Excursus: Would the incarnation have taken place irrespective of the Fall?
Chapter One
God prepares the way from the beginning
Origins are fascinating. At present I am doing some research on my Jewish grandfather on my mother’s side of the family. He was known to the press as a flamboyant character who had emigrated from the Crimea after the First World War. He called himself a professor and ran a dance studio in Sydney, Australia, in the first half of the twentieth century. Some of the dances he invented and put into print are in the National Library of Australia and are also listed in a Stanford University catalogue that begins with Domenico da Piacenza in 1425 and concludes with Elizabeth Gibbons in 2007. I learned that one of the dancing teachers he employed, Nellie Cameron, was a notorious character in the underworld of Sydney. He died when I was two so I have no memory of him, only a photo or two.
Origins matter to individuals and indeed to an entire people. They mattered to Israel. Genesis as the name implies is about origins. The most basic of questions are addressed in the text: Where does humanity in general come from and where does Israel in particular come from? Why is the world so broken and we with it? Do we have a future?
In this chapter we consider how from the beginning the Creator prepared a way to be present among his creatures. As Thomas F. Torrance rightly says, ‘The incarnation of the Son of God has a prehistory, a background or hinterland of preparation and significance which we must not overlook.’ In addition an excursus will address a venerable question: Would the incarnation have occurred irrespective of the Fall? But first, who is this God who prepares the way and who not only has his own glory but has humanity’s best interests at heart?
God and God’s image
The God who comes into majestic relief in Genesis 1:1 – 2:3 is the creator of all things who acts with purpose and not caprice. The language is simple, the thought profound. God is pictured in terms any Israelite would understand. He is the great worker who does six days on the job and then comes rest. The first three days see the creation of environments: day one, the heavens (Gen. 1:3–5); day two, the waters (Gen. 1:6–8); and day three, the earth (Gen. 1:9–13). Each day is pronounced as good and the presentation of each day’s creative work has an evening-and-morning formula attached to it. If the first three days represent the forming of three different environments, the next three days articulate their filling with different kinds of creatures suitable for them. And so on the fourth day the heavens are populated with sun, moon and stars (Gen. 1:14–18). The fourth day is pronounced good and God applies the evening-and-morning formula. The fifth day sees the waters populated with all sorts of sea creatures and the air with winged creatures. Both the populating of the sea and earth are thematized. It too is good and once again the evening-and-morning phrase is in evidence (Gen. 1:20–23). On the sixth day God focuses on the earth and the creatures suitable for inhabiting it. It is on this day that a unique creature appears, humankind (more anon). The creation of various earth creatures is good, according to the text, but there is a qualitative leap in relation to the creature uniquely in the image of God. Now we read that the creation is very good (Gen. 1:24–31). And once more the evening-and-morning formula is in view. The seventh day moves the reader onto a different plane. Here is the climax of all the events that have gone before. The language of holiness is used in the Bible for the first time, as this time ‘frame’ itself is hallowed. Significantly the evening-and-morning phrase drops from view. There is something very different about this end point. Chaos has thus given way to cosmos. The process has been an orderly one.
The nature of those days is controversial still. Richard Dawkins is not the first person to raise questions. Aquinas (1225–74) in his era was faced with multiple ways of understanding those days, as can be seen in Paul J. Glenn’s paraphrase of part of the Summa Theologica:
There are different interpretations of the term day as used in the scriptural account of creation. Some say the six days of active creation are not periods of time but a listing of the order in which creatures were made. Others think these days have time significance, but hardly in the sense of our twenty-four hour day, for that is measured by the sun, and the sun was not created until the fourth day. In any case the six days of creation and the seventh day of rest give an adequate account of the works of creation and their sanctification. St. Augustine makes the days of creation into one period in which God manifests worldly creatures to the angels in seven ways. It must be acknowledged that Scripture uses suitable words to express the works of creation, and to suggest or imply the operation of the three persons of the divine Trinity in these works.
So what we have seen is how Aquinas explores the options: six days of revelation to the angels (Augustine), an orderly listing (others) and special days (still others). He concludes that, whichever it was, God created in an appropriate manner. Wise words.
