Friday, December 23, 2022

Why did the Incarnation occur precisely when it did?

Why did the second Person of the Trinity become man two thousand years ago – rather than at the beginning of the human race, or near the end of the world, or at some other point in history?  The Christmas season is an especially appropriate time to consider this question.  And as is so often the case, St. Thomas Aquinas provides guidance for reflection.  He addresses the issue in the last two Articles of Question 1 of the Third Part of the Summa Theologiae.

No sin, no Incarnation

In order to understand his explanation, it is important to consider what he says earlier in the Question, in Article 3, about the issue of whether God would have become incarnate had the human race not fallen into sin.  Aquinas answers in the negative.  Though God could have done so, Aquinas says, he would not have.  Scripture so emphasizes the theme that the Incarnation occurred as a remedy for sin that the natural conclusion to draw, in Aquinas’s view, is that there would have been no need for it otherwise.  Elaborating on the point, Aquinas says that in falling into sin, man “stooped to corporeal things” instead of rising up to God, and that this is what made it fitting for God to become corporeal so as to raise man back up again. 

Now, why exactly is this fitting?  Yet earlier in the Question, in Article 1, Aquinas emphasizes that “the very nature of God is goodness… [and] it belongs to the essence of goodness to communicate itself to others.”  And out of his goodness, says Aquinas, God “did not despise the weakness of His own handiwork.”  The idea seems to be that sin has exposed us to the weaknesses entailed by corporeality (from which we would have been protected had our first parents obeyed).  To restore us to strength, God in his goodness imparts himself to us by becoming a member of the human race and thereby taking on corporeality. 

Exactly how this strengthens us is elaborated on in turn in Article 2, wherein Aquinas makes a number of points.  For one thing, the Incarnation aids us in disentangling ourselves from the evil in which we’ve become enmeshed.  For that God has taken on our nature and the devil has not helps us to come to prefer the former to the latter.  And by underlining the dignity of human nature, the Incarnation prompts us to avoid sullying that nature with further sin.  Moreover, Christ’s innocence encourages us away from the sin of presumption, and his humility encourages us away from pride.  And of course, his sacrifice on the cross makes satisfaction for our guilt.

For another thing, the Incarnation positively aids us in pursuing what is good, in several ways.  By speaking to us directly, as a human being himself, God makes the truths of revelation better known to us, thereby fostering the theological virtue of faith.  By taking on our nature he also shows the depth of his love for us, thereby fostering the virtue of hope.  Insofar as this prompts us to love God in return, it also fosters in us the virtue of charity.  By living a perfect life, Christ sets an example of how we ought to live.  By uniting divinity and humanity in himself, he reveals something of the supernatural end of the beatific vision, which also involves such a union (albeit not in exactly the same way).

Not too soon

In these ways, then, the aim of the Incarnation was to remedy the sin into which the human race has fallen.  But now Aquinas goes on to argue that to realize this aim, it was best that the Incarnation occurred just when it did, rather than closer to either the beginning or the end of human history.

In Article 5, he proposes several reasons why it was not fitting for the Incarnation to occur soon after the fall of our first parents.  First of all, in order for human beings to understand the need for the Incarnation, it was necessary for them to perceive the inadequacy of their natural powers and their desperate need for special divine assistance.  And only when “the disease gained strength” was that possible.  The idea here is that the dire ramifications and intractability of sin are fully manifest only after many generations have passed.

Second, we tend (by nature, Aquinas seems to be saying) to arrive at perfection only from imperfection, and to understand the spiritual only after understanding the natural.  Putting the Incarnation at the beginning of human history rather than later in the story would be contrary to this order of things.  Third, with the Incarnation as with the arrival of the merely human dignitaries we are familiar with in everyday experience, it is fitting that the event be preceded by heralds.    

Aquinas does not elaborate, but it seems to me that what he is driving at is the need for what is traditionally referred to as the praeparatio evangelica or “preparation for the Gospel.”  The Incarnation could not properly be understood just at any old time or location.  Rather, the right cultural preconditions had to be in place.  Consider that, as St. Paul famously noted, the notion of God incarnate dying on the cross was a stumbling block for the Jews, and seemed foolishness to the Greeks (1 Corinthians 1:23).  To be sure, it is not in fact foolishness and should not have been a stumbling block.  But there is a sense in which it is precisely because the Jews and many of the Greeks had a proper understanding of the divine that it seemed to be both.

It is clear enough why a Jewish audience of the day would be scandalized by the doctrine.  A commitment to God’s unicity and absolute distinctness from the creation had been cemented into the psychology of the people of Israel over the course of centuries, as a long series of prophets and divine punishments gradually purged the nation of any vestige of idolatry.  The claim that there are three Persons in the one God, and that one of them took on flesh and died on a cross, was therefore bound to be shocking.  But these ideas would not have been properly understood if they were not shocking.  If God is one, how can he be tripersonal?  If he is the creator of the material world, how could he take on flesh?  It was essential that the Jewish people, the first recipients of the Gospel, understood that however these doctrines are to be spelled out, they are not to be interpreted in terms of the idea that the God of Israel is merely part of some pantheon of corporeal deities – as they very easily would have been interpreted had a horror of idolatry not taken deep root among the Jewish people by the first century AD.  And inculcating such a horror was part of the point of the establishment of the ancient nation of Israel and the law given through Moses.

Now, the Gentiles too needed a proper conception of the divine nature if they were correctly to understand the central claims of Christianity once it was propagated beyond its original Jewish context.  Suppose your understanding of the divine were molded entirely by stories about the gods of Olympus, or by myths about dying deities like Adonis, Attis, Osiris, or Dionysus.  Then the Trinity will sound like just another pantheon, the virginal conception of Jesus will be interpreted as comparable to Zeus’s impregnation of various mortal women, and the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus will be reminiscent of a dying and rising fertility god.  In other words, they will seem to be mere variations on familiar pagan themes.  However, if instead you conceive of God as the purely actual prime unmoved mover of the world (as in Aristotelianism), or as the non-composite One from which all else derives (as in Neo-Platonism), then the claims of Christianity will sound as shocking as they did to the Jews of the first century.  How could that which is pure actuality take on flesh and suffer?  How could that which is utterly simple or non-composite be three divine Persons? 

