We aren’t saying he could not access his divine nature, just that he didn’t.
Moreover, there is no reason to think that Jesus was speaking with scientific precision. Even if we know that orchid seeds are smaller, it isn’t false or a lie to say that “mustard seeds are the smallest of seeds” as a poetic turn of a phrase. Language just doesn’t work that way.
I disagree. I think the most accurate thing to say is that he did not access it every time.
I can agree that human Jesus would have been ignorant of many things, but IMO its very unlikely he would not have known how man came into existence which happened via evolutionary mechanisms.
We know that orchid seeds are the smallest seeds, and that’s why Jesus’s claim was wrong. It doesn’t matter whether its poetic or otherwise, its still empirically false. After all I could be poetic and tell my (future) spouse that my love for her would never set like the sun, but that wouldn’t make it an empirically valid statement.
This is just another example of Ken Ham overstepping in his statements about which beliefs are orthodox for Christianity, because he is not trained in theology. He was a science educator prior to starting AiG.
Are orchids native to Israel? Would the average Israeli have seen an orchid seed to know it existed and is smaller than a mustard seed? Do orchids grow as large as mustard trees? He was using a metaphor to make a theological point, not teaching botany.
Doesn’t that lead to a paradox?
If Jesus didn’t know he was omniscient, he wasn’t omniscient.
AFAIK it is commonly held in epistemology that not all knowledge is occurrent, i.e. you can know something without it being immediately present to your consciousness. There’s no contradiction here.
Yes, I know that - it frequently happens when watching quiz shows that I find I know an answer that I’d forgotten or didn’t know I knew.
But I’m not omniscient.
I’m having difficulty imagining how unconscious omniscience would work in practice. Would Jesus just know the answer to anything he was thinking about? No need to ask anyone their name because as soon as he did he’d know the answer? Would he then know that others did not have this ability, wonder why he was different and then realise that he was omniscient? Or was he “slow on t’ uptak”?
The answers to these questions should be fairly straightforward to glean from comments already made in this thread…
Not really. The closest I can find is this:
…which implies Jesus was consciously omniscient (i.e. he knew he was omniscient), because if he wasn’t, he wouldn’t have known he could choose to access his divine knowledge.
Hi @swamidass, @structureoftruth, @Michael_Okoko and @thoughtful,
What’s being overlooked in this discussion is that William Lane Craig is a self-declared neo-Apollinarian, who believes that Jesus Christ had only one mind. As he puts it:
What I suggest is:
- We agree with the Council of Chalcedon that in Christ we have one person with two natures – human and divine.
- The soul of the human nature of Christ is the second person of the Trinity, the Logos . The human nature of Christ is composed of the Logos and a human body.
- The divine aspects of the Logos are largely concealed in Christ’s subconsciousness so that he had a waking conscious life that would be typical of any human being and that like the mass of an iceberg submerged beneath the surface so in his divine subconsciousness there lay the fullness of divinity. The waking consciousness was typically human…
What I argue in my Neo-Apollinarian proposal is that the Logos brought to the human body just those properties which would make it a complete human nature – things like rationality, self-consciousness, freedom of the will, and so forth. Christ already possessed those in his divine nature, and it is in virtue of those that we are created in the image of God. So when he brought those properties to the animal body – the human body – it completes it and makes it a human nature.
With the greatest respect to Dr. Craig, this is not the position taught by orthodox Christianity, which is that Jesus Christ had two minds: an omniscient divine mind and a limited human mind. The latter could be ignorant of certain facts, but not the former.
The Third Ecumenical Council of Constantinople (680-681 A.D.) , which is the sixth of the seven great ecumenical councils of the Christian Church, defined that Jesus Christ had two energies (or operations) and two wills (one divine and one human, with the latter in subjection to the former). If Christ had two wills, then by the same token, he must have had two intellects: one divine and one human. In other words, Jesus had two minds.
Dr. Craig objects to this model, on the grounds that anything with a human soul joined to a body would be ipso facto a human person, which would mean that if Christ had a divine mind, a human soul (with a mind of its own) and a human body, then he must have been two persons, as the heretic Nestorius taught: a divine person and a human person. In his own words:
Think about it. What goes to constitute a human person? It is a rational soul and a body. If you have a rational soul and a humanoid body, you have a human person. That is all it takes. So if you say that Christ had a merely human soul and a human body then why wasn’t there a human person, Jesus?
My answer to that argument is that it takes more than a human soul plus a body to make a human person. A person is an autonomous human soul plus a body. Christ’s human soul was never autonomous. It possessed the freedom to choose between various human goods, but not the freedom to choose between good and evil. Because of its hypostatic union with the person of God the Son, evil was never an option that Christ’s human soul could have chosen. Christ’s human soul had no personality of its own; rather, it served as the vehicle through which the person of God the Son was made manifest as man. (I speculate that if you had actually met Jesus while He lived on earth, you would have found Him an incredibly boring guy on many levels: no favorite colors, no favorite hobbies, no favorite friends, or even a favorite sex - He would probably have been asexual. In short: Jesus’ human soul had none of the quirks and idiosyncrasies that we associate with a human person. He was a man with a mission, and He was 100% focused on that.)
