Most philosophers today would say that all causal statements have counterfactual implications or they are not intelligible to humans as causal statements in the first place. If we say that "A causes B," they would say, we must also mean that "not-A results in not-B." If we do not, then the causal assertion is unintelligible. Humans cannot construe it.

The perspicuity of the scriptures obliges us to take any causal assertions in gospel proclamations as intelligible by humans. Christians do not seem to have claimed an exemption from this requirement for causal language, though Muslims do, for example, claim that Allah engages in misleading ruses with an ultimately salvific purpose.

Earlier generations of readers of the scriptures were no less acute than we are now. It is not a stretch to suppose that the reason why they were concerned by the counterfactual conditions of causal assertions whose prior term is "The Fall" is that they were humans trying to make sense of the gospel as a narrative whose texture is causal. Is there any way to proclaim the gospel intelligibly whilst wholly avoiding causal claims? If not, then we must bear with their questions.

But Phil and most of us would likely insist that the scriptures be the source of at least the kerygmatic claims. We feel sure of the scriptural origin of--

(1) "Cross --> redemption" and implicitly, "no cross --> no redemption."

But what of these?--

(2) "Fall --> cross" and implicitly " no Fall --> no Cross."

(3) "Fall --> death --> sin" and implicitly "no Fall --> no death --> no sin."

(4) "Fall --> sin --> death" and implicitly "no Fall --> no sin --> no death."

It will not escape the reader's notice that (3), perhaps further exfoliated, has a particular relevance to the discussions of this thread, but that (4) is far more familiar to most of us.

I would have thought that Incarnation cannot be separated within Christological thought from redemption. I am not sure it is possible to say the Cross is more important than who Christ was/is.

Nor do I think some of the passages of scripture quoted have been used entirely appropriately.

Philippians 2: 6-9 cannot be interpreted without including 9-11, especially given that NT scholars tell us, and I would agree, that what we have here is an early christian poem or piece of liturgy. Therefore the cross in the poem is part of the schema of salvation which includes incarnation, resurrection and exaltation.

Similarly with the Johannine Prologue, the verses about sonship are part of another poem (probably), and quite likely to be insertions into it. I am not sure why Incarnation cannot at times be seen as more important than Redemption. I would be hesitant about any facet of Christian theology dominating over another, except perhaps the Trinity, for it is in discovering who God is that we find out who we are as human beings.

I realise an immediate response is Paul's comment in Galatians re: boasting in the cross; he did so because he had met the crucified messiah who had been exalted.

Peace,

Kevin

Simon, thanks for some helpful leads. Googling for Scotus I have unearthed an article by Philip Yancy on precisely this topic ...

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2008/january/20.72.html

DavidR

All my posts on this thread have arisen from the conviction that, as I said in my first post, paraphrasing, there is no Biblical foundation for the idea (I stand by my word ‘speculation’) that there would have been an Incarnation of the second Person of the Trinity if man had not fallen. Before I try to answer your challenge and questions in your last post on this thread (6 January 2012) I wonder if we could just close this specific loop by you graciously and candidly acknowledging that none of John’s prologue, Philippians 2, Ephesians 1 and Colossians 1:15-17 supply any foundation for this idea, as I argued in my 5 January 2012 post on this thread. For this specific idea. I am not asking you to acknowledge that they do not provide some of the foundation for understanding what God is like – I will address that when I respond to your recent post (6 January).

Phil Almond 

It is interesting to note how this has been discussed previously through history, trying to make sense of the Bible. There have been some patristic quotes already, but one of the periods in which this discussion was most active is the late middle ages.

Bonadventure and the Scotus advocated that the second person of the Trinity would have become human even if there had been no fall. In contrast Aquinas advocated the necessity of the incarnation because of human sin:

'Although God could have become incarnate without the existence of sin, it is nevertheless more appropriate to say that, if man had not sinned, God would not have become incarnate, since in Sacred Scripture the reason for the Incarnation is everywhere given as the sin of the first man.' Summa Theologica, Third Part, Question 1, Article 3

Generally speaking, the church decided that Aquinas' account was more plausible.

I would hope however that we would simply preach the message of any passage set for us, rather than import things said in other parts of scripture which, however good, God is not trying to communicate through this particular one.

Thank you for responding Phil - but this is going to quickly move towards a very familiar impasse is it not?

