Reading preferences

Font Serif Sans-serif OpenDyslexic

Text size 100%

Tempted in Every Respect: Christ, the Spirit, and the Proclivity to Sin

An Examination of the Tension between Hebrews 2:17 and 4:15

By Warwick Allen

31 May 2026

Abstract

Hebrews 2:17 and 4:15 together affirm Christ’s full solidarity with his people and his temptation in every respect, while insisting that he remained without sin—a pairing that raises an acute question: did he bear the interior proclivity to sin that marks fallen humanity, and if so, how does his dependence on the Holy Spirit relate to ours? This essay maps the logical options for resolving the dilemma—limiting the scope of “in every respect,” denying the necessity of the Spirit’s assistance, treating concupiscence as already excluded by “without sin,” accepting a Spirit-dependent Christ, and qualifying that dependence by the hypostatic union—before making the strongest available case for the dependent-Christ position as developed in the Irving–Torrance tradition. Two pressures initially drive the argument in that direction. Exegetically, χωρὶς ἁμαρτίας in Hebrews 4:15 is more plausibly read as adverbial than as exceptive, favouring options that affirm rather than exclude Christ’s bearing of the conditions of fallen humanity. Soteriologically, Gregory of Nazianzus’s axiom—what is not assumed is not healed—places serious strain on any Christology that withholds those conditions from what Christ assumed. The essay contends, however, that the Irving–Torrance position, though plausible and serious, ultimately founders on three difficulties: its incomplete answer to the question of Christ’s holiness, its extension of the Gregorian axiom beyond the polemical context for which Gregory forged it, and its reliance on that axiom to perform adjudicating work that biblical exegesis alone cannot supply. Once these difficulties are registered, the costs previously identified in the limited-likeness and sinful-concupiscence options look less decisive, and both emerge as defensible resolutions between which the essay does not choose.

I. Introduction: The Dilemma in Its Biblical Setting

Two verses in the Epistle to the Hebrews sit at the heart of a deceptively difficult Christological problem. The first is Hebrews 2:17: “Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people.” The second is Hebrews 4:15: “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.”

The purpose of both passages is pastoral and soteriological. The author of Hebrews wants his readers to be confident that their high priest is not a remote deity unmoved by human struggle, but one who has stood where they stand. The emphasis on likeness “in every respect” is not an incidental rhetorical flourish—it is doing weighty theological work. The fitness of Christ to represent humanity before God and to make propitiation on humanity’s behalf depends, the author implies, on the genuineness of his solidarity with human experience.

Yet the very completeness of that solidarity creates a problem. If Christ was like us “in every respect,” and if one of the most pervasive and defining features of our experience as fallen human beings is an interior inclination toward sin—what the classical theological tradition calls concupiscence—then it seems to follow that Christ shared that inclination. But that conclusion strikes many readers as deeply uncomfortable, if not outright heretical. The question of how to resolve this discomfort, without sacrificing either the genuineness of Christ’s solidarity with us or the unblemished character of his person, is the subject of this essay.

The essay proceeds by giving the dependent-Christ option, particularly in the nuanced form developed by the Irving–Torrance tradition, its strongest available hearing. That case is a serious one, and the pastoral and soteriological pressures that drive it deserve to be felt at full weight. The essay’s ultimate conclusion, however, is that three persistent difficulties prove more telling than the case in its favour—and that the limited-likeness and sinful-concupiscence options, once those difficulties are registered, emerge as more defensible resolutions between which there is no compelling need to choose.

II. The Logical Structure of the Dilemma

The problem can be set out with some precision. Consider the following argument:

1. Christ was like us in every way except without sin.
2. We have a proclivity to sin that can only be resisted with the assistance of the Holy Spirit.
3. Therefore, Christ had a proclivity to sin that could only be resisted with the assistance of the Holy Spirit.

The conclusion follows validly from the premises. If one finds the conclusion unacceptable, there are three types of response available: one may challenge one of the two premises, one may accept the conclusion and show that it is less troubling than it first appears, or one may challenge the inference itself—arguing that even if both premises are granted, the conclusion does not follow in the same way it would for an ordinary human being. The following options arise.

(a) Weakening the Force of Premise (1) by Limiting the Scope of “Every”

On this view, the phrase “in every respect” is not a comprehensive metaphysical claim but a rhetorical intensification of a more limited point. Christ was like us in all the ways that matter for his priestly solidarity, but not necessarily in every conceivable biological or psychological feature.

We will refer to this as the limited-likeness option.

(b) Rejecting Premise (2) by Denying That Human Beings Require the Spirit’s Assistance to Resist Sin

On this view, the proclivity to sin exists in fallen humanity but is not so strong as to be irresistible without supernatural help. Natural willpower or reason can, at least in principle, resist sinful inclinations.

We will refer to this as the resistible-sin option.

(c) Arguing That the Proclivity to Sin Is Itself a Form of Sinfulness and Therefore Already Excluded by the Exception in Premise (1)

This is structurally different from the limited-likeness option, because it does not weaken the scope of “every” but rather argues that concupiscence falls within what is already excluded by the phrase “without sin.”

We will refer to this as the sinful-concupiscence option.

(d) Accepting the Conclusion—That Christ Had a Proclivity to Sin Which He Resisted through the Spirit’s Empowerment

On this view, both premises are affirmed, and the force of the argument is accepted. The task then becomes showing how this conclusion can be held without compromising Christ’s sinlessness or the efficacy of the atonement.

We will refer to this as the dependent-Christ option.

(e) Challenging the Inference by Distinguishing the Manner of Christ’s Dependence on the Spirit from Ours, on Account of the Hypostatic Union

This option does not reject either premise, nor does it simply accept the conclusion as stated. Instead, it challenges the inference from the premises: even if Christ depended on the Spirit, that dependence was categorically different from ours, because his human nature subsisted within the person of the eternal Son in a way that has no analogue in ordinary human existence. Unlike the preceding options, this one does not constitute a standalone resolution to the dilemma; as will become clear, it functions rather as a qualifying framework that operates alongside the other options, and most decisively alongside the dependent-Christ option.

We will refer to this as the dissimilar-dependency option.

