The Expression of Like Ideas

I must deal with the concept of “transcendence,” particularly as I believe it is misapplied to the teachings of Jesus (and, of course, to the understanding of divinity that undergirds Jesus’ teachings.)

I will refer to a Patheos blog post by Anthony Costello:

“The Next Major Shift In Christian Apologetics?: Paganism & The Power of God”

(https://www.patheos.com/blogs/theologicalapologetics/2022/10/the-next-major-shift-in-christian-apologetics-paganism-the-power-of-god/)

Costello writes, “Human beings are designed to worship that which is somehow above them, but which is also personal in nature. If they do not enter into relationship with God (who is ultimate in both aspects), they will find a lesser, but similar, replacement.”

Costello is repeating a perennial mis-statement of Christian theology—that human beings, such as we can understand them, reflect what we can presume to label “God’s design.”  Whether polluted by The Fall (with which I disagree) or shown to be lacking from the very recorded start (which I have described as Adam’s lack of satisfaction in being “alone”), humanity has never reflected a “design” that can be assigned to the will of God.  Indeed, the more it is contended that human beings (who Jesus called every one “evil”) reflect God’s design—and also the more it is held that we can presume to comprehend that original design—the more likely it is that we will fail at the last to understand our needs and to appreciate the salvation offered by Jesus.

Contrary to Costello, “human beings” are NOT “designed” to “worship that which is somehow above them, but which is also personal in nature.”  We are in a state different from that which we might contend was the original state of created humanity (if indeed we might even grasp what that state was).  Looking to our present state as some sort of shadow of our proper creation leads us to misunderstand Jesus’ role in re-establishing that proper condition.  Jesus did not go about connecting us with a God “somehow above” us, and he did not go about connecting us to something “personal.”  Jesus went about drawing us through those spatial and natural conceptions toward the ultimately inconceivable—the God I have described as the great Other.

Our God is a transcendent God, but standard Christian theology gives us a shrunken and impious version of that transcendence.  Christianity presents a “transcendent” God who “transcends” every boundary and every conceivable limit WITHIN THE COLLECTION OF PROPERTIES WHICH WE CAN CONCEPTUALIZE.  The “God” of Christianity can be everywhere at every time and know everything.  On the other hand, the true God transcends time and space and thought—or are we to presume otherwise?  The very idea that we can reenter communion with God is the greatest idea—the least conceivable idea—that we might encounter in our earthly existence.

Jesus’ ability to draw us again into communion with God is the ultimate miracle of salvation, and it is that very ability that is the center of the gospel narrative.  Jesus BEFORE HIS PASSION told his disciples that he had overcome the world, and Jesus’ ability to reunite us with God is the miracle of his narrative and of his salvation.  The Christian idea that Jesus saved through the Resurrection is nothing but a shrunken version of Jesus’ miraculous quality.  The Christian fetish with the Resurrection takes a stated version of “something that could happen only miraculously” (Jesus dying and then resurrecting himself—the “himself” part being crucial, what with the regularity with which people rose from the dead in those days), and then Christianity presumes to sell that story as a recognition of God’s (and Jesus’) “transcendence.”  This is a horror.  The dirt scuffed about on the floor of the tomb was a greater miracle than we can truly conceive, as is the very existence of anything.

Costello writes that if human beings “do not enter into relationship with God (who is ultimate in both aspects), they will find a lesser, but similar, replacement.”  The “both aspects” to which Costello refers are encapsulated in his description of God as “that which is somehow above them, but which is also personal in nature.”  Wow.  So the “transcendent” God who only Jesus could simply and without reservation call “Father” is “transcendent” enough to be ultimately “above” humanity and ultimately possessing of a personal nature.  What a pitifully underwhelming description of God, who truly transcends all direction—indeed, all dimension—and whose appraisal by humanity as a “personality” must border on degrading blasphemy.  Sadly, it is inescapable that “transcendence” in Christian theology does not refer to the inconceivableness of God, but rather to a self-congratulatory contest of trying to come up with the most sublime and expansive descriptions of conceptuality into which to huff up an idealized balloon of “God”.

Later, in a comment reply in which Costello contends that “atheism can’t last,” he tells us that “human beings are made to worship God, or, put another way, they are made for something that transcends themselves.”  This statement is particularly unfortunate, but is does highlight the essential flaw in Christianity’s assessment of the nature of God.  Actually, nothing in our existence is more to be avoided than acting as though “human beings are made to worship God, or, put another way, they are made for something that transcends themselves.”  “Transcends themselves”?  Girding its loins most earnestly, Christianity through the ages has attempted to expand its conceptions of the inconceivable God, with greater or lesser success, but it has never been able to free itself from that attachment of worship to appraisal of God.  After all, such a thing SEEMS pious, but appraisal is forever tethered to the self-conception of the one doing the appraising.

