Could Jesus Have Sinned?

 

Could Jesus Have Sinned?

The Two Natures of Christ and the Doctrine of Original Sin

Could Jesus have sinned? – The instinctive Christian answer is “No,” but this raises a secondary question: In what sense, then, could Jesus be said to have struggled and been tempted like us?

Hebrews 2:17-18: “For this reason he had to be made like them, fully human in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people. Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.”

Hebrews 4:15: “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin.”  (See also Matt. 4:1-11)

The answer to the title question hinges on understanding the two natures of Christ: fully divine, and fully human. Based on that fact, the correct answer would seem to be: Yes, in theory, the human nature of Jesus Christ could have sinned; but also No, in practice, Jesus would never have sinned because of the union of his human nature with his divine nature. So while his human nature could, in theory, have sinned, in actuality it was a practical impossibility. Let’s back up a little and examine what this answer is getting at:

The Two Natures of Christ:

The Bible testifies that Jesus is fully man and fully God. On the one hand, he is a human being with a real human body and a rational human soul, sharing the same human nature that you and I do (Heb. 2:17; Rom. 5:12-17). On the other hand, Jesus is clearly shown in Scripture as being fully God, sharing the same divine nature as God the Father (John 1:1; Col. 2:9; Heb. 1:3; John 10:30). In the words of the Chalcedonian definition (an early Christian summary of traditional doctrine), Jesus was “perfect in Godhead, perfect in Manhood, truly God and truly Man, the self-same of a rational soul and body; co-essential with the Father according to the Godhead; co-essential with us according to the Manhood; like us in all things, except for sin.”

[It is important to note that this does not mean that Jesus had two “persons” inside of him, a human Jesus and a divine Christ, or anything like that. Rather, Jesus is one person, who shares fully, at the same time, in both the divine and human natures. These two natures are distinct from one another by essence (one is uncreated and eternal; the other is created and contingent), but they are perfectly united in Christ, so that he cannot be seen as internally divided (like a split personality), nor as having the two natures blended together into something new. He has both natures, fully distinct but inseparable, existing in perfect union together in his one person.]

So Jesus had a full, authentic human nature. This human nature was naturally inherited, in the miracle of his incarnation and birth, from his mother Mary. But that leads to another question:

Since human nature is fallen, wouldn’t Jesus have inherited a corrupt, fallen human nature? The answer to this is No, and to explain why, we must look at the doctrine of original sin, and what we mean when we say that human nature is fallen (or corrupted by sin).

Original sin is the term we use to refer to the clear biblical teaching that in Adam and Eve’s act of disobedience against God, sin affected human nature in such a way that every subsequent human being is automatically and inextricably trapped in sin’s power (Romans 5:12-19).

-        How does original sin get passed on? Even though the Bible is clear about the reality of original sin, it does not provide a clear picture for the mechanism by which original sin works (that is, how it is transmitted from person to person).

-        Is it biologically inherited? Throughout church history, various answers have been given. Augustine thought that original sin was a genetically-inherited corruption, passed on biologically from parents to children. (Incidentally, this view is partly why the Roman Catholic Church holds to the immaculate conception of Mary, believing that it would have been necessary for Mary to be purified from all sin before she became the mother of Christ, otherwise a “sin nature” would have been passed to him.)

-        Is it legally imputed upon us? The Protestant Reformers thought that original sin was both a matter of an inherited corruption which inclines us toward sin, and also the imputation of the guilt of Adam’s sin upon us, since Adam is the “federal head” of all humanity, representing us before God.

