The Perfect Sinlessness of Jesus Christ

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Timothy W. Whitaker is a Retired United Methodist Church bishop who served the Florida Area.

One of the absolute teachings of apostolic and catholic doctrine is the perfect sinlessness of Jesus Christ.

That Jesus Christ was and is and always will be without sin was a teaching of the apostolic church as attested ecumenically by the Pauline, Hebrews, Petrine, and Johannine traditions of the earliest church in the New Testament (2 Corinthians 5:21; Hebrews 4:15; 1 Peter 1:19, 2:21-22, 3:18; John 8:46; 1 John 3:5). And, who can doubt that Jesus is portrayed as the one who is without sin in the Synoptic tradition in which he is proclaimed as the Son of God with whom God is well pleased, the authoritative teacher of the pure will of God, he who performs signs and wonders by the Spirit of God, and the one who never confessed his own sin but who had the qualifications to forgive the sins of others? The profession that Jesus Christ was “without sin” was grounded both in the impression which he made on those who knew him during his earthly career and in his resurrection from the dead by which God the Father vindicated him through the power of the Holy Spirit as the faithful and holy one (Acts 2:24-32, c.f. Psalm 16:10; Romans 1:4).

It matters little that Jesus was opposed by people who had a different understanding from him about the identity and mission of Israel. Some of these accused him of being a false prophet or magician trying to deceive the people. But, as Socrates pointed out according to Plato’s The Republic, II, the just man is the human being whose aim is not to seem good, but to be good, and those who are truly just often have a reputation for injustice because of the resentment of others. Indeed, Socrates declares, society will destroy a truly just man since someone who really is just is a threat to unjust people who only want to seem to be just:  the good man will be whipped, bound, have his eyes burnt out, and, in the end, crucified. Socrates’ teaching about the just man proved to be prescient about his own end, and, even more so, the earthly end of Jesus.

The testimony of the apostles and earliest Christians that Jesus Christ is sinless is essential to historic orthodox Christology. Writing between 726-736 C.E., John of Damascus summed up the classical Christian teaching of the creeds, councils and church fathers in his The Orthodox Faith. In XIII.1, John writes, “Confessing, then, the same Jesus Christ, our Lord, to be perfect God and perfect man, we hold that the same has all the attributes of the Father save that of being ingenerate, and all the attributes of the first Adam, save only his sin, these attributes being body and the intelligent and rational soul….”

One of the interesting things about the history of Christian teaching regarding the sinlessness of Jesus is that those who emphasized it the most were the early Protestant liberals who, unfortunately, were never able in a post-Kantian era to appreciate the metaphysical claims inherent in historic Christian doctrine. Friedrich Schleiermacher, considered by many to be the father of liberalism, writes about “Jesus’ sinless perfection” in The Christian Faith (88) that was published in German in 1830 as a second edition. For Schleiermacher, Jesus Christ is the Redeemer who is distinguished from all other human beings by his “God-consciousness,” which is the presence of God in him. The new life in the Christian community, says Schleiermacher, is ultimately derived from “the influence of the personal perfection of Jesus Himself.” The community possesses a “picture of Christ” which gives to persons even today “the impression of the sinless perfection of Jesus.” In The Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation first published in German in 1870-1874, Albrecht Ritschl appreciated Schleiermacher’s emphasis on Jesus’ “sinless perfection,” but he did not prefer Schleiermacher’s “psychological” approach of speaking about Jesus’ “God-consciousness” or his assumption that we are capable of truly imitating Jesus rather than “having confidence in our reconciliation with God through Him to trust in the Fatherly grace of God in all our experience” (VIII. 59). Ritschl emphasizes the faithfulness of Jesus to his God-given vocation, saying that “Christ, as the Bearer of the perfect revelation of God, through His solidarity with the Father, in the right exercise of His love and patience over the world, demonstrated His Godhead as man for the salvation of those whom, as His community, He at the same time represented before the Father by His obedience, and still represents” (VIII. 60). Nonetheless, Ritschl affirms that Schleiermacher was correct to account for the “Christian humility and moral purity which appear in the midst of a general state of perversion of Christian churches” by giving credit to the “image of Christ” which leaves the “impression of the sinless perfection” of Jesus which is “a common fact and a common possession” of the church (VIII. 57). In The Doctrine of the Person of Jesus Christ published in 1921 the more centrist Protestant liberal H. R. Mackintosh defends the significance of the doctrine of the sinlessness of Jesus as being necessary in addition to the more positive “idea of Jesus’ perfect fidelity to His vocation” because the doctrine of Jesus’ sinlessness, which sounds so negative, refers to “the inner life which made this fulfillment [of His task] possible” (pp.37-38). Moreover, the “traces of moral imperfection” which have been alleged about Jesus, such as his harsh denunciation of some Pharisees, is “a quite intelligible manifestation of fidelity to His Messianic task” (p. 36). The attention that was given to the personal life of Jesus by the liberal Protestant theologians, particularly their deep appreciation for the doctrine of his sinlessness, is one of their most important contributions.

