A strong version
Christ never thinks nor feels nor acts wrongly, either by omission or intention.
Objection: if we are all born into a fractured social world that socializes us into sinful behaviour, how can Christ escape? (If his mother is sinless and brings him up alone that only sets up an infinite regress and fails to acknowledge that others than our parents affect us). If he is fully human, he cannot. This is simply docetic and implausible (doesn’t the name ‘the sinlessness of Christ’ rather than of Jesus hint at this?). Note also that we probably have some different views about virtues and vices than in Jesus’ culture (c.f. the story of the Syro-Phoenician woman).
A weak version
Christ does not consciously sin but does make mistakes for which he has to apologize.
Implications: not all moral wrong is sin; only that which fundamentally hinders the work of redemption. In support of this version:
Oliver Quick, Doctrines of the Creed, London: Nisbet & Co. ltd, 1938
171 ch 17 ‘the moral perfection of Jesus’
‘It is a postulate of the truth of the incarnation that Jesus can never have thought, said, or done anything that was either unfitting for God in the state of condescension to manhood, or unworthy of man as raised into union with the Godhead.’
172 the NT is interested in Jesus as God’s means of salvation. His ‘holiness and righteousness’ is a corollary.
172-3 either we can’t be perfectly moral unless everyone is, because we’re social beings; or we can only be fully moral if we sacrifice a lot and exercise moral heroism (and in the perfect society there is no morality).
175 ‘our broad judgement of the moral perfection of Jesus will be based, not upon a minute examination of particular acts and sayings in reference to some generally accepted rule of human conducts, but rather upon our recognition of the fitness of his whole life to be the human instrument of the divine love for that purpose of salvation which is revealed in it.’
So Jesus can still reveal God and complete his messianic vocation with some moral imperfection. As we accept that God is shown through the lives of imperfect people through history. In order for Jesus to be fully human he must do moral wrong and experience forgiveness.
But is this distinction between moral wrong and sin correct? Is sin simply refusing repentance rather than moral wrong doing? Could Jesus have committed murder and repented and still have performed his task? (Note that in the desert temptation narratives there is no sexual temptation even though that is a prominent one in our culture. This suggests these temptations are about Jesus’ understanding of his messianic vocation rather than about him overcoming all possible temptation at that point.)
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In terms of atonement models, Jesus represents us before God, re-orients human nature, fits us to receive the Holy Spirit. Why do any of these require sinlessness? If a strong version of sinlessness is required to make atonement models work why not change atonement models?
Anselm: Jesus makes up for infinite dishonour to God. Surely the cross is a rejection of honour as a regulating principle for God?
Christus Victor: If the victory is over political authorities (including metaphorical understandings of the demonic) then we can trace the historical effects of Jesus and Christianity, but why posit sinlessness? If the victory is over the demonic conceived as really existing spiritual beings then perhaps sinlessness does matter but how and why?
Recapitulation: since no-one is ever perfect, unless this means no deliberate wrongdoing, why does Jesus need to be sinless to re-orient human nature?
Marilyn McCord Adams: if sin is a property of being a creature then Jesus is a creature and so sinful.[1]
The crux of the problem is how one understands the divine-human relation in Jesus rather than the question of the atonement. Is it the case that one cannot be in the presence of God if one has any sin? But we are all in God’s presence all the time and ‘have sin’. Is Jesus ontologically God all the time, in which case he cannot sin, or
A Žižekian alternative
What if we say Jesus does sin and brings sin and death within the Godhead? Is it that God achieves subjectivity like us by overcoming alienation and so needs Jesus to sin and die to experience that for Godself? If God can overcome death by taking it within himself, surely she can do the same with sin?
Objections: does this subject God to the same rules as humanity and deny her unique nature (the doctrine of analogy)? In what way does this change in God help either God or us?
Reply: we are created in God’s image and share this process on that basis. This helps God achieve full subjectivity that God did not possess ‘before’ [implications about time and divine being here].
(This is based on Hegel’s idea of evil being a necessary stage on the way to good).
A Shanksian alternative
What does Christ teach us about sin? That is, what does he shows us about what sin is that we didn’t know before? And so, what is redemption in the concrete?
What does it mean to affirm that Jesus is ‘sinless’?
It’s a matter of definition. Jesus-as-Christ is ‘sinless’ because, for the purposes of theology, it’s his story that defines what ‘sin’ is, by way of contrast.
He’s sinless as Christ. That is, as our Saviour from the power that sin has over us, by our not properly knowing what sin is. And as Christ, he’s quite rightly further affirmed to be the incarnation of God: so definitive is this event, both of sin and of salvation.
But how, exactly, is he Christ? I take it to be in two ways:
- He’s Christ, first, by virtue of his dying as a crucified dissident; and then being seen to be raised by God, in symbolic refutation of the pagan Roman message of the cross. Could he have been Christ had he died in any other way? No. Everything here depends upon the pre-existent meaning of crucifixion, what it symbolically meant every time the Romans crucified someone; and the way in which that symbolism is symbolically reversed here. So that sin comes to be metaphorically defined as whatever tends towards crucifixion.
- Secondly, his Christ-nature is further confirmed by the record of his teachings, and illustrative miracles, insofar as these also are full of the spirit of agape; that is, the sheer antithesis to everything the pagan Roman-imperial message of the cross represents.
