4 Reasons the Trinity is Essential to Christian Belief

Why exactly is temporary subordination not sufficient to explain that?

I mean, I think this question would best be directed at a defender of orthodoxy.

But to try to answer for it (at least among those orthodox that didn't just hand-wave the verse away, and did come closer to a kenotic interpretation): realize that the idea that the "Son" lacked any knowledge was just totally unacceptable in the early church, in light of the statements where the Son is in such a close relationship to the Father that they're equals.

So, in order to get around this (re: Mark 13:32 and elsewhere), what people seem to have done is to have created a division within the Son. Basically, they say that part of the Son did know the day/hour, and part of the Son didn't. For example, Athanasius insists that "the very context of the passage shows that the Son of God knows that hour and that day." Yet he didn't go for reinterpreting the syntax of the verse in the same way that those who tried to make it say "the Son wouldn't have known the day/hour of the end if it hadn't been for the Father" did. Instead, he seems to have interpreted the syntax almost in a way to suggest that Jesus was only pretending not to know... or, rather, that say what he did to demonstrate, to the disciples, something about the nature of humanity say, pretending to be human (which is sort of what I was hinting at in my comment here, where this comes dangerously close to doceticism).

The problem, of course, is that nothing about Mark 13:32 suggests any type of partition in the Son. Yes, throughout Mark 13 may be some tension where the Son does indeed appear to know a good bit about the eschaton (so why wouldn't he know the "day/hour"?); but the plain (and best) interpretation is certainly not that the Son created a partition within himself so that one part of him would know and another wouldn't. Rather, it's that this knowledge just wasn't given to the Son to "know," in any sense of the word; and the context suggests that it wasn't given by the Father, in the same sense that the angels, too, were not made privy to this information. To insist otherwise is, again, to fall victim to the anachronism of imposing later Christologies on earlier ones.

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