I’m reading through Gerald O’Collins’s Christology: A Biblical, Historical, and Systematic Study. I’ll post some reflections as I go. This reflection is on the chapter, “The Human History”.
“Fully” Knowing
Towards the beginning of the chapter O’Collins gives a preliminary framework of how he views knowledge. For him, knowledge can never be grasped in purely objective ways, there is no “view from nowhere” or un-touched facts, so to speak. Rather, all facts are obtained via interpretation; this interpretation relies on the action of an interpreter. In other words, the apprehension of knowledge is integrally reliant upon experiential participation in the act of interpretation. For example, O’Collins delineates the difference between knowing about a person and knowing a person. To say you know a person necessitates having an involvement with that person whereas knowing about a person is merely an interpretation of facts from a distance. This means that any attempt at finding a distilled, invariant Jesus within the gospels will be frustrated by the ulterior aims of the authors. Ultimately, the evangelists’ portraits of Jesus were aimed at communicating Jesus as he is experienced, meaning they were considered with the reader knowing the person Jesus above simply knowing about Jesus (Though, of course, to know a person includes a measure of knowing about a person).
I think this preliminary assertion concerning knowledge provides an apt approach for O’Collins’s later discussion, not on the knowledge the gospel writers were concerned with, but the prior knowledge Jesus had concerning the severity and significance of his death. The assertion that Jesus did not have complete knowledge raises grave concerns for many concerning Jesus’s full divinity and therefore omniscience. Such a concern explains why O’Collins’s conclusion that Jesus went “willingly and to some extent ‘knowingly’ to his death” (p.69, emphasis added) may face immediate and perhaps violent demurral. The contentious aspect of this statement, as the italics highlight, is that Jesus may not have known fully, but only to some extent, what he would suffer. Rather than rushing to clench our fists and prepare for an Arian-Nicholas type showdown, I think that, when charitably and seriously considered, O’Collins view highlights deep, ontological truth about the Incarnation that may be overlooked by certain fixations on sacred categories such as omniscience. Here, I’m not so concerned with the category of omniscience as it relates to God. I am more interested in what O’Collins’s differentiation between knowing about and knowing experientially might contribute to a human knowledge that includes knowledge of the body via the impressions upon the flesh rather than an abstract divine knowledge.[1] If Jesus was human, we could potentially affirm that Jesus knew everything about the severity and significance of his death and still maintain that he did not know the severity and significance fully. Such a full knowledge, in the human sense of knowledge apprehension, would require participation with death and being raised. In other words, until he had experienced the severity of the Passion’s trial, torture, and death, he could only know about these things, but not in the fullness that concerns human knowledge.
Likewise, Jesus’ knowledge of the significance of his death could not be fully understood until after his experience with death and glorification. His experience in a resurrected body is an experience he may have known about but could not know fully until actually attaining a glorified embodiment. It seems that this resurrected body would include a new flesh-experience and consequently a new mode of perception not privy to the pre-resurrected.
As I think through this, I have two new questions: (1) what does a divine knowledge look like if it encompasses human knowledge; is such an experiential knowledge possessed by God solely because of the Incarnation or has such an experience always been within the Godhead. Or maybe it’s both because the Son has always been the one who does (the one who experiences) as is the case in the Trinitarian view of the Father decreeing, the Son doing, and the Holy Spirit enabling the doing. But still, how does this ‘doing’ relate to the unique knowledge via embodiment? I think Jenson has a view, if I recall, about the accomplishments of Christ being valid before we see them happen in history because Christ is the one whose promises are certain, and therefore, his promises are effective even before we see them effected.
My second question (to play around with categories) is, if experience is so integral to knowledge and we consider God omniscient, what would/could it look like for God to be omnisentient? I’m somewhat hesitant to do anymore with that than pose the question.
[1] which may just be our attempt at a propositional-type of knowledge
photo: Crucifix in Prague, soundpattern.wordpress.com
Following the Pines 