Calvin affirms quite a few times the idea that God could have incarnated his Son without himself yielding to death for us, but God did not have done so because that would have been inferior to what in fact occurred. God would be free to, but this course would have been an impossible way to achieve our redemption.

This is the second of the posts on ‘Christmas reflections’. The first was on Jesus’s present physical absence which  Christmas nativity plays, on  baby Jesus’s appearance, are rather misleading rather than helpful. The Christmas (of 2019) is by now rapidly  disappearing, which is how it is with anniversaries. Needless to say, a Christian should mull over the significance of ‘God was in Christ’, whatever the day of the year.

So now we are going to briefly reflect on the fact that God decreed the coming into flesh of his one and only Son, and what the character was of that decree.

The view of the ‘incarnation anyway’ a ‘supralapsarian’ Christology has  provoked some discussion, following the book of that title by Edwin C. Van Driel (Oxford University Press.) On this view, even had there be no lapse, the virgin Mary would have given birth to Emmanuel. (Or maybe not, depending on the multitudinous counterfactuals that are possible, given the view.) Or maybe it is congruent with such a view that the Incarnation could have been repeated at intervals, (not on once 25^th December); maybe, according to this speculation there could be annual incarnations. That’s the way with speculations.

In Christian dogma, the ‘incarnation now’ view has had a long ancestry, having been held by, for example, Alexander of Hales, Ockham, Bonaventure and others before the Reformation. At the time of the Reformation it was held by Osiander, a Lutheran whose views bothered Calvin. And since Osiander, Dorner in the 19^th century and Barth in the last century have engaged in the same speculation. But this  view is not of concern here:

Calvin says in the Institutes, in the opening section of Book II.Chapter12.

It deeply concerned us, that he who was to be our Mediator should be very God and very man. If the necessity be inquired into, it was not what is commonly termed simple or absolute, but flowed from  the divine decree on which the salvation of man depended.   What was best for us, our most merciful Father determined. Our iniquities, like a cloud intervening between him and us, having utterly alienated us from the kingdom of heaven, none but a person reaching to him could the medium of restoring peace. But who could thus reach to him? Could any of the sons of Adam? All of them, with their parents, shuddered at the sight of God. Could any of the angels? They had need of a head, by connection with which they might adhere to their God entirely and inseparably. What then? The case was certainly desperate. If the Godhead itself did not descend to us, it being impossible for us to ascend. Thus the Son of God behooved to become our Immanuel, i.e. God with us, and in such a way, that by mutual union his divinity and our nature might be combined; otherwise, neither was the proximity near enough, nor the affinity strong enough, to  give us hope that God would dwell with us, so great was the repugnance between our pollution and the spotless purity of God.

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