The charge that the New Testament statements about the “day and the hour” destroy Trinitarian doctrine rests on a cluster of exegetical and metaphysical misunderstandings whose pedigree stretches from the second-century Monarchians through the fourth-century Arians down to present-day anti-Trinitarians. A Thomistic response must proceed on three levels: the text of Scripture read in its canonical totality, the patristic consensus that shaped the dogmatic definitions, and the metaphysics of the Incarnation and of divine knowledge. Only within that triple horizon can Mark 13:32, Acts 1:7 and analogous passages be weighed without anachronism.
First, the literary context. In Mark’s eschatological discourse Jesus enumerates created orders—“heaven and earth,” “angels in heaven,” “the Son”—in order to establish an absolute epistemic gap between creaturely time and the transcendent counsel by which the Father determines the parousia. Nothing in the syntax compels the inference that the Son as such is ignorant; rather, Jesus is speaking in the prophetic persona of the Servant who, in Isaiah’s idiom, “does nothing of himself” and whose teaching deliberately withholds what the disciples “cannot bear” (Jn 16:12). This pedagogical reserve re-emerges after Easter in Acts 1:7, where the risen Lord repeats almost verbatim the prohibition against apocalyptic timetables. It is therefore hermeneutically arbitrary to wrench Mark 13:32 from that two-stage discourse and read it as a metaphysical disavowal of omniscience. The function of the saying is ascetical: to silence eschatological curiosity and impose vigilance. As Augustine remarks (Trin. I 12), Christ “makes others ignorant by saying he does not know,” just as God tests Abraham not to learn but to reveal what was already known to God.
Patristic exegesis is unanimous on this pedagogical key. Athanasius, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, Cyril of Alexandria and Augustine distinguish between what the Word possesses per se as consubstantial life and what he economically communicates ad extra. When the Arians brandished Mark 13:32, Athanasius replied that the verse refers to the Son’s οἰκονομία, not to his θεότης: “as God he knows, as Teacher he withholds” (Or. III 46). Gregory of Nazianzus insists that it is “the flesh-bearing form” that is said not to know, lest the faithful “adore a naked Deity without the veil” (Or. 29 17). Pope Gregory I will later enshrine the same reading: Christ knows in his humanity, but only because his humanity subsists in the person of the Word, and he may elect not to render that knowledge communicable (scientia incommunicabilis). The Church therefore branded as Agnoetae those who ascribed genuine ignorance to Christ’s humanity, precisely because such ignorance would contradict the communicatio idiomatum guaranteed by the hypostatic union.
Aquinas systematises the patristic data with unrivalled clarity (ST III, q. 9–12). Christ’s one human intellect exercises three modes of cognition. The beatific vision, granted from the first instant of conception, is a direct intuition of the divine essence in which all truths are implicitly contained. Infused knowledge (scientia infusa) endows the humanity with habitual propositional truths proportioned to his mission. Acquired knowledge grows historically through experience. If a datum pertains to the salvation he came to reveal, it falls within the scope of infused knowledge and can be expressed at will; if it lies outside that scope, it remains incommunicable, even though virtually present in the beatific vision. Thus Aquinas can affirm that Christ “knows the day and hour in two ways and does not know it in a third,” without incoherence: he knows simpliciter in the beatific vision; he knows secondarily by infused habit, should he choose to apply that habit to the object; he “does not know” relative to the office of revelation, because revealing it would frustrate the moral purpose of the discourse (ST III, q. 15, a. 10 ad 2).
Hence Christ possessed three kinds of knowledge as man: the beatific vision (intuitive vision of God), infused knowledge (a supernatural illumination exceeding that of any creature), and acquired knowledge (gained experientially through his human faculties). The “ignorance” ascribed to Christ in Mark 13:32, as Augustine, Gregory the Great, and many others taught, refers not to any imperfection or deficiency in the Word as such, but to the economy of revelation and the limitations proper to Christ’s assumed human nature—limitations freely embraced for the sake of our redemption (Philippians 2:6-8). Indeed, even in his humanity, the Church teaches that Christ's soul, being hypostatically united to the divine Person, possessed all knowledge necessary for the accomplishment of his salvific mission, including the day of judgment, though not all knowledge was “communicable” or disclosed in his prophetic office. Thus, as Aquinas observes, Christ may be said “not to know” in the sense of not making known, or not knowing in the manner appropriate to his office as the revealer of the Father at that particular moment.
It is a category error, then, to suppose that a limitation in communicable, human, or prophetic knowledge constitutes an ontological limitation upon the divine nature itself. This is precisely the error of the Agnoetae heresy, roundly condemned by the Fathers. As Gregory the Great wrote to Eulogius of Alexandria: “He knows the day and the hour in his humanity, but not from his humanity; what he knows as man, he knows through the power of his divinity.” This is no mere evasion, but a careful articulation of the metaphysical reality that, although the human nature of Christ is not omniscient per se, it is never separated from the Logos, who is omniscient per se.
