In my group Bible-study experience, the question of Jesus's omniscience comes up often. There are places in the gospels where He seems not to know things he could if he were indeed God. He even says so about the timing of the last days, and has to ask in the crowd "Who touched my garment?"
The omnipotence of God is a greater emotional and logical barrier for people. There is always The Problem of Evil which looks to many to be incompatible with the existence of an omnipotent God. CS Lewis thought it was better to look at this as The Problem of Good. Why does good exist?
But Jesus's omniscience is less emotional a topic even if it is just as much a puzzle. Jesus says to Nathanael "I saw you under the fig tree," and knows where the disciples will find an ass in Jerusalem, but not those things mentioned above. It seems contradictory. I have mentioned before that some of His words suggest that he knows things as he sees them but not before, as parents can see in a children's game "The only way that ends is if someone stops it or someone gets hurt," but magnified a thousand times. This would explain people coming up and saying things that surprise him but he responds perfectly. Until the centurion comes up he does not know a centurion is coming. Once the man speaks, he reads the situation instantly.
Yet even that does not get around the contradiction above. This week in class the instructor used a metaphor I had not heard before but makes sense to me. We are studying Luke, and he has noted that whenever that gospel mentions that Jesus prayed, it signals a change in the ministry. They fit under the general category of an unfolding of the ministry rather than a change of direction. He contrasted this with being able to dip into his source of omniscience for answers, relying instead on listening to the Spirit. The latter seems to be superior, but as with other abilities, Jesus shows that he is able to be omniscient, in order that we might believe. He has omniscience available to him, but chooses to limit himself and not use it.
In all likelihood this is is some heresy that was fought over in the first few centuries and resulted in a particular line in the Athanasian Creed that I never paid much attention to. But until I hear otherwise, I'm sticking with this explanation of omniscience as something that Jesus had available, but chose not to use.
It would imply that we should do the same, relying on the Spirit. That doesn't make trying to figure things out a sin, and consulting with wise others is even better, but pray and fasting are best of all.
5 comments:
I think Jesus must have enjoyed the humility consequent upon the Incarnation. What a relief, not always having to be the smartest guy in the room.
If it's a heresy it's not one I'm familiar with, and one a Catholic priest with
his own radio show has proclaimed without being called on the carpet: Jesus in his humanity was willing to only know what it pleased the Father to show Him--just as we.
His prayer in the Garden is similar ("My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me. Yet not as I will, but as You will" Matthew 26:39).
Miscellaneous thoughts:
This sort of problem may be part of the motivation for a number of gnostic Christologies, in which Christ was a flat-out spirit, never incarnate, who possessed the merely human Jesus. In that system, Christ is omniscient, Jesus is not, no problem.
The other gnostic approach is the Docetic one, in which Jesus was never really incarnate, but toured Judea for thrity-odd eyars as an apparition people were fooled into thinking was a man, and his apparent ignorance was just as much an act as the rest of it.
And, yeah, there are clauses in the Creeds aimed at those ideas, e.g. the "truly man" bits.
Arian Christianity didn't have this problem either. In their system, Christ is a creature, albeit the first and highest, and maybe only the Father is really completely omniscient.
In her director's notes for "The Man Born to Be King," Dorothy L. Sayers remarks that she thinks it impossible for us to imagine the mode of consciousness of the Incarnate Word, but, for theatrical purposes, she has written as if his "God consciousness" (or whatever term she used) was sometimes more to the front and sometimes less.
Whatever else the Incarnation means, it clearly was never anything as straightforward as depositing the entirety of the Creator into a human vessel, like a transplanted brain.
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