Jesus and omniscience (in honour of Roger Forster)

Here are some of the answers I've given when I've been asked about how Jesus in his humanity relates to aspects of his divinity.

Omniscience and God

A question that will arise in this post is this: does God have any power to veil any of the future of our world from his own view? Or does omniscience always dictate this? We'll come back to that. But let's start with Jesus of Nazareth,

Omniscience and Jesus of Nazareth

In his time on earth, were the faculties of Jesus’ divine nature fully conscious of his human nature?

Yes, we can believe that the faculties of Jesus’ divine nature were fully conscious of his human nature. More on that further below.

Does it automatically follow that Jesus' human nature was fully conscious of everything he knew in his divine nature?

No, it does not necessarily follow that his human nature was fully conscious of all that he could know in his divine nature. 

Did Jesus' divine mind forget everything it had ever known? No. Can Jesus' human consciousness draw on it? That's asking the right question.

Let's explore this. We rightly expect that Jesus' human nature while on earth was as limited as our human nature, for example in the scope of human awareness. (Although within this, he went further. He knew his heavenly Father in a way we do not. But I don't want to get too much off the topic.)

So, can Jesus' human consciousness draw upon his divine mind? And can he choose to leave knowledge veiled, like in his human unconscious faculties, so to speak? 

Think about Jesus. As a human Jesus, like you, multi-tasked with staying alive while not being consciously physically aware of everything his body was doing (you are pumping blood round your body, breaking your food down to send nutrition round your body, without you having a never-ending conscious thought about it every second). And on a more psychological level, like you, Jesus would have had levels of consciousness of which he would naturally be unaware much of the time. This isn’t just a view of modern psychology but of the Bible: "The purposes of a man's heart are deep waters, but a man of understanding draws them out" (Proverbs 20:5). Jesus was like this.

So we suggest that Jesus, in his human experience, could have related to His divine nature as he would have related to those "deep waters" of his own unconscious mind so to speak: "The purposes of a man's heart are deep waters, but a man of understanding draws them out".

(By the way, Jesus reading God’s word (in the Old Testament) would have an obvious means to draw on this side of his identity, and I see passages where Jesus takes the words of YHWH and uses them of himself, and I can read them in that light.)

Human consciousness does not comprehend the infinity of the divine mind. As he was made just like us, it was surely impossible for Jesus's limited human consciousness to apprehend the limitless scope of his divine mind. This is very much at the heart of the incarnation. This meant Jesus from childhood could grow intellectually, as we must do.

In any case it was surely unnecessary for Jesus to know at the level of his human consciousness all that his divine nature was doing just as it was unnecessary for him to know the rate at which blood was pumping round his body, etc. Jesus was one person growing, learning as one of us, without being aware in his human consciousness of exactly what his body was doing in terms of his human heart rate or the work of his gut bacteria every second of the day, or fully conscious in terms of his divine capacity.

In the flesh

Jesus' humanity was the temple of his divinity. They are joined, just as heaven and earth are joined.

When you stand on the seashore with water lapping your toes, are you on land or in the sea? Answer: both, because that is where these places overlap. So it is with heaven and earth, which meet in the temple, according to the Bible. So it is with Jesus, being both human and divine. His humanity was the temple of his divinity. If it sounded like I was saying that Jesus was in heaven and earth at the same time, that wouldn't be too far off.

In ancient Jerusalem, in the Holy of Holies, the temple was in heaven and earth at the same time, and God is in both at the same time. The temple was the meeting place of heaven and earth. Like the man standing on the seashore, so on land and in the sea at the same time, thus it is with heaven and earth. In ancient Israel, the idea of God being in more than one place at once, would not have been controversial. It was the worldview of the Jews who worshipped at the temple.

Jesus, says the New Testament, is the new temple. Heaven and earth meet in his body. At the same time, his humanity was the temple of his divinity. 

