Addressing Rampant Confusion about Jesus’s Temptations
Hebrews 4:15 is not a license for a winsome view of human licentiousness.
Due to confusion about versions, we loaded the incorrect edit. The correct version is now in place. Our apologies.
Introduction
There are few passages in the Bible as comforting as Hebrews 4:14-16:
“Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has ascended into heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin. Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need” (italics mine)
Our Lutheran Confessions explicitly connect this kind of comfort with the indwelling of the divine-human Christ:
“Hence we consider it a pernicious error to deprive Christ according to his humanity of [the divine] majesty. To do so robs Christians of their highest comfort, afforded them in the cited promises of the presence and indwelling of their head, king, and high priest, who has promised that not only his unveiled deity, which to us poor sinners is like a consuming fire on dry stubble, will be with them, but that he, he, the man who has spoken with them, who has tasted every tribulation in his assumed human nature, and who can therefore sympathize with us as with men and his brethren, he wills to be with us in all our troubles also according to that nature by which he is our brother and we are flesh of his flesh” (Formula of Concord, SD VIII, 87, bold and italics mine).
The connection with Hebrews 4:14-16 here could not be more clear. No Christian can doubt that this kind of teaching is deeply connected with the wondrous Gospel of God’s amazing grace!
That said, when it comes to the matter of the temptations that Jesus Christ experienced, Scripture – as well as patristic and Lutheran tradition – demand we distinguish between intrinsically good natural desires versus desires that are unnatural and parasitic. Recent attempts to blur this distinction represent both anthropological and Christological errors with the potential for serious pastoral consequences. We absolutely need to get this right.
What in the World are “Conservative” Lutherans Today Thinking about Hebrews 4:15?
Three years ago, in response to ideas I was encountering online from my fellow confessional Lutherans, I felt compelled to do a deeper dive on Hebrews 4:15. At the time I wrote the following in a blog post after researching the issue:
“[I] want to emphasize that it is immensely important to teach that Christ was tempted in every way that we are, yet without sin (Heb. 4:15)...[and I believe that] insofar as any temptation to sin arises partly out of a desire for real affection or love we would simply be fools to say that God in Christ is unable or unwilling to sympathize with our weak – and yes, evil – fallen human nature.”
Why did I feel compelled to write the italicized words there? It has to do with the fact that some desires, being in line with God’s purposes evident in creation, are intrinsically good even if they are infected with sin. Other desires, being out of line with God’s purposes evident in creation, are intrinsically evil and blameworthy (Rom. 1:27). Nevertheless, in seeking love, affection, and meaning, severely damaged men and women will often look to even the worst kinds of sins for [false] comfort.
More specifically, what prompted me to delve into such matters three years ago – and again recently – is that some prominent LCMS pastors and laypeople are now saying things like the following:
Desires for homosexual activity, bestiality and pedophilia are not necessarily sinful in themselves.
We should necessarily assert that Jesus Christ himself experienced desires like these for our salvation (again, per Heb. 4:15!).
This nevertheless does not mean that Jesus Christ sinned.
As shocking as this may sound to some of us, there are also prominent and influential voices in the LCMS saying that in certain appropriate contexts it should perhaps be acceptable to posit Jesus may have experienced such desires.1 And I have in fact learned that there are evidently a good number of pastors who also think along these lines! As I argued in a recent blog post, there seems to be a kind of extreme anti-Christian “Scorsesiazation” that has taken place among us Christians in our day and age.
As I pointed out in that post:
“Now, there is no doubt that among Christians, a variety of opinions can be held on a variety of issues….
The fact of the matter [though] is that all of us will agree that there are some theological questions that simply should not be debated. We don’t debate about whether or not Jesus is God, we condemn the Arians. We don’t just “agree to disagree” whether or not women should be pastors, we simply say what Paul says in 1st Timothy 2, that a woman is to remain silent and not have authority over a man.
Should not the same be true for a question like this? The debates that have occurred in the church about just how Jesus Christ was tempted, the nature of his temptations, have never gone in the frightening direction some men today seem so oddly comfortable with!...”
