Incarnation is intrinsic to the very act of Creation because Christ is “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.”
At the very moment of “Let there be light”, the created sphere was fashioned for and awaiting the appointed ingress of the Word Incarnate. The Word is necessarily incarnate, prospectively and essentially, from the foundation of the world in one and the very same sense that the Lamb is slain from the foundation of the world.
Similar to how Jesus told His disciples, “I go to prepare a place for you...”, we may justifiably say that the Father brought into being a world that was—inevitably, no matter how you try to conceptualize it in terms of cause and effect—For The Son.
Incarnation had to happen because, in a manner of speaking, it is just like God to do something like that. It is Who He is, Who He has revealed Himself to be. He wants to dwell with His children in the created sphere. What I cannot and will not believe is that such a divine desire is in any essential way contingent on, or catalyzed by, the Fall. The divine motive to enter Creation is, I am convinced, prior—not in terms of Eternity (beyond our examining in any case) but in terms of Divine Character.
While I cannot and, therefore, do not assert it as a tenet of orthodox biblical doctrine, an obligatory point in statements of faith, I harbor the personal conviction, extrapolating from the biblical revelation of God’s “character” and ways, that the Incarnation would have taken place even in the absence of Man’s Fall. I do not believe the Incarnation was centrally a remedial expedient. I believe it was, in a human way of putting this, always the point of the Creation itself—intrinsically the divine motive, Fall or no Fall.
In other words, “He came and dwelt among us” and “Immanuel—God with us” and “Look! The dwelling of God is with men!” are inherently expressions of not only redemptive triumph but the consummation of God’s very creative act.
To put it yet another way, it is Creation, not the Fall, that functions as the material “catalyst” for Incarnation. It is the Fall, however, that makes that necessary Visitation necessarily redemptive because, again, “it is just like God to do something like that.”
Two fellows might drive separately to the same house one evening for dinner with their common friend, and they may turn into their friend’s street simultaneously to find their friend’s house engulfed in flames. They might jump out of their cars at just the same moment, and hear their friend screaming for help from inside the house. One fellow instantly concludes he cannot risk his life, while the other instantly rushes into the burning house, willing to lose his life for his friend. The latter of the two fellows is analogous to the God Who, having intrinsically intended to manifest Himself in union with His creation “anyway”, doesn’t hesitate to keep the date even when it means unspeakable agony and unfathomable loss. He was coming to “visit” anyway; the catastrophe of Sin could not but mean He’d come to the rescue. How could He not?
The Lord’s weeping words over Jerusalem, that they didn’t recognize the time of their Visitation, resonate profoundly to me in this respect. I have this nagging suspicion that our understandable emphasis on the Redemption causes us to under-appreciate the depths of meaning in the Visitation itself.
To some, particularly my good friends of a more Calvinistic bent, even asking “If there had been no Fall, would God have become Man in Christ anyway?” is perfect absurdity, on the principle that there can be no “ifs” under the sovereignty of God. No Plan B can be conceived of, for God has foreordained all things. Speculating on an Incarnation in the absence of a Fall makes as much sense, my strongly predestinationist friends might say, as speculating on what would have happened had Jesus yielded to the temptation in the wilderness: well, He didn’t; He couldn’t; it doesn’t compute; there’s no there there...”vanity of vanities!”
For several reasons, I disagree. That is, I disagree when it comes to the Incarnation. We will leave the Temptation aside for the moment, except to say that it’s an inappropriate analogy, since the analogy points to what Christ didn't and was never going to do, while the present discussion on the Incarnation focuses on what God did and was always going to do, and asks to what degree that divine act is intrinsic to the Creation—indeed, a Sovereign design not contingent on the Fall. There is an apples-and-oranges quality to the analogy. So we’ll leave it there.
I remember being accused of “Calvinism!” once in, believe it or not, the kitchen of a monastery I happened to be visiting. This particular day I was helping the cook get dinner together, and we were chatting theologically. I popped out with “I believe that Jesus would have come into the world even if there had been no Fall.” The cook practically recoiled in horror and gasped, “That’s Calvinism!” I attempted to explain to him what I meant, but he was so aghast and kept repeating adamantly “That’s Calvinism! That’s Calvinism!” (My real Calvinist friends, who would never in their lives utter the proposition I did, will readily see the humor in this.) His reaction was so severe, and perplexing, I needed to “suss it out”, as they say in Belfast, and upon reflection I realized that my friend the cook thought (because he never let me finish) I was saying that, even had there never been a Fall, the New Testament “script”—from the manger to (take note)The Cross and the Empty Tomb—would have played out 100% the same anyway because that’s how God foreordained it.
In that light I could understand my interlocutor’s highly exercised but premature and flawed response. After all, I never said that, nor did I have anything so nonsensical remotely in mind. The whole proposition he evidently took me to be articulating makes no sense on any level whatsoever. I could wish my cook friend had given me a bit more credit for brains than that!
What I meant of course was that, if there had been no Fall, there’d still have been—some time, somehow—a Visitation, an Incarnation, under, needless to say, entirely different, unimaginable conditions and circumstances. Not because I’m a Calvinist (I don’t happen to be, but some of my best friends are) but because God has demonstrated, revealed in historical act and Word, that entering the Creation is intrinsically “of” Him, of His character and desire. There is an infinite difference between asserting unconditional predestination and asserting that God will, no matter what, be true to Himself. I am asserting the latter.
“If there had been no Fall....”
So we come back to that troublesome “if”. Are “ifs” allowed?
Significantly, some who would not hesitate to evangelize by asserting “Jesus would have died for you even if you were the only person in the world” (a state of things that has never existed—an “if”!) would immediately dismiss my proposition as a theologically intolerable “if”.
But why then do they assert the evangelistic “if”?
Well, they do so to express what is in God’s “nature”, what it is “just like Him” to do. And they do so on good evidence. And there is nothing in their “if” that contradicts or violates the spirit or thrust of the biblical revelation. Actually, I happen to agree with it!
I suggest that all the same factors relate equally well to my “if.” The value in my “if”, and the reason it is not “vanity of vanities”, is that it contemplates the biblical evidence, reflects on the nature of the God Who became Man, applies a bit of “emotional/relational logic” (the same kind that leads to “Jesus would have died for you even if...”), and deduces, then adduces, that the God we love is a God Who intrinsically aims to abide with His creation incarnately, supremely for the Love of it.
Time, or questions about eternity, or God’s foreknowledge, or cause-and-effect, are no sorts of factors worth getting tangled up with here in the least. We are talking about character, not cause-and-effect. There is no point in wandering through this rabbit warren: “But wait. How can you posit what God ‘would have done’ under different circumstances when God knows everything beforehand and there never could have been other circumstances, on top of which Scripture clearly states the Incarnation was eternally in view explicitly with respect to a redemptive purpose—‘the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world’?”
To all of which I would simply say, I doubt that, in the eternal kingdom, the Lord and Creator will find Himself abiding with His children in a way (Incarnation) that was pointedly necessitated by human sin. If His dwelling with us (Look! The dwelling of God is with men!) is the summum bonum, then the summum bonum is the intrinsic divine motive, an a priori “intentionality” originating of (eternally “originating of”, just as the Son eternally proceeds from the Father) its saving, redeeming appointment.
So, yes, of course He is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world—how could He not be?
And the man who rushed into the burning house always was, prospectively, the one who risked his life for his friend. Which doesn’t in the least negate the, dare I say, deeper reality that, one way or the other, he was going to visit his friend out of love, because that’s just who he was.
And I think that’s worth knowing about God.