In ancient Israel, prayers went to heaven through God’s presence in the temple – the Jews prayed facing towards the temple. Heaven and earth were joined together in the Holy of Holies. That is why they did this. Of course, Jesus' followers transferred these beliefs to him: he is the true temple, and we pray to God through him; in him is God’s presence.

John 1:14 says "ho logos sarx egeneto" traditionally rendered in English as "the Word became flesh".  John's epistles add clarification. They function almost like commentaries on the main themes of his gospel. 1 John 4:2 says "Jesus Christ came in the flesh". The Greek is "en sarki" ("in flesh"). This is no accident. Indeed it is repeated in 2 John 7 which speaks of "Jesus Christ coming in the flesh". The Greek again is "en sarki" ("in flesh").  The meaning of “become flesh” is that the Word added human nature to his divine nature.

But at a more basic level, we can also recognise a familiar way for early Christians to speak. For 2 Corinthians 5:1-8 speaks of our own bodies as something we inhabit. It mentions "the earthly tent we live in" in which "we groan" while we long "to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling". It sums up this human condition by saying in verse 6, "while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord". (A similar idea is in Philippians 1:21-24.) We are not just flesh in these verses. Our body is something we are "clothed" in, and we inhabit it. 

So it should not be too difficult to think of the Word being in flesh.

 

Omniscience and forgetting and remembering 

"Who has known the mind of the Lord?" (1 Corinthians 2:16).

If one were to suppose that God is always conscious of all of the facts of the universe, the latest count of every tin can in the world etc - this is how some people seem to contemplate God's omniscience - that would mean God is really also still thinking about all our forgiven sins all the time, even though he has actually told us that, "I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more" (Hebrews 10:17 - RSV). What a horrible thing it would be to suppose that God cannot stop thinking about all our moments of sin just when we are before him enjoying the embrace of his love, his presence. 

God deals with this. God said he would remember them no more. What God reveals to us in verses like this (see also Hebrews 8:12 and Jeremiah 31:34 for example) is that God can choose to put things out of his own mind, so he is NOT thinking about all our forgiven sins every time we pray to him for example. God does as he says: "I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more".

This should not be strange. God should be able to do what we can do and more. We humans have the ability to put things out of our minds. If we were to deny God the same ability, we make him out to be less than us! And then we make him into a grotesque God who can't stop thinking about our acts of sin! So we should let go of any such unscriptural distortions of omniscience. According to scripture God can put things out of his mind, and can remember things at will.

Omniscience doesn't control God. It's the other way round.

So God chooses to remember what he chooses to remember. So he faithfully chooses to remember his covenant with Israel (Luke 1:52) for example.

"Who has known the mind of the Lord?" (1 Corinthians 2:16). But we humans who barely know the depths of the mind of the Lord hold such firm opinions about it that are inconsistent with scripture, especially about his omniscience! Sometimes the way God's omniscience is spoken of, you'd be left wondering if an omniscient God can never stop thinking about all of Delia Smith's recipes and every McDonald's hamburger for all of eternity. Why should he do that if he had any power over his omniscience? 

Now that we know a little more of what God has revealed about his mind in scripture, we can apply this lesson to what we know of his eternal Word. In the incarnation, the eternal Word puts things out of his mind. Indeed he puts everything out of his mind when he first appears in the flesh as a baby. And so, as he grew up, "He increased in wisdom and in years" Luke 2:52.

He experienced revelation, no doubt as he read scripture that prophesied his coming, or as he heard Mary tell him about the angel's words before she conceived Jesus. In such moments imagine the resonance in his unconscious with the things put out of his consciousness. Imagine revelation erupting within his thoughts, for example reading Isaiah and recognising that he himself would be the Suffering Servant whom Isaiah foretold. So Jesus' developed in wisdom, as these things resonated deep within him. "The purposes of a man's heart are deep waters, but a man of understanding draws them out" (Proverbs 20:5). 

