211. A good but unanswerable question
211. A GOOD BUT UNANSWERABLE QUESTION
Are there any reasons to believe Christ would or would not have become incarnate if man had not sinned? Or, to change the question from a contrary-to-fact conditional to a real possibility, suppose there are rational beings on some other planet (which is possible) and suppose they passed the test we failed in Eden, and remained innocent (which is also possible, since free choice follows upon reason); would Christ incarnate Himself in them too? Obviously we do not know, but can we intelligently guess?
Whether, if man had not sinned, God would have become incarnate?
Augustine says, expounding what is set down in Luke 19:10, For the Son of Man is come to seek and to saved that which was lost:—Therefore, if man had not sinned, the Son of Man would not have come.. . .
I answer that, There are different opinions about this question. For some say that even if man had not sinned, the Son of Man would have become incarnate.
Others assert the contrary, and seemingly our assent ought rather to be given to this opinion. For such things as spring from God’s will and beyond the creature’s due can be made known to us only through being revealed in the sacred Scripture, in which the divine will is made known to us. Hence, since everywhere in the sacred Scripture the sin of the first man is assigned as the reason of the Incarnation, it is more in accordance with this to say that the work of the Incarnation was ordained by God as a remedy for sin, so that had sin not existed, the Incarnation would not have been. For God allows evils to happen in order to bring a greater good therefrom; hence it is written (Rom 5:20): Where sin abounded, grace did more abound. Hence too in the blessing of the Paschal candle we say: O happy fault, that merited such and so great a Redeemer! (III,1,3).
And yet the power of God is not limited to this; even had sin not existed, God could have become incarnate. . . .
Even when St. Thomas may be wrong, his principles are right.
Christ came for a purpose: to die for us. This we know. What we do not know is what other purposes may have led Him to come in incarnate form if He had not needed to die.
It is possible that Christ did in fact come in non-incarnate and pre—incarnate forms throughout Old Testament history: in the burning bush; in the three persons who visited Abraham at the oaks of Mamre (they are called “men,” “angels”, and “lords”); in “the Angel (messenger) of the Lord”; and/or in Melchizedek (see Heb 7:1-10). If so, these may be clues to a second purpose for His coming: not merely to set right sin but also to reveal Himself to man and for intimacy and closer union, which is the aim of love. And that is a purpose that stems from His essential nature.
St. Thomas almost always accepts the opinions of St. Augustine; and Augustine wrote that “if man had not sinned, the Son of Man would not have come.” However, the very first thing St. Thomas says in his answer is that “there are different opinions about this question.” And the most important point in his answer (which Augustine would certainly agree with) is that we do not know, since such things “spring from God’s will and beyond the creature’s due (deservingness)” and therefore are “made known to us only through being revealed”. St. Thomas modestly keeps the options open, for “the power of God is not limited” and “even had not sin existed, God could have become incarnate.”
God’s Word clearly says that the reason for the actual Incarnation was (a) our sin and (b) God’s love and grace, but does not say whether (b) without (a) would have motivated an Incarnation. We know what we know, and we don’t know what we don’t know. But what we do know about the reason for the Incarnation is a profound and mysterious answer to the “problem of evil”: St. Thomas’ quote from Romans 5:20. God turned our greatest evil (sin) into the occasion for our greatest good (salvation); in fact He turned the greatest sin ever—deicide—into the very instrument of our greatest good, “Good” Friday.