Again, these central claims of Christianity, properly understood, are in fact neither scandalous nor foolish.  The point, though, is that they are so subtle and difficult – and indeed, they are mysteries in the sense that we could not have learned of them apart from special divine revelation – that a proper initial understanding of them should be jarring.  If it were not, that would likely reflect some serious misinterpretation (as the later Christological heresies do).

A last consideration Aquinas gives in Article 5 is that faith and charity tend to wane over time, and indeed it is foretold that they will wane especially in the last days.  Hence it was important that the Incarnation not occur too early in human history, lest its benefits become inaccessible too soon.  But this brings us to Aquinas’s treatment of the question of why the Incarnation did not occur later in history.

Not too late

In Article 6, Aquinas explains why the Incarnation was not put off until the end of the world (as it might seem it should have been, given the considerations adduced in the previous Article).  Once again he makes several points, and the first is, I think, most easily explained in terms of the language of efficient and final causes (though Aquinas himself does not here use those terms).  As he said in the previous article, because with human beings imperfection precedes perfection, it was fitting that the perfection of the Incarnation be preceded by the imperfection of human history between the fall of our first parents and the time of Christ.  Now, you might think of the Incarnation as the final cause or end toward which that history pointed.  And in our experience, the realization of an end or final cause comes later in time than the processes that lead to it.

However, the Incarnation is also an efficient cause of our perfection.  And in our experience, efficient causes typically come before their effects (even if, as the metaphysician knows, some efficient causes operate simultaneously with their effects, and God’s causality is altogether atemporal).  Hence, in order for us to be able to understand the Incarnation as a final cause, it was fitting that it not occur too early in human history.  But in order for us to be able to understand it also as an efficient cause, it was fitting that it not occur too late in human history – that we be able to observe its effects in the foundation of the Church and spreading of the Gospel in the centuries after the time of Christ.  (Anyway, this is, again, my own explanation of what Aquinas is getting at in his first point.)

Another point Aquinas makes (his third, actually, but I’ll treat them out of order) is that it is fitting that human beings be saved by faith in something past as well as by faith in something future.  He does not elaborate, but I’d propose doing so as follows.  Faith involves trusting the testimony of divine authority concerning matters that are usually not otherwise knowable to us.  Now, sometimes things are not knowable to us because they are in the future, to which we have no access.  But sometimes they are not knowable to us because they are past, and the past is also something to which we have no access, or at least no direct access.  Hence, Aquinas seems to be saying, it is fitting that faith involves matters of the latter sort as well as the former sort.  And the Incarnation’s being a past event (which it could not have been if it occurred at the end of the world) makes it possible for it to be among the things we know by faith in what God has done in the past.  (For those who lived before the Incarnation, of course, it would have been something they would know by faith in what is future.)

The remaining (and in my view more interesting) point made by Aquinas is this.  There is a tendency toward decline in human history, such that “men's knowledge of God [begins] to grow dim and their morals lax.”  This is why God had to send a succession of prophets to restore things, such as Abraham and Moses – and, finally, Christ, who effected a much greater restoration precisely by virtue of his Incarnation.  “But if this remedy had been put off till the end of the world,” Aquinas says, “all knowledge and reverence of God and all uprightness of morals would have been swept away from the earth.”

The idea seems to be that the effects of original sin are so profound that without the Incarnation, even a succession of prophets would provide only temporary respite, and the human race would eventually sink into complete darkness and depravity unprecedented even in the history of the world prior to Christ.  As it is, Christian teaching is that a period of such darkness and depravity will indeed occur prior to the end of the world.  But it will occur precisely as a result of apostasy from the faith.  And Aquinas’s point seems to be that it would have occurred sooner, or would have occurred without the intervening period of illumination provided by Christian teaching, had the Incarnation not happened when it did.

Just how bad things would have been is indicated by another remark Aquinas makes, to the effect that God “came when He knew it was fitting to succor, and when His boons would be welcome.”  Perhaps what Aquinas means is that had the Incarnation occurred much later, then the human race would have become so extremely corrupt that the Incarnation would simply not have been accepted.  Of course, prophets are typically resisted, but not by everyone, which is why they go on to be revered and their message has an impact at least after their deaths.  But the implication of Aquinas’s remarks may be that had the Incarnation been put off too long, human minds and wills would have been so thoroughly corrupted that it would have been of no effect.  A chilling thought, that – and also an indicator of how depraved human beings will become in the great apostasy predicted for the last days.

Further reading:

Putting the Cross back into Christmas

Christmas every day

The still, small voice of Christmas

83 comments:

  1. The idea seems to be that the effects of original sin are so profound that without the Incarnation, even a succession of prophets would provide only temporary respite, and the human race would eventually sink into complete darkness and depravity unprecedented even in the history of the world prior to Christ.

    And in the event that I am such a person born into such an era, what should my reaction be? Despair?

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    1. Given that you still have free will, you still have the choice to turn away from sin and love God. The abovementioned point clearly should not be taken so strongly that it is completely impossible for anyone born in that era to repent - just that their culture will be extraordinarily corrupt and wicked. It is de fide that all humans have free will, and this cannot be overridden or contradicted by mere private theological opinion, even that of a goodly and wise Saint.

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    2. @Cantus What about St. Alphonsus Di Liguori's section in Preparation for Death titled "On the point where (in life) God no longer offers forgiveness for sins"?

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    3. @ Infinite_Growth,

      "And in the event that I am such a person born into such an era, what should my reaction be? Despair?"

      Your question is hypothetical and may therefore not even make sense in the light of the Truth In Act in which we now live and struggle, so don't worry about it.

      Merry Christmas Infinite_Growth.

      Tom Cohoe

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    4. @Tom Cohoe Merry Christmas to you too!

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  2. WCB

    I don't find any of this as convincing.

    1. There is no original sin in Genesis. That was an invention of Augustine many centuries after Genesis was written.

    2. The Bible gives us the geneologies that give us a 6 thousand year old Universe. God waits 4,000 years to deal with Augustine's Original Sin Problem? Why?

    3. God, being omnipotent could have eliminated the effects of original sin that plunged the world in evil on day one.

    4. Sending Jesus to eliminate original sin is a clumsy, and overly complex scheme concocted by early theologians. A real, omnipotent, and super intelligent God would have eliminated original sin on day one by divine fiat. All of this seems to paint God as being bad at problem solving.

