Sunday, August 14, 2022

John Laing (Trinitarian): Jesus had the Libertarian Freedom to Choose to Sin

  

Most debates over peccability are couched in terms of whether he was able to sin but did not, was able to not-sin and did not, or not able to sin and therefore could not. Certainly, he was able to not-sin and did not, which is clear from Scripture (Isa 53:9; 2 Cor 5:21; Heb 4:15; 1 Pet 2:22; 1 John 3:5). What is in question is the Son’s ability to sin, not his ability to avoid sinning, for that is clearly established in Scripture. There are some good reasons to think that Jesus had libertarian freedom with respect to sinning. The correlation the apostle Paul makes between Adam and Christ seems to suggest that he could, for it is grounded in the similarity of situations and callings, but dissimilarity in outcome. That is, if the Son could not have done otherwise and therefore had to be obedient, then the contrast between his success and Adam’s failure seems vacuous. Similarly, Jesus’s perfect fulfillment of the Law and his genuine temptation seems diminished if he could not have chosen to disobey. Still, his deity mitigates against the suggestion that he really could have sinned, and there is no necessary connection between temptation and ability to act (even if one is implied or suggested). At the end of the day, an important distinction needs to be made: to say that he could sin is not the same as to say that he would or even might. May fear that it is a claim that Jesus really might have sinned or spurned the will of the Father, but that is another matter. (John Laing, “Determinism and Human Freedom,” in Calvinism: A Biblical and Theological Critique, ed. David L. Allen and Steve M. Lemke [Nashville, Tenn.: B&H Academic, 2022], 418 n. 57)