How Did The Incarnation Change The Son?

[icelandic_iceskater]

The title pretty much says it all.

I guess its pretty obvious that He gained experiences that could not have experienced without a human body, but doesn't there have to be more? What does it really mean to say that Christ took on a human nature?

[CatherineM]

I've often thought that the Father couldn't figure out why we kept sinning and turning away from him. He gave us everything, and we still don't appreciate the gift. The one thing an omnipotent being can't know is what it is like to not be omnipotent. If you know the future, you have no fear of it. If you can create anything you want, how could you know jealousy or greed. Jesus had to become human in part so that God could understand human fear and despair and greed.

[Nihil Obstat]

Seems to me that it's more for us than for God. God became Man to show us the perfection of humanity. God subjected Himself to everything that is wrong with us and with our world so that He could give us a perfect model to follow. Now we can relate to God in everything, including in our humanity.

[icelandic_iceskater]

[quote name='CatherineM' date='26 June 2010 - 11:37 PM' timestamp='1277606223' post='2134718']
I've often thought that the Father couldn't figure out why we kept sinning and turning away from him. He gave us everything, and we still don't appreciate the gift. The one thing an omnipotent being can't know is what it is like to not be omnipotent. If you know the future, you have no fear of it. If you can create anything you want, how could you know jealousy or greed. Jesus had to become human in part so that God could understand human fear and despair and greed.
[/quote]
But can He know things out without ever having actually experienced them?

[aalpha1989]

[quote name='CatherineM' date='26 June 2010 - 10:37 PM' timestamp='1277606223' post='2134718']
I've often thought that the Father couldn't figure out why we kept sinning and turning away from him. He gave us everything, and we still don't appreciate the gift. The one thing an omnipotent being can't know is what it is like to not be omnipotent. If you know the future, you have no fear of it. If you can create anything you want, how could you know jealousy or greed. Jesus had to become human in part so that God could understand human fear and despair and greed.
[/quote]


[quote name='icelandic_iceskater' date='26 June 2010 - 11:17 PM' timestamp='1277608668' post='2134741']
But can He know things out without ever having actually experienced them?
[/quote]

Of course He can. God is omnipotent. We cannot add to His understanding of mankind, nor could we before the Incarnation. God understood us better than we understood ourselves through all of time. By definition, there is not a "one thing that an omnipotent can't know".

[icelandic_iceskater]

But, like CatM said, then how could an omniscient know the experience of not knowing? Something cannot both be and not be.

[Innocent]

[quote name='CatherineM' date='27 June 2010 - 09:07 AM' timestamp='1277606223' post='2134718']
I've often thought that the Father couldn't figure out why we kept sinning and turning away from him. He gave us everything, and we still don't appreciate the gift. The one thing an omnipotent being can't know is what it is like to not be omnipotent. If you know the future, you have no fear of it. If you can create anything you want, how could you know jealousy or greed. Jesus had to become human in part so that God could understand human fear and despair and greed.
[/quote]

I've seen you say this before, and I've been thinking about this, but I'm not convinced of your hypothesis for the following reasons:

After all, true despair comes when a man comes to self-knowledge and has to acknowledge that he is sinful, and that even if he turns back to God, he can't be sure of being faithful to him.

Christ never sinned. (According to Catholic Christology, as I understand it, Christ didn't even have concupiscence.) So Christ could never understand despair.

It's the same with fear. At most Christ felt the fear of a creature which is natural for reasons of self-preservation. Though he cried aloud "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani" on the cross, nowhere do we see him experience the most terrible fear namely, the fear of the sinner for anything that is good and holy, and especially for God.

Also, if Christ had no concupiscence and never sinned, he couldn't have felt greed, and nowhere in the scriptures is it recorded that he did.

Since God not only created us but holds us in existence every moment of every day, it has to mean that he "knows us inside out" and thus he understands our inner darkness even better than we do.

If Christ really wanted to experience the depths of our fallen-ness first-hand, he would have had to commit every possible sin that man is capable of commiting. Although Christ in a way "identified with our human sinful nature" during his baptism in the Jordan and though St. Paul says that "Christ was made sin" Christ never committed personal sin, and thus he cannot have meant to experience in his human nature, in the normal way that we do, the despair and fear that a sinner feels.

Also, I think that while Good can understand evil, evil cannot understand good. As [url="http://songosmeltingpot.blogspot.com/2008/09/wh-auden-on-jrr-tolkien.html"]Auden says in a review of the Lord of the Rings[/url],

[quote]Evil, that is, has every advantage but one-it is inferior in imagination. Good can imagine the possibility of becoming evil-hence the refusal of Gandalf and Aragorn to use the Ring-but Evil, defiantly chosen, can no longer imagine anything but itself.[/quote]

Even Jacques Maritain makes a similar point in his book [i]Moral Philosophy[/i], but I can't seem to hunt down a quote at the moment.

