Did Jesus have the ability to say "No" to the Father?

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No, that was about your understanding of original sin, which is wrong.
 
WileyC1949 said:
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Wesrock:
Yes, we did. Because of Adam and Eve’s sin, we do not inherit the original holiness and justification granted to men and, lacking that, we experience concupiscence.
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Granted. But if Adam & Eve were part of a story and were not actual people, which is what I fully believe, then the theology built around, including the concept of Original Sin as a “black mark on the soul” as a result of their sin completely vanishes.
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What you believe is not the Catholic faith.
WileyC1949 said:
If you try to treat it as actual history then you are fighting against a host of scientific knowledge and theories including evolution which the Church acknowledges IS possible.
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Disagree. And I an aware of the host of scientific knowledge you mention.
WileyC1949 said:
However as a story the focus changes from their supposed disobedience to the concept of man being given a conscience (or a human soul) which gave him “the knowledge of good and evil” as the tree was aptly named. I firmly believe that the conscience … the human soul rather than the animistic one is what completely separates us from all other animals and is responsible for all of the achievements of man.
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The human soul does separate us from animals, and Adam and Eve had human souls before sinning.
WileyC1949 said:
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Wesrock:
Adam was created rational and with a conscience. There are different approaches to the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, but we do not consider Adam lacking in knowledge that disobeying God was wrong.
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There is nothing in the story that indicates that the supposed Adam knew beforehand that disobeying God was wrong. The story clearly states that “his eyes were opened” AFTER he ate.
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Opened to sin. Evil. Experience. Shame. It’s your issue if you chose to take a surface level approach to scripture apart from the traditions it belings to. Your assertion is false, none the less.

(1) God created man and woman in his image, a reference to their rational soul, not to their animal body.
(2) Adam is shown to have named the birds and the beasts, to have been given dominion over them, and to recognize Eve as like him.
(3) The very fact that God gives them a command is indicative of their ability to understand it.
 
WileyC1949 said:
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Wesrock:
You’re making up your own theology and interpretation of scripture.
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Perhaps I am. But which interpretation makes more sense? That we inherited the stain of Original Sin from Adam and Eve (who most likely never really existed) despite the Church teaching that we do not inherit the sins of our fathers but are only responsible for our own sin, or the concept that when somewhere along the evolutionary line our first truly human parents were given a truly human soul and with it a conscience which gives us the ability to know good from evil, and it was the conscience, not a “stain of sin”, that we inherited, and it is the conscience which gives us the ability to sin.
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These aren’t altogether incompatible. And original sin is different from personal/actual sin. Original sin is not a personal sin, but a lack of a quality.
WileyC1949 said:
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Wesrock:
We lack the inheritance of original holiness and justice and so we are also left with concupiscence.
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If you accept the concept of evolution then we never had “original holiness”.
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That doesn’t follow.
WileyC1949 said:
Before we were given the human soul we were animals incapable of sinning because we had no knowledge of good and evil. Is a wolf doing something “evil” when he kills a man or is he just being a wolf?
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No, a wolf does not sin, nor did early hominids that lacked a rational soul. Indeed, it was because Adam and Eve had a conscience that they were capable of sin, but that does not mean they never had and lost of original holiness and justice they had all their lives up to the Fall.
 
People in heaven who see God, don’t have the ability (or any desire) to say no to God. It is not a matter of being forced to be so.
 
This passage from the Bible can act as a comment on the original questions posed here.
John 4:32-34>
32.But he said to them, "I have food to eat of which you do not know."33.So the disciples said to one another, “Has any one brought him food?” 34.Jesus said to them, "My food is to do the will of him who sent me, and to accomplish his work.
 
Yes, I do believe He had two will, just as we are body and soul. But while the human will of Jesus would have loved to say no, He did always defer His will to the Father’s. But while the result was Jesus accepting the will of the Father His human will was opposed until He accepted without question the Divine will… hence His calmness in meeting those sent to get Him.
 
Thom18 said:
Jesus and the Father share the same Will, so it would be impossible for Him to do so. To deny the Father would be to deny Himself.
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The Divine Will was certainly present in Jesus, but He was fully human as well and as is seen in the temptations and the Agony that while He always deferred to the will of God His human will was saying something different.

One of the most intense experiences I have had was an Out-of-Body Experience which convinced me that even we have two wills… physical and spiritual… that can disagree. I haven’t thought this through but that might be the reason why our physical nature can tell us to do one thing while our conscience can tell us the opposite.
 
