Month: July 2013

The Sinlessness of Jesus, pt. 3

In this third and final post of the series (see part one & part two), I want to look at how a proper understanding of the sinlessness of Jesus and of the cross redefines our whole idea of what “truth” even means. In the earlier parts of this series, I have set forth a view of Jesus sinlessness as something he enacted within our naturally fallen humanity, showing himself to be God’s obedient and faithful Son in the power of the Spirit, over and against all the temptations and powers of sin at work in the realm of “the flesh”—the natural array of dynamics and relationships that constitute the world as we experience it in the present age. Within the conditions of an existence pervaded by sin, conditions that he made his own by becoming man, Jesus sinlessly offered up to God all that is naturally twisted and broken in our human existence on the cross, and by his death and resurrection has become the beginning of a new humanity, liberated from sin and death through his obedience on their behalf.

This radically determines our whole idea of God’s saving action at the cross, most profoundly by showing that at the cross God deals with the objective problem of sin itself, as it has become embedded within created existence. The problem that the cross “solves” in other words, is not merely how God “feels” about sin, but sin itself (though surely, in resolving the problem of sin itself God is pleased and his wrath against sin satisfied). The cross brings God’s judgment against sin (i.e., death) to bear upon the fleshly human existence of Jesus, who accepts God’s judgment against sin in the flesh, not as a peaceable and loving Son placating the rage of his Father, but as the one who in the incarnation willingly became the true bearer of the problem of sin—to be the place where God determines to destroy sin, as opposed to sinners having to bear sin’s destruction along with themselves. In yielding himself fully to God on the cross as God’s own Beloved, fit to bear the problem of sin without himself being a sinner, the Father and Son by the Spirit in a joint action of the trinity recreate the human condition through the death and resurrection of Jesus, exhausting and terminating the problem of sin and raising up a new creation in its place, in the risen body of Jesus. By faith we come to share in Jesus’ new humanity, through the Spirit which unites us with him so that he becomes our death and our life, our salvation and our substitute; the old humanity of our sinful flesh, though persistent in our experience, is no longer what we really and truly are in Jesus Christ. He is our life, and when he appears at the end of the age, what we shall be will finally appear in all its glory—we will be made perfect in his new humanity, never to be touched by sin and death again.

What we “really and truly are,” then, is not defined by mere “truths” and “principles” abstracted from the world of our experience, but by what God has actually done in Jesus’ human existence, in time and in space, for our sake. Where most religions and philosophies devote their energies to describing the static order of things—the “way things are”—Christians are meant to concern themselves with the dynamic movement of God in history—with “what has happened.” All of our cosmologies, our philosophies, and other assumptions about “the way things are” meet their reckoning at the cross, where the old order of things—whatever that may be—is terminated and replaced by a new order in the death and resurrection of Jesus. The implication of all this for our understanding of God, of the world, and of ourselves, is that theological truth is not ultimately about “ideas,” but about persons and events. Truth is about beings and realities that move and interact within our very world, that change the way things are in our world, in a way that places demands upon us whether we are willing to acknowledge them as true or not.

That is the inevitable implication of the gospel message that in Jesus Christ, God in person has dealt decisively with our sin, and by his resurrection inaugurated his kingdom and the birth of a new age in the midst of the old. The claims of Christianity are not “true” because they accurately reveal a timeless “order” of things that somehow accurately pertains to a “higher reality” that we (or at least some) call “God” and the world that he created (and that perhaps other religions and philosophies see in an equally valid way from a different angle). Rather, those claims are true because they happened—because God has done something within time and space that actually changes time and space forever. The abstract claims that a Christian might make about God—that “God gives life,” perhaps, or that “God is love”—are all subordinate to the deepest claims of the Christian faith: that God has given new life, that God has loved, because in his Son Jesus Christ he has gathered the corruption of the present age to himself in our own humanity, and through the events of his kingdom ministry, his death, and his resurrection has acted decisively, putting to death an old creation and beginning a new in himself, which he offers to the whole world freely in prodigal, everlasting grace.

