It will not follow, however, that
because there was no thinking going on in the human mind of the infant Jesus,
there was none going on in the Logos. For it must be remembered that though the
Logos has condescended to take “the form of a servant,” he has not ceased to
exist in “the form of God.” While he voluntarily submits to the limitations of
human infancy and will do no more in the sphere of the infinite infant with the
feeble instrument which he has condescended to employ that the instrument is
fitted to perform, yet in the other infinite sphere of the Godhead he is still
the same omniscient and omnipotent person that he always was. The Son of Man was
on earth and in heaven at one and the same instant (John 3:13). Because the
Logos was localized and limited by a human body on the earth, it does not
follow that he did not continue to exist and act in heaven. And because the
Logos did not think in and by the mind of the infant Jesus, it does not follow
that he did not think in and by his own infinite mind. The humanity of Jesus
Christ, then, knew as much and only as much as the Logos pleased to disclose
and manifest through a human mind. Says Beza: “The very fullness of the Godhead
(theotētos) itself penetrated the assumed humanity just as and as much as it
wished.” Grotius (on Mark 13:32) says: “It seems to me that it is not impious
to explain this passage in this way: that we might say that divine wisdom
impressed its effects on the human mind of Christ according to the manner of
the times.” Says Tillotson: “It is not unreasonable to suppose that divine
wisdom, which dwelled in our Savior, did communicate itself to his human soul
according to his pleasure, and so his human nature might at some time not know
some things.” Christ’s knowledge was, and ever is, dependent upon the amount of
information vouchsafed by the deity in his person. He did not know the time of
the day of judgment “because the Word had not revealed this to him,” says
Turretin (13.13.5). He could therefore “increase in wisdom” (Luke 2:52) as a
child and a youth, because from the unfathomable and infinite fountain of the
divine nature of the Logos there was inflowing into the human understanding
united with a steady and increasing stream. But that infinite fountain was
never emptied. The human nature is not sufficiently capacious to contain the
whole fullness of God.
The ignorance of Jesus may still further
be illustrated by the forgetfulness of an ordinary man. No man, at each and
every instant, holds in immediate consciousness all that he has ever been conscious
of in the past. He is relatively ignorant of much which he has previously known
and experienced. But this forgetting is not absolute and total ignorance. This
part of his consciousness may reappear here upon earth and will all of it
reappear in the day of judgment. But he cannot recall it just at this instant.
He is ignorant and must say: “I do not know.” Simply, if we suppose that Christ
when he spoke these words to his disciples was ignorant of the time of the judgment,
he may subsequently have come to know as his human nature increased in knowledge
through the illumination of the divine. Says Bengel, “The stress in Matt. 24:36
is on the present tense, ‘No man knows.’ In those days, no man did know, not
even the Son. But afterward he knew it, for he revealed it in the Apocalypse.”
Christ was relatively ignorant, not absolutely, if he was destined subsequently
to know the time of the judgment day. It is more probable that the glorified
human mind of Christ on the mediatorial throne now knows the time of the day of
judgment, than that it is ignorant of it. (William G. T. Shedd, Dogmatic
Theology: Complete and Unabridged, Volumes 1-3 [Reformed Retrieval, 2021], 548-59)
