Curse, Corruption, and the Christology of Self-Love: A Hermeneutical Argument for Volitional Depravity and the Spirit-Empowered Humanity of Christ
Abstract
This paper argues that the Reformed doctrine of original sin benefits from a sharper distinction between two categories that standard formulations tend to conflate: the curse inherited from Adam (the condition of mortality, suffering, and subjection to a corrupted created order) and the corruption that characterizes every fallen human life (the volitional preference for autonomy over God’s authority). The paper proposes that the curse is inherited while corruption is chosen, and traces the implications of this distinction through anthropology, hamartiology, Christology, pneumatology, and soteriology. The argument engages the tension between Ezekiel 18:20 and Romans 5:12-19, the anthropology implicit in Jesus’ Great Commandment (Mark 12:28-31), and the Christological question of how the incarnate Son could genuinely inherit the Adamic curse while remaining sinless. The paper argues that Christ’s sinlessness is grounded in His willing, total surrender to the Father, accomplished as a genuinely human volitional act in cooperation with the Spirit’s preservative work from conception, and that the Great Commandment describes the necessary condition for escaping corruption: total love for God and others. The hermeneutical method employed is Scripture interpreting Scripture, with conclusions drawn by good and necessary consequence.
Keywords: original sin, Imago Dei, Christology, self-love, kenosis, pneumatology, volitional depravity, impeccability
1. Introduction: The Problem of Inherited Corruption
The Reformed tradition has long affirmed both the universality of human sin and the justice of God in holding sinners accountable. These twin commitments generate a tension that standard formulations of original sin have addressed with varying degrees of success. The Westminster Confession of Faith (6.3) speaks of a “corrupted nature” that is “conveyed to all their posterity descending from them by ordinary generation.” This language treats corruption as something transmitted, as though moral defect were a substance passed from parent to child through the act of generation itself.
The difficulty is that this formulation sits uneasily alongside texts that deny the transfer of guilt from parent to child. Ezekiel 18:20 is unambiguous: “The soul who sins shall die. The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer for the iniquity of the son. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself.” If corruption (understood as moral guilt or culpable defect) is transmitted rather than chosen, the prophetic denial of inherited guilt becomes problematic. Why is each person culpable for a moral orientation they did not select?
This paper proposes a distinction that resolves the tension while preserving the core Reformed commitments: total depravity (every human apart from Christ chooses sin), sola gratia (grace alone enables the reorientation of the will), and Christ’s genuine humanity (the incarnate Son shares our condition without sharing our guilt). The distinction is between curse and corruption, understood as follows:
Curse: The condition imposed by God on creation and humanity in response to Adam’s rebellion (Genesis 3:14-19). This includes mortality, suffering, toil, subjection to futility, and the disordering of the created environment. The curse is inherited universally by all who are born into the post-Fall created order, including Christ (Hebrews 2:14; Romans 8:20-22).
Corruption: The volitional preference for self-rule over God’s authority. Corruption is not transmitted; it is chosen. Every human agent, possessing the self-relating capacity of the Imago Dei and born into the cursed condition, inevitably chooses self-preference over God-preference. This inevitability is a certainty of outcome within God’s decreed order, not a mechanical compulsion of any particular act. Corruption is therefore universal without being inherited.
A note on the proposal’s relationship to the Reformed tradition. This paper is a revisionist proposal, not a mere restatement of existing confessional formulations. It consciously departs from the Augustinian/Calvinian account of original sin on one specific point: the mechanism by which corruption becomes universal. The standard formulation (WCF 6.3; Belgic Confession Art. 15; Canons of Dort III/IV.2) treats corruption as transmitted from Adam to his posterity through ordinary generation. This paper argues that the curse (penal condition) is inherited while corruption (culpable moral orientation) is chosen, universally and certainly, by each human agent within the inherited condition.
What is preserved: total depravity (universal, certain corruption apart from grace), the inability of fallen humans to choose God without prior divine initiative, the monergistic character of salvation, the necessity of the Spirit’s work for any reorientation of the will, and the federal significance of Adam’s act (God imposed the curse on all creation in judicial response to Adam’s rebellion, establishing the conditions within which all subsequent humans live and choose). What is revised: the claim that Adam’s personal guilt is imputed to his posterity apart from their own volitional corruption.
This proposal is not Pelagian. Pelagianism denies inherited damage and affirms the natural capacity of the human will to choose good without grace. This paper affirms inherited damage (the curse) and denies that any unaided human will in fact chooses God-preference over self-preference. It is not semi-Pelagian. Semi-Pelagianism affirms that the human will can initiate the turn toward God, which grace then completes. This paper affirms that the Spirit must move first to reorient the will before any human response to God is possible (Section 7.2). The revision concerns the mechanism of universality (volitional certainty under cursed conditions rather than transmitted moral substance), not the scope of depravity or the necessity of grace.
The paper develops this distinction through seven stages: definitions and scope (Section 1.1), the anthropology of self-love as a structural feature of the Imago Dei (Section 2), the hermeneutical case for the curse/corruption distinction including engagement with difficult texts and anticipated objections (Section 3), the Christological implications for Christ’s genuine inheritance of the curse and His volitional surrender as the necessary condition for escaping corruption (Section 4), Christ’s developing human awareness through general and special revelation (Section 5), the pneumatological pattern of Christ’s Spirit-empowered ministry (Section 6), and the extension of that pattern to the church through grace (Section 7).
1.1 Definitions and Scope
The argument requires precision in terminology, since several key terms carry different meanings in different theological traditions. The following definitions govern usage throughout this paper.
Curse: The condition imposed by God on creation and humanity in response to Adam’s rebellion (Genesis 3:14-19). Contents include mortality, suffering, toil, subjection to futility, and the disordering of the created environment. The curse is inherited universally by all who are born into the post-Fall created order, including Christ (Hebrews 2:14; Romans 8:20-22). The curse is a condition, not a culpable state.
Corruption: The volitional preference for self-rule over God’s authority. In this paper, corruption refers specifically to the culpable posture of the will toward autonomy. It is chosen, not transmitted. Each human agent, possessing the Imago Deiself-relating capacity and born into the cursed condition, in fact chooses self-preference over God-preference.
Noetic and affective impairment: The progressive degradation of cognitive and moral faculties that results from chosen corruption. This impairment is a consequence of corruption, not a synonym for it. Romans 1:21-28 describes the process: volitional refusal to honor God (”they did not honor him as God”) produces cognitive degradation (”they became futile in their thinking”) and escalating moral disorder (”God gave them up”). The impairment accumulates as each act of self-preference further distorts the faculty. By adulthood, the accumulated effect is substantial, which is why it can be mistaken for an inherited condition. It is not inherited; it is built, choice by choice.
Self-love: The instinctive awareness of and concern for oneself as a subject of value, concern, and responsibility. Self-love is a structural feature of the Imago Dei, present by creation design and presupposed by Jesus’ Great Commandment (Mark 12:31, “as yourself”). Self-love is distinct from self-preference.
