Loving to Know
Ordo Amoris, #2
“So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” 1Corinthians 13:13.
As we continue to explore the principle of 'ordo amoris', we move from its biblical and historical development, explored in Part I, to its theological foundations and practical implications. The Anglican emphasis on rightly ordered love, which we traced from Genesis 3 to Augustine and into the English Reformation, finds its ultimate justification in the nature of God himself and in our capacity to know him. As I’ll explain below, we are told in 1 John and elsewhere in Scripture that God can be known only if we love rightly (1 John 4:7-12). Why must we love to know God?
BEGINNING WITH GOD
Without question, the knowledge of God is unlike the knowledge we have of created things. This is because, from a Christian perspective, God is not a solitary being – set apart from other, lesser beings and communicating knowledge of himself as one being would to another. Rather, the Triune God is, to quote the apostle Paul, the one in whom “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). God is creator of all that exists; he cannot be found among the objects of creation. C.S. Lewis addresses this theme often. On page 24 of Mere Christianity, he puts it like this:
If there was a controlling power outside the universe, it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe – no more than the architect of a house could actually be a wall or staircase or fireplace in that house.1
GOD IS INCOMPREHENSIBLE
The God of Christian faith is beyond being. Because he transcends all that exists, God can never be known in the way that objects of creation can be known. As Augustine of Hippo and others insisted, a “comprehended God is no God at all.”2 Consider this small sampling of supporting passages.
Isaiah 55:8-9 "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," declares the Lord. "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts."
Job 11:7-9 "Can you fathom the mysteries of God? Can you probe the limits of the Almighty? They are higher than the heavens above—what can you do? They are deeper than the depths below—what can you know? Their measure is longer than the earth and wider than the sea."
Romans 11:33-34 "Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out! Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor?"
1 Timothy 6:15-16 "God, the blessed and only Ruler, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see. To him be honor and might forever. Amen."
Deuteronomy 29:29 "The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law."
Psalm 145:3 "Great is the Lord and most worthy of praise; his greatness no one can fathom."
Ecclesiastes 3:11 "He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end."
Job 36:26 "How great is God—beyond our understanding! The number of his years is past finding out."
1 Corinthians 2:11 "For who knows a person's thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God."
Exodus 33:20 "But," he said, "you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live."
Isaiah 45:15 "Truly you are a God who has been hiding himself, the God and Savior of Israel."
Colossians 2:2-3 "My goal is that they may be encouraged in heart and united in love, so that they may have the full riches of complete understanding, in order that they may know the mystery of God, namely, Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge."
Job 26:14 "And these are but the outer fringe of his works; how faint the whisper we hear of him! Who then can understand the thunder of his power?"
Psalm 139:6 "Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain."
Romans 1:20 "For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse."
1 Kings 8:27 "But will God really dwell on earth? The heavens, even the highest heaven, cannot contain you. How much less this temple I have built!"
Psalm 92:5 "How great are your works, Lord, how profound your thoughts!"
Isaiah 40:28 "Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom."
Job 37:5 "God's voice thunders in marvelous ways; he does great things beyond our understanding."
Proverbs 25:2 "It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; to search out a matter is the glory of kings."
God's transcendence and incomprehensibility are so important in the Old Testament, that these attributes are enscribed in His name – Yahweh. This name, revealed to Moses at the burning bush, carries profound theological significance. When Moses asks for God's name, God responds with the enigmatic phrase "I AM WHO I AM" (Exodus 3:14). This self-revelation simultaneously conveys God's inscrutability and His reliability. The divine name YHWH is derived from the “to be” of verse 14. Notably, many scholars prefer to translate YHWH as “I will be who I will be” to emphasize the fact that God promises to make himself known through his covenant faithfulness – his hesed or ‘steadfast love.’3
On one hand, the name YHWH emphasizes God's transcendence and mystery. It suggests that God's nature is beyond full human comprehension – He simply is who He is, defying categorization or definition. This sets the God of Israel apart from the deities of surrounding cultures, who were often associated with specific natural phenomena or human-like characteristics. Thus, there were Gods of fertility, war, rain, etc. On the other hand, the name also implies God's immanence and faithfulness. By identifying himself as the eternally present “I AM," God assures Moses (and by extension, all believers) of His constant presence and unwavering commitment, His steadfast love. The name suggests that God will always be there, faithful to His promises and actively involved in human history. This is the God of covenant faithfulness. Although we can never master YHWH, our call is to be mastered by him Who is the Lord of all.