Unfortunately, there is a crucial difference between seeing God as frustrating all concepts, and seeing God as satisfying convincingly all expansive and majestic concepts we can come up with.  When our intellects collapse before the prospect of conceptualizing God, we at least in our exhaustion have taken a shuddering step—even a shuddering attempt at a step—toward true worship.  When, on the other hand, we praise God as a the ultimate of anything we can conceive, we are indeed trying to worship (as we must try), but we can never forget that we are shoving toward God a gift that is presented only with the provision that its value is commingled with the esteem we attach to our attempts to understand.

And any attempt to understand is destined to fail.  That failure is part of the worship, but a true moral failing latent in any of this is bound up with the idea that humans must worship something that “transcends themselves.”  God transcends all concepts, while—all disavowings of idolatry notwithstanding—praising God for “transcending” any limits within or between concepts merely rebounds to the undeniable fact that the worshipper is claiming participation in the scenario.  Actually, worshipping a God who is “transcendent” requires crucially the realization that the worshipper is neither “transcendent” nor capable of postulating any comprehensible participation in transcendence.

A worshipper of God is not an “understander” of God, and Costello notwithstanding, any attention directed to the notion that human beings “are made for something that transcends themselves” would be as meaningless as to contend that Jesus, demanding that his followers see their Savior in their fellow humans, was interchangeably demanding as Savior that his followers see themselves in their fellow humans.  We must extinguish both our selves and our self-driven approaches to understanding.  Our proper task in addressing ourselves to God’s transcendence is to attempt—however feebly—to extinguish all limitations of conception that we attach to God.  Any conceptualization that we retain is necessarily originating in, and tied to, our self-conceptions.  We have no other way of understanding our existence, yet God is not some burnished and magnified version of existence.

Costello, of course, is not solely to blame for the notion that human beings “are made for something that transcends themselves.”  Paul pandered to the philosophers by repeating back to them the notion that “in him we live, and move, and have our being”—as though the inescapable and rather pedestrian notion of the connectedness of existence was of signal import.  An ultimately unassailable contention can be made that termites live and move and have their being in the Creator—if one wishes to waste time on attenuated strands of thought.

Jesus, on the other hand, credited his audience with knowing how the world works, and how the universe in its existence “works” only with the postulation of an ineffable Source—at least as far as we can understand.  Between the mundane elements of the world with which we are familiar, and the ultimate fact that we cannot understand anything ultimately, we exist.  Jesus ought not to have to tell us this, but he does make it clear when he presents to Nicodemus the idea of the wind—a mundane aspect of our existence that nevertheless (then as now) we do not understand in its ultimate aspects.  The wind can be understood in its nearness in terms of the person’s self, and in its distant origins in terms of the great Other.

It is through the meta-conception of the great Other—God both near and far—that Jesus directs us.  The God of Jesus transcends everything, and any notion we might have that the God of Jesus “transcends ourselves” is ridiculous.  “Why do you call me good?” asks Jesus.  There is but one who is good.  God is not the culmination or apex or type or consummation of any “good” that we can conceptualize—the adjective “good” as we know it (along with any other expression of esteem) must break down when we try to approach its application to God.

So also must break down any contention that God “transcends” us, and the expression of like ideas on the part of Christians is an aspect of lamentable idolatry.

Diving Into the Process

One of the things that sticks out most prominently about the theologians’ version of the earliest part of the Bible is their musings about why Abel’s sacrifice was acceptable, while Cain’s was not.  Certainly a bias in favor of blood sacrifice seems to be detectable in the text, although the theologians must admit that a bloodless sacrifice was perfectly acceptable.  Abel’s sacrifice is described more explicitly than Cain’s—what with the first-born of the flock and their fat as well—but any pointedly-intended praise of Abel’s sacrifice (if it is relatable to the subsequent instructions to the Hebrews) would have emphasized that it was “without blemish.”

There does not seem to be anything wrong with Cain’s sacrifice (which, in its vegetarian essence, would not have the same oomph as Abel’s.)  In truth, we do not know why Abel’s sacrifice was accepted, and Cain’s was not.  Most importantly, we can never know with certainty what would make any person (or any person’s efforts) acceptable.  “If you do what is right, will you not be accepted?” was certainly a good question to be asked of Cain, but it tends toward a challenge to Cain to “do what is right,” not to opine about what is acceptable to God.

