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

[FrDavid96]

Of course, yes. I surely don’t mean to say that God could sin.

And I also see that leading to another circular argument.

 

[WileyC1949]

The bottom line is this:
Grace never violates free will. Your position is suggesting otherwise. That’s a basic principle that you should conform your thinking to, and not try to conform the principles to your doubts.

I agree that grace never violates free will. I think that is part of the point I am trying to make. Jesus had to have the free will to choose, and He had the ever presence of God’s grace to choose wisely even if His human will was against it.

 

[FrDavid96]

FrDavid96:

Wannano:

Was Christs human nature perfect by more than the fact that He never sinned?

Oh yes! Most certainly, yes.

I’m listening.

Perfect in every way. Keep reading…

I don’t think that gets us very far though. When I think about it, I ask “what is, or what could be, an imperfection in human nature?” and the only answer to that would be “sin.”

Now this can go deep into the weeds. By “imperfection” I mean a defect; something wrong.

Of course, as human beings we are imperfect. If I fall on a sharp stone, I can cut my leg, because my body isn’t perfect.

So I’ll say that His human nature is perfect in-so-far as human nature can ever be perfect (before Judgement Day). I fear we could wax philosophical about this point all night…

 

[FrDavid96]

Let me give this a try…

We can establish for certain that because Christ is truly God, He cannot sin, because it is logically impossible for God to sin. The objection is that His human nature, but not His divine nature, could have allowed Him to sin, though in actuality He never would have sinned.

However, a nature does not sin; a person does. And Christ, as a Divine Person, could not sin, not even through His human nature, for that would be God sinning through a human nature. Perish the thought!
[/quote]

Yes, I could live with that.

 

[Wannano]

Wannano:

FrDavid96:

Wannano:

Was Christs human nature perfect by more than the fact that He never sinned?

Oh yes! Most certainly, yes.

I’m listening.

Perfect in every way. Keep reading…

I don’t think that gets us very far though. When I think about it, I ask “what is, or what could be, an imperfection in human nature?” and the only answer to that would be “sin.”

Now this can go deep into the weeds. By “imperfection” I mean a defect; something wrong.

Of course, as human beings we are imperfect. If I fall on a sharp stone, I can cut my leg, because my body isn’t perfect.

So I’ll say that His human nature is perfect in-so-far as human nature can ever be perfect (before Judgement Day). I fear we could wax philosophical about this point all night…

Think on it with time and feel free to private message if you desire. Thanks.

 

[WileyC1949]

Jesus said to them, "My food is to do the will of him who sent me, and to accomplish his work.

This passage implies that it was His free decision to do the will of God. It is what nourishes Him. Years ago I actually knew a guy who for a while refused to take left hand turns when driving. Instead, to turn left, he took three right hand turns. But the fact that he never turned left did not mean he lacked the ability to do so.

Jesus never sinned. That doesn’t mean He lacked the ability to sin.

 

[Roseeurekacross]

i am not disputing that I am saying Jesus was fully human,

you said Jesus was not fully human

 

[WileyC1949]

The human soul or conscience did not somehow begin to exist only after Adam ate from the tree.

I think a human soul and the conscience goes hand-in-hand. I know that it is not the Church’s teaching that animals do not have souls but an intense personal experience convinced me otherwise. My thinking is that somewhere along the evolutionary line God changed the animistic soul of the pre-human to a human soul and along with that man was endowed with a conscience. I see the conscience as being the thing that truly separates us from animals because it give us the drive to always seek the “greater good” or the “greater evil”. I think it is this which sparked the imagination and thus is responsible for all of the achievements and innovations of man. It is a God-given gift that has truly put in charge over the Earth.

 

[WileyC1949]

Lucifer and the Fallen Angels were in heaven. Did they not sin?

You are opening another can of worms with me with that one Father. But it is probably best suited for another topic. I would be interested in your views on my take of it.

 

[meltzerboy2]

Or some might eat the rotten food as well if they are hungry enough.

 

[WileyC1949]

Of course, yes. I surely don’t mean to say that God could sin.

And I also see that leading to another circular argument.

