Divorce of Knowledge from Practice

The "Divorce of Knowledge from Practice" names the structural rupture that occurs when religious or existential truth is recast on the model of propositional, scientific knowledge — that is, when "knowing" is treated as the possession of information that is logically separable from how one lives. In the Judeo-Christian framework Rollins is analysing, genuine knowledge of God is not a set of detachable propositions but a mode of being-in-the-world: knowing and doing, knowing and devoting, are internally related moments of a single practice. To model religious truth on the scientific-informational paradigm is therefore not merely a pedagogical error but an ontological severance — it produces a subject who "possesses" truth as an object while remaining existentially unchanged by it. This is what Rollins calls the "wedge" between possessing 'truth' and engaging in a life of devotion and service.

The move is diagnostic rather than merely moralistic: the wedge is not the result of individual hypocrisy but of an epistemic framework — the Cartesian-scientific framework — that structurally disconnects knowledge from the subject who holds it. In Lacanian terms, this is precisely the condition Lacan identifies with the University Discourse and with post-Cartesian science: knowledge (S2) becomes self-accumulating, self-grounding, and severed from truth. Rollins' concept names the lived, practical consequence of that severance: once knowledge is treated as value-neutral information, its transformative and ethical force — the force that makes it truth in the deeper, enunciatory sense — is neutralised.

This concept appears in rollins-peter-the-fidelity-of-betrayal-towards-a-church-beyond-belief-paraclete and is best understood as a theological-practical specification of tensions already identified in the canonical concepts of Knowledge and Truth. Rollins' argument runs exactly parallel to the Lacanian diagnosis of post-Cartesian science: as the canonical Knowledge entry notes, "Knowledge from Descartes on is what can serve to increase knowledge… a completely different question to that of truth." The "Divorce of Knowledge from Practice" is, in effect, the experiential, communal cost of that Cartesian split when it is imported into religious life — the community ends up with an accumulating stockpile of S2 (doctrinal information) structurally severed from the enunciatory dimension of truth that can only be "half-said" and lived.

The concept also bears on the canonical Subject and Subjectivity entries. If genuine religious knowledge is constitutively tied to a mode of life, then it necessarily implicates the whole split subject — the subject who is not merely a knower but a desiring, practicing, suffering being. The "wedge" Rollins identifies is therefore also a wedge driven through subjectivity itself: it produces a subject who inhabits knowledge without being transformed by it, a subject whose enunciation and statement are radically dissociated. This aligns with the Lacanian principle that the subject is "what is lacking to knowledge" — precisely because knowledge modelled on information tries to close the gap, to make itself complete, it loses contact with the truth that speaks through the divided, practising subject. The "Divorce of Knowledge from Practice" is thus a diagnosis of what happens when a community forgets that truth, as Lacan insists, can never simply be stated but must be lived — it can only be "half-said."

The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond BeliefPeter Rollins · 2008 (page unknown)

such an approach creates a wedge between possessing 'truth' and engaging in a life of devotion and service.

The phrase "wedge between possessing 'truth'" is theoretically loaded on two counts: first, the scare-quotes around 'truth' signal that what is "possessed" in the propositional-informational model is not truth in any deep sense but only its simulacrum — truth reduced to a statement, severed from enunciation; second, "a life of devotion and service" names the practical-existential register that genuine truth requires, the mode of subjectivity that cannot be separated from knowing without destroying the knowing itself.