Similarly, statements from Jesus are best understood as challenges, not as postulates for our examination.  The idea of us as “the salt of the earth” is just one of a galaxy of gospel statements that are gazed at by theologians in light of notion of salvation/justification, but we must ask a pertinent question: Of what profit is it to us to understand (as though ever we might) the connection of “losing one’s saltiness” to ultimate salvation (or the possible loss thereof) if we can never know how “salty” we are, or whether or not our “saltiness” is still sufficient?

We are participants in the salvation process (or else all opining is without substance).  We are not observers of the salvation process.  Any notion of the course of our participation (e.g. “roused, readied, reaped”) is only of value if we dive into the process, not hover above it.

We Cannot Think Ourselves

We were all created like Adam.  The idea of our being in communion with God is the greatest idea that we might try to hold, yet everything about ourselves stands in opposition to that idea.  And I mean everything.  This is indeed an important point—so much of Christian history has been focused on the notion of a pervasive “sin nature” that pollutes our (apparently, according to the theologians) entirely satisfactory states in other regards.  In other words, there is nothing wrong (other than forgivable limitations) with our minds and our bodies—there is only something wrong with our moral natures.

This contention stands in utter opposition to Jesus’ formulation of the matter.  He tells us that anything can be achieved by the person who believes.  The flesh may be weak, and yet anything is possible for the person who believes.  Inescapably, then, our limitations in terms of physicality and mentality are as much our moral failings as anything we would imperiously decree to be “moral failings.”

This is why Jesus, at the point of the Crucifixion, says, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do”—leaving theologians to contend about who might be innocently ignorant (the pagan soldiers?) and included in Jesus’ statement, though the statement’s presentation in the gospel is on its face generally directed.  The statement is indeed generally directed, in the largest sense.  None of us knows what we do—none of us knows anything—and the reason for this, according to Jesus, is that we do not ask for knowledge.

“Forgive them, for they know not what they do” is not an exculpatory statement.  Ignorance is no excuse for sin, for ignorance is a sin.  We could know everything, if we would only ask for such knowledge.  It is not, unfortunately, in our nature to ask sincerely.  Jesus is highlighting the sin of ignorance, and asking the Father to forgive that sin.  Jesus is not arguing away the Father’s rightful wrath against those who—in any capacity—participated in the torture of his son.

Only when we realize that sin is not that unsettling “doing nasty things” that we pretend it is, and realize that all of our limitations (as against the Father’s original intention for us) is a complex of sin, can we begin to address our real moral condition before God.  We sin when we do horrible things, and we sin when we fail to do good things, and we sin when we fail to think good things.  In all of our doings and thinkings we are limited, and Jesus says that is our fault.

This now has let me understand what Jesus meant when he described the Sheep and the Goats.  It seems illogical—as I have written before—that Jesus would tell how people at the final judgment would ask “when did we do (or not do) thus and such to thee”—illogical, that is, once Jesus has told the story in advance.  Would not his hearers and succeeding generations know the “punch line,” and therefore refrain from saying it?  The answer is that we will always think in the us-versus-them fashion that causes us not to see our Savior in our fellows.  We will always fail in our thoughts, and at the point of judgment that set of mental failings which is really part of our set of sins will be with us still.

Even at the end, we will think in terms of “Lord, when did we see you hungry, and not feed you?”  Such is our sin nature, and we cannot think ourselves out of it.

The Travail of Stature

I am trying to present “roused, readied, reaped” in its simplest formulation, so as to demonstrate its application to the teachings of Jesus.  “Roused, readied, reaped” is an arc (really, innumerable arcs) in our existence, and so “roused, readied, reaped” is a temporal-spatial thing.  Jesus, in his totality, is of course not a temporal-spatial entity.

And so time and space—and we—must bow before Jesus.  This is a careful formulation, meant to be distinguishable from the notion that true piety can be exhibited in bowing before a Jesus who strides across time and space—as though it would be proper to confine the Creator of All on a stage of dimensions wrought by himself.

And so I intend to conceptualize our predicament as in part our being bound in our creaturely limitations—though it probably could go without saying that it is the refusal to acknowledge such limitations that is our crucial failing, not the limitations themselves.  Whether we pretend we are free of time and space, or we pretend that Jesus as God shares our confinement in time and space—in either event the result is the same.  I will even maintain—as I have tried to describe before—that our existences as persons can even be understood as ranging counter-intuitively across time and space (involving us in all horrid deeds always and everywhere) while yet we are—unlike Jesus—still within the larger temporal-spatial realm.