I think we are getting into the could/would issue again. The Bible states clearly in several places that God created BOTH good and evil. So wouldn’t it be accurate to say that God would never sin, but He could if He wanted to (even though He would never want to)?

 

[WileyC1949]

If it were not a part of His plan for creation then how do you account for the fact that the Bible states clearly in several places that God created evil? For evil to exist it had to be part of His plan. The question we have to ask is “What role does evil play in God’s plan?”

While no one but God could answer that question fully it seems to me that the role it plays lies in what it teaches us. I believe that the purpose of the physical realm is so that we could learn what God could not give us… the ability to love. Love cannot be forced and remain love; by its very nature it must be freely given. So God could not create us “already loving” as that would be a contradiction. It is something we had to learn on our own. So how do we learn to love?

I don’t know if I am repeating myself or not, but seeing you are not here to stop me I will go right on and repeat it if I already said it. It seems obvious to me that we learn to love through the experience of evil, pain, suffering, toil and death. These were the so-called “punishments” for Adam’s disobedience. I consider them realizations and awakenings. Without the complete freedom to choose to do any and all evil, even though that leads away from God and from love we would never have the freedom to reject that evil and do the good that leads towards love and God. This also explains why direct knowledge of God’s existence is denied to us because such knowledge would interfere with the freedom of our choice. Likewise, without our experience of pain, suffering, toil and death with ourselves or a member of our social circle we would never be able to learn compassion and sympathy for others experiencing the same thing. Without first learning compassion and sympathy we would never learn to care about those outside of our own social circle. And without first learning to care about others we would never be able to learn true selfless love of all.

Complete free will is a vital part of this.

 

[ncmpriest]

Did anyone comment about the “Admirable Exchange”? It is the point of the Incarnation. (The language is slippery here and it is easy to slide into heresy, but we only have language, so here it goes.) Where Life is exchanged for Death it requires that there be a reversal of original sin. Original sin is a movement of the will of humanity in response to the sin of pride. I, personally, have often thought that the sin was not the eating of the fruit, but the decision by Adam and Eve that God was wrong.

If you notice the scene in Gethsamani, Jesus reverses the curse of Adam and Eve by asking the Father if the cup could pass from him, but instead of getting what he wants, he acquiesces to the will of the Father. This movement of the human will to obedience is the exact opposite of what happened when Satan succeeded in convincing Adam and Eve to be disobedient.

This makes Jesus the Way, the Truth, and the Life for humans. Our baptism into him, then leads us through this same exchange.

Without the ability to say “no”, there would be no exchange, no reversal of original sin, and we would not be saved.

So, this is an excellent question. It is really a practical issue of salvation. Great job.

 

[goout]

You have to look at this with this basic truth in mind: grace does not violate free will.
Not even the perfection of grace violates free will.

And then you have the issue of potency, or what we are calling the ability to do something, or “could have”. In perfect loving grace, the potency and freedom to do something are…perfected to the divine will.
We are confusing that perfection with a lack of potency and freedom, I think. But again, grace does not rob a person of the power to act or violate free will.

And as someone else said, you have the theoretical observations that we are debating here, and then you have the reality of the matter, or _the Incarnation of i_t, and that Incarnation of it is all that matters.
Subjecting the reality of the matter to the theoretical is not very fruitful.

 

[Hodos]

No I didn’t. I quoted Hebrews demonstrating that Jesus is fully human. I said we in our sinful nature aren’t fully human.

 

[Wesrock]

FrDavid96:

The human soul or conscience did not somehow begin to exist only after Adam ate from the tree.

I think a human soul and the conscience goes hand-in-hand. I know that it is not the Church’s teaching that animals do not have souls but an intense personal experience convinced me otherwise. My thinking is that somewhere along the evolutionary line God changed the animistic soul of the pre-human to a human soul and along with that man was endowed with a conscience. I see the conscience as being the thing that truly separates us from animals because it give us the drive to always seek the “greater good” or the “greater evil”. I think it is this which sparked the imagination and thus is responsible for all of the achievements and innovations of man. It is a God-given gift that has truly put in charge over the Earth.