On the way to the Sabbath God created creatures to image his ways (Gen. 1:27):
So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
The divine intent is stated in the previous verse (Gen. 1:26): ‘Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”’ God exercises dominion. They exercise dominion. He subdues. They subdue. The notion of humankind in the image of God (imago Dei) is also an essentially contested concept to this day. Are human beings images of God like the image of President Lincoln stamped on an American coin? Is the image ontological or substantival? Or are human beings images of God like the image we see of ourselves in a mirror? What we do, so the image does. So is the image functional? Or is it neither but rather a relational idea? Just as male and female are the image of God, so there is something relational about God on the inside (ad intra). Ultimately the doctrine of the Trinity lies behind our being the images of God in this view. C. John Collins wisely suggests, ‘Scholars will advocate one of these three over the others, but we will note that they need not be mutually exclusive. Perhaps none is right, or some combination is right, or maybe we simply cannot come to a firm conclusion.’ Following Aquinas here one could say whatever ‘image’ means, it is an appropriate way to describe who we are as creatures, vis-à-vis God. What is clear is that on this sixth day the creature is to act in Godlike ways in the created order. Furthermore Genesis 2 and 3 make plain that this creature can be God’s speech partner. These three foundational chapters merit closer attention from this angle of vision. What portrayal of God is found in them? How is God rendered?
The portrayal of God in the beginning
The word to sum up the God of Genesis 1 is ‘transcendent’. This God has no rivals. He stands on the other side of the ontological ledger to creatures. He is beyond creatures. Creation is spoken into being by God. God’s repeated speech acts are causative. As we observed previously, over the first three days various environments are formed: sky, next the waters and finally earth (Gen. 1:2–13). Over the remaining three they are filled: sun, moon and stars, next come the sea creatures and lastly the animals and humankind (Gen. 1:14–31). God is like a great emperor. His word works and is enough. Divine action is speech action. His words do things. And with that speech the Spirit also is at work. Indeed spirit or breath is the vehicle for the spoken word with us and with God.
In Genesis 2 God not only speaks but he fashions. Like a potter with clay Adam is formed from the earth: ‘Then the LORD God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being’ (Gen. 2:7). God commands Adam regarding the task to control and care for the garden sanctuary: ‘The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it’ (Gen. 2:15). If Genesis 1 presents humankind in royal terms as rulers, Genesis 2 renders Adam as a priest who is to relate to the garden zone like the later Levites are to relate to the tabernacle and temple. Gordon J. Wenham comments:
Similarly, [šmr] ‘to guard, to keep’, has the simple profane sense of ‘guard’ (4:9; 30:31), but it is even more commonly used in legal texts of observing religious commands and duties (17:9; Lev 18:5) and particularly of the Levitical responsibility for guarding the tabernacle from intruders (Num 1:53; 3:7–8). It is striking that here and in the priestly law these two terms are juxtaposed (Num 3:7–8; 8:26; 18:5–6), another pointer to the interplay of tabernacle and Eden symbolism already noted (cf. Ber. Rab. 16:5).
Significantly the garden sanctuary does not appear to constitute the geographical limits for the Adamic task. Following the logic of the narrative that begins in the previous chapter, humankind is to exercise dominion over the fish of the sea. This is hardly satisfied by a horticultural existence. In other words, the garden sanctuary is best seen as a staging post for the task of Edenizing the entire world. William J. Dumbrell makes the point well: ‘As a paradigm of the end, Genesis 2 thus displays the harmony that humankind’s dominion was to secure the world at large. Adam’s role in Eden was to extend the contours of the garden to the whole world.’
Clearly in Genesis 2 God is portrayed as transcendent once more. What the human experience of being so commanded by God sounded or felt like is not explored. The text has little interest in human psychology per se. Moreover this chapter presents God as a farmer who planted the garden that became the Adamic responsibility: ‘Now the LORD God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed’ (Gen. 2:8).
As literary scholar Leland Ryken suggests, the scriptural story is a comedy in literary terms. He writes regarding comedy that it is ‘a work of literature in which the plot structure is U-shaped, with the action beginning in prosperity, descending into potentially tragic events, and ending happily’. The Dictionary of Biblical Imagery amplifies his point in relation to the Bible per se:
The overall plot of the Bible is a U-shaped comic plot. The action begins with a perfect world inhabited by perfect people. It descends into the misery of fallen history and ends with a new world of total happiness and the conquest of evil. The book of Revelation is the story of the happy ending par excellence, as a conquering hero defeats evil, marries a bride and lives happily ever after in a palace glittering with jewels. From Genesis to Revelation we see the U-shaped structure working itself out: from the harmony of Genesis 1 – 2 through the disharmony of Genesis 3 – Revelation 20 to harmony again and albeit of a higher kind in Revelation 21 – 22.
