McBrien's book "CATHOLICISM" (with all its errors, half-truths, and logical and interpretive inconsistencies) can only destroy the stability of faith in his gullible readers.
The following comments deal with McBrien's views of Jesus' freedom and sinlessness and particularly his denial of Our Divine Lord's impeccability (i.e. He could not sin). McBrien teaches that Christ could have sinned! McBrien writes:
"To accept a Jesus who is at once fully human and yet immune from sexual desires is to stretch not only one's imagination but also one's theological convictions about the incarnation and the fundamental goodness of creation, the human body, and human sexuality ... Jesus was fully a human being, with sexual desires..."
(pages 562 - 563).
McBrien makes the usual error of believing that freedom demands the possibility of sin as well as virtue. If this were true, then God Himself would not be free since He cannot choose a moral evil. No. Freedom involves, first of all, the embracing of the truly good. In being LOVE Itself, God is fully free. Jesus, the God-man, was truly free while at the same time, impeccable.
Secondly, freedom means the choice of one good in preference to another good. This is commitment. God is free and not evil when He chooses a particular finite reality into the world. For example, having freely chosen me, He cannot reverse that choice, even when I prefer Hell to Him. That he does not choose every possible good in a finite world is never evil. Evil is not the absence of a good, but the deprivation of a good which should be there. Too frequently people believe that the absence of a good (height, athletic ability, etc.) which I would like to possess is a positive deprivation for me (cf. the lament, "If only I were a rich man!"). This is the reason that the avaricious, whether rich or poor, factually demand to keep or to re-possess whatever they want as 'entitlements.' It is truly a mystery of freedom that the human person can choose moral evil under the guise of apparent good.
However, to be really human, or better, to be really man, does not mean that one must have each and every experience of sin that every other man may have. I am equally a member of "homo sapiens" despite the lack of mathematical ability or the literary genius of a Shakespeare. Nor need I to sin or be drawn into sin to be a man, or even to understand and expiate sin for another (as indeed our Lord did, according to St. Paul).
It should be recalled that Adam and Eve were fully human before the Fall. Indeed, the mystery to be explained is not why Jesus as perfect God and perfect man was impeccable, but why and how Adam could sin! Indeed, our own ability to sin is called the mystery of iniquity. One cannot really explain how anyone clearly recognizing murder to be an abominable evil could culpably inflict such a death on another as a good to be chosen!
The possibility of pure malice is a mystery. Denial of this truth explains the erroneous "proportionalism" of today's dissenter theologians who have just about destroyed even the concept of sin. By comparing and subjectively weighing every possible consequence of an action, they have made the psychic mechanism of sinning to be identified and interchangeable with conscience! Their position has necessarily demanded that there be no negative or positive moral absolutes. They ignore the fact that before the Fall there was no 'concupiscence of the eyes' (evocativeness of the not-yet-real), no 'concupiscence of the flesh' (the compulsions of unfulfilled bodily appetites), and no 'pride of life' (that inventive creativity making the world plastic to one's own design). These 3 concupiscences (inclinations to sin) seduce a person to contradict the significance of actions designed by God as morally good.
Interestingly, St. Thomas Aquinas indicates that there probably was sexual passion in Paradise, but not sexual concupiscence. Indeed, he insists that spousal love-making would have been more intense while being more free there. He teaches that, even after the Fall, passion arising antecedent to a willing choice diminishes the freedom to either love or sin while passion consequent upon a free choice intensifies that choice for good or evil! He notes further that only after the choice of setting their own wills against God's "knowledge of good and evil" did Adam and Eve experience an antecedent and unruly swelling of sexual passion.
The Catholic faith holds that the Lord Jesus did not sin personally (on the testimony of the Scriptures), and that there was no concupiscence or inclination to any sin in Him. Moreover, He could not have been interiorly tempted to sin since He was not subject to Original Sin, and Original Sin's resultant effect of concupiscence was not transferred to Him by human generation. Jesus Christ was "conceived of the Holy Spirit." Nor could Our Divine Lord have considered an evil moral act as possibly desirable because His will was in conformity with the will of His Father at all times.
McBrien extends the idea that Jesus was "like us in all things but sin" (cf. Heb. 4:15) to attribute to the God-man sexual concupiscence, such as all fallen humanity is subject to. That Jesus be "like us in all things but sin" - as understood by McBrien - leads to other absurdities as well. His interpretation would demand that Jesus be now male, now female, now a Jew, now a Gentile, etc., etc. That Jesus possessed human nature simply means He had the body and soul of a man with all the potentials of mind, will, emotions, and bodily senses, abilities and skills. However, Our Lord is not like me in many respects. He is not like me as the user of a Word-processor; He wrote in the dust. He did not read Latin or Greek, but Hebrew. As the Eternal Word made flesh, He was completely human, and remained completely human though He never sinned and was even incapable of sin (i.e., impeccable). Since it is impossible for God to sin, Jesus Christ was not capable of being interiorly tempted as McBrien falsely alleges.
As regards the Scriptural accounts of Our Lord's Temptations in the Desert, McBrien glibly explains them as though the Devil's temptations were attractive to Him. But there is no sign of this in the Scriptures. That Jesus, for example, experienced hunger does not indicate that He was emotionally drawn to perform miracles to satisfy it. Similarly, temptations due to spontaneous sexual concupiscence were impossible in the God-Man Who possessed a perfect human nature united to divinity.
About Dr. James Likoudis
James Likoudis is an expert in Catholic apologetics. He is the author of four books
dealing with Catholic-Eastern Orthodox relations, including his most recent "The
Divine Primacy of the Bishop of Rome and Modern Eastern Orthodoxy: Letters to a Greek
Orthodox on the Unity of the Church" He has written many articles dealing with
Liturgy, Catechetics, and Sex Education published by various religious papers and
magazines.
He can be reached at: jameslikoudis1@gmail.com, or visit Dr. James Likoudis'
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