    This strikes me as a case of Alfred Jerry's satirical Pataphysics. Finding imaginary solutions to imaginary problems.

    The rising tide of Nones, and non-Christions in modern Western nations seems to suggest many people no longer find any of this any more than theologian's rationalization.

    WCB

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    1. WCB,

      #2, #3, #4 are all answered in the original blog post.

      The only correct point you raise is #1: Judaism doesn't have a notion of original sin and it isn't mentioned in the New Testament. The soonest we have of an explicit affirmation of such a doctrine is Augustine.

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    2. On the eve of the 2000 election, every newspaper and broadcasting station labeled states that supported George W. Bush as "red" and Al Gore as "blue".

      This is definitely a divine sign, because red always meant communist, so G-d did a deliberate reversal and did it without any conspiring or coalition.

      What is the meaning? The answer is in the Bible. Edom means "red" and it was the first "red state" in recorded history.

      G-d was telling the world that traditional "heartland" American values are Edomite values. And "red Americans" are "red" like Esau.

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    3. "There is no original sin in Genesis"

      Wat

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    4. 1. That's just your opinion. The Church, which has magisterial authority to interpret Scripture, says that Augustine is right.

      2. Feser already answers this question in the article.

      3. Basic theodicy. God allowed for evil so that greater goods may come out of it. Also, Feser talked about this in the article.

      4. If you aren't a "real omnipotent, and super-intelligent God", then you do not have the perspective to know what the best course of action given your limited knowledge. That's the entire point of the Book of Job.

      The rising tide of Nones is due to a combination of theological ignorance and willful blindness due to sin. Case in point, sin has blinded you to the point where you didn't even read the blog you're responding to. Otherwise, you'd have actually addressed the points Feser makes in the article you reject. You can't claim that the reasons are bad if you don't know them!

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    5. That was an invention of Augustine

      Augustine did not write the book of Romans.

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    6. "1. There is no original sin in Genesis. That was an invention of Augustine many centuries after Genesis was written."

      True in part. It does seems like the idea that Adam guilty is passed on to his descendents is not taught in Genesis, but, ignoring that, how invented is St. Augustine view?

      I'am reading the City of God and he does argue that the humans were not naturally immortal in the Garden but needed the Tree of Life to escape old age and got screwed up because they could not eat from it anymore. They also had hunger, thirst and other human necessities, they just had were to eat and drink while not making no effort. They also did not have concupiscence, close to Aquinas original justice.

      St. Augustine view is, ignoring guilty, actually pretty closer to what you find on St. Thomas and,from what i can see, the jews. Quite unlike what you see on american fundamentalists, for instance. So it seems unfair to just say that his view is invented and leave at that.

      And the whole guilty passing thing seems irrelevant to the post anyway.

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    7. St. Augustine view is, ignoring guilty, actually pretty closer to what you find on St. Thomas and,from what i can see, the Jews.

      Judaism has a prayer titled "Elohai Neshamah" that specifically asserts that you were created pure, unadulterated, and whole as a baby. Jews pray it every morning waking up in gratitude to God.

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    8. @Kevin

      Augustine did not write the book of Romans.

      You do not understand that what a text actually says is nowhere near as important as the people who interpret it. Literally speaking, the Greek words for "original sin" or "concupiscience" do not appear anywhere in Romans. There's a section about how all men have fallen short of the glory of God and how the law provokes sinful man to sin (Paul gives his experience of how the tenth commandment, "thou shalt not covet" constantly provoked him to envying others), but none of those in and of themselves elucidate "original sin". That requires an external authority to assign the interpretation to the text.

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    9. I'm not sure what the rise of the nones is supposed to prove. Everybody gets their choice, and God honours every choice. If every human being on the planet became a none, it would still not change the terms on offer from above. It isn't a haggle. You take it or leave it.

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    10. WCB

      @Talmid

      True in part. It does seems like the idea that Adam guilty is passed on to his descendents is not taught in Genesis, but, ignoring that, how invented is St. Augustine view?

      There is no original sin to be found in Genesis. Paul wrote that Adam's resulted in death being introduced into this world. Not original sin. Original sin was later invented by Augustine, who invented that phrase.

      As to Paul and death, in Genesis Adam and Eve are mortal. They were thrown out of Eden to prevent them from eating of the fruit of the Tree Of Life, and becoming rival gods to God and his sons. (Genesis 6, Job, 1 and 2)

      God later shortens lifespans of mankind to 120 years.

      Obviously, we do not have the original myths Genesis were based on, but obviously many ancient civilizations had creation myths that explained why life is hard and brutal. But the God of Genesis is not the God of the prophets, Paul, or Augustine.

      WCB

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    11. "That requires an external authority to assign the interpretation to the text."

      Of course, that it is the point of any non-Protestant church (or, if you want, any religion or ideology with exception of the ones derived from Protestantism). In USA, there is an external authority to interpret the Constitution: it is called "the Supreme Court".

      Texts don't interpret themselves and don't have any meaning before interpretation: they are only ink on a paper or pixels on a screen before humans interpret them. To prevent differences of interpretation, Jesus gave the authoritative interpretation to the apostles: this was the point of Jesus telling his disciples that they had to learn more things but he was going to send the Spirit to teach them.

      "Judaism has a prayer titled "Elohai Neshamah" that specifically asserts that you were created pure, unadulterated, and whole as a baby. "

      Rabbinical Judaism is a different religion than Biblical Judaism so recurring to a Rabbinical prayer is not a piece of evidence. Rabbinical Judaism is built as a reaction against Christianity.

      Let's look at Biblical Judaism: "Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me." (Psalm 51, 5).

      This is much earlier than a Rabbinical prayer. Rabbinical Judaism contradicts the Hebrew Bible in many things. In the Talmud, Rabbis are given authority of interpretation even higher than God. When God disagrees on an interpretation, a Rabbi says that God has no authority after he gave the Law at Mount Sinai. Of course, this is completely alien to the spirit of the Hebrew Bible.

      "Literally speaking, the Greek words for "original sin" or "concupiscience" do not appear anywhere in Romans."

