Category: Theology

Recently, in a formal setting among Pastors someone threw out the question of whether or not Jesus could have sinned. Now, I had always been trained that Jesus could not have sinned though the temptation remained very real. However, the answer that was thrown out and affirmed is that Jesus could have sinned. Inwardly, I groaned at this affirmation and since that meeting I have gone back and double checked my training.

In double checking my training I learned that Charles Hodge (he of Princeton fame) believed that Jesus could have sinned. Hodge reasoned that the temptation to sin assumes the possibility to sin. I don’t agree with Hodge but in reading someone as illustrious as Hodge I realized that the idea that Jesus could have sinned was not as obviously muddleheaded as I had thought. I mean … if Hodge can make this kind of mistake then it is understandable that lesser mortals could make it as well.

The refutation of Hodge is really quite simple though the refutation probably opens up more questions. The refutation to Hodge is that since Jesus didn’t sin, Jesus couldn’t have sinned since the not sinning of Jesus demonstrates that Jesus was predestined not to sin. In retrospect no action of any being could have been other than what that action was after the fact for the action, after the fact, belongs to God’s decretal ordering.

I suppose, at this point it is possible for someone to now ask, “Could God have decreed Jesus to sin, thus resulting in Jesus sinning (?) Even here though we run into the reality that as God is both a eternal and necessary being, therefore all of God’s actions, including His decrees, are likewise eternal and necessary. In short, since God is eternal and there never was a time when He wasn’t it is also true that God’s decrees are likewise eternal having the same quality of eternality of God. This explains why we refer to the decrees as “The eternal decrees of God.”

There is a problem though in the presupposition of an affirmative answer to the question,could Jesus have sinned, and that problem is that such an affirmation seems to presuppose the non-Reformed premise that choices that were made, were not made by necessity. This introduces the non-Reformed notion of absolute contingency which suggest that decisions made or actions taken could have been other than they were.

However, the question can also be addressed from another angle. When we talk about the person of Jesus Christ we must take into consideration the question of the properties of His person-hood. Any hypothetical actions of Jesus Christ that we consider, can not be such that those actions violated the properties of his person-hood.

If we were to talk about hypothetical things that I might or might not do we could come up with any number of examples of things I might have done that I didn’t do. However, all of these examples of things I might have done that I didn’t do must remain consistent with the properties of my human person-hood. I might have decided to become a body-builder but I could not have decided to become a insect. (Insert favorite insult here.)

When we consider the person of Jesus Christ and the issue of sin, we have to say again, contrary to Hodge, that Jesus could not have chosen to sin for the same reason I could not choose to be an insect. Both Jesus Christ and I could not make those decision because to make those decisions would be a violation of the property of our person-hood. For myself, humans do not have the ability to become insects and for Jesus Christ — a person with a divine nature — God-Men do not have the ability to sin. Jesus Christ, being very God of very God, had a impeccable and immutable divine nature as a property of His person and as such He could not act in any way that would be contrary to that property.

The implications of this are clear. Jesus could choose to do all things that humans do save those things that humans choose to do that are inconsistent with divinity. Humans who do not have a divine nature choose to sin but a Human who has a divine nature cannot choose to sin.

Now the question that begs being asked is, If Jesus couldn’t sin, then was His temptation really temptation(?) The answer to that question is, “yes.” If our success, as redeemed fallen humans, to occasionally resist temptation, does not negate the reality of the temptation that we occasionally resist then why would Jesus’ always resisting temptation all the time negate the reality of the temptation with which He was presented? Success in resisting temptation does not negate the reality of temptation.

Also, we have to keep in mind at this point, and on this issue, that not only was Jesus divine but also touching His humanity, having no sin nature, He had no inclination to sin.

Hat Tip — Ron DiGiacomo

http://reformedapologist.blogspot.com/2006/09/could-jesus-have-sinned.html

In some Reformed quarters today it is all the rage to say that Worship must precede Theology. As such, in these Churches, all kinds of attention is paid to the Worship service itself and the Liturgy of the Worship service. Now, I certainly agree that we need to be careful regarding our worship but genuine care for our worship requires us to get our theology right, for their will be no Christ-honoring worship where our theology is skewed or confused. Suggesting that doxology precedes theology skews both our theology and our doxology.

