Soteriology

Jesus did not “die for our sins.”

He died so that humanity could be judged honestly according to its merits.

In other words: God the Son was presented with both the best humanity had to offer — His disciples, and those, too, seem pretty dull — and the worst — His murderers.

Jesus came so that given these two extremes, He might in His own heart and guided by own personal experience judge whether the virtues and strengths of the totality of humanity outweighed its vices and faults.

It so happened that we all have been judged on the whole greater than zero, an asset and not a liability.

The way Christ’s decision benefited us is that the souls of those who had died before the Incarnation were awakened and brought into either a temporary afterlife of natural happiness or into full glory, and similar fate awaits now everyone else.

It is on this contingent event — meaning that it did not have to happen — that the Christian religion is built. Jesus was graced first with knowledge of the created universe, then with full power of the Father, and lastly with charity toward humans. His freely given acceptance of that final grace despite the injustice done to Him and the suffering He experienced was a crucial component of the entire divine project.

In the first part, I point out that before Jesus’ mission was finished, souls of the dead slept in the Limbo. Upon His ascension, they were given new bodies, and anyone who died or will die thereafter is also instantly embodied upon death.

An illustration of one part of this understanding is found in 1 Sam 28, an episode with the witch of Endor who brought up the spirit of prophet Samuel for king Saul. She summoned a “ghostly figure” who looked like an “old man wearing a robe.”

The old man was predictably cantankerous. But apparently for a reason; he says: “Why have you disturbed me by bringing me up?” Then Samuel predicts a vast amount of gloom and doom for Saul.

I admit, there isn’t much to go on with this exchange. From what was Samuel disturbed? From contemplating God while fully awake or from sleeping?

Well, a man who is perfectly happy would probably have enough self-esteem not to be as cruel to Saul as Samuel was. I say, therefore, that Samuel — or rather his ghost, a being with will and intellect but no power — was sleeping, and he did not appreciate being awakened, when it was not yet time for ghosts to come unto Jesus.

Recall our 3 trinities within: nature (will + intellect + power), virtue (duty + moral ideal + personality), and narrow happiness (plan + execution + pleasure).

Jesus indeed had 2 natures that were entirely separate and unmixed with each other. He was fully God and fully man.

He also has 2 personalities, one divine, the other human, but those two were so inextricably and fully intertwined as to form a single person. For example, Jesus enjoyed not only the vision of God even while incarnated but even His full comprehension. At the same time, He had a human body including the brain. His body may have been exceeding healthy and handsome, but it was the body of a particular human being, and supplied Jesus with a unique and distinct human personality. These two personalities were united such that “who or what sort of person Jesus was” was different before and after the Incarnation.

For example, Jesus’ life on earth was enriched at least with the natural functions of the body, the deliverances of the senses, and the operation of the concupiscible and irascible appetites. And there was surely more, e.g., “Then he said to them, ‘My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.’ Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, ‘My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.'” (Mt 26:38-39) As a human being, Jesus wanted to avoid the horror ahead; as God, He was perfectly resolute in His purpose. There was conflict even in His will which is the intellectual appetite, a choice to be made between the human inclination and the divine duty.

Thus, we say, as per the orthodox teaching, that Jesus was two natures and one person.

Finally, Jesus’ pursuit of happiness was a single thing. There were no separate either in reality (as for nature) or in the understanding (as for virtue) for Jesus divine and human planning and executing of His plans to achieve His goals. There were no “divine actions” and “human actions” for Jesus; there was just a single set of “Jesus’ actions” and Jesus’ enjoyments. The choices Jesus made and deeds He performed in life were all for the sake of Jesus’ good, in whatever variety of things (including humanity’s good) it consisted.

We have then that Jesus was: 2 fully separate natures, 1 personality fully interwoven or fused from 2 persons, 1 pursuit of happiness.

