Refuting Unitarianism: Jesus' Sinlessness
There are many arguments to easily refute unitarianism and not get lost in endless philosophical conjectures and debates, as is usually the case with any discussion involving the incarnation or the Trinity and a unitarian. You can point to the historical and archaeological evidence that Christians worshiped Jesus as the pre-existent God long before the councils of the 4th century (such as the Alexamenos Grafito or the recently discovered Megiddo Mosaic, or writings of many early Church Fathers or various creeds or early Christology in general). One can also simply point to the writings of John, Jude, Paul and Peter, who all claimed explicitly that Jesus was God made flesh and pre-existent, such as 2 Peter 1:1, Jude 1:5, Romans 9:5, Philippians 2:6, 1 John 5:20 and countless others that I’ve discussed in many places.
One can also read the words of Christ Himself, who claimed to be God and pre-existent on several occasions (John 8:58, John 17:5, Revelation 1:17-18, etc.) as well as received worship from infancy all the way to His death and after the resurrection. The word for worship used in the text for these situations is “proskuneo”, which is the word attributed to worship of God or false deities, like in Matthew 4 when Satan tempts Christ with worship and Jesus responds with the first commandment. Both individuals use this word. Jesus also calls Himself the Son of Man dozens of times in the gospels, and the vision of the Son of Man by Daniel (Daniel 7) uses the word “pelach” to describe the nations bowing down in worship of Him, which is the same kind of worship/word attributed to God in other places (or false deities). When John falls down to worship (proskuneo) the angel messenger in Revelation 22:8, the angel rebukes John — yet Jesus accepts this worship countless times and the text has no issues with it. Why? Because Jesus is God made flesh.
Jesus’ deity and equality with God is also necessary for the gospel to work. Genesis 18:25 says that God is the Judge of the Earth, yet Romans 3:21-28 (and the general arc of history and scripture) reveal to us that God has passed over countless sins for thousands of years. This creates an enormous dilemma, because it stains the reputation of the Judge of the Earth as either corrupt, incapable to enforce justice or simply arbitrary with His own moral standards. If God is infinite and His reputation holds infinite value, it stands to reason then that such an offense requires an infinite payment to be justified. Mercy is not cheap, and when you are the Judge of the Earth, mercy comes at the highest cost.
Romans 3 tells us that God revealed His righteousness and His mercy simultaneously by sending Christ, the Son of God, to die. According to the unitarian philosophy, Christ is merely a vessel for God to communicate with mankind. Some hold to an adoptionist view (Jesus was “adopted” by God) while others have a vague doctrine of pre-existence yet without committing to a Jesus that is the uncreated God incarnate. So ironically, their doctrine (should they accept some form of pre-existence) demands there be an incarnation of some kind, which is mysterious, yet they refuse to accept a mystery because their fundamental assumption is that God is limited by human logic.
Nevertheless, regardless of which view a unitarian holds, their warped christology cannot reconcile this problem. Jesus is a created being of some kind and that means God created a payment to pay for all the times when it looked like He passed over former sins. But does that work? The answer is no, because God is uncreated. How can the reputation of the uncreated, self-existent, omnipotent and glorious Creator of the Universe be redeemed by a mere creation? No matter how glorious that creation is, it is not in the same category as God. The only way the atonement works is therefore with absolute christology.
A God that is the Judge of the Earth and has appeared in history as if He doesn’t care about justice can only redeem that image with the ultimate price: the price of His own blood. How will people know with absolute certainty how serious God is about sin and His glory? The only way is through an absolutely (infinitely) valuable payment, which results in the mystery of the incarnation. Paul refers to the gospel as a mystery about 17 times in the New Testament. It is not a mystery if Jesus is a created being of any caliber, yet it is a great mystery if Jesus was God in the flesh on that cross. It is also no reconciliation on God’s part if He simply created a being to go take the punishment for sin, because it means God never put skin in the game and His glory isn’t actually infinite.
Yet because Jesus was actually God on that cross, it changes everything. Such an incomprehensible and magnanimous act simultaneously proves once and for all how utterly serious God is about sin and His glory, while also revealing God’s mercy and abundant love for sinners. It is the only way to reconcile the age old problem of justice and mercy, and unitarian christology simply cannot provide this solution because unitarian christology in no form of interpretation offers any truly meaningful payment provided by God on behalf of all the evil that He forgave in history. As a result the unitarian gospel is not a gospel of good news, because their Christ is not God and cannot offer any assurance of salvation nor a truly meaningful statement of God’s love. How can God be loving if He never entered reality to be with His own creations, rather sending a created being to talk for Him instead? How can God be loving (or just for that matter) if He simply created a being to take the punishment for sin? How can one hope through suffering when the Christ one believes in is not sovereign over salvation, because that Christ isn’t actually God? As a result, I have yet to meet a unitarian that actually trusts in the gospel. They can't have any good news, because their philosophy does not provide the true hope of the gospel (a sovereign Christ) or a loving God. It provides a framework to emulate Christ, not to trust in Christ, and that is why all unitarians in history have been legalistic and synergistic and philosophers that overthink salvation.
So these are some important talking points, and perhaps you’ve had to deal with them before. But today I actually wanted to present you with yet another, probably that you have not considered — and that is the argument of Jesus’ sinlessness.