I call our predicament “the travail of stature.”  We suffer because we are.  We exist, yet we don’t know why we should exist.  We orient ourselves improperly, yet we don’t know why this should be so.  Jesus is not so limited, or so burdened—the Jesus of his divine nature, of course.  As a man he existed so as to wonder if God’s plan for him might not be God’s ultimate will (Gethsemane), and as a man he did not know how to square himself with his earthly fate (Calvary).  As the perfect divine Son of God, of course, he did not sin in his sufferings, but as a man he experienced what all persons will experience.

And so to return to us mortal persons.  By “travail of stature,” I refer to that predicament that binds together the active and passive elements of the existence that torments us.  We exist in time and space.  We are bedeviled in time and space.  “Travail of stature” is two words (linked with “of”) meant to encapsulate a single idea, yet each of those words includes both elements of that idea.  “Travail” indicates suffering, but (and I know I am flirting with word-games) “travail” shares a derivation with “travel”—we bear burdens, even if only our own weights of being, along the road we call time.  And “time,” as I have indicated before, is a necessary element of stature—we must be something across time if we are to be that “something” at all.

And as for “stature”: stature refers to how something “stands,” yet as I tried to describe in the previous post, for something to possess “standing” (or “stature”) it must possess that standing both in terms of some measure, and in terms of some passage of time.  Therefore “travail of stature” can be thought to apply simply to the burden of existence, yet a careful application of the phrase will be bound up with the intrinsically “bound-up” quality of our experiences.  We are the subjects of space and time.  In the potential of Adam’s communion with God there would have been no necessary elements of time or space.

Similarly the divine Jesus was never separated from God by time or space.  We are not so situated, and so we suffer the travail of stature.  Only in this realization can we grasp what Jesus requires of us (though ever and always in this life we will be lacking.)  Over and over again in the gospels Jesus directs us to consider our stature, and over and over again through the centuries we have busied ourselves about what we are—or are not—to undertake.  This seemingly laudable quest to undertake the right things, or to undertake the right thoughts, presumes of necessity that we grasp the stature from which we operate.  This grasping is always futile, and so our moral schemes have always tended to spiral toward futility.

Unsurprisingly, the moral progress of humanity (such as it is) is ever and always rooted in the difficult and draining process of humanity loosening its grasp on notions of stature (supremacy, overlordship, racial purity, ideological exceptionalism, to name a few).  Such progress does not nearly so much lie in us getting better, but rather in us getting a better view of how great, and how transcendent, must be the attributes of the divine—the Great Other who can awe us out of our pretensions to stature.

The Thing of Stature

This post is just to tie down a one-word description of the moral import of “roused, readied, reaped.”  That word is “stature.”  This condensed approach that I intend to use is rooted in what is itself a condensation of “roused, readied, reaped”—which, as I have written, is a categorization of the events of Creation, from the momentary to the eons-long.  Those events occur in time and space, and while they must be linked in our temporal-spatial conceptions of the universe, similarly they share the distinctions of their own describable beginnings, middles, and ends—hence this blog’s title.

And so “roused, readied, reaped” has to do with time and space, although in any religious implications the particular designation of time or space or any other possible dimension must be understood as provisional—presumably there is that which transcends dimensions.  Of course, no human can understand that which is "hyper-dimensional” (or some other such silly term), but the attempt to recognize that which is sublimely outside of dimensions is perhaps best framed in terms of concepts that are familiar to us, and yet which can be understood routinely in terms of our limitations, rather than in terms of the exaggerations of “understanding” that we tend toward whenever we have satisfied ourselves that we have named something.

I suggest that, having distilled an approach to “roused, readied, reaped” into “time and space,” it behooves us to consider the still-simpler imagery of “stature.”  (I will not pretend that my attachment to “stature” is not based on what I understand to be Jesus’ emphasis of the concept.)  “Stature” seems to be one-dimensional, insofar as an entity’s stature can be described so when as few as a single criterion is being applied.  I contend that the proper religious application of “stature,” however, is not so simple.  For something to possess stature, it must exist in some dimension—be that dimension physical, social, or intellectual—and the very business of “possession” and “existence” must bear a description of the entity over time.  “Stature” can apply only to that which possesses some category of distinction to some extent, and over some span of time.