This dual nature of God's self-revelation – mysterious yet trustworthy – stands in stark contrast to the practices of divination common in the Ancient Near East. Unlike pagan deities who could be manipulated through rituals or incantations, Yahweh cannot be controlled or fully comprehended by human beings. Instead, He calls for trust and obedience. The giving of the divine name thus serves as a foundation for the third commandment, which prohibits taking God's name in vain. To misuse God's name would be to presume a level of familiarity or control over God that humans do not possess. It would be an attempt to reduce the infinite, incomprehensible God to a mere tool for human ambitions.
In essence, God's revelation to Moses establishes a paradigm for how humans are to relate to the divine – with a mixture of awe at His mystery and confidence in His faithfulness. This invites us into a relationship with God that is based not on our ability to fully grasp or manipulate him, but on our willingness to trust and follow the one who is both beyond our understanding and intimately involved, governing us and all things for good.
This understanding of God's incomprehensibility is not at odds with the concept of 'ordo amoris' that we explored in Part I. Rather, it is precisely because God is beyond our full comprehension that the right ordering of love becomes so crucial. As we saw in Augustine's thought and its development through the English Reformation, rightly ordered love allows us to approach the incomprehensible God in a way that respects both His transcendence and immanence. It provides a path to knowing God that doesn't depend on our ability to fully grasp His nature, but on our capacity to respond to and participate in His love. I’ll explore these ideas below.
YET, GOD CAN BE KNOWN
Although incomprehensible, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is made known in a way appropriate to human, creaturely capacities, in the person of Jesus Christ. That is what the incarnation achieved, as Athanasius explains in this famous passage:
Men had turned from the contemplation of God above, and were looking for him in the opposite direction, down among created things and things of sense. The Savior of us all, the Word of God, in His great love took to himself a body and moved as Man among men, meeting their senses, so to speak, halfway. He became himself an object for the senses, so that those who were seeking God in sensible things might apprehend the Father through the works which He, the Word of God, did in the body.4
So, God came among us and dwelt in human flesh. Jesus was explicit in identifying himself with YHWH when, in John 8:58 he said, “Truly, truly I say to you, before Abraham was, I Am.” No doubt, the repeated use of “I Am” in the gospel of John communicated to the early Christians that Jesus of Nazareth discloses YHWH in a new and more tangible way. Of course, we find this truth in many other New Testament passages, such as in this small sample:
The prologue of John (1:1-18) presents Jesus as the Word (Logos) who was with God and was God from the beginning, and who "became flesh and made his dwelling among us" (v.14). Verse 18 explicitly states, "No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known."
In Colossians 1:15-20, Paul describes Jesus as "the image of the invisible God" (v.15) and states that "in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell" (v.19).
Hebrews 1:1-3 contrasts God's previous revelations with the revelation in Christ: "In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son... The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being" (v.1-3).
In John 14:9, Jesus tells Philip, "Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father."
In Matthew 11:27, Jesus says, "No one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him."
In 2 Corinthians 4:6, Paul writes, "For God, who said, 'Let light shine out of darkness,' made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God's glory displayed in the face of Christ."
God came among us and dwelt in human flesh. Thus, like grasping the ocean in our hands, the incomprehensible God was heard, seen, and touched, though the fullness of God remained utterly beyond our grasp. So how might we describe the kind of revealed knowledge of God that the resurrected Jesus imparts, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to those who love him?5[v]
As we turn to Scripture to answer this question, we find that the biblical witness aligns closely with the ‘ordo amoris’ tradition we’ve been tracing. The Johannine literature, in particular, provides a profound exploration of the relationship between love and knowledge of God that echoes through the Anglican tradition. But before I turn to 1 John, I’d like to take a quick foray into biblical Hebrew and Greek for some insight into the biblical understanding of personal knowledge.
LOVING TO KNOW
In Hebrew, the word "yada" (ידע) includes but goes far beyond mere intellectual assent or factual awareness. It implies true knowledge gained through close relationship and familiarity. It is more than merely abstract or theoretical. When the Old Testament speaks of Adam "knowing" Eve (Genesis 4:1), or God "knowing" Israel (Amos 3:2), it conveys a deep, personal connection. In the case of Genesis 4:1, it conveys a sexual connection.
Similarly, in Greek, "ginosko" (γινώσκω) often carries connotations of true knowledge involving experience and intimate acquaintance. When Jesus says "I know my sheep and my sheep know me" (John 10:14), he's not simply stating that he has information about his followers or they him. Rather, he's describing a mutual, relational knowing rooted in apprehension of lived experience and loving interaction.
