What it means to have knowledge of something is to be able to "place" it in its proper context in the world; to comprehend its structure, its functions, its relationships with other creatures like it and those different from it; and ultimately its relationship to God who made it and governs it by his law. Students learn through being inquisitive, wondering, imagining, exploring, questioning. These activities have a purpose as they seek to come to know something of the world.
Who is it that knows? What is it about a person that enables their knowing? We could consider that knowing is a function of the "mind." We think, we analyse, we examine things with the mind, and then when the mind has finished its task, we consider that we "know" something. And the influence of Western Christian tradition means that we consider the Fall into sin something which affected the "will" but not the "mind." This means then that we consider it possible to arrive at the "truth" about something through use of the mind.
The Greeks considered the mind as the organ of knowledge. For them reason was a god-like quality which human beings possessed, and that through the use of the mind they were able to use to discover the truth of the world around them. But in Biblical terms, we do not know with a mind or with the reason. In fact, there is nothing in the Bible that suggests that there is such a thing as the mind or the reason. Rather, in terms of our chart of the functional aspects of creation, there is an action of minding or reasoning.
Many of our problems arise because we have considered these aspects of our existence as entities rather than functions, nouns rather than verbs. Reasoning is something we do, it is not something that happens within our reason. This then brings us to the crucial point in all this: knowing is an act of the whole person. We cannot know in the mind alone, in the reason alone, and leave the rest of our being unaffected. It is the whole person that knows, not a part. Thus there is no way we can be dissociated from our knowing.
Who we are, how we feel, where we are, why we are there, and so on, are all part of the knowing process, because it is we who know, and we cannot be divorced or dissociated from our particular location in time and place and emotional state when we are in the process of knowing. It is thus I who know, and not just a part of me. And because I as a person am a creature of God, a sinner and a redeemed new creation, that also affects me as a knower, because it is me as a creature, a sinner and a new creation, who knows. There is an inherent, intrinsic, inescapable relationship between who I am and my knowing.
Thus knowing is not a rational, analytical process unrelated to faith. As it is I who believe, and not a part of me, and as it is I who know, and not a part of me, so then it is me as a believing person who knows, and it is me as a knowing person who believes. Knowledge is not an abstract, objective analysis and description of a reality outside of us and independent of us. So knowing is not simply apprehending information, not simply acquiring facts and skills, it is the development, the maturing, the enriching of the whole person through deepening their relationship with the world around them.
And it is impossible to know the world and ourselves truly apart from a true relationship with God, since to assume otherwise is to presume that we can know the world truly without knowing the God who made it and constantly upholds it and orders it by his Word. To assume that is to distort our knowing by denying the most fundamental truth about the world, and from there to distort everything we claim we know about it. We cannot know the things of the world as if they were things in themselves, Kant’s "Ding an sich," because there is no such thing as a "thing in itself." Everything in the world exists only in relationship to God who made it, and in relationship to every other thing God made, because every thing stands together with every other thing under the one, unified law-order established by God for the whole creation.
And if all truth is in Christ [John 14:6], and if by him the whole creation was formed and in him it holds together [Colossians 1:16-17], then there is no possibility of knowing the truth of the world unless we are in right relationship with Christ. Truth does not stand independently of human beings, it does not stand independently of God: truth is in God in Christ, and to know the truth is to be in right relationship with Christ. Outside of that relationship, that personal knowing, there is no truth. Truth is not an objective realm of facts that exists somewhere that we have to grasp hold of; truth is only ever found in personal relationship. It does not exist in and of itself, and to know the truth is to be personally involved with that which we know the truth of.
Knowing in Biblical terms is not something that you think but something that you do. We are not called to hold knowledge in our minds, but to live in accordance with the truth, that is, in right relationship to God.