FOEESIGHT
FORESIGHT
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in the way, it might well be understood that the ilwmurlisis would be deterred from seeking, in the ciisi' (if Mirh .-i Being, other sources of information huHides Ills Divine intelligence to account for all His far-roaching and varied knowledge. At all events, it is clearly their conviction that all He knew — the scope of which was unbounded and its depth unfathomed, though their record suggests rather than fully illustrates it — found its explana- tion in the dignity of His person as God manifest in the flesh.
Nor can the effect of their representation of Jesus as the subject of this all-embracing Divine knowledge be destroyed by the discovery in their narratives of another line of representation in which our Lord is set forth as living His life out under the conditions which belong naturally to the humanity He had assumed. These representa- tions are certainly to be neglected as little as those others in which His Divine omniscience is sug- gested. They bring to our observation another side of the complex personality that is depicted, which, if it cannot be said to be as emphatically insisted upon by the Evangelists, is nevertheless, perhaps, equally pervasively illustrated. This is the true humanity of our Lord, within the scope of which He willed to live out His life upon earth, that He might accomplish the mission for which He had been sent. The suggestion that He might break over the bounds of His mission, in order that He might escape from the ruggedness of His chosen path, by the exercise whether of His almighty power (Mt 4^'-, Lk #'•) or of His unerring foresight (Mt 16" II), He treated first and last as a tempta- tion of the Evil One — for ' how then should the Scriptures be fulfilled that thus it must be' (Mt 26" ID? It is very easy, to be sure, to exaggerate the indications in the Evangelists of the confine- ment of our Lord's activities within the limits of human powere. It is an exaggeration, for example, to speak as if the Evangelists represent Him as frequently surprised by "the events which befell Him : they never predicate surprise of Him, and it is only by a very precarious inference from the events recorded that tliey can ever be supposed even to suggest or allow place for such an emotion in our Lord (ef. art. Amazement, p. 48). It is an exaggeration again to adduce our Lord's questions as attempts to elicit information for His own guid- ance : His questions are often plainly dialectical or rhetorical, or, like some of His actions, solely for the benefit of those ' that stood around.' It is
nient in many cases of the term yLv6(7Kui, when Evangelists speak of our Lord's knowledge, as if it were thereby implied that this knowledge was freshly born in His mind : the assumed distinction, but faintly marked in Greek literature, cannot he traced in the usage of the terms -yvdvai and elSivai in their application to our Lord's knowledge ; these terms even replace one another in parallel accounts of the same instance (Mt 22i8 1| Mk 12'= ; [Mt 9^] || Mk f, Lk 522; cf jit i225_ Lk 68 Q" 11", Jn 6«) ; yyS,vo.L is used of the undoubted Divine knowledge of our Lord ([Mt 11-^5] Lk 1022, Jn 10'= 17=», Mt T^; cf. Jn 2SJ. 25 542 iQU. 27) . and indeed of the knowledge of God Himself (Lk lO^^ 16«, Jn 10'-^ [Mt IV"]) : and, in any event, there is a distinction which in such nice inquiries should not be neglected, between saying that the occurrence of an event, being per- ceived, was the occasion of an action, and saying that knowledge of the event, perceived as occur- ring, waited on its occurrence. Gravely vitiated by such exaggerations as most discussions of the sub- ject are, enough remains, however, after all ex- aggeration is pruned away, to assure us, not indeed that our Lord's life on earth was, in tlie view of the Evangelists, an exclusively human one ; or that.
apart from the constant exercise of His will to make it such, it was controlled by the limitations of humanity ; but certainly that it was, in their view, lived out, so far as was consistent with the fulfil- ment of the mission for which He came — and as an indispensable condition of the fulfilment of that mission — under the limitations belonging to a purely human life. The classical passages in this reference are those striking statements in the second chapter of Luke (2*- ''-) in which is summed up our Lord's growth from infancy to manhood, including, of course, His intellectual development (cf. art. Children, jj. 302), and His own remark- able declaration recorded in Mt 24**, Mk 13^-'^ in which He affirms His ignorance of the day and hour of His return to earth. Supplemented by their general dramatization of His life within the range of the purely human, these passages are enough to assure us that in the view of the Evan- gelists there was in our Lord a purely human soul, which bore its own proper part in His life, and which, as human souls do, grew in knowledge as it grew in wisdom and grace, and remained to the end, as human souls must, ignorant of many things, — nay, which, because human souls are finite, must ever be ignorant of much embraced in the universal vision of the Divine Spirit. We may wonder why the ' day and hour ' of His own return should remain among the things of which our Lord's human soul continued ignorant throughout His earthly life. But this is a matter about which surely we need not much concern ourselves. We can never do more than vaguely guess at the law which governs the inclusions and exclusions which characterize the knowledge-contents of any human mind, limited as human minds are not only qualitatively but quantitatively ; and least of all could we hope to penetrate the principle of selec- tion in the case of the perfect human intelligence of our Lord ; nor have the Evangelists hinted their view of the matter. We must just be content to recognize that we are face to face here with the mystery of the Two Natures, which, although they do not, of course, formally enunciate the doctrine in so many words, the Evangelists yet efl'ectively teach, since by it alone can consistency be induced between the two classes of facts whieli they present unhesitatingly in their narratives. Only, if we would do justice to their presentation, we must take clear note of two of its character- istics. They do not simply, in separated portions of their narratives, adduce the facts which mani- fest our Lord's Divine powers and His human characteristics, but interlace them inextricably in the same sections of the narratives. And they do not subject the Divine that is in Christ to the limitations of the human, but quite deci- sively present the Divine as dominating all, and as giving play to the human only by a constant, voluntary withholding of its full manifestation in the interests of the task undertaken. Observe the story, for example, in Jn 11, which Dr. Mason {Conditions, etc. p. 143) justly speaks of as 'indeed a marvellous weaving togetlier of that which is natural and that which is above nature.' 'Jesus learns from others that Lazarus is sick, but knows without any further message that Lazarus is dead j He weeiis and groans at the sight of the sorrow which surrounds Him, yet calmly gives thanks for the accomplishment of the miracle before it has ))een accomplished.' This conjunction of the two elements is typical of the whole Evangelical narra- tive. As portrayed in it our Lord's life is distinctly duplex ; and can be consistently construed only by the help of the conception of the Two Natures. And just as distinctly is this life portrayed in these narratives as receiWng its determination not from the human, but from the Divine side. If what