The older Protestant liberals would be aghast at some of the preaching of modern progressives. Reports of progressive clergy accusing Jesus of being a “hypocrite” or a “sinner” because of his attitude toward, and statements to, the Canaanite woman in Matthew 15:21-28 would appall Schleiermacher and Ritschl. Such accusations against Jesus represent an interpretation of the Gospel in an anachronistic manner according to the alien ideology of modern identity politics instead of according to the internal scriptural doctrine of the divine election of Israel to be the light to the nations. Moreover, such accusations lack a perception of Jesus’ interplay with both the woman and his disciples who are also present with Jesus and the woman (a significant factor which Matthew adds to the briefer account in Mark 7:24-30). If Jesus is being faithful to the election of Israel, but also engaged outside Israel at Tyre with a Canaanite woman, he is pointing to the coming mission of a reconstituted Israel to all nations by educating, as it were, the disciples who had scorned her, and his conversation with the woman must be understood in this context. Jesus may have been tough in his dealings with the woman just as he was often tough in dealing with others, but it is not hard to imagine how his conversation with her manifests the spirit of a serious “game” and that she entered into it, sensing that “he was definitely not sending her away,” as James D. Smart observes in The Quiet Revolution.  At any rate, the older liberals clearly saw the truth of the sinlessness of Jesus in the portrait of Jesus Christ in the New Testament, they understood that he was faithful to his mission as the Messiah of Israel, and they would have never stooped to besmirch his character with accusations of hypocrisy or sin because he was fulfilling his mission. We do not judge the Lord by our standards of bourgeois niceness or pharisaical wokeness; the reality is just the opposite.

The sinlessness of Jesus Christ is bound up with God’s act of salvation in which God justifies sinners “by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith” (Romans 3:24-25). The mercy of God is revealed in the divine offering of one who is righteous for the sins of all who are unrighteous. As the apostle Paul says, “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). The offering of Jesus Christ for the atonement of sins constitutes the fulfillment of the sacrificial system of Israel. The author of Hebrews declares, “For if the blood of goats and bulls, with the sprinkling of the ashes of a heifer, sanctifies those who have been defiled so that their flesh is purified, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to worship the living God!” (Hebrews 9:13-14). And, how different is the atonement from sins that comes from the offering of Christ the righteous one from the appeasement of the gods of the nations by the offering of coins in pagan temples. As the apostle Peter writes, “You know you were ransomed from the futile ways of your ancestors, not with perishable things like silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish” (1 Peter 1:18-19). 