This is a refreshing way to view the biblical accounts. Clearly Scripture seen in these terms is no scientific monograph. Its interests lie elsewhere.
In Genesis 3 the comedy takes its dark turn in what Augustine famously termed ‘the Fall’ and more recently Jacques Ellul ‘the Rupture’. Importantly for our purposes in this section the transcendent God of Genesis 1 and 2 is also now to be understood as concomitant as well. God comes alongside his creature made in his image, as Genesis 3:8 shows. This God walks in the garden: ‘Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden.’
The idea of divine concomitance adds an important nuance in understanding the divine relation to creatures. The traditional categories are transcendence and immanence. Transcendence has been thematized earlier in the discussion. Immanence refers to God’s indwelling creation and working within it. Concomitance adds to these categories the notion of alongsideness or God with us. The notion of the divine alongsideness is important in both Old Testament and New. For example, Moses pleaded for the divine accompaniment in Exodus 33:15–16: ‘Then Moses said to him, “If your Presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here. How will anyone know that you are pleased with me and with your people unless you go with us? What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the earth?”’ And Jesus promised it to the eleven disciples in Matthew 28:18–20 in the famous Great Commission passage:
Then Jesus came to them and said, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.’
Indeed Jesus arguably is entrusting to the disciples the Adamic task that Adam and Israel failed in, namely to be fruitful and multiply.
Process theologian Norman Pittenger articulates these categories clearly when he writes:
This God, who is the one and only God, is above and transcendent to the creation – inexhaustible and beyond our human grasping. This God is active within the creation, enabling its response to the divine intention – here is the divine immanence. This God is also alongside the creation too, disclosed by act in the affairs of the world; here is what I like to name the divine concomitance.
The supreme instantiation of divine concomitance is the incarnation of the divine Son of God (John 1:14), as I shall argue in a later chapter. Importantly divine transcendence allows no room for pantheism. The Creator–creature distinction is the most basic metaphysical one in Scripture. The divine immanence and concomitance leave no room for deism as though the Creator has lost interest in creation.
Another significant question arises from reviewing the early chapters of Genesis. How are we to understand the language of speaking and seeing of Genesis 1, of resting, planting and commanding in Genesis 2 and walking in Genesis 3? The traditional way of addressing the question is to view this language as anthropomorphic. An anthropomorphism (anthrōpos, ‘human’; morphē, ‘shape’) is a description of God in human terms. R. T. France makes an important observation in relation to biblical anthropomorphisms when he writes:
It is one of the marks our departure from the biblical way of thinking about God, as the living God, that we are inclined to be ashamed of anthropomorphism…. We pass it off as a rather regrettable primitive phase in the evolution of thinking about God, just a step higher than sheer idolatry, a crude and unsophisticated language which our more advanced and respectable theology has translated into abstract concepts.
Herman Bavinck, for one, felt no such embarrassment. As he put it, ‘If it is improper to speak about God in anthropomorphic language, the only logical alternative is not to speak about God at all.’ For him biblical anthropomorphisms as a category covers the application to God of language about ‘human organs, members, sensations, affections… human actions, a certain office, profession, or relation. … [and even] language derived from the organic and inorganic creation’. Useful though this conventional approach is, I believe that more precision would be clarifying. But what would more precision look like? Terence E. Fretheim offers some clarifying distinctions regarding categories of anthropomorphic speech: ‘(a) form, with its function (mouth, speaking, Num. 12:8); (b) emotional, volitional and mental states (rejoicing, Zeph. 3:17); (c) roles and activities, within the family (parent, Hos. 11:1) or the larger society (shepherd, Ps. 23.1)’. With debts to Fretheim, I propose that when Scripture speaks of divine action in a way that is analogous to human action and roles such as ‘speaking’, ‘seeing’ and ‘walking’, the descriptor to employ is ‘anthropopraxism’. However, when Scripture uses terms of God that have their analogues in human emotion, then ‘anthropopathism’ is the more precise descriptor. Lastly, when Scripture ascribes human organs to God or facial features or limbs, then ‘anthropomorphism’ is the appropriate term. In fact this last category admits of further refinement. When the text speaks of an appearance of God in human form per se, then we are dealing with an anthropomorphic theophany. (In scholarly discourse, a theophany is an appearance of a god.) Genesis 6 is a case in point: ‘The LORD saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. The LORD regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled’ (Gen. 6:5–6). The Lord sees human wickedness (anthropopraxism). He is grieved and has pain (anthropopathism). This pain fills God’s heart (anthropomorphism).