To say that the historic Jesus was uniquely Christ in the specific sense, however – and in that role sinless – is by no means necessarily to claim that he was Christ, and therefore sinless, entirely infused with the spirit of agape, in every aspect or every moment of his life.
For how would we know? We weren’t there.
Rather, the affirmation that, for the purposes of theology, he simply is Christ essentially serves to define the proper limitations of theological interest in the details of his life. For theology’s only interest in Jesus concerns his Christ-role. Therefore, a basic rule of the game, ‘theology’, is that one never criticizes the Jesus of the New Testament. One interprets every ambiguity in the record as generously as possible, in terms of the primary gospel truth encapsulated in the symbol, resurrection-of-the-crucified. The more detail that can be, so to speak, mined from the NT – for the purposes of salvation so defined – the better. And whatever in the gospel picture of Jesus may perhaps still remain recalcitrant to one’s theological understanding one is, as a matter of principle, simply silent about…
Theology is only properly interested in what we need to understand in order to grasp the proper meaning of ‘salvation’, and his role as revealer of that. But not every detail of the historical record regarding his life is actually relevant here.
If questions like ‘Who moved the stone?’ are treated as having any theological significance, they become a sheer distraction.[2]
Now that we have recognized the Unhappy Consciousness because of the experience of subjectivity and its freedom, we see Christ symbolically dramatizing that as the union of human and divine. So Christ is the religious validation of regarding the Unhappy Consciousness as sin, perhaps one of the primal sins, with all of the consequences that follow (anti-propaganda, the need for Honesty, etc). Christ also consciously understands and refuses the scapegoat and allows us to see that. This comes from the Jewish prophetic tradition, especially the Servant Songs. So we do not need to posit an ontological union between Jesus and God that entails a strong version of the sinlessness doctrine. Redemption in the concrete is the overcoming of the Unhappy Consciousness and scapegoating.
On the relation between the divine and human natures in Christ:
In what exact sense is Jesus ‘Christ’?
Again, let’s distinguish the symbolic from the pre-symbolic. [‘Symbolic significance: the meaning that matters to theology; that which relates to the salvation of our souls today. Pre-symbolic significance: discerning, in detective fashion, what most likely happened, originally, to give rise to the symbolism.]
Symbolically, for the purposes of Christian theology, the historic Jesus simply is Christ. There’s no theological point in questioning this. The only theological question is what it implies.
For my part, I would define ‘Christ’ as: ‘the embodiment of the truth decisively revealed in the symbol, “resurrection of the crucified dissident”; representing all the values deriving from that symbol’.
Pre-symbolically, to what extent was the historic Jesus, at every moment of his earthly life, Christ, in this precise sense?
Who knows? For the purpose of theology, this is really a pointless question, a mere distraction.[3]
But can this cohere with this statement:
In symbolic terms, it’s crucial I think (a) to insist that the resurrection isn’t just the same as the followers of Karl Marx, say, would have in mind were they to affirm that Marx’s spirit lives on, in the life of Marxist political parties. No, it’s about a physically enacted judgement, the symbolic statement embodied in the act of crucifixion, being reversed. It isn’t just that a doctrine survives. But, far rather, that a new symbolism is created. In other words: raw material for art; precisely in the sense of an assemblage of physical images, expressing that reversal.
(b) The message of crucifixion is reversed: what Pontius Pilate symbolically affirms is no longer allowed any validity at all. It isn’t as though there’s a lower, merely ‘physical’ domain of reality, the domain of this-worldly politics, in which the values Pilate represents remain valid, in the sense that we just have to resign ourselves to their domination; from which however we’re invited to escape by becoming ‘spiritual’, basically in the sense of ceasing to care about what happens in that domain. No, the liberation represented by the symbol, ‘resurrection of the crucified dissident’, is also an event with urgent this-worldly political implications. The Docetic heresy sought to ‘spiritualize’ the symbol, by dissipating its physicality; thereby purporting to spring from a wisdom that rose above politics. Against that primordial error, we need forever to reaffirm the physicality of the symbol – inasmuch as physicality in this context connotes political urgency. (Or anti-political urgency: if ‘anti-political’ is understood to be the opposite of ‘depoliticizing’.)
In pre-symbolic terms, however: who knows just what happened? And why should it matter, theologically?
If I understand this correctly, the resurrection must be physically enacted to gain its symbolic value, but then this physicality seems to be understood as a political interpretation rather than as a historical event (hence the last sentence). This seems to be a tension.
Summary
The strong version is untenable. The weak version is interesting and possible but is it a fudge? Žižek’s idea is very interesting and suggestive and would require major reworking of the traditional ideas if taken in a realist theistic sense (which he does not intend), which is not at all a strike against it. Shanks’ version is plausible and interesting but would perhaps take fire from some of the more conservative elements of the tradition intent on emphasizing the ontological union of the two natures in Christ. That is not necessarily a problem, though I think his position on the resurrection needs to be clarified.
[1] Marilyn McCord Adams, ‘Sin as Uncleanness’, A Reader in Contemporary Philosophical Theology, ed Oliver Crisp, London: T&T Clark, 2009.
[2] Private communication, March 8th 2011.
[3] Private communication, 30th March 2011.
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