Jesus’ Humanity and Limited Knowledge

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A.Joseph

Puritan Board Senior
Is there any good books or summaries that cover the extent and limits of Jesus’ knowledge and omniscience when He took on our humanity. It seems His divinity did enable Him to know things that should be limited as per His humanity and other things that He seemingly did not fully know, or seemed somewhat taken by surprise as per limitations of this humanity.

I’m reviewing this in WC chp. 8, sec 2 and the author lists limited knowledge as an attribute of Jesus’ human nature.
 
Is there any good books or summaries that cover the extent and limits of Jesus’ knowledge and omniscience when He took on our humanity. It seems His divinity did enable Him to know things that should be limited as per His humanity and other things that He seemingly did not fully know, or seemed somewhat taken by surprise as per limitations of this humanity.

I’m reviewing this in WC chp. 8, sec 2 and the author lists limited knowledge as an attribute of Jesus’ human nature.

Muller on ectypal theology and theologia unionis. Christ’s knowledge in his Incarnate life. It is the union between ectypal and archetypal theology, but still a form of ectypal theology
 
I too would appreciate good resources, especially if they are brief, since this issue comes up often and good scholars disagree with each other. It seems there are at least two reasons why Jesus' exceptional knowledge would not necessarily come from being divine.

1. He was a prophet. Prophets are often given special knowledge. This doesn't mean the prophet is divine.

2. He was sinless. We might reasonably expect a sinless person to have acute insight and pick up on things others miss, and to understand where Scripture is headed in ways others don't.

That said, Jesus is divine. It is Jesus the person who has knowledge, and divinity is part of his person. That doesn't just go away, even if it is somehow veiled. So what's the simplest/best way to explain this mystery? Most of my attempts suffer from being more convoluted than I would like.
 
Puritan Christology

If there were infinite worlds made of creatures loving, they would not have so much love in them as was in the heart of that man Christ Jesus.

—thomas goodwin1

Puritan theologians produced outstanding studies in the area of Christology, namely, the person and work of Christ. These men combined their learning with soul-stirring applications to bring Christ home to the mind and soul. John Arrowsmith (1602–1659), in his formidable exposition Theanthropos (“The God-Man”), shows beyond doubt that Jesus of Nazareth was both God and man in one person.2 On a more pastoral level, Looking unto Jesus, the more than six-hundred-page work of Isaac Ambrose (1604–1664), presents Christ to the believer in both His person and work in a way that highlights the distinctive nature of Reformed Christology.3 Many more works could be listed, and it is a great mystery why so little secondary literature has been written on Puritan Christology. This chapter will, however, consider the unique contributions of two eminent Puritan theologians, Thomas Goodwin (1600–1680) and John Owen (1616–1683).

Puritan Christology unquestionably distinguished itself from other theological traditions regarding Christ’s work.4 Yet most scholars assume that the aforementioned theologians simply affirmed Nicene and Chalcedonian orthodoxy regarding His person and nothing more distinctive. However, a closer examination shows that while Puritan theology affirmed the basic teaching of Chalcedon, a distinct Puritan Christology with regard to Christ’s person emerged in the seventeenth century, especially in the writings of Goodwin and Owen.5 The fixed Reformed-Lutheran divide on Christology played a significant role in their thought, as did the rising influence of Socinianism, but neither author was merely polemical; both, in fact, sought to make positive contributions to Reformed orthodoxy. One such contribution was the appreciation of the true humanity of Jesus Christ and the development of a better model for understanding the relation of the two natures in His person in both His earthly and heavenly ministries. In this chapter, the theological contributions of both Owen and Goodwin will be examined in light of a distinctively Reformed Christology that considers the person of Christ in His two states of humiliation and exaltation, and how the Holy Spirit relates to Him in each state. A brief account of the polemical situation will lay a foundation for better appreciation of the genius of Reformed Christology.



Owen’s Contribution to Christology

If we argue that Christ’s divine nature acts through the human nature, thus enabling Him to perform miracles, for example, a serious problem emerges concerning the plethora of texts that speak of the Holy Spirit’s role in the life of Christ. This was the problem that Cyril’s position was unable to overcome. By affirming that the Logos was the sole effective agent working on the human nature, Cyril’s asymmetrical relation between the two natures renders the Holy Spirit’s work in the life of Jesus superfluous. In fact, the Socinian, John Biddle, picks up on this tension by asking a series of questions:

What need was there that the holy Spirit should be given unto Christ, to enable him to do miracles; and an Angel appear from heaven unto him to strengthen him; or why should he so earnestly expostulate with God for forsaking him, if Christ were he, by whom the First Creation was performed, had a Divine Nature and was God himself?… Would it be said of him that had the Divine Nature, that he did miracles because God was with him, and not rather, because he was God?… Would not the Divine nature in Christ, at this rate, be in the mean time idle and useless?35