This Thomistic framework also dissolves the alleged silence concerning the Holy Spirit. When Jesus distinguishes himself and the angels from “the Father,” he is using “Father” in the economic sense of principium operationum, the fountain from whom both the Word and the Spirit are eternally spirated and by whom the missions of Son and Spirit are historically sent. To say that “only the Father” knows is to say that the knowledge of the parousia is incommunicable from the intra-divine principle to the creaturely order until the economy renders it manifest. It is no more a denial of the Spirit’s omniscience than Jesus’ statement “my doctrine is not mine” (Jn 7:16) is a denial that the doctrine belongs to the Word. Appropriation language assigns operations to one person to highlight relational origin, not to imply ontological deficiency in the other persons.
Hence the supposed silence regarding the Holy Spirit's knowledge in Mark 13:32 is an argument from silence—a fallacy easily avoided by reading the totality of scriptural testimony. The New Testament consistently attributes omniscience to the Spirit (cf. 1 Corinthians 2:10-11: “the Spirit searches all things, even the depths of God... no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God”), and thus no reasonable reading would take Mark 13:32 as a literal exclusion of the Spirit’s omniscience, any more than it would deny the Father’s omnipotence when a passage fails to mention it explicitly. The dominical saying singles out the Father as the arche (principle, source) of the Trinity—consistent with Trinitarian doctrine—not as the sole possessor of divine knowledge in a unipersonal sense.
The reading of Revelation 14 advanced by anti-Trinitarians ignores Johannine symbolism. The “one like a Son of Man” is the Danielic figure to whom universal judgment is given (Dn 7:13–14); his receiving angelic exhortation functions typologically, echoing Daniel’s visions where angels mediate heavenly decrees to prophetic seers. Within apocalyptic convention such an exchange does not prove ignorance; it dramatizes the liturgical cooperation of heavenly orders with the enthroned Lamb. Indeed, earlier in the same book the risen Christ proclaims, “I was dead, and behold I am alive for evermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades” (Rv 1:18), a self-designation that presupposes exhaustive sovereignty over eschatological moments. Revelation 1:1, far from contradicting this, displays the taxis of the economic Trinity: the Father as arche without origin, the Son as mediator of revelation, and the Spirit as the prophetic breath speaking to the churches (Rv 2:7). At no point does the text suggest a hierarchical deficit of knowledge within the Godhead.
Hence the assertion that the “Son of Man” in Revelation is presented as an angelic figure is not sustained by critical scholarship or the development of New Testament Christology. The “one like a son of man” motif (Daniel 7:13; Revelation 1:13; 14:14) is consistently interpreted in the New Testament as a messianic, divine-human title, uniquely fulfilled in Christ, not as a mere angel among angels. The reception of the message “from another angel” in Revelation 14:15 does not render Christ angelic any more than the reception of the Spirit at the baptism or the voice from heaven at the Transfiguration undermines his divinity. Rather, these are symbolic of Christ’s mediatorial office and the proper roles within the economy of salvation, not ontological statements about his nature.
The complaint that the dual-nature doctrine is a post-biblical contrivance betrays historical amnesia. Every document of the New Testament attributes to Christ prerogatives that Israelite monotheism reserves to YHWH—creation (Jn 1:3), judgment (Jn 5:22), worship (Mt 28:17), theophanic glory (Phil 2:10–11)—and simultaneously affirms his genuine humanity subject to growth (Lk 2:52) and passion. Chalcedon’s “without confusion or division” merely provides the metaphysical grammar to hold together what the canonical witnesses already conjoin. Nor is mystery a resort to irrationality. Mystery, in the scholastic sense, is a truth that exceeds but does not violate reason; it can be negatively circumscribed and positively harmonized with all data once revelation supplies its principle. To dismiss mystery is to mistake transcendence for contradiction. This union is not a mere juxtaposition but a true and intimate union at the level of personhood (hypostasis). The distinction between nature (what one is) and person (who one is) is not artificial, but metaphysically necessary for coherently articulating the Incarnation without lapsing into either Nestorianism (dividing Christ into two persons) or Eutychianism (mixing the natures into a tertium quid).
Hence the claim that the doctrine of Christ’s dual nature is an artificial, post-biblical construct is contradicted by the testimony of both the New Testament and the earliest Christian writings. John 1:1-14, Colossians 2:9, Philippians 2:5-11, and Hebrews 1:1-4, among others, unmistakably teach the full deity and true humanity of Christ. The Church’s dogmatic definitions (Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus, Chalcedon) are not “inventions” but authoritative syntheses of the apostolic deposit, responding to heresies that denied either Christ’s divinity or his humanity. The fact that the technical vocabulary (e.g., “hypostasis,” “ousia”) emerged in the patristic period does not undermine the doctrine’s scriptural foundation; it merely reflects the Church’s task of defining, not inventing, the content of divine revelation.