Before surveying the options, it is worth registering that the Greek text of Hebrews 4:15 itself bears directly on which options are exegetically viable. The phrase rendered “without sin” (χωρὶς ἁμαρτίας) is grammatically ambiguous: it may be read as adverbial, modifying the manner of the temptation—Christ was tempted in every respect, yet throughout without sinning—or as exceptive, meaning he was tempted in every respect except with respect to sin itself, i.e. he had no sinful inclinations to speak of. The majority of modern commentators on Hebrews (including Harold Attridge, William Lane, and Gareth Cockerill)¹ favour the adverbial reading, on the grounds that the exceptive reading sits awkwardly with the emphatic force of κατὰ πάντα (“in every respect”) and with the pastoral logic of the passage. On the adverbial reading, the text does not exclude Christ’s having borne the interior conditions of fallen humanity; it affirms only that he never yielded to them. This exegetical point does not settle the theological question by itself, but it does mean that the options surveyed below are not all exegetically equal: those that read χωρὶς ἁμαρτίας as exceptive are working against the grain of the most defensible reading of the Greek.

⥊

Each of the first four options has been held by serious theologians. Each has genuine strengths. Each also carries costs. The following sections examine them in turn, before presenting the strongest available case for the dependent-Christ option and then examining the three persistent difficulties that that case ultimately cannot resolve.

III. The Limited-Likeness Option: Limiting the Scope of “Every Respect”

The most straightforward response to the dilemma is to observe that the phrase “in every respect” in both Hebrews 2:17 and 4:15 need not be read as a comprehensive inventory of all the features of fallen human psychology. Language of this kind in ancient rhetoric often functions to intensify a point rather than to enumerate exhaustively. The author of Hebrews is not conducting a systematic anthropology; he is making a pastoral argument about the fitness of Christ to sympathise with and represent his people.

On this reading, “in every respect” means something like “in all the ways that are relevant to genuine human solidarity and priestly identification.” Christ took on flesh, knew hunger and thirst, experienced grief and rejection, faced genuine external pressure and temptation, suffered and died. In all these respects he was like us. The verse does not necessarily commit one to the view that every feature of fallen human psychology was reproduced in him.

This reading has historical support. Reformed orthodoxy, particularly in the tradition of Francis Turretin,² has generally maintained that Christ assumed human nature but not fallen human nature—that is, he took on humanity as such without the inherited disorder that characterises humanity since the fall. On this account, he was genuinely and fully human, in just the same way that Adam before the fall was genuinely and fully human, without concupiscence.

Strengths

This option is theologically tidy. It preserves the sinlessness of Christ without requiring any complicated distinctions between types of sinfulness. It also has a certain intuitive appeal: if concupiscence is a defect introduced by the fall rather than a feature of human nature as God originally designed it, then its absence in Christ is not a failure of full humanity but a restoration of unfallen humanity. In this light, Christ’s sinless humanity is not a truncated humanity but a perfected one.

Weaknesses

The cost of this option becomes apparent when one asks whether it does full justice to the pastoral claims of Hebrews 4:15. For most people, the most potent form of temptation is not external pressure but internal pull—the experience of a desire that already inclines one toward a sinful object before any deliberate choice has been made. This is what James 1:14 describes when it says that “each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire.” If Christ had no such inner pull, his temptations were structurally different from ours in a significant way. The defender of the limited-likeness option can argue that external temptation is still real and genuine temptation; but to many readers, this will seem to fall short of what “in every respect” requires.

Furthermore, and crucially for the broader soteriological question, the limited-likeness option creates a problem when placed alongside the Gregorian axiom: what is not assumed is not healed. Gregory of Nazianzus forged this principle in his fourth-century dispute with Apollinarius, who had proposed that the divine Logos took the place of the rational soul in Christ. Gregory’s reply was that it is precisely the rational soul which is the seat of sin’s disorder, and therefore it is the rational soul which most needs to be assumed and healed. The logic is directly applicable here: if the disordered inclination toward sin is among the most debilitating features of fallen humanity, and if Christ did not assume it, then it is unclear how its healing is grounded in the incarnation at all. This soteriological cost will be examined more fully in section VII; for now it is enough to note that the limited-likeness option purchases theological tidiness at a significant price.

IV. The Resistible-Sin Option: Denying the Necessity of the Spirit’s Assistance

A second response attacks the second premise rather than the first. Perhaps it is an overstatement to say that human beings require the Spirit’s assistance in order to resist sin. Perhaps, on a more Pelagian or semi-Pelagian account, there is a natural human capacity to resist sinful inclinations which Christ exercised, and which we also possess but typically fail to exercise.

Strengths

This option has the merit of avoiding the Christological awkwardness entirely. If we can resist sin by our own unaided will, then Christ’s resistance of sin requires no special explanation: he simply exercised the same natural capacity that all human beings possess, but exercised it perfectly.

Weaknesses

This option is, however, difficult to square with the mainstream of Christian theology in both the East and the West, and with the testimony of Scripture. The Pauline account of human nature in Romans 7 and 8 paints a picture of human beings in bondage to sin, incapable of the obedience that God requires without the liberating work of the Spirit. The Council of Orange in 529 condemned the Pelagian and semi-Pelagian positions³ that suggested humanity could move toward God or resist sin without prevenient grace. Augustine’s extensive writings on grace and free will argue that the will, while formally free, is in practice bound by disordered loves until it is liberated by God’s grace. Even traditions more sympathetic to natural moral capacity, such as the Eastern Orthodox tradition, do not typically endorse the view that fallen human beings can resist the power of sin without any assistance from God.

The pastoral and experiential testimony of believers across the centuries also weighs heavily against this option. The near-universal Christian experience of moral failure, and the sense that sustained holiness is not achievable by willpower alone, suggests that premise (2) is not as easily dismissed as this option requires. Abandoning it in order to resolve the Christological dilemma would seem to purchase a tidy Christology at the cost of a distorted soteriology. The resistible-sin option can therefore be set aside; the more interesting question is whether the proclivity to sin should be excluded from what Christ assumed, or affirmed as part of it.

V. The Sinful-Concupiscence Option: Concupiscence as Already Excluded by “Without Sin”

A more sophisticated version of the limited-likeness option avoids simply weakening the scope of “every respect” and instead argues that the inclination toward sin falls within what is already excluded by the exception “without sin.” This requires distinguishing between what counts as sin and what counts as morally neutral human nature.

