Inbox: Christ and Learning

“What about the questions Jesus asked as a boy (Lk 2:46). Did He know the answers or did He learn?”

There is no application of the word “learn” in Luke 2:46. Luke simply says that Jesus Christ was listening to the teachers and asking them questions. There’s no reason to suppose he was asking those questions because of any lack in his own knowledge, rather than the sort of rhetorical and didactic questioning in which he would later so frequently engage with his disciples or with the Pharisees. He would call on their judgment in order to set the stage for deeper thinking on a subject they had so far understood only superficially.

There is but one passage in all of scripture that employs the word “learn” in reference to Christ’s life: Hebrews 5:8.

Learning Obedience

There, the nature of the learning is given: “obedience”, meaning submission or compliance — literally “attentive or sharp hearing”. In other words, it was not content but dynamic or experience that was being “learned”. For the first time in all of eternity, the Son of God was experiencing what it was to be subject to the Father: “not my will, but thine be done”. The practice of hearing the Father speak into the life of a man who had set aside his divine privileges, “emptying himself” to be “like his brethren” was a new situation, one that had never been possible before. In eternity, the will of the Father and the will of the Son were identical. On earth, the Son would experience the challenges of applying the will of God to human existence; and though he would triumph utterly on every occasion, this was a new dynamic.

On earth, the Son could say, “I always do those things that please the Father.” But notice that even in this phrase is a dichotomy between what one might be inclined to if one were thinking only humanly, thinking only about one’s flesh, and what the Son understood to be harmonious with the will of the Father — and he’s saying, “I always choose the latter.” Not that he was at all inclined or even tempted to do otherwise; but until he was truly a human being, even the opportunity or external situation for such a decisive move to occur could never have happened. God is always necessarily who he is; the Son, as the devil found to his chagrin, took on the full challenges of being truly human but never took on the human penchant for sin, or for making bad choices.

In “learning obedience”, Christ was undergoing the external situation common to mankind, for the first and only time, wherein free choice of the good was a reality in him. He would always "attentively or sharply hear” that which the Father required of him. There would be no variance in that. But the experience of having to hear, in the way that humans have to hear, was new and unique in the life of the Son of God.

An Analogy

I would put it this way by analogy. Suppose you were a skilled electrician, but only a self-taught one. You’ve wired your own house, that of your neighbor, and been a hobbyist since you were a child, fixing and selling electric devices of all kinds. You know everything about electricity, and could assemble your own power plant or dynamo if you had to. But you are entering the trade: and one of the requirements of the trade is that you apprentice to a senior electrician for two years.

In this imaginary case, the apprentice actually may know far more than the certified electrician “training” him. Nevertheless, he cannot be certified as an electrician until he submits himself to “learning” from the senior tradesman. When his two years are completed, he may not have actually learned anything at all contentwise — he knew it all before. But he will have passed the bar set for all electricians, and so be certified by the trade itself. He will have “learned” or experienced the dynamic of being an apprentice by having gone through it. Without that, it will not matter how much he knows; nobody would be able to say that he has been proven competent for his aspired role and should be trusted to perform it. After all, what he knows is what he knows; and part of being a certified electrician is that other people have to know and have good reason to believe that’s what you are.

Now, what’s interesting is that the apprentice here is in no way insufficient. He’s in no way ignorant. He would have been a perfectly good electrician if he’d been trusted from the start. But he really couldn’t be called an electrician until he’d done the required steps. However good he was at electrical work, he had to submit to the requirements of that particular office in order to be a complete, certified and trusted electrician.

Meeting Necessary Requirements

I think it’s in this context that Hebrews speaks of the Lord “learning submission”: not pointing to the inadequacy of his person, nor the insufficiency of his knowledge, but to the necessary requirement for a high priest that would serve eternally. He must be a man. He must undergo what it means to be under the will of the Father. He must demonstrate his worth, both as Son of God and Son of Man … or how shall we know that he loves and identifies with us, so as to intercede for us, and how, unless he does not fail, will we know that he also has the certification of God the Father and can offer us the help we need?

I think that’s all we can say about Christ “learning”. I think it’s all that the Bible says about it, actually.