When Jesus (before the resurrection) said about end time events, "only the Father knows the day and time... not the son", we are in another of these moments. The incarnate Son is only going to know in his consciousness what the Father wants him to be conscious of. So the wonderful thing is that although much greater knowledge is there deep in Jesus' unconscious, he is obedient to the Father and he will not pull it out, having already put it out of his conscious mind. The eternal Word in the bosom of the Father has put such things out of his mind. In this way, Jesus is like his Father who, according to scripture, can put things out of his own mind: "I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more".

Jesus' consciousness at death

God vividly experienced what was happening in the death of a man on the cross. Two natures interacted. Jesus is of two natures, but not two parts, so it wouldn't be right to say the 'human part' dies and the 'divine part' lives because he is a unity, not two parts. The two natures are married as one. The divine nature is immortal, the human nature is mortal (especially because the wages of sin is death, and Jesus bore the wages of our sin - death). How did the two natures interact? God vividly experienced it.

It won't do so suggest, as some do, that the divine Word did not undergo this experience and that a totally separate being died (such a saying would be akin to the heresy of Cerinthus). 

The truth is easily shown from scripture. In John 15:13 Jesus says, "No one has greater love than this, that one should lay down his life for his friends." (Darby translation). 

No one has greater love than the love of Jesus laying down his life for us. 

If one were to hold that Jesus is not God, then that forces on scripture an interpretation in which the self-sacrificing Jesus showed greater love than God is capable of. That would be a theological problem. What a perverse view of God that would be. Only the death of God's incarnation answers this problem: God truly experienced in himself the death of a man on the cross. This is not patripassianism, because what I am talking about is a person of the Trinity, the Son, and the empathy that the Father has for his son.

This dovetails with the Christian of whether a Christian, alive in the Spirit, is conscious after death in an intermediate state. I'll deal with that in a separate post, as it is worth a separate post. 

Red herrings

In the context of this subject, people have brought up about Jesus learning obedience, and ask why. (Hebrews 5:8) Why would he need to learn anything? And some go even further and assume that learning obedience means Jesus learning his way out of disobedience. We can dismiss that as a misunderstanding. Rather, Jesus is all the time learning instructions and obeying them, like a student to a master, like an acolyte rising in steps. This is what it means to learn obedience. It is like training. It is training. Not like learning his way out of disobedience.

Some ask, if he is omniscient, how come the Son of God has to receive a revelation in Revelation 1:1? This is even more of a red herring, as I explain here.

Knowing the time of the end: Mark 13:32 / Matthew 24:26

What about Mark 13:32 / Matthew 24:36? "But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son,[f] but only the Father." Let's answer first regarding Jesus, then the Holy Spirit.

Jesus

As already said, Jesus of Nazareth was closed off from some knowledge while on earth.

This verse reveals what can be veiled from his consciousness for the purposes of his mission on earth. Jesus has the Spirit without limit, and this is the Spirit of the Father, and there is nothing that the Spirit of the Father lacks. (John 3:34; 1 Cor 2:11; Matt 10:20) Having the Spirit without limit, he could choose to know. Or he choose to leave it veiled. But he sticks to his mission, that of being made like us. 

In principle, Jesus can potentially know all things because he has the Spirit without limit. As 1 Cor 2:11 for example says, "no-one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God." The Spirit knows the Father's thoughts. And Jesus has the Spirit without limit, so he could know all things unless his consciousness be veiled. As Colossians 2:3 speaks of him: "Christ in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge." That's all knowledge, all in Christ.

Having the Spirit without limit, he has both the power and the ability to choose to know. The Holy Spirit is God's unlimited power, and as for Jesus - he is called the Power of God and, as it says, he has the Spirit without limit.  (Interesting to note: 'Spirit without limit' is ontological. Knowledge is functional, something that God has control over, not the other way round.)  So not knowing the time of the end is about what is veiled from his consciousness for the purposes of his mission on earth. So, Jesus sticks to his mission with no compromise. It remains veiled from his consciousness in his mode of mission.

