This is the point of departure in this exchange - by “theological” definition, a fallen human being cannot be a sinless human being. It is this rhetoric that makes your comments unorthodox, and perhaps contrary to all Christian teachings.
Or … you are trying to make a semantic mole hill into a mountain in order to disqualify me from this discussion.
I am not using “fallen human” in any unusual way … I’m attempting to use vocabulary that you would recognize.
I don’t think Humans are fallen … so it isn’t even my axe to grind.
You think humans have fallen, yes? And you think Jesus became a man … so … whatever “magic” is going on with that … I don’t see how the same “magic” doesn’t apply to an evolved human… that Jesus manifests himself in the guise of an evolved human … instead of one that, if he was anyone other than Jesus, people would usually characterize as fallen.
I am at a loss - if you wish to continue this discussion, you need to stipulate your belief regarding my phrase, “Christ was without sin”, and “all humans have sinned and have come short of the Law”. Without some comprehension of these matters, I find it impossible to engage you in anything meaningful on this matter.
I am at a loss as to why you are going around in circles.
You say Christ is without sin … and that all humans have sinned.
I say All Humans Have sinned… because that is the nature of all Evolved life that evolves to the point of moral agency.
You say Jesus could never assume the form of an evolved human known for being sinful…
… But, you are perfectly content with the idea that Jesus assumes the form of a creation of God known for being sinful.
I just don’t see a meaningful distinction here. We both place humans in the sinner camp.
Why can’t the sinner be from an evolved form of humankind?
So this has turned into quite an entertaining dialogue. I had a few thoughts…
I will acknowledged that I do believe we can and do have “personal” relationships with God, and this is some of the divide between my pietist faith and @vjtorley’s catholicism. This, however, is entirely separate from what I mean about “knowing a person.” Even theistic propositionalists have argued for a long time that the underlying reality of our world is “personal” rooted in a God who is a person. Knowing the identity of this God, (His “Name” if we want to get Biblical) is the central Truth claim of our faith.
I would go farther to point out that we can be in covenantal (let’s leave aside “personal”) relationship with God without having an strong spiritual experience of this relationship, or even while being wrong on substantive propositions concerning God and our faith. I’m just echoing Jesus, when I say that the we are to be “in Him”, and we can be “in Him” even if we are wrong about many of the particulars, and even without a personal experience of relationship.
This is all just to say that my claim of Truth being personal is not to insist on pietism, or to import evangelicaism into Scripture. I’m talking about a concept of truth that is deeply embedded in our faith, but is more emphasized in easter traditions and cultures.
Paradox is very closely connected to mystery. It is, in fact, an embrace of mystery that arises from our limited ability to understand the world and God. It is a bit more than mystery, because it carries with it the exhortation to teach “both sides” of the paradox without fear of contradiction. This is the sense in which I use the word. Of course, I do not believe that our faith is an ultimate logical contradiction. However, paradox teaches two things that simultaneous can appear like a contradiction in our limited understanding of the world. The temptation is to “collapse the mystery” by ignoring one truth in favor of the other. The paradoxical solution is to teach both truths whole heartedly. To embrace the mystery.
This debate about the incarnation is a great example of this, IMHO. Jesus is fully God and fully Human. He was sinless, but became one of us, a sinful people. He is the Creator, and became one of the created, a creature. The exact mechanics of this are a mystery. Our charge, in the Church, is to teach both sides of the tension because we know it is not a contradiction, because this is in fact what God did in Jesus. To teach only one part of this tension is to misteach the nature of Jesus.
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“To embrace the mystery … and to teach both sides…”
Yes, and teaching both sides includes to fully understand the great distinction between us, a sinful race, and Christ who was without sin - if we do not accept this important distinction, we fail to understand salvation. To say Christ was fully human is correct, but consequently, if anyone then says Christ was a sinner, just as we are, amounts to denying the Faith in Christ. I hope and pray no Christian would ever adopt such a view in an attempt to maintain an evolutionary outlook.
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I feel like this information almost exactly describe my peers in my church which identifies as Evangelical. Even though I attended church for a long time (well I’m only 21 years old), I still don’t know a lot about theology and doctrines. I’m trying to learn more, but a lot of my peers don’t seem too concerned.
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How does evolution tell us anything about whether Jesus was a sinner or not? It seems like these (evolution and the nature of Jesus) are entirely separate concerns. Am I missing something here?