The argument proceeds as follows. Concupiscence—the interior bias toward sinful objects—is not a feature of human nature as God originally created it. It is, rather, a consequence of the fall, a condition introduced by sin and itself belonging to the domain of sinfulness. The Council of Trent, affirming against the Reformers, insisted that concupiscence in the baptised is not formally sin but only the tinder of sin (fomes peccati).⁴ The Reformers, by contrast, tended to regard concupiscence as itself sinful, even where it is not acted upon. But even on the Council of Trent’s more cautious formulation, concupiscence is closely associated with sinfulness—it is an inheritance of the fall, a disorder in human nature that belongs to the domain of what sin has introduced into creation.

If this is correct, then the phrase “without sin” in Hebrews 4:15 already excludes concupiscence, and the phrase “in every respect” need not be weakened at all. Christ was like us in every respect as human beings—but an inclination toward sin is not properly a feature of human beings as such, but of fallen human beings. What he lacked was not humanity but fallenness.

Strengths

This option is exegetically cleaner than the limited-likeness option. It does not require one to attenuate the force of “in every respect,” but rather to argue that the exception already covers the relevant case. It also draws on a legitimate and venerable distinction between nature and the consequences of the fall, and has the support of a significant strand of Reformed Christology.

Weaknesses

The difficulty, as noted above, is that it creates an asymmetry in Christ’s experience of temptation that sits uneasily with the pastoral claims of Hebrews 4:15. Moreover—and here is the key soteriological problem—it faces the same pressure from the Gregorian axiom that undermines the limited-likeness option. If concupiscence is excluded from what Christ assumed, then the question of how concupiscence is healed in us becomes pressing. It will not do simply to say that the Spirit heals it in sanctification unless one can show how that healing is grounded in the incarnation and atonement. A soteriology in which Christ purchases the right for the Spirit to mortify concupiscence in us, without himself engaging and conquering it in the assumption of human nature, leaves the Gregorian logic unanswered.

One further difficulty: the argument that concupiscence is excluded by “without sin” depends on classifying concupiscence as a form of sin or as a consequence of sin that belongs to the domain of the sinful. But this classification is itself contested. On the view that concupiscence is simply a feature of creaturely desire that becomes sinful only when acted upon, it is not obvious that its exclusion from Christ follows from the exception “without sin.” The question of where concupiscence falls in the taxonomy of sin, nature, and the fall remains theologically unresolved, which means the sinful-concupiscence option is more vulnerable to the pressure from Hebrews 4:15 than it first appears. The two remaining options approach the dilemma differently: one by challenging the inference rather than the premises, and one by accepting the conclusion and showing that it is less troubling than it first appears.

VI. The Dissimilar-Dependency Option: The Hypostatic Union as a Qualifying Context

The dissimilar-dependency option does not contest either premise but challenges the inference from them. Even if Christ had a proclivity to sin, and even if he required the Spirit’s assistance to resist it, the nature of that dependence and its relationship to his sinlessness may be so different from ours as to constitute a categorically different situation.

The relevant doctrine here is the hypostatic union: the classical Chalcedonian affirmation that in Christ, a complete human nature and a complete divine nature are united in one divine person, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation. The person of Christ is the eternal Son; it is this person who acts in and through both natures. This means that Christ’s human will—however it stands in relation to sinful inclinations—is the will of a person who is also God, and who therefore does not merely resist temptation by willpower or Spirit-empowerment alone, but whose very identity is constituted by an eternal disposition of perfect obedience to the Father.

On this account, the question of whether Christ “could have sinned” (peccability versus impeccability) is complicated by the fact that the person who would have to sin is the eternal Son. Whether it is even coherent to speak of the eternal Son sinning—whether the divine nature places a kind of logical constraint on the possible actions of the one person—is a question that systematic theologians have debated with great sophistication.

Strengths

This option does justice to the full complexity of the Chalcedonian picture. It resists the temptation to consider Christ’s human experience in isolation from his divine person. It also provides a principled reason why the conclusion of the original argument, even if conceded, does not threaten the sinlessness or the divine dignity of Christ: the person who depended on the Spirit was not merely a human being but the God-man, and the conditions governing that dependence are therefore different in kind.

Weaknesses

The risk of this option is that it could subtly undermine the reality of Christ’s temptations in a different way. If the hypostatic union provides a kind of metaphysical guarantee against sin—if Christ could not have sinned because the divine nature ensured it—then in what sense were his temptations genuine? A temptation that cannot possibly succeed does not seem to be a temptation in any meaningful sense. The tradition has generally tried to protect both Christ’s genuine temptability and his impeccability, but the combination is not easily articulated, and the hypostatic union cannot simply be invoked to dissolve the tension without risk of making the human experience of Christ somewhat theatrical.

The dissimilar-dependency option is therefore best understood not as a standalone resolution but as a supplementary qualification to whichever primary option one adopts. It is a genuine and important consideration, but it does not by itself resolve the dilemma. With the four primary options and the qualifying role of the dissimilar-dependency option now in view, we are in a position to examine the soteriological pressure that bears on all the preceding options.

VII. The Soteriological Pressure: “What Is Not Assumed Is Not Healed”

Before making a positive case for a version of the dependent-Christ option, it is worth dwelling on the soteriological problem that bears on all the preceding options, because it is this pressure that initially appears to determine which resolution is most adequate.

Gregory of Nazianzus’s axiom—what is not assumed is not healed (to gar aproslepton, atherapeuton)⁵—was forged in a specific polemical context, but its logic is far wider than that context. Gregory’s point was that salvation is achieved by the incarnate Son taking on and transforming human nature from within. The healing is not solely juridical—a legal transaction conducted at a distance—but participatory: Christ enters into the condition of fallen humanity, takes it up into himself, and transforms it by his sinless life, atoning death, and resurrection. If any part of the human condition is excluded from what he assumed, that part is excluded from what he healed. This is an important claim, and it deserves a brief examination before it is applied.

