 Yes, I've been thinking about modes of knowing how we know things for a long time, partly because I was trained early on as a philosopher. And I've come to the view that though the word love is a very floppy word in the English language and you can actually describe different kinds of love and people have done that, it's a useful overall title for what I think ought to be going on with all knowing. Because all genuine knowing, unless it's just solipsistic, that is imagining I'm knowing something but in fact only knowing the inside of my own head. All knowing is knowledge of something, whether it's a book or a tree or an animal or particularly another human being or dare I say even God. And in order to be sure that it is knowledge of whatever we are trying to know, we have to give the other the space. Sometimes I pick up a book imagining it's going to be one particular kind of book. And sometimes after a page or two I realize, oh, I thought this was a history book and it's actually a novel or possibly the other way around. And sometimes you walk into the wrong bit of an art gallery and you thought these were going to be paintings of one sort and it takes you a moment or two to look at them and realize, oh no, they're actually quite different. We have to allow the different things to impinge on us and to say no, actually I'm like this and this is of course particularly so in human relationships. Humans are very mysterious beings and the more we get to know somebody, often the more surprises there are partly because we hide from one another for social and cultural reasons and we only really reveal more depths of who we are to people that we trust, people that we think will not exploit or hurt us. Although of course that then does often happen, not least in intimate relationships. And that's why love is a mode of knowing because it simultaneously affirms the otherness and the rightness of the other. Doesn't mean that everything the other person does is right, but they have the right to be themselves as it were rather than be imposed on by me. But it's not just objective. It's not just, oh well I see you the other side of the street and I acknowledge you. Love is a way of saying I engage with you, I enjoy engaging with you. This gives me delight because you are not the same as me and I'm not going to try and make you after my own image. And so this is a mode of knowing, a way of describing a mode of knowing which is both simultaneously engaging oneself and affirming the other. And over against the old dichotomy between subjective knowledge and objective knowledge, love is a way of holding those together. And then in the New Testament we find Paul saying that love is the ultimate mode of knowing God. Paul says if one loves God, one is known by him and various other passages as well, where in 1 Corinthians 13 famously Paul says now abide faith and hope and love these three, but the greatest of these is love. And I think Paul had reflected long and hard on the way in which we are drawn out of ourselves when we are loving God, when we are loving one another, but at the same time we find ourselves, we discover ourselves. Love is both gloriously objective and wonderfully subjective. And we maybe don't have very good ways of expressing that, but I hope this is coming across. And then as we'll see in the second part of this course, I have argued in chapter six of history and eschatology that there is kind of another dimension to this, because with the resurrection of Jesus, what is going on is God the Creator affirming in love the goodness of the original creation by saying, I know that this creation of mine has been spoiled and is subject to decay and death, but I am reaffirming it. And belief in the resurrection of Jesus is therefore a new kind of knowing of love, because it is a response of love to the act of love in the raising of Jesus. So that I have argued in the book that knowing that Jesus was risen, was raised from the dead is as it were a special heightened version of the epistemology of love. All are knowing ought to be about knowing and loving, but knowing that Jesus was raised from the dead is the response of love to the act of love on the part of God the Creator.