“Loving To Know” by N.T. Wright

“Image-bearers are called to be “knowers”—that is, to be suffused with a rich and personal knowledge of God, through which to bring blessing to his world; and to understand in all appropriate ways what the created order is all about, so as to sum up and express something of the reality of the richly varied creation. Both the suffusing and the understanding involve speaking words that construct the true reality. That is the prophetic vocation of the image-bearers, standing alongside their royal vocation of being stewards and their priestly vocation of summing up creation’s praises.”

“An epistemology of love, seeing the creation as the outflowing of divine creative love, must pay attention to that creation. It isn’t enough to know that it is God’s creation, and so to infer that we already know all that’s important to know about it. Love demands patient curiosity. Love transcends the ­objective/subjective divide, because as the image-bearing stewards of creation, as liturgists of creation’s praise, as prophets called to speak creation’s reality, we humans are called not to a cool, detached appraisal of the world, nor to a self-indulgent grasping of it, but to a delighted exploration and exposition, in which respect and enjoyment go together.”

“Love means not just allowing others to be themselves but relishing them as being themselves, as being both other than ourselves and other than our initial hopes and expectations of them.”

Read the full article here:
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2020/02/loving-to-know