If truth is to be understood in this sense—as God’s personal reality encountering us in time and in space through his actual intervention in history in Jesus Christ—then the whole focus of our lives as “truth-seekers” must change. The reality of God presses upon us as Truth in the deepest possible sense: God has taken up our own humanity and made a fundamental decision about us, that he would lavish his love upon us and, in his own human life on our behalf, liberate us from all of the things that captivate our sinful existence, that enslave and degrade us and distort the image of God in which he made us. The ultimate concern of our lives is not with mastering our own existence through our own self-understanding, our own morality, philosophy, dreams of accomplishment, power or whatever else it may be. Our ultimate concern is, rather, with this person, this flesh and blood human being through whom God has come near to us and set our existence on a new basis. The humanity of Jesus—God in the flesh, healing and restoring and welcoming, condemning evil, bearing our sin and death, rising to new life and exalted to God’s right hand to offer himself to the whole world—this is the concern of our lives, this man. He himself is “the truth” (John 14:6), and we live in and come to be shaped by the truth when their fundamental concern is with him. The God who became man and bore the burden of our existence to its death and resurrection, who resolved the real problems of the real world in his own equally real being—he is Truth, and our life’s occupation.

The Sinlessness of Jesus, pt. 2

In the first entry of this series, I discussed the question of how exactly we should understand Jesus to be the sinless Son of God. Contrary to the view that has prevailed within the western, Latin theological tradition (in which Jesus’ sinlessness is an ontological feature of his “human nature”), I have sided with the view that Jesus’ sinlessness is something he enacts within the same fallen humanity that you and I share, such that his sinlessness is the actual means by which our humanity is restored to redeemed fellowship with God through his life, death, and resurrection. This understanding of Jesus’ sinlessness yields a distinctive picture of the atonement in which the objective problem of sin is dealt with in Jesus’ own human existence through his death, as substitute on our behalf. God condemns sin in the flesh of his Son—in a moment, we shall discuss precisely how—and inaugurates a new creation through his death and resurrection. Because Jesus, even as a sinless person, nonetheless carried the problem of sin in himself, his death and resurrection actually dealt with the problem of sin decisively by taking it into the very life of the triune God himself and terminating it there for the sake of all.

This brings us to my concern in this entry: now I want to look at how this construal of Jesus’ sinlessness affects our understanding of God’s “self-substitution” for sinners. The protestant tradition in particular has (rightly) made much of how, in Jesus, we see God himself occupying the place of the sinner, for our sake. As we have normally described it, this substitution consists in a forensic exchange whereby our sin is “reckoned” to (an ontologically sinless) Jesus, who in turn bears the penalty of the sins reckoned; we in turn have his righteousness reckoned to us, and in consequence do not bear the penalty. So Jesus is understood to “stand in the place” of sinners—by receiving the penalty due to their transgressions. (This in turn raises the question of “limited atonement”—of whether the number of sins reckoned to Jesus and punished are those of every individual in the world, or of only the elect who will believe—which is a topic we will be considering in future posts as I discuss some of the research I have been doing lately on the topic.)

This picture of God’s self-substitution remains the same in its essentials, but gains a new depth of clarity as we consider it in light of how Jesus actually bears the problem of sin in himself. We could sum up God’s self-substitution in the statement: “God condemns sin in the flesh—by letting us condemn it to death in him.”

In other words, God deals with the world’s sin through the world’s own sinful rejection of him. By coming to us in Jesus Christ, bearing the problem of sin in his own humanity, he uses our rejection of his Son at the cross to destroy sin itself in his very being for our sake. The God whom we have rejected in Adam draws near to us in Adam’s flesh to bear our corruption as his own, and to receive our rejection in this new and utterly astonishing way, by taking on our stained and broken humanity, our captivated existence permeated by sin and estrangement, and as a sinless person accepting the death penalty we impose upon him, such that his innocent death and vindication in the resurrection at last put the whole problem of the sinful human condition to an end in his very person, and make it possible for sinners to find liberation and forgiveness in being joined to him through the Holy Spirit, by faith.