Self-preference: The disordered orientation of self-love in which the self becomes its own ultimate authority, directing the self-relating capacity inward rather than toward God and others. Self-preference is what this paper means by corruption: the volitional act of choosing self over God. Self-love is a creation good; self-preference is its fallen distortion.
Teleological necessity: Certainty of outcome within God’s decreed order. When this paper says corruption is “inevitable” or “certain,” it means that within the decreed order, the outcome (universal human sin) is assured. This is distinct from efficient causation (direct production of an act by an agent). God decrees the conditions; the creature makes the choice. The certainty is in the decree; the culpability is in the agent.
The distinction between curse and corruption is not without Reformed precedent. The tradition has long recognized that the consequences of the Fall include both penal and moral dimensions, and that these dimensions are distinguishable even when they are inseparable in human experience. The present paper presses this distinction further than standard formulations typically do, arguing that the moral dimension (corruption) is volitional rather than transmitted, while the penal dimension (curse) is inherited universally.
2. Self-Love and the Imago Dei: Structural Feature, Not Fallen Defect
2.1 The Presupposition in the Great Commandment
When asked to identify the greatest commandment, Jesus responded with a dual command that has become the summary of the moral law:
“The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12:29-31, citing Deuteronomy 6:4-5 and Leviticus 19:18)
The second commandment contains an often-overlooked anthropological presupposition. The clause “as yourself” does not command self-love; it assumes it. Jesus treats reflexive self-love as a datum of human nature, a given that requires no instruction or justification. The command redirects an already-operative orientation: love others with the same instinctive concern you already direct toward yourself.
This presupposition is theologically significant. If self-love were a product of the Fall (a consequence of sin rather than a feature of creation), Jesus would be grounding a moral command in a fallen defect. The command would amount to: “Love your neighbor with the same disordered self-preference that characterizes your sinful nature.” This is incoherent. A moral exemplar does not ground positive obligation in moral corruption.
The better reading is that self-love, understood as reflexive self-relation (the capacity to be aware of oneself as a subject of value, concern, and responsibility), is a structural feature of the Imago Dei. Human beings are created as self-relating agents. This self-relation is part of what it means to bear God’s image, since God Himself is a self-knowing, self-relating being (the intra-Trinitarian relations presuppose divine self-knowledge).
2.2 Scriptural Grounding of Self-Relating Agency
Scripture consistently addresses human beings as deliberative subjects capable of genuine self-awareness and responsible choice.
Deuteronomy 30:19: “I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live.”
The command to choose presupposes the capacity for reflexive deliberation. The agent must be able to consider options, relate them to the self, and determine a course of action. This is self-relating agency.
Joshua 24:15: “And if it is evil in your eyes to serve the LORD, choose this day whom you will serve.”
Again, deliberative self-relation: “evil in your eyes” appeals to the agent’s own evaluative perspective. The agent assesses, weighs, and decides.
Romans 2:14-15: “For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them.”
Paul describes an internal moral dialogue: “conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse.” This is reflexive self-relation at the moral level. The agent engages with the self as an object of moral evaluation.
Genesis 1:26-27: “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.’ ... So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”
The Imago Dei is established before the Fall. Whatever capacities it entails are creation goods, not fallen defects. If self-relating agency is essential to deliberative moral choice (as the above texts demonstrate), and if deliberative moral choice is presupposed by God’s commands from the beginning (Genesis 2:16-17), then self-relating agency is part of the original created endowment.
2.3 Good and Necessary Consequence
The Imago Dei includes reflexive self-relation as a creation good. Jesus’ Great Commandment presupposes this self-relation as the baseline from which other-directed love is commanded. Self-love, understood as the instinctive awareness of and concern for oneself as a subject of value, is not sinful. It is part of what it means to be human.
The question is not whether self-love exists (it does, by creation design) but whether it is properly ordered. Before the Fall, self-love was subordinated within the love of God: the self related to itself under God’s authority and toward others. After the Fall, self-love became disordered: the self relates to itself as its own ultimate authority and against others when they compete with self-interest.
The Fall did not introduce self-love. It disordered it. This distinction is essential for what follows.
3. Curse and Corruption: A Hermeneutical Distinction
3.1 The Curse: Inherited Condition
The curse imposed in Genesis 3 is comprehensive, affecting the serpent (3:14-15), the woman (3:16), the man (3:17-19), and the ground itself (3:17). Its contents include increased pain in childbearing, relational conflict, toilsome labor, thorns and thistles, mortality (”to dust you shall return”), and subjection to a now-resistant created order.
Paul interprets this condition cosmically in Romans 8:20-22: “For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.”
The curse is the condition into which all subsequent humanity is born. It is inherited in the straightforward sense that every person born after Adam enters a world marked by mortality, suffering, scarcity, and a created order that resists human flourishing. This inheritance requires no theory of transmitted moral substance. It requires only birth into the post-Fall world.
3.2 Corruption: Chosen Orientation
Corruption, as used in this paper, denotes the volitional preference for self-rule over God’s authority. It is what Genesis 3:5 describes: “you will be like God, knowing good and evil,” understood as the assertion of interpretive and moral independence from the Creator. Sin, as defined by Scripture, is fundamentally this preference for autonomy (Genesis 3:5; Isaiah 14:13-14; Romans 1:21-23; James 4:17).
The critical claim is that corruption is chosen, not transmitted. Each human being, possessing the self-relating capacity of the Imago Dei and born into the cursed condition, makes the choice for self-preference. This choice is universal, but its universality is grounded in the certainty of outcome given the conditions, not in a metaphysical transfer of moral guilt from Adam to his descendants.
3.3 The Hermeneutical Case
Several texts support this reading when allowed to interpret one another.
Romans 5:12: “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned.”
Note the final clause: “because all sinned” (eph’ hō pantes hēmarton). Paul does not say “because all inherited Adam’s guilt.” He says “because all sinned.” The universal fact is that all sinned, each in their own person. Adam’s role is introducing the condition (sin and death entered the world through him); each person’s role is their own sinning within that condition.
Ezekiel 18:20: “The soul who sins shall die. The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer for the iniquity of the son.”
This text directly denies the transfer of guilt from parent to child. Reformed interpreters frequently argue that Ezekiel 18 addresses personal responsibility within Israel’s covenant life, rejecting a proverb about immediate intergenerational punishment (cf. Ezekiel 18:2, “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge”), rather than denying Adamic federal headship. This interpretive boundary is real. However, the principle Ezekiel articulates is stated in universal terms (”the soul who sins shall die”), and restricting it to intra-Israelite covenantal disputes requires importing a limitation the text does not express. On the reading proposed here, Ezekiel’s declaration is straightforwardly true in its fullest scope: no one bears the guilt of another’s sin. Each person’s guilt arises from their own choice of self-preference within the inherited cursed condition.
Romans 1:18-23: Paul’s account of universal human sinfulness in Romans 1 describes a volitional process: “For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened” (1:21). The progression is volitional: knowing, failing to honor, becoming futile, exchanging the truth for a lie. This is chosen corruption, not inherited defect. The noetic impairment (”futile in their thinking,” “foolish hearts darkened”) is presented as consequence of the volitional refusal, not as its cause.
