I have spoken before about what Christ knew as a man and yet questions remain. There is no way that we can absolutely penetrate this issue. Why is it important? Particularly for those of us who pursue an active intellectual life, living largely in our heads, this matter touches the depths of our own sense of identity. What we know and believe largely defines us and our place in the human family. The operations of the human soul, knowing and willing, speak to our appreciation of faith and our convictions— separating us from animals and machines.
As a pastor of souls, I have also accompanied families in their dealing with aging relatives suffering from Alzheimer’s and other ailments of the mind. Families confessed to losing loved ones, not all at once, but a little at a time. Eventually they must deal with loving someone who does not even know his or her name. It is our firm confidence that the soul retains that which escapes the grasp of physical brains. We hope that one day we will be restored body and spirit— sharing something of Christ’s resurrection.
I mention this, because I firmly believe that if we and the world forget— God will never forget. This is very pertinent to Christ because when as a man he is most vulnerable on the Cross, as God he is the most powerful in offering himself for each of us by name. Jesus knows us better than we know ourselves. Such is the wonder and necessity of his divine knowledge.
Christ possesses both his divine and human intellect. Further, as the new Adam, he would claim what our primordial parents had lost— an infused science that complements experiential knowing. Further, he always enjoys the beatific vision. As a divine person, Christ knows all things. His conceptual knowledge could not expand because it was already infinite. While the general awareness of Christ is unbounded, his experiential knowledge is mysteriously shielded or preserved. When he walked the earth as one of us, his human experiential knowledge came through his physical senses. While his divine knowing and infused knowledge were always a part of him, in his humanity he could ask questions (see John 18:4 and John 6:5-6).
Variations of Gnosticism plagued the early high Christology of the Church. Docetism was a heresy that Jesus was fully divine but only appeared or pretended to be human. Monothelitism also stressed the divinity of Christ but denied he had a human will, just a divine will. Apollinarianism reduced Jesus’ body to a shell for his divinity, with no human soul (and thus no human mind and will). Others would assault the identity of Christ from the perspective of a low Christology, viewing Jesus more as a creature than the Creator: Nestorians (viewing Mary as the “mother of the man” but not as the Bearer of God) and Arians (defining Jesus as a spiritual demiurge but not truly divine). All these false roads also espouse an erroneous psychology in the Lord.
The business about Christ’s identity and awareness is still explored and often gotten wrong, particularly in films, television, and popular books. The novels about Jesus from the late Anne Rice appealed to the apocryphal and were dangerously shallow in trying to speak from Jesus’ perspective. Her Jesus was neither omniscient nor omnipotent. He was liable to error and was more human than divine. As a corrective, we have the life of Christ given us by the late Pope Benedict XVI. He writes in regard to the finding of Jesus in the temple:
On the one hand, the answer of the twelve-year-old made it clear that he knew the Father— God— intimately. Only he knows God, not merely through the testimony of men, but he recognizes him in himself. Jesus stands before the Father as Son, on familiar terms. He lives in his presence. He sees him. As Saint John says, Jesus is the only one who rests in the Father’s heart and is therefore able to make him known (cf. Jn 1: 18). This is what the twelve-year-old’s answer makes clear: he is with the Father, he sees everything and everyone in the light of the Father. And yet it is also true that his wisdom grows. As a human being, he does not live in some abstract omniscience, but he is rooted in a concrete history, a place and a time, in the different phases of human life, and this is what gives concrete shape to his knowledge. So it emerges clearly here that he thought and learned in human fashion. It becomes quite apparent that he is true man and true God, as the Church’s faith expresses it. The interplay between the two is something that we cannot ultimately define. (Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, p. 127)
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