With the sinless Jesus of Nazareth, we sinners drove the nails and plunged the spear into our own fallen flesh and blood; we pressed the crown upon and smote the head of our own Adamic nature, innocently held before us by the Word of God made flesh; we in our sinfulness eradicated sin forever when we banished the Son of God into the outer darkness of Golgotha, bearing our sin-nature in himself. God has substituted himself for the sinner, by placing his only Son at the hands of our “justice” to be rejected, despised, and crushed, so that the sinner himself becomes the executor of God’s judgment against sin—upon God himself! Because God gives himself to us even in the uttermost of our rejection, bearing our fallen existence and approaching us in our own flesh and blood, our rejection that he willingly accepts becomes one and the same with his own rejection of sin forever.

This, then, is God’s self-substitution: he reverses our death penalty in himself, by bearing that penalty at our hands and by his faithful obedience rising again in victory; he then offers himself to us as the risen Lord, to be our substitute—our new humanity in which sin has been forever annihilated, in which the filth of our fallen condition has been washed away in his blood and a new creation raised up by the power of God’s Spirit. “You have died,” Paul writes, “and your life is hid with Christ in God…. Christ is your life” (Col 3:3-4). Because we are born again as a “new creation” through the Holy Spirit, Christ’s humanity is now the objective center of our own existence; we are “in him,” as Paul says over and over again. “I no longer live—Christ lives in me” (Gal 2:20). Jesus is our surrogate humanity, our true life and meaning; because he is our life and we are now objectively situated in him by the Spirit, we have no penalty to undergo, no sin for which to face condemnation, for our Head has faced it already for us, and we are his Body.

That is how Jesus is our substitute, and how God substitutes himself for us. It is not most fundamentally a “reckoning” of something to someone, but an actual bearing of the burdens of those for whom the substitute acts, and an actual re-creating of sinners that places them “in Christ” by the Spirit, forgiven and no longer identified with their old and fallen humanity. Jesus gives himself to be the place where sin is condemned and its hold on the creation—specifically, on Jesus’ own humanity as the creation’s representative—is broken, and as the reigning King of the new creation gives himself to sinners like you and me to become, really and actually, the new seat of our identity through the Holy Spirit. Our death to the power of sin has already occurred; our old humanity has already been dissolved, because Christ has died and risen, and we are “no longer in the flesh but in [his] Spirit” (Rom 8:9)—what is true of Christ, our Life, is true of us, for our birth is of his Spirit and now no longer of the sinful flesh.

The Apostle Paul wrote, “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ” (Gal 6:2). In God’s self-substitution, we discover just how integral to the life and identity of God himself this really is—the “law of Christ” is none other than the law of God himself! God is the one who carries the burdens of his creation—not in any metaphorical or sentimental way, but in real space and time, becoming flesh and blood and making the weight of our broken existence his own, in order to bear its pains to the uttermost and to renew it in faithfulness as one of us. God carries the burden of our sin in Jesus his Son, and he gives himself to us in his Son to be the fulfillment of everything we need, to be the new creation in whom all things are united and re-created in life and freedom. That is God’s unfathomable, invincible love: to become what we are—broken, bowed down, under sin and death—so that we might become what he is: alive forevermore in the image of God, his Son.

In the third (and probably final) post of this series, we will consider how this understanding of Jesus’ sinlessness and the corresponding nature of the atonement determines our idea of what “truth” really is, and how this differentiates our gospel message from the claims of other philosophies and religions.

The Sinlessness of Jesus, pt. 1

In the past semester I’ve had something of an epiphany regarding the nature of the atonement, and as I reflect back on it, it seems to me that what really lay at the heart of it all was a shift in my understanding of the sinlessness of Jesus. This issue illuminates a great deal of what exactly happened on the cross and in the resurrection, and all of our theology that issues from that event will be decisively colored by our grasp of just exactly how God, in Jesus his Son, somehow bore the problem of sin in himself, as a sinless human being.