Here’s how the Catechism of the Catholic Church explains it:
472 This human soul that the Son of God assumed is endowed with a true human knowledge. As such, this knowledge could not in itself be unlimited: it was exercised in the historical conditions of his existence in space and time. This is why the Son of God could, when he became man, “increase in wisdom and in stature, and in favour with God and man”,101 and would even have to inquire for himself about what one in the human condition can learn only from experience.102 This corresponded to the reality of his voluntary emptying of himself, taking “the form of a slave”.103
475 Similarly, at the sixth ecumenical council, Constantinople III in 681, the Church confessed that Christ possesses two wills and two natural operations, divine and human. They are not opposed to each other, but co-operate in such a way that the Word made flesh willed humanly in obedience to his Father all that he had decided divinely with the Father and the Holy Spirit for our salvation.110 Christ’s human will "does not resist or oppose but rather submits to his divine and almighty will."111
481 Jesus Christ possesses two natures, one divine and the other human, not confused, but united in the one person of God’s Son.
482 Christ, being true God and true man, has a human intellect and will, perfectly attuned and subject to his divine intellect and divine will, which he has in common with the Father and the Holy Spirit.
The Catholic and Orthodox Churches, as well as the Lutheran and Methodist Churches, accept the teachings of the seven ecumenical councils. Anglicans accept the first four only. I’m not sure what Dr. Craig’s position is, but he clearly does not accept the teachings of the sixth ecumenical council.
Now, I freely admit that the “two minds” and “two wills” picture of Jesus is hard to square with Scripture (e.g. Matthew 24:36; Hebrews 4:15). But consider the alternative that we are being offered. Dr. Craig is proposing that Jesus had a divine mind which was temporarily unable to access some of its own thoughts. I put it to my readers that God Who cannot access part of His own Mind is surely not God. A God Who is partly unconscious is not God, either. Craig’s neo-Apollinarian model is cleverly conceived, but in the end, it does not make sense.
No.
No. They didn’t have microscopes then and that’s why Jesus was wrong.
Generally, yes. Technically, “mustard trees” don’t exist. They grow into shrubs. See the gallery section here to see pictures. Do those resemble the sort of trees Jesus alluded to in his parables?
This is false. To the Jews, the mustard seed was the smallest they ever planted and that’s why he used that fact to teach them. However, if Jesus had presented it this way, that is, describing the mustard seed as smallest within the context of Israeli farming practices, then there would be no qualms. Instead, he proclaimed the mustard seed to be the smallest in the world and that’s empirically false.
Thanks @vjtorley. Your points clearly illustrate why I find the arguments that Jesus did not tap into his divinity quite unconvincing and much more unconvincing that he wouldn’t be aware of evolutionary theory with regards to the common descent of man and other great apes.
First, my church would be very careful not to wed their views to any particular person, including Calvin. For instance, they would not have supported the death penalty for heresy. They do accept the tulip model, though.
I think if confronted with passages incongruent with omniscience, I think they would have possibly conceded there was some divine mystery involved in Jesus seemingly not knowing certain specific things, but to suggest that Jesus was so handicapped as to not be aware of something as basic as the true nature of humanity’s origins, or even to compare His knowledge in any meaningful way to that of humans, would be too large a pill to swallow.
I wonder what he taught kids before his turn to the “wild”.
Exactly.
Just like creationism, all of this ad hoc apologetic handwaving, instead of simply admitting a mystery, only diminishes the concept of the divine.
Thanks. I wasn’t aware. I definitely wouldn’t agree with WLC. That position doesn’t even make sense to me biblically concerning other passages not discussed, but maybe I need to read more about it. I’ll have to read your post more carefully later to understand the position you describe. It seems like it’s much easier to describe what’s unorthodox than orthodox here - sometimes it can just be a mystery I think.
Read Christian scholars instead.
Why? Evolutionary creationists, like those at BioLogos, affirm/accept common ancestry and believe in the need for redemption.
Jesus’ wasn’t making a claim about seed size.
Christian apologists frequently use material published by Christian scholars, so its unlikely that many things these apologists says isn’t supported by Christian scholars.
That’s because the Genesis story differs from the details of our evolutionary history. Attempts to marry both have resulted in serious mental gymnastics. The concept of Original Sin is just superfluous to the descent of man with other apes. After all, other great apes maim, kill, and steal from each other (which would be regarded as sinful under most religious viewpoints), yet they weren’t given any redeemer.
Biologos has no clear position on how Original Sin came upon humans. Just loads of speculation about a representative Adam and Eve or a single pair picked out from the earliest population of Homo sapiens.
Regardless, he made an empirically false statement.
Well the apologists online responding to WLC-Ham have been pretty harsh on Ham. There is clearly something here in theology that you missed somehow.
Which is?