When I posted about this topic on Facebook a couple months ago, Pastor Eric Phillips also made a comment that is worth highlighting here and carefully meditating on:
“In order to understand what it means that ‘Christ was tempted,’ we need to read the Gospel accounts of His temptation by Satan. Even in the case of the first temptation (to turn stones into bread), Jesus was not ‘tempted’ in the internal sense we know, where we really want to give in, even if we end up standing firm by an act of the will. He was tempted strictly in the sense that Satan offered Him things that appeal to natural human appetites and ambitions.
Homosexuality, pedophilia, and bestiality are not natural, but perversions. There are no good ends for such desires. Thus an unfallen man (e.g. Jesus, or Adam in his original innocence) could have no such desires. Most fallen human beings have no such desires” (italics his).
This is the way. I submit our pastors and teachers need to tackle this matter sooner rather than later, and to do so with extreme vigor! Let’s dive in a bit deeper.
There are Good Ends for Some but Not All Desires
Above, I mentioned “desires that are unnatural and parasitic” and Dr. Phillips speaks of perverted desires for which there are “no good ends”. Still, let’s not delve into that just yet.
Why? As I noted in my published piece, “The End of Temptation in God’s Good Creation”:
“Sometimes, the example of Canadian Mounties knowing the genuine article of money so well that they are immediately able to recognize counterfeits is used in reference to Christians knowing the right doctrine and immediately being able to recognize heresy. This is a good illustration, and can also be extended to the Christian knowing what is good. When the Christian increasingly comes to love what is good, true, and beautiful, he will all the more easily be able to recognize, in whatever context, those things that are not of God – and be better prepared to resist temptation.”
So, let’s focus on what intrinsically good natural desires are and where they come from.
God created each one of us with an end, a purpose, in mind (see Luke 7:30, Rom. 1:27, 2 Pet 3:9, Eph 2:10, 1 Thess 4:3). For example, men do the kinds of things men were created to do (provide, protect, lead), and women do the kinds of things they were created to do (help, give life, beautify and glorify). In the beginning, it was given man to name the animals (2:19) and to work in and care for the Garden of Eden (Gen. 2:15). Feeling no shame and being at complete peace together (2:25), Adam and Eve were given the task to fill the earth and subdue it (Gen. 1:28)!
Ever since the subsequent fall into sin, our desires to do these things have been infected with sin (a desire for excess, a desire to do good things in the wrong context, selfish motivations, ignoring God, etc). Christians especially know that we sometimes do the right things largely for the wrong reasons or motivations, but that Christ’s blood also covers the sinful impulses that remain in the believer’s objectively good actions, putting our consciences at rest. Why is this? It is because If we are used according to our purpose, it is indeed very satisfying!
Christians are all meant to grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and this in part means learning to better understand our purpose in God’s creation. This was true for Adam and Eve, and it was true even for Jesus Christ according to his human nature. As my pastor once beautifully put it, there is nothing wrong with the sapling of an apple tree, but as that tree grows and matures it does indeed become better, greater, and more useful!
This means that learning to use and better use all the gifts God gives in love according to their design and nature is the goal to which we all have been called. Contrary to all of the currents of our modern world, this is actually what it means to love. Love is making sacrifices for others in this particular way! So as we really come to better understand God’s creation in Christ, we grow in love!: we will have affection for, and desire to treat rightly all those concrete things and gifts that God has given us to rightly know! Naturally speaking, marriage and all that it entails exemplifies this.
And how can we make sure that we do not miss God’s goal, His end, for us? We look to Jesus Christ, who, according to his human nature, grew in the grace and favor of God and men (Luke 2:52)! He lived as a man fully alive and today invites his followers to the same, indeed, not just to survive, but thrive, living abundantly (John 10:10)! Men are on a mission, and our mission (Gen. 1:28, Eph. 1:10, 1 Cor. 10:11), first and foremost, is to mirror that of our Lord Jesus’s, with His own devotion to His Father.
As we will see below, all of this goes hand in hand with not only what our Lutheran fathers taught but also the fathers in whose footsteps they followed.