James 1:14-15: “But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.”
James locates the origin of sin in the individual’s own desire. The agent is “lured and enticed by his own desire,” not by an inherited moral substance. The progression from desire to sin to death is personal and volitional.
3.4 Romans 5:12-19: Engagement with the Federal Reading
The standard Reformed reading (Murray, Hodge, the Westminster tradition) treats Adam as federal head whose guilt is imputed to his posterity. Romans 5:18-19 is the primary anchor: “Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men. For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.”
On the federal reading, “made sinners” (katestathēsan hamartōloi) means “constituted as sinners by legal imputation.” Adam sinned; his guilt was credited to all his posterity; they stand condemned before they personally do anything.
This paper proposes an alternative reading that preserves the Adam/Christ parallel while locating the mechanism differently. “One trespass led to condemnation for all” (eis katakrima) can mean: Adam’s trespass introduced the cursed condition (mortality, futility, the environment that makes corruption certain), and within that condition all are condemned because all in fact choose corruption. The eis traces the causal chain: Adam’s act initiated the conditions; the conditions produced universal corruption; universal corruption produces universal condemnation. The condemnation is for allbecause the corruption is by all, but the corruption is by all because the conditions Adam introduced make it certain.
The verb kathistēmi (”made” in “the many were made sinners”) can mean “constituted” (legal declaration) or “rendered” (placed in a condition that produces a result). Both glosses are lexically available. The present model reads it as “rendered”: Adam’s disobedience placed humanity in conditions that rendered them sinners through their own volitional corruption.
To be clear: this paper does not deny that Adam’s act bears a judicial relation to the status of his posterity. God imposed the curse on all creation in response to Adam’s rebellion (Genesis 3:14-19; Romans 8:20). That imposition is a judicial act with universal consequences. Every human born into the cursed condition bears its penal effects (mortality, suffering, subjection to futility) as a direct result of Adam’s act and God’s response. What the paper denies is that Adam’s personal guilt (culpability for his specific act of rebellion) is imputed to his descendants apart from their own volitional corruption. The judicial relation is real: Adam acted, God cursed, all inherit the condition. The imputation of guilt is what is revised: each person’s guilt arises from their own chosen self-preference within the inherited condition.
Murray’s Imputation of Adam’s Sin argues that the Adam/Christ parallel demands strict symmetry: just as Christ’s righteousness is imputed to believers apart from their works, Adam’s guilt is imputed to his posterity apart from their personal sin. This is a serious exegetical argument that deserves direct engagement.
The response: the parallel is structurally symmetric (one man’s act, universal consequence) but anthropologically asymmetric, and Scripture itself encodes this asymmetry. On the sin side, no one needs to be commanded, instructed, or enabled to choose self-preference. Self-love is the nature (the Imago Dei self-relating capacity), and under cursed conditions it produces corruption without any additional input. On the righteousness side, we must be commanded to love God, commanded to love others, enabled by the Spirit to respond, and united to Christ by faith. The Great Commandment confirms this asymmetry: Jesus commands love for God and love for neighbor because these require instruction and enablement; He does not command self-love because it requires neither.
If the parallel required identical mechanisms, then “made righteous” would mean “legally constituted as righteous by imputation regardless of personal response,” which yields universalism (all saved by Christ’s act without faith). The Reformed tradition avoids universalism by introducing faith as the instrument by which Christ’s righteousness is received. But if an instrumental condition is necessary on the righteousness side, the parallel permits one on the sin side: Adam’s act introduced the cursed condition, and each person’s own self-preference is the instrument by which condemnation becomes theirs.
Romans 5:14 supports this reading: “Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam.” Death (curse) reigned universally, including over those whose volitional situation differed from Adam’s. This permits a category of those subject to the curse’s lethal consequences without having committed the identical kind of transgression Adam committed.
1 Corinthians 15:22: “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.” On this framework, “in Adam all die” describes the curse: all who are in Adam (all humanity by birth into the cursed condition) experience death. “In Christ shall all be made alive” describes the redemptive reversal through union with Christ. The parallel is condition-to-condition: the Adamic condition is death (curse); the Christ condition is life (grace). The “in” is participatory in both cases. No imputation mechanism is required.
3.5 Texts That Appear to Teach Congenital Sinfulness
Several texts are regularly cited in support of inherited corruption. The present model must engage them directly.
Psalm 51:5: “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.”
David is confessing the depth of his corruption in response to Nathan’s confrontation over Bathsheba (2 Samuel 12). The prepositions are significant: he was brought forth in iniquity, in sin. He was born into the condition that sin produced. The curse is the environment. Iniquity and sin describe the world he entered, the condition that surrounded him from the moment of conception.
This reading strengthens rather than weakens the psalm’s penitential force. If David is saying “I inherited guilt and couldn’t help it,” the confession is diminished: he points to something outside his control. If he is saying “the cursed condition has surrounded me from conception, and within that condition I have chosen self-preference again and again, culminating in this,” the confession is devastating. He owns it completely. The curse explains the environment; his choices explain the guilt.
Psalm 58:3: “The wicked are estranged from the womb; they go astray from birth, speaking lies.”
This describes the observable pattern rather than making a metaphysical claim about neonatal guilt. “From the womb” and “from birth” are temporal markers indicating how early the pattern begins, not ontological claims about transmitted corruption. The wicked go astray from birth, meaning the cursed condition is operative from the beginning and the pattern of self-preference begins as soon as volitional capacity permits. The speed and universality of the pattern are what the psalmist emphasizes.
Ephesians 2:1-3: “And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.”
The phusei (”by nature”) in verse 3 is frequently read as teaching inherited sinful nature. However, the surrounding context is thoroughly volitional: “walked” (chosen activity), “following” (deliberate direction), “carrying out the desires of the body and the mind” (the self-relating capacity directing itself inward).
“By nature children of wrath” describes what humans are by the very nature God gave them, operating in the conditions the curse imposed. The nature in question is the Imago Dei self-relating capacity: the instinctive self-love that is our created endowment. Under cursed conditions, this nature produces self-preference so universally and so early that Paul can describe the result as what we are phusei. We are children of wrath by nature because the faculty that was meant to orient us toward God and others orients us toward ourselves instead. No transmission mechanism is needed. No federal imputation is required to explain universality. The nature plus the cursed conditions are sufficient.
The flow of the passage confirms this reading. “Dead in trespasses and sins” (condition and choices together); “in which you once walked” (volitional); “carrying out the desires of body and mind” (the self-relating capacity turned inward); “by nature children of wrath” (summary: this is what the nature produces under these conditions); “But God, being rich in mercy” (grace intervenes because the nature under cursed conditions cannot reorient itself).
3.6 The Inevitability Problem
If corruption is chosen rather than inherited, why is it universal? The answer lies in the combination of two factors: the self-relating capacity of the Imago Dei and the cursed condition.
