Ignorant Only in Response to Nature
A final strategy for dealing with this verse is to admit that it does
depict actual ignorance on the part of Christ, but that it is only in reference
to Christ’s human nature. A proponent for this understand would argue that
Christ was omniscient in respect to his divine nature, but ignorant in respect to
his human nature. Thus, Jesus’ apparent claim to ignorance is in reference to
merely his human nature. This strategy also faces insurmountable difficulties.
First, natures do not know things. Rather, persons know things. It makes no sense to say that X believes or is consciously aware of something
unless X is a person. One might dispute this inference and claim that a
non-person can have such states, but to such objections I will say that their
understanding of “person” is so removed from our ordinary use of the word that
that they have rendered the word meaningless. Second, even if natures can be
said to know things while remaining non-persons, that doesn’t help the
proponent of this strategy for the following reasons.
First, Jesus specifically refers to the Son not knowing things, not to
his human nature, or divine nature. A proposition is being applied to the Son,
not to his nature. To try and rephrase this verse as applying to one of the Son’s
natures but not the other is to anachronistically import later Christological
developments into the mouth of Christ with no scriptural support. The Son, as a
person, cannot both know the hour while also being igornat of it, as this is a
contradiction. Pawl thinks that he can deny a contradiction here by simply
modifying the truth conditions under which a person can be said to know
something. Pawl suggests that instead of having a truth condition such as “s is
consciously aware of p just in case s has an occurrent mental state (of the
right sort) of p,” we can modify the truth conditions to be “s is consciously
aware of p just in case c has a nature that has an occurrent mental state (of
the right sort) of p..”
What might one say in response to this? I would begin by nothing that
it is far from clear that a nature is the type of thing (if it exists) which
can have mental states at all. However, looking past that, one might respond by
pointing out that it is indeed easy to avoid contradictions when one is willing
to redefine truth conditions willy nilly. Pawl defends his maneuver against the
charge of being ad-hoc by noting that he has performed a similar rhetorical
move when discussing impassability. However, the fact that Pawl redefined terms
in ad-hoc way on a previous issue does not clear him from being ad-hoc in this
instance.
Imagine I came up to you and I said, “I have a friend named Stan who
is a married bachelor.” You would likely scoff at this statement and point out
that this is a contradiction, as a person being married entails that they have
at least one spouse, while a person being a bachelor implies that they have
none. Thus, Stan cannot be both. Suppose I replied “No, you see, you are using
the wrong truth conditions. Stan is a bachelor so long as he has a nature which
lacks a spouse, and Stan is married so long as he has a nature which possesses
a spouse. Stan is very special in that unlike most people he has two natures
and thus the issue is resolved.” Is anybody convinced of this? It is difficult for
me to see how Pawl’s strategy is any less absurd. (James Agnew, What
Jesus Didn’t Know: A Defense of Kenotic Christology [2025], 128-29)