The assertion that the Son’s reception of revelation from the Father (Revelation 1:1) indicates ontological inferiority confuses the immanent Trinity (the eternal relations within the Godhead) with the economic Trinity (God’s action in salvation history). According to the classical doctrine, all that the Son has, he has from the Father (John 16:15: "All that the Father has is mine"); this eternal procession is not an act of subordination but the very mode of the Son’s equality with the Father (cf. Augustine, De Trinitate, I.12). In the economy, the Son is sent, reveals, mediates, and intercedes, but these actions manifest, not compromise, his essential equality with the Father. To borrow Aquinas’s formula, “the principle is not greater than that which proceeds, except according to the manner of origin, not according to nature.”
Nor does the claim that Jesus “nowhere claims a dual nature” withstand scrutiny. The entirety of Christ’s self-revelation presupposes a consciousness and authority both utterly unique and divine (“Before Abraham was, I AM”—John 8:58; “He who has seen me has seen the Father”—John 14:9), alongside an evident participation in human limitations (“I thirst”—John 19:28; “My soul is sorrowful unto death”—Mark 14:34). The resultant theological tension is not a later imposition, but the very datum to which the Church’s Christology is a faithful response.
As for the charge that mystery is invoked to avoid difficulties, it is a profound misunderstanding of the Christian tradition’s understanding of “mystery.” “Mystery” in the Christian sense is not the abandonment of reason, but the humble confession of the creature’s finite capacity to comprehend the infinite God, especially in the central mysteries of the faith (Trinity, Incarnation, Eucharist). This is not a retreat from evidence, but the recognition that, as Aquinas notes (ST I, q. 1, a. 5), revelation, as the self-disclosure of the transcendent God, necessarily surpasses the grasp of natural reason, though it never contradicts it.
The objection that the dual nature of Christ is philosophically incoherent is, in fact, an assertion of fideistic empiricism rather than an argument. The unique singularity of the Incarnation is no argument against its coherence; rather, it points to its transcendence above created analogies. The distinction between confusion and division, as articulated at Chalcedon, affirms that the properties of each nature are preserved even in the unity of the person.
A word on the Jehovah’s Witness proposal of “selective foreknowledge.” By conceding that God may voluntarily refrain from knowing particular futures, the position abandons the very premise used to demote the Son. If omniscience can coexist with voluntary non-cognition in the Father, then the Son’s purported ignorance—granting for argument’s sake that it were real—would not disqualify him from deity. The JW argument undercuts itself. Classical theism, by contrast, defines omniscience as knowledge of all truth values; voluntariness applies to the decision to reveal or to actualize certain truths, not to the possession of them. Hence the scholastic axiom: Deus non potest sibi ignorantiam adjicere—God cannot add ignorance to himself—because ignorance would be a privation incompatible with pure act.
The Watchtower’s peculiar theory of “selective omniscience” is not only unbiblical but conceptually incoherent. Classical theism maintains that God’s knowledge is not discursive or contingent, but identical with his essence; he knows all things past, present, and future, not by observation but by eternally causing their being. To suggest that God “chooses not to know” certain things is to collapse the distinction between the Creator’s simple, eternal act of knowing and the creature’s limited, temporal cognition. If the Father can “choose not to know,” then ignorance of the future cannot be taken as evidence of non-divinity in the Son. In effect, the Watchtower’s own logic undercuts the very objection they make against orthodox Christology.
Finally, the Thomistic vision situates Christ’s human not-knowing within the mystery of kenosis (Phil 2:7). The Word “empties” himself not by surrendering attributes but by assuming a created nature capable of temporal learning and docility to the Father’s will. The one person ensures that whatever is predicated of either nature is predicated of Christ; yet the modes of predication differ. The subject “Son” can truly say “I do not know” insofar as he speaks from the vantage of his created intellect engaged in pedagogical economy, while the same “Son” possesses uncreated scientia that eternally comprehends the term of history. To pose the alternatives “either Christ is omniscient or he is ignorant” is therefore to impose a univocal epistemology upon a hypostatic union that transcends such flat categories.
In sum, the alleged dilemma dissolves when Scripture is read within its canonical scope, when patristic exegesis is heeded, and when the metaphysical precision of Aquinas is applied. The Trinity is not embarrassed by Mark 13:32; rather, the verse becomes a luminous instance of how the eternal Son, remaining what he is, chooses in the humility of his mission to direct the faithful away from speculative curiosity toward the practical vigilance of hope. The Thomistic synthesis secures both the absolute divinity of Father, Son and Spirit and the genuine humanity of the Incarnate Word, thereby preserving the coherence of biblical revelation against every reduction, ancient or modern.
The challenge presented above is rooted in category errors—failing to distinguish between nature and person, between economic and immanent Trinity, and between communicable and incommunicable knowledge. The Catholic doctrine does not rely upon “contorted arguments,” but upon a coherent metaphysical framework, consistent exegesis, and the accumulated wisdom of the Church. The difficulties posed by passages such as Mark 13:32 are neither ignored nor explained away, but carefully integrated into the total mystery of Christ, who is at once true God and true man. Far from being a problem for the Trinity, they are a confirmation of the apostolic faith that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14)—a mystery ever-ancient, ever-new, and worthy of faith and adoration.