A self-relating agent who experiences hunger, pain, mortality, scarcity, vulnerability, and a resistant created order will find self-preservation overwhelmingly rational. The cursed condition loads the experiential environment such that self-preference becomes the path of least resistance for any finite agent who relates to the self as a subject of value and concern. Universally, apart from special grace, humans in fact choose self-preference. The self-relating capacity that God gave as a creation good (and that Jesus presupposes in the Great Commandment) becomes, under cursed conditions, the instrument of universal corruption.
The universality of this outcome is grounded in the decreed order. God’s decree ensures that the conditions produce certain results (teleological necessity) without compelling any particular act (efficient causation). The conditions make the outcome certain; the choice in each instance remains the agent’s own. The “can” of genuine agency refers to the faculty of choice (the Imago Dei self-relating capacity is not destroyed by the curse), not to the probability of a different outcome under identical conditions. Under the conditions that actually obtain, the outcome is certain. The capacity for choice is real; the exercise of that capacity under these conditions is uniformly toward self-preference.
This preserves culpability: each person’s corruption is genuinely their fault, chosen by their own will in their own circumstances. It preserves universality: the conditions guarantee the outcome. And it preserves the need for grace: since the conditions are such that no unaided human will in fact chooses God-preference over self-preference, only divine intervention can redirect the will from inward to outward orientation.
3.7 Infant Death and the Threshold of Volitional Capacity
The question of infant death presses directly on this model. If corruption is chosen rather than inherited, what about infants who die before reaching volitional capacity?
The answer: the curse kills; corruption condemns. Infants die because they are born into a world where mortality reigns (Romans 5:14, “death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam”). Death is a consequence of the curse, not of personal corruption. An infant who dies before the Imago Dei self-relating capacity has developed sufficiently for genuine volitional self-preference has experienced the curse (mortality) without having chosen corruption.
The precise moment at which any individual’s volitional capacity becomes sufficient for the first act of self-preference is individual, interior, and known only to God. This paper does not propose an “age of accountability” or a developmental timeline. The thresholds are not exhaustively revealed (Deuteronomy 29:29). What Scripture establishes is the structure (self-relating agents under cursed conditions produce self-preference), the universality (all who reach volitional capacity in fact choose it), and the justice (God judges according to light given, knowledge, and capacity, per Luke 12:47-48 and Romans 2:12-16). The application of these principles to specific cases belongs to God, not to the theologian.
3.8 The Theodicy Implication
A critic may press: if God created the conditions that make corruption certain, is God morally responsible for sin? This question deserves acknowledgment even though a full theodicy is beyond the paper’s scope.
The framework’s answer rests on the distinction between teleological necessity and efficient causation. The Fall was “the teleologically necessary historical unfolding of the decree that the Son be glorified as Redeemer” (cf. Revelation 13:8; 1 Peter 1:19-20; Acts 2:23). God ordained the conditions within which corruption would certainly occur. But God did not cause any creature to prefer self over Him. The moral quality of each act of self-preference belongs entirely to the creature. God decreed the end (the Son glorified as Redeemer) and the historical order in which it would be achieved; the creature, using the genuine volitional capacity God gave, chose self-preference within that order.
Scripture explicitly denies that God is the efficient cause of sin: “Let no one say when he is tempted, ‘I am being tempted by God,’ for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one” (James 1:13). The conditions are God’s; the choices are the creature’s; the decree encompasses both without collapsing the distinction between them.
4. Christ and the Curse: Genuine Inheritance Without Corruption
4.1 The Textual Case for Christ’s Inheritance of the Curse
The distinction between curse and corruption yields a significant Christological result: the incarnate Son genuinely inherited the Adamic curse while never choosing corruption.
Hebrews 2:14: “Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil.”
The author of Hebrews insists that Christ “partook of the same things” as the “children” (humanity). The “same things” include flesh and blood, which in the post-Fall order entails mortality, vulnerability, and susceptibility to suffering. Christ did not take on a pre-Fall human nature insulated from the curse’s effects. He entered the cursed condition as it actually exists.
Hebrews 2:17-18: “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. For because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.”
“In every respect” is comprehensive. Christ’s likeness to His brothers includes the full range of cursed-condition experience: suffering, temptation, mortality. The efficacy of His high priestly ministry depends on this genuine solidarity.
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.”
This verse contains the hinge of the entire argument. Christ was “tempted as we are” (genuine experience of the cursed condition’s pull toward self-preference) “yet without sin” (He never chose corruption). The reality of the temptation depends on the reality of the curse; the sinlessness depends on the will’s refusal to choose self-preference.
4.2 The Concrete Evidence
The Gospels present a Jesus who experiences the full weight of the cursed condition.
Hunger: Matthew 4:2, “After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry.” The wilderness temptation to turn stones into bread (Matthew 4:3) is only a genuine temptation if the hunger is real. Self-preservation in the face of genuine need is the cursed condition operating as expected.
Weariness: John 4:6, “Jesus, wearied as he was from his journey, sat down beside the well.” Physical exhaustion is a consequence of embodied existence under the curse.
Grief: John 11:35, “Jesus wept.” Emotional suffering in response to death (Lazarus) demonstrates genuine human affective response to the curse’s most devastating consequence.
Agony: Luke 22:42-44, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.” The Gethsemane prayer is the supreme demonstration of the curse/corruption distinction in operation. Jesus’ human will inclines toward self-preservation (”remove this cup”). This inclination is the self-relating capacity of the Imago Dei functioning under cursed conditions: the self, aware of impending suffering and death, instinctively moves toward avoidance. This is not corruption; this is the proper functioning of a self-relating agent facing genuine threat. The corruption would be to act on that inclination in defiance of the Father’s will. Jesus does the opposite: “not my will, but yours.”
Death: Hebrews 2:9, “so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.” Christ died. Mortality is the defining feature of the curse (Genesis 3:19). His death confirms His full participation in the cursed condition.
4.3 The Christological Precision
The claim that Christ inherited the curse must be carefully distinguished from two errors, and its positive content must be stated with precision.
First, it is not the claim that Christ possessed a fallen nature in the sense of an inherent moral defect or an internal bent toward sin. The traditional Reformed distinction between the posse peccare (ability to sin) and the non posse peccare(inability to sin) is relevant but must be reframed within the present model. On this account, Christ possessed genuine human nature subject to the curse’s effects (mortality, suffering, real temptation arising from the self-relating capacity under pressure). His sinlessness is preserved not by a metaphysical inability to sin but by the willing, complete, and total surrender of His human will to the Father.
4.3.1 Impeccability: Personal Character, Not Mechanical Override
This paper affirms impeccability: Christ could not sin. But the ground of this impeccability must be stated with precision. The “could not” is a characterological certainty grounded in the Person bearing the human nature, not a mechanical constraint imposed on the human will from outside.
The divine Person who bears the human nature is the eternal Son whose character is total love for the Father. That character, expressed through a human will receiving undistorted revelation, produces sinlessness with certainty. The certainty flows through the human will, not around it. The Son’s unwavering commitment to the Father is expressed in and through the genuine operation of the human nature, not by overriding it.
