Christ's Freedom from Original and Personal Sin

Everything said in an earlier volume about the ethical goodness or sanctity of God applies to Christ insofar as He is God.¹ Here we are concerned only with the human holiness of our Lord — the holiness of His created soul, and more specifically of one faculty of that soul, His will. Holiness formally consists in “exemption from sin combined with rectitude of moral conduct.” Keeping this definition in mind, we prove the holiness of Christ’s humanity through a series of theses, bringing out first its negative element (sinlessness) and then its positive element (moral purity).

Thesis I: Christ, as Man, Was Exempt from Original Sin and Concupiscence

This is an article of faith in both its parts. Christ’s freedom from original sin is defined in the Decretum pro Iacobitis of Pope Eugene IV (1439): “Who, conceived, born, and dying without sin, alone struck down, by His own death, the enemy of the human race, blotting out our sins.”² Freedom from original sin implies freedom from all its evil consequences, especially concupiscence — the Fifth General Council of Constantinople (553) condemns anyone who defends “the most impious Theodore of Mopsuestia, who said that the Word of God is one thing and Christ another, and that Christ suffered the disturbances of the passions of the soul and the concupiscences of the flesh.”³

That Christ was actually and rightfully free from original sin follows from every Scriptural text affirming His sinlessness and impeccability in general, and especially from those emphasizing that He appeared in the flesh precisely to expiate the inherited guilt weighing on the human race. Had He been tainted by original sin Himself, He could not have been the “lamb unspotted and undefiled” (1 Peter 1:19), nor could He have taken away “the sin of the world” (John 1:29) — for the sin of the world is original sin, and it is unthinkable that the One destined to take it away should Himself have been stained by it. This is why St. Paul, who repeatedly ascribes genuine “flesh” (human nature) to the God-man, never once calls that flesh “sinful”: “God sending his own Son, in the likeness of sinful flesh and of sin, hath condemned sin in the flesh” (Romans 8:3). And in drawing his parallel between Adam, the first man, “of the earth, earthly,” and Christ, the second Adam, “from heaven, heavenly” (1 Corinthians 15:47), Paul effectively excludes original sin from the God-man altogether — otherwise the parallel would carry no force.

The Fathers treated Christ’s freedom from original sin as a self-evident corollary of His divine dignity and the very origin of His human nature. As man no less than as God, Christ is the natural Son of God; to say He was conceived in original sin would be to say the Divine Logos Himself was stained by sin. “God alone is without sin,” writes Tertullian, “and the only man without sin is Christ, because Christ is God.”⁴ A further argument: original sin can be transmitted only through ordinary, sexual generation; but Christ was conceived by the Holy Ghost and born of a virgin; therefore He cannot be tainted by original sin.⁵

If Christ was conceived without original sin, He must equally have been exempt from concupiscence — a conclusion so evident that even the heretics who denied Him a human intellect or will (the Apollinarists, the Monothelites) never ventured to charge Him with moral imperfection. “If anyone believes that the flesh of Christ lusted against the spirit,” St. Augustine exclaims, “let him be anathema.”⁶ The temptations of Christ recorded in Scripture were external occasions or suggestions that never elicited consent or even inward delight, but were promptly repulsed (“Begone, Satan!”): “God, who by becoming incarnate in the Virgin’s womb had entered this world without sin, tolerated no contradiction within Himself. So while it was possible for Him to be tempted by suggestion, no sinful delight ever entered His soul.”⁷

Thesis II: Christ Was Free from All Personal Sin

This too is an article of faith. Our Lord’s actual sinlessness (impeccantia) is beyond question a matter of defined doctrine. The Council of Ephesus: “If anyone says that [Christ] offered Himself for Himself, and not rather for us alone — for He who knew absolutely no sin had no need of any offering — let him be anathema.”⁸ The Council of Chalcedon calls Him “like unto us in all things except sin.”⁹

Even without these express ecclesiastical definitions, Christ’s sinlessness would have to be received as revealed doctrine simply because Scripture teaches it directly. The prophet Isaiah says of the coming Messias, “He hath done no iniquity, neither was there deceit in his mouth” (Isaiah 53:9; cf. 1 Peter 2:22), and the Archangel Gabriel tells the Virgin Mary, “The Holy which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God” (Luke 1:35). St. Paul declares that Christ “knew no sin” (2 Corinthians 5:21), and that though “tempted in all things like as we are” He remained “without sin” (Hebrews 4:15); elsewhere he describes our Lord as “holy, innocent, undefiled, separated from sinners” (Hebrews 7:26). No mere man ever dared challenge his own accusers the way Jesus did, according to the Fourth Evangelist: “Which of you shall convince me of sin?” (John 8:46). His whole life was pure enough that countless saints have attained sanctity simply by following Him — indeed there is no other way of escaping blindness of heart than, in Thomas à Kempis’s phrase, “endeavoring to conform one’s whole life to the life of Christ.”¹⁰

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