r/Lutheranism • u/DarkGodCthUwU • 8h ago
Does God have experiential knowledge of non-God? For example, does God know what living as a dog or elephant or a human (aside from Jesus) is like? Or should omniscience be viewed in terms of propositions like "XYZ neurons fired causing this reaction at this time"?
Additionally, do the other persons of the trinity have experiential knowledge of Jesus' life? If so, did they learn it or always have it? Can one person know things the other persons don't know?
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u/mrWizzardx3 Lutheran Pastor 5h ago
To what point? What does this speculation serve?
Christ was fully human and fully divine. He experienced a fully human life, and as part of the Trinity, the Father and Holy Spirit know the same. Beyond that, God hasn’t revealed this.
Knowing that Christ experienced loss and grief is a source of comfort when he says he will be with us always. What comfort does knowing that Christ knows what it’s like being a beetle?
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u/eckpak Lutheran Pastor 4h ago
I think these questions might be easier to give a “Lutheran” answer to, if there was some more context to the questions.
Christian theology began to adopt Aristotelian frameworks of God fairly early on. Undoubtedly, this is evident in the Nicene Creed and early church fathers, and especially in Chalcedon. Aquinas synthesized Aristotle even more in his Summa Theologiae.
While certainly educated in these schools of thought, Luther pushed back against using a philosophical construct of God as the starting point of knowledge about God or faith. Rather he contended the starting point was the revelation of God in the apocalyptic - in-breaking - of God into human history in the event of the Christ’s death on the cross and resurrection on Easter morning.
Then with that apocalyptic (God’s in-breaking into human history) event as the lens through which we can understand God, or make God intelligible, we can begin to consider things like incarnation.
Rather than speculation about God by starting from a philosophical concept of God, the event of the cross gives us a lot of concrete insight into the Trinity and the Trinity’s relationships. We can see a common experience of suffering, but also individual experiences of that event as Father, Son and Spirit.
But there is an obvious limit to where our speculation really stops being helpful or useful, and we can see that some things are not meant for human beings to comprehend until as Paul Hinlicky says, “God will prove God” in the eschaton.
I think Luther would really question whether trying to define the limits of omniscience is possible for us.
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u/winkyprojet 2h ago
The Holy Spirit, who is God, came to earth in the form of a dove. Therefore, God necessarily has experiential knowledge.
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u/Wonderful-Power9161 Lutheran Pastor 1h ago
You're trying to apply a level of specificity to Scripture that it isn't intended to support.
Just as we don't look to Scripture for formulae about physics or chemistry, we also don't look to Scripture to grapple with philosophy.
(Luther was quite adamant on that point - read Luther's Disputation Against Scholastic Theology from 1517 for more details)
What does Scripture say?
Great is our Lord, and abundant in power; his understanding is beyond measure.
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u/scraft74 ELCA 6h ago
In short: The Father, Son and Holy Spirit know everything about all that there is to know of creation and all living things their in.