The temptation is therefore real, not theatrical. The human nature genuinely experiences the pull of self-preservation under the cursed condition. Gethsemane demonstrates this: “Remove this cup from me” is a real expression of the self-relating capacity recoiling from death. The outcome is certain because of who is praying, but the cost is real because of what the human nature experiences. Remove the certainty and redemption becomes contingent. Remove the cost and the obedience becomes theatrical. The framework preserves both.
4.3.2 The Active Maintenance of Sinlessness
Christ’s sinlessness was not passive inevitability but active warfare. As the human will developed alongside His growing awareness, Jesus actively identified and rejected every incipient movement of created drives toward self-preference before such movements could take root and become corruption.
A clarification is essential here. The created drives themselves (hunger, self-preservation, desire for comfort, recoil from pain) are good. They are part of the Imago Dei self-relating capacity functioning as designed. What the Spirit and the developing human will rejected was not the drives but their possible misdirection toward self-preference at the expense of the Father’s will. Hunger is not sinful. Turning stones into bread to satisfy hunger in defiance of the Father’s timing would be. The instinct to avoid death is not sinful. Refusing the cross to preserve the self in defiance of the Father’s purpose would be. The work of active maintenance is the ongoing, decisive refusal to allow good created drives to become instruments of self-rule.
Jesus’ own teaching reflects this pattern. In Matthew 5:29, He says: “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell.” This is not abstract moral instruction delivered from a position of serene detachment. It describes the radical, violent, decisive action against sin that Jesus Himself practiced from the earliest emergence of His volitional capacity. He prescribes what He accomplished. The command carries the authority of lived experience.
The Spirit’s role in this process is collaborative rather than overriding. As argued more fully in Section 5.4 below, the Spirit was active in Christ’s life from conception, doing preservative and sanctifying work: cultivating the ground, maintaining the conditions under which created drives could function without misdirection. As the human will developed, it became an active participant in this work, choosing to reject every movement toward self-preference each time it arose. The sinlessness described in Hebrews 7:26 (”holy, innocent, unstained, separated from sinners”) is the combined result of the Spirit’s preservative cultivation and the will’s genuine, ongoing, active cooperation. Neither alone is sufficient. The Spirit without the will’s cooperation would be mechanical override. The will without the Spirit’s preservative work would face the same degraded conditions every other human faces.
4.3.3 Distinguishing Errors
This surrender was a genuinely human volitional act, accomplished through the Imago Dei self-relating capacity operating under cursed conditions in cooperation with the Spirit’s preservative work from conception. The decisive volitional orientation toward the Father was not produced by the later messianic anointing for public ministry; it preceded that anointing. As Section 5 will argue, Jesus came to awareness of His identity and the Father’s will through general and special revelation, and His will was surrendered to the Father before the Spirit empowered Him for miraculous works. The Spirit’s messianic empowerment confirmed what the will had already chosen; the baptism (Luke 3:21-22) then served as the public acknowledgment of what was already operative.
The necessary condition for escaping the corruption that every other human chooses is precisely what the Great Commandment describes: total love for God with all heart, soul, mind, and strength, and total love for neighbor as oneself. This is what Jesus accomplished. His Imago Dei self-relating capacity, receiving revelation without the distortion of prior corruption, recognized what the Father required and surrendered completely. In this, He is sui generis: the unique human being who met the condition that the cursed environment makes overwhelmingly improbable for every other agent.
Scripture does not reveal the interior timeline of this surrender. We do not know at what point Jesus’ developing awareness became sufficient for the decisive act of total submission. What we know is the result: the surrender occurred early enough that corruption never gained a foothold. By the time the Spirit empowered Him for miraculous works, and by the time the Father publicly acknowledged Him at the baptism (Luke 3:22), there was no sin burden to account for. The Father’s declaration, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased,” confirms a completed surrender, not an initiation of one.
Second, it is not adoptionism. Christ did not become the Son of God through moral achievement or through the Spirit’s empowerment. The eternal Son, who was always the Logos (John 1:1), genuinely took on the limitations of human existence in the cursed condition (Philippians 2:7). His ontological identity never changed; His human experience of that identity developed (as argued in Section 5 below). The baptism is the public acknowledgment before witnesses of what was ontologically true from eternity and volitionally accomplished in His human experience before that moment.
4.4 The Adam/Christ Contrast
The distinction between curse and corruption sharpens the Adam/Christ typology of Romans 5:12-21 and 1 Corinthians 15:21-22, 45-49.
Adam was created into the uncursed condition. He possessed the self-relating capacity of the Imago Dei without mortality, scarcity, or a resistant created order pressing him toward self-preference. He chose corruption anyway: “you will be like God” (Genesis 3:5).
Christ entered the cursed condition. He possessed the self-relating capacity of the Imago Dei with the full weight of mortality, suffering, hunger, and a resistant created order pressing Him toward self-preference. He chose submission: “not my will, but yours” (Luke 22:42).
The second Adam succeeds where the first Adam failed, under harder conditions. This makes His obedience genuinely meritorious in a way that goes beyond mere positional substitution. Christ did not simply occupy the right legal category. He accomplished, act by act and choice by choice through a life lived under the full weight of the curse, what Adam failed to accomplish in a garden without thorns.
5. Christ’s Developing Human Awareness: General and Special Revelation
5.1 The Textual Basis for Genuine Cognitive Development
If the kenosis of Philippians 2:7 (”he emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men”) includes genuinely taking on the limitations of human cognition, then Christ’s human awareness of His identity and mission must have developed over time rather than being present as a pre-loaded data set from birth.
Luke 2:52: “And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man.”
The verb proekopten (increased, advanced) describes genuine progression. Jesus grew in wisdom. This is not mere appearance; the Lukan narrative presents cognitive and spiritual development as a real feature of Christ’s human experience.
Luke 2:46-49: “After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers. And when his parents saw him, they were astonished. And his mother said to him, ‘Son, why have you treated us so? Behold, your father and I have been searching for you in great distress.’ And he said to them, ‘Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?’”
At twelve, Jesus demonstrates early awareness of a unique filial relationship (”my Father’s house”). But the narrative context qualifies this: His parents “did not understand the saying” (2:50), and He returned with them and “was submissive to them” (2:51). This is a developing awareness, not omniscient self-knowledge deployed from childhood.
5.2 General Revelation and Uncorrupted Reception
Every human being has access to God’s self-disclosure through creation and conscience.
Romans 1:19-20: “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.”
Romans 2:14-15: “For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves... They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness.”
Christ, as a human being under the cursed condition but without chosen corruption, would have received general revelation without the distortion that corruption introduces. Romans 1:21-23 describes the process by which corruption degrades the reception of general revelation: “although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking.” Christ, having never chosen corruption, experienced none of this degradation. His reception of general revelation was what every human’s would be if the will remained properly ordered: clear, undistorted perception of God’s “eternal power and divine nature” through creation and conscience.