      Yes, the Greek word for Trinity does not appear literally in the entire New Testament. Only that there is a Father, a Son and a Spirit and that the three are God and there is an only God. But "Trinity"? Not once.

      The original sin is not explicit in the Old Testament but saying that it was an invention of Saint Augustine is an exaggeration. Besides hints at Genesis and in the Psalms, we have some sayings of Jesus

      "When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished and asked, “Who then can be saved? Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” (Matthew 19, 25-26)

      There is Romans and there is the fact that man cannot save himself so he needs a Savior.

      Yes, Augustine developed the doctrine of original sin and the Church (inspired by the Spirit) adopted it, as an authoritative interpretation. This is similar to other doctrines, such as the Trinity. Development of doctrine is the explicit clarification of doctrines that were implicit. But saying that Augustine invented the doctrine is a far stretch.

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    12. See also the reference of Church Fathers before Augustine about Original Sin. I only needed a Google search.

      https://christianity.stackexchange.com/questions/26217/are-there-any-writings-from-the-church-fathers-teaching-original-sin-before-augu

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    13. @Infinite_Growth

      Besides what Chent said, St. Augustine did not teach that our nature got from immortal to mortal thanks to Adam and Eve, but that our mortality was aways a thing and we just lost thd means to deal with it. We also got a tendency to doing bad but our nature is, contra protestants, still good.

      The diference between the views seems that the saint teached that Adam guilty gets passed along as well, but i did notice this in the original post.

      @WCB

      You seems to object to St. Augustine view that guilty being passed over and the name "original sin" being not on the Bible, i dont dispute that.

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  3. Beautiful. God bless

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  4. Very nice and timely article. Thank you Prof. Feser. The reality that the incarnation wasn't necessary but fitting makes it all the more interesting and glorious in terms of who and what God is. It may be thought of as God truly 'going the other mile with us', so to speak. Also, based on the Gospel, particularly the parable of the one lost sheep vs the 99 non-lost ones, we can safely presume that the incarnation would still have taken place just the same had it just been only me or you (a single human person) in existence that fell from grace. In his recent video reel "Why you Deserve God", in response to the otherwise valid thought that we don't actually deserve God, Fr Mike Schmitz says (and thanks to the incarnation) "He's declared once and for all that you are worth his life".

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  5. It seems to me that it’s also a fairly particular time in mankind's technological/civil development. It could be argued that the Romans were the first civilisation that really kept detailed administrative records of what happened across their territory. For all the ridiculous claims of the ‘mythicists’, the reality is that the Romans were far better at providing an independent record of at least the death of Jesus than even the Greeks. In fact, you could say that the Greeks, as well as setting a solid philosophical ground, also prepared the conditions where you had an educated class across the Mediterranean and middle east with a consistent basic frame of reference in which to comprehend the incarnation outside of the Jewish cultural frame of reference?

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    1. We don't have administrative records of Christ's death for the simple reason that Jerusalem (and much of the surrounding territory) was destroyed completely in A.D. 70.

      The testimonium flavianum was made up because it uses "christianos" to refer to the community of believers, and this word was coined much later in the Roman Empire's history. If it were an authentic Josephus passage, it would have used the word "chrestianos" like the real first-century document Acts.

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    2. Apologies, that was written in a pre christmas rush. My point was more that the nature of the Roman empire was such that when Christianity started to grow in towns and cities (within living memory of the events), if soldiers/officials etc based in Jerusalem at the time denied that a preacher called Jesus had been crucified at all, that would surely have been used as an argument against the Christians early on. However we have details of the criticisms against the early believers, and none of them were that Jesus had not existed, or that he had not been crucified etc.

      So yes any local records were likely destroyed AD 70, but my contention is still that when you look at the development of civilisation up until then, although there were others that kept some level of written administration (such as the Egyptians, Assyrians, Greeks etc), the Romans were distinct in the likes of administration, language, education and commentary - across a vast portion of the known world - in a way that seems fitting to me for the incarnation, for the ‘covenant with all peoples’. The fact that it was in a backwater of the empire, born in a lowly stable, is equally perfect.

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    3. G. Mancz 滿償喬治December 25, 2022 at 4:27 AM

      In actual fact, Acts 11:26 happens to have the plural accusative of Χρῑστῐᾱνός, so this comment is somewhat mistifying.

      On the subject of Josephus, I'll just leave this here, as a sample of what even a non-Christian scholar is prepared to hold on the subject:

      http://josephusblog.org/evaluating-the-josephus-jesus-paraphrase-model/

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    4. @G. Mancz all the earliest and best manuscripts of Acts use "chrestianos". Later scribes, because an eta is close in sound to an iota, changed it.

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  6. Gordolastic manualistDecember 24, 2022 at 2:39 AM

    The finishing remarks about the Encarnation not being accepted at a different moment is chilling indeed. It makes me wonder if there is any work developing a theology of history with this kind of considerations. By the looks of it, Aquinas would appreciate Warhammer 40k with all the grimdark future where there is only war.

    Happy Christmass to everyone, might this coming of Christ sanctify and prepare us for the Second coming.

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  7. Dear Prof.Feser

    Thank You So much for this post! It's an issue that I have been wondering about for awhile so it means a lot to me! I think it is a very thought provoking reflection. Thanks Again!
    Wishing you and your family a merry Christmas.

    If I might recommend an idea for a future post, it could be an extended thomistic treatment on why the incarnation would not have happened without sin, you briefly mentioned it here basing it on biblical emphasis which is quite strong, but if you could perhaps provide more reasons as to why it would have been unfitting if the incarnation happened in a world without sin that would make the thomistic position much stronger against the Scotists. But this post is more than enough for a Christmas Gift. :)

    "As it is, Christian teaching is that a period of such darkness and depravity will indeed occur prior to the end of the world."

    P.S: I think you made a typo in the post, you forgot to mention the word "in", i.e
    "Christian teaching is IN that period....."

    Merry Christmas again and a Happy New Year!!!

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  8. Actually, the Son would have become human even in the absence of the Fall. The sin only greatly complicated the original project of God - theosis.

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    1. "whether God would have become incarnate had the human race not fallen into sin. Aquinas answers in the negative."

      Ovidiu, your stance does not appear to reconcile with Dr. Feser's initial paragraph. Would you be able to develop your reasoning?