To the question, “Was Jesus sinless?” the Christian answer has always been (and must be) an unequivocal “Yes”; but the church tradition has given more than one answer to the further question, “How was Jesus sinless?” From about the fourth century onward, mainly in the western Latin theological tradition, the sinlessness of Jesus has been treated as an attribute of Jesus’ “essential” humanity—something intrinsic to his “human nature,” as distinct from your human nature or mine. In other words, Jesus’ humanity was not touched in any way by the fall, but represented humanity in its original state: sinless in a qualitative and ontological (not just an active and moral) sense. Following Augustine, this got bound up with the church’s understanding of “original sin,” and together with Augustine’s somewhat dubious notion of original sin’s transmission through sexual intercourse, came to form part of the tradition’s basic apologetic for the virgin birth: the reason Jesus had to be conceived of the Spirit in the virgin Mary is that he would otherwise have been tainted by original sin, and would therefore have been a sinner. (Later on in the Roman Catholic tradition this impulse created a felt need to remove that taint even from Mary, and so it was concluded that her own conception was also free from original sin—this is the doctrine of the “immaculate conception.”)

My own view of Jesus’ sinlessness is different, and more comparable to the early (particularly Greek) church fathers, as well as some notable theologians of the twentieth century like Karl Barth and T.F. Torrance. Among the earliest church fathers, it was generally recognized that the incarnation was not only God’s act of putting himself in the right “position”—that of a human being—to deal with the broken relationship of humanity to God. More profoundly, the incarnation was God’s assuming of the problem of our corrupted human condition to himself, in order to deal with that problem in his very own existence through the events of his life, death, and resurrection. In Jesus of Nazareth, God draws near to us not in an immaculate “humanity” different from ours, but in the selfsame broken, corruptible, fallen human existence in which we all live, and that is precisely the context in which his own sinlessness becomes all-important.

This second view is, in my opinion, much more in accord with the apostolic mind as we see it in the New Testament. The apostles didn’t regard human beings chiefly in terms of their individual “natures” in distinction from others around them, such that one human being could be “fallen” and another might not be. Rather, they saw all of humanity, and the rest of the created order along with them, as sharing in a mode of existence in the present age called “the flesh”—the natural and corruptible array of relationships and dynamics in which our whole created reality consists, and according to which it operates. This reality of “the flesh” is the creation as God has made it—originally good, but now because of the invasion of sin through human disobedience, utterly pervaded by sin, broken by a “missing of the mark” within created existence that has hijacked the world and taken it off into slavery to evil, sin and death. Within this picture, to be personally sinful is, quite simply, to be an agent who operates independently and self-reliantly according to this reality in which we are all bound up—a way of life that, despite the temporary satisfactions and delights it may afford, is actually a form of slavery to the broken world in which we live.

