Welcome to Curiously Caitlin, a podcast where we try to make theology make sense.

I'm Caitlin shess, and every week on.

This show you will hear a kids 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 grown ups 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.

Curiously, Kate, Doctor Hill, thank you for joining me today. I really appreciate you being willing to be grilled by the kid question I have for you.

I'm excited about it. 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.

Good. We'll see. We'll see.

This is doctor 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 isn't 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?

Yeah, that's the complicated part of that question, perhaps, is what does it mean to be perfect? Is being perfect like being six three and a half and no gray hairs in the perfect hairline? I don't know. I really want to be six three, so that's why I picked that. Or is being perfect 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 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 she's onto something here. Humans supposed to be perfect. 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?

Yeah. 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 COVID of the box of the Legos, there's a picture of what the Legos are supposed to be when they were all put together properly. The people at the Lego factory think that the piece is 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's 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. 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 really like that analogy. 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 as 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 in to it, but I also have a lot of experience of being tempted and giving in to 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?

Yeah, 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.

When Doctor Hill says the God man, he's using a phrase christians have used since the third 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.

And so we can talk about things in relation to his human will, and we can talk about things 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 thirsts 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. He says, save me from this hour. I do not want what is coming, but not my will, but yours be done. And then there's an instance where you see this kind of dual predication.

Oh, you're gonna have to explain that.

That's. Yeah, so that I'm stalking.

Word alert. Dual predication.

It just doesn't make sense.

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

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You talk about some things in respect to Jesus as divine, and you talk about some things as 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 say, oh, 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.

What doctor Hill isn't saying here is that this question of how to talk about the will 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 worlds 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's 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.

I can't remember the lady's name, but she says, jesus does not exist in the world in this plastic bubble. He's not like ceramically wrapped or Saran wrapped. And if we, I think we can read, 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, but it's also.

Can you explain this story?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

So it's recorded in the synoptic gospel. So Matthew, Mark, Luke.

Doctor Hill calls Matthew, Mark and Luke the synoptics. Because scholars group these three 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.

And Jesus is with the disciples. And this lady comes up to him and she says, my daughter's possessed by 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, you know, it's not suitable. It's not appropriate for me to take the, 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 can set. 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, face to face, 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, said to Israel, he's going to this gentile population for one person. So Jesus is not someone who's, like, removed even some of his personal relations. His friend dies, goes to the cross, knowing that his mother will be, I was gonna say it, 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 would be. That's, like, another level of heartbreak. Jesus isn't removed from any of that. He is actually consistently going into those situations.

Yeah. And the example you just gave of the seraphoenician 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?

Yeah, I don't love it. 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, I'm getting things wrong in terms of. In math, they talk about just went from fourth grade to 7th grade. There's an order of operations. There's 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 overdetermined 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, some of our commitment, some of the ways we think about Jesus, the way we think about salvation, the way we think about who's in and who's out of the kingdom. Another way we do this, he said, somewhat, uh, calamitously, is like all the pictures of Jesus. He has perfect teeth and, uh, you know, he's, he had like a bowflex machine in the first century. And because he got six pack abs and, you know, 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 have had straight teeth, but he would have been odd in the first century.

It sounds like, too, what you're saying is not only that we have to think through what 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 does. 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.

Yeah, that's the rub. 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're made to be in these kind of right relationships of service to God, in service to one another. And that's what real life is, is operating rightly on those two horizons. I think another thing we learned from looking at Jesus in 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 forth. I mean, they kind of can sometimes, 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. Like, 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 changed from being human to being an angel or a sphere or ivy branch, but that my humanity needs to be healed in a.

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.

Yeah. 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. 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?

Yeah, 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 Falker Jones, a theologian at Northern Seminary. She talks about how there's also this sense, though, that I can only. I can mostly be hurt because I'm embodied. And you see that also in Jesus. Like, I can't be, you know, 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.

Yeah. 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.

Yeah.

Thank you, doctor Hill, for this. Really appreciate it. And thank you for taking seriously the question that this kid asked.

Yeah, I'm glad they asked it.

Some of us grew up being told that what was fundamentally true about us was our sinfulness. We're nothing but rotten little worms. Some preachers have said what Doctor 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, Caitlin is a production of holy post media, produced by Mike Strelo, editing by Seth Gorvette, theme song by Phil Vischer. Be sure to follow us on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, and leave a review so more people can discover thoughtful christian commentary, plus cute kids and never any butt news.