Knowing more about God does not automatically make you love him more, because knowing a truth and being changed by it are two different things. Information is what you can explain. Formation is what that truth has done to your character. A person can gather the first for years without much of the second. When that happens, knowledge tends to swell the ego instead of softening the heart, and the people nearby feel it first.
That distinction sits at the center of a conversation between Lisa Fields and Dr. Dharius Daniels, a pastor who planted Kingdom Church in New Jersey after seminary at Princeton. Both of them value serious study. Both describe a stage in their own lives when study made them harder to be around. Their account explains why the gap exists and what closes it.
Two kinds of knowing
Start with the terms. Information is content held in the mind: doctrines, definitions, arguments, the ability to say what a passage means. Formation is what happens when that content reshapes how you trust God, how you suffer, and how you treat people. The first can be tested on paper. The second shows up in a hospital room, an argument, or a long friendship.
We use the word “know” for both, and that hides the problem. If someone says a believer knows God is good, they could mean the believer can defend the claim. They could also mean the believer has trusted that goodness through loss and kept trusting. Those are different achievements. One does not guarantee the other.
Lisa Fields puts the gap in a single sentence from her own experience: “sometimes the people that have the information don’t have the practice.” She adds the other half: “And the people that have the practice might not necessarily be able to articulate it, but they know it in their hearts and they walk it out in their lives.”
Her point is that practiced believers hold their knowledge in habit and prayer rather than vocabulary. A test of doctrine would miss it. A crisis would reveal it.
Jesus makes the same distinction in the parable Daniels points to in Matthew 7. The wise builder is the one who “heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them” (Matthew 7:24). The foolish builder is the one who “heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not” (Matthew 7:26). Read the two verses side by side. Both builders hear. Both have the same information. The difference lies entirely in the doing, and the storm exposes which house was built on what.
Why knowledge can make people arrogant
Here is the part most readers find puzzling. It would make sense if knowledge without formation simply did nothing. Instead it often does harm. People who study more can become colder, quicker to correct, and slower to listen.
Paul names the mechanism in 1 Corinthians 8:1: “Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth.” The context matters. Some believers in Corinth knew correctly that idols are nothing. They were right on the facts, and Paul grants them that. Their failure was in using that knowledge in ways that wounded weaker believers whose consciences were still tender. Knowledge held apart from love inflates the one who holds it. Love is what builds other people up.
Daniels describes how this plays out among people who have just had some theological training. In his words, “sometimes we can unintentionally become like anointed elitist.” He continues: “We can become subconsciously condescending.” The words “unintentionally” and “subconsciously” carry the point. Nobody sets out to look down on the church that raised them. It happens because new knowledge feels like a new height, and from a height everyone else looks lower.
He gives an example. A friend in Bible college praised Daniels’s preaching for being centered on Christ and wanted the Black pastors he knew to learn that approach. Daniels pushed back: “I think you’re making some assumptions that aren’t true.” He grew up Baptist, and in his experience the preachers of that church, whatever their topic, landed on the cross and on Jesus. His friend had learned a real and good idea. What he lacked was the humility to see it already at work in people who did not use his vocabulary.
Daniels admits he was probably underserved in some areas of teaching growing up. He also notes that churches enduring Jim Crow and open injustice had urgent priorities, and he doubts that explaining the Trinity would have topped the list when people could not vote. His concern is a generation that is quick to judge those leaders, and he names the danger as being “unwilling to extend the type of grace to previous generations of leadership that all of us currently need now.”
The arrogance, then, comes from treating knowledge as rank. Once information becomes a measure of who is ahead, every conversation becomes a chance to prove it.
What carries truth from head to heart
If the two kinds of knowing are separate, something has to carry truth from one to the other. In this conversation, the answer is life lived under pressure, alongside people who have already walked that road.
Lisa Fields describes her own path. In college a professor set out to overturn what she believed about Jesus, and the exposure to textual criticism left her angry that church had not prepared her. She swung toward a rigid theological phase and concluded the Black church needed to get it together. Then came a gap of years between college and seminary. In that gap, as she puts it, life happened, and the information she had gathered had to reach her heart. The people she had wanted to correct turned out to be the people she needed. “I needed them to pray me through some stuff,” she says.
