Why Aren't Humans Perfect?

I'm Caitlyn Schess, and every week on this show you will hear a kid's question about

God, theology, or the Bible, and then I'll talk with a scholar who will try to answer

it.

Some of the questions are silly, some are more serious, but all of them will help us

learn more about God.

And hopefully along the way, us grownups will learn from these kids and scholars how to

be more curious, ask more questions, and learn from each other.

I don't know.

That doesn't make any sense.

I really appreciate you being willing to be grilled by the kid question I have for you.

This is, uh, hopefully I can knock some rust off.

I used to teach middle schoolers and be an elementary school principal, so I should be

better at this than I will be.

We'll see.

We'll see.

This is Dr. Daniel Hill.

He's an assistant professor of Christian theology at Baylor's George W. Truitt Theological

Seminary.

He studies theological anthropology.

In other words, how we think theologically about what it means to be human.

He's the author of the book, Gathered on the Road to Zion, and a forthcoming book about

how 19th century abolitionists can help us think about a theology of public life.

And fun fact, he was one of my seminary professors.

All right.

So this is our kid question today.

How come no one is perfect and how come Jesus is perfect even though humans are not supposed

to be perfect?

A very good question.

A very smart question.

Let's start with the kind of assumption at the end there.

Humans were not supposed to be perfect.

What do you say about that?

Were humans supposed to be perfect or what does it mean to be perfect?

perfect?

Is being perfect like being 6'3 and a half and no gray hairs and a perfect hairline?

I don't know.

I really want to be 6'3, so that's why I picked that.

Or is like being perfect like a moral quality?

And are humans supposed to be perfect?

I think Jesus tells us that we are to be perfect as our Heavenly Father is perfect.

So there is a way that I think we can think about being perfect that isn't like there's

one human person like a Ken doll or a Barbie doll that we're all supposed to approximate

like physically or intellectually or some way.

But there is a way that we're all supposed to align ourselves to God.

And if we were to do that in the way that we're supposed to, if we were to love God

the way that we're supposed to love God and think about people the way God wants us to

think about people and love the people God loves, which is everyone and His creatures

as well in the ways that God wants us to, that would be a kind of perfection.

So I think part of what she's asking too is, and this is a question I have heard people

ask in the church a lot, which is basically, how can Jesus be human if He didn't sin?

And you might have something to say about what that underlying assumption is about what

we think it means to be human.

But I think that's part of what she's getting at is like, my experience of humans is that

humans sin.

So how can Jesus be what we say Jesus is fully human if Jesus doesn't sin?

And every human I've ever met.

And even those I haven't, I'm pretty sure sin in some way.

This is a bad analogy.

I tell my students I only give bad analogies.

But I was thinking of if I was talking to my nephew, who's seven, and I could hold his

attention for the three minutes of this analogy, what I would say, I would say, you have this

box of Legos in front of you.

And on the cover of the box of the Legos, there's a picture of what the Legos are supposed

to be when they're all put together properly.

The people at the Lego factory think that the pieces in there, if you put them in the

right order, if you take the, you know, follow the instructions or whatever, then you'll

get that picture that's on the box.

That picture, we would call it the archetype.

It's the thing the Legos are supposed to look like.

But now imagine that someone, someone sinister goes into the Lego factory where they are

cutting and there's a machine that's producing all the Legos and they start to like, they

take a blowtorch to it or they move some stuff around so that all the Legos are coming

out now and they're maybe a little bent.

Maybe they're melted a little bit.

You can't put them together to get that picture, no matter how much you try, no matter how

much you follow the instructions.

You can get closer to the picture, hopefully, you can get farther away from the picture

if you just leave them all in the box, but you can't get the picture.

And we wouldn't want to say, because they're on the box.

That's what the Legos, those are Legos put together in the right way.

We wouldn't want to say that it's impossible that Legos are all destroyed and bent and

melted.

That's just what it means to be a Lego pile.

But that all the Legos we've experienced, they are like that now.

And what we need then is someone to come in and undo the damage that the Legos have received

from this machine.

So maybe you, well, I don't know how you do it with plastic, but if they were metal, maybe

you remelt them down and reshape them in some way so that they can now approximate the picture

on the box.

I think that's a good one.

Thank you.

Related to all of that too, though, I think is this feeling that we have that isn't just

a sense of, okay, we know what it is to be human because we see people.

