doctrine of Jesus” knowledge, however, a docetic-Monophysite threat was continually present and occasionally dominant.5 Pannenberg suggests that this is in part a reaction to the Arians who argued against the divinity of Jesus partly on the basis of his ignorance. As Pannenberg goes on to note, it was only the Antiochene theologians who were able to concede some ignorance on the part of Jesus; the Alexandrian tradition made sure that Jesus was omniscient. The net result is that time after time, we find that Jesus shares the divine knowledge.
Let me take two illustrations, starting with Anselm. His discussion of the knowledge of Christ is found in Cur Deus Homo, chapter 13. Under the chapter heading “It is not the case that along with our other infirmities He has ignorance” Anselm sets out his commitment to the omniscience of Jesus. Boso (his conversation partner in the dialogue) assumes that the humanity of Jesus requires ignorance. Anselm explains:
The assumption of a human nature into the unity of a divine person will be done wisely by Supreme Wisdom. And so Supreme Wisdom will not assume into its human nature that which is not all useful … to the work which this man is going to do. Now, to be sure, ignorance would be of no use to Him; instead, it would be of much harm. For without great wisdom how would He do the very numerous and very great works which He was going to do? Or how would men believe Him if they knew He was ignorant? … Furthermore, if only what is known is loved, then just as there would not be any good which He did not love, so there would not be any good which He did not know. But only one who knows how to discern good from evil has a complete knowledge of good. … Therefore, He will know everything, even though He will not publicly display all of His knowledge in His association with other men.6(See Box 2.3.)
Box 2.3
Footnote 6 is interesting. The author quotes Anselm (and provides the source of the Anselm quote). However, the author then expands the footnote to a secondary source that reinforces the significance of the quotation from a scholar of Anselm. The author found Daniel Deme’s recent discussion of Anselm’s Christology helpful (and 2003 is still relatively recent in scholarship on Anselm); the author acknowledges his debt to this book and invites the reader to look at Deme’s scholarship more closely.
The argument here is interesting. Jesus must be omniscient because (a) he is God and (b) this is the basis of his divine authority. Anselm then identifies three areas requiring this authority; these are in respect to the miraculous, to attracting disciples, and to the moral realm (see Box 2.4).
Box 2.4
The author is setting up the counter position at the start of the article. Notice how he has clearly gone back to the primary sources (he is not dependent on a summary from a secondary source – for example, a textbook summary). In addition, he has helpfully identified the main features by listing them.
The second example is Thomas Aquinas. In the Summa Theologiae, he gives sustained attention to the issue of the knowledge of Christ. For Aquinas, the Eternal Word assumed a human nature that was perfect and integral. The question in the Tertia pars is this: How exactly did Christ possess these perfections? For Aquinas, “Christ had beatific knowledge,”7 which Aquinas explains is embedded within “the soul of Christ, which is a part of his human nature.”8 However, Aquinas also wants Jesus to learn and grow in knowledge; so he develops a distinction between “experimental knowledge” – knowledge from experience, which is acquired – and imprinted, divine knowledge. With the latter, Jesus is omniscient or as Aquinas puts it, “Therefore it would seem that by the knowledge infused by the Holy Spirit Christ knew everything.”9 With the former, Christ had an active intellect which led to learning of human activities. So Aquinas writes:
The human mind looks in two directions. It looks to what is above it – and it was in this line that the soul of Christ was filled with infused knowledge. But it also looks to what is beneath it, to the data of the imagination, which is meant to move the human mind by the power of the active intellect. The soul of Christ had also to be filled with knowledge along this line; not that the previous complement of knowledge would not of itself be enough for the human mind, but because the mind had also to be filled through its dealings with the imagination.10
For Aquinas, it is part of the perfection of the human Jesus that he learned.11
Aquinas writes, “The habit of knowledge is acquired from the association of the human mind with the imagination.”12 But there is more. Corey L. Barnes provides a good discussion of this section of the Summa and he stresses the importance of this form of experimental knowledge because it was a condition of the freewill of Jesus. Barnes explains that for Aquinas, “Christ willed the passion with full knowledge of its pains and outcomes.”13
Although Aquinas distinguishes between different types of knowledge (thereby creating some flexibility for the accumulation of knowledge in Jesus), he shares with Anselm a sense that the knowledge of Jesus is considerable; it includes the beatific vision and infused knowledge. For both, the Incarnation, conceptually, needs an omniscient (or almost omniscient) human. This is a long way from a person with Down’s Syndrome (see Box 2.5).
Box 2.5
On Aquinas, the author is sensitive to a literature that discusses how best to interpret Aquinas. The footnote is used effectively to expand and explain Aquinas and link the author’s discussion with a wider discussion among scholars about this passage in Aquinas. To include all this in the heart of the article would have reduced the flow and made the article difficult to follow.
Interestingly, most theologians have worried about an omniscient Jesus on the grounds that this undermines the humanity of Jesus (see Box 2.6).14 For the child Jesus to know every name of every person living in New York and be able to recite every cricket score of every cricket match makes Jesus an odd child. As Pannenberg observes:
Box 2.6
Footnote 14 is a “confining footnote.” The purpose of this footnote is to confine the discussion of omniscience and ignorance to certain limited, and manageable, territory. No article can cover every single dimension of the topic. Theology has an interconnected tendency; and the result can be confusing. So the author confines his discussion to make it manageable. If this were a book, then there presumably would be some discussion of the “two natures” solution of Chalcedon. As it is an article, the author explains his decision to confine the discussion in this footnote and directs the reader to texts that make use of the “two natures” solution.
[T]o attribute to the soul of Jesus a knowledge of all things past, present, and future, and of everything that God knows from the very beginning, in the sense of a supernatural vision, makes the danger more than considerable that the genuine humanity of Jesus’ experiential life would be lost.15
This traditional criticism does have some force; however, I want to argue for a different position. Let us recognize that there is a difference between propositional knowledge and wisdom. Propositional knowledge at one extreme is omniscience (knowing every true proposition) through to intelligence (which customarily is more knowledge than other people). The argument I want to make is that the Eternal Word (or for the sake of this argument let us use the phrase Divine Wisdom) does not require omniscience (in the sense of knowing everything); indeed, the Divine Wisdom does not need a conventional intelligence. In fact, human intelligence can make knowledge of the divine harder and less accessible because the immediacy of the spiritual can be lost through the overly complex rational interpretative processes, with which we interpret the spiritual.16 Let us develop this argument by turning to the concept of the Divine Wisdom (see Box 2.7).
Box 2.7
This is the heart of the argument. The author is going to distinguish between omniscience and wisdom. For the reader, this is the point that you pause. Much hinges on this