The biblical understanding of knowledge challenges our modern tendency to separate head from heart, or theory from practice. In the Bible, truly knowing God involves our whole being - intellect, emotions, and will. It's a transformative encounter that shapes not just what we think, but how we live and love. As such, "yada" and "ginosko" offer linguistic support for the principle of ordo amoris, which prioritizes rightly ordered love as the path to genuine knowledge of God. And now back to 1 John.
I asked above, “how might we describe the kind of revealed knowledge of God that the resurrected Jesus imparts, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to those who love him? We find an answer in 1 John 4:8-12, which reads as follows:
Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.
Throughout 1 John, knowing and loving go hand in hand. Remember, Augustine defines love as that which unites us to the object of our affection. In the passage above, God first unites us to himself through the love poured out on the cross. Accepting that love and returning it with gratitude, we become in the words of Ashley Null, “right willed” and God becomes an “object of our affection.” For that reason, according to John, God abides in us as “his love is perfected in us.” We must admit that becoming “right willed” does not suggest becoming righteous and does not suggest that our will becomes entirely pure. We agree with Article 11 of the Thirty-Nine Articles which states:
We are accounted righteous before God, only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith, and not for our own works or deservings.
What we can say is that, a “right willed” Christian, thought not righteous, will be repentant. This is Paul’s point in Romans 7:15, when he writes, “For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” He understands and wills rightly, but the mark of sin remains even as he continues to grow and God’s love is increasingly perfected in him. That process will go on forever, I assume. Though we can agree with the Reformers that we are not reconciled to God because of our own righteousness, the love of God and neighbor remains a mark of all christian disciples (John 13:35). No matter how weak our desire, grace does create in us a desire for God that leads to repentance.
Thomas Aquinas described God as ‘Ipse Actus Essendi subsistens” or the “subsisting act of being.” This means that God is not one being among others – not part of the furniture of the universe, so to speak. Following the logic of 1 John, Aquinas claimed that knowledge of God is possible and is “produced by an assimilation of the knower to the thing known, so that assimilation is said to be the cause of knowledge.” The point I’m making is that, love is assimilation to God. Love conforms us to God in and through Jesus Christ. This is why Paul could write that “faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” 1 Corinthians 13:13. Love is greatest because it “never ends” and because it constitutes the goal of redemption – our ultimate unity with God – a unity that never ends.6
CONCLUSION
The right ordering of love, as we have seen, is not merely a moral imperative or a spiritual discipline. It is the means by which God unites us to himself, enabling us to know him despite the impossibility of comprehending him. As finite creatures, we cannot fully grasp the infinite Creator. Yet, through love – God’s love for us and our responsive love for him – we are drawn into a transformative relationship that allows us to know God from the inside, as participants in the body of Christ and therefore “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4).
This understanding of love as the key to knowing God is not a modern innovation, but a profound truth that has been recognized and cultivated throughout Christian history, particularly within the Anglican tradition. The Book of Common Prayer, the Book of Homilies, and the Thirty-Nine Articles are not mere historical artifacts. The Anglican formularies are, in fact, carefully structured to promote the church's spiritual maturation, enabling God's love to be perfected in us and our own love to be constantly redirected towards Him and our fellow human beings. The formularies faithfully guide our reading of scripture and equip us to believe, love, and follow Jesus Christ, who is “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).
The liturgies, prayers, and doctrinal statements found in the formularies provide a structured and time-tested approach to cultivating rightly ordered love. They immerse us in Scripture, guide us in corporate and individual prayer, and articulate theological truths in ways that shape both our minds and hearts. Through regular engagement with these resources, we are formed and reformed in love, enabling us to know God more deeply and witness to him more faithfully.
In the next section, we’ll explore in greater detail how this right ordering of love is fostered through the reading of Scripture and participation in the liturgies of the Book of Common Prayer. We will examine how these practices, central to the Anglican way, were designed to serve as conduits for God’s transforming grace, facilitating the ongoing reorientation of our affections and deepening our knowledge of the incomprehensible yet self-revealing God.
Lewis, Mere Christianity, 24
The term "incomprehensible" derives from the Latin "incomprehensibilis," which literally means "that which cannot be grasped or seized." Breaking it down further, "in-" means "not," "com-" means "together," and "prehendere" means "to grasp" or "to seize." In theological discourse, when we say "God is incomprehensible," we are asserting that the divine nature cannot be fully grasped or contained by the human mind. This doesn't mean, however, that God is entirely unknowable. Rather, it suggests that while we can know God in part through his self-revelation and our experiences of him, we can never exhaust the mystery of God or master him intellectually. Like trying to hold the ocean in our hands, the disciples could touch and interact with God in Jesus Christ, but they could not contain or fully understand him.