The axiom is not a merely speculative philosophical claim imported from Greek participation theory; it rests on a deeply biblical account of how salvation works. The New Testament consistently presents redemption not as a legal decree issued from a distance but as the result of the Son entering into the human condition, sharing it from within, and transforming it. This participatory logic is prominent in Paul—”God sent his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin” (Romans 8:3), so that the condemnation belonging to that flesh might be dealt with in it—and it is central to the argument of Hebrews, as the following paragraph will show. A reader steeped in the forensic tradition of Reformed soteriology might object that the axiom assumes too much: perhaps the atonement is legally efficacious regardless of which specific conditions of fallenness Christ assumed, so long as he bore the penalty due to sin in our place. This objection has genuine force, and nothing in the present argument denies that the atonement has an indispensable forensic dimension. But a purely forensic account, taken in isolation, struggles to ground the sanctifying and transformative dimensions of salvation that the New Testament equally insists upon. When Paul speaks of believers being “buried with Christ” and “raised with him” (Romans 6:4), or of the Spirit uniting them to Christ’s own humanity (Romans 8:9–11), something more than a legal transfer is in view. The Gregorian axiom is not anti-forensic; it insists, rather, that the legal transaction has an incarnational depth without which these participatory dimensions of salvation lack a proper ground. Assumption and healing are not two separate mechanisms but two moments in a single act of redemption.

Among the biblical passages that give this logic its most pointed and immediate expression, Hebrews 2:17 stands out. The passage moves from Christ’s likeness to his brothers “in every respect” to his capacity “to make propitiation for the sins of the people.” The connection is not incidental. His fitness to be the atoning high priest is grounded in his genuine participation in the human condition. The solidarity and the atonement are not two separate things; they are aspects of a single redemptive movement.

If concupiscence is among the most crippling features of the fallen human condition, and if freedom from it is among the most urgent needs of redeemed humanity, then a Christology which excludes it from what Christ assumed must explain how it is healed. The limited-likeness and sinful-concupiscence options face this question most acutely. Their answer must be that the Spirit heals concupiscence in sanctification on the basis of the atonement, without that specific condition having been assumed and conquered in the incarnate life. This is not an impossible answer, but it does introduce a gap between the Gregorian logic and the actual structure of salvation—a gap which, once noticed, is difficult to close without qualification.

The full weight of this pressure will be allowed to stand in the sections that follow, where the dependent-Christ option is given its fullest and strongest presentation. It should be noted here, however, that the argument’s force depends on two assumptions that will need to be examined: that the Gregorian axiom can legitimately be extended from the structural completeness of what Christ assumed to the condition of what he assumed; and that the axiom can perform the role of adjudicating between options that biblical exegesis alone leaves underdetermined. Both assumptions will be scrutinised in section XII, where they prove less secure than the foregoing argument requires.

VIII. The Dependent-Christ Option: Christ’s Dependence on the Spirit—The Irving–Torrance Tradition

The most thoroughgoing attempt to take the dependent-Christ option seriously—to affirm that Christ assumed fallen human nature, including its vulnerability to sinful inclination, and overcame it through the Spirit without himself sinning—is associated above all with the Scottish preacher Edward Irving (1792–1834)⁶ and the twentieth-century Scottish theologian T. F. Torrance (1913–1996),⁷ who developed Irving’s insights within a more rigorous systematic framework.

Irving’s central claim, which caused him considerable controversy in his day, was that Christ assumed human nature “in the fallen condition”—not that he was sinful, but that he took on the nature that Adam’s race actually has, with all its weakness, mortality, and vulnerability to temptation. The sinlessness of Christ was achieved not by insulating his human nature from the conditions of fallen humanity, but by the constant action of the Holy Spirit within and upon that nature, preserving it from actual sin. Irving drew a sharp distinction between fallen nature (which Christ assumed) and actual sin (which he never committed).

Torrance developed this position with greater theological precision. For Torrance, the incarnation is not simply the assumption of an abstract and pristine human nature but the assumption of the specific, historically conditioned humanity of Adam’s race. Christ “entered into the full reality of our lost condition,” taking on the same flesh that is subject to corruption, temptation, and moral disorder. His entire life was, in Torrance’s account, a continuous act of atoning and sanctifying humanity from within, not just a prelude to the cross. The cross was the climax and decisive moment, but the whole incarnate existence—from conception to resurrection—was a transformative engagement with fallen human nature.

Crucially, Torrance preserves the sinlessness of Christ not by qualifying what he assumed but by insisting on the distinction between nature and person, and between inclination and act. Christ assumed the condition of fallen nature—its frailty, its susceptibility to temptation, the weight of disordered desire that belongs to human existence in its fallen state—but his person, the eternal Son, never yielded to it. The Spirit’s work was not to supply something lacking in his divine person but to sustain and empower his human nature in its obedient resistance to the very conditions it had taken on.

Strengths

This position is, first of all, the most faithful to the Gregorian axiom. If concupiscence is among the conditions of fallen humanity, and Christ assumed fallen human nature, then concupiscence in some sense falls within what he engaged and conquered. The healing of that condition has a direct and coherent incarnational ground: Christ overcame the disordered inclinations of fallen nature in his own person, and his victory becomes the basis for the Spirit’s work in transforming the same nature in believers. The logic runs from assumption to conquest to application, and there is no gap.

Second, this position does full justice to the pastoral claims of Hebrews 4:15. Christ was tempted not only by external pressures but by the full weight of fallen human experience from within. When Hebrews says he can “sympathize with our weaknesses,” this sympathy is not merely theoretical but existential: he has been where we are, in the specific sense that matters most—he has felt the pull of the same disordered inclinations that beset us.

Third, this position makes sense of the pervasive New Testament emphasis on the role of the Holy Spirit in Christ’s life. Luke presents Christ as Spirit-conceived, Spirit-anointed, Spirit-led (even into the wilderness to face temptation), Spirit-empowered in his ministry, and Spirit-sustained in his death (Hebrews 9:14). The Irving–Torrance reading provides a principled account of why this emphasis is there: the Spirit was not just clothing Christ in messianic authority but genuinely sustaining his sinless human nature under the conditions of fallen existence.

IX. The Nuanced Position: Distinguishing Mode of Dependence from Fact of Dependence

The concern that most naturally arises against the dependent-Christ option is that it appears to place Christ in the same position as us—a fallen human being struggling against sin, dependent on the Spirit in the way that any Christian is dependent on the Spirit. That picture seems to reduce Christ to merely the first and best disciple rather than the unique Son of God.

This concern is legitimate, but it can be met by drawing the distinctions that the Irving–Torrance tradition itself requires, and which were introduced in the earlier stages of the present discussion.

The Distinction between Therapeutic and Instrumental Dependence

In our case, the Spirit’s work has a therapeutic dimension. He must act against the grain of our actual sinful orientation—mortifying the old nature, restraining impulses that have become habitual, renewing minds that have been shaped by patterns of sin. There is a real sense in which we are, in Paul’s language, “at war” with our own desires, and the Spirit is engaged in that war on our behalf. This therapeutic dimension is what the tradition speaks of as regeneration, mortification, and progressive sanctification.