A danger in this “Liturgi-centric” approach is that so much effort is expended upon ecclesiastical worship and in emphasizing the importance of worship that the impact of theology on every area of life does not receive the attention it deserves. If people really believe that getting worship right will lead to everything else being right then the outcome of this will be people who know both the solemnity and the hilarity of worship but know little of what theology should look like as we worship God outside the sanctuary in our daily living worship. This kind of liturgi-centirc emphasis can lead to the same old problem of communicating that the sum of Christianity is found in the Church.

Now, as I believe that the worship is at the heart of the Church, and that sound communities are only as good as the theology taught in their Worship centers, I do highly regard worship but there are other life systems in the body that must be attended to or we will have a strong heart and a weak limbic system, or failing auto-immune system, or a worthless nervous system. The means by which a body is kept in shape — from its worship to its ministry of mercy, to its body life — is theology that is Biblical, practical and alluring.

Below is a conversation I had on this subject with a fine Christian Brother. I disagree with him on this subject but I have a high esteem for him.

Dr. Blast

Get the worship right first…or pervert it all.

Bret responds,

Get the theology right and the worship will follow.

Dr. Blast

Not at all persuaded bro. Bret…have seen far too many ‘theological-link picking know-it-alls…who have precious little heart for worship. I would rather say…”get the worshiping heart right…and the theology will follow.”

Bret responds,

Not possible Doc. Literally impossible. You’re arguing for the consequence before the cause. No one will get worship right unless they are smitten with the beauty of the Holy. That is Theology.

What the know-it-alls need is better theology. A theology that does not lead to Christ centered worship is pagan. A theology that is theological-link picking is not Christian theology.

Dr. Blast

No, you are mistaken brother. known and seen too many pastors & children who could pass any theology/catechism exam…but had little real heart for true worship…your bassackwards…a heart for true & vibrant worship might eventually get the theology right, but churches are plagued w/heartless theologians who hate worship, people… & God.

Bret responds,

LOL … bassackwards.

You show me a man who has worship right and I’ll show you a man who has his theology right. You can not worship Biblically what you do not know. This whole movement lately to front-load worship over theology is fundamentally horrid. It is yet one more example of looking for experience and emotion to lead the way over thinking God’s thoughts after him. People who advance this paradigm, while well intentioned, are doing God and true religion a disservice.

Worship is the out-flowing of the minds intoxication with God. You can know more have Worship before Theology than you can have babies before Sex.

People who have their catechisms memorized or their systematic theology down cold who are not at the same time not smitten with the beauty of God do not know their catechisms or their theology. The remedy for such people is to return to their Bibles, catechisms, and theology for it will only be a return to the beauty contained in those where they will find their hearts strangely warmed.

“Theology” that is known in the way that a Medical student knows his cadaver is not Christian theology. The problem for such people is not cured by getting them jazzed up in a worship service or by introducing them to the solemnity of worship associated with smells and bells. The problem is cured by the Spirit given realization that they are the cadavers and God is the Medical student. Only by the Spirit given understanding that God is not a subject to be dissected but a Triune person who fills the earth with His splendor, majesty, and royalty can a person be cured of this theolog-itis. However, when a person is given that understanding they have passed into true theology and are not for the first time ready for worship.

You can not have right worship without right theology and if you have right theology that does not lead to right worship you do not have right theology.

Man is a bipartite being. The materialist’s mistake is to reject the incorporeal reality of man and view man only as a bio-chemical machine. Man has a brain, but no mind. Man has a heart, but no soul. Man secretes thought the way liver secretes bile. This is the error that Christians have fought for over two centuries now, but there is another error they must consider.

This other error also implicitly denies man’s bipartite being but this denial is the opposite error of the materialists. This error is the mistake of the Gnostic and it is comprised of the error of denying man’s corporeality. This error views man only as the sum of this abstract thinking as if man’s corporeal embodiment is unaffected by his bio-chemical reality.

If the error of the materialist is to deny man’s incorporeal reality and the effect it has man’s material being, thus seeing man as all enzymes, proteins, and the firing of synapses, the error of the gnostic is to deny man’s corporeal reality and the effect that his corporeal reality has upon man’s spiritual being, thus seeing man as all thought, contemplation, and ethereal spirituality.

