Hi redrosetea,
My main objection to your opening post was to your apparent speculation that the Lord was at some point ignorant of His own identity. I am not trying to be a smarty pants here. It just happens that I came across this teaching in a devotional work during Advent and subsequently studied up on it a bit. There are so many wonderful insights into God’s love to be derived from this teaching as has been pointed out to me. But even putting that aside, I am now pretty certain that it would be very difficult to maintain that such a level of ignorance in Christ, as to not know His own identity, is compatible with obligatory Catholic teaching.
You have objected to private revelation on the grounds that it is not obligatory. But that is far from saying that it is unreliable. Regarding private revelations, the Church condemns that which is impermissible, such as at Medjugorge, judges some such as Fatima and LaSalette worthy of belief, and permits others. For the one who wants to know more and more, private revelation can be a reliable source of evidence.
But I wouldn’t want to give the impression that my citation from St. Alphonsus was a private revelation. It is firmly rooted in defined Catholic Theology. Theology, whereby implicit truths of Scripture are clarified are also reliable, and sometimes declared infallible. In addition to St. Alphonsus, St. John Cassian, Thomas Aquinas, the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1913, and more recently, Pope Pius XII has affirmed the teaching that by virtue of the hypostatic union, from the very moment of His conception, Christ had the immediate knowledge of God.
The Church speaks of Christ’s acquired human knowledge (whereby he grew in grace and wisdom, Luke 2), His infused knowledge (such as our first parents and the angels have), and His divine knowledge. Assuredly, Christ acquired experiential knowledge as any human toddler would. But the reason why Catholic paintings and statuary sometimes exhibit the infant Christ making gestures of blessing and appearing to be more cognitive than ordinary babies is that He was extraordinary. Catholic theology can not attribute to the Baby Jesus the ignorance that is ordinary in other babies because of the certainty of the hypostatic union.
In the encyclical Mystici Corporis, Pope Pius XII argues from the Catholic teaching regarding Christs’s knowledge that even from the womb, He knew every member of the future Mystical Body of Christ. Here is how Pope Pius puts it:
“…in virtue of the Beatific Vision which He enjoyed from the time when he was received into the womb of the Mother of God, He has forever and continuously had present to Him all the members of His mystical Body and embraced them with His saving love.”
The Scriptures are not intended to explicitly inform us of everything that we are intended to accept by faith. But by pondering the truths which are derived therefrom, theology has enabled the Church to propose doctrines that are obligatory. It is not my opinion that faithful Catholics are strictly obliged to embrace the doctrine of Christ’s knowledge as proposed by the Fathers, St. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa, and Pope Pius XII in his recent encyclical. But to suppose that Christ was ever ignorant of His identity and mission is in my opinion, dangerous. I cannot imagine how speculations that Christ was ever ignorant will be able to be reconciled with the defined and obligatory doctrine of two natures in Christ.
None of this is intended to be critical of your wish to fill in the blanks in the history of Christ. Apart from an explicit Gospel statement, Catholics can have reliable confidence from other legitimate sources which have pondered and developed the Gospel record, to know that Our Lord has always and continuously had knowledge of His own identity and mission.
Regards,
Rory