“Stature” is what something possesses in reference to some other thing, and over some time.  Something indistinguishable from something else is, inescapably, that something in itself.  Something that possesses some distinction and yet does not do so over some span of time is a thing that has never possessed that distinction at all.

Stature is that which every thing possesses, and for ourselves our stature is that which we presume to possess.  I will try in the future to illustrate how “stature” makes plain (or as plain as can be) that which Jesus requires of us.

The Existence of Jesus

In my last post I wrote:

“The great moment of humanity’s fate was not the apple-story Fall, but the primordial moment in which God decided of Adam, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone’—when the element of ‘alone’ reflected the dispositions of Adam, not the dispositions of the Creator who for eons has lamented a broken communion with the man and his progeny.”

Against this I placed a description of Adam’s savior:

“This is the Jesus who could never stop moving toward God, who could never stop reaching out toward God, who could never stop yearning for God.  Between us and Jesus, of course (as between us and God) is a chasm.  Across the chasm come the dwindling strains of the screams and of the laughter, all of which—even together with every breath of Jesus—were bought for us at an inestimable price.”

Jesus could never be alone in the universe of God—even in the totality of totalities of God.  Adam (and his offspring) could be alone.  Jesus is the Adam who cannot be without God.  Jesus is the Adam who cannot exist—who cannot be conceived to exist—without God.

In his incarnation, Jesus—the eternal Son of God—was a man like any other, except in the aspect of humanity’s alienation from God.  It is a fool’s errand to attempt to pick out the particulars of how Jesus’ divinity would have informed him as a man, or have affected his ability to do things as a man, or have colored and defined his expression of himself to his fellow humans.  When “God” and when “man”?  When “God-like” and when “human”?  It suffices to say that he was a man, and it ought to suffice, to observe that untying the mysteries of his “dual” nature is no more to be achieved than untying the mystery of God’s existence itself.

Indeed, it might be more apt to observe that the mortal human, created in the image of God and yet capable of desecrating that image, is the one with a “dual” nature.  Adam lacked nothing when he was created—the horrible mystery is why Adam (and all of us) could find existence in God’s Creation to be an unfulfilling state.  (This, by the way, can clean up any concern about God in Genesis described as creating them “male” and “female” in his image.  There is no reason to imagine that Eve was created less pristinely than Adam and—like Adam—her first narrative description has to do with a proclivity to find something lacking in existence.)

As I wrote above, it is a fool’s errand to attempt to pick out the particulars of how Jesus’ divinity would have informed him as a man, or have affected his ability to do things as a man, or have colored and defined his expression of himself to his fellow humans.  This is no small consideration.  The depictions of Jesus in the Gospels dance back and forth, for example, between Jesus being described as knowing all that was in the minds of people around him, and Jesus being described as asking honest questions and reacting to the answers as though he had to digest them in real time.  Such things are puzzles only to commentators who insist on pulling apart mysteries, and all that is to be found within is more mystery.

No one has to read three-quarters of the way through the Bible, arriving at last at what we generally call the “New Testament,” to be confronted by such mysteries.  Does God need to ask Adam where he is?  Does God have such a body as to enjoy “the cool of the day?”  Could Adam have imagined that he could evade God’s gaze?  Such things are stories, meant to illustrate truths, and it is conceit indeed to imagine that we can grasp more than a fraction of those truths in any event.  In the gospels we are confronted by stories.  Sometimes we like to call them “accounts”—as though that altered the fact that we are presented merely with ideas, and—like the limited viewpoints of stories—such ideas are in essence merely voices thrown against ineffable mysteries, voices the echoes of which are the moments when we think we have a greater understanding, to be followed hard upon by other moments when the illumination—was it real or not?—fades from us.

What is really lamentable about our attempts to understand the mysteries of religion is our tendency to try to answer the wrong types of questions.  No casual reader of Church history has to be told of the incredibly virulent disputes about the Incarnation.  That the general answer arrived at after centuries is that the incarnate Jesus was “all God and all man” is scarcely surprising—in that (apart from it being a truth understandable to us when we are exhausted from postulating otherwise), it is so general an answer as to swamp other, more particularistic, contentions.

But what have we achieved when we declare that the incarnate Jesus was “all God and all man,” when we apply such an idea so as to undercut the manifest import of gospel stories?  I am thinking most particularly of Jesus’ cry of despair on the Cross.  “All God and all man” at that point means little if Jesus is thought to be suffering all the pains of a mortal, yet denied by our analysis one of the greatest pains of death—the pain of uncertainty that must always attend a mortal’s limited understanding.  It is contended sometimes that Jesus was simply praying from the psalms—an unprovable contention that would scarcely explain why such a Jesus, possessed at that moment of a divinely-unquestioning human comportment, would choose to burden untold generations with such a choice among so many in the psalms.

