IF JESUS WAS GOD THEN HE COULD NOT SAVE US FROM
SIN
Christian doctrine since the Council of Chalcedon is that Jesus Christ is fully
human like us except in sin but is also fully God. It is two natures in one
person. Logic says a person is a nature so there is a contradiction there. The
Church uses the cop-out that it is a mystery. 2 and 2 being 10 could be called a
mystery too!
If Jesus Christ is man and God, two separate natures in one person like the
“infallible” Council of Chalcedon decreed, then could he have merited anything?
Could he deserve any blessings for doing good? The question arises because of
the fact that he taught that God could not sin. If Jesus was God then he
couldn't sin.
Yet to teach that Jesus was properly man and had a normal human will as the
Third Council of Constantinople in 681 taught is impossible if his human will is
so swamped by his God nature and his will as God that it cannot sin. To say
Jesus cannot sin is to say the Monothelitist heretics who were saying that Jesus
did not have a human will and a separate divine will but only one will were
right.
It seems obvious that neither God nor a divine Christ would deserve any credit
for doing good.
The theologians say that when you merit a reward by doing good when you cannot
sin because you are not thinking about sin, Jesus could do the same. Clever in
its deceptiveness this answer is wrong.
You deserve the reward for you can sin but don’t for you have the power to do
evil. The power is still there even if you don’t think of evil. The power to sin
is there but it is just the thought of doing evil that is dormant.
But Jesus hasn’t the power to do evil.
The scriptures tell us that Jesus was tempted to sin.
If he could not sin these temptations were not real.
Christians reply that he felt the full force of the attraction to sin but
resisted it just like a person who is virtuous can resist the charms of someone
who is trying to lure them into sexual sin. That is a lie for it's not the same.
The virtuous person has the faculty to sin but doesn't use it. But Jesus did not
have the faculty.
The more honest of them admit that they cannot explain how a divine son of God
could be tempted but choose to say he was (page 89, Asking them Questions). Some
say the fact that the more you sin the less you see the badness of its nature
(page 104, Asking them Questions). I would correct the word see to feel. To say
see is as silly as saying that the more you deliberately do maths wrong the less
you will see how wrong a bad sum is.
Rubbish. Attraction alone is not temptation. It is only temptation when the
person can give into it. Temptation means trying to get a person to sin and
trying to get a person who cannot sin to sin is not really trying but acting
like a moron.
If Jesus was incapable of sin then he was merely play-acting when he was
“tempted” by the Devil. And if he was pulling the wool over anybody’s eyes then
he was a sinner and did give into the temptations. The temptations he triumphed
over were just hoaxes played by him and the Devil meaning that the two were as
thick as the thieves of truth they were.
Some authors think that Jesus did have the power to sin. And if he had sinned he
would have broken the hypostatic union between his deity and humanity and have
become a man who was no longer God. This is illogical. If the two natures are
one person then who is the person that breaks away? A new person. God incarnate
sins and remains God but his humanity becomes a new person. This theory makes
more absurdities than solutions.
To avoid sinning God would have to make the break just before Jesus sins. This
implies that what God sees in the future influences what he does in the present.
That is impossible for the future is ahead of the present. It would also mean
that God can see into a future that will not exist for he will avoid it, which
is mad. He can’t see that god made man will sin when he prevents God made man
from doing that.
If Jesus Christ was God then it is not true that he suffered for our sins on the
cross to merit our deliverance from sin and estrangement from God. He just came
to teach us. And if that was all he came for then he was certainly a fraud
because this would have God doing bizarre and wasteful miracles like becoming
man and becoming man in such a mysterious way that we are all puzzled by it. It
is wrong to make too many mysteries for that opens the way for depraved schemers
to make up as many so-called mysteries as they can and use mysteries to hide
their theological mistakes. Would it really be any sillier to believe that a man
who claimed that he was God but his sins were not sins but the product of
insanity which he took on himself like Jesus took the cross was really God? It
wouldn’t be that hard to pay a few people to say they saw him rise again too.
If God gave Jesus a human will then he gave it to him for nothing for it
couldn’t merit anything. If Jesus had a human will as the Bible says then he was
not God.
In popular opinion, there is more merit in doing more than you are obliged to
do. For example, if the Christian avoids sin she will be more pleasing to God if
she does good works that she is not commanded to do on pain of sin. The
Christians say that God commands some things in which it would be a sin to
disobey and commands other things in which it is not a sin to disobey. This
makes no sense. If you got the gift of patience from God and didn’t develop it
further then this is breaking your duty to God. For example, if God called St
Therese of Lisieux to be a nun she would not have sinned by refusing but if he
told her to abstain from insulting the pope it would be a sin to ignore him. It
is argued that Jesus by freely becoming man and dying on the cross did more than
he was obliged to do and that makes his acts more meritorious. But Jesus could
have done more than he did and did not do it so what does that make him? It
makes him an imperfect sinner for God does everything to perfection.
To defend Jesus shows a pompous and lucid lack of integrity. To call a person
good who refrains from doing better good is incoherent. If I won’t give a child
money for sweets though I have plenty then I am denying that child something
good. I am not doing my best. If it is my duty to harm no one then it must be my
duty not to harm anyone by being miserly with charity. And if the people do not
realise I am harming them I am still trying to.
The doctrine that Jesus was divine and died for the expiation of sins directly
implies that this wicked philosophy that you can be good and not do as much as
you can for others is true. If Jesus were God then even a pin-prick of pain
would make an infinitely valuable sacrifice of pain to cancel the sins of the
world because the being suffering is infinite in love and worth. It follows that
even emerging from his mother’s womb was an act over and above the call of duty.
The early Church invented the idea of Jesus dying for sins to explain how God’s
Son could die on the cross. This was to stop the people seeing that Jesus was a
failure. But if Jesus was God this doesn’t explain the cross at all for the
atonement took place the first time he hurt or sacrificed himself – that is when
he was a baby. Christians curiously have rejected the idea that Jesus just died
as an example though their faith forces them to accept just that idea.
There are no such acts as superogation therefore if Jesus was God he was not our
saviour and if he was not our Saviour he was just our teacher and if he was just
our teacher he was a fraud for anybody could have done that job for him.
If Jesus could not sin and could still freely love God and gain merit then we
should and would all be as incapable of sin as he was. To call Jesus sinless and
voluntarily good is to cast aside al reason and to hail a tyrant who needlessly
lets us sin and makes us take all the blame for it is barbaric and callous.
Calling Jesus God is to say Jesus is responsible for all the evil in the world.
Jesus couldn’t earn anything for he couldn’t sin. Jesus did not atone for our
sins.