      It also appears to follow from Aquinas answer that we would have never have had the knowledge of Christ, should we not have sinned in the first place. This also probably means that we would have never had the need for a Catholic Church. In short, we are able to discuss these matters because we have sinned. The reward for our sinning is the knowledge of Christ. Ate we better off having sinned? I cannot reconcile this apparent contradiction.

      PS. Merry Christmas and Peace to all.

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    2. "Ate we better off having sinned? I cannot reconcile this apparent contradiction."

      Both St. Irenaeus, if i'am remembering right, and St. Augustine at least especulated that, had man not sinned, God would eventually offer theosis anyway.


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    3. Thank you Talmid

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    4. Merry Christmas to all!

      I will look for the right references.

      In the meantime, I remember that the main reason is that the Incarnation was the divine purpose for creating the man.
      If the Incarnation were determined by the Fall, that would mean that the Fall was, ultimately, a blessing, or, that it would be possible to constrain God by evil.
      So, man was created in order to unite with God ("God became man so that man would become god" is one of the constant teachings of the Fathers), and the Fall greatly complicated matters because it added the need for Salvation through Christ's sufferings, dying and resurrection.
      You've noticed, I think, that I argue from an Eastern Orthodox perspective. In the West, I think this was Duns Scotus' conviction (not so sure, though). In the Eastern Tradition, there are more references to be given.

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    5. @Ovidiu
      Thank you for your reply. The Fall was always known to G-d, so it should probably not be perceived as a complication. So, your statement "If the Incarnation were determined by the Fall" cannot be other than true, because the Fall has started a chain of sins culminating in the Incarnation. This really sounds like a heretical comment, but it surely cannot be that G-d has decided to send his Son only after The Fall, because He had to know about The Fall prior to it happening, so it must be also true that He always intended to send His Son. And since He doesn't change His Mind, given He is All-wise, it really doesn't matter how much or how little we have sinned because His Son would always be Incarnate at a precise pont in time He was, and no sooner and no later. We, believers, are led to believe that G-d took pitty on us, and sent His Son, when He knew all along He would send Him. Maybe I am having a bout of Anthropopathism but I confess I am confused.

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    6. Duns Scotus does argue that the Incarnation would happen even with no sin. I dont know if it fits eastern orthodox argument, from what i remember he goes from another angle.

      It seems a completely possible position to roman catholics.

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    7. @ anon 25dec 6.02 pm

      Given Ovidiu comment in that "Both St. Irenaeus, if i'am remembering right, and St. Augustine at least especulated that, had man not sinned, God would eventually offer theosis anyway.", we must conclude that St. Irenaeus and St. Augustine 'speculation' is not really a speculation but a certainty.

      It was always G-d's intention to offer theosis. Either that or the opposite in which case we will never be offered theosis, that is, "God became man so that man would become god" will not happen and the teaching of the Fathers is incorrect, which cannot be, as they are part of the Dogma. In other words, G-d indeed must not have decided half-way to offer theosis. This is truly confusing, as it seems to me that all that happens to Humanity has been already foreseen before Time.

      fc

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    8. @Talmid
      Thank you Talmid. Really struggling here.
      As fc stated before, the Incarnation must have been foreseen before Time, so it appears indeed that this is a mute point in that there is no need to argue about a decision taken before it all started. Happy to get some understanding. Maybe indeed the anon 24dec 1:29 pm is right: the moment you ask, your Faith is questionable. Personally, this is hard as I really do envy the true faithful ones; the feeling of Faith must be extraordinary and, I confess, don't have it.

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    9. Aways had a problem with faith as well. Fortunately, there was philosophy and all that, it helped me get open to having the relation that faith asks for.

      Anyway, even if we take the view that there would be no Incarnation if there was no Fall it is true that God decision of sending His Son happened before the Fall, for He is outside time(,as St. Augustine argued) and so there is not in God something like thinking at time t1 and them choosing at time t2. The same eternal decision of having the Fall got at the same time the aincarnation decision.

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    10. @anonymus
      From the fact that God knew from eternity about the Fall, I don't think it follows that the Incarnation was determined by the Fall. As I said above, this would imply, I think, the "felix culpa".
      Or, put differently, the essential idea here is an anthropological one: the teleology of man is to be united with God (to become god through grace). The Fall didn't change this divine project (it couldn't have, by necessity), but changed its method, or its course, so to speak, because it brought with it the need for Salvation. So, looking from the fallen humanity, the Incarnation is both the initial divine project, and the means for Salvation.
      More than this, I cannot say. I will look further in the works of the Fathers. Saint Maximus the Confessor and Saint Isaac the Syrian will be of help here, I think.

      @Talmid
      Thank you!
      I don't really know Scotus' argumentation. If you any references...

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    11. "Anyway, even if we take the view that there would be no Incarnation if there was no Fall it is true that God decision of sending His Son happened before the Fall, for He is outside time(,as St. Augustine argued) and so there is not in God something like thinking at time t1 and them choosing at time t2. The same eternal decision of having the Fall got at the same time the aincarnation decision."

      I don't think I agree with that. I would say God can choose at t2 something that he would not have chosen at t1, if, for instance, something happened at t2 which had not happened before it. For instance, if you just decided to go pray at t2, but not at t1, God might then have decided at t2 to make himself present to you or whatever, in response to what you chose to do at t2.
      But of course, I reject foreknowledge, so there's that.

      But even under foreknowledge it is still plausible that God's choices are taken in different logical moments (even if not at different temporal moments), we might say. Because we want to say (if we believe in free will) that God chooses to do things in response to our choices. So these particular choices of God will at least be dependent on our making of the choices (maybe, if you believe in foreknowledge, God chose everything he would do at the very same temporal moment he created the world, but there must have been some logical priority to his choice of creating the world, since your choices - and therefore God's responses to your choices - are dependent upon that world being made).

      Of course, none of that (not even my own view) needs to entail that God is temporal. My view of time is the classical Aristotelian one as the "measure of change", not the confused modern one. God choosing what to do at t2 (and not at t1) doesn't entail that God is temporal unless it also entails that God undergoes a change of intrinsic properties when he makes the choice, which classical theists should deny. If it implies God is "temporal", it is only in a way that would be perfectly open to classical theists (since it wouldn't imply God is changing).