Even more so, the perfect sinlessness of Jesus Christ is the ground of the ultimate goal of redemption from sins, the complete sanctification of human persons. Sanctification, being made holy and being restored to the glory of being the image and likeness to God, is the fulfillment of the human yearning for true freedom. In our neo-pagan society, freedom is sought in moral license and hedonistic indulgence. In such a society seeking sanctification is mocked as a slavery that deprives one of excitement and enjoyment. However, the Christian perspective runs directly counter to this neo-pagan dream of freedom. The reality is that seeking freedom to do whatever we want is sheer bondage to the passions of our own self, and it always results in wasting our lives and the dissolution of our true selves. The original pagans who first accepted the gospel of Jesus Christ had their eyes opened and experienced a liberty which they had not known was possible. As the apostle Paul wrote to the first Christian converts from paganism in the capital of Macedonia, “May the God of peace himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do this” (1Thessalonians 5:23-24). This liberty to be sanctified is a gift of God through Jesus Christ who himself lived as the authentic human being free from slavery to sin. In discussing the sinlessness of Jesus in Church Dogmatics, IV.2 and explaining that Jesus does not repeat our “perversion” or “do wrong,” Karl Barth declares, “He is just what we are and how we are. The only difference is that He is it in genuine human freedom.”

Reflecting upon the freedom of Jesus is an important angle in studying the perfect sinlessness of his behavior and being. Jesus’ freedom in the world comes from his complete obedience to God the Father by the power of the Holy Spirit:  when confronted by temptation, Jesus grounds his soul and body in the scripture which he has internalized all his life, “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him” (Matthew 4:10; Deuteronomy 6:13). He keeps the law of Israel, but he opens up its original good purposes, showing how it was a gift to God’s people to enable them to know and obey God, but it ought not be codified in human traditions so as to burden ordinary people. He fasts during prayer, but he does not make a show of it, and he also knows how to enjoy delicious food, drink and conversation when he is invited to banquets. He is not entranced by the seductive power of the human sexual drive, but he also does not condemn those who have succumbed to it, offering acceptance of them with the strong command to sin no more. He can vigorously compete with other men, and he can move among women as a trustworthy companion and be like a child among children. He shows compassion for the poor and gives warnings about being enslaved to riches, but he does not hate wealthy persons but takes them seriously and offers them an invitation to learn how to be liberated from their bondage. Before powerful agents of the state and of religion decked out in their official garments in their palatial surroundings, he is free of fear and so knows how to preserve his dignity in silence but also when to speak a word of truth that clarifies how, in judging him, they are bringing judgment upon themselves. He knows how to feel deep emotion, but he shuns cheap sentimentality. He faces death acknowledging his dread and grief, not pretending that death does not matter, but also holding to sure and certain trust in God the Father.

The German theologian Martin Kaehler emphasized that the Gospels present a compelling “picture of Christ” which Christ himself originated. In The So-called Historical Jesus and the Historic Biblical Christ, published in German in 1896, he writes, “If now, with due recognition given to their differences, the first eyewitnesses were nevertheless in agreement on the picture of Christ which they handed down, a picture marked by utter simplicity in externals yet far transcending in intrinsic sublimity all that is human, then this picture must have been impressed upon their hearts and minds with an incomparable and indelible preciseness rich in content. They themselves tell us this, and later their lives became powerful proof of how completely Christ had filled their minds and hearts” (from the chapter, “The Christ of the Whole Bible”).

At the heart of Christian contemplation should be a continual gazing upon the Icon of the true God and the true human who is Jesus Christ. This is a lifelong endeavor, and I doubt whether any one of us is fully able to rightly perceive the picture of Jesus Christ that is impressed by Christ himself upon the canonical Gospels. We read the Gospels not only to examine the details of particular stories and sayings in depth, but also to let the picture of Christ impressed upon the whole narrative emerge into our view. We are drawn to the goodness, truth and beauty of the picture, and we find in it a standard of becoming human as God intends as we look at it from one angle and then another. Even Pontius Pilate was moved to exclaim, “Behold the human being!”–the authentic character of the person of Jesus shining into the prefect’s heart despite his own pagan enculturation, political compromises, and self-seeking (John 19:5).