And then now you're saying, well, maybe we need something else than just the experiences

we have had with humans to know what it really means to be human.

We also have in scripture descriptions of Jesus understanding how we experience the

world because of the incarnation.

So I've also heard people say, similar to this child's question, well, how can scripture

say that Jesus can understand us or has experienced what we have experienced if Jesus hasn't sinned?

And that, it feels pretty central to my experience of the world is my own sin and other people's

sin.

And scripture also talks about Jesus being tempted, which many of us go, okay, I have

some experience with being tempted and not giving into it, but I also have a lot of experience

of being tempted and giving into it.

Can you help us think about what it means that Jesus was tempted and how that is similar,

but also different maybe than our experience of sin and temptation in the world?

I think that there's a long, a lot of ink has been spilled on the question of like,

how does Jesus's will and desires function, which is the, how can he be tempted?

How can he desire something that doesn't align?

And then that not be or considered or classified as a sin.

I think on the one hand, one of the ways the church has tried to think about this is we

think of human creatures as beings that have one will.

So I want things and I desire things.

And you would say, I desire and want according to the will that I have.

But when we talk about Jesus, we're not talking about just a human being.

We're talking about the God-man.

century as a shorthand for a much bigger theology of who Jesus is, fully human and fully God.

There's a fancier theological term for this, the hypostatic union.

The idea that Jesus is fully human and fully God, not a mix of the two, a little bit God

and a little bit human.

in relation to his divine will, and we have to kind of speak out of both sides of our

mouth at the same time because he's complicated.

So on the one hand, he does experience the damage of sin.

He dies, his friends die, his loved ones turn their back on him.

He hungers and thirst and all of that, we would say, that's a result of living in a

damaged world.

I think on the other hand, there are instances where you see things like in the Garden of

Gethsemane, where Jesus is praying out to the Father, the God-man Jesus, human and divine,

is praying out to God the Father and he says, you know, save me from this hour.

I do not want what is coming, but not my will, but yours be done.

And then you see, there's an instance where you see this kind of dual predication.

It just doesn't make sense.

Sorry, I was trying so hard and I almost got three minutes into this.

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it's Jesus as human.

It's the speaking out of both sides of your mouth kind of thing, where I have to talk

about Jesus twice to talk about him accurately.

So I have to talk about him as God, but also I have to talk about him as human.

So how can he say, God, not what I want, but what you want?

Doesn't that sound like his will is not aligned with God's?

So how do you make sense of that?

Well, you would say, well, according to his human nature, he does not desire death.

He does not desire the pain that accompanies death, but he does desire to honor the Father.

And so he's submitting his will, his desires to God in order to do what God wants.

of Jesus was a big fight in the early church.

Some people said that Jesus only had one will and that while his body was human, his will

was divine.

So he wasn't human in his soul or spirit, just in his body.

Later, some people would argue that Jesus only had one will or even one nature in order

to argue for the unity of their political and church power.

Why does any of this matter?

Well, for one thing, we should remember that our modern theological fights are nothing

compared to the conflicts of the past, when people were at war with each other over the

philosophically correct way to think about the will of Christ.

But secondly, this should teach us that this is what theology is.

Practical questions people have asked about how Jesus could be human and still sin.

When we answer these questions and see all the different implications of our answers

and then go back and revise and try again, we're doing theology the way Christians have

done it for the whole life of the church.

Similar to all of this, you said in your answer here, he is affected by brokenness in the

world, affected by sin in the world that he is not the agent of, that he's not doing.

Can you say more about how Jesus is affected by the brokenness of the world?

Because again, this goes back to I think part of the question is just, does Jesus' experience

of being human look something like mine or not?

And many of us, while we do have a lot of experience of sin that we are doing against

God, against others, against ourselves, we also have great experience of sin that others

do to us, or that just feels like it's not a particular sin that one person did against

another person.

It's the world is broken in various ways, like hunger and thirst, but also disease and

death.

And how does that affect how we understand who Jesus is?

That Jesus had that kind of experience of the brokenness of the world that we also have.

this plastic bubble.

He's not like ceramically wrapped or saran wrapped.

And if we, I think we can misread some of the gospels.

If we unintentionally like that, it's like Jesus is talking to the Syrophoenician woman

or the Canaanite woman.

And we can look at that as like, oh, this is just a part of Jesus teaching the disciples

something.

Can you explain this story?

Oh yeah, for sure.

So it's recorded in the Synoptics, the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke.

gospels together.

