What It Means that Jesus Was ‘Without Sin'

Theologians such as Karl Barth and T.F. Torrance argue in the spirit of Gregory of Nazianzus that “the unassumed is the unhealed.” In order for Jesus to bring healing to our sinful natures and provide a new way to be human, in the incarnation Jesus must vicariously assume a fallen human nature into union with his divine nature and divine person. In the words of 20th-century Scottish theologian T.F. Torrance, Jesus “entered into our condemned state under divine judgment and made it his own, suffered the ‘Eli, Eli, lama sabacthani,’ and yielded up the Ghost under the burden of sin and judgment and wrath.”