She then turns the lesson outward. To the person eager to teach everyone what they have learned, she says, “You have it in your head, but it hasn’t penetrated your heart.” And she names the test that information alone cannot pass. Someone can explain that God is good, she says, “but what does that mean when life happens?”
Daniels names the risk of never crossing that gap. Young leaders, he says, can “suffer with arrested development and get stuck in that stage” that he and Lisa Fields both went through before life happened.
This explains why reading faster cannot rush formation. Formation needs three things the classroom cannot supply by itself: time, suffering that tests what you claim, and relationships with people further along. Lisa Fields’s story contains all three. Her information was not wasted. It was waiting for the conditions that would make it hers.
Study itself becomes formative when it is read from inside loss. Daniels describes preparing a sermon series by reading the Bible’s stories of trouble without hurrying to spiritualize them. Reading Job that way, he noticed that Job received new children at the end but did not get his first children back. As a father of two, he saw that new children would not replace lost ones, and that Job had to wrestle with real grief. The same text that could have become a tidy argument became a lesson in grief, because he read it as someone who could lose what Job lost. That is the second ingredient, suffering, entering the study itself.
Is study the problem, then?
That is the most common misreading, and both speakers reject it. Some churches have treated seminary as a threat, a place where faith goes to die. Lisa Fields recalls being grateful that her father never believed intellect was the enemy of faith, even though others in his circle did.
Daniels holds the line on doctrine firmly. He argues that wrong belief does not stay in the head: “you can’t live a good life with bad doctrine.” He ties this to the same parable in Matthew 7. The rock is truth, and sand shifts. He also argues that the stakes are higher for Black and brown communities living under the effects of systemic sin, where decisions about health, school and loans are often made by people who do not share their experience. When your margin for error is small, building on truth is a necessity.
He also warns against overcorrecting. Some pastors, reacting to harsh and condescending apologetics, swing to the other end and become “so tactful that we aren’t always truthful.” Tenderness that drops the truth is a different failure, and it forms no one.
So where does suspicion of study come from? Daniels does not think the fear of seminary arose on its own: “I don’t think it just emerged out of thin air,” he says. He suggests that “the way we have historically managed knowledge has contributed to people being adverse to” intellect. That is a striking admission from a seminary-trained pastor. He is asking educated believers to own part of the problem. If trained people have often been proud, churches learned to distrust training. He doubts conversation alone will change that perception. What will change it, he argues, is educated believers letting truth reform their hearts and their treatment of people. In his words, “that type of fruit is probably going to be one of the most effective ways” to do it.
Wood or weapon
Daniels offers an image for the right relationship between knowledge and love. He hopes “that truth would not be a weapon that you use to beat up others, but that truth for you would be wood that you use to kinda ignite a fire and a passion for God and for God’s purposes in your own heart.”
The image works because the same material can serve either purpose. A piece of wood can be swung at someone or set in a fire. Nothing about the wood decides which. The person holding it does. The image has a limit worth stating: wood burns up, and truth does not. The picture is narrower than that. It asks where your knowledge is aimed, outward at others as ammunition, or inward as fuel for your own love of God.
Scripture supplies the outward test. In 1 Peter 3:15 the believer is to “be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.” Many modern translations render “meekness and fear” as gentleness and respect, which is how Daniels quotes it. He reads the manner as part of the command. An answer given with contempt disobeys the verse, even if every sentence in it is accurate. Lisa Fields shows what obeying it can look like. She once told a coworker plainly that she believed rejecting Jesus leads to hell, and the friendship survived. She describes truth spoken in love as being committed to the other person’s process.
Daniels supplies the inward test. For years he saw scholarship in some places and passion in pulpits, but rarely a deep love for God that carried on outside the pulpit and the classroom, until he came across writers like Dallas Willard. That observation points to one question: what are you like when you are not performing your knowledge? His own answer is humbling. “I don’t even remember what I preached this time last year, and I preached it,” he admits. What shapes his congregation, he says, “is the example that I set for them” and the way he loves them.
That is the real answer to the reader’s question. Knowing more about God was never meant to be the goal. It was meant to be fuel. Study that leaves you warmer toward God and gentler toward people is doing its work. Study that leaves you sharper with people and colder in prayer has stopped at the head. The remedy is to keep learning while letting what you learn meet suffering, time and the company of people who already live it, until the knowledge becomes yours.