They're similar in their content, a lot of their wording, and the order or structure

of a lot of their stories.

The fourth gospel, John, is a little different from them.

possessed by a demon, can you do something about it?

And she's crying out to Jesus over and over again, over and over again.

And Jesus says, it's not suitable, it's not appropriate for me to take the food and give

it to dogs.

I'm paraphrasing a little bit, but he's the Messiah who's come for Israel, to save Israel.

And so it's not appropriate for him to give the blessings, I'm interpreting now, and to

give that to just about anybody.

And she says to him, but even the dogs eat the crumbs that come from the master's table.

And he points out her faith to the disciples and then delivers her daughter.

And there are just so many instances where Jesus is like, not even face to face, that's

too far removed.

Whatever is like a step closer than face to face with the suffering and the damage that

people have experienced.

There's the man in Gennesaret, so he crosses a lake, he finds this man who's bound, possessed

by multiple demons and has been kicked out of society.

That's a desperate situation.

Jesus goes into that desperate situation to bring redemption to this person, to deliver

this person from demon possession, even though he's the Messiah sent to Israel.

He's going to this Gentile population for one person.

So Jesus is not someone who's removed.

Even some of his personal relations, his friend dies.

He goes to the cross knowing that his mother will be, I was gonna say abandoned, but in

a real sense, abandoned by the child she loves.

And he has to watch that.

I mean, I can't even imagine, I'm sorry, I'm rambling, but I can't imagine suffering and

watching my mother watch me suffer.

That's like another level of heartbreak.

Jesus isn't removed from any of that.

He is actually consistently going into those situations.

And the example you just gave of the Seraphim woman, I have heard people use as kind of

evidence that, okay, Jesus is sinless in a certain sense, but like all humans is affected

not only in the sense that he experiences the reality of sin around him, he experiences

the reality that people die and that there's injustice, but he is shaped by that in ways

similar that we might talk about fallen humans being shaped by the society that they're in

or the culture they're in.

And we sometimes say it in a way as if to kind of decrease the guilt we want someone

to have of like, well, you were just sort of shaped by the society that you were in,

you couldn't really help it.

And so we can apply that to Jesus and say, oh, he was shaped by the biases of the society

that he lived in.

And so that's what's happening here.

What do you say to that?

I know it's not my favorite, as I would say to my fourth graders.

I don't like it because it seems like what I'm doing, that I'm getting things wrong in

terms of like, in math, they talk about, you just went from fourth grade to seventh grade.

There's an order of operations.

There's like a way that you do a math problem.

You start with the parentheses, you do the multiplication, and then you go to the addition

and subtraction.

But you have to do the parentheses first in order to get the equation to come out right.

And that's another bad analogy to say, I think we shouldn't, if Jesus is who he claims to

be and who we as Christians say he is, then we don't want to just kind of project our

own understandings of being human onto him.

We want him to be the one that kind of determines for us what it means to be human.

And so I think I would say that the cultural, Jesus being kind of over-determined by his

culture, is us just reading our experience back into him and not letting that story in

the gospels do what it's trying to do.

It's trying to unravel some of our commitment, some of the ways we think about Jesus, the

way we think about salvation, the way we think about who Jesus is.

Who's in and who's out of the kingdom.

Another way we do this, he said somewhat calamitously, is like all the pictures of Jesus, he has

perfect teeth and he had like a Bowflex machine in the first century because he's got six

pack abs and long wavy hair.

We just have some idea of beauty that we're just throwing up and saying, well, this is

what Jesus must have looked like.

He might've had straight teeth, but it would have been odd in the first century.

we understand sin to be and how sin works to answer this question, but also our understanding

of goodness and what makes a good human.

And so if what we're partially saying is that Jesus ultimately tells us what it means to

be human, what do we learn from Jesus that we might not otherwise learn about what it

means to be human?

Because again, I think going back to this initial kid's question, it returns to, well,

my experience of humans is this kind of experience.

This is how I have learned what humans are.

And we would say it's appropriate for a human in development to learn that humans sin and

that they sin.

But also this goes back to, we need revelation from God to tell us things.

There are things we can learn from our experience, and then there's things we can't learn.

And one of those things it seems like is there are things about what it means to be human

that we don't learn without the revelation of Jesus Christ, the incarnation.

So what do we learn from that?

And are there limits on things we should not be learning from?