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    12. @Ovidiu

      This video does a good comparision of St. Thomas and Duns Scotus views on the matter: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lsAweWK8PZ4

      Personally, i found Scotus argument very interesting, but need to look further into it.

      @RunDec

      If we take these choices on a logical level only them i'am cool with they. As long as there is no need to God to change them it is okay

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    13. As I see it, Ovidiu is correct in saying

      Or, put differently, the essential idea here is an anthropological one: the teleology of man is to be united with God (to become god through grace).

      Yes. Theosis was not part of God's plan as a result of the Fall. And therefore fc rightly observes

      It was always G-d's intention to offer theosis.

      And Anonymous rightly says

      As fc stated before, the Incarnation must have been foreseen before Time,

      But it does not follow from this that God DECIDED upon the Incarnation because he foreknew about the Fall. This makes God's action to be caused by Adam's action, which is wrong. So, we need to be more circumspect in how we describe it:

      God intended theosis in the very formation of human nature;
      He knew from all eternity that Adam would Fall;
      He intended from all eternity to rescue man from the Fall;
      He intended from all eternity to accomplish that rescue by the Incarnation.

      In a certain sense God's intending the Incarnation "hinged upon" Adam's sin, and it is in this sense that we refer to that sin as "O Happy Fault!". But of course every sin (and certainly that first human sin) is wrong, and ought to be repudiated; Adam (as Tradition has it, saved in the long run) would have had to have remorse for said sin, and remorse just is an internal position of repudiation of the sin in terms of its wrongness and its guiltiness. But any sinner can regret the wrongness of the sin while being grateful to God for some goodness which God brings out of the sin through his power.

      And since God wills primarily the goodness of the ENTIRE ORDER of the created providential order rather than the goodness of any one element thereof, (in willing Creation), He wills most especially the unifying principle of goodness of that created order - which (the saints tell us) is the Incarnation, in that the Son's union of divinity with a created nature ennobles the entire created order, as well as making possible (due to sin) the theosis of the highest natural beings, which is their proper end, and thus the highest good of the highest natural beings.

      To get bound up in whether God willed the Incarnation because of the Fall is to get caught in a web of wrong questions.

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  9. People without the Faith commenting on faith questions takes the biscuit. To those unbelieving no answer is possible

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    1. And to those believing no answer is needed, hence, accordingly, no answers will ever be given

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    2. WCB

      @Anonymous

      "People without the Faith commenting on faith questions takes the biscuit. "

      Whose faith statements? Catholics, Calvinists? Lutherans? Sunni Molsems? Shiites? Mormons? Scientologists? How else are we to decide facts and truth without honest doubts? Without careful though, and careful consideration of basic claims?

      WCB

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    3. "On the road halfway between faith and criticism stands the inn of reason. Reason is faith in what can be understood without faith, but it’s still a faith, since to understand presupposes that there’s something understandable.”
      — Fernando Pessoa, "The Book of Disquiet"

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    4. Reason is faith in what can be understood without faith, but it’s still a faith,

      It is a "faith" only in an extended sense of the term, and only because the state of philosophy regarding how we know is so ridiculously poor.

      It is not necessary to "presuppose" that there are things that we want to understand, as that is manifest to us. It is not necessary to presuppose that at least some of those things are understandable, as we form some understandings of them even before we can formulate the question "are these 'understandable' ". A child of 5 understands enough about causality to apprehend that "if I do X, then Y will result". He doesn't need a philosophical basis for understanding WHY he understands this to have that much understanding of X and Y, and he doesn't need to first prove whether it is possible to know that if I do X, Y results before knowing THAT X results in Y.

      But even more basic to all of that, all babies start forming ideas and concepts of things around them, and learn language to express those ideas within a few years; these concepts are a form of knowing in and of itself, and do not rely on logic or proofs of "knowability".

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  10. Merry Christmas, Ed, and fellow blog members. May Jesus bless us all.

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  11. I think that William Lane Craig explained in a debate that only a small minority of mankind was born before Jesus. I don't remember the percentage but it was small because the progress in technology has made Earth population increase. So this could be combined with other arguments both in the post and in the comments.

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  12. Merry Christmas to all. When I woke up this morning I found that Santa had put a book called "Aristotle's Revenge" by some dude named Feser under my tree. I'm afraid it's caused me some marital strife as my wife is angry at me for thumbing through it during Christmas dinner!

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  13. Merry Christmas All,

    A related, but distinct, question is that given God's atemporal nature, and the universe's speculated age, why did he decide to create human beings at exactly the moment he in fact did so? Presumably, our creation could have happened before or after - is there any speculation as to why it happened when it did?

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    1. St. Augustine tackes that one on the City of God part I. Since God is outside time and time only exists when there is change, there is only time after creation started. This means that there is no God sudently deciding to create at time x and not y, there just is He deciding to create and time starting with the world.

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    2. St. Augustine tackes that one on the City of God part I. Since God is outside time and time only exists when there is change, there is only time after creation started. This means that there is no God sudently deciding to create at time x and not y, there just is He deciding to create and time starting with the world.

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    3. Hi Talmid,

      Thanks for your reply. That seems to explain creation as a whole, but not human creation in particular. So, the question could be rephrased as follows: After God created the universe, why did human beings come into existence at time X and not time Y? It is speculated that the universe is billions of years old, so why did human creation occur less than 200,000 years ago? Perhaps, to borrow some of the language used in this post, the final cause of the universe itself is to accommodate human existence - that is, to generate a planet suitable for life, where evolution is possible, and secondary matter that is in potency to receive a human soul comes to exist. Not sure, just speculating.

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    4. " there any speculation as to why it happened when it did?"

      We can speculate all we want. Perhaps he made us later because all the previous things were also good in their own right and deserved their "time to shine". Perhaps it took as long as it did because God wanted the angels or the Valar to be co-creators fashioning the universe for us before he gave us life, and so this was just the time that the angels or the Valar, who are finite beings, took. Or perhaps God made us so "late" in order to give us a sense of humility towards the universe- same as having life only in this lonely small planet here -, or give us a greater sense of mystery when studying cosmology. Who knows? We can speculate all we want, we probably won't know the answer. But given that there are these possible speculations, I don't think it's too serious a "problem" for theism.

