Resolved: A living human can never live their lives without sinning. A sinless Perfection debate.

Xian-Pugilist's arguments are clear and well-articulated, which is both a boon and a disappointment. It's a boon because it makes it easier to respond to. It's a disappointment because it reveals that I was arguing the wrong thing. I mistakenly interpreted "A living human can never live their lives without sinning" to mean that no human can ever live their entire lives without sinning. That is the contention that I defended in my last post, and it turns out that Xian-Pugilist completely agrees with me. He said that "man can't help but sin from birth," and that it's true that "everybody must sin." What he meant to argue, instead, was that although nobody can live their entire lives without sinning, people can nevertheless break the habit. A person can reach a point in their lives where, from that point forward, they no longer sin. That is going to be a much more difficult position for me to refute. The crux of Xian-Pugilist's argument is this: 1. God's will cannot be thwarted. 2. It is God's will that we each reach a state of perfection in this life. 3. Therefore, we can reach a state of perfection in this life. Putting the argument in the form of a syllogism, I think, immediately reveals a problem. The conclusion should not be that we simply can, but may not, reach moral perfection in this life. Rather, the conclusion ought to be that we necessarily do reach moral perfection in this life. But XP does not reach that conclusion, which means there's a problem with one of the premises. I think the problem with the premises is that he's equivocating on the phrase, "God's will." There are two senses in which God can will something--he can will it morally, or he can will it sovereignly. God's moral will includes his commands and desires. We can disobey God, so clearly it doesn't follow that because something is God's moral will that it will necessarily take place. God's sovereign will includes what God actually accomplishes. It's his sovereign will that cannot be thwarted. XP appears to be using "God's will" in the sovereign sense in the first premise, but he's using it in the moral sense in the second premise. That makes his argument invalid since it commits the fallacy of equivocation. Since XP may object to the charge of equivocation and insist that he is using the phrase with the same meaning in both premises, let's run the argument through both ways and see what happens. 1'. God's sovereign will cannot be thwarted. 2'. It is God's sovereign will that we reach moral perfection in this life. What follows from these two premises is: 3'. Therefore, we will necessarily reach moral perfection in this life. But XP denies 3', which means that his second premise must be false. It's not God's sovereign will that we reach moral perfect; rather, it's his moral will. Now, let's try God's moral will. 1'. God's moral will cannot be thwarted. 2'. It is God's moral will that we reach moral perfection in this life. What follows from these premises is again that: 3'. Therefore, we will necessarily reach moral perfection in this life. This time the problem is with 1'. No doubt, XP will agree with me that 1' is false because if it were not false, then sin would be impossible. But in either one of these cases, the argument does not lead to XP's intended conclusion, which is that a person can reach a state of moral perfection, but doesn't necessarily. If you read XP's 1st heading, "God's will", you'll see that he's appealing to God's moral will. He points out that in Matthew 5:43-48, God commands that we love perfectly. In verse 48, it says to "be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect." If that were God's sovereign will, then everybody would be perfect. But it is clearly referring to God's moral will, which can be disobeyed. XP points to a number of verses that speak of the removal of our sarx (i.e. flesh, sinful nature, etc.), including Colossians 2:8, and Romans 8:9. Interpreting these passages the way XP does, though, proves too much. Paul is speaking to his audience, telling them that the removal/burial of their sarx is a past event. It has already happened. It would follow, from XP's interpretation, that they no longer struggle with sin. It would follow that no Christian struggles with sin. But that is demonstrably false. I'm sure that even XP would agree that the vast majority of Christians (if not every one of them) has an internal struggle with sin. And certainly no Christian is free from sinful desires immediately after conversion. We are like the person Paul describes in Romans 7:14-25 who has an internal conflict between the good he wants to do and the evil he is drawn to do. XP rightly points out that the Spirit works in us, causing us to continually improve morally. He points to Ephesians 4:11-13, which says that Christ appointed officers in the church for the purpose of equipping the saints "until we all attain to the unity of faith, and of the knowledge of the son of God, to a mature man, to a measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ." Notice this passages say "until we all" become as mature as Christ. Well, that goal is never reached. After 2000 years, believers still have not reached perfect unity in their beliefs about the son of God, and they still have not all become as mature as Christ. Clearly, then, this passage does not guarantee that the goal is arrived at during our lifetimes. Rather, it is the end that we aim for during our lifetimes. It's the direction we are headed. It's the limit that we approach but never arrive at. The Spirit enables us to approach the goal, but that doesn't mean we ever reach it in our lifetimes. So far, I think I have shown that XP's arguments do not demonstrate that a person can reach a point in their lives that they no longer sin. But I have not shown that they can't. It is trivially true that a person can experience some small interval of time in which he does not sin. A person might go a whole hour without sinning. If we suppose that a person commits a sin, lives another 30 minutes without sinning, then dies, then we would have to concede XP's point that it's possible for a person to reach a point in their lives where they stop sinning and never sin again for as long as they live. But I think XP wants me to defend a more robust view than that. Dying before committing the next sin is just cheating if the goal is really to reach a state of moral perfection. On the other hand, if you think that through, you'll see that nobody can ever really be said to have reached a state of moral perfection. Say, for example, that somebody stops sinning at the age of 50, and they live another 30 years before dying. The only difference between them and a person who died 30 minutes after his last sin is just a matter of degree. Suppose the person who went 30 years without sinning didn't die. Could we say that if they live another 200 years that they will not sin in all that time? I don't think we can say that. As long as we live in a fallen world, it is inevitable, given enough time, that we will sin. The fact that we might die before committing the next sin, therefore, is no basis for saying that we have really reached a state of moral perfection. The only way we can really reach a state of moral perfection--from which point we will never sin again regardless of how long we exist--is if God finally deals with sin and evil in the world, and that won't take place until the resurrection and the judgment. ps) I'm typing in Word and cutting and pasting. Every time I do that, it turns my ' into ". I've attempted to make all the necessary corrections, but I may have missed some. pss) I must apologize to XP for misunderstanding what this debate was supposed to be about. I guess I should've asked for more clarification before accepting. I thought I had thought of everything! :-/