[b]EDIT:[/b] I found it. Here's the paragraph:

[quote]I have just said that Hegel carried modern rationalism to its ultimate extreme, by rendering the irrational consubstantial with reason. It is relevant to note that the very word irrational, in its modern usage, belongs to the conceptual vocabulary of rationalism. For a rational but not rationalist philosophy, like that of Aristotle for example, there were different degrees of intelligibility; there were in particular, at the very bottom of the scale of intelligibility, realities which were not intelligible directly in themselves (per se), although intelligible through other things -- but there was nothing irrational. Intelligibility in pure act was found only in Intellection in pure act, and intelligibility went hand in hand with being, so that things contained a certain intrinsic element of unintelligibility (non-intelligibility directly in themselves) to the extent that they involved potency, and especially matter, or to the extent that they freely "nihilated" (swerved toward nothingness) by choosing evil. This element of opacity, essential to things insofar as they are not God, is only surmounted, St. Thomas was to hold, by the divine Intellect, which utterly and exhaustively knows potency through act, matter through form, evil through good, because it knows all things in and through its own uncreated essence and intelligibility. For our human reason this element of intrinsic opacity constitutes a mystery in things into which our reason penetrates but which it will never surmount; it exists outside our reason, in extramental reality, which for that reason will forever remain obscure to us in some degree, and will not permit our reason to know the whole of anything.[/quote][url="http://maritain.nd.edu/jmc/etext/jmoral07.htm"]SOURCE: Moral Philosophy, Pt II, Ch 7.[/url]

If an omnipotent being cannot know what it is not to be omnipotent, wouldn't that mean that that being wouldn't be omniscient? We are creatures and we know and feel what it means not to be omnipotent and omniscient, and since "it is in God that we live and move and have our being" God cannot help knowing, since he knows the essence of what a creature is, what it means not to be omnipotent and omniscient.

Edited June 27, 2010 by Innocent

[Resurrexi]

According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church (quoting the Byzantine Liturgy), the Son of God became man "without change" ([i]Catechism of the Catholic Church[/i], no. 469).

[icelandic_iceskater]

So Christ had a human nature before (for lack of a better word) humanity was created?

[Resurrexi]

[quote name='icelandic_iceskater' date='26 June 2010 - 11:34 PM' timestamp='1277613244' post='2134779']
So Christ had a human nature before (for lack of a better word) humanity was created?
[/quote]

No, but Christ's divine nature was not changed by the incarnation.

[Miss Hepburn]

[quote name='icelandic_iceskater' date='26 June 2010 - 09:18 PM' timestamp='1277605090' post='2134710']
What does it really mean to say that Christ took on a human nature?
[/quote]

It says that out of the wisdom and kindness of our Father - He wanted us to see fully that we - "us" -
could experience true Christ Consciousness- The Holy Awareness and Perception of Christ's---that we could be joint heirs along with Him and realize all that He did - that we could share in His wisdom - the wisdom that allowed Him to walk on water and to resurrect.

As Christ - so can we be...and are.

Miss Hepburn

[Ephrem Augustine]

I cannot say much that the Son of God was changed at the incarnation, but i can say i am changed as a result of it.

[Ziggamafu]

The decision to create a human nature by which the Word could become flesh no more changed God than the decision to create a universe by which the Word could one day take on a human nature.

The change resides in the temporal object of creation, not in the eternal Creator. God took on change [i]in His human nature[/i], but God remained (and remains) unchanged.

[kafka]

[quote name='Nihil Obstat' date='26 June 2010 - 10:49 PM' timestamp='1277606992' post='2134728']
Seems to me that it's more for us than for God. God became Man to show us the perfection of humanity. God subjected Himself to everything that is wrong with us and with our world so that He could give us a perfect model to follow. Now we can relate to God in everything, including in our humanity.
[/quote]
That is well said. Basically the same thing is expressed in the teachings of Vatican II:

"Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear." (Gaudium et Spes 22)

The Son is able to assume a human nature without changing the Divine Nature since human nature is created in His own image and likeness. The Son expresses His Divine Nature in His human nature since the two are so intimately, thoroughly, and irrevocably united. Yet His human nature is created and finite so Christ reveals the Divine Nature in his human nature to the limit of created and finite potentiality in One and the Same Pure Eternal Act of fully and immutably being the Divine Nature.

[Innocent]

[quote name='CatherineM' date='27 June 2010 - 09:07 AM' timestamp='1277606223' post='2134718']
I've often thought that the Father couldn't figure out why we kept sinning and turning away from him. He gave us everything, and we still don't appreciate the gift. The one thing an omnipotent being can't know is what it is like to not be omnipotent. If you know the future, you have no fear of it. If you can create anything you want, how could you know jealousy or greed. Jesus had to become human in part so that God could understand human fear and despair and greed.
[/quote]

This thought just occurred to me today:

If your theory is that God wanted to experience something new, i.e., the viewpoint of a creature, [which means, God is open to new experiences] and that before the Incarnation, God didn't have this experience [which means, God must be within time] then your theological worldview seems very close to the [url="http://www.phatmass.com/phorum/index.php?showtopic=105380&view=findpost&p=2126615"]Open Theism that RevProdeji subscribes to.[/url]