The Duality Of Christ's Cognition

The duality of Christ's intellectual experience is evident to a New

Testament student who has any acquaintance with psychology. We find in

Christ two cognitive faculties with two dominant universes of thought

and knowledge. On occasions He speaks and acts as if He read at a

glance all the secrets of nature and the human heart, as if all time

past, present, and future was an open book to him, as if He were in the

coun els of the Most High. On those occasions divine intuition

superseded in Him the slow and faulty methods of human intelligence;

thought was vision, intellect intuition, knowledge omniscience. Thus

His divine nature cognised and knew. That, however, is only one half

of the picture. On other occasions his mind appears to have been

perfectly human. His intelligence and perceptive faculties differed

not essentially from ours. He asked questions and sought information.

He used human categories. He progressed in wisdom. The development of

His mind was gradual. His knowledge was relative to His age and

surroundings. Memory and obliviscence, those complementary and perhaps

constituent elements of soul-being, attention, sensation, recognition,

and discursive reasoning, all these exhibitions of the workings of the

normal mind appeared in Christ. In this manner His human nature

cognised and knew.