Christ’s dependence on the Spirit, even on the Irving–Torrance account, does not include this therapeutic dimension. His human nature, though assumed in its fallen condition, was never in a state of actual rebellion. It never yielded to the disordered inclinations it bore. The Spirit was not rescuing Christ from an actual sinful orientation but empowering and sustaining a human nature that, while carrying the weight of fallen existence, never departed from perfect obedience. This is better described as instrumental and vocational dependence rather than therapeutic dependence: the Spirit equipping a sinless but humanly constrained nature for the exhausting and ultimately lethal work of redemption.

The Distinction between Inclination and Rebellion

A further distinction must be drawn between having an inclination and being in rebellion. In fallen human beings, concupiscence is not just a neutral susceptibility but is entangled with an actual orientation away from God—what the Augustinian tradition, and especially Luther, calls incurvatus in se, the soul curved in upon itself.⁸ Christ, even on the assumption that his human nature bore something analogous to concupiscence, was never in this condition of actual rebellion. His will was, from the first moment of his human existence, wholly directed toward the Father, wholly shaped by the love of the Spirit. The inclinations he bore were, so to speak, never in alliance with a rebellious self, because there was no rebellious self for them to ally with.

This is where the dissimilar-dependency option has a legitimate supplementary role. The reason that Christ’s bearing of fallen human nature did not constitute actual sinfulness or rebellion is not merely that the Spirit continually intervened but that the person who bore that nature was the eternal Son, in whom there is no shadow of turning. The hypostatic union does not dissolve the real human experience of temptation, but it does mean that the identity of the one who endured it was never in question.

The Distinction between Assumption and Personalisation

Classical Christology employs the paired concepts of anhypostasia and enhypostasia to describe the personal mode of Christ’s human nature: anhypostasia denotes that his human nature has no independent personal existence of its own (hypostasis) apart from the divine Son, while enhypostasia denotes that it is fully and really personal by virtue of being taken up into the person of the Son. On this account, Christ’s human nature has no personal existence of its own apart from the person of the Son.⁹ In ordinary human beings, human nature is personalised in created human persons, each of whom has their own particular history of sin. In Christ, human nature is personalised in an uncreated divine person, who has no such history and whose identity is constituted by an eternal act of self-giving love to the Father and the Spirit. The fallen conditions that Christ bore in his human nature were not therefore personalised in a fallen individual—they were personalised in the Son of God.

This distinction matters because it explains why Christ’s assumption of fallen human nature is not simply the story of one more fallen human being. It is the story of the eternal Son entering into the condition of fallen humanity from the outside, taking it up into a personal existence that transcends and ultimately transforms it.

X. The Efficacy of the Atonement Under the Nuanced Dependent-Christ Option

Having sketched the positive case for a carefully nuanced version of the dependent-Christ option, it remains to show that this position does not merely avoid the Gregorian problem but actively enhances the account of the atonement’s efficacy.

On the nuanced dependent-Christ option, the atonement is not only a transaction; it is also a transformation. What Christ achieves on the cross is not simply the payment of a penalty standing over against humanity, but the completion of a lifelong work of engaging, bearing, and conquering the conditions of fallen human nature. The cross is the climax of an incarnate life in which fallen humanity was continually being assumed, tested, and upheld in obedience by the Spirit.

This has direct implications for what is accomplished in our sanctification. When the Spirit applies the benefits of Christ’s work to believers, he is not introducing a healing agent that has no connection to Christ’s own experience. He is uniting believers to a humanity that has already been through the fires—a humanity that bore the weight of fallen existence, faced the pull of its disordered inclinations, and emerged without sinning. The sanctification of believers is therefore not merely the consequence of a legal transaction but a participation in Christ’s own conquered and transformed humanity. Paul’s language of being “in Christ” and of Christ being formed in us (Galatians 4:19) has its proper ground here.

The resurrection is also significant on this account. It is not merely the vindication of Christ’s identity but the transformation of the human nature he had assumed. In the resurrection, the humanity that bore the conditions of fallenness—mortality, susceptibility to temptation, the whole weight of human frailty—is taken through death and raised in glory. The resurrection body is no longer subject to the conditions of fallen existence. What was assumed in the incarnation has not only been endured: it has been redeemed. And since Christ is the first fruits of a new humanity, his resurrection is the pledge and ground of ours.

The Gregorian axiom is therefore not just satisfied but exceeded on this account. What was assumed was not merely engaged and preserved from sinning; it was conquered, transformed, and glorified. The healing is complete.

XI. Objections Considered and Answered

Objection 1: Does this not make Christ a sinner in some sense?

The most persistent objection to the Irving–Torrance position is that speaking of Christ as having assumed “fallen” human nature attributes sinfulness to him and therefore contradicts the consistent New Testament testimony to his sinlessness (2 Corinthians 5:21; Hebrews 4:15; 1 John 3:5).

The response requires clarity about what “fallen nature” means in this context. Fallenness, as Irving and Torrance use the term, refers to the condition of human nature since the fall—its mortality, its susceptibility to temptation, its liability to suffering, the inclinations that press upon it from within. This is to be distinguished from actual sin, which is the yielding to those inclinations, the consent of the will to what is contrary to God. Christ assumed the former condition while never committing the latter act. The distinction is between the terrain in which the battle was fought and the outcome of the battle. Christ assumed fallen terrain but never lost the battle.

This distinction between terrain and outcome is genuine and important, and it goes some distance toward answering the charge that the Irving–Torrance position attributes sinfulness to Christ. Section XII will press the question further, however: the relevant concern is not only whether Christ sinned but whether the bearing of morally disordered desires—desires oriented toward objects contrary to God—is compatible with the holiness proper to the incarnate Son’s human nature considered in itself. That question is not settled by the nature/person distinction alone.

Objection 2: If Christ had concupiscence, does that not make his sinlessness merely contingent?

This objection worries that a Christ who could have sinned—whose sinlessness depended on a continual exercise of will and Spirit-empowered resistance—is a less reliable saviour than one whose sinlessness was metaphysically guaranteed.