Some early Christian commentary
Early Christian commentators and preachers had to face the challenge of anthropomorphisms, anthropopathisms and anthropopraxisms. The depiction of God’s walking in the garden in Genesis 3:8 provides a case in point. Ephrem the Syrian (born c. 306; fl. 363–373) comments:
It was not only by the patience he exhibited that God wished to help them [Adam and Eve]; He also wished to benefit them by the sound of his feet. God endowed his silent footsteps with sound so that Adam and Eve might be prepared, at that sound, to make supplication before him who made the sound.
This early church poet seems to be working with some notion of divine accommodation to human need to account for the language.
John Chrysostom (344/354–407; fl. 386–407), the famous early church leader and preacher, wrestles with the question ‘Does God have feet?’ There were some in his context who appeared to take Genesis 3:8 with a naive literalism. Chrysostom asks:
What are you saying – God strolls? Are we assigning feet to him? Have we no exalted conception of him? No, God does not stroll – perish the thought. How could he, present as he is everywhere and filling everything with his presence? Can he for whom heaven is his throne and earth a footstool be confined to the garden? What right minded person could say this?
Having dismissed literalism, what positively can be said according to Chrysostom?
So what is the meaning of this statement, ‘They heard the sound of the Lord as he strolled in the garden in the evening?’ He wanted to provide them with such an experience as would induce in them a state of anguish, which in fact happened: they had so striking an experience that they tried to hide from the presence of God.
Significantly Chrysostom’s doctrine of God trumps a literalist hermeneutic: ‘Have we no exalted conception of him?’ He seeks to protect the idea of the divine transcendence with his question. This insight will prove important, for, as we shall see in subsequent chapters, the biblical writers were very much aware that God belongs to a different order of being to ourselves.
God prepares the way to what end?
More than once in this chapter thus far the notion that God has prepared the way from the beginning has been thematized. The question now must be put as to the end in view. Hints have been given. The Adamic task is royal and priestly. Recent scholarship throws great light on the question, and for the purposes of this chapter I shall follow John H. Walton’s discussion. In a nutshell God from the start has created with the end in view of living with the creature in his image. Put another way, the purpose of creation is divine habitation in a cosmic palace-temple. This is such a crucial point that elaboration is needed.
According to Walton, Genesis 1 is a temple text. The accent in the chapter is not on the material origins of the universe but on how God prepares a habitation for himself. In the ancient Near East such a habitation is a temple. He sums up his argument in the following way: ‘In summary, we have suggested that the seven days are not given as the period of time over which the material cosmos came into existence, but the period of time devoted to the inauguration of the functions of the cosmic temple and… the entrance of the presence of God to take up his rest that creates the temple.’
Walton’s thesis needs amplification in that the early chapters of Genesis not only present the making of a temple but a palace-temple. Rikki E. Watts asks a crucial question:
But is there any evidence of this notion in the Bible? The data is overwhelming…. In fact, the Hebrew Bible is awash with architectural imagery when describing creation. It speaks of the foundations of the earth (Ps 18:15; 82:5; 102:25; 104:5; Prov 8:29; Isa 51:13, 16; 2 Sam 22:8, 16; Zech 12:1; cf. 2 Sam 22:8), the pillars of the earth and of the heavens (1 Sam 2:8; Job 9:6; Ps 75:3; Job 26:11), the heavens’ windows (Gen 7:11; 8:2; Isa 24:18; Mal 3:10; 2 Kgs 7:2; Ps 104:2), the stretching out of the heavens like a canopy/tent (Isa 40:12, 22; 42:5; 44:24; 45:12; 48:13; 51:13; Jer 10:12; 31:37; 32:17; 51:15; Amos 9:6; Zech 12:1; Job 9:8; Ps 102:25), and storehouses (Deut 28:12; Jer 10:13; 50:25; 51:16; cf. Ps 33:7; 135:7; Job 38:22).