But man is a bipartite being and who God has made him to be in his corporeal reality impinges upon and colors the manifestation of the incorporeal, just as the incorporeal reality impinges upon and colors the manifestation of the corporeal.

If God has made the corporeal nature of men to be distinct, though all sharing the imago dei, then it should not be surprising to find that as distinct tribes, tongues, and nations are, by grace visited w/ redemption, that spiritual reality of redemption, as poured over the distinctions of corporeality that God has created — and made good — will find itself being colored and shaped by those God given corporeal distinctions — just as redemption will color and shape man’s corporeal realities.

It seems the only alternative to this is to suggest that God has made men all the same and that it is only sin that makes us to differ. Such a view would suggest that man’s corporeality is mute once He is visited by grace, thus suggesting that man’s corporeality is really inconsequential once he has been visited with regeneration. This view would seem to deny our bipartite being. Remember here, when we are renewed it is our sin nature that is put off — not our human-ness.

Further such a view that does not allow for diversity among those who share the Imago Dei would seem to suggest that the result of grace is an expected sameness in the renewed-humanity. Is it really the case that the new man in Christ is a new man completely stripped of his distinct human-ness , or as more likely is the case, is it that the new man is new precisely because all that comprised his human-ness is now bent in a God-ward direction?

“Historian Herbert Butterfield, in noting the different political spirit of Western man since the French Revolution and how he had once, long before 1789, responded to the intractable difficulties of human coexistence & social order, has remarked that men ‘make gods now, not out of wood and stone, which though a waste of time is a fairly innocent proceeding, but out of their abstract nouns, which are the most treacherous and explosive things in the world.'”

M. E. Bradford — American Man Of Letters / Classicist
Original Intentions; On The Making & Ratification of the united States Constitution –pg. 18

We are still the knuckle dragging idolaters that pagan man was. The only difference is that our idolatry is gnostic, which is seen in how we reify nouns turning them into gods. Pagan man had the good sense to eschew abstract gods for the safety of the concrete gods of wind, water, fire, and wood. The idolatry of the pagans was a mirror opposite of modernity as it embraced an animism that found its gods in all things material. The whole notion of evolutionary progress of religion is a myth, as measured by its own standard. We have not advanced from an earlier age where men worshiped false gods. We have merely abstracted our gods so that we no longer have the inconvenience of carrying them around with us or of building shrines in order to lodge them. Pagan man today is religiously one with his pagan forefathers. Their multitudinous gods were concrete. Our multitudinous gods are abstract. We simply are to close to our gods to see that they are just as fatuous and just as powerless as the gods that were made out of trees and iron.

It remains true today with our abstract gods what was true of the concrete gods made by the pagan idolaters of old.

Isaiah 44:9 All who make idols are nothing,
and the things they treasure are worthless.
Those who would speak up for them are blind;
they are ignorant, to their own shame.

10 Who shapes a god and casts an idol,
which can profit him nothing?

11 He and his kind will be put to shame;
craftsmen are nothing but men.
Let them all come together and take their stand;
they will be brought down to terror and infamy.

12 The blacksmith takes a tool
and works with it in the coals;
he shapes an idol with hammers,
he forges it with the might of his arm.
He gets hungry and loses his strength;
he drinks no water and grows faint.

13 The carpenter measures with a line
and makes an outline with a marker;
he roughs it out with chisels
and marks it with compasses.
He shapes it in the form of man,
of man in all his glory,
that it may dwell in a shrine.

14 He cut down cedars,
or perhaps took a cypress or oak.
He let it grow among the trees of the forest,
or planted a pine, and the rain made it grow.

15 It is man’s fuel for burning;
some of it he takes and warms himself,
he kindles a fire and bakes bread.
But he also fashions a god and worships it;
he makes an idol and bows down to it.

16 Half of the wood he burns in the fire;
over it he prepares his meal,
he roasts his meat and eats his fill.
He also warms himself and says,
“Ah! I am warm; I see the fire.”

17 From the rest he makes a god, his idol;
he bows down to it and worships.
He prays to it and says,
“Save me; you are my god.”

18 They know nothing, they understand nothing;
their eyes are plastered over so they cannot see,
and their minds closed so they cannot understand.

