Sinless? Who and how?

(This post is one of a sporadic series on the Church of England’s Thirty-nine Articles)

I start this post on Article XV slightly baffled as to what its doing there in the first place. As far as I know (which isn’t, in all honesty, all that far) there were no significant debates about Christ’s unique state of being without sin going on at the time. The precise issue of Mary’s possible sinlessness was a relatively erudite dispute between theologians that was nowhere near being settled or presented as anything other than a pious opinion. (Aquinas certainly didn’t hold to any idea of immaculate conception.) Questions of the possibility of Christian perfection were still centuries away. Neither the Augsburg Confession nor the Westminster Confession have anything really comparable. It would be nice to know exactly why this debate came up, but I’m in the dark. Anyway, here’s the article.

XV. Of Christ alone without Sin

Christ in the truth of our nature was made like unto us in all things, sin only except, from which he was clearly void, both in his flesh, and in his spirit. He came to be the Lamb without spot, who, by sacrifice of himself once made, should take away the sins of the world, and sin, as Saint John saith, was not in him. But all we the rest, although baptized, and born again in Christ, yet offend in many things; and if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.

There is a rather odd mix of texts here. Hebrews 4:15 and 1 John 3:5 are clearly referred to, although the article conflates 4:15, where Jesus “in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin” with 2:17 “Therefore he had to become like his brothers and sisters in every respect.” This blurs a difference: the former refers to “being tested” and not sinning, the latter simply to sharing the same flesh and blood, with no mention of sin. Hebrews doesn’t share the view that sin is a sexually transmitted disease, and so does not conflate these two different statements. Then, linking and dominating the two explicit references is a traditional interpretation based on John that links Jesus to the Passover Lamb, and so transfers the physical quality of that sacrifice being without blemish into the moral quality of Jesus being without sin.

This provides an object lesson in the inseparability of tradition from the reading of scripture. Historically speaking, there is no single straightforward doctrine of original sin in Scripture, at least not one which looks like Augustine’s, yet it is both presupposed and found here in this creative reading of the text. (We are back, again, to some of the problems I noticed in dealing with the article on Original Sin which began this section of the articles).

For Paul, who is intriguingly ignored in this article, human sinfulness seems to be primarily (not exclusively) being under the domination of a power which frustrates not only our own desires and actions, but also God’s calling of us to a holy life. That power is perceived as having particular dominion in the “flesh” a term which characterizes non-eschatological this-worldly existence. It is doubtful whether Paul, or any of the NT writers, conceived of some kind of hereditary sinful nature in the way that Augustine does, although it is certainly possible to see how easily some texts led to Augustine’s interpretation, once that sinful nature had been deduced (partially from infant baptism).

In the NT Christ’s sinlessness essentially means that he did not sin, and does not ask or answer questions about a sinful or sinless nature. For people who, however loosely, conceive of themselves as children of the Reformation, that should stimulate possibilities of rethinking the question. If one takes Gregory Nazianzus’ maxim seriously: “What he did not assume, he did not heal” then we must (to speak in terms of the biblical narrative) ask whether Jesus took human nature as it was after the Fall, flesh under the dominion of sin (in Pauline terms) in order to live out the life of God in human flesh with, as it were, one hand tied behind his back.

Of course, that approach does raise considerable problems with some expressions of traditional doctrine, mainly in its Western Catholic (post-Augustinian) form, as reflected in this article. Nor am I suggesting we can simply set up a facile contradiction between scripture and tradition that simply does away with the latter. The tradition is as much a reading of scripture as the questioning of it is. I do think that posing the question again, however, allows us to revisit those earlier traditional ideas that suggested Christ took our human nature as it is.

On the positive side, that may further help us develop some of the line of thinking I engaged in an earlier post in this series: how we reframe the language of Fall in an evolutionary cosmos. On the negative side, It means revisiting an ongoing sore-spot, largely but not exclusively between Roman and non-Roman Christians in the West about the Immaculate Conception, or at least the way that doctrine might be interpreted (and there are some clever interpretations around that take the matter forward). For what this line of argument suggests is that Jesus does not need insulating from real human nature, and the Blessed Virgin does not need to stand as a genetic barrier between sinners and their Saviour.

Tagged as: 39 articles, anglican