The response to this objection draws on both the dissimilar-dependency option and the distinction between nature and person noted above. The reliability of Christ’s sinlessness is grounded not in a metaphysical insulation of his human nature from fallen conditions but in the identity of the person who bore that nature. The eternal Son cannot cease to be the eternal Son; his filial orientation to the Father is not a contingent achievement but the expression of who he is. The hypostatic union ensures that, whatever pressures fell upon his human nature, they were borne by a person whose personal identity was entirely constituted by perfect love and obedience. The reliability of the atonement is grounded in persons, not in natures in abstraction from persons.

Objection 3: Is the Irving–Torrance position orthodox?

Irving himself was controversially handled by the church courts of his day, though subsequent scholarship has generally concluded that his accusers misunderstood his position and attributed to him the view that Christ sinned, which was not his claim. Torrance worked within the mainstream of Reformed theology and took care to frame his position in terms of Chalcedonian Christology. The position is not uncontested, but it falls within the range of positions that orthodox theologians have maintained. Within the patristic tradition, Cyril of Alexandria¹⁰ insists that the Word assumed flesh in its full post-lapsarian condition—subject to suffering, mortality, and the disordered passions of fallen humanity—while remaining personally sinless; and the recapitulation theology of Irenaeus,¹¹ in which Christ traverses every condition of fallen human existence in order to renew it from within, provides an earlier structural parallel. Gregory of Nazianzus’s own writings, beyond the axiom for which he is most cited in this essay, press in the same direction: his insistence that Christ assumed the full range of human experience, including its disordered passions, in order to heal it, anticipates the Irving–Torrance logic with some precision. Within the Reformed tradition, John Owen’s¹² extended treatment of the Spirit’s work in sustaining and empowering Christ’s human nature throughout his earthly life—developed in his Pneumatologia—constitutes meaningful precedent, even if Owen does not draw every conclusion that Irving and Torrance draw. It should be acknowledged, however, that the patristic support is itself contested. Oliver Crisp¹³ argues against the assumption of a fallen human nature on broadly Reformed grounds, contending that the distinction between fallenness and sinfulness is less stable than Irving and Torrance suppose, and that an unfallen human nature is both exegetically defensible and Christologically preferable. Crisp’s challenge is a serious one, and the Irving–Torrance tradition has not always answered it with full precision. The most adequate response, implicit in the distinctions drawn in section IX above, is that the relevant sense of “fallen” is carefully circumscribed: it refers to the conditions and susceptibilities of post-lapsarian human existence—mortality, liability to temptation, the weight of disordered inclination—and not to any actual sinful act or orientation. Whether that circumscription is stable enough to satisfy Crisp’s objection is a question on which the theological debate remains genuinely open. Some scholars further dispute whether Cyril and Gregory should be read as affirming the assumption of fallen nature in precisely the sense that Irving and Torrance intend, and the question of how far the patristic witness underwrites the later position remains a matter of ongoing debate. The Irving–Torrance position is, in short, a serious theological option with deep historical roots, even if those roots do not add up to a unanimous historical endorsement.

XII. Three Persistent Difficulties

The force of the case made in sections VII through XI should be acknowledged before it is questioned. The Irving–Torrance position is genuinely serious, its historical roots are real, and the soteriological pressure it places on its alternatives is not imaginary. Three difficulties remain, however, that this position cannot fully resolve, and together they prove more decisive than the case in its favour.

Difficulty 1: The Holiness Concern Is Not Adequately Resolved

Section XI acknowledged the distinction between fallen terrain and sinful outcome, and noted that this distinction does not quite settle whether the bearing of disordered desires is compatible with the holiness of the incarnate Son’s human nature. The difficulty runs as follows.

Concupiscence, understood in the classical sense, is not simply a neutral susceptibility to external pressure. It is a disordered orientation of desire—desire toward objects that are contrary to God, arising prior to any deliberate act of the will. The Irving–Torrance response moves in two directions: it invokes the nature/person distinction to show that such disorder in the human nature does not constitute sinfulness in the divine person; and it invokes the distinction between inclination and rebellion (section IX) to argue that, in Christ’s case, these inclinations were “never in alliance with a rebellious self.” Both moves are illuminating, but neither fully resolves the difficulty.

The nature/person distinction shows that Christ’s having concupiscence would not constitute actual sin—a verdict with respect to acts. What it does not show is that the bearing of morally disordered desires is consistent with the holiness proper to the human nature of the Son of God. The question here is not whether Christ sinned but whether “the holy thing” (Luke 1:35) conceived by the Spirit and born of Mary was holy in the constitution of his human nature, or merely in his personal orientation and the outcomes of his acts. The tradition’s strong instinct—expressed in the Roman Catholic doctrine of the immaculata conceptio as applied to Christ, and in the broader Protestant insistence on his spotless inner life—that Christ’s humanity was pure in its very condition and not merely in its conduct, is not obviously wrong. The nature/person distinction does not, by itself, show that it is.

The distinction between inclination and rebellion is similarly limited in its reach. It correctly observes that Christ’s inclinations had no rebellious self to ally with. But “having no rebellious self to ally with” is a description of the personal context of those inclinations, not of the inclinations themselves. If the inclinations were genuinely concupiscent—genuinely oriented toward objects contrary to God—then they are morally disordered whether or not they find a willing partner in a rebellious will. The Irving–Torrance tradition has not produced a fully satisfying answer to this point. The essay’s acknowledgment in section XI that the question of the position’s internal stability “remains genuinely open” is more telling than it might first appear: it is a concession that the most fundamental objection has not been closed.

Difficulty 2: The Gregorian Axiom Is Extended Beyond Its Original Context

Gregory of Nazianzus forged his axiom in Epistle 101⁵ in response to a specific claim: that the Logos, in becoming incarnate, assumed the human body and irrational soul but not the rational soul or mind (nous). Gregory’s reply was that if the rational soul is missing from what Christ assumed, then the rational soul is missing from what he healed—and since the rational soul is precisely the seat of sin’s disorder, that omission would be catastrophic for salvation.

The structure of the argument is accordingly this: missing parts of human nature → those parts go unhealed. The application of this logic to the condition of the assumed nature—whether it was fallen or unfallen, whether it bore concupiscence or not—is an extension of the original argument, not a direct application of it. The question Gregory was answering was: “Did Christ assume a complete human nature?” The question now being pressed by the same axiom is: “Did that nature bear the post-lapsarian condition of fallen existence?” These are related questions, but they are not the same question. The first concerns the structural completeness of the assumed humanity; the second concerns its historical condition. Gregory’s logic moves from the first but does not itself reach the second without an additional inferential step—one that Gregory himself did not take, and one that his own theological commitments do not unambiguously support.

