My first year in seminary was also the first year for a young lecturer who had just completed his PhD studies in Hebrew at Harvard. Now he set his sights to train eager young minds instructing beginner’s Hebrew, affectionately called “baby Hebrew”. Within weeks, half of the students in his class had dropped out to enrol with other lecturers or had given up on learning the Hebrew language all together. Within a month, the class of thirty had been reduce to six, all of whom were barely hanging in there due to the heavy study load and the lofty teaching style of the course. Mercifully for everyone involved, he was removed by a senior professor and relegated to working with doctoral students.

Here’s a guy who knew the Hebrew language better than most would ever dream of; however, he couldn’t teach. So, what went wrong? Along the way, he forgot what it was like not knowing anything. He couldn’t remember what it felt like to be a beginner and as a teacher, he was a disaster. This is called the curse of knowledge. As the Heath brothers state in their book, Made to Stick, “The moral of the story is not to ‘dumb things down’… (rather) to find a ‘universal language’ one that everyone speaks fluently.”

Now, we understand that ignorance is no blessing but we come to realise that with great learning can come difficulties as well. How many times will preachers just talk over people’s head? Messages are delivered burying people beneath a mountain of facts in which listeners strain to make any connection to their lives. The curse of knowledge is expressed in various ways. Sometimes, learned people assume that everyone gets the same delight they do in going over each minute detail. Another issue is that those who are well versed in a subject move too quickly over-estimating what people can grasp in a limited time-frame. Often times, the curse of knowledge comes to being in the speaker communicating in abstraction because he or she understands the principles upon which something is based.

Take, for instance, a trial by jury. The lawyers must pitch their argument to the jurors who are not schooled in law in tangible ways that anyone could understand; however, the presiding judge will be listening to the case on a much higher level. With two different sets of listeners, to whom does the lawyer pitch the case? The uninitiated listener, not the highly informed one. The parallel for ministry is that we don’t pitch the communication at the level of the initiated to faith, but the uninitiated and in doing so, everyone gets it. For example, we can speak of the substitutionary atonement of Christ (abstraction) or simply state “that Jesus died in our place to cover our sins”.

Abstractions affect more than how we communicate the message but how we apply it. Someone brings a message which calls people to love Jesus more. Great, right? What does that look like? How does someone working in the marketplace with a wife and two kids express this love? Sadly, the message never seems to get around to that. Abstractions will result in people being unclear as to how to respond. Abstractions are difficult to measure. Have you loved Jesus more this week? Abstractions leave listeners with warm fuzzies and nothing to aim for. Concrete communications makes targets transparent. For example, as a means of growing closer to Christ, let’s commit to read and reflect on one chapter of Mark’s gospel for the next two weeks. We’re talking now about means and ends. Often times, we aspire to an end result that are difficult to state in concrete terms and yet, the way or means to achieving it should be measurable and specific. The curse of knowledge need not weigh us down if we are able to monitor our communication and take the simple steps to be clear.