This can go further still. Jesus and the Father (and the Spirit) are mutually indwelling. The Father's level of omniscience is the standard touchstone (although that omniscience doesn't subsist, I would argue, without the Spirit's role - see below). And as Jesus is in his Father in a unique way, and vice versa, that makes a difference to Jesus' access to omniscience too. And as Jesus says more specifically, all that belongs to the Father belongs to Jesus. What the Father knows is therefore always potentially accessible to Jesus, without limit again. All in all, it is difficult to deny Jesus rightful access to omniscience. Where we see something different, it comes down to what is veiled in the incarnation. There's access, and there is veiling. It's about the incarnation.

The Holy Spirit

But does the Holy Spirit know all things? The very being of the Father cannot exclude the Spirit of the Father. It is his own Spirit. Pushing "only the Father knows" to extremes would be a bit irrational. If the Father knows, the Spirit of the Father knows. They are indivisible, and it goes without saying. 

As I said, we should not push "alone" to extremes. For example, does the Lord 'alone' being holy in Rev 15:4 mean the Son is unholy? Of course not. "Only" does not exclude Jesus here. We shouldn't press "only" to the point of treating it like binary computer code. In a less striking example, does Jesus being described as 'alone' in John 8:9 mean the woman wasn't there? Of course not. The text doesn't actually say he was "alone with" her but it obviously means that. And only the accusers are said to have left; the witnessing crowd aren't said to have left. "Only" doesn't exclude the woman and the crowd. As I say, we shouldn't think the Bible speaks like binary computer code. It speaks with the fluency of human language. 

In summary, the Father knows the time of the end to the extent it is knowable (see below), and consequently the Spirit of the Father knows, but it's veiled from Jesus' own consciousness to honour his mode of mission, which had not fully run its course yet.

Addendum on this passage in Mark and Matthew

There is something else misunderstood about this verse which is worth mentioning. 

People assume from this verse that the Father already knew the time of the end, of the eschaton, and they contrast this with Jesus not knowing. But look closely.  

To suppose simplistically that the Father already knew the time of the end ignores that the Father is holding back from deciding when the end will come, and he urges us to help make the time of the end sooner rather than later. That's what 2 Peter 3:9-12 says. God has determined that there will be such an occasion, but Peter prevents us from thinking foolishly that the date of the occasion has been set. (You get something similar from Paul in Acts.) Peter only confirms that there will be such an occasion, and that the date is unfixed, and that we can help make that date sooner rather than later.

If one were to suppose that Jesus was saying that the Father actually did know a set time, would that be Jesus having an off day? 

What then did Jesus mean? It's not difficult to read the text as Jesus' own way of saying that the decision about the timing (the yet-to-be-decided timing) was under the Father's authority, and no-one else's authority. But that doesn't commit the Father to knowing when that will be yet. And it means that Jesus was not saying that he lacked knowledge of a fixed date that was known to the Father. So that assertion falls. It was deferring the question to where the authority lay. Jesus was only expressing his 'functional subordination' to the Father which is common ground for Trinitarians and non-Trinitarians.

So this is nor really about omniscience. But, as already said, Jesus was closed off from some knowledge. (Also see footnote 1 below.) Jesus had to wait to have full knowledge because he was made flesh, he had to be made just like his brothers as the scripture says, so while he was with us on earth it was appropriate for him to relate to the Father as one made flesh. It's only prior to the resurrection that Jesus operated within human limitations.  After the resurrection we see him in his glorified state. The omniscience of the resurrected Son is asserted by John 21:17 "Lord, thou knowest all things".

Some might say "surely God would know anyway?" But that owes more to Greek conceptions of perfection than to the Biblical God. God in the Bible is not portrayed quite like that. 