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    5. @Anon

      I see, it is suprising to me that we are born so late too. I remember Dr. Craig saying before that the universe needed to be old for things like the formation of the solar system to happen and the Earth elements and all that.

      Since God likes to use secundary causes, it couls be it.

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  14. WCB

    @Chent

    "I think that William Lane Craig explained in a debate that only a small minority of mankind was born before Jesus."

    If we take Augustine's idea God is outside of time, and that for God, there is no past, present, and future, only an eternal Big Now, all people who existed, exist, and wil exist, exist in God's Big Now. That would seem to make WLC's solution moot and wrong. Augustine's timeless God throws lots of monkey wrenches in a lot of theological works.

    WCL

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    1. “Augustine's timeless God throws lots of monkey wrenches in a lot of theological works.”

      I’m not sure any of us are competent to even imagine time from God’s perspective. We imagine a “before” time and a “beyond” space, but of course both of those are incorrectly applying relative terms to the absolute. We do know that God started time and space, and is at times present at particular points within time and space, but applying the ‘block universe’ of General Relativity onto God is in no way reasonable, as He is the living beginning and end.

      The fact that, at the most fundamental perspective, there is no space or time, is not really relevant to us (outside of mystical experience), or to Gods ongoing plan for our creation. We were created in time and space, and the plan is temporal and spatial. The trinity seems to be an important part of the way in which God acts in space and time, but essentially we only see and really conceive of this less fundamental ‘level’, within which God sometimes allows or makes His-eternal-self present.

      Long story short, I don’t really understand why God being more fundamental than time makes any difference to WLC’s observation?

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    2. Hey WCL. There was this other guy, WCB, who was arguing earlier in this thread that God should have immediately and instantly corrected the effects of sin. Seems like God's timelessness renders that guy's objection up there moot, doesn't it?

      Maybe you can help talk some sense into him. Frequently, his arguments don't hold up to scrutiny like this.

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    3. Hey WCL. There was this other guy, WCB, who was arguing earlier in this thread that God should have immediately and instantly corrected the effects of sin. Seems like God's timelessness renders that guy's objection up there moot, doesn't it?

      Maybe you can help talk some sense into him. Frequently, his arguments don't hold up to scrutiny like this.

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    4. Funny that WLC actually argues for God being temporal after creating. This makes the post amusing, i dunno.

      But i don't really see St. Augustine view wrecking Bill Craig point, for it is still the case that the number of people redemned by Christ is higher with He appearing on the place He did than on the Garden with Adam and Eve still there or with, say, Noah and his boys.

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  15. Adam & Eve always needed God (before and after the fall). However, they were convinced otherwise by the Enemy, which resulted in their fall from Grace. The original spiritual war was between God & Satan and then God created man; and so the spiritual war continues. As man is below the nature of an angel, Satan is enraged to think that humans can be given Divine Life in their souls, an act of God’s pure love and mercy for us. Be convinced; we cannot save ourselves. All is Grace! I highly recommend the book, ‘Courage to be Afraid’ by Fr. Marie-Dominque Molinie, O.P., which speaks on the simplicity of following Christ and the grandeur of God’s plan for each of us. A blessed Christmastide to all!

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    1. The original spiritual war was between God & Satan and then God created man; and so the spiritual war continues. As man is below the nature of an angel, Satan is enraged to think that humans can be given Divine Life in their souls, an act of God’s pure love and mercy for us.

      According to some authors, Satan's primary outrage was in apprehending that God would unite Himself to human nature (not to an angelic nature) and that a human being would be elevated above the angels in the order of grace. I.E. Mary.

      I don't know if they are just speculating on this, or even merely proposing it as one way to explain Satan's rebellion. I suspect that some of the authors who propose it do so out of a conceit in their own hearts: since (in this account) God's foreseen action makes man special: even Satan's sin must be centered on man's special role. I say this because Satan's sin - if right described above - is one of pride, in that he was unwilling to see angels below a mere creature composed of body and soul. But such pride in a being, once you grant that Satan was going to be proud, needs no intervening object about which to be proud, than his OWN being and his relation to God: Satan could be proud by refusing to accept his dependency on God without any further need of considering Satan's relation to other beings. Parsimony of hypothesis does not require us to lever in Satan considering some third party to the matter, in order to find room for pride.

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    2. “ I suspect that some of the authors who propose it do so out of a conceit in their own hearts”

      It seems to me that pride can be present without any effects until there is a comparison with a third party. You see examples of this in Cain and Abel, the prodigal son etc. If you consider how pathetic we humans often are, and imagine what directly created angels are like, it must indeed seem outrageous that God has lifted us up so far, like squirmy little worms invited to partake in the eternal Trinity. That God became a son of man, to make us feeble creatures son’s of God, is far more shocking that the father welcoming the prodigal son (who was already a son).

      I don’t know how true the stories are of why Lucifer fell, without explicit revelation I’m not sure we can know what happened or even how angels think. However it sounds very plausible to me.

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  16. This is not a comment that directly addresses your point. But with regard to the human timeline, it is interesting how in recent years our confident understanding of the general outlines of human history, of civilizational progress, and of cultural development, has been upended from the picture we may have learned in college some few decades ago - and most certainly what we absorbed as children (if you had such an interest and opportunity) from popular tomes issued by historians of the late prehistoric/preliterate period.

    It's probably understandable that in light of that, there is such an obvious explosion of interest in not only the Bronze, but the Chalcolithic and polished stone ages. Who would have suspected in 1959 or even just before the fall of the Soviet Union the depth of Eurasia's complex social development?

    Who could have guessed?

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  17. Without the fall. If the goal of Humanity is still Theosis. The incarnation would still occur.

    For without God becoming Man. Then Man cannot achive Theosis.

    The only difference is the lack of the need for atonement.

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  18. Interesting 12/23 Substack from Michael Warren Davis on this very topic, adopting Scotus’ “Franciscan Thesis” — “As the Subtle Doctor put it, ‘Christ would not have come as Redeemer if man had not fallen’—but he would have come anyway.”

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    1. Warren Davis is not Catholic as far as ideas go.