That’s a biblical anthropology as I see it. And, I might add, at this point the growing majority of biblical scholars (including those of the evangelical stripe) see the same thing in the apostolic writings. We humans are “of the flesh, sold under sin” (Rom 7:14), subject to a condition in which sin’s power is pervasively at work ruining, perverting, misleading, and polluting. We have nothing in ourselves with which to escape, to get to God, or to give ourselves true life as we were made to have it. The best we can manage is to fabricate idols in the world that we feel can serve our own ends, that can provide us with ultimate security and satisfaction; but in reality we are blinded by ourselves—enthroned at the center of our own universes, but ultimately as much slaves to futility and death as everything around us. But into this bleak picture steps Jesus of Nazareth, the Word of God who “became flesh and dwelt among us” (Jn 1:14). Precisely where the power of sin in the flesh made it impossible for us to have life, God did the impossible: “having sent his Son in the exact likeness of sinful flesh and for a sin-offering, he condemned sin in the flesh” (Rom 8:4); “our old humanity was crucified with [Jesus], so that the body of sin might be destroyed, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin” (Rom 6:6); “he has now reconciled [us] in his body of flesh through his death” (Col 1:21); “God made him who knew no sin to become sin for our sake, so that in him we would become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor 5:21). In Jesus of Nazareth, God has taken the flesh of this present evil age to himself, and made its burden his own. He has worn the garment of our stained humanity; he has shouldered the weight of our corruption and ruin and captivity to the present evil age; and in astonishing grace and mercy, he has sinlessly borne it to its destruction at the cross, and to its renewal in the resurrection. Standing in our place, Jesus has done within our broken humanity what Adam was unwilling to do, and what we were incapable of doing: saying to God in the power of the Spirit, “Not my will, but yours be done.” By putting to death the reality of our fleshly existence at the cross, and by raising Jesus from the dead to a new and transformed mode of embodied life by the Spirit, God has brought the old age of sin and death to an end and inaugurated the new age of God’s kingdom in Jesus’ very body—in which all may share by faith, through the Holy Spirit, for the forgiveness of sins and for release from the bondage of the present age. That is atonement.

The sinlessness of Jesus, in other words, is not a feature of his incarnate humanity considered in itself, but rather is a statement about how he, in the power of the Holy Spirit, lived his life blamelessly before God in perfect fidelity to the Father, in the face of all the temptations that sin resident in the flesh posed against him. Because our humanity was what needed saving, God made the problem of the human condition his own in the incarnation, in order as our substitute to restore it to reconciled fellowship with himself. In this picture, reconciliation between God and man takes place in the humanity of Jesus of Nazareth, for the sake of all, and is then shared with the world through the gospel proclamation of the church in the power of the Spirit. In Jesus, God has met our deepest needs by doing in our broken condition what none of us could do: bear that condition before him and offer it up in love and faithfulness and obedience to him as our Abba, “father.”

In the next post on this topic, we’ll look further at the implications for this understanding of Jesus’ sinlessness, not least at how it affects our understanding of God’s self-substitution for us in his death, and how this action on God’s part reveals to us who God really is in the depths of his own identity.

List of relevant sources for further reading:

  • T.F. Torrance’s lectures on Christology: (vol. 1) Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ; (vol. 1) Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ (vol. 2)
  • T.F. Torrance, The Mediation of Christ
  • Robert C. Tannehill, Dying and Rising with Christ
  • Susan Grove Eastman, “Apocalypse and Incarnation: The Participatory Logic of Paul’s Gospel,” in Apocalyptic and the Future of Theology: With and Beyond J. Louis Martyn (Joshua B. Davis & Douglas Harink, eds.)
  • James Dunn, “Paul’s Understanding of the Death of Jesus“
  • J. Louis Martyn, Theological Issues in the Letters of Paul

Update!

Welcome to the new Bear With Foolishness! For a number of reasons, I’ve decided to switch over from my old page to a WordPress blog (and grab a domain name while I’m at it). I hope to be updating this page more frequently than on my old blog, which seemed to get a new post only every few months or so. Lately, I’ve been trying to develop some stronger writing habits (at least fifteen minutes of solid writing every day, usually in response to something I’ve been reading or thinking about), and I figure there could hardly be a better time to try and revive an old blogging habit.

So, in the weeks and months ahead, I can promise you (I hope) some more frequent thoughts, reflections, and notes on what I’ve been researching. Most lately, I have been doing some reading for a summer online class, Church History from the Reformation to the Present, specifically regarding the debate in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries over the extent of the atonement. This interest has arisen out of some prior reflections over the course of the past semester on the nature of the atonement itself, about which I hope to be doing some writing soon as well. While I hope that my research will make it onto this blog, it is still my primary intention to devote this space to broader reflection on theological topics and their import for the church and for our personal lives today. So if you’re interested in joining me, feel free to subscribe to the blog (see below)!

Thanks,

David