St. Thomas seems to suggest that He would have died in this manner, perhaps from a heart attack at the age of 95: “Christ’s body was subject to the necessity of death and other like defects,” not because He contracted these defects through the manner of His birth, “as if taking them upon Himself as due to sin,” but because He assumed them voluntarily. The fundamental reason to think so is that “it was in order to satisfy for the sin of the human race that the Son of God, having taken flesh, came into the world. Now one satisfies for another’s sin by taking on himself the punishment due to the sin of the other. But these bodily defects, to wit, death, hunger, thirst, and the like, are the punishment of sin, which was brought into the world by Adam… Hence it was useful for the end of Incarnation that He should assume these penalties in our flesh and in our stead…” (ST, III, 14)

But I reject the premise of this Pauline teaching that the Father punished the Son as some sort of hated scapegoat in order for the human race to evade divine justice. Without this disgraceful and absurd idea, does the argument still hold up?

There are two reasons to think that Christ would have died of old age. First, because of the easy syllogism:

(1) All men are mortal.
(2) Christ was a man.
Therefore,
(3) Christ was mortal.

If Jesus’ body was naturally immortal and would not age beyond 30 years old or whatever, then His body had to have worked very differently from our own bodies. It would then be difficult to maintain that Christ took on human nature.

Second, because of the realistic consideration to the effect that “what good would it have done Him?” Jesus knew that He would die on the cross, unjustly destroyed by those He loved, and an ageless body would have been entirely useless to Him.

There are, however, two other possibilities. First, St. Thomas argues that Adam in his Garden in the state of original righteousness and pure uncorrupt nature was graced with natural immortality and the “fullness of health, i.e., vigor of incorruptibility.” Upon his sin, this grace was withdrawn, and Adam, now expelled into the world, ended up growing old and dying as per the functioning of human nature as we now know it. Could it be that, say, at Jesus’ baptism, the Holy Spirit similarly imparted immortality upon His body: “heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him”? (Mt 3:16)

Unfortunately, there is no Scriptural support whatsoever for this opinion.

Second, it may be that Jesus’ bodily immortality resulted from the union of His human nature with His divine nature or Godhead; or from the eminence or even glory that accrued to His human soul. St. Thomas admits that this is possible but denies that it was actual: “the beatitude remained in the soul, and did not flow into the body; but the flesh suffered what belongs to a passible nature; thus Damascene says… that, ‘it was by the consent of the Divine will that the flesh was allowed to suffer and do what belonged to it.'”

St. Thomas lists two more reasons “for the body assumed by the Son of God to be subject to human infirmities and defects” that do not depend on the dubious theory of “punishment”:

1) In order to cause belief in Incarnation. For since human nature is known to men only as it is subject to these defects, if the Son of God had assumed human nature without these defects, He would not have seemed to be true man, nor to have true, but imaginary, flesh, as the Manicheans held.

2) In order to show us an example of patience by valiantly bearing up against human passibility and defects. Hence it is said… that He “endured such opposition from sinners against Himself, that you be not wearied, fainting in your minds.”

On the whole, it seems somewhat more plausible that Jesus would indeed have died of old age, perhaps in the manner of the rather honorable Moses’ death, in His pre-resurrection body, had He not been murdered by us in His prime.

It is often argued that Jesus thought of Himself as divine because He claimed for Himself the power to forgive sins. Now of course, any man can forgive a sin by another against himself, but only God can forgive sins tout court, and Jesus did just that: “‘But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins’ — he then said to the paralytic, ‘Rise, pick up your stretcher, and go home.'” (Mt 9:6)

But a much less often stressed Biblical fact — and with some reason, because it’s scary — is that Jesus also claimed for Himself the power to refuse to forgive and by that very fact, condemn to hell, e.g., “the Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all who cause others to sin and all evildoers. They will throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.” (Mt 13:41-42)

Of course, the opposite of “to condemn” is not “to forgive” but “to glorify.” Forgiveness is for us as wayfarers; glory or damnation is one’s ultimate destiny. Thus, Jesus adds in the next sentence, “Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.” (Mt 13:43)

Now today a Catholic priest can forgive a person’s sins, as per “I will give you [Peter] the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” (Mt 16:19)

But no man whatever can condemn another to hell or, for that matter, bestow glory. The power to administer the final judgment then is even greater than the power to forgive. For one, the latter is at least partially communicable from God to human beings, while the former is the sole prerogative of God. And being forgiven is merely a means to glory; it is better not to sin in the first place than to be forgiven for sins.

If that’s not an indication of Christ’s divinity, I don’t know what is.