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This discussion seems to have taken so many twist and turns (with another commentator) that I have a difficult time getting my thoughts together. So, instead, I will start by noting I had more or less asked a question: “If we believe human beings have descended (or a similar term) from non-humans, and Christ is part of that evolution, how can we consider Christ without sin?”
Note that the comments have been that Christ is just the same human as any evolved human - so unless there is an incredible mystery regarding the notion of common descent, one has to logically arrive at an alternate belief than Christianity.
This point is also relevant to the belief that Adam was created by God, and this is the beginning in terms of understanding human nature - so… Christ was also born the Son of God, and consequently we have a break in the evolutionary outlook from Adam to Christ.
Given my comments, and in that context, I would agree with your rhetorical , “How does evolution tell us anything about … Jesus?” My response is that it does not. However, to perhaps make my point clear, evolution cannot tell us much about Adam also. Please note the central argument from evolutionists - Christ is the same as other evolved human beings. The rant commences when I am accused of thinking it all started 6000 yrs ago - but let us put that nonsense to one side.
Obviously you have given this matter some thought, so I would welcome a reasoned discussion if you are so inclined.
Perhaps a literal scientific take would be that Christ as the new Adam was made of the same original DNA sequenced de novo for the first Adam, and therefore was pre-fall and thus without the stain of original sin. I hesitate to put this idea forward, as some might agree.
I maintain my view that Christ was born the Son of God, as a human being, by the power of the Holy Spirit. There is no room for speculation that may sound scientific in this.
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Although the topic of this thread is about Western and Eastern views of reality, I don’t think we have touch upon it in depth.
From what I learned, the philosophy of Plato had significant influence on early Christian thought. I don’t know much about Platonic philosophy, but I think Plato believed that this material-physical universe is imperfect, making it inferior and less real than the eternal and ethereal world. Neoplatonic beliefs were adopted by many people in the Church and affected the worldviews of early Christians. Consequently, the natural sciences were considered to be unimportant until the Scientific Revolution and later the Enlightenment started to gradually change things.
Although I’m from an East Asian family, I don’t really know much about the Eastern views of reality because I grew up as a Christian American. I just know that Hindus and some groups of Buddhists have pretty interesting views.
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Thanks Joshua - I think this is the most cogent part of your reply, which (I anticipate) covers Jay’s observation of the growth in the Charismatic movement worldwide. That, apart from anything, has I think a lot to say about why even academia now regards miracles as at least on the table, compared to when I was a kid, when “No modern person can believe in miracles”.
Saving faith is a strange creature, as the study of church history shows. At diffferent times and places there have been overemphases on orthodoxy, or on experience, or on orthopraxis or liberty, on immediacy or tradition. God saves through all those varieties of faith - yet they all have their dangers in destroying faith, too.
As a bit of a hybrid myself (whose main conscious influences are the Reformation stress on the word of God as the sword of the Spirit, and a leaning towards the Charismatic emphasis on “experimental religion”) I see the times we’re in as tending to over-emphasise the “personal” at the expense of both the “corporate” and the “doctrinal”.
As to where that fits into “East” and “West” I’m not sure - I’ve been greatly influenced by the Eastern Fathers like Athanasius and the Big Cappadocian Three - and they were no slouches in the business of SCriptural doctrine.
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_From what I learned, the philosophy of Plato had significant influence on early Christian thought. I don’t know much about Platonic philosophy, but I think Plato believed that this material-physical universe is imperfect, making it inferior and less real than the eternal and ethereal world. Neoplatonic beliefs were adopted by many people in the Church and affected the worldviews of early Christians. Consequently, the natural sciences were considered to be unimportant until the Scientific Revolution and later the Enlightenment started to gradually change things. _
Although I’m from an East Asian family, I don’t really know much about the Eastern views of reality because I grew up as a Christian American. I just know that Hindus and some groups of Buddhists have pretty interesting views.
Thank you for your response and your comments.
Part of what we are is based on our faith tradition, part is based on our education, and part is based on cultural background. People who have a diverse background as you seem to have are often more aware of how these three aspects of life affect us.
While there are always problems about making general statements like this, I would say that on the East there is no clear line between Nature and the Supernatural. I would say that this is true of Buddhism, Hinduism, Daoism, and Confucianism. Although there are many differences between these faiths, I think that this similarity is real.
In the ancient world there developed that made a clear distinction between the Natural and the Supernatural, which has two sources, Greek philosophy and Jewish theology. Platonic thinking tended to superordinate the physical to the ideal, but there is a clear distinction. There is also the distinction between God and God’s Creation, which applies to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
In the West Platonic subordination of the physical lost out for the most part. In Eastern Christianity it generally prevailed. In Islam the theological position of divine simplicity has overruled separation of Allah from Nature. .