Lutherans Can Also Learn from the Early Lutherans and Earlier Church Fathers
When Pastor Eric Phillips says that an “unfallen man” like Jesus or Adam in his original innocence could have no perverted desires, what does he mean? I’ve attempted to explain this in a sermon and others today have as well, but it is important to understand that all of this is grounded in the wisdom of great Lutheran teachers like Martin Luther and Martin Chemnitz.
And these men in turn knew the great wisdom that could be gathered from the early church fathers. We are talking about good Christian men like Athanasius, Cyril of Alexandria, and Augustine, men heavily quoted in the Lutheran Book of Concord and its “Catalog of Testimonies”.
St. John of Damascus was also one of these men the early Lutherans looked to, particularly for his Christology. In his eighth century classic The Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, he basically summarizes as follows: Christ assumed all the blameless passions – hunger, thirst, weariness, the shrinking from death – but not the blameworthy ones. These are in fact parasitic developments that arise from misuse of the natural capacities. When it comes to Christ’s temptations, this – along with the fact that there was no history of prior consent to evil – means the devil’s suggestions had nothing interior in the person of Jesus Christ to “hook unto.”
Let’s look at this kind of thinking in more detail, in some of the other early church fathers. St. Mark the Ascetic, for example, taught that sin begins with a simple movement of self-will, a basic turning of attention from God toward self. Everything else is just elaboration, and the fundamental temptation is always the same and reduces to the same basic structure. Is this not exactly right?: Will we trust God, His word, to direct and shape us? Or will we, preferring our will, try to do that to it?
Other saints offer additional guidance. St. Maximus the Confessor, for example, taught that Christ possessed the full natural human will (the “thelemata physika”), which means that he experienced hunger, fatigue, the instinct toward self-preservation, the natural desire for comfort and life, etc. These also are a part of good human nature, even apart from the fall. He said that, unlike us, Christ did not possess a “gnomic will” (”gnome”), that is a wavering and unsure disposition (what the book of James calls “double-mindedness”). Such a gnomic will only develops in fallen men through repeated bad choices in the face of temptation.
In general, many early church fathers distinguished between prosbole (προσβολή) – the initial suggestion or assault of a temptation – and synkatathesis (συγκατάθεσις) – the consent of the will to that suggestion. One should stop temptation – a necessary part of the spiritual life, intended to strengthen the believer – and master one’s desires before being mastered by them! It is important to note that even as ideas like “prosbole” and “synkatathesis” might be extra-biblical categories, such distinctions have a long pedigree in the church, and Luther, when discussing temptation, also distinguishes in a similar fashion in the Large Catechism. So he agrees with men like St. Mark the Ascetic who said men should not be blamed for the Satanic assault but only for the consent!
Getting into Christian anthropology and hamartiology (the theological treatment of the doctrine of sin) here, a saint like Augustine would emphasize that the process of a “gnomic will” forming could really apply most fully only to the original man, Adam, and that in fallen humans – i.e. his progeny who are one with him – this inevitably happens in all sinners to various degrees, as apart from God’s grace in Christ we go from bad (original sin, that is culpable ignorance and concupiscence) to worse!
Classic Christology Means Jesus Christ Had no Evil Passions!
Regarding the process discussed above, an article sent to me by an acquaintance said:
“The gnomic will is essentially the accumulated sediment of prior consents. Each time a person consents to a small temptation, the interior landscape shifts. New categories of temptation become possible that weren’t before – not because the external suggestion is new, but because the interior terrain has been reshaped to receive it. A person who has never consented to vanity simply does not have the interior architecture for the elaborate temptations that afflict the vain person.”
So what does all of this have to do with our Lord Jesus Christ? If one reads men like Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Steve Paulson, the answer is evidently something. As a friend put it dealing with the particular problem explored in this article: “It seems like the desire of saying that Jesus experienced perverted temptations is to apply comfort to those who are experiencing such perverted temptations. This desire is certainly commendable.” Commendable, perhaps, but ultimately disastrous (as my friend would agree).