These questions are not without merit and deserve answers.36 Neither Roman Catholic nor Lutheran theologians can adequately account for any meaningful role of the Spirit in the life of Christ; indeed, their respective Christologies may find Biddle’s questions rather difficult to answer. Bavinck makes the strong assertion that “while Lutheran Christology still speaks of gifts, it actually does not know what to do with them and no longer has room even for Christ’s anointing with the Holy Spirit.”37 And this is precisely where Owen makes his valuable contribution to understanding the person and work of Christ. Indeed, Owen’s understanding of the Spirit’s work in Christ is the consistent outworking of the Reformed insistence on both the integrity or perfection of the two natures and the unity of the person. He argues that “the only singular immediate act of the person of the Son on the human nature was the assumption of it into subsistence with himself.”38 Thus, the Holy Spirit is the “immediate operator of all divine acts of the Son himself, even on his own human nature. Whatever the Son of God wrought in, by, or upon the human nature, he did it by the Holy Ghost, who is his Spirit.”39 Oliver Crisp admits that “it could be argued that it is the Holy Spirit that enables the human nature of Christ to perform miracles, rather than Christ’s divine nature.”40 However, he is careful to note that “this is not a conventional view of the means by which Christ was able to perform miracles. A conventional view would claim that Christ was able to perform miracles in virtue of the action of his divine nature in and through his human nature in the hypostatic union.”41 The implication of Crisp’s observation is, of course, that Owen’s Christology is not conventional.[1]




1 Thomas Goodwin, Exposition of Ephesians, in The Works of Thomas Goodwin D.D. Sometime President of Magdalen College in Oxford (London, 1681–1704), 2:162.

2 John Arrowsmith, Theanthropos, or, God-Man Being an Exposition upon the First Eighteen Verses of the First Chapter of the Gospel according to St John (London, 1660).

3 Isaac Ambrose, Looking unto Jesus; A View of the Everlasting Gospel (London, 1674). Another gold mine of rich Christology can be found in William Gouge’s work, A Learned and Very Useful Commentary upon the Whole Epistle to the Hebrews … (London, 1655).

4 For example, Arminian and Reformed theologians have historically disagreed on the doctrine of justification by faith. The Arminian Bible commentator, Adam Clarke, remarks, “To say that Christ’s personal righteousness is imputed to every true believer, is not scriptural: To say that he has fulfilled all righteousness for us, in our stead, if by this is meant his fulfillment of all moral duties, is neither scriptural nor true. In no part of the Book of God is Christ’s righteousness ever said to be imputed to us for our justification.” Christian Theology (London: Thomas & Son, 1835), 156. See also the excellent work by Aza Goudriaan, “Justification by Faith and the Early Arminian Controversy,” in Scholasticism Reformed: Essays in Honour of Willem J. van Asselt, ed. Maarten Wisse, Marcel Sarot, and Willemien Otten (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 155–78.

5 We are grateful for the work of Alan Spence, who has discussed this issue in some detail in his work Incarnation and Inspiration: John Owen and the Coherence of Christology (London: T&T Clark, 2007). Stephen Holmes also made a similar contention regarding the uniqueness of Owen’s Christology. See “Reformed Varieties of the Communicatio Idiomatum,” in The Person of Christ, ed. Stephen Holmes and Murray Rae (London: T & T Clark, 2005), 70–86.

35 Quoted in Spence, Incarnation and Inspiration, 16. Incidentally, McGuckin shows that Cyril explained Christ’s prayer life “as an economic exercise done largely for our instruction and edification.” Saint Cyril of Alexandria, 133. Contrary to this position, Reformed theologians believed that Christ, as a true man, needed to pray, which is to say, of course, that He did not pray merely for our instruction.

36 Owen appears to be fully aware of this criticism, but he argues that “with the clear and evident analogy of faith” he can easily overcome the difficulty pressed by the Socinians. Pneumatologia, in The Works of John Owen, D.D. (Edinburgh: Johnstone & Hunter, 1850–1855), 3:160.

37 Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 3:309.

38 Owen, Pneumatologia, in Works, 3:160.

39 Owen, Pneumatologia, 3:162. See also Donald Macleod, The Person of Christ (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1998), 195.

40 Crisp, Divinity and Humanity, 25.

41 Crisp, Divinity and Humanity, 25. Calvin, for example, reflects “conventional” Christology: “How plainly and clearly is his deity shown in miracles! Even though I confess that both the prophets and the apostles performed miracles equal to and similar to his, yet in this respect there is the greatest of differences: they distributed the gifts of God by their ministry, but he showed forth his own power.” Institutes, 1.13.13.

[1] Beeke, J. R., & Jones, M. (2012). A Puritan Theology: Doctrine for Life (pp. 341–342). Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books.
 
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