands as she dreams up her next adventure.

Photograph © Aung Soe Min, used with permission