I am exploring what the Incarnation reveals of the eternal, ‘original’ character and purpose of God. (now our words get horribly clumsy very quickly at this point as we seek to grasp utter mystery).  You say you can only read these texts as pointing to the cross. - ‘The purpose of the incarnation is the cross’.  I fully accept the cross as central to Christ’s incarnate work in a fallen world but I still see something richer and deeper everywhere in these texts and am puzzled why you don’t! Is it possible to be so focussed on a scripture for what it says about one aspect of faith that we miss the wider context in which it is set?

‘Your speculation is just  …. speculation’ was how you dismissed my initial discussion starter on this thread (a bit circular that?).  But I invited you to respond to me from a different angle. Instead of your familiar – ‘give me all your verses and I will tell you if I agree’ (which I have tried to do actually). I wrote, ‘let me challenge you. What is it that you find difficult, surprising or wrong about what I am saying?’ You have not responded to this and I wonder why.

Let me fill out that question and invite you again to respond.

It is surely not speculative to ask - What kind of God, from all eternity, chooses to create a finite, material world at all? What is revealed about such a God that this world exists as it does and that its creating and sustaining (and finally its redeeming) has been, from the beginning,  a matter of such personal, costly, self giving for God?

What kind of God, who is Spirit, chooses to create in flesh and blood a uniquely expression of the Divine Image? Is this not already a way of incarnation?

And if the Fall expresses a human vocation gone wrong  - what was it that God originally hoped for in calling us into being? ie what is the vocation Christ restores  in us?

I would love to hear how you (and any others) reflect on this – and I mean a discussion, if just for the moment, that goes beyond ‘show me the verses that teach this’. We have long established that although we both seek to be rooted in scripture we do operate with different principles of reading and interpreting the Word.

DavidR

As far as I can see the only chapter and verse you have yet given on this thread to support the view that ‘…but the Incarnation remains above all the fulfillment of God's original plan…’ is Colossians 1:17 in your first post on this thread. I am not querying the wonder and mystery of the Incarnation. I am just saying that there is no Biblical support for the specific view that the Incarnation was always God’s plan whether the Fall occurred or not. Your other chapter and verses in your latest post, while they speak in various ways of God’s gracious plan, do not offer any support for that specific view:

John 1:1-14      John 1:12-13 talks about the right to become the sons of God by being born of God. This is necessitated by the Fall. John 1:6 refers to the witness of John. Among his first recorded words are ‘Behold the lamb of God taking the sin of the world’.

Ephesians 1      Verses 3-7 state that God’s choice in Christ, of those whom he has now blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies in Christ, took place before [the] foundation of [the] world, which must mean an original plan, and was so that those blessed would be holy and without blemish, being predestined in love, to be redeemed in Christ by his blood and forgiven their trespasses, all to the praise of his glorious grace. This sets the context for the rest of the chapter and confronts us with the mysterious truth that the Fall and redemption of the elect must have been part of that original plan. Compare Revelation 13:8 and 17:8.

Colossians 1:15-17       As I posted, these verses are true before the Incarnation. Furthermore 1:18-22 are enabled by reconciliation through the blood of the cross.

Philippians 2: 5-9          culminates in ‘he humbled himself becoming obedient until death, and death of a cross’. The cross is the supreme, the richest, and most glorious manifestation of God’s self-giving in Christ. Because there, paraphrasing Warfield somewhat, the infinitely just Judge became the sinner’s substitute before his own law and received in his own person, in the human nature he assumed at the Incarnation, the penalty of sin.

I do not see my approach as a culture of suspicion but a desire to test my views, and the views of even the greatest and most venerable theologians, by the Bible.

Phil Almond

Dear Phil. I was afraid you would ask more for chapter and verse?  But let me challenge you. I have written very fully and quoted or alluded to key doctrines and scripture already - and noted somne of my sources. What is it that you find difficult, surprising or wrong about what I am saying. And are you not aware of this teaching in the theological traditions of the Christian church through history?

Though I have never doubted your sincerity and passion for the Word, as I briefly respond please recall, with all respect, how your use of scripture has often been challenged on these thread - not just by me.

You ask for chapters and verses. It is a fair question at one level. Although you will not agree you surely know that I do not consider that bible truth cashes out so directly - like factual statements we can just read and agree or disagree on.