This alone would have produced extraordinary theological understanding, because the ordinary impediment to understanding (the corruption that makes thinking “futile” per Romans 1:21) was absent.
5.3 Special Revelation and Progressive Recognition
Christ was raised in a faithful Jewish household (Matthew 2:23; Luke 2:39-40). He was taught the Torah, heard the prophets read in synagogue, and engaged with the Scriptures from childhood. The temple incident at twelve demonstrates that this engagement was already producing unusual depth of understanding.
The decisive public moment is recorded in Luke 4:16-21:
“And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up. And as was his custom, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and he stood up to read. And the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written, ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’ And he rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them, ‘Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’”
This public declaration presupposes a prior process of recognition. Jesus did not open the scroll and discover for the first time that Isaiah 61 was about Him. He opened it and announced what He had already come to understand through sustained engagement with special revelation, illuminated by the Spirit.
5.4 The Spirit’s Three-Stage Role in Christ’s Human Life
The Spirit’s involvement in Jesus’ life is not a single undifferentiated work but a three-stage pneumatology, each stage distinguishable by function while all three proceed from the same Spirit.
Stage 1: Preservative and sanctifying work (from conception).
Luke 1:35: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God.”
The “therefore... called holy” connects directly to the Spirit’s action. The Spirit is active from conception, not passive. This is not regeneration (there is no corruption to reverse at conception). It is preservative cultivation: the Spirit actively maintains the conditions under which the Imago Dei self-relating capacity can develop without corruption gaining a foothold. Under normal cursed conditions, the environment presses toward self-preference from the earliest moments of volitional development. The Spirit’s preservative work from conception counteracts this pressure, plucking out incipient sinful proclivities before they can establish roots.
This explains Hebrews 7:26 (”holy, innocent, unstained”) and Luke 1:35 (”called holy”) without reducing holiness to a purely human volitional achievement. The holiness is real and from the beginning, maintained by the Spirit’s active cultivation. The Spirit tends the ground; the will, as it develops, grows in clear soil.
Stage 2: Collaborative work with the developing human will.
As Jesus’ awareness grows through general and special revelation (Luke 2:52), His human will becomes an active participant in the work the Spirit has been doing. The will, developing on ground the Spirit has kept clear, begins to make its own choices: recognizing the Father’s claim, rejecting self-preference, directing the self-relating capacity outward. The Spirit’s cultivation and the will’s cooperation work together. The Spirit did not cause the surrender; He maintained the conditions under which the uncorrupted will could choose surrender. The will moved on ground the Spirit had tended.
This collaborative stage produced the progressive deepening of surrender that culminated in total, conscious commitment to the Father’s will. The Spirit’s illumination of Scripture and the will’s response to that illumination worked together throughout Jesus’ development.
Stage 3: Messianic anointing for public ministry and signs.
Luke 3:22: “The Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form, like a dove; and a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.’”
Luke 4:1: “And Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness.”
Luke 4:14: “And Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit to Galilee.”
This third stage is the empowerment for miraculous works and public ministry. It is this stage that Jesus later extends to the disciples (Acts 1:8; John 14:12). It must be distinguished from Stages 1 and 2: the Spirit was active in Christ’s life long before the messianic anointing. The claim of this paper is not that Jesus’ human will operated in a Spirit-vacuum before the anointing. The Spirit was preserving and cultivating from conception (Stage 1) and collaborating with the developing will throughout growth (Stage 2). What the paper does claim is that the decisive volitional surrender was not produced by the Stage 3 messianic anointing; it was accomplished in the context of Stages 1 and 2 and preceded Stage 3.
The distinction between these stages resolves the concern that the framework implies Christ’s obedience was Spirit-independent. It was not. The Spirit was active at every stage. But the functions are distinguishable: preserving, collaborating, empowering. And the volitional surrender, while accomplished on ground the Spirit tended, was a genuinely human act of the will.
5.5 The Sequence: Surrender, Empowerment, Public Acknowledgment
The New Testament evidence, when the Johannine and Synoptic accounts are read together, presents a three-stage sequence that carries theological weight:
Jesus grows in wisdom and stature (Luke 2:52), receiving general and special revelation with uncorrupted reception. At some point in this developmental process, His awareness becomes sufficient for a decisive act of total volitional surrender to the Father’s will. This surrender is a genuinely human act, accomplished through the Imago Dei self-relating capacity without Spirit empowerment.
The Spirit empowers Jesus for miraculous works. John’s Gospel presents “the first of his signs” at the wedding in Cana of Galilee (John 2:1-11), where Jesus turns water into wine. John notes that Jesus “manifested his glory, and his disciples believed in him” (2:11). The Johannine witness thus presents miraculous manifestation early in Jesus’ ministry. The Synoptic tradition emphasizes the baptismal anointing as the inauguration of public ministry. Together, the accounts indicate that the Spirit’s empowerment for signs and ministry is operative by the time Jesus begins His public work, and that the baptism functions as public Trinitarian acknowledgment rather than the onset of Spirit activity, which Luke 1:35 places at conception.
The baptism (Luke 3:21-22; cf. John 1:32-34) is the public acknowledgment of what is already the case. The Father’s voice declares, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.” The Spirit descends visibly “like a dove.” John the Baptist testifies, “I saw the Spirit descend from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him” (John 1:32). This is the formal, public, Trinitarian attestation before witnesses: the Father acknowledging the Son, the Spirit visibly confirming the anointing, the Baptist providing prophetic testimony. The baptism inaugurates public ministry in the formal sense; the Spirit’s work in Christ’s life extends back to conception (Stage 1), and the messianic empowerment (Stage 3) is operative by the time of the earliest signs.
The sequencing is theologically decisive at the first transition. The Spirit’s empowerment follows the surrender; it does not produce it. Jesus’ human will, operating with the Imago Dei capacity under cursed conditions, chose total submission to the Father before the Spirit equipped Him for miraculous works. The baptism then serves as the public attestation of what the surrender and empowerment had already accomplished.
Scripture does not reveal the interior timeline of the surrender itself. The temple incident at twelve (Luke 2:49) indicates that awareness of a unique filial relationship is well underway by that point. The sign at Cana indicates that Spirit empowerment (and therefore the surrender that preceded it) is operative by the time of Jesus’ adult ministry. Between these markers, the text is silent on the precise developmental process. What we know is the result: the surrender occurred early enough that corruption never gained a foothold. There was no sin burden. When the Spirit empowered, He empowered a will already completely submitted. When the Father spoke at the baptism, He acknowledged publicly what was already accomplished.
This epistemic limitation is itself theologically appropriate. The interior volitional life of the incarnate Son is not exhaustively revealed, and we should not expect it to be. What Scripture provides is sufficient: the markers of genuine development (Luke 2:52), the evidence of early awareness (Luke 2:49), the demonstration of Spirit empowerment already operative (John 2:1-11), the public Trinitarian acknowledgment (Luke 3:22), and the Spirit-empowered public ministry that follows (Luke 4:14-21).