This observation does not render the extension illegitimate; it flows coherently from the same soteriological instinct, and the analogy is principled. But a principled analogical extension is not the same as a direct application, and the essay has been treating the axiom as if it were directly applicable to the question of concupiscence rather than extended to it. Once this distinction is acknowledged, the axiom’s authority in the present debate is proportionately diminished.

Difficulty 3: The Axiom Is Performing Work That Exegesis Alone Cannot Supply

The exegetical situation, as sections II and III have noted, is genuinely underdetermined. The adverbial reading of χωρὶς ἁμαρτίας in Hebrews 4:15 is more defensible than the exceptive reading and is favoured by the majority of modern commentators. But the adverbial reading establishes only that the text does not exclude Christ’s bearing of the interior conditions of fallen humanity; it does not require it. The limited-likeness and sinful-concupiscence options are not exegetically ruled out by the Greek—they are simply not the reading for which the text most naturally calls.

The Gregorian axiom has been invoked throughout this essay to break this exegetical tie. But if the axiom is an extended application rather than a direct one—as difficulty 2 has argued—then it cannot bear this adjudicating role without independent biblical justification for the extension itself. The New Testament texts cited in section VII—Romans 8:3, Romans 6:4, Hebrews 2:17—genuinely support the claim that salvation has participatory and incarnational depth. None of them, however, requires the assumption of concupiscence as such. Romans 8:3’s “likeness of sinful flesh” is consistent with the Irving–Torrance reading but does not demand it; Hebrews 2:14–17’s solidarity language grounds the atonement in genuine participation in the human condition but does not specify the interior phenomenology of Christ’s temptations. The inference from “participatory soteriology is biblical” to “therefore Christ bore concupiscence” requires the Gregorian axiom as an intermediate step, and it is precisely that step which is now in question. The participatory dimensions of salvation identified in section VII are not mistaken; what is mistaken is the assumption that they supply exegetical warrant for the specific Irving–Torrance claim about concupiscence, when in fact they rely on the axiom to do so.

Revisiting the Costs of the Competing Options

Once these three difficulties are registered, the costs previously identified in the limited-likeness and sinful-concupiscence options look considerably less decisive than they appeared in sections III and V. Both options were found wanting primarily because they left the Gregorian logic unanswered—a gap “difficult to close without qualification.” But that gap is significantly narrowed if the axiom’s extension to concupiscence cannot be sustained. The genuinely applicable force of the axiom concerns the structural completeness of what Christ assumed: he must have assumed a full human nature, rational soul included, and this both options affirm without reservation. They differ from the dependent-Christ position only on the question of the condition of what was assumed, and it is precisely on that question that the axiom’s authority has now been challenged.

Both options must still answer the pastoral question of whether Christ’s sympathy for the struggling believer is fully grounded. The Irving–Torrance tradition rightly presses here: a Christ who did not share the interior disorder of fallen humanity faces something structurally different from what we face, and this asymmetry should be acknowledged honestly rather than minimised. It can be answered, however, without the Irving–Torrance solution. On either the limited-likeness or the sinful-concupiscence reading, Christ faced genuine external temptation, bore the full weight of human mortality and suffering, experienced grief and rejection and the agony of Gethsemane, and resisted all of it in the Spirit-sustained obedience of a genuinely human will. Without the interior pull that sometimes rationalises the believer’s capitulation, his temptations were no less demanding—and in some respects more so, since he bore them without the anodyne of yielding. The sympathy he offers is qualified by this asymmetry; it is not destroyed by it.

XIII. Conclusion

The dilemma posed by Hebrews 2:17 and 4:15 is a genuine one, and the Irving–Torrance tradition offers what is in many respects the most theologically ambitious response to it. By affirming that Christ assumed fallen human nature in the full weight of its condition, overcame its interior disorders through the Spirit’s sustaining work, and thereby conquered from within the very conditions from which we need to be freed, the tradition honours the pastoral claims of Hebrews with unusual thoroughness. The positive case set out in sections VIII through X is a serious one, and the Gregorian pressure it brings to bear on its alternatives is not imaginary. Any adequate Christology must reckon honestly with the force of that case.

Nevertheless, the three difficulties identified in section XII are, taken together, sufficient to render the position unsatisfying as a conclusion. The holiness concern—whether the bearing of morally disordered desires is compatible with the constitution of the Son’s human nature, not merely the conduct of his personal life—is not adequately resolved by the nature/person distinction or by the observation that Christ’s inclinations had no rebellious self to ally with. The Gregorian axiom, for all its genuine soteriological insight, is being extended from the structural completeness of the assumed nature to the condition of that nature—an extension that Gregory himself did not make and that cannot be treated simply as an application of his own argument. And the axiom, even in its extended form, is performing adjudicating work between exegetically underdetermined options; the biblical texts support participatory soteriology as a general account of salvation but do not themselves reach the specific claim about concupiscence.

Once these difficulties are acknowledged, the two options that appeared most disadvantaged under the Gregorian pressure—the limited-likeness option and the sinful-concupiscence option—emerge in a considerably more favourable light. Both affirm the structural completeness of what Christ assumed. Both maintain his sinlessness without qualification. Both have deep historical roots in the mainstream of the Christian tradition. The limited-likeness option, in the tradition of Turretin, presents Christ’s humanity as an unfallen humanity—not a truncated one but a perfected one, restored to the condition for which human nature was originally designed. The sinful-concupiscence option, more exegetically precise, does not weaken the scope of “in every respect” but argues that what the exception “without sin” already excludes is precisely the domain of concupiscence, understood as a post-lapsarian disorder belonging to the realm of the sinful. Each option carries its own costs, principally in the structural asymmetry of Christ’s temptations relative to ours; but those costs are answerable within the resources that each option already possesses, and they are less decisive than they appeared when the Gregorian axiom was performing its full adjudicating role.