He asks a further question:
But what kind of building is this? As Isaiah 66:1 makes clear, ‘Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool. Where is the house you will build for me? Where will my resting place be?’ Where does one find a throne and a footstool if not in a palace, and what is the palace of Yahweh if not a temple? And note too the image of resting in his house (= Temple) in the light of Yahweh’s resting in his completed abode on the seventh day of Genesis 1. In this sense, the whole of creation is seen as Yahweh’s palace-temple, and hence the reason for his Jerusalem temple itself being a microcosm, a mini universe: it serves to remind Israel that the whole world is Yahweh’s. Granted, Genesis 1 does not explicitly describe Yahweh as actually rolling up his sleeves and ‘building’ why should it when a truly Lordly Yahweh would merely have to give the word? But given the rather widespread Ancient Near Eastern notion linking creation, defeat-of-chaos, and temple-building, and the thorough-going architectural imagery which characterizes the biblical conceptualizing of creation, it would be very odd if Genesis 1 were not to be understood along the lines of cosmic palace-temple building. As the Great King, Elohim, naturally creates realms for the lesser rulers (cf. Gen 1:16) as he forms his palace-temple out of the deep and gives order to and fills it. And as the Great King, having ordered his realm, he now rules over all in ‘Sabbath’ rest (see Exod 20), sitting in the great pavilion of his cosmos-palace-temple (cf. Ps 93).
The idea of Emmanuel, ‘God with us’, is there in the biblical account from the very beginning.
God prepares the way by promise
As mentioned previously, in the divine comedy the harmonies of Genesis 1 – 2 with God and humankind at peace, humankind and the rest of creation at peace, humankind and the environment at peace give way in Genesis 3 to discord and fracture. As Thomas F. Torrance argues, ‘It belongs to the nature of sin to divide, to create disorder, to disrupt, to destroy fellowship.’ In Genesis 3:1–5 we learn that the catalyst comes from outside the garden sanctuary in the guise of the serpent armed with dark innuendo:
Now the snake was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, ‘Did God really say, “You must not eat from any tree in the garden”?’
The woman said to the snake, ‘We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, “You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.”’
‘You will not certainly die,’ the snake said to the woman. ‘For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’
The character of God cannot be trusted. His word is not to be believed. Something good is being held back from the man and the woman. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is not to be resisted but embraced. After all it is so alluring, a sensual delight (Gen. 3:6): ‘When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.’ The results of the disobedience are catastrophic. No longer is there the fellowship between God and his image. Fellowship gives way to fear and flight from the presence (Gen. 3:8): ‘Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden.’ Meredith G. Kline offers an intriguing interpretation of this episode:
We may then translate Genesis 3:8a: ‘They heard the sound of Yahweh God traversing the garden as the Spirit of the day.’ The frightening noise of the approaching Glory theophany told them that God was coming to enter into judgment with them. The sound of judgment day preceded the awesome sight of the parousia of their Judge. It was evidently heard from afar before the searching, exposing beams of the theophanic light pierced through the trees in the midst of the garden. Momentarily, then, it seemed to them possible to hide from the eyes of Glory among the shadows of the foliage. Thus, inadvertently, they positioned themselves at the place of judgment in the midst of the trees of the garden, at the site of the tree of judicial discernment between good and evil.
In brief Adam and Eve meet with God’s Spirit in judicial mode. Hence they hide. There is merit in his argument. The questioning is indeed confrontational in Genesis 3:9, 11 and 13. Furthermore in verse 24 the man and the woman are sent out of the garden and not simply led out. Even so, there is grace in the provision of a better and more permanent covering in Genesis 3:21 to address their nakedness.
The cascading consequences of the primordial disobedience are manifold. The rupture is not simply an external one between God and humankind, but an internal one. There is shame at one’s nakedness. Adam answers God, ‘I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid’ (Gen. 3:10). Consciousness of the other has become self-consciousness. The first pair has entered the dungeon of self-preoccupation. Furthermore there is not only the vertical relational rupture with God but a horizontal one between the sexes. The will to relate, exemplified in the one-flesh union of Genesis 2:24, becomes the will to blame (‘the woman you put here with me’) and the will to dominate (‘he will rule over you’). Lastly, the downward relation to the rest of creation is disrupted such that ultimately the environment triumphs over us and back to dust we go. The world of Genesis 1 – 2 is no longer accessible. The cherubim with the flaming swords exclude the possibility of a simple return to paradise (Gen. 3:23–24): ‘So the LORD God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life’ – paradise lost, as Milton wrote. And yet there is evidence of mercy in the midst of judgment. The man and woman attempted to cover their nakedness with fig leaves (Gen. 3:7). The text does not elaborate but clearly they were no Versaces. And so God provides (Gen. 3:21): ‘The LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.’ Indeed as I have written elsewhere, ‘Even the banishment from the garden zone may have been a mercy, given the narrative logic of the account. Man and woman are prevented from eating of the tree of life and thus kept mercifully from being locked into their alienated state.’
