In response to the claim that Jesus was only speaking from his “human nature” when he said he did not know when the Parousia would be (Mark 13:32), Thomas Emlyn (1663-1741) soundly refuted this terrible apologetic in his An Humble Inquiry into the Scripture-Account of Jesus Christ:
I intend now to expose
the futility of this tricky move by showing how absurd it is to suppose that
this distinction of two natures removes the force of such expressions from
Christ’s own mouth which in their natural and ordinary appearance proclaim his
inferiority to God, even the Father. And I shall dwell more on this because
it’s the most popular and common evasion, and comes in at every turn, when all
other relief fails.
It’s reasonable for
us to ask what hint of such a distinction of two natures they can point us to
in any of these discourses of Christ. Should we devise or imagine for him such
a strange and seemingly deceitful way of speaking simply to uphold our own
precarious opinion? But I have several remarks to make about this common
answer.
My first objection is
that our blessed Lord Jesus Christ, if he was the supreme God in any nature of
his own, he could not have said, it seems to me, consistently with truth and
sincerity (which he always maintained strictly), that he could not do or
did not know something which all this while he himself could do
or did know very well—as surely as if he were the supreme God, he could
and did. This would be to make him say what is most false and to equivocate in
the most deceitful manner. Even if we should suppose he consisted of two
infinitely distant natures, and so had two capacities of knowing and acting,
yet since he includes them both. It follows that when he denies something of
himself in absolute terms, without any limitation in the words or other obvious
circumstances, he plainly implies a denial of its belonging to any part of his
person, or any nature in it. Although we may affirm a thing of a person which
belongs only to a part of him, as I may properly say a man wounded or hurt,
though it only be in one part, suppose an arm—yet I cannot rightly deny a thing
of him which belongs only to one part, because it belongs not to another. I
can’t say a man is not wounded because although one arm is shot or wounded yet
the other is unharmed. For instance, I have two organs of sight, two eyes. Now
suppose I converse with a man with one eye shut and the other open. If being
asked whether I saw him, I should dare to say that I didn’t see him (without
any qualification) meaning (to myself) that I didn’t see him with the eye which
was shut although I saw him well enough with the eye which was open, I fear I
would be criticized as a liar and deceiver, notwithstanding such a mental
reservation as some would attribute to
the holy Jesus. For knowledge is the eye of the person; Jesus Christ is
supposed to have two of these knowing capacities, the one weak, the other
strong, and piercing, discerning all things. Now as such a one, the disciples
come to him and ask him when the end of the world and time of his coming shall
be (Matthew 24:3). He answers them by giving some general account of the
matter, but says that he didn’t know the particular day and hour, nor did any
know them except the Father, meaning (say my opponents) that it wasn’t included
in his human knowledge, although he knew it well enough with his divine nature,
at the same time that he said absolutely and without qualification that the Son
doesn’t know it).
If Jesus Christ had a
divine knowledge and nature, no doubt his disciples (who, if anyone, must have
believed it) would have directed their question to that divine capacity of his
rather than to the imperfect human capacity, and yet in answer to their
question he says he didn’t know the day, which would not be counted as sincere
or truthful in ordinary people. But surely we mustn’t think Jesus Christ was
dishonest in this way, for in his mouth was no guile (1 Peter 2:21-24). Let us
not impute it to him.
That you may see this
is good reasoning, hear how some o the other side admit it out of the heat of
this controversy. See Dr. Stillingfleet’s sermon on Matthew 10:16 on the
equivocation of Catholic priests whose common answer, when questioned about
what they have known by hearing confession, is that they don’t know it.
And they think it vindicates them from the charge of lying to say that in
confession the priest knows matters “as God (that is, as God’s representative)
not as man,” and therefore he denies knowing them, meaning “as man” (In late
medieval and early modern Roman Catholicism, many scholars argued that it was permissible
to say something one knew to be false, for instance, a priest denying knowledge
of something he heard in confession, so long as one had a “mental reservation,”
a modifying phrase in one’s mind which when added to what was actually said
would make it a true statement. This was widely criticized, especially in
Protestant countries. But in 1679 a Pope condemned this teaching as “scandalous
and pernicious in practice” [Innocent XI, A Decree, Preface, 7] and in
recent times it plates no part in Catholic moral teaching). But, says the
Doctor, this is absurd, because to say he does not know is as much as to say
that he does not in any way know. Now if this is a good answer against
the Catholics, as no doubt it is, then it surely is so in the present case.
Therefore, when
Christ says he doesn’t know the day of judgment, it is as much as to say that
he does not in any way know it, and consequently it is a useless trick
to say that his ignorance was “as man only.” We must beware lest we make the
holy Jesus as liable to the charge of equivocation as are the Catholic priests,
and lest we make the Jesuits think they have a good claim to that name because
in their practice of lying they are imitating Jesus’ example—a great advantage,
they imagine, of this “mental reservation” interpretation of his denying
knowledge the day or hour.
As a further evidence
that Jesus Christ intended no such distinction of two natures, as is supposed,
it’s to be observed that he doesn’t distinguish between the Son of Man and the
eternal Word (as some would) but between the Son and his Father; the Son
doesn’t know, but only the Father (Mark 13:32). Thus it is clear that he had no
thought of including any person or nature of his own among those excluded by
his phrase “only the Father.” For whatever was not the Father, he says was
ignorant of that day. Now it’s certain that in no nature was the Son the Father,
and consequently where no one but the Father knows, no one who is not the
Father can be intended. And since our Lord was making an exception in the case,
he would not have forgotten to except the eternal Word too, if there had been
such a divine agent in himself, equal to the father and distinct from him. For
it’s a known rule that an exception from a general assertion confirms that
general assertion in other instances not excepted (Emlyn’s point is put
abstractly here, but an example makes his point clear. If you say, “All the
apples in the basket except these two are rotten,” you are asserting rottenness
of all the other apples in the basket, all of them beyond these two exceptions.
Thus, when Jesus says that only the Father knows the day and hour, he is
asserting that anyone other than the Father fails to know the day and hour.).
Will they say that
“the Father” here means all three Persons, father, Son, and Holy Spirit? What?!
Can “the Father” as opposed to “the Son” mean both the Father and the Son? What
woeful work will this make with Scripture, to suppose that things opposed to
each other are included in each other because of the very titles by which they
are opposed? They may as well say that in the baptismal formula (Matthew
28:19), by “the Father” is meant “Father, Son, and Spirit,” though he be
distinguished from the other two. And I should despair of ever understanding
the Scriptures above all books that were written at this rate of
interpretation. There is no doubt, therefore, that “the Father,” as opposed to
“the Son,” excludes all that is the Son. Thus, there can be no Son of God who
knows of that day which only the Father knew of, and consequently no Son that
is God equal to the Father. (Thomas Emlyn, An Humble Inquiry into the
Scripture-Account of Jesus Christ: A Short Argument Concerning His Deity and
Glory, according to the Gospel, eds., Dale Tuggy and Kegan A. Chandler
[White House, Tenn.: Theophilus Press, 2021], 58-63)
