This is Life!: Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis

How Human Was Jesus?

Well, as I said to Karl in the comments to my previous post replying to Darren, although it wasn't my intent to start a diablog, I could be tempted. As you can see, I've succumbed to the temptation. So, Darren has offered his most recent reply, Salvation and Christ's Human Will. (And Kevin has chimed in as well.)

At issue between us is the reality and role of human free will in salvation. I have argued that to properly understand this issue, we must look not to postlapsarian man but to the Second Adam, Jesus Christ, that in Christ is the true picture of humanity. Thus, if Christ, who had two natures and two wills (human and divine) in his one Person, the human will had to be operative and thus freely exercised so that it would be united with his divine will. I have contended that any understanding of Christ that diminishes his human will or prohibits its exercise is either outright monothelitism (an ancient Christological heresy) or a form of monothelitism and still heretical.

Darren has, for the most part, accepted this. But what he denies is that the human will of Jesus was like our human will. As I understand his contention, our human nature and will is fallen and therefore "sinfully depraved," and although Jesus was like us in all ways, he was not like us in sin, and therefore he could both want and will to do God's will, while we cannot. As Darren writes:

Christ has a perfect human nature, nature as originally intended and created by God for us. Jesus does not possess a sinful nature, and so is not totally depraved, and so his human will is not incompetent and is not in opposition to the divine will. Jesus is not precisely what we are, but rather is what we are to be.

One rightly asks where Jesus got that unfallen human nature, that nature as it was intended. For Mary was his mother, and I know that Darren believes Mary was fallen. But if Jesus took his humanity from Mary, then the humanity he took was a fallen one. Or does Darren posit that Mary, too, was unfallen? But then where did she get her unfallen nature?

In any case, he goes on to say in his conclusion:

I fully agree with the point that Clifton is trying to make here: Christ is not only our full revelation of who God is, but our full revelation of who man is! It is an amazing truth about the Incarnation, that Christ showed us ourselves as much as he showed us God.

It is a mistake, however, to argue from this truth that either 1) he was as we are; or 2) we are as he is. No, but as he is, we are to one day be. This is the great why of reconciliation.

Christology is formative of an eschatalogically aware anthropology. Christology is not synonymous with anthrology any more than there are no differances between Christ and the serial murderer.

So there are two questions, in terms of the discussion here is: How human was Jesus? Or what does it mean to say that Jesus was both fully God and fully man? For if Darren is right, then even if I am correct that Jesus is the archetype of humanity, it is immaterial in terms of the freedom of the will. He had it, but we don't. But if I'm right, if Jesus' human nature was a fallen human nature, save sin, then the exercise of his human will freely is not a reality limited only to the Incarnation, but is true of all humans as well. That is to say, if my argument holds, this gives one major support to the teaching of synergism in soteriology.

The other question is: What does it mean to be a person? Or are persons determined by their nature? For whether or not Jesus had an unfallen nature, then any discussion of his human willing is determined by his human nature (and also his divine willing by his divine nature). But if Jesus was determined by his natures, then he is not, proprely speaking, a Person, but an essence. So we are brought here to the Trinitarian understandings of personhood. (I should note here that though Kevin has offered a reply, I will not respond separately as my comments here will address the substance of his contention: that we will according to our nature.)

These topics are obviously too large to deal with exhaustively in a single post, so I can only offer what is hopefully a substantial outline, but an outline nonetheless.

One thing to which Darren takes objection is that I have asserted that Christ, in assuming our humanity, assumed fallen human nature, save without sin. But he finds this nonsensical.

I do not see any valuable definition of the term "fallen" apart from humankind's sinfulness, so I reject the suggestion that Jesus took on a fallen human nature or that he possessed a fallen human will. For what is it to be "fallen" but to be sinful and separated from God? Jesus Christ was neither. He took on a human nature and possessed a human will that are perfect, idealized to God's creative intent.

Kevin wants to assert that no actual change took place after Adams' sin.

The question of whether Jesus takes on a human nature as created or a human nature as fallen is moot because no change occurs in human nature as such after Adam sins. Original sin, which we all have as a result of Adam's sin, is a matter of forensic declaration due to union with our Federal Head. Period.

But what does Scripture say? (All emphases below added.)

Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death passed to all men, because all sinned--(For until the law sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed when there is no law. Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who did not sin according to the likeness of the transgression of Adam, who is a type of Him who was to come. But the free gift is not like the offense. For if by the offense of one man many died, much more the grace of God and the gift by the grace of the one Man, Jesus Christ, abounded to the many. And the gift is not as by one having sinned. For the judgment which came from one offense resulted in condemnation, but the free gift from many offenses resulted in justification. For if by the offense of the one man death reigned through the one man, much more those receiving the abundance of the grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ.) Therefore, as through one man's offense judgment came to all men, resulting in condemnation, even so through one Man's righteous act the free gift came to all men, resulting in justification of life. For through the disobedience of the one man the many were constituted sinners, so also through the obedience of the One many shall be constituted righteous. (Romans 5:12-19)

For since by a man death came, also by a Man comes the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ all will be made alive. . . .

. . . The body is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body. Thus also it is written, "The first man Adam became a living soul;" the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. However, that which is spiritual is not first, but that which is natural, then that which is spiritual. The first man was from earth, made of dust; the second Man is the Lord from heaven. Like the man made of dust, so also are those who are made of dust; and as is the heavenly Man, so also are those who are heavenly. And just as we have borne the image of the man made of dust, let us also bear the image of the heavenly Man. Now this I say, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; nor can corruption inherit incorruption. (1Co 15:21-22, 42-50)

So clearly a change took place in human nature as a result of Adam's sin. And that change resulted in death and corruption. Indeed, the consistent patristic witness on these texts is that the fallenness of human nature was precisely mortality and corruption, or what we might think of as death and a disposition to sin. That it to say, humans are born mortal and with an inherent tendency to sin. But they are not born guilty. Being human, even a fallen human, is not sinful. Human guilt, on the other hand, results exactly from each person's individual sinful acts. That is to say, what sins, in a human, is not his nature, but his person. In none of these texts is guilt attributed to humans on the basis of Adam's sin. The condemnation humanity received in Adam was death. The constitution they receive from Adam is not moral guilt, but mortal nature and an inborn tendency to sin.

This is illustrated in the patristic witness regarding the Virgin Mary. Mary, the Church teaches, was born mortal, but through synergistic grace, did not herself commit personal sin. Mary, however, still needed salvation, for she was born in mortality. Her human nature, which she gave to Jesus, was mortal. It is this mortal nature which died on the Cross and was raised by the divine nature in the Resurrection. And it is Christ's saving work which saved Mary from death and corruption.

The only way fallen human nature can be sinful is if one takes an Augustinian interpretation of these passages. But this, of course, begs the question as to the validity of the Augustinian interpretation. If this interpretation is incorrect, then the assertion that Jesus could not assume a fallen human nature cannot itself be substantiated.

In a moment I will return to the implications of Jesus assuming an unfallen human nature and what that means in terms of salvation. But to show how this patristic interpretation of Adam's original sin and human fallenness as mortality and not inherited guilt is consistent with the rest of Scripture, we need to revisit some Scriptures which speak of Jesus' sharing of our human nature. (All emphases below added.)

For both He who sanctifies and those who are being sanctified are all of one; for which reason He is not ashamed to call them brothers (Hebrews 2:11)

Therefore since the children have partaken of flesh and blood, He Himself likewise shared in the same things, in order that through death He might destroy the one having the power of death, that is, the devil, and that He might set free these, as many as by fear of death through all of their lives, were subject to bondage. For indeed He does not take hold of angels, but He does take hold of the seed of Abraham. Therefore He was obligated to become like His brothers in all respects, in order that He might become a merciful and faithful High Priest in things pertaining to God, in order that He might make propitiation for the sins of the people. For in that which He Himself has suffered, being tempted, He is able to help those who are tempted. (Hebrews 2:14-18)

Note especially this passage. Christ shared in the same things as humans, that he might destroy death by death, he was obligated to become like us in all respects, that he might make propritiation.

For we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but having been tempted in all respects in quite the same way as we are, yet without sin. (Hebrews 4:15)

Christ has been tempted in all ways like us. It is right to ask, if his human nature was unfallen, what temptations could he have faced that would have been like ours? How would an unfallen Person have been tempted to lust in all respects in the way a fallen person would? Yes, Christ was without sin, but having a fallen nature is not sinful.

