St. Paul, writing to the Corinthians, provided both the matter and the form of sacred theology when he declared:

The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God. For “who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct Him?” But we have the mind of Christ.

In this Pauline text, the words nous Christou are typically translated by the English phrase mind of Christ. Perhaps a better translation would be Christ’s perception as indicated in the Vulgate’s Latin phrase, sensus Christi. St. Jerome, the author of the Vulgate seems to have interpreted nous Christou in the sense of how Christ Himself understands the things freely given to us by God.

And just what have we been given in Christ? He Himself tells us: “All things that I heard from My Father I have made known to you” (John 15:15).  Christ indeed discloses to us the mind of God, and He does this through the medium of His own human mind, His own sensus. The Incarnation is not simply a revealed truth; it is the fact and foundation for knowing all revealed truth, including the truth of salvation. So what we must do is to explore, as much as possible, Jesus’ own self-understanding, His ideas about how to live – His interpretation of His redemptive work. If we want to understand what Jesus was doing on this earth, perhaps we should first inquire what Jesus thought He was doing. This, I believe, is what the apostolic writings were attempting to do.

If the word salvation is taken to summarize “the things freely given to us by God” (Paul), then the first question we should ask is, just what did Jesus the Savior think He was doing in the work of salvation? How did the God-Man perceive what He was about? What, in His mind, were “the things of My Father” that He had to accomplish? What was Jesus’ own sense of redemption?

Understanding salvation to consist in the union of human beings with God, the Church – rather early in the history of sacred theology – perceived (and then went on to define in her conciliar determinations) an intimate connection between the truth of what salvation is  and the truth about what God’s Incarnation means for humanity. The Church determined that man’s salvation required the Savior, God’s divine and eternal Son, to become an integral human being.