19 No one stops to think,
no one has the knowledge or understanding to say,
“Half of it I used for fuel;
I even baked bread over its coals,
I roasted meat and I ate.
Shall I make a detestable thing from what is left?
Shall I bow down to a block of wood?”

20 He feeds on ashes, a deluded heart misleads him;
he cannot save himself, or say,
“Is not this thing in my right hand a lie?”

“Therefore, whereas salvation in Christ, was formerly considered primarily a means to separate man from sin and the world, to prepared him for heavenly blessedness and to cause him to enjoy undisturbed fellowship w/ God there, Ritschl posits the very opposite relationship: the purpose of salvation in Christ is precisely to enable a person, once he is freed from the oppressive feeling of sin and lives in awareness of being a child of God, to exercise his earthly vocation and fulfill his moral purpose in this world. The antithesis, therefore, is fairly sharp: on the one side a Christian life that considers the highest goal, now and hereafter, to be the contemplation of God and fellowship w/ him, and for that reason (always being more or less hostile to the riches of an earthly life) is in danger of falling into asceticism, pietism, and mysticism; but on the side of Ritschl, a Christian life that considers its highest goal to be the Kingdom of God, i.e., the moral obligation of mankind, and for that reason, (always being more or less averse to the withdrawal into solitude and quiet communion w/ God), is in danger of degenerating into a cold Pelagianism and an unfeeling moralism. Personally, I do not yet see any way of combining the two points of view, but I do know that there is much that is excellent in both, and that both contain undeniable truth.”

Herman Bavinck
De Theologie van Albrecht Ritschl (Theologicische Studien VI 1888 — pg.397)
Nature & Grace in Herman Bavinck — Jan Veenhof

The Pietist dualistically separates nature from grace and lays all the emphasis on the human being as Christian and so calls the person to give up his humanity (nature) in favor of the pursuit of his Christianity (grace). This can express itself in the Anabaptist who considers the world of nature evil and who thus seeks to completely withdraw from the world or it can find Roman Catholic expression where nature only finds its meaning where it is brought under the canopy of grace. In such an expression nature only has value where it is superintended by the hierarchy of grace as found in the Church. A third way this dualism can express itself is in the R2Kt Kantian system where nature and grace remain cordoned off from one another. In such a dualistic system grace neither calls the faithful away from the world as with the Anabaptist dualism expression nor does it seek to bring nature under the canopy of grace as in the Roman Catholic dualism. Instead what it does is it allows nature to operate independently of and uninfluenced by grace in a common realm that is neither of the devil (anabaptism) or under the mediation of supervening grace (Roman Catholicism). In the R2Kt dualism there is no attempt to solve the dualism that one finds attempted both by anabaptists (nature is all evil) or Rome (nature is controlled by grace).

Bavinck points out however that there is another side of the coin that traditional liberalism falls into. Liberalism of the Ritschl variety tended to deny a supernatural realm of grace and as such the realm of grace was collapsed into the realm of nature, with the result that the nature/grace realm was the realm that must be rescued by deliberate activism. Since there is no unique supernatural grace realm to give a clear word as to what this activism must look like the result of Liberal activism was always autonomous and anthropocentric, and inevitably resulted in a kingdom building effort that, though pursued in the name of Christ, invariably led to Hegelian statist control structures where the representative of the State became God walking on the earth.

As a theologian Bavinck was not satisfied w/ these dualisms, nor was he satisfied with the how Ritschl and other liberals collapsed grace into nature. Bavinck’s contribution to Reformed theology was the attempt to find a way where grace could influence nature without collapsing grace into nature. Bavinck was not satisfied w/ either a nature-grace schematic where nature and grace were divorced from one another but neither was he satisfied w/ a nature-grace understanding where the distinctions between nature and grace were obliterated.

Veenhof in his book suggests that Bavinck limned a third way where grace could be seen to influence nature without either nature swallowing grace or grace swallowing nature. Such a solution is thus a threat to all dualisms and pietisms on one side as well as all autonomously inspired Kingdom projects on the other that lose grace in the putative pursuit of the Kingdom of God on earth which is in reality the Utopian search for the Kingdom of man.

Bavinck’s solution ends up making him the foe of just about all other contenders.