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Don't get too happy. The opposition considers this very statement you made and the person who wrote it (you) metaphorical by the standards presented in this thread.
I guess that Jesus should be expected to understand everything that is related to Scriptures, theology, important historical facts etc. Or else His teachings would not be rooted properly in reality.
Perhaps, though I'm not sure it's clear that He would need a perfect knowledge of facticity, only the wisdom to know how to apply the Scriptures in accordance with the will of the Father. Personally, I think He knew full well what His mission was but that there were still knowledge gaps about the ins and outs of Scriptural details that didn't directly contribute to His mission, at least until after He completed it and returned to His initial glory.
I think understanding God in the flesh may be a tiny bit more challenging that this, just a thought.
The mystery of God as man...one thing that I think(hope) we can all agree on is that when it comes to anything related to God we can only scratch the surface with even the fullest understanding that any human but Jesus could muster. There will lways remain more that is mystery than what we understand.
We can't minimize what his humanity may have entailed either. There are human geniuses and even those with what have been scientifically assessed as paranormal powers. Even those who dismiss Jesus as "just a guy" often acknowledge that he was a genius and mystic of some sort. The core issue is that for him to be "God in the flesh" does raise thorny issues like omniscience and the ability to fix the transmission on a 1957 Ford. He actually seems to me a more profound figure if he remained "divine" but more human than anything like God in the flesh. His prayer for the cup to be taken away if possible and his cry on the cross suggest to me a very human figure who understood his mission but wasn't entirely at peace with it and didn't fully understand it.
It's a question the church has been wrestling with for 2000 years, and I doubt it will be satisfactorily resolved anytime soon. All we can really do is recite the creeds and offer our prayers. He was fully man and fully God, with neither confusion or subversion of either. The great mystery of the Christian faith, more a declaration than an understanding.
I think He understood the mission being as He told His disciples multiple times in advance. I think his humanity simply did not want to endure the agony that He was keenly aware it was going to take to redeem all of us. Pain is pain, even for God in the flesh, and the intensity of it is life-changing if a person really understands what was done and endured for their salvation.
Why do I need to present what is obvious to everyone who might look at and read post #258? A little hermeneutics can go a long way.
Here’s a start …
Therein lies the rub...how much of humanity did He have to put on to accomplish His mission? Hebrews says He was like unto His brothers in every way, and Gregory Nazianzus helpfully put it as "that which is not assumed is not healed." Questions remain, but we must be careful not to reduce Jesus' humanity to an avatar or make Him God in a man suit.
Personally, I'd rather not be banned from CF, but I tend to take the opposite approach. I question YECs and how much they actually believe the Bible. Versus how much they've allowed worldly culture to blind them to its ancient near east context.
YECs tend to selectively apply their literal interpretation, as is true of just about everyone. The real issue tends to comedown to philosophy, rather than hermeneutics as YECs are stuck on the same philosophical understanding that persisted when the dogmatics of protestant fundamentalism came to be solidified in the mid-18th century. It becomes obvious when the history of Western philosophical movements are studied side by side with the types of epistemic constructs that are in play with disputes between so-called literalists and individuals with more contemporary frameworks for understanding the Christian faith.
Yeah, that's a good way to put it. Though I think it's not so much the religious aspect of traditional religion, but a subtler philosophical consideration: dogmatics and a priori approaches to reality. One of the more pernicious(as far as traditional religious belief is concerned) elements of scientific thinking is that we have abandoned the idea of absolute truth in exchange for a provisionalist approach to truth. While this approach has proven extremely fruitful for phenomenology, it has had a chilling effect on people's ability to form convictions outside of descriptive modeling. Religion has had trouble adapting to this, especially as we have largely passed a major event horizon as we begin to adopt post modern philosophy that tends towards nihilism on a societal level. It isn't just an issue of literalism, but a major clash of philosophical and epistemic approaches that traditional religions have not yet been able to adapt to, at least partially beccause we no longer value tradition for its own sake and instead have become obsessed with novelty.