The true answer, of course, is that this kind of process had nothing to do with Jesus Christ because he – perfectly attuned to His Father’s will at the deepest levels possible – immediately nipped even the most fundamental and general of temptations in the bud! On the other hand, as fallen men who continue to fall, who resist God’s grace, we can develop a disturbingly complex “phenomenology of fallen human temptation”, a horrifyingly unnatural labyrinth constructed from the accumulated wreckage of our fallenness and evil choices.
In other words, again, it is not a feature of good human nature but a fallen bug that we might:
Have a fierce internal dialogue
Consider evil suggestions, turn them over in our minds
Develop very elaborate rationalizations, and…
Eventually, either consent or resist (most likely consent at this point!).
Jesus, on the other hand, did not have this precisely because such an experience does not belong to the humanity he assumed – the humanity of Adam before the fall, not after! For Lutherans, this should be Christology 101:
“..the Son of God has assumed this human nature, however, without sin, and therefore not a foreign, but our own flesh, into the unity of His person, and according to it is become our true Brother… He took on Him the seed of Abraham. Wherefore in all things it behooved Him to be made like unto His brethren, yet without sin” (Formula of Concord, Ep. 1).
All of the things he learned as a boy and a man would only serve to reinforce this basic self-knowledge.
So, if one thinks that the process of Jesus’s being tempted was also internal – as some orthodox fathers have indeed argued (this has always been seen as permissible!) – would it be because he really considered doing the devil’s suggestions, “consented” to these in any way? No. Still, could he have been “curious”? This is certainly within the bounds of possibility. Perhaps he was particularly interested in identifying just how the most subtle of Satan’s temptations were wrong. There are, after all, things that the God-Man either chose not to know, or, again, to learn, as human nature does.
Didn’t any of Satan’s temptations “hit home” though? We certainly need not think that they didn’t in some very real way! After all, again, Jesus truly experienced the pull of hunger in the desert, the natural human desire not to suffer, and the real attractiveness, beauty, of earthly goods and glory. Nevertheless, even if all of Satan’s temptations may have both knocked on the door and arrived in one sense (consent given in this sense!) they also were recognized for what they were and were not – and were therefore decisively dealt with by a will perfectly oriented toward the Father.
These kinds of rich teachings, all there for our encouragement and hope (Rom. 15:4), are our heritage as well! Good Lutheran teachers have always simply been echoing the consensus of church history on this topic, and on Hebrews 4:15!
In Conclusion
The Church of God, as it faithfully delivers the faith contained in the Holy Scriptures, is indeed the living Pillar of Truth on earth! (I Tim. 3:15) So, we can definitely sleep better knowing that thoughtful and wise Lutheran shepherds like Pastor Eric Phillips and others are passing on the baton!
For they are seeking to honor and love Jesus Christ as he has been revealed to us in God’s word, passed on throughout the church’s history! Today, it does us all well to realize that all those strong men never discussed our contemporary concerns because they never got to the unfortunate point where they would bother to give such concerns the time of day – much less imagine them in the first place! Why not? Because, they were, above all, rooted in the truths about God’s purposes revealed in creation and in the Holy Scriptures which sharpen such knowledge!
Which of course means, above all, knowing our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ as the awesome God-Man who is both compassionate and powerful enough (knowledgeable enough!) to save us from sin, death, and the devil!
FIN
Publisher's note: In simple terms, the 'in every respect' of Heb. 4:15 is categorical, not cumulative. It is comprehensive in kind, not exhaustive in instance. [AdC News]
This sentence has been updated to reflect Lyman’s Stone’s comment about his tweet, which was posted after it became known on social media that Pastor Chris Rosebrough had promoted a website containing an article (https://www.operation-valkyrie.group/operation-valkyrie-blog/fisking-a-turnip-part-3-never-go-full-antichrist) arguing the three points mentioned above. Screenshots with the relevant material can be seen here
Excellent article that really exposes how original sin has and continues to afflict us in the many temptations we face every day. Thank you to the author.
Always nice to hear and read good things about my father. Good article (not just because of the glowing review of my dad).