Donald Macleod offers some intriguing insights in his IVP book on the Person of Christ: In many respects, Jesus’ human knowledge was like our own, as He learned about His Father through revelation: “his own capacity for such knowledge would differ significantly from that of ordinary men. But it would not differ in kind or in principle. He knew the will of the Father because the Father revealed it to him.”
Jesus’ knowledge differed from ours because of His sinlessness and because of the “intimacy of his relationship with God. He conversed with God as his Son; and he thought as his Son. We may even say that he lived in a thought-world of pure revelation so that to an extent that we cannot fathom God disclosed himself not only to his thinking but in his thinking. In this respect, revelation, in the case of Christ, was concurrent with his own thought-processes.”
Intriguing, as I say. But I wonder. Having a human soul and mind, Jesus surely pondered, asked questions about the world and about Scripture (explicitly, Luke 2:46). Were these questions revelation? If he thought “I’m terribly hungry,” was that revelation? Perhaps we should say that every thought and word that ever came to or from Jesus was revelation, but it means that “revelation” is a much larger and richer category than we sometimes think.
Dear Reader,
Can I be direct with you?
War abroad. Socialists on the rise. AI upending human life. Endless uproar online. The modern attention economy doesn’t want readers — it wants users enslaved to the tyranny of the present.
First Things is the antidote: literary excellence, timeless truths, and a fixed point of reference in a culture that has lost its bearings.
But we can’t do it without readers like you.
Our goal: Raise $150,000 by November 1 to sustain First Things in the year ahead.
Your gift anchors readers in the permanent things.
Make your Fall Campaign gift now using the button below.
If you have any questions or would like more information, please contact Giovanni Del Piero, Director of the Editor’s Circle, at gdelpiero@firstthings.com or 212-627-1985.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
The Church in the Age of Therapy
In 1966, Philip Rieff wrote in The Triumph of the Therapeutic that “Religious man was born to…
Canada’s Deadliest Blind Spot
On September 20, the Daily Mail ran a story with the provocative headline, “Our 83-year-old Christian grandmother…
The Faithful Joy of Dolly Parton and Fulton Sheen
Dolly Parton and Fulton Sheen seem to have had little in common. She favored rhinestones; he wore…