Just as He also says in another place: "You are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek"; who [Jesus], in the days of His flesh, when He had offered up both prayers and supplications, with strong crying and tears to the One who was able to save Him from death, and was heard because of His fear of God, though He was a Son, He learned obedience by the things which He suffered. And having been perfected, He became the author of eternal salvation to all who obey Him . . . (Hebrews 5:6-9)

Clearly the divine in Jesus needed no perfection. So how could an unfallen human Person be perfected through obedience? Surely it was Jesus' fallen human nature that was perfected through his sinless obedience which included his submission to death and resurrection.

But listen to what St. Gregory of Nyssa has to say.

. . . He Who had determined once for all to share the nature of man must pass through all the peculiar conditions of that nature. Seeing, then, that the life of man is determined between two boundaries, had He, after having passed the one, not touched the other that follows, His proposed design would have remained only half fulfilled, from His not having touched that second condition of our nature. Perhaps, however, one who exactly understands the mystery would be justified rather in saying that, instead of the death occurring in consequence of the birth, the birth on the contrary was accepted by Him for the sake of the death; for He Who lives for ever did not sink down into the conditions of a bodily birth from any need to live, but to call us back from death to life. Since, then, there was needed a lifting up from death for the whole of our nature, He stretches forth a hand as it were to prostrate man, and stooping down to our dead corpse He came so far within the grasp of death as to touch a state of deadness, and then in His own body to bestow on our nature the principle of the resurrection, raising as He did by His power along with Himself the whole man. (St. Gregory of Nyssa, The Great Catechism, 32)

God's condescension to us in Christ means that Christ himself partook of the fullness of our mortal (that is to say, fallen) nature, including death, so as to save us.

In Adam's fall, the image of God in which he and Eve had been created was defaced. It was stained with mortality and corruption. But it was not destroyed. (We will speak below on what is this image.) So Christ, being the true Image of God in fullness, was able to take the distorted human image and restore it. As St. Athansios writes:

What then was God to do? or what was to be done save the renewing of that which was in God’s image, so that by it men might once more be able to know Him? But how could this have come to pass save by the presence of the very Image of God, our Lord Jesus Christ? For by men’s means it was impossible, since they are but made after an image; nor by angels either, for not even they are (God’s) images. Whence the Word of God came in His own person, that, as He was the Image of the Father, He might be able to create afresh the man after the image.

But, again, it could not else have taken place had not death and corruption been done away. Whence He took, in natural fitness, a mortal body, that while death might in it be once for all done away, men made after His Image might once more be renewed. None other then was sufficient for this need, save the Image of the Father.

For as, when the likeness painted on a panel has been effaced by stains from without, he whose likeness it is must needs come once more to enable the portrait to be renewed on the same wood: for, for the sake of his picture, even the mere wood on which it is painted is not thrown away, but the outline is renewed upon it; in the same way also the most holy Son of the Father, being the Image of the Father, came to our region to renew man once made in His likeness, and find him, as one lost, by the remission of sins; as He says Himself in the Gospels: “I came to find and to save the lost.” Whence He said to the Jews also: “Except a man be born again,” not meaning, as they thought, birth front woman, but speaking of the soul born and created anew in the likeness of God’s image. . . . Whence, naturally, willing to profit men, He sojourns here as man, taking to Himself a body like the others, and from things of earth, that is by the works of His body [He teaches them], so that they who would not know Him from His Providence and rule over all things, may even from the works done by His actual body know the Word of God which is in the body, and through Him the Father. (St. Athanasios, On the Incarnation, 13-14)

So, in other words, the ancient teaching is that we are all born fallen, subject to mortality, but we are not born guilty. That is, we are born with a fallen nature predisposed to sin. Our human nature was not originally created with this disposition. But it came into human nature via the sin of the Adam and Eve. But this fallen nature does not make of us guilty of Adam and Eve's sin, only the recipients of a fallen nature predisposed to sin. It is this same nature that Christ assumed when he became man. How could it be otherwise?

We may take our cue here from the Chalcedonian definition.

For it [the Christology of the Fathers] opposes those who would rend the mystery of the dispensation into a Duad of Sons; it repels from the sacred assembly those who dare to say that the Godhead of the Only Begotten is capable of suffering; it resists those who imagine a mixture or confusion of the two natures of Christ; it drives away those who fancy his form of a servant is of an heavenly or some substance other than that which was taken of us, and it anathematizes those who foolishly talk of two natures of our Lord before the union, conceiving that after the union there was only one.