By the end of Genesis 1 – 3 we see that the creation purpose to provide a dwelling place for God with humanity is challenged by both human and angelic sin. But there is light in this darkness: in the midst of judgment the text of the protoevangelium comes into view. God will remove the challenge but at a cost. He addresses the serpent as follows:
So the LORD God said to the snake,
‘Because you have done this,
“Cursed are you above all livestock
and all wild animals!
You will crawl on your belly
and you will eat dust
all the days of your life.
And I will put enmity
between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head,
and you will strike his heel.”’
The blessing language of the creation account in Genesis 1 is now counterbalanced by the words of cursing in the Fall narrative of Genesis 3 (cf. Gen. 1:22, 28; 2:3, 14, 17). According to Gordon J. Wenham the reference to the serpent’s eating dust is full of significance: ‘“Eat dust.” The serpent will experience abject humiliation. Metaphorically eating dust is what happens to one’s enemies (cf. Ps 72:9; Isa 49:23; Mic 7:17).’ Furthermore, the ‘enmity’ in view suggests a long period of conflict rather than a short one (cf. Num. 35:21–22; Ezek. 25:15; 35:5).
C. John Collins, in a careful discussion of Genesis 3:15, captures the programmatic nature of the Genesis text:
Hence, this is in fact a promise that God will act for the benefit of mankind by defeating the serpent (really the Dark Power that used the serpent as its mouthpiece) in combat and defeat him, thus bringing benefits to mankind. That is, he is a champion. We are further entitled to say that he will be a human (an offspring of the woman), but one with power extraordinary enough to win…. The rest of Genesis will unfold the idea of this offspring and lay the foundation for the developed messianic teaching of the prophets. We must remember that an author put this text here, and we suppose that he did so with his plan for this unfolding in mind; hence for us to ask whether this is messianic may mislead us: instead, we may say that Genesis fosters a messianic expectation, of which this verse is the headwaters.
There is admirable caution here in not overstating the case. It is in the retrospective light of the canonical unfolding of the biblical story that the programmatic nature of the protoevangelium comes into view. Hence the coining of a term meaning ‘first gospel’, which presupposes the gospel that came much later.
Genesis 3 does not make clear in any deep way just how the serpent’s fate will be sealed. What is clear is that a male descendant of the woman will be involved. Triumph will come through suffering and that suffering will involve both the male offspring and the serpent:
he will crush your head,
and you will strike his heel.
The serpent will lose definitively, a crushed head, while the seed of the woman will sustain a struck heel. A subsequent book in the Torah underlines the nature of the challenge posed by the divine to human life in the new normal or abnormal (the post-Fall world). Leviticus reads strangely to modern Western ears: priests, sacrifices, blood and ritual. However, once the issue comes into view, namely of how a holy God can be present in the midst of an unholy people, then the logic of Leviticus becomes much less opaque. Ultimately atonement is needed, and at a cost.
Conclusion
In this chapter we have explored the idea of preparation from the beginning. That preparation is for the dwelling of God with humankind in a sacred space that is a palace-temple. The six-day process is best seen in architectural terms. God is building a habitation for himself. The divine largesse is shown in the way God creates a creature as his image with whom he can dwell. This is sheer grace in that there is no hint in the Genesis text that there was divine necessity to so create. Creation is an expression of divine freedom and generosity. However, discord entered the scene with devastating consequences for the habitation of God with humankind. Even so, the divine project is not abandoned. There is not only judgment but also the promise (the protoevangelium) of the world set right. The divine comedy will reach its harmony once more, the serpent will be defeated and a male descendant of the woman will be the key to the resolution of the conflict. The depiction of God in these early chapters is filled with anthropomorphism, anthropopathism and anthropopraxism. This depiction we shall continue to explore as we follow the biblical plotline.
Excursus: Would the incarnation have taken place irrespective of the Fall?