Can I also say, as someone who has taught church history and theology over the years, that I never lose a sense of standing on the shoulders of giants when I read and reflect on such early church theologians as I have been quoting. It does not mean that I always agree with them - or even understand them at times. But it is always a holy conversation. I feel we have lost that reverence for history and replaced it with a culture of suspicion. But as Wesley covered the country on horseback reading as he went it was these theologians he was reading - in Greek and Latin. They underpinned his theology and ministry and prayer. And it shows doesn't it? By their fruits ....

For passages that lead into the theme of the incarnation I would point to the prologue of John's gospel, to Phil 2 on the self emptying of Christ as a revelation of the nature of God - this is how God loves, creates and redeems. On the cross God is not offering something out of character in that sense. God's love is eternally a way of incarnation.  Also Eph 1 and Col 1.15-17 - and 26. 

I hope this helps

DavidR

I was hoping that you would give me some Biblical chapter and verses used by the people you quoted to support their views. I can then comment on whether I think they do support their views.

Phil Almond 

Phil. Not sure what sort of answer you are looking for. You obviously have not read them? You see it is a bit like asking if John Stott  or John Calvin based their teachings on the Bible. Irenaeus was also one of the leading figures to establish the canon of Scripture. He lived at a time when the church was under attack from the gnostics and other false teachers. His whole teaching was based upon the New Testament as the decisive norm and standard of the Church's doctrine. For him, it was essential to keep the path laid down by the authority of Scripture and in the clear tradition of the apostolic churches which was the best guarantee of resistance to innovation and dangerous speculation. I have just leafed through my copy of the writings of Gregory of Nyssa. Amazing stuff. My English edition has footnote numbers on almost every line tracking the scripture texts and allusions wherever they occur. So the simple answer is 'yes'.

DavidR

Did ‘The Christian theologians of the first centuries’ whose observations you quote give support for these observations from the Bible?

Phil Almond

Some beautiful and helpful reflections on this thread - thank you. My starting position (as someone involved in training people to preach, among other things) is that there a widespread lack of confidence and content in our preaching on the Incarnation (and I share that lack in my own preaching). One familiar consequence in the evangelical world is the tendency to reduce it solely to God's method for bringing the cross into the world. It is, to put it crudely, a divine problem solving device. But it is surely much more than that. A faithful teaching of the incarnation will always find a cross at the heart of it but our understanding of the cross must be founded on the foundations of a rich biblical doctrine of the Incarnation. (And the incarnation itself is such an extraordinary gift of utter self-emptying, sacrifice and self giving that it already anticipates the gift of the cross doesn't it?)

The Christian theologians of the first centuries pondered this long. Irenaeus famously summed it up in this way. 'God became a human being that we might become divine'. I am not sure if Phil would accept this and would insist Irenaeus should have said 'that he might die upon the cross'. But Irenaeus was setting the cross in a richer and more glorious context - a teaching called 'divinisation' or 'theosis'. It is really not such a novel (or speculative) thought to suggest that this was always God's longing and plan - the original secret, a mystery hidden throughout the ages, at the heart of creation. It had to be so. And this is a mystery that now, through the tragedy of human sin, must come by way of the cross. The point is that the cross is part of, and central too, a much greater self-revelation of God that reveals the destiny of the whole cosmos. The Incarnation reveals the way God creates, gives himself and seeks to draw all things into unity in Himself, as it was in the beginning. This is the way God loves. This is his desire. So Maximus, a c6 theologian writes of three degrees of 'embodiment' of the Word. Each an intensification of the other. Firstly, there is the very existence of all this, the cosmos, creation, you and me .... this world is a theophany. 'All things came into being through him'. Secondly, there is the hidden presence of the Word in history - providential, guiding, Law, prophets - all uniquely revealed and interpreted in the Scriptures. Thirdly, the personal incarnation of the Word brings this to its fullest and unique expression. For Gregory of Nyssa the first two are so compelling a witness that he writes, 'that God should have clothed himself with our nature is a fact that does not seem strange or extravagent [for] he clothes himself with the universe and at the same time contains it and dwells in it'.  So Clement  (see my first post) movingly concludes, 'the incarnation was therefore the product of a long history, a fleshly fruit that had been long ripening on the earth'  and declares that 'everything exists in an immense movement of incarnation which tends towards Christ and is fulfilled in him'.

On the threshold of a new year in a very uncertain world I find that so encouraging.  New Year greetings to fellow travellers on this thread.