-        Sin = Falling out of Communion with God: The classical view of the eastern church fathers, however, had a view which was rooted both in the philosophical nature of sin and the idea of salvation as a matter of union with God. This view holds that sin is not a “substance” that can taint our nature or produce a direct effect on human biological inheritance, but that, as disobedience to God, it simply signifies the breaking of communion between God and humanity. When Adam and Eve sinned, their communion with God—the spiritual closeness that connected them to God’s grace—was ruptured. All human beings inherit a fallen human nature in that sense—not as though something has gone genetically awry with human nature that changes us in our essence, but rather that human nature as a whole is no longer in communion with God and thus no longer in direct contact with his sanctifying grace. We fell away from God together, as a race, in Adam and Eve, and are now born disconnected from his grace. So, what we inherit didn’t change in the Fall—human nature is still “in the image of God”—but the intended conditions in which our nature was meant to operate have changed. To use an analogy from electronics, our natures were meant to be “plugged in” to God, but all humans now are born in an unplugged state. In the absence of communion with God, who is the source of all spiritual life, we inherit the consequence of death, and we are left with the survival-oriented selfishness of humanity’s biological nature. This self-oriented bent, which conforms to the established patterns of ancestral sin in the world around us, makes it an absolute certainty that every single one of us will sin. Thus, because of the Fall, we have two effects: (1) we inherit the consequences of original sin because our human nature is not in communion with God (as it was originally intended to be, before Adam and Eve’s sin), and (2) we all ultimately ratify this condition with our own sins.

-        Why Was Jesus’s Human Nature Not Fallen? Under this conception, Mary was a recipient of humanity’s sinful inheritance just like us (as both the Bible and the earliest Christian witness appear to assume). How, then, did the nature she passed on to Jesus not suffer from the problem of sin? Because the problem of sin was fundamentally a problem of being out of communion with God. But the incarnation was a miracle of the union of God’s nature with the human nature Jesus inherited from Mary, so his human nature automatically existed in full communion from the very beginning. It came into being in a “plugged in” state because of the union of Christ’s two natures. Therefore, Jesus’s human nature did not bear the fallen effects of sin that ours do, because his human nature was in union with the divine nature.

-        Jesus’s nature and pre-Fall Adam’s nature: As such, the closest parallel we have to Jesus’s human nature is that of Adam before the Fall: a nature in communion with God. (Technically, Adam’s communion with God may not have been fully developed. Many church fathers thought he was created on the beginning of “growth trajectory” into greater union with God, which sin interrupted. Further, Adam did not have the divine nature existing in his person, as Jesus did, so the analogy is imperfect—but it still remains the closest one we have.)

-        Then could Jesus have sinned? In theory, yes—Jesus’s human nature, possessing authentic free will, could have sinned, just as Adam’s human nature, in communion with God, did sin. However, because Jesus’s human nature was fully united to the divine nature, in practice this flips the answer to No—sin is a practical impossibility when one is in full union with God. To put it another way: Jesus’s human nature was fully capable of sinning, but because of its union with the divine nature, it never would. (And this also explains why we won’t have to worry about sin in heaven—as heirs of full communion with God, even richer than Adam experienced, sin will become a practical impossibility, even though we retain free will.)

-        What was Jesus’s temptation like? So did Jesus really experience the struggle of temptation? Yes, in his human nature he really did. There was never any possibility that he would give into it, but the struggle was real in a couple key ways: both in terms of facing the pain of our broken, fallen world, and of having the discipline to choose God’s way instead of the easy path of self-satisfaction. Jesus’s human will had authentic power of choice, and every time a temptation came his way, it had to choose to align itself to God’s will.

-        What This Means for Us: When we come in faith to Christ, we are transferred over from the old humanity under Adam to the new humanity in Christ (Rom. 5:12-21). This new humanity has a restored communion with God, made permanent in the everlasting union of Christ’s two natures. In other words (to return to our electronics analogy), we get plugged back in. So as we stay connected to Christ, like branches to the vine, we remain connected to God’s sanctifying grace. Our individual sins still occur, but they no longer break our communion with God because those sins have been atoned for by Jesus’s death, and we are covered by his righteousness, which justifies us and restores us to right relationship with God. Now, by his grace, we can learn the same discipline against temptation which Christ practiced, and in our ever-deepening communion with God we can experience ever greater deliverance and purification from our sins.