Or as I wrote of Jesus in the last post but one:

“When his mortal mind was burdened—and in the horrifying instance violently beset—with the human-intellect-defying question of God’s justice, he cried out, ‘Why have you forsaken me?’  For Jesus—reckoned to have set aside his divinity for this episode—to have understood as a man the totality of what was happening to him, would have been as unnatural for him as it would have been for him to be able to hang there and suffer as a man until the crack of doom.”

And yet we seem to be perennially unable to shake the imagery of “all God and all man” as being “man on the outside and God on the inside.”  I am thinking of the debate about the “historicity” of Jesus, wherein it is claimed by some (often leaving the idea of the supernatural aside) that the Jesus of the early Church must have been based on a real figure, while it is claimed by others that the early Church believed first in an otherworldly crucifixion—a supernatural rather than earthly phenomenon—that was only later imagined to have occurred on Earth to a real man.

In one mode of analysis, it might be granted that each side (the “historicist” and the “mythicist”) has its points, but that question itself is tangential to another, which we are unlikely to notice.  If it is maintained that Jesus could not have failed to know always of the justice of God (that is, if Jesus’ cry of despair was mere display) or even if it is maintained that Jesus could not have failed to know the names of every member of every first-century Amazonian tribe—he’s “all God,” after all—what then is the distinction between a “supernatural” crucifixion and an “earthly” one?

That is—and I am addressing the question as it would exist for believers—if the humanity of Jesus did not permeate his existence in the Incarnation, so as to extend even to his most basic thoughts during the Crucifixion and otherwise, what point then is there in attempting to defend the existence of an historical Jesus versus a “supernatural” myth?  In every substance of belief—if not in the eyes of an unsympathetic secular “world”—a Jesus existing and suffering on a supernatural plane would differ in no discernable respect from an always-encyclopedically-right-thinking (and therefore in no respect doubting) flesh-and-blood Jesus hanging on a real Cross.  This never-doubting Jesus (whose divinity could not by definition be confined to a physical plane) would be simply a supernatural entity before whom was being paraded the tangible trappings of a series of events.  Calling such a supernatural procession “real” in the historical sense would be to claim for that Crucifixion no more substance than the Crucifixion as described by the mythicists.

The incarnate Jesus was divine.  How that might work out in particulars does not seem likely to be understandable to us this side of the grave.  In trying to work out how we should address the Gospels—and therefore our limited understanding of the Incarnation—it makes all the difference, whether we view humanity’s predicament as one stemming from the “Fall” (so-called) or—as I maintain—as a predicament stemming from Adam's original estrangement from God.  In the former conceptualization, that of the “Fall,” the operative notion is the sin of transgression, and therefore we try to look at the Gospels in terms of who was right and who was wrong—a somewhat problematic quest in the service of a Savior who counsels us against passing judgment.  Moreover, there are times when Jesus accords to the tantalizingly-described “Son of Man” prerogatives that frustrate (to say the least) any attempts to define Jesus’ acts as “right or wrong” according to some set of rules.

In the latter conceptualization—conceiving of humanity’s separation from God as being an ineffable mystery—“sinlessness” (if we could even hope to get our minds around all its permutations) is subservient to affinity.  Jesus, being divine, was never separated from God.  Of course, in a generalized mode of analysis, it might be said that Adam never had to be separated from God.  What was paramount, of course, in the case of Adam was his tendency to direct his attentions elsewhere, to look—unsurprisingly, we would say—for a counterpart to himself in the creaturely realm.  To call that “sinful” would be a stretching of our understanding of the word, and much less might we understand why Adam was created as he was by a God who loved him.

God loved Jesus as a man in the world, and God loved Adam as a man in the world.  We can analyze Jesus and Adam in terms of sinfulness, and we can analyze Jesus and Adam in terms of merit.  Or we can analyze the humanity shared by them in terms of the great element that the Scriptures declares to separate them in the narrative—the element of affinity with God.  Adam lost that affinity in the paradise of the Garden.  Jesus retained that affinity in the agonies of the Cross.  The Garden, for Adam, was not without its toil.  The Cross, for Jesus, was short-lived enough to surprise Pilate.  None of that matters—any more than do our puerile declarations about righteousness—in the face of the question of affinity with our Maker.