5.6 Chalcedonian Guardrails
This account of Christ’s developing human awareness and volitional surrender must be carefully distinguished from adoptionism (the heresy that Jesus became divine at some point through the Spirit’s action or through moral achievement). The claim is not that Jesus became the Son of God through growing awareness, through the act of surrender, or through Spirit empowerment. The eternal Son, who was always the Logos (John 1:1-3), genuinely experienced the limitations of human cognition in His incarnate state and came to understand in His human mind what was always true of His Person. He surrendered in His human will to a mission that was always His by eternal decree. The Spirit empowered what the will had already chosen. The Father publicly acknowledged what was already accomplished.
The ontology never changed. The human awareness of the ontology developed. The human will’s surrender to the mission was a genuine temporal act within the life of One whose Person is eternal. The Spirit’s empowerment was a genuine equipping within the life of One who is Himself the eternal source of the Spirit’s procession. The Chalcedonian Definition preserves both: the divine nature (omniscient, eternal, fully self-aware) and the human nature (growing, learning, surrendering, being empowered through revelation) are united in one Person without confusion, change, division, or separation. The kenosis of Philippians 2:7 includes the genuine acceptance of human cognitive limitations and the genuine experience of volitional surrender, which means the genuine experience of choosing, as a human being under cursed conditions, what the divine Person had decreed from eternity.
6. Spirit-Empowered Humanity: The Pneumatological Pattern of Christ’s Ministry
6.1 The Attribution of Christ’s Works to the Spirit
A striking feature of the New Testament’s presentation of Jesus’ miraculous ministry is its consistent attribution of His works to the Spirit’s empowerment rather than to the independent exercise of divine omnipotence through the hypostatic union.
Acts 10:38: “God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power. He went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him.”
Peter’s explanation of Jesus’ miracle-working power to Cornelius does not appeal to the hypostatic union. It appeals to the Spirit’s anointing. The operative power is pneumatological.
Matthew 12:28: “But if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.”
Jesus Himself attributes His exorcisms to the Spirit. The conditional (”if it is by the Spirit of God”) is rhetorical in context; the point is that the Spirit is the operative agent.
Luke 4:18-19: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
The programmatic statement of Jesus’ ministry grounds it entirely in the Spirit’s empowerment. The anointing precedes and enables the works.
John 1:33: “He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain, this is he who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.”
The Spirit descends on Jesus and remains. This permanent endowment distinguishes Jesus from the Old Testament prophets on whom the Spirit came temporarily. The Spirit rests on Him as the foundational source from which it flows to others.
6.2 The Operational Mode: Prior Surrender, Subsequent Empowerment, Public Acknowledgment
These texts yield a consistent pattern: Christ’s earthly ministry operates through the Spirit’s empowerment of a genuinely human will that had already surrendered to the Father before the empowerment was given. The miracles are not exercises of divine omnipotence bypassing the human nature. They are the Spirit working through a human agent whose will had already been totally and willingly submitted to the Father.
The sequencing established in Section 5.5 is essential here. The Spirit did not empower Jesus’ will in order to produce surrender. The Spirit empowered Jesus’ will because surrender had already been accomplished. The surrender was the precondition for the empowerment, not its product. The sign at Cana (John 2:1-11) demonstrates that this empowerment was operative before the baptism, confirming that the baptism served as the public Trinitarian acknowledgment of what surrender and empowerment had already accomplished, and as the formal inauguration of public ministry.
This coheres with the broader Christological framework developed above. If Christ genuinely took on the cursed condition and genuinely experienced human limitations (including cognitive development through revelation), then His miraculous works are best understood as the Spirit empowering what His prior surrender made available. The divine nature does not override the human nature; the surrendered human will receives Spirit empowerment for mission.
6.3 The Transferability of the Pattern
The decisive evidence for this reading is that Jesus extends the same pattern to His followers.
John 14:12: “Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I am going to the Father.”
This promise is intelligible only if the power source is transferable. If Jesus’ miracles were exercises of divine omnipotence through the hypostatic union, they could not be handed to the disciples. The hypostatic union is unique and non-transferable. But if the operative pattern is the Spirit working through a submitted human will, then the same Spirit working through other submitted human wills produces the same (and, Jesus says, greater) works.
Acts 1:8: “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”
The Spirit’s empowerment at Pentecost replicates the pattern established in Jesus’ own ministry. The disciples receive power, and they perform works.
Acts 3:6, 12: Peter heals a lame man and immediately clarifies: “Why do you stare at us, as though by our own power or piety we have made him walk?” The power is God’s, working through submitted human agency. The pattern is identical to Jesus’ own operational mode.
Acts 6:8: “And Stephen, full of faith and of the Holy Spirit, did great wonders and signs among the people.” The description echoes the descriptions of Jesus’ own ministry: fullness of the Spirit producing powerful works.
6.4 The Ontological Distinction Within Operational Continuity
The continuity of operational mode between Christ and the disciples does not collapse the distinction of Person. The disciples perform works by the Spirit because they are united to Christ by faith. Christ performs works by the Spirit because He is the Christ, the one on whom the Spirit descends and remains (John 1:33). The disciples’ empowerment is derivative and dependent; Christ’s empowerment is foundational. The Spirit rests on Him as the source from which it flows to others (John 7:38-39; Acts 2:33).
The operational continuity is itself theologically significant: it demonstrates that Jesus’ life is the prototype of redeemed humanity. His Spirit-empowered obedience under the cursed condition establishes the pattern that grace enables other humans to participate in. He does not perform miracles in a mode that has no connection to the rest of us. He performs them in precisely the mode that He then extends to those whom the Spirit regenerates and empowers.
7. Grace and the Reorientation of the Will
7.1 The Necessity of Grace
The argument of the preceding sections converges on the absolute necessity of grace. If corruption is chosen (not inherited) but universally chosen (because the cursed condition makes self-preference overwhelmingly probable for any finite self-relating agent), then no unaided human will can reliably choose God-preference over self-preference. The conditions are too heavily weighted toward self-preservation.
Grace is therefore necessary at two levels.
Common grace restrains the full expression of chosen corruption in fallen humanity. Without common grace, the cursed condition combined with universal self-preference would produce unmitigated predation and chaos. Common grace explains why unregenerate humans are capable of genuine kindness, self-sacrifice, and moral seriousness despite their fundamental orientation toward self-rule. The self-relating capacity of the Imago Dei is not destroyed by corruption; it is disordered. Common grace limits the disorder without reversing it.
Saving grace actually reorients the will from inward to outward. This is regeneration: the Spirit’s work of turning the self-relating capacity from autonomous self-preference toward God-preference and other-preference. The reorientation is the Spirit’s initiative (John 3:8, “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit”). The human will cooperates once reoriented but does not initiate the reorientation.
7.2 The Asymmetry Between Christ’s Sequence and Ours
For Christ, the sequence was: revelation received with uncorrupted reception, volitional surrender accomplished by the Imago Dei capacity alone, then Spirit empowerment for mission. The will moved first; the Spirit confirmed and equipped.