Following the holy Fathers we teach with one voice that the Son [of God] and our Lord Jesus Christ is to be confessed as one and the same [Person], that he is perfect in Godhead and perfect in manhood, very God and very man, of a reasonable soul and [human] body consisting, consubstantial with the Father as touching his Godhead, and consubstantial with us as touching his manhood; made in all things like unto us, sin only excepted; begotten of his Father before the worlds according to his Godhead; but in these last days for us men and for our salvation born [into the world] of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God according to his manhood. This one and the same Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son [of God] must be confessed to be in two natures, unconfusedly, immutably, indivisibly, inseparably [united], and that without the distinction of natures being taken away by such union, but rather the peculiar property of each nature being preserved and being united in one Person and subsistence, not separated or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son and only-begotten, God the Word, our Lord Jesus Christ, as the Prophets of old time have spoken concerning him, and as the Lord Jesus Christ hath taught us, and as the Creed of the Fathers hath delivered to us. (Definition of Chalcedon

Now, the “perfect” in manhood is often taken as perfection in the Hellenistic sense of human perfection (without blemish, weakness, etc.). But it is clear from the context here that the “perfect” means complete, full. Christ, that is to say, was fully human. Indeed, just as Christ is consubstantial with the Godhead, so he is consubstantial with us, apart from sin. Thus, in the incarnation, Christ took on fallen human nature, and perfected it and renewed it in the Resurrection.

This may, up to this point, seem a contentious rendering. Darren and I differ on some Scriptural interpretations. He can pull in some Augustinian interpreters in the West. I can pull in the Eastern Fathers.

But there is another essential point that I need to reiterate: that of “what is not assumed is not healed.” This is an unequivocal and consistent soteriological principle of the ancient Church. If human beings were to be saved from death and corruption and have their sins remitted, it was necessary that Christ become all that man is, excepting sin. If there is anything human that is to be saved, Christ must assume it, sin excepted. Therefore if our fallen human nature is to be restored to its archetype in the God-man, the God-man must assume fallen human nature. He must overcome death by death.

Here are the seminal patristic witnesses to this assumptive principle.

. . . the only true and stedfast Teacher, the Word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, who did, through His transcendent love, become what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself. (St. Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies, Book V, Preface)

For He was made man that we might be made God. (St. Athanasios the Great, On the Incarnation of the Word, 54)

. . . He was transfused throughout our nature, in order that our nature might by this transfusion of the Divine become itself divine, rescued as it was from death, and put beyond the reach of the caprice of the antagonist. For His return from death becomes to our mortal race the commencement of our return to the immortal life. (St. Gregory of Nyssa, The Great Catechism, 25)

For that which He has not assumed He has not healed; but that which is united to His Godhead is also saved. (St. Gregory the Theologian, Letter to Cledonius Against Apollinaris (CI))

For when he had come to be the God-man,
God came to an end as man, to honor me,
so that, by the very things he took on, he might restore,
and destroy sin's accusation utterly,
and, by dying, slaughter the slaughterer.
(St. Gregory the Theologian, "Against Apollinarious," lines 5-9 [carm., 1.1.10, 5-9], On God and Man, tr. by Peter Gilbert, SVS Press, 2001, p. 81)

What must be remembered here is that Christ saved us, as understood by these writers and the ancient Church, “so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire” (2 Peter 1:4). God became what we are that we might, by grace, become what He is. Our participation in God's divinity is a participation of the whole person, body and soul. But that participation then means that we must be healed of all that is death and corruption in us.

Thus, Christ had to take on fallen human nature if we are to be saved.

I have taken this effort to insist that Christ assumed a fallen, though not sinful, human nature because Darren wants to insist that Christ's human nature does not include fallenness. But then if so, we are not saved from the death and corruption which is part of our fallen state. Kevin wants to insist that there is no change in human nature, that it is all forensic, and that the death and corruption we experience are a result of God creating humans this way. But he must argue this in conflict with Scripture and the historic Church.

But we must ask a further question: What does it mean to be a person? Or are persons determined by their nature? Both Darren and Kevin want to assert that our will is bound up with our nature and that our nature then determines our will. So, though our will is free to do what it wills, what it wills is thoroughly determined by our nature.