Some people think of omniscience as if it were something that just happens to God, something that God has no control over. Omniscience afflicts him. As if God has no choice, no way to stop thinking about the latest count of tin cans, Hamburgers and sins. This is hardly an adequate view of God. God chooses. God will be what God will be. God chooses to know as God chooses to know. If God chooses to search hearts – or not to search hearts – it is his prerogative. If God chooses to look upon evil, it is his prerogative. If God chooses to remember your sins no more – or to remember them – it is his prerogative. God can choose to veil things from his thoughts. God calls to his mind whatever he wills, he searches what he wills, he looks upon what he wills. God is self-controlled. He will be what he will be. The idea of a God who would know without any choice in the matter, is the God of Greek philosophy. The Father and the Son both choose to know and remember whatever they wish. Of course people may want a God who isn't like that, but they may not get it.

Greek philosophy influenced the classical idea of God, in which God is effectively subordinate to omniscience in some of the clumsiest versions of the doctrine. It is based on ancient Greek ideas of perfection. The classical God has to have knowledge of the number of tin cans at the bottom of the ocean at every moment in history for all eternity. He has no choice in the matter. He may not need to know, but he is subordinate to omniscience.

Again God may want to forget your sins, to see the spotless white robes provided by the Lamb of God. But the classical philosophical God, even as he listens to the prayers of the most holy saint, is unable to shake off the impression of the saint's former sins. These scarlet sins are ever before the eyes of this kind of omniscient God, because he is subordinate to omniscience. The saint lovingly uttering, 'Abba Father,' faces a God who is still visualising him in sin. This is the omniscient God of Greek philosophy. It is not, thankfully, the Biblical God. 

Conclusions

I've tried to avoid technical terms such as partitive exegesis, which means an interpretative approach designed to discern the different 'registers' as to Christ's human and divine natures as observed in Scripture. So, in my plainer language, these are my main points:

The Biblical God is in command of his own faculties. He can choose to 'remember your sins no more,' because he is not subordinate to omniscience. Omniscience is subject to the love of God.

So, the Biblical God can put things out of his mind, veil things from his thoughts. The Biblical God has choice. He is not forced by omniscience to keep count. If God wants to count something or remember something, it is so out of love, not out of slavery to omniscience.

The Biblical God is embodied in Jesus of Nazareth who could veil things from his mind. In this state, Jesus could have things revealed to him by his Father. Just like the Father can veil his mind from our sins or remember them.

The 'classical' God of philosophy cannot do these things. This is the Biblical God. He's better than the classical God.

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This post is dedicated to the memory of the late Roger Forster, by whom I was so graciously and charitably tutored, and to whom I owe the best of these insights. As for the rest of it, all the stuff of a lower standard, is down to me.

On issues of divine omniscience and foreknowledge, Roger was happy to dialogue with theologians who hold to the Open View of God, such as Greg Boyd, without nailing his colours to that mast. For Roger's views, please see his work in God's Strategy in Human History. Roger opens the question of whether an omnipotent God can choose to veil the future from his own eyes so as to enable true relationship with free-will beings he has created.

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Footnote 1: Jehovah's Witnesses and the foreknowledhge of God 

We have seen that Trinitarians can say that Jesus is closed off from some knowledge. By a curious coincidence, there is a Watchtower teaching that Jehovah is closed off from some knowledge. Their Watchtower teaches that:

1) Jehovah chooses not to know some things, thus limiting his foreknowledge of the future (“Foreknowledge, Foreordination,” Insight on the Scriptures Vol. 1, pg 851-860; 1988);

2) Jehovah gains knowledge from his information-gathering angels (Watchtower, 1^st August 1970, pg 471);

3) Jehovah did not foreknow the fall of Adam and Eve (Watchtower, 1^st June 1953, pg 341).

This view of foreknowledge is precisely the sort of thing people say about Jesus. Any suggestion from Jehovah's Witnesses that that makes ‘Jesus’ less than ‘Jehovah’, therefore falls away.

Further reading:

A fascinating article on Ambrose's views on the Son knowing the day and the hour: https://www.readreflectwrite.com/2021/06/ambrose-nicene-defense-of-jesus-not.html