There is no compelling reason to choose between the limited-likeness and sinful-concupiscence options. They differ primarily in where they locate the relevant distinction—at the level of “every respect” (limited-likeness) or at the level of “without sin” (sinful-concupiscence)—and in the taxonomical assumptions they make about concupiscence’s relationship to sin and fallen nature. Both are exegetically available, both are historically supported, and both leave room for the Spirit’s work in sanctification to address the concupiscent condition of believers on the basis of Christ’s atoning work—without requiring that he shared that condition himself. The unresolved question of precisely where concupiscence belongs in the taxonomy of sin, nature, and fall is itself the reason why neither option can claim decisive superiority over the other, and why the essay is right to leave both standing.

The pastoral stakes deserve a final word. Hebrews was written to a community under pressure—exhausted, tempted to abandon its confession, uncertain whether its high priest could truly understand its struggle. The answer the author gives is not purely doctrinal but deeply personal: he has been there. The limited-likeness and sinful-concupiscence readings affirm this, though they qualify its scope. Christ did not pass through human history unmoved: he knew hunger and grief, rejection and abandonment, the agony of Gethsemane and the desolation of the cross. He faced genuine temptation—real external pressure, real cost, real obedience— and overcame it. His sympathy for the struggling believer is not purely formal; it is grounded in genuine human experience of what faithfulness costs. That the interior disorder of concupiscence may not have been part of his experience is a genuine asymmetry, but it is one that the author of Hebrews does not appear to have regarded as disqualifying: what is affirmed, emphatically and pastorally, is that he was tempted in every respect as we are, and that he did not sin. To rest in that affirmation—without resolving every question about its inner phenomenology—may itself be the most faithful response to the text.

Bibliography

Attridge, Harold W. Hebrews: A Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews. Hermeneia. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1989.

Cockerill, Gareth Lee. The Epistle to the Hebrews. NICNT. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012.

Council of Orange. “Canons of the Council of Orange (529).” https://www.creeds.net/ancient/orange.htm.

Council of Trent. “Session V: Decree Concerning Original Sin (17 June 1546).” https://history.hanover.edu/texts/trent/ct05.html.

Crisp, Oliver D. Divinity and Humanity: The Incarnation Reconsidered. Current Issues in Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Cyril of Alexandria. On the Unity of Christ. Translated by John A. McGuckin. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995.

Gregory of Nazianzus. “Letter 101 (To Cledonius the Priest, against Apollinarius).” In NPNF², vol. 7, edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, 439–43. Buffalo: Christian Literature, 1894. https://www.tertullian.org/fathers2/NPNF2-07/Npnf2-07-59.htm.

Irenaeus. Against Heresies. In Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1, edited by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson. Buffalo: Christian Literature, 1885. https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf01.

Irving, Edward. The Orthodox and Catholic Doctrine of Our Lord’s Human Nature. London: Baldwin and Cradock, 1830.

John of Damascus. On the Orthodox Faith. In NPNF², vol. 9. https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf209.

Lane, William L. Hebrews 1–8. WBC 47A. Dallas: Word, 1991.

Luther, Martin. Lectures on Romans. Translated by Wilhelm Pauck. Library of Christian Classics 15. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1961.

Owen, John. Pneumatologia: A Discourse Concerning the Holy Spirit. In The Works of John Owen, edited by William H. Goold, vol. 3. Edinburgh: Johnstone and Hunter, 1850–1853. https://www.monergism.com/works-john-owen.

Torrance, Thomas F. Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ. Edited by Robert T. Walker. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2008.

———. The Mediation of Christ. Colorado Springs: Helmers and Howard, 1992.

Turretin, Francis. Institutes of Elenctic Theology. Translated by George M. Giger. Edited by James T. Dennison Jr. 3 vols. Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1992–1997.

---

All Bible quotations are from the English Standard Version (ESV).

---

View Source on GitHub

1. On Heb 4:14–16, these three commentaries treat χωρὶς ἁμαρτίας as qualifying Christ’s endurance of testing from the side of sinlessness rather than as marking out a sphere of human experience from which interior temptation is excluded; I take that exegesis to align with the “adverbial” construal defended above. Harold W. Attridge, Hebrews: A Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1989), 137–42; William L. Lane, Hebrews 1–8, WBC 47A (Dallas: Word, 1991), 114–23; Gareth Lee Cockerill, The Epistle to the Hebrews, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), 218–30. ↩

2. Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, trans. George M. Giger, ed. James T. Dennison Jr., 3 vols. (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1992–1997), 2:405–30 (Topic XIII, “The Person and State of Christ,” esp. qq. 7–10 on Christ’s assumption of true human nature without sin). ↩

3. Second Council of Orange (529), canons 5–6, in Canons of the Council of Orange, https://www.creeds.net/ancient/orange.htm. ↩

4. Council of Trent, “Decree Concerning Original Sin,” Fifth Session, 17 June 1546, §5, in Session V: Decree Concerning Original Sin, https://history.hanover.edu/texts/trent/ct05.html. ↩

5. Gregory of Nazianzus, “Letter 101 (To Cledonius the Priest, against Apollinarius),” in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 7, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Buffalo: Christian Literature, 1894), 440–41 (Greek to gar aproslepton atherapeuton). ↩ ↩²

6. Edward Irving, The Orthodox and Catholic Doctrine of Our Lord’s Human Nature (London: Baldwin and Cradock, 1830). ↩

7. Thomas F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, ed. Robert T. Walker (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2008); Thomas F. Torrance, The Mediation of Christ (Colorado Springs: Helmers and Howard, 1992). ↩

8. Martin Luther, Lectures on Romans, trans. Wilhelm Pauck, Library of Christian Classics 15 (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1961), on Rom 5:4, 124–31. ↩

9. John of Damascus, Exposition of the Orthodox Faith 3.9–12, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 9, ed. Philip Schaff (Buffalo: Christian Literature, 1899), 45–52. ↩

10. Cyril of Alexandria, On the Unity of Christ, trans. John A. McGuckin (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995), 95–111. ↩

11. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.18.1–7, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Buffalo: Christian Literature, 1885), 444–48. ↩

12. John Owen, Pneumatologia: A Discourse Concerning the Holy Spirit, in The Works of John Owen, ed. William H. Goold, vol. 3 (Edinburgh: Johnstone and Hunter, 1855), 171–220. ↩

13. Oliver D. Crisp, Divinity and Humanity: The Incarnation Reconsidered, Current Issues in Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 90–117 (ch. 4, “Did Christ have a fallen human nature?”), esp. 93 on the inseparability of “fallenness” and sinfulness in traditional formulations of original sin. ↩