However, I have been insisting that Christology, anthropology and soteriology cannot be separated from one another, and that Christology is the proper foundation of our anthropology. And if, as Scripture asserts, Christ became all the we are, save sin, then what we assert about man, apart from sin, we will be asserting about Christ necessarily. So if nature, irrespective of fallennes, as Darren and Kevin contend, is what determines our will, then we must also assert this of Christ. But if we assert of Christ that nature determines will, we must also assert this of the Trinity, since Christ is consubstantial with the Trinity as well.

In other words, the understanding of human volition vis a vis human nature is ultimately found in our understanding of the Holy Trinity, in whose image man was created, which image was defaced in man, and which defaced image Christ, as true Image of God, came to restore.

It is common, at least in the West since Augustinian scholasticism, to argue about God beginning with his essence or nature. But this is fundamentally mistaken. God is not an essence or a nature, but a Person, or, rather, a tri-unity of Persons. The East has always maintained that positive assertions about God can only and must begin from the standpoint of the full revelation of God in Christ. That is to say, what God is is forever hidden from our view. All that we can know of God is what has been revealed to us, and that revelation has always been a revelation of his triune Person.

But if God is a Person, or tri-unity of Persons, then Personhood must necessarily exceed nature. That is to say, God is not an essence, but is superessentially a Person. The seemingly contradictory statements, God is all-good and God is not all-good, are, in fact, both true when predicated of God as Person, because his Personhood so far exceeds our understanding of what essential goodness would mean of the Godhead that while we know of God's goodness through his consistent never-failing acts of love toward us, we cannot know, finally, what that goodness means. It is beyond all human grasp, fallen or completely regenerated.

To illustrate what I mean, it is helpful to take the argument from Sextus Empiricus's Outlines of Pyrhhonism, Book III. Sextus argues that we have no way of asserting positively that God exists, for everything that we can say about God ultimately results in antinomy. That is to say, if we predicate of God the natural and essential qualities of omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolence, we end in negating one or more of them. That is to say, if God is omnibenevolent, we would not suffer. But we do suffer. So if God is omnibenevolent, he cannot be omnipotent, for he would be able to eliminate our suffering. But if he is omnipotent and we suffer, then he cannot be omnibenevolent. Further, if God is omniscient he would have known that we would suffer. But we do suffer. Therefore if God is omniscient and knew that we would suffer he must not be omnipotent, or he would have stopped it, being omnibenevolent, or God is not omnibenevolent, since both knowing and being able to stop our suffering, he does not do so. But if God is not any of these qualities, or does not have them, he is not God.

Nor does it do any good to argue for the traditional theodicies that all things work together for good, or that our suffering is for our discipline, and so forth, because this, too, results in antinomies: the suffering of the innocent, the fallenness of creation (or God's intention to create it fallen), and so forth.

Rather, the ancient Church's insistence on approaching kataphatic theology from the starting point of the Persons of God perserves such theology from rational antinomies (at least antinomies that derive from the rational concepts themselves) and preserves the inherent paradox and mystery of the Trinity by asserting the Personal transcendence of what we might term God's nature.

Thus, insofar as God wills and acts, he does so as a Person and not as an essence. Rather, it is the Person who wills, not an essence. God's will, if we can speak of it in this way, is directed by his Person, not, as it were, by his essence.

And if Christ is the express image of God, then when Christ wills, he does so from the standpoint of his Person and not from some sort of nature, or natures. Kevin wants to caution my saying that Christ has two wills and two natures in one person because it

is dangerously close to the classic formulation of Nestorianism, "Two natures and two hypostases in one Person." The will is not distinct from but is a component of the nature.

But if I was unclear, then let us both resort to the definition of the faith of the Sixth Ecumenical Council and confess of Christ that he is:

one and the same Christ our Lord the only-begotten Son of two natures un-confusedly, unchangeably, inseparably indivisibly to be recognized, the peculiarities of neither nature being lost by the union but rather the proprieties of each nature being preserved, concurring in one Person and in one subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons but one and the same only-begotten Son of God, the Word, our Lord Jesus Christ, according as the Prophets of old have taught us and as our Lord Jesus Christ himself hath instructed us, and the Creed of the holy Fathers hath delivered to us; defining all this we likewise declare that in him are two naturalwills and two natural operations indivisibly, inconvertibly, inseparably, inconfusedly, according to the teaching of the holy Fathers. And these two natural wills are not contrary the one to the other (God forbid!) as the impious heretics assert, but his human will follows and that not as resisting and reluctant, but rather as subject to his divine and omnipotent will. For it was right that the flesh should be moved but subject to the divine will, according to the most wise Athanasius. For as his flesh is called and is the flesh of God the Word, so also the natural will of his flesh is called and is the proper will of God the Word, as he himself says: "I came down from heaven, not that I might do mine own will but the will of the Father which sent me!" where he calls his own will the will of his flesh, inasmuch as his flesh was also his own. For as his most holy and immaculate animated flesh was not destroyed because it was deified but continued in its own state and nature, so also his human will,although deified, was not suppressed, but was rather preserved according to the saying of Gregory Theologus: "His will [i.e., the Saviour's] is not contrary to God but altogether deified."

We glorify two natural operations indivisibly, immutably, inconfusedly, inseparably in the same our Lord Jesus Christ our true God, that is to say a divine operation and a human operation, according to the divine preacher Leo, who most distinctly asserts as follows: "For each form does in communion with the other what pertains properly to it, the Word, namely, doing that which pertains to the Word, and the flesh that which pertains to the flesh."

For we will not admit one natural operation in God and in the creature, as we will not exalt into the divine essence what is created, nor will we bring down the glory of the divine nature to the place suited to the creature.

We recognize the miracles and the sufferings as of one and the same [Person], but of one or of the other nature of which he is and in which he exists, as Cyril admirably says. Preserving therefore the inconfused- ness and indivisibility, we make briefly this whole confession, believing our Lord Jesus Christ to be one of the Trinity and after the incarnation our true God, we say that his two natures shone forth in his one subsistence in which he both performed the miracles and endured the sufferings through the whole of his economic conversation, and that not in appearance only but in very deed, and this by reason of the difference of nature which must be recognized in the same Person, for although joined together yet each nature wills and does the things proper to it and that indivisibly and inconfusedly. Wherefore we confess two wills and two operations, concurring most fitly in him for the salvation of the human race. (excerpted from The Definition of Faith of the Sixth Ecumenical Council)

And this is precisely what I am contending, that the exercise of Christ's wills, human and divine, was from his Person, not from either of his natures. The human will, that is to say, submitted to the divine will, because the one Person, Jesus Christ, so exercised that human will. Similarly, the human will was not supressed or subsumed under the divine will, because Christ the Person so exercised his divine will that the human will was free to submit to the divine will in all things.

But if Christ, the express image of God, exercised his will from his Person, and not from his nature, just as the Holy Trinity wills as tri-unity of Persons and not from a nature, then humans, too, must exercise their will from the self-transcendence inherent in Personhood derived from the Holy Trinity and revealed to us in Christ.

Only if the imago dei was obliterated in humans could it be said that the human will is not subject to personality but to nature. But if the imago dei is destroyed, we are not persons, but animals only, whose wills are necessarily bound by nature. Yet the imago dei is not destroyed but us, but merely defaced, and stained. That is to say, though we will from our person, that will is predisposed to corruption and death, as it is fallen as is our human nature. We sin, not because we must because our wills are bound to our nature, not because our nature is sinful per se, but because our person is subject to mortality and freely chooses to sin. That is to say, rather than transcending our nature, as we do as persons made imago dei, we freely choose to give way to it.

Christ, however, though having assumed a fallen nature, did not so sin, as his divine-human person transcended that fallen nature and deified it, ultimately healing it through his death, resurrection and ascension.

All this is not to say that forensic descriptions of our fallen state are illegitimate. For we are, indeed, declared to be and are guilty on the basis of our personal choice to sin. But dependence on a forensic description of our fallen state alone leads to irresoluble antinomies that ultimately affect our understanding of Christ and the Holy Trinity, and lead us away from the faith once for all delivered to the saints.

I trust that my criticisms of Darren's and Kevin's assertions on particular points have shown this to be the case. Christ did assume a fallen human nature, else we are not saved. Adam's sin did effect a change in human nature and creation (cf. also Romans 8), and did not result in just a forensic declaration, else we have no participation in the divine, as St. Peter asserts.

But this post has grown far beyond my original intent and I summarily draw it to a close.