On Temptation and the Perfection of Jesus

Joshua Orsak e-mails: 

Your recent posts on temptation got me thinking (again) about a problem I've wrestled with a long time. I'm a Christian minister and I've long thought about a tension between Jesus Christ's focus on intentions and sin in the internal life of man and the Christian conviction summed up in Hebrews 4:15 that Jesus was tempted in all the ways that we are but did not sin. I accept Jesus' injunction against (for instance) lusting after a person in one's heart and being angry at a person as sinful mental states or attitudes. I know from many of your past posts that you, too, are sympathetic with such a view. I believe that attitudes and intentions can be sinful as well as actions, and no doubt I get that from my Christianity.

 

But it seems to me that to be tempted is at least in part to (for instance) 'lust after a woman in your heart'. To be angry at someone is to be tempted to act against them. To be attracted to a woman and think about (say) cheating on my wife is to be tempted to cheat. But isn't that lusting after her in my heart? This creates a problem with the view that Jesus was sinless and indeed has often made me question that particular doctrine. How could Jesus be tempted 'in all ways' that we are and yet not sin, since it seems that to be tempted is to adopt, if only for a moment, the attitudes he labels as sinful? I've never come up with a satisfactory answer to this question, so I was wondering what you might think of it.

I had actually never thought of this.  The problem seems genuine and worth discussing for anyone who takes Christian orthodoxy seriously.  To throw the problem into sharp relief, I will formulate it as an inconsistent pentad:

 

1. Being fully human, Jesus was subject to every manner of temptation and was actually tempted.
2. To be tempted to do X is to harbor the thought of doing X.
3. Thoughts are morally evaluable: there are such things as evil (sinful) thoughts.
4.  If a person habitually harbors evil (sinful) thoughts,  then the person is sinful.
5. Being fully divine, Jesus was wholly sinless.

 

This quintet of propositions is logically inconsistent as is obvious from the fact that if  the first four are true, then the fifth must be false.

 

To solve the problem we must reject one of the pentad's limbs.  (1) and (5) are clear commitments of orthodox Christian theology and so cannot be abandoned by anyone who wishes to remain orthodox.  (3) has a NT basis, and so it cannot be abandoned either.  But (2) and (4) are rejectable.

 

As for (2), I can be tempted to do something like cheating my inexperienced customers without harboring the thought of doing so: I might just have the thought but then suppress it or dismiss it.

 

As for (4), even if  a married person dwells on the sinful thought of a trip to Las Vegas (where, we are told, "what happens there, stays there") to hook up (in the contemporary sexual sense) with an old flame, that by itself does not make the person a sinful person.  To be a sinful person one must habitually sin in thought, word, or deed.  Going on a drunk or two does not make one a drunkard; lying a few times does not make one a liar, etc. 

 

Note that (2) and (4) are necessary to derive a contradiction.  The problem can thus be solved by rejecting one or both of these propositions.  Rejecting (2) suffices to solve the problem.

 

In sum, Jesus' being tempted and his being perfectly sinless are consistent because, while Jesus had tempting thoughts, he did not entertain them with hospitality but rejected them.  "Get behind me, Satan, etc."

 

See also: Can Mere Thoughts be Morally Wrong? and Thoughts as Objects of Moral Evaluation: Refining the Thesis.