In the NEB and the CEB bibles, this translation is listed as an option for Exodus 3:14. It is listed as an option in the footnote of my ESV and is not uncommon among Jewish and Christian bible scholars. To get ahead of ourselves here, God is known to his people, even in the Old Testament, through his steadfast love. In the New Testament, God will be known in a much deeper and more intimate way as we become participants in his steadfast love, in and through Jesus Christ and his Spirit-empowered body, the church.
Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation of the Word, 3.15.
Anglican moral theologian, Oliver O'Donovan provides a nuanced and insightful perspective on how we can know God, given his incomprehensibility yet self-revelation in Christ. O'Donovan argues that our knowledge of God is fundamentally different from our knowledge of created things, yet it is still genuine knowledge. O'Donovan begins by emphasizing that our knowledge of God must be "evangelical," rooted in the good news of Jesus Christ (chapter 1). This knowledge is not something we can attain through our own efforts or reasoning, but is a gift that comes through God's self-revelation as we hear and embrace the gospel of Jesus Christ, and all that it means. O'Donovan outlines several key characteristics of this knowledge, which I summarize in what follows. First, "it must…be knowledge of things in their relations to the totality of things. To know cosmic order is, in a sense, to know the totality of things" (p. 77-79). This doesn't mean knowing everything that exists, which is God's prerogative, but knowing what we do know as part of a meaningful totality. We must grasp the 'shape' of the whole, in so far as it gives meaning to the particular objects of our knowledge. This, incidentally, is what the ancient’s called cosmology and what the apostle John intended to convey when he referred to Jesus a the “logos.” [v]Having knowledge of God in Jesus Christ is to grasp something about the order of all things. Consider the famous description of Jesus’ preeminence from Colossians 1:15-20: “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross” (Colossians 1:15–20). Second, our knowledge of God is necessarily participatory – it is knowledge from the inside, since there is no stepping outside of God to survey him objectively. O'Donovan states, "It must be, to use in its strict sense a rather overworked term, 'existential' knowledge, which can occur only as the subject participates in what he knows.” Knowledge of the universe never takes shape at an observer's distance; it is not knowledge-by-transcendence. O’Donovan also suggests in terms reminiscent of the divine name, that “we expect scientific knowledge to ‘comprehend’ or ‘contain’ its object, whereas in this knowledge the object contains us.”[v] O’Donovan’s third point is that, our knowledge of God must be from man's position in the universe. O'Donovan explains, "Knowledge is the characteristically human way of participating in the cosmic order. Man takes his place, which is the place of 'dominion', by knowing the created beings around him in a way that they do not know him" (p. 78). This means that “the exercise of knowledge is tied up with the faithful performance of man's task in the world and that his knowing will stand or fall with his worship of God and his obedience to the moral law. We cannot speak of knowledge as belonging to man’s place in the universe without remembering that this place has not been faithfully occupied, that man has refused the role assigned him by his creator…. Knowledge will therefore be inescapably compromised by the problem of fallenness, the defacement of the image of God, and by the fallen creature's incapacity to set himself right with good will and determination” (81). Finally, our knowledge of God is limited . O’Donovan writes that “such knowledge must be ignorant of the end of history.” He explains further that "Whatever apprehension of created order may be available to disobedient man, it cannot include knowledge of the end of history. The creature must walk blindfold along the road of time, and may see only when he turns to survey that portion of the road which has already been traversed." Nevertheless, God has entered history and directed our attention to that point in history where his own goodness, power, and holiness were on full display: “The finger of God must point to the place in history where the meaning and direction of the whole is to be found, and his voice must proclaim it: ‘This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased’” (83). In summary, O'Donovan presents a vision of knowing God that is deeply rooted in the gospel, centered on the resurrection of Christ, and intimately connected with our understanding of creation and morality. This knowledge is not abstract or detached, but deeply personal and transformative, shaping not just our thoughts but our entire lives. It respects both God's transcendence and his immanence, allowing us to know him truly while acknowledging that He always remains beyond our full comprehension. O'Donovan's insights resonate deeply with the principle of 'ordo amoris.” Just as Cranmer and his contemporaries sought to reorient Christian piety around right desire, in continuity with the Augustinian tradition that persisted through the middle ages and into the English Reformation, O'Donovan emphasizes that our knowledge of God is fundamentally participatory and existential.
Romans 6:5 - "For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his." Galatians 2:20 - "I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me." Ephesians 2:21-22 - "In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit." Colossians 3:3 - "For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God."2 Corinthians 5:17 - "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!"