Happymom said:
So I no longer believe Jesus could say no. To have the ability in Jesus to say no would give an inch in for the devil in all of us because what we learn from Jesus is the way to the Father and disobedience is not the way to the Father. Jesus was man same as us in all ways except sin and that’s what this means. Jesus is our Savior and so we follow Him in His ways. We don’t choose to doubt God’s plan.
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Most of us do fight against God’s plan, sometimes daily. That is what sin is all about. And while I agree that we should always follow Him in His ways, we do not always succeed at that. Jesus DID have an encounter with the devil in the devil which left Him exhausted and He had to be tended to by the angels. So the three offers of the devil must have been very tempting for Him but He still did the will of God.

Without a human will and the ability to say NO is to say that Jesus, as a man, was forced to accept His suffering and death blindly with no choice. Without a free choice there was no sacrifice.

I firmly believe that the physical realm exists so that we can learn to love selflessly. Love is one thing that God could not embed in us because love by its very nature must be freely given and cannot be forced. We learn to love through our dealings with evil, pain, suffering, toil and death (the so-called punishments given to Adam for his disobedience). If Jesus did not have the ability to say no then His actions were not done out of love for us but rather through programming.

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semper_catholicus said:
It was God’s will that Christ suffer and die for our Sins. Christ is God. Therefore, His Divine will was that He suffer and die for our sins.

It wasn’t like He was being forced to suffer and die for our sins by the Father.
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Are you saying that Jesus, the man, did not have a human will? At the agony in the Garden He said He did and His human will was to have His task taken from Him. But He made the choice to do the will of God over His own will. If He did not have the ability to say No then His actions were not a sacrifice at all.
 
WileyC1949 said:
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Thom18:
Jesus and the Father share the same Will, so it would be impossible for Him to do so. To deny the Father would be to deny Himself.
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The Divine Will was certainly present in Jesus, but He was fully human as well and as is seen in the temptations and the Agony that while He always deferred to the will of God His human will was saying something different.
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His human will was subject to temptation, but He was unable to sin or otherwise oppose His divine Will. His human nature wasn’t corrupted like ours is.
 
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Wesrock said:
No, that was about your understanding of original sin, which is wrong.
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It is not my understanding of Original Sin which is wrong. I understand it just fine, but I think that the Church’s teaching on it is incorrect (or at least was incorrect). If the Church has admitted that they were wrong about Galileo and that his concept of the universe was correct and theirs wrong, why would it be so difficult to take a look at other areas where they may have erred. I think I have made some logical points here that so far most want to ignore is favor of tradition. Our understanding on a whole lot of things has dramatically changed in the last century alone. I am just suggesting another look.
 
WileyC1949 said:
If the Church has admitted that they were wrong about Galileo and that his concept of the universe was correct and theirs wrong, why would it be so difficult to take a look at other areas where they may have erred.
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The Church only took issue with Galileo because he tried to use Scripture to back up his unproven scientific theories. It didn’t have an issue with the actual science. The Church cannot allow someone to use Scripture to validate whatever scientific theory they may have when that theory isn’t even confirmed to be correct.
 
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Happymom said:
Fr I hear what you’re saying… but I think and this is my opinion…bless you…
Jesus is the way… He shows us the way… and the way is obedience to God… How can we know what is expected of us if Jesus disobeyed God? More and more I think about it the more it make sense why it ‘appears’ Jesus had a choice to ‘us’ but really He couldn’t because Jesus is God and can’t contradict Himself. This is Jesus teaching us to obey…🙂
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No. He had to have a choice. In order to have a choice, one must have options: in this case, the option to sin or not-sin. If He had no choice, then the fact that He did not sin would be meaningless. It’s like me choosing not to sprout wings and fly. I can claim all day long that I “choose” not to do it, but that’s meaningless because I could never do it in the first place.

This isn’t a complicated question really. The Temptation in the Desert event proves to us that it was possible for Him to sin. Clearly, that’s an important Gospel event.

Obedience also means that one must have a choice.

Finally, I never wrote that He did sin—I don’t know where you’re getting that. Of course, He never sinned.
 
Fr, I’m having a difficult time of making sense of what you’re saying.

How is it possible that Christ could have sinned?
 
Wesrock said:
Jesus’s human will voluntarily submitted to the divine will. However, God would not have assumed a human nature in which the will did not submit to begin with.
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Not “submit” but cooperate. It’s an important distinction.

Christ is one person, two natures (human and divine), two wills (human and divine). Neither side submits to the other–rather they are in complete cooperation.

Folks, this is all covered in a field of theology called "Christology."

These questions were settled centuries ago. The Church KNOWS the answers.
 
Wesrock said:
Jesus’s human will voluntarily submitted to the divine will. However, God would not have assumed a human nature in which the will did not submit to begin with.
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See 3rd Council of Constantinople (the 6th ecumenical Council).
 
It’s hard for me to explain this mystery I am seeing except for I know that God doesn’t make mistakes.
 
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