For every other human, this sequence is impossible. Every other human, having already chosen corruption at some prior point in their development, has degraded the very faculty by which they would recognize and respond to the call to surrender. The corruption that distorts thinking (Romans 1:21, “they became futile in their thinking”) means that by the time any other human encounters the call to total surrender, they are working with equipment their own choices have damaged. They cannot do what Jesus did, in the order He did it, because they have already broken the instrument.
For believers, therefore, the sequence must be different: the Spirit reorients the will first (saving grace, regeneration), then the will surrenders in response, then the Spirit empowers for service. The extra step at the front (Spirit-initiated reorientation) is necessary because the starting conditions differ. Jesus arrived at the call uncorrupted; we arrive already corrupted. The Spirit must repair what our corruption has degraded before the will can respond as Jesus’ will responded.
This asymmetry is what makes Christ sui generis as a human being. He alone accomplished the volitional surrender that is the necessary condition for escaping corruption, using only the Imago Dei capacity receiving undistorted revelation, before any Spirit empowerment for ministry. No other human has done this. No other human can, because every other human has already chosen corruption by the time the question arises.
This grounds the believer’s life in Christ’s life as genuine prototype while preserving the decisive asymmetry: He is the model of what total surrender looks like under cursed conditions; we are the beneficiaries of grace that first restores our capacity to surrender, then progressively conforms us to the model.
7.3 The Great Commandment as Compressed Christology and Soteriology
The full theological architecture can now be seen in Jesus’ articulation of the two greatest commandments.
The command to love God with all heart, soul, mind, and strength (Mark 12:30) directs the self-relating capacity upward: the self, which instinctively relates to itself, is commanded to direct that relational energy toward God as its primary object.
The command to love neighbor “as yourself” (Mark 12:31) directs the self-relating capacity outward: the same instinctive self-concern that is a feature of the Imago Dei is to be extended to others.
Together, these commands describe precisely the necessary condition for escaping the corruption that the cursed condition makes overwhelmingly probable. The Great Commandment is not an arbitrary moral standard imposed from outside the human situation. It is the description of the one condition under which a self-relating agent can live under the curse without choosing corruption: total, willing love for God and total, willing love for others. Anything less than total leaves room for self-preference to reassert itself under pressure.
Jesus knows this because He lived it. He commands it because He accomplished it. He sends the Spirit because He knows no one else can accomplish it unaided.
The Great Commandment thus functions simultaneously as anthropological diagnosis (you are self-relating agents who instinctively love yourselves), as moral prescription (direct that self-relation totally toward God and others), as Christological testimony (I have done this, under the full weight of the curse, and it is the path to life), as soteriological pointer (you will need the Spirit to do it, because your prior corruption has degraded your capacity to respond), and as eschatological promise (the Spirit I send will progressively accomplish in you what I accomplished perfectly).
This is the logical circuit completed: the Imago Dei provides the capacity, the curse loads the conditions, corruption is the universal result for every unaided will, total surrender is the necessary escape condition, Jesus alone met that condition as a human being, the Spirit empowered Him for mission after the surrender, and the same Spirit now reorients and empowers those who could never have surrendered on their own. The Great Commandment stands at the center of this architecture as both the description of what was accomplished in Christ and the prescription for what grace enables in believers.
8. Conclusion: The Coherence of the Framework
The distinction between curse (inherited condition) and corruption (chosen orientation) produces a theologically coherent framework that simultaneously preserves:
The universality of sin. Every human agent, possessing the Imago Dei‘s self-relating capacity and born into the cursed condition, chooses self-preference. The certainty of this outcome is teleological, grounded in God’s decree, without being mechanically compulsive.
The justice of divine judgment. No one bears another’s guilt. Each person’s corruption is genuinely their own, chosen by their own will within the inherited condition. Ezekiel 18:20 stands without qualification.
The genuine humanity of Christ. The incarnate Son inherited the full Adamic curse: mortality, suffering, hunger, weariness, grief, and real temptation. His experience of the cursed condition was comprehensive, as Hebrews 2:14-18 and 4:15 require.
The sinlessness of Christ. Christ never chose corruption because His will was willingly, completely, and totally surrendered to the Father. This sinlessness was actively maintained through radical, ongoing rejection of every self-preferring impulse as it arose, in cooperation with the Spirit’s preservative work from conception. The paper affirms impeccability grounded in the Person: the eternal Son’s character of total love for the Father, expressed through genuine human agency, produces sinlessness with certainty. The certainty flows through the will, not around it. The temptation is real; the outcome is certain in the Person.
The developing awareness of Christ. The kenosis of Philippians 2:7 includes genuine cognitive limitation. Christ came to understand His identity and mission through the ordinary channels of general and special revelation. Scripture does not reveal the interior timeline of His developing awareness or the precise progression of His volitional surrender. What we know is the result: the surrender occurred early enough that corruption never gained a foothold.
The three-stage pneumatology. The Spirit’s work in Christ’s life is distinguishable by function: preservative cultivation from conception (Luke 1:35), collaborative work with the developing human will throughout growth, and messianic anointing for public ministry and signs. The decisive volitional surrender was accomplished in the context of the first two stages and preceded the third. The Spirit was active throughout; the functions are distinguishable; the will’s cooperation was genuine at every stage.
The pneumatological pattern of ministry. Christ’s miraculous works were accomplished through the Spirit’s empowerment of His already-surrendered human will, establishing a transferable pattern that He extended to the church at Pentecost.
The absolute necessity of grace. Every other human, having already chosen corruption, has degraded the faculty by which they would recognize and respond to the call to surrender. The sequence for believers must therefore differ from Christ’s: the Spirit reorients first, then the will surrenders, then the Spirit empowers. Common grace restrains the full expression of corruption; saving grace restores the capacity to surrender.
The coherence of the Great Commandment. Jesus’ articulation of the two greatest commands describes the necessary condition for escaping corruption (total love for God and others), testifies to His own accomplishment of that condition, and points to its impossibility apart from the Spirit’s work. The command stands at the center of the entire framework as both Christological testimony and soteriological prescription.
The framework rests on a single exegetical move: taking seriously the distinction between the condition we inherit and the corruption we choose, and tracing its implications through anthropology, Christology, pneumatology, and soteriology. The result is a unified account in which Christ’s life, from His birth under the curse through His developing awareness, His volitional surrender, His Spirit-empowered ministry, and His sacrificial death, is the definitive demonstration of what humanity was created to be and what grace enables humanity to become. He is the unique human who accomplished what the Great Commandment describes. Grace is the means by which others are progressively conformed to what He achieved.
References
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Hawthorne, G. F. (1991). The Presence and the Power: The Significance of the Holy Spirit in the Life and Ministry of Jesus. Word Publishing.
Longmire, J. (2025). A Systematic Declaration of Faith and Reason: Foundational Axioms and Theorems. Unpublished manuscript.
Longmire, J. (2025). Imaginary Foundations: Christ as the Material Ground of Moral Reality. Working paper, Zenodo.
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James (JD) Longmire
ORCID: 0009-0009-1383-7698
Northrop Grumman Fellow (unaffiliated research)
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