The question is whether the incarnation would have taken place irrespective of the Fall of Genesis 3. In other words was an incarnation of deity always the divine intention? It is not a new question.
The major figure in the early church period who turned his mind to the question was Maximus the Confessor (c. 580–662). Maximus argued that the incarnation would have taken place irrespective of the Fall. The incarnation of the Logos was always the divine intention and the grand eschatological goal of creation. The question received more attention in the medieval period in the Western church. (According to Meyendorff it was never a major question of interest in the Byzantine church.) In the West, Honorius of Acun (fl. c. 1106–35) believed that the incarnation was always the divine intention, as did Rupert of Deutz (c. 1075–1129). Aquinas (c. 1225–74) was more cautious than Honorius and Rupert. Aquinas was well aware of differences of theological opinion on the question, but on balance thought that the incarnation was God’s remedy for sin and presupposed the Fall. Aquinas argued:
Some say that the Son of God would have become incarnate, even if humanity had not sinned. Others assert the opposite, and it would seem that our assent ought to be given to this opinion. For those things that originate from God’s will, lying beyond what is due to the creature, can only be known to us through being revealed in Holy Scripture, in which the divine will is made known to us. Therefore since the sin of the first human being is described as the cause of the incarnation throughout Holy Scripture, it is more in accordance with this to say that the work of the incarnation was ordained as a remedy for sin, so that, if sin had not existed, the incarnation would never have taken place.
Even so, Aquinas had a healthy respect for the freedom of God: ‘Yet the power of God is not limited in this way. Even if sin had not existed, God could still have become incarnate.’
Among those who believed that the incarnation would have taken place irrespective of the Fall, two main rationales for the divine purpose were suggested. Both Maximus the Confessor and Honorius of Acun saw deification as the key. The divine purpose was to make humanity divine through union with the divine-human Son. Rupert of Deutz suggested another reason: ‘he [Christ] had no necessary cause for becoming man, other than that his love’s “delights were to be with the children of men”’. For Rupert the incarnation was the climax of concomitance.
The medieval debate may seem particularly esoteric to those whose high view of Scripture makes them cautious about going beyond what is written. However, it does raise the importance of having some concept of dogmatic rank. Dogmatic rank is the idea that not all doctrinal claims stand on the same level. As we saw above, Aquinas was sensitive to the fact that ‘those things that originate from God’s will, lying beyond what is due to the creature, can only be known to us through being revealed in Holy Scripture, in which the divine will is made known to us’. The Christian past is indeed helpful here. In the Reformation era the early Lutherans and later Reformed divines posited three levels of theological claim. Fundamental articles are those doctrines ‘without which Christianity cannot exist and the integrity of which is necessary to the preservation of the Faith’ (e.g. the resurrection of Christ). Secondary fundamental articles are derived from the primary ones (e.g. how Christ is present in the Lord’s Supper). The Lutherans argued that Calvinists were Christians because they held the primary fundamental articles but were clearly not Lutherans because of their view of the Lord’s Supper. The Calvinists denied the Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation. Non-fundamental articles were those theological claims that did not affect one’s salvation and the maintenance of the faith (e.g. the exact identity of the Antichrist).
In the light of the above I would assign the answer to the question of whether there would have been an incarnation irrespective of the Fall to the non-fundamental article category. The ever-present danger to the evangelical movement is to confuse these categories. The main thing is to make the main thing the main thing. This wisdom also applies to doctrine. Even so, if John H. Walton is correct, then Old Testament scholarship and ancient Near Eastern analogies throw fresh light on this old question. If Genesis 1:1 – 2:3 is a temple text, then the divine design was always to establish the divine presence on earth among God’s creatures in a cosmic temple, which the Garden of Eden anticipates. This thesis, in my view, tips the speculative balance in favour of Maximus the Confessor, Honorius of Acun and Rupert of Deutz. The incarnation is no afterthought.
In terms of dogmatic rank, both the question and my answer are speculative and to some presumptuous. Even so, Colin E. Gunton wisely argues, ‘Would Christ have come even had there been no fall? Hypothetical questions are dangerous in theology, because it [theology] is concerned with what God has done, not what he might have done instead. But in this case the question enables us to bring out the point of what has happened.’ He maintains – following Edward Irving – that sin and evil may have dictated the form of Christ’s coming but not the fact that he would come.