Practically anyone who calls themselves a Christian today should believe in the doctrine that Jesus was sinless throughout His earthly life. Anyone who denies such a thing denies basic biblical truth and cannot be said to be a Christian. Unitarians in general will accept Jesus’ sinlessness, yet in doing so they actually refute their position and that’s the lesson of today. How so? Because Jesus’ sinlessness proves that He was God in the flesh.
A simple parallel example can illustrate the point, and that is with the blasphemous Catholic doctrine of the immaculate conception. Catholic dogma teaches that Mary was sinless, born without sin, and therefore (among other lies, like her assumption into heaven just like Jesus) she is worthy of veneration, prayer, worship and all the other things Catholics do with Mary. But an immediate objection to this doctrine, besides the obvious that it is blasphemous and nowhere found in scripture, is the following: why would God do such a thing? In other words, if God could simply create a sinless human being after the Genesis curse, why didn’t He just do that for everyone? Why go through all the trouble of thousands of years of evil, Satan, even His own torture and execution, when He could have just snapped His fingers and made everyone, beginning with Adam and Eve’s progeny, sinless. No need for history, no need for the devil or the cross or any of it.
The answer is that God did not create Mary sinless because Mary was a normal human being like everyone else. She was righteous, as in elect and deemed innocent in God’s eyes by her relationship to Christ — but Mary had sin like everyone else. And if God would do such a thing, it would discredit the gospel, discredit His own efforts through Christ, call into question His impartiality and many other serious problems that Catholics will never deal with but are there as testimonies against their religion regardless.
So now we return to unitarians and Jesus’ sinlessness. Do you see the relationship between the immaculate conception and this issue? The main question to ask a unitarian is the following: where did Jesus get His sinlessness from? Assuming they believe Jesus was sinless (which if they don’t then that’s already a strike out) — where did Jesus get this property from? In other words, was Jesus sinless because He was God or was He sinless because God created Him to be sinless? Did Jesus’ sinlessness exist because God Himself entered reality and took on human form, with all of its cursed existence yet without sin (Hebrews 4:15), or was Jesus sinless because God created a sinless vessel to represent Him to the world?
If the latter is true, then we run into the same irreconcilable blasphemies of Catholicism and the immaculate conception. If Jesus was sinless because God simply created a sinless vessel that would represent Him to humanity, then why couldn’t God do that with Adam or Seth or everyone else? And if this is the case and Jesus as a human being received special treatment, how can God do that and remain impartial? If Jesus was just a human being that “got lucky” and received the blessings of God and was created without sin, then in theory any one of us could have been it and gotten the same perks. Oh well.
This is why Jesus’ sinlessness refutes unitarianism. Jesus of Nazareth was a human being, but Jesus as the eternal Son of God existed before the world began. It is this Jesus, as the Son of God, that imparted sinlessness to His own human nature when He chose to enter reality and be born. Some may argue that Jesus’ sinlessness comes from His Father, which is true and not being contested. But what do you mean exactly? Words matter. Jesus as the incarnate God-man is from God the Father, because He was appointed by the Father and sent by the Father. But the scriptures are clear that the Son is also God and equal with God and has always existed. Therefore Jesus’ sinlessness is not something God created uniquely in history as an exception in humanity. Jesus’ sinlessness is part of His pre-existent nature, because Jesus is God and has always been and will always be without sin. That He entered reality is why Jesus of Nazareth, as a human being, was sinless. But that choice is anchored in the choice of Jesus as the Son of God, existing before all things, and deciding out of love for the Father to enter reality and take on the burden of God having to show mercy to humanity — which is the burden of justice discussed previously.
Now some may point to the resurrection, and claim that God has the power to create sinless beings who will not sin at all forever. This is partially true. At the resurrection, God will be “all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28) and our bodies will be transformed. We will be so full of the Holy Spirit that we will never have an evil thought or deed again for eternity. God will flex His restraining power and prevent all evil by destroying death, Satan and this world system, as well as our corrupted flesh. So God can do these things easily. But does that negate the argument presented here? The answer of course is no.
It is one thing for God to resurrect and transform people at the final judgment, and it is another thing to make an exception for one human being in history while history and the curse of death are still playing out. Furthermore, God could have restrained Adam from taking of the tree of knowledge in the very beginning. God could have restrained Satan from tempting Eve. But He didn’t, because He had already decided to enter reality and reveal His justice and mercy at the cross, all of which required history, context, evil, Satan and death. And at the resurrection, we are still ourselves. Probably we will soon forget our old lives, but we are still created beings that lived at one point in time in sin but have been redeemed. We were never created sinless. We were redeemed, and then caused to be good for eternity. That’s significant, and when it comes to the question of how Jesus was sinless — the answer makes the difference between truth and apostasy.
So this is a simple yet incredibly important argument that I have not seen in this discussion. Where did Jesus’ sinlessness come from? Is it a default property of His ontology? Or was it created by God? If the latter is true, then this leads to blasphemous conclusions and irreconcilable problems with the gospel and God’s character. If the former is true, then Jesus must be God and equal with God.
Spoiler alert: He is.
For a treatment of these and other theological topics in detail, please see my book “The Seven Transformations: Finding the Narrow Road by Pursuing a Sovereign Christ.”