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    2. One can only concur. In a recent article “The Great Convergence”, Davis asserts: “… the Orthodox need more popery and Catholics need less… the West needs to remember that our bishops do not derive their authority from the pope”. Davis’ “solution” to the schism: “Both the Orthodox and the Catholics would call the pope the primus inter pares. What’s more, everywhere I look now, I see signs that traditional Catholics are moving closer toward the Orthodox position (in a good way)” Perhaps if he left the Vigano/Pietro Siffi cheer squad, his adoring eyes would see something else – there are more than a billion Catholics out there after all. But then, he doesn’t believe there are any doctrinal differences with non-Catholic Orthodoxy (revealing his own lack of orthodoxy), claiming it’s just to do with the way we “do” theology.

      He says the Catholic Church is better than the Orthodox in that it is less “ethnic”, but could not resist this: “I did once get some dirty looks for showing up at a Spanish-language Mass in a D.C. ghetto”. Vile. What a way to speak of the Church that welcomed him a few years ago; this “ghetto” of Hispanic Catholicism now includes most US Catholics. What goes on in their parishes is culturally speaking, a window into 1960s liberal US Catholicism.

      Yes, as he finds the Catholic Church stinky, exotic folk-religion and “decentralised” local churches are a greener grass. What he can’t explain is how, since the vast majority of “local” churches are pretty liberal, giving them “autonomy” will result in the restoration of orthodox Catholicism. The answer would be obvious to any normal Catholic: pray and work for the re-emergence of the Papacy that has overseen the years of glories he dismisses as “300 years” of “ultramontanism”. He can’t wait for the “great convergence” with non-Catholic churches to happen, he says. But he, and people with his views, are not part of the discussion on how to “restore” ANYTHING. His ideas are part of the problem: Modernism plus smells and bells does not make Catholicism.

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  19. Nobody can really account for the appearance of anyone or anything, including Jesus. Nobody really knows why, what, when or where anything is - anything. This includes Aquinas. And yet some people claim to know exactly when, where and why the presumed incarnation of Christ occurred.

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  20. The question in the OP was "Why did the Incarnation occur precisely when it did?" I am shocked that nobody in this thread, including Ed and including the material he cites from Aquinas, has addressed the conditions that were around PRECISELY at the time of Jesus's earthly life, because of varying factors in the prior centuries. "When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law" (Gal 4:4). No one has discussed Hellenism, the translation of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek beginning with the Torah in the 3rd century BC but including most or all of the prophets and writings by the time of Jesus, the Roman empire which had begun less than thirty years prior to Jesus' birth, the Jewish diaspora throughout the Roman empire which was vital to spreading the Gospel in the first century (the expulsion of Christians from the synagogue in the late first century largely puts an end to that aspect), the events that took place at the time of the Maccabean revolt which put certain things (a functioning Temple) in place for Jesus's message, and above all the Jewish expectations of a Messiah to fit the 70 weeks prophecy in Daniel 9 coinciding with the 10th jubilee in which Melchizedek was to make atonement (see the Dead Sea Scroll 11QMelichizedek and other Dead Sea Scrolls for the Messianic expectations at that time). None of this contradicts Aquinas' account but it needs to be supplemented significantly.

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  21. A defect of scholastic theology is that in the presence of the mystery of God it seeks to answer the unanswerable and know the unknowable and in so doing achieves a spurious clarity and precision that many people find implausible or even absurd.

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    1. Which particular questions are unanswerable that scholastic theology attempts to answer and how do we actually know that those questions are in fact unanswerable?

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    2. Faith Seeking ReasonDecember 31, 2022 at 3:33 PM

      A defect in the degenerate theology of mysterianism is the presumption that if something isn't known now then "it is unknowable", an inherently insoluble mystery, and the pursuit of knowing it means running into absurdity. A species of this kind of defect is the presumption that if something cannot be known in all respects then it cannot be known in any respect at all. This "theology" achieves a fideism that ultimately can lead to a rejection of intellect and knowing as such, including any firm ground for its own tenets.

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    3. "to answer the unanswerable and know the unknowable"

      Uh... before you claim something is "unanswerable" and "unknowable" you must first try to know it, and try to find answers.

      And if you can't know it, and can't give any answers, that doesn't mean others are as incapable as you. Ironically, your position lacks humility. You should be more humble in recognizing that what is "unanswearable" and "unknowable" for you might really be just that: unanswerable and unknowable FOR YOU. Not necessarily for others.

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  22. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle teaches that it is not possible to know with certainty the position and momentum of a physical particle. The key here is that this uncertainty is accepted as certain, and the discussion ends for all practical effects in that it does not impose any particular difficulties in the interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, as far as I understand.

    Maybe by way of a metaphor we can transpose the same principle to metaphysical and theological matters, namely the existence of soul, self and, ultimately, G-d.

    There is no dispute that physical particles are endowed with position and momentum. It happens that we cannot measure them. It's not because we cannot measure them that they don't exist. Why can't we transpose these thoughts into the metaphysics of the Soul, the Self and G-d. They exist, we simply do not "have the tools" (aka Faith).

    ... or so it seems to me ... juat a random thought.

    May G-d be with you all in the coming year and the ones that follow.

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  23. @ Alexander VI

    "answer the unanswerable and know the unknowable"

    There seems to be an underlying certainty that there is something unanswerable and/or unknowable. In this sense, I am not sure we can classify Scholastic Theology as "defective", rather, I humbly submit "limited".

    The same probably can be stated about any field of thought, whether philosophical, theological or, say, mathematical. There are several open problems in mathematics that do not yet have an answer, and yet, we do not ascribe the term "defective" to the current corpus of mathematical knowledge.

    fc

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  24. Fred Sheed wrote about this in his book "Theology and Sanity" and it was similar to this article. thank-you

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  25. "...[W] what Aquinas means is that had the Incarnation occurred much later, then the human race would have become so extremely corrupt that the Incarnation would simply not have been accepted."
    March 3rd, 2013 may mark that point in history; I'm not really sure.

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  26. "[W]hat Aquinas means is that had the Incarnation occurred much later, then the human race would have become so extremely corrupt that the Incarnation would simply not have been accepted."

    March 13th, 2013 may have been that watershed moment; but I'm not certain.

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    1. Why, what happened then? Seriously, as an uninformed but interested reader, I do not get your meaning.

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    2. The election of the 266th Roman pontiff

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