The Highway Forums General Discussion Theology Discussion Forum The impeccability of Christ

We are not denying the union of the TWO natures, that is our point--there is a union and a mystery that cannot be fully fathomed. However, your view denies the "full" existence of Jesus in the flesh. You say, He was not tempted like we are, you say, He was not able to sin, you say, He was incapable of being truly tempted. Jesus, being divine, would not sin, but this does not mean he could not be truly tempted. Satan tempted him to disobey the Father by self-gratification, self-display, and self-aggrandizement (Matt. 4:1-11), and the temptation to retreat from the Cross was constant (Luke 22:28, where the Greek for “trials” can be translated “temptations”; Matt. 16:23; and Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane). Being human, Jesus could not conquer temptation without a struggle, however being divine it was His nature to do His Father’s will (John 5:19, 30), and therefore to resist and fight temptation until He had overcome it. From Gethsemane we may infer that His struggles were sometimes more acute and agonizing than any we ever know. The happy end-result is that “because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted” (Heb. 2:18). Incarnation means, that the Son of God lived his divine-human life in and through His human mind and body at every point, maximizing His identification and empathy with those He had come to save, and drawing on divine resources to transcend human limits of knowledge and energy only when particular requirements of the Father’s will so dictated (Packer).

Your view does away with the very humanity of Christ making Him some super-human-non-human. Your problem is that you look at the DIVINE side of Christ with higher respect and faith than the HUMAN side of Christ. In essence, you deny the humanity of Christ for you are denying that He is the Second Man Adam who was capable of sin (though He never sinned).

Have you ever studied the early heresy of Apollinarianism? This was the heresy taught by Apollinaris the Younger, bishop of Laodicea in Syria about 361. He taught that the Logos of God, which became the divine nature of Christ, took the place of the rational human soul of Jesus and that the body of Christ was a glorified form of human nature. In other words, though Jesus was a man, He did not have a human mind but that the mind of Christ was solely divine. Apollinaris taught that the two natures of Christ could not coexist within one person. His solution was to lessen the human nature of Christ. Apollinarianism was condemned by the Second General Council at Constantinople in 381. This heresy denies the true and complete humanity in the person of Jesus which in turn, can jeopardize the value of the atonement since Jesus is declared to be both God and man to atone. He needed to be God to offer a pure and holy sacrifice of sufficient value and He needed to be a man in order to die for men (CARM). You may desire to look at the heresy of Monophysitism while you are studying the heresies in part you are embracing.

WT Shedd or AW Pink or have much better arguments than the likes of Dr. John W. McCormick on impeccability--though still easily disproved. <img src="/forum/images/graemlins/hello.gif" alt="" />