Real Knowledge of God
One of the most significant and scandalous implications of the Incarnation of God in Jesus of Nazareth is the fact that, in doing so, God brought real knowledge of himself into our humanity. Sometimes, it is tempting to think that Jesus had the entirety of the Old Testament revelation already implanted into his human mind from birth and that there was no real human learning in his life. We cannot maintain this, however, when we recall the story in Luke, chapter two when Jesus is left behind in Jerusalem and was found in the Temple when he was twelve years old. We remember that Jesus amazed the teachers with his answers and his understanding of the Old Covenant, but we often forget that we are told that he was asking them questions. Jesus took our ignorance upon himself and actually went through a process of learning the revelation of God from within our humanity. Granted, he was so connected to his Father that his learning was greatly increased and he reached a deeper understanding of God than we often do, but the learning process is indeed real.
Throughout his life, Jesus tells us about the exclusive relationship that he has with his Father. He says things like (Matthew 11:27) “All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father; nor does anyone know the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son wills to reveal him.” This verse, so often used in support of double predestination, is primarily speaking of the absolutely exclusive knowledge of God that is possessed by the Son. No one can have any real knowledge of God unless it is rooted and grounded in the Son. It is as Athanasius said, “It would be more godly and true to signify God from the Son and call him Father, than to name him from his works and call him Unoriginate.” Our knowledge of God must arise in and through the Son; if it does not do so, our conclusions can be rooted in nothing other than our own human subjectivity and have no objective grounding in the being of God.
We must remember, though, that Jesus is not simply speaking of the knowledge that the Son has had of the Father since eternity past, but is referring to the knowledge that the Incarnate Son has of the Father in his incarnate person. This real knowledge of the Father is lodged in Christ’s human nature as well as his divine nature. We cannot separate Christ’s divine knowledge of God from his human knowledge of God without introducing a dangerous split in the person of Christ.
This is important for us to understand because it means that, in Jesus, God has introduced real knowledge of God into our humanity, that the limits of humanity are not intrinsically incapable of real knowledge of God, that God’s ability to manifest knowledge of himself in our humanity is greater than our humanity’s limitations (though we know this only because this real knowledge has been brought into our humanity in Christ). This means that, as we participate in Christ through the Holy Spirit, we actually become partakers of the real knowledge of God that Christ had. In 1 Corinthians 2, Paul asks, “For who has known the mind of the Lord, that he will instruct him?” He is asking the philosophical question, “How can we know God?” He answers his own question by saying, “But we have the mind of Christ.” For Paul, this is the same idea as what he mentioned just a few verses before when he comments, “‘Things which eye has not seen and ear has not heard, and which have not entered the heart of man, all that God has prepared for those who love him.’ For to us God revealed them through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches all things, even the depths of God.” God has revealed the things of God to us through the Spirit, which is to have the mind of Christ. Through the activity of the Triune God, we partake of authentic knowledge of God.
To the Jews a Stumbling Block
When we look at some of how Jewish thought has approached the problem of knowing God, we see a different conclusion. If you were to ask a pious Jew, who is rooted in and committed to the historical faith of their ancestors, and ask them, “Who is God?” They would answer like the Old Testament does. “God is the one who delivered us from slavery in Egypt; he parted the Red Sea; he fed the people with Manna from heaven; he led them into the Promised Land; he defeated their enemies.” But if, after this response was given, you were to press further, saying, “Wonderful. You have told me what God does and has done. Who is God in God’s own life?” The response would be a pious shrug of the shoulders. “I don’t know.”
When we ignore the Christian doctrine of the Trinity and we insist on a radically unitary understanding of God where there is no personal distinction within the being of God, God becomes an enigma. There are no relationships of mutual and reciprocal knowing rooted within the very being of God and so God is intrinsically unknowable. If this is how we understand God, our claims to know God are more an example of human presumption than real knowledge.
It is important to understand that this claim to know God is not based on what has been called “natural revelation,” or what we try to deduce about God from nature and human experience. We root our authentic knowledge of God in the person of Christ, not in any abstract concept of God. This is why Christian faith can claim to really know God. What we need to understand is that, when we compare this to the views of other monotheistic faiths, we must not be surprised when others say that we are blasphemers for becoming too familiar with God.
To Gentiles Foolishness
In light of the cosmological dualism latent in much of Western philosophy, it can come as no surprise to us that Paul tells us that the Incarnation is foolishness to the Gentiles. In the Greek mind, God is even further removed than he is to the Jew. The Jews believe that God interacts with humanity and at least reveals something of himself, even if it is not a fully reliable understanding of God in God’s own life. To the Greek, God is completely separate from the created world. Indeed, ancient Greek philosophy felt that the creation had a kind of necessary existence because it emanated from the very being of God (that is, it is not created out of nothing). If God is so utterly transcendent over the created order so as to be unaware of it, then human beings cannot really have any kind of meaningful knowledge of God. It is not a stumbling block like for the Jews, who consider such knowledge to be blasphemous. Rather, it is simply foolish to say we can know God, a claim more to be laughed at rather than taken seriously.
Another way Greek thought dismissed the Incarnation is because, in their mind, it was simply inconceivable that God would enter into humanity because, to the Greek mind, human flesh was restrictive and evil (this view was brought to its most extreme expression in Gnosticism). If this is indeed true, then God cannot enter into human flesh because it would taint God’s divinity. Once again, Athanasius was the one who decisively overthrew this way of thinking. He argued (in light of what we actually see in Jesus Christ) that the entry of God into tainted humanity is not the corruption of God but the uplifting and healing of humanity. This observation will come into play when we consider the Christian life.
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