Discussing the debate about whether Jesus, while never having sinned (Heb 4:15), had a fallen human nature, Marc Cortez wrote:
If we receive corrupt human natures (fallenness) as a consequence of guilt (sinfulness), then there does not seem to be any way of saying that the incarnate Son had the former without concluding that he also had the latter. So both fallen options either need to reject the fallenness view or find some way of breaking the link between fallenness view or find some way of breaking the link between fallenness and sinfulness. According to Crisp, “This is the issue upon which the fallenness view stands or falls.”
Before we deal with that issue directly, though, it might help to clarify the relationship between a person and a nature with respect to things like fallenness and sinfulness. According to McFarland, sinfulness is a moral category that involves agency, responsibility, and guilt, things we must associate with persons because only persons can be moral agents. But natures are not the kinds of things that engage actions for which they can be held responsible. Instead, we associate agency and morality to the person, the who that is responsible for every intentional action, rather than the nature, the what that comprises the basis of the action. Consequently, it would make no sense to describe a nature as “sinful” with all of the corresponding implications of responsibility and blameworthiness. Instead, these properly belong to the person. “Fallen,” on the other hand, is a category that describes a situation in which a nature has become damaged or disfigured in some way. Such defects may well come as a consequence of sin, yet they do not become blameworthy in and of themselves. He thus concludes, “Quite simply, fallenness is a property of nature and sin of hypostasis (or person).”
This terminological distinction helps us see that the real issue: whether we can find a coherent way of affirming that Jesus’s nature was fallen without the corresponding implication that he must be a sinful person (the guilt problem). And even if this were a coherent position, would Jesus need to be condemned for his corrupt nature regardless of whether he had any personal guilt (the corruption problem)? Let’s take the guilt problem first. On many accounts of original sin, all humans receive a corrupt nature as a punishment for participating in the guilt of Adam’s sin. If his is the case, then even if there is a conceptual distinction between fallenness and sinfulness, the former entails the latter. One way of breaking the link would simply be to deny this view of original sin. For example, many theologians maintain instead that humans receive corruption but not guilt from Adam. If this is the case, then corruption should be viewed more as a consequence of the fall rather than a punishment for personal guilt . . . Despite receiving this corrupt nature however, they do not actually participate in the guilt of their parents any more than my children participate in my guilt even though they routinely experience the consequences of my broken parenting. They only become guilty when they participate culpably in their sinful condition. On this story, Jesus could have a corrupt nature fallenness) without personal guilt (sinfulness) as long as he never participates culpably in that sinful condition. Although sinfulness inevitably results from fallenness for all other humans, Jesus alone resists his fallen condition and lives a life of perfect faithfulness before God. (Marc Cortez, Resourcing Theological Anthropology: A Constructive Account of Humanity in the Light of Christ [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2017], 153-54, italics in original, bold added for emphasis)
In many respects, allowing Jesus to have our nature, including the ability to sin (while he never did sin) allows for one to hold to the true, full humanity of Jesus. LDS Christology and Anthropology allows for a greater consistency on this matter, in comparison to Trinitarian theologies, on other points, too, including our affirmation personal pre-existence is universal and normative of humanity. For a fuller discussion, see:
