Pints With Aquinas - Did JESUS Have to Come!? | Fr. Gregory Pine, O.P.

Episode Date: July 13, 2024

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Hello, my name is Father Gregory Pine and I am a Dominican friar of the province of St. Joseph. I teach at the Dominican House of Studies and I work for the Thomistic Institute and this is Pines for the Aquinas. In this episode I'd like to go back to the basics. I'd like to go back to one of the most important articles of the faith because when you're thinking about our faith and you're trying to figure out like, yeah, what's most important, at the end of the day it's the triune God and the incarnate Lord and as Christians we just

take the fact of the incarnation for granted which is good I mean we take it for revealed which I suppose is different than taking it for granted but nevertheless keep going for the Gregory and we don't always stop to inquire why it is that our Lord Jesus Christ took human flesh and how it is that that choice saves us. So let's take some time together and consider it. Here we go. So maybe you've heard of cool conversations that take place in the Christian tradition regarding the incarnation. Certainly people ask whether or not the Son of God would have taken flesh had we not sinned. If you don't see how that's important, don't worry about it. Don't spend too terribly much time pondering it. But, I mean, if you're interested, here

we go. There's a Franciscan position in the Middle Ages where you have folks saying that if we hadn't sinned, our Lord would have still taken flesh because it represents like the culmination of creation in the sense that creation comes to its apex or comes to its fullest realization in our Lord Jesus Christ and that there's a kind of tendency or trajectory of creation which is incomplete until such time as He appears on the horizon of our lives. The Dominican position has typically been one that's like, I don't know, it would pride itself on being somewhat more modest in its understanding, even a little bit agnostic. I mean, the fact is that we just don't know. We don't know except for what's revealed to us. And when the sacred

scriptures speak of the incarnation, they link it with our sin. Not in the sense that our sin makes it necessary that Christ take human flesh, but in the sense that the incarnation is connected with our salvation and our salvation is downstream of our choice against God and his plan for our lives. Okay? So then we can just take it for granted that we have sinned, that's an historical fact, and we can take it for revealed that our Lord Jesus comes to save us. But we'll zoom out here for a second. You can ask the question whether he had to save us or whether it was necessary that he save us.

Because I think sometimes, you know, in the 21st century, we think a lot about our rights, what we are due or what we are owed, and we can ask can ask like do we have rights in the matter or are we owed salvation by our Lord Jesus Christ? And I mean from the one vantage you can say well He created us so He ought to supply us with the things that we need in order to attain to our end, in order to attain to our goal, which is life with Him forever in heaven. Okay? But then again, I mean God did provide us with that. He provided Adam and Eve, he provided our first parents with everything that they needed, right? So they had grace and they had it such that, you know, their emotions, their lower powers, were in sync with their reason and will, their higher powers, and even that their body was in

sync with their soul. But in choosing against that, in choosing against God, or in choosing not to have God for their end, or not to abide by God's gift, that is to say, work within the bounds of grace, they lost it. All right? And then the question is, do we still have those rights? Well, I mean, strictly speaking, no, because we're culpable.

And I think that's really hard for us to imagine, or really hard for us to understand, because we have difficulty seeing how it is that we're culpable for a choice that we didn't make personally or that we didn't make individually But in the christian tradition, you know, we say that we are present in Adam's nature We are present in Adam's choice. We are present in a certain sense in Adam's loins So that gets into a whole big discussion about original sin and how it's communicated and how now we're judged in light of it. We're going to set that aside and just kind of forge on because this is an introduction, but we can answer those questions in due course.

What I think that we see is that when God creates, He creates out of His loving-kindness. God created us because He thought we might like it. God created us because He wanted to afford us a share in his divine life. And we see that loving-kindness intensified in his choice to recreate us. Okay, so we don't think about it too much in terms of justice, we think about it in terms of mercy. That in the fullness of time, God sent his only begotten son, who was born under the law, to deliver from the law those who were subject to it, the law of sin and death, and to bring us anew into the life of grace. And not just like restore what we lost, but there's a sense here of how much more, because we have it now as a fruit of friendship with our Lord Jesus Christ, that he has claimed us, you know,

one by one through faith and sacraments. Okay, so having entertained the question whether or not he had to take flesh and entertained the question whether or not he had to take flesh and entertain the question whether or not we have a right to this salvation which he makes manifest and communicable in his incarnation, we can then ask like did he have to save us in the way that he did? And there again the Christian tradition will typically say no, he could have done it in any number of ways. To speak somewhat imprecisely or to speak somewhat metaphorically, God could have snapped his fingers and put us back in right relationship, you know, kind of set

us to rights. So there's no intrinsic necessity to it, nor is there any extrinsic necessity in the sense of like, God isn't pushed or forced or coerced to do this particular thing or to operate in this particular way. But the way that the tradition speaks about his choice to save us in this manner is that given the goal, namely salvation, this seems a most excellent way by which to go about it. So you've got technical language which we don't need to get into, but the basic idea

here is that it's supremely fitting or it's most excellent or it's most wonderful, delightful, beautiful that God go about it in this way. So then we can ask, like, why this way in particular? And here we're taking a deep dive into the divine wisdom and we're trying to get a feel for the divine choice. Now mind you, whenever we're talking about the divine wisdom and the divine choice, we're talking about something that's beyond us, right? We're talking about something that's not so much incomprehensible as super comprehensible or super comprehensible. So we're not going to be able to say, like, it's definitely this, no other way, or it's definitely this,

and we've exhausted all the content that there is to be kind of described or set forth. But we can kind of play, or we can kind of, you know, read the Scriptures and read the tradition, the fathers of the church, the medieval theologians, those who have come since as a means of appreciating God's loving design. So again, we think about what's the goal? It's salvation. All right? And what is salvation but reconstituting human beings, you know, human persons in right relationship

with God, which means righteousness, justification, and then the ongoing sanctification that follows from that. But what we're basically talking about is this creature who was made for the divine life, lost the divine life, and is now being reconstituted in the divine life. Okay? So when we look at the incarnation, we're looking at what seems to be or what appears on the horizon of our lives as the best way, the most excellent way by which to go about it. And like when St. Thomas Aquinas asked this question, he'll say, like, why do we say that it's most excellent or what about it is most excellent? And he'll point especially to the fact that God gets so close to us.

God is already close to us because He creates us and He gives us our nature and our agency and everything is transparent to his gaze. So it's not like God is far off. God is already closer to us than we are to ourselves. But there's a way in which in the life of grace he gets closer still because he dwells in us as in a temple, because we welcome him in knowledge and love and we engage with him as a beloved friend. But in the incarnation he takes our very nature to his divine person.

We talk about the hypostatic union. If you've heard that language, cool. If not, no worries. He assumes our very nature in his human flesh. There you see that salvation has already begun, in a certain sense, already accomplished in his flesh. But then he exercises our humanity. He puts our humanity through its paces so that all of our life from top to bottom and from start to finish is thereby filled with the divine life is graced in most excellent fashion as a way that's now in a way that's now communicable in a way that we can now lay hold of because not that we couldn't lay hold of it before because God could have done whatever he wanted to do but in the sense that like now it's nearer to us, it's easier for us,

we can better recognize it because it's now in human shape or human form. Alright, so God commends salvation to us in most excellent fashion and we see it shine forth in his love for us. So when you think about the incarnation, you have to marvel at the fact that God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son such that we might not perish but have eternal life. So it's like the charity of our Lord Jesus Christ makes most manifest and communicable the love of God for humanity, which love is just what we mean by grace and what it is

that we're intended to lay hold of, what we're intended to interiorize, what we're intended to make good on so that we can abide with Him forever in heaven. So then when St. Thomas goes about answering this question, he'll list a billion ways in which the incarnation promotes or advances our salvation and then draws us away from or withdraws us from things contrary to it. So he'll say, for instance, you know, it enlivens our faith, right? It fires our hope, it stirs up our charity, it gives us an example that we can follow, it brings about this work of divinization. But then also like you'll say, like, it puts the devil in his place because in incarnation

we're talking about something like God takes human flesh, He doesn't take angelic nature, right? So it's like God, yeah, God so loved us that He took our flesh and it shows us our dignity and it steers us away from sin lest we sully that nature which God Himself has assumed and it tells forth how very gratuitous is the divine plan, how very generous are God's designs at work in our life so that we wouldn't presume upon our own power because it's all really a response to His generosity. And it helps to cure our pride, which is that sin whereby we turned away from God by showing the divine humility, commending to us a kind of approach of humility whereby we can be in right relation to God. And then it makes satisfaction, right? It offers to God a gift which is more pleasing than our sin was displeasing. It

offers that in our very nature such that sin and death would be overcome in human nature such that we can, you know, claim that as our inheritance now in our Lord Jesus Christ because we've been made adopted sons and daughters and thereby coheirs with him. So when we think about this question of whether or not our Lord Jesus Christ had to take human flesh, we're thinking about it against the backdrop of sin, we're reading the sacred scriptures and recognizing, okay, it seems like his coming is in some way connected with our sin, not that sin forces his hand,

but that he shows himself most humble, most generous, most condescending against the backdrop thereof, right? And that he could have gone about it in any number of ways, right? Because God can do what God can do, but he did it in a way that we can recognize and receive for us as further testimony of that gift or that divine generosity which is present in creation and more excellently present in recreation and that God, you know, in making this now easier for us, nearer to us, or somehow humaner, I mean, he took to himself human flesh, it gives us a kind of entrée to the divine life whereby it, you know, it grows us in faith and hope and charity,

gives us an example, it divinizes us, right? It puts the devil in his place, it shows us our dignity, it saves us from pride and presumption, and it helps us to lay hold of his satisfaction so that we in turn can make satisfaction. So there's something very beautiful. I mean, there's many things, many very beautiful, but the fact that our Lord Jesus Christ did not have to take human flesh makes us appreciate the gift that he did take human flesh. So we praise God for his overwhelming generosity and we seek thereby to better unpack this gift to appropriate it in our lives. Alright, that's what I hope to share.

This is Bcience with Aquinas. If you haven't yet, please do subscribe to the channel and push the bell and get sweet email updates when other cool things happen. And also you can check out God Splitting, which is a podcast that I contribute to with four other Dominican friars, which has cool stuff. Sometimes boring stuff I suppose, but that's human life. There are things in human life that are boring, so you're just gonna have to deal with it.

There are things though that are cool, so we gotta enjoy those as well. And yeah, that's what I wanted to share. I wrote my thesis, like my doctoral dissertation on a theme not unrelated to this and I'm supposed to get that into book form in the next two years so you can say a prayer for that. Know of my prayers for you? Yeah, and again, please pray for me and I'll look forward to chatting with you next time on Points with Aquinas.