If we are to live together in this increasingly shrinking world, we need to understand and respect these differences.
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There are two completely separate conversations going on here, so I will separate my replies on the topics to try to maintain some sense of clarity. (Whether my thinking is clear remains to be seen.)
Most (if not all) of my discussion is based on Henri Blocher’s excellent study, Original Sin: Illuminating the Riddle.
This would be a problem only if you believed that the sinful nature was physically inherited. In other words, if you believed that Adam passed sinfulness to his descendants like an infection. This is one of the traditional metaphors in the doctrine of original sin (Tertullian, Anselm, Luther, Augsburg Confession). The problem with this conception is that it doesn’t take into account mankind’s voluntary disposition and responsibility (guilt) for sinning, which make it qualitatively different from sickness. A second metaphor for the transmission of sin from Adam to his posterity is legal, drawn from Paul’s discussion in Romans 5. This is the “federal” view of Reformed theology, which pictures Adam as the representative of us all, and thus his guilt is imputed to us all. The strengths of this metaphor are that it does not rest on physical transmission of sin from Adam to his posterity, and it is more consistent with the language of Scripture. The problem is that it violates many people’s (including Christians) sense of justice: How could God declare us “guilty” on the basis of a choice we had nothing to do with? The third common metaphor is one of privation, or lack. Catholic theology since Anselm has preferred this approach. The fall entailed the loss of original righteousness and other divine gifts. If Adam lost the gifts, obviously he could not pass them down to his descendants. Blocher has an excellent discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of these views. It is worth reading, if you are interested in the topic.
Since your question dealt specifically with how Jesus could be without sin, yet “born of a woman,” I’ll quote Blocher’s discussion: "Roman 5, as we have read it, unfolds a parallel that is more than a parallel. The apostle sets forth an a fortiori argument which makes Adam’s role in the spread of sin the presupposition of Christ’s redeeming work, and thus only can he proclaim its powerful reversal.
“The relationship appears to be twofold. In order to defeat the dominion of evil, Scripture tell us, the Redeemer had to come in Adamic flesh, in the very likeness of sinful flesh, to break the power of sinfulness in the flesh (Rom. 8:3). He had to enter humanity, to become a son of Adam (Lk. 3:38), and to share in the communal life of the race, in order to be able to take upon himself ‘the sin of the world.’ The spiritual solidarity of humankind was, it seems, a prerequisite of his sin-bearing office, regarding both the ‘synthesis’ of all sins as the sin (singular!) of the world, and the possibility of transference. … Had he been ‘in Adam,’ however, under that first head, he would have been born a sinner as all other children of Adam are, in a state of enmity towards God. He would have been unfit for any atoning substitution. But because of his personal pre-existence, he did not depend totally on Adam, he did not owe his individual existence to Adam, so he was not in Adam. He did not fall under Adam’s headship. His birth could mark a new beginning in the life of humankind. He could become a new head, a second and final Adam (1 Cor. 15:45ff). Knowing no sin and yet truly joined to Adam’s posterity, he could freely take upon himself the communal guilt of his fellow humans… The spread of righteousness and life does not follow the course of nature. It is not of the flesh but of the Spirit (Jn. 3:6). It requires a ‘new birth,’ brought about by the Spirit and the Word.”
This is the claim that brought me into the discussion above.
If I can agree with GJDS’s quote below …
. . . how does the evolutionary origin of humans affect this in any way? It sounds like some kind of magical status being proposed where because Humans emerged through evolution, God would never allow Christ to be born of a human being.
This doesn’t seem theologically entailed at all…
Eddie has already discussed the influence of Plato in math and the sciences. I’d like to add just a bit on the influence of Aristotle on Christian thought, specifically as it was channeled through Aquinas. In particular, Aquinas followed Aristotle in his anthropology of body and soul. Aquinas identified the soul, the “higher” part of man, with reason, and he blamed the passions that come from the body, the “lower” part of man, for all disturbances of reason and as the source of all sin. (Eddie can flesh out this summary much more accurately, so I’ll be content to stop here.) From this dichotomy, you can understand the medieval fascination with monasticism and asceticism, with denying and abusing the flesh and bringing it under control. We still see the ramifications of this theology played out in the church today. The Biblical view of man, however, is a unity. But that’s a whole 'nother thread …