And what if the first man with a human soul (as opposed to his blood relations which may not have made that leap) is the figure we call Adam, and original sin is when that first man disobeyed God, and its from this man’s descendants (and maybe even intermixing with the ones who hadn’t made the leap leading to greater genetic diversity) that all men and women with true human souls come from?

 

[Usagi]

I agree on taking the Eden story figuratively, but your particular interpretation of the story is not the only one, and not one that is particularly compatible with Catholic teaching (as you recognize). “The Church allows us to acknowledge evolution and take the Adam and Eve story figuratively” does not inevitably lead to “The Church embraces WileyC1949’s reading of the story that leads him to deny Original Sin and various other doctrines.”

I agree with you that “Adam” could very well have been a hominid who, unlike those around him, became aware of himself and the world on a human level, and aware of God as well. But that wasn’t the “eating from the tree” moment. The Fall was not a Rise. In the Catholic view, whoever this “Adam” was, he did something, made some choice, after his coming to awareness, that broke his awesome relationship with God. And his descendants ever since have had to live with that broken relationship until God took the initiative to heal it through the Incarnation. That broken relationship is “the stain of Original Sin.” Not an inherited sin or guilt, but an inherited consequence, a lack of something we could all have had.

Mary’s Immaculate Conception means that she did not start with that lack; God healed it pre-emptively in her. So she had better control over her appetites than the rest of us — but that doesn’t mean she had no ability to sin. Concupiscence is the tendency to sin because we do not control our urges, not the ability to sin. Eve (whoever and whatever “Eve” might have been in evolutionary history) did not have concupiscence, but she still sinned. That Mary is also understood to have committed no actual sin by the grace of God is a separate gift, not a necessary consequence of being free from Original Sin. Like Adam or Eve, Mary could have sinned, but we believe that she always cooperated with the grace of God (and of course, the grace of God helped her in that cooperation — remember, we don’t believe in either “irresistible grace” or completely free will to be awesome without God’s grace, though the exact way in which the two factors interact is mysterious and has yet to be settled by the Church.

On your original question, I agree with most people here (and you, I think) that Jesus’ truly human will must have had the capacity to choose against God … but since Jesus’ human nature was perfectly united to the divine nature, and Jesus was truly God as well as truly human, it was not something that would ever have happened in fact. Jesus experienced hunger in the desert, and anguish over his coming death in the garden, and we have it recorded in revelation that he asked for the cup to pass if it were possible … but I don’t think there’s a practical possibility (even though his human will had the theoretical ability) that he would have said “No! My will be done!” and gone on about his life. Jesus also embodied the divine will, and the divine will does not change or oppose itself.

 

[Wannano]

WileyC1949:

FrDavid96:

The human soul or conscience did not somehow begin to exist only after Adam ate from the tree.

I think a human soul and the conscience goes hand-in-hand. I know that it is not the Church’s teaching that animals do not have souls but an intense personal experience convinced me otherwise. My thinking is that somewhere along the evolutionary line God changed the animistic soul of the pre-human to a human soul and along with that man was endowed with a conscience. I see the conscience as being the thing that truly separates us from animals because it give us the drive to always seek the “greater good” or the “greater evil”. I think it is this which sparked the imagination and thus is responsible for all of the achievements and innovations of man. It is a God-given gift that has truly put in charge over the Earth.

And what if the first man with a human soul (as opposed to his blood relations which may not have made that leap) is the figure we call Adam, and original sin is when that first man disobeyed God, and its from this man’s descendants (and maybe even intermixing with the ones who hadn’t made the leap leading to greater genetic diversity) that all men and women with true human souls come from?

That would certainly explain why we act so much like monkeys! I wonder why it is so hard to believe God formed the first man Adam from the dust just like the Bible says. Is it that we do not like to believe God either? Shouldn’t our baptism take away the desire within us to disobey and challenge God?

 

[AugustTherese]

No I didn’t. I quoted Hebrews demonstrating that Jesus is fully human. I said we in our sinful nature aren’t fully human.

What do you mean by ‘our sinful nature’?

 

[STT]

Having both divine and human will is not possible.