"Annoyed Pinoy" regularly posts at Triablogue. See here. He defends the Trinity doctrine at one of his own blogs.
I posted the following challenge to him at that blog (see here).
I now crosspost that here in case it happens to disappear:
Trinitarians get around Mark 13:32 by limiting Jesus' confession of ignorance solely to his "human nature". But since one's "nature" is their inherent feature and thus something the person cannot avoid implicating, then if Jesus had two natures, it would be perfectly reasonable to say that BOTH of them were implicated in his confession of ignorance (i.e., the divine side of Jesus admitted being ignorant of something).
The reasonableness of implicating both of his alleged "natures" is not going to disappear merely because you feel forced under biblical inerrancy to automatically favor any view about Jesus that will make sense of the premise that he could both know and not know one single factoid at the same time.
You probably believe that a person's mind is their "spirit", and if so, this would be the case with Jesus who became a "real" human being (i.e., became a higher-order mammal whose mind was capable of operating separately from its body). Ok, was Jesus speaking with his "mind" when he confessed this ignorance? Is Jesus' "mind" the same as his "spirit"? Was Jesus' speaking from his "spirit" by divulging the ignorant state of his "mind" in Mark 13:32? What exactly would be "unreasonable" in saying Jesus' was speaking from his "spirit" in Mark 13:32?
Was Jesus' spirit separate from the Holy Spirit? Mark 3 would seem to disallow this with its warning that accusing Jesus of demon-possession constitutes blasphemy of the Holy Spirit, as it falsely equates the Holy Spirit with demons...which implies that Jesus' "spirit" is the Holy Spirit, there is no lesser "human spirit" in addition to his "Holy Spirit". Jesus also breathes on the disciples in John 20 and says "receive ye the Holy Spirit" powerfully supporting the notion that his spirit is the Holy Spirit, and there is no fourth identity called "human spirit" in existence here.
Therefore, if Jesus was speaking his "mind" in Mark 13:32, he was also speaking from his "spirit" in Mark 13:32, and thus his confession of ignorance constitutes the Holy Spirit's ignorance, which then saddles god himself with this ignorance.
Was the day of Christ's return missing from Jesus' "mind"? Was it missing from his "spirit"?
If you try to get away from this by positing that Jesus had a "human mind" that was separate from "Holy Spirit", you'll end up with 4 people in the Trinity...at least during his earthly life, even if there were only 3 people in it before the incarnation.
Remember, there are only 3 persons you are allowed here, no extras!Seems to me that reading Trinitarian theology back into Mark 13:32 comes at great intellectual sacrifice, and doesn't even conform to normative hermeneutical convention, since what the originally intended audience likely understood Mark 13:32 represents a normative rule of interpretation, and common sense would insist that Mark's orignally intended audience, back there in 60 a.d., likely had views of Jesus far less theologically sophisticated than the views espoused by the "orthodox" at Nicaea.
So Mark's originally intended audience would more than likely have denied Jesus' alleged omniscience, and if other parts of Mark indicate Jesus knew all things, this is either typical Semitic exaggeration, or Jesus inconsistently held an unrealistically high view of himself, or Mark's gospel is merely inconsistent about the matter.
I personally prefer the second. Mark's obvious apathy toward Jesus' childhood is more consistent with the theory that he was something of an adoptionist, even if, like most people, his entire story is not consistent with everything adoptionist.
Regardless, bible inerrancy is a false doctrine, so I'm quite reasonable to feel comfortable with the possibility that the interpretation of Mark 13:32 that causes Mark to contradict himself, is the correct one.
This is despite the fact that Mark nowhere claims that Jesus is equal with God.