Are there ways in which we might go, oh, well, Jesus flips over tables in the temple.

So that's part of what it means to be human.

And I should do some of that too.

How do we know what we're learning in especially the gospel's description of Jesus that we

should take as a lesson for us as we want to discover, not just who Jesus is, but what

that means for how we think about what it means to be truly human.

The complication is we can turn Jesus into a cipher, like a proxy for our own desires

and our own values.

And that's generally a bad thing to do, generally being me underselling it quite a bit.

So what are some things we learn?

I think one thing we learn is that there's this kind of fullness of life that is found

in relation in loving God and loving the other, the other being not just the neighbors around

you, but the marginalized or the ostracized or the politically kind of oppressed in some

sense, that there's this fullness of life, that that's who we were made to be.

We were made to be in these kind of right relationships of service to God and service

to one another.

And that's what real life is, is operating rightly on those two horizons.

I think another thing we learn from looking at Jesus and Jesus' life is that we are

creatures who need.

We're dependent.

Jesus at some point is nursing and is being carried around.

The maker of heaven and earth is being carried down to Egypt and back and needs his disciples,

even, I mean, they kind of can sometimes be like, why would he pick these people?

He could obviously have found better folks, but he needs them and he chooses to need them

and doesn't run away from his need of them.

So I think that's another thing we learn from Jesus.

I think another thing we learned is that sin is not our sin and my sin is not like,

we would use the technical language of being essential.

It doesn't have to be a part of me for me to be me.

And the same thing with the human creature, that it doesn't have to be a part of the

human in order for the human to still be human.

And if we could remove that, if we could, then I'm still me, even if you take away

some of my sin.

One other thing, and there's more we could go on and on.

One other thing is that there is a need for us to be radically changed, to go back to

my Lego analogy.

We need to be unmelted and unbent.

And it's this qualitative change that I would be kind of, not change from being human to

being an angel or a sphere or an ivy branch, but that my humanity needs to be healed in

a real sense.

And that until that happens, and it happens in the resurrection life, that until that

happens that I'm not quite right until that day, that I'm longing and hoping and waiting

for those things.

I think one of the things you just said that is so important that we've kind of already

talked about, but is underlying this question that was asked, is that we don't have physical

embodied experience with other humans of perfect humans.

So we can easily slip into thinking, using the language you just used, that sin is essential

to what it means to be human.

Just to emphasize what you said, that it's not, that it's not essential to be human that

we have sin.

So that's one thing that we would not know without Jesus on some level, we don't have

experience of that.

Yeah.

So thank you for this.

Thank you for these answers.

Is there anything when it comes to any of these questions that has not been said that

you think is important?

Especially if this child was sitting in front of you going, I'm not quite sure I understand

yet.

Is there anything you would add?

One thing I would, I'm remiss that I didn't say this when you asked me some things we

learned from Jesus, is that bodies are good and that they are also the cause of pain.

But they're good, that God loves bodies and material creatures so much that he sends his

son to add that to his life, to be united with humans in their bodies and to heal humans

in their bodies and to resurrect humans in their bodies.

Beth Felker-Jones, a theologian at Northern Seminary, she talks about how there's also

this sense though that I can mostly be hurt because I'm embodied.

And you see that also in Jesus.

Like I can't be stabbed if I'm just a spirit floating around.

So I would want this kid to know, hey, your body is a good thing, but it's also something

God wants to take so that it can't be harmed anymore.

Another good example of experience we do not have of what it would be to be truly human

is a body that is good, but is not the source of much pain in my life.

Thank you, Dr. Hill, for this.

Really appreciate it.

And thank you for taking seriously the question that this kid asked.

We're nothing but rotten little worms, some preachers have said.

What Dr. Hill shared today is a good reminder that we don't learn what it means to be human

just from ourselves or the sinfulness of the world around us, but from the incarnation of Christ,

who lived a perfect life, a human life, the most fully human life that has ever been lived.

While we only have experience with human life under the conditions of sin,

there is more to the story than sin.

When we sin and then say, oh, I'm only human,

we're deeply confused about what it means to be human.

Sin doesn't make us more human, it makes us less human.

And the good news of the gospel is that while we experience great sin and brokenness now,

it is not how we were created.

The good news of the gospel is that we will be freed from sin to be truly human.

Curiously, Caitlyn is a production of Holy Post Media, produced by Mike Strelow,

editing by Seth Corvette, theme song by Phil Vischer.

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