Are Perfect People Possible?

We've heard - "Nobody's perfect" so many times, that we finally begin to believe it. We believe that it's impossible for people to be perfect. And when someone says - "you're just perfect!" like in this photo, we think they're just blowing smoke.

But what did Christ teach us? "Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect" (Matthew 5:48). How should we understand this command of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God? Some translations render the word "perfect" as "mature" in other New Testament texts, but that doesn't make sense here: our heavenly Father isn't merely mature, He's perfect. And that is what we're supposed to strive for, by God's grace. Humanly speaking, without Divine help, perfection is impossible, and perfectionism - striving for perfection by our own efforts - can cause serious psychological problems. But with the Holy Spirit working in us and sanctifying us, making us holy, perfection is possible.

Romans 5:12 is the key verse: "Therefore, as sin entered into the world through one man, and death through sin; and so death passed to all men, in that all sinned." When St. Jerome translated the original Greek New Testament into the Latin Vulgate, this verse became: "Wherefore as by one man sin entered into this world and by sin death: and so death passed upon all men, in whom all have sinned" (1899 Douay-Rhiems Catholic Bible). Note "in whom" (masculine pronoun) vs. the Greek - "in that" (neuter pronoun).

The neuter pronoun is just one letter in Greek, but either Jerome's knowledge of Greek wasn't that great, or he held a prior belief that it should refer to Adam, but in any case, he rendered it as "him," and This One Letter has changed the West's whole theological system! Based mainly on this verse in the Latin Vulgate, St. Augustine developed his doctrine of original sin and guilt passing on from Adam to all men. And even though most modern Bible translations including the modern Catholic Bible have corrected this translation error, the Western doctrine of original sin has remained.

Are the universe and mankind essentially good, or inherently evil? This is the so-called liberal vs. conservative argument, but there are actually two sides to the conservative viewpoint. What are they?

Origen, a second-century Bible scholar, wrote: "when he [St. Paul] speaks about sin, because of which death has passed to all men, he attributes the line of human descent, which has succumbed to this death because of sin. The apostle stated most categorically that the death of sin has passed to all men because all have sinned." St. John Chrysostom wrote in the fourth century: "Paul inquires as to how death came into the world and why it prevailed. It came in and prevailed through the sin of one man and continued because all have sinned. Thus once Adam fell, even those who had not eaten of the tree became mortal because of him." But St. Augustine wrote in the fifth century: "Everyone, even little children, have broken God's covenant, not indeed in virtue of any personal action but in virtue of mankind's common origin in that single ancestor in whom all have sinned."

St. Augustine wrote in Latin that without God's grace we are "posse pecare et non posse non pecare" (able to sin and not able not to sin). Only after receiving God's grace to we become in this life "posse pecare et posse non pecare" (able to sin and able to not sin), and in heaven "non posse pecare" (not able to sin). Both Martin Luther and John Calvin refined this doctrine further, into the idea of the predestined salvation of the elect, the predestined damnation of the un-elect, and total depravity - unregenerate mankind is totally depraved and incapable of not sinning, unable to do anything good; thus much of Protestantism has inherited this doctrine of total depravity from Roman Catholicism. You can read more about total depravity here.

But this doctrine of total depravity, the idea that for unregenerate mankind it is totally impossible to do anything that is purely good, that every action is tainted by sin, is not held by Eastern Christianity. Orthodoxy teaches that Adam and Eve's original sin has weakened human nature so that we all tend to sin, and are subject to death because of original sin, but not that we are guilty of Adam's sin and that we are incapable of doing anything good without God's saving grace. The idea that God chose some people to be eternally damned to hell fire is probably the greatest cause of atheism in the West: how could such a god exist?

Moral responsibility and guilt can only exist if one is capable of making a free, conscious choice to do evil. The prophet Ezekiel (ch. 18) wrote that children are not to be condemned for the guilt of their fathers. But if most of mankind is predestined to damnation because of Adam's sin, they have no moral responsibility or guilt because they had no choice, they were predestined before all eternity to go to hell. So this doctrine of our inheriting Adam's sin guilt falls apart.

We very likely know good people who do good works out of the goodness of their hearts. We are all created in God's image, whether we are Christians or Jews or Muslims or Buddhists or Hindus or atheists. And all of us, even atheists, are capable of doing good. Can a person go a minute or an hour or a day without committing any sin? If so, can that person go 48 hours, or 72, or 96 hours without committing any sin? Here's more on Christian perfection.

Even though the image of God in us is distorted, we should know right from wrong and are capable of choosing what is right. This is why Orthodoxy teaches that Mary committed no personal sins: she was capable of doing what is right, and with God's help ("Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you" Luke 1:28) she consistently chose the good. Thus the Eastern Church's teaching has no need for the Roman Catholic doctrine of her immaculate conception because she did not inherit Adam's sin and guilt. But because her human nature was weakened by sin and subject to death, she needed a Savior ("God my Savior" - Luke 1:47).

The Eastern Church teaches synergy, that we are capable of doing good, and are co-laborers together with God: He works in us, but we must work with Him. We are saved by grace unto good works (Eph. 2:9-10). This is not the heresy of Pelagianism, that we are capable by our good works alone to save ourselves. Salvation is the process of being personally transformed into the image and likeness of God, which is called theosis or deification, "partakers of the divine nature" (2 Pet. 1:4). A segment of Protestantism also emphasizes mankind's free will to choose: this is called Arminianism. You can read more about it here: Semipelagianism and Arminianism.

The teaching of predestination, based largely on Rom. 5:12, says that because God knows from all eternity who will be saved, Christ's atonement is limited to only the elect. But God loves all mankind, and "is not willing that any should perish" (2 Pet. 3:9). "He [Christ] died for all" (2 Cor. 5:15) Thus we understand that Christ's atonement on the Cross is for all mankind: "If anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous. And he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the whole world" (2 John 2:1b-2). This is the doctrine of Unlimited Atonement.

St, Peter wrote that we should not conform to our former lusts, "but just as he who called you is holy, you yourselves also be holy in all of your behavior" (1 Pet. 1:15). And St. Paul wrote: "Follow after peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man will see the Lord" (Hebrews 12:14). When we consider these Scripture texts together with our first quotation, "Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect" (Matthew 5:48), we see that perfection or holiness is not only possible, it is what God expects of every Christian.

(Linked to www.Hosken-News.info of 12 Nov. 2016.)