I’m re-reading through NT Wright’s Surprised by Scripture, specifically a section on how we “know” anything. The Christian category of knowing anything is stimulated by love.
Wrights says,
Love is a mode of knowing all right, but it transcends the objective/subjective distinction that has been inscribed in so much of our thinking in the Western world. In love, the main thing is to admire, respect, celebrate, and take delight in the object of that love, to let it be itself, to want it to be gloriously and freely itself, not to snatch it or control it or squash it into another shape. That’s not love, but lust. Is love then the pursuit of objectivity? Of course not. Precisely at the moment when love is celebrating the radical otherness of the beloved – whether it be a star twenty million light-years away or a human being twenty millimeters away – love enters into a relationship with the beloved, a relationship that is defined by the nature of the beloved, but in which admiration is mixed with curiosity, a desire to discover more, respect with a longing for intimacy, a desire to know (so far as is possible) to be known.
NTW, Surprised by Scripture, 159
Joe Skillen 