Warfield on the Incarnation

Cur Deus homo? "Why did God become a man?," Anselm asked. This is a question that has exercised theologians for hundreds of years, with the canonical materials receiving their first deep and searching analysis in Athanasius' On the Incarnation of the Word of God. The question received new urgency after the rise of a school of thought that held that the Incarnation would have occurred regardless of the fall of man in Eden--because creation itself, teleological as it is, seemed to demand it. What nearer manifestation of God could man have had than for God to dwell among us? And how could man have possessed happiness fully without him so dwelling? If the perfection of created nature can only be achieved through its close union with God, the Incarnation, it may seem, would have occurred whether or not man sinned. And yet the Scriptural witness runs in precisely the opposite direction. Is there any way to hold that witness together with what many have felt to be the goal of creation as such? Should we want to?

We can get some help from Benjamin B. Warfield, whose brief essay "The Principle of the Incarnation," first published in 1900 in The Bible Student, is a lucid treatment of these issues.

So, first: the issue of the Scriptural witness. The testimony of the New Testament is nearly unanimous that what Warfield calls the "motive" for the Incarnation was soteriological rather than ontological: the Incarnation as presented in the New Testament sprang from the need of man as wrecked and undone by sin rather than from the need of man as such. 

One can easily assure himself that this is the case by a perusal of both the Johannine and the Pauline writings. Warfield's comment on "For God so loved the world..." can be taken as a summary: "The emphasis thrown upon this teaching in the great passage, John iii. 16sq., indeed, is so intense as to be almost oppressive: the gift of God's Son is accounted for, it is intimated, only by the intensity of His love for the perishing world, and it is added with explicit iteration, that God sent the Son into this sinful world only 'that the world might be saved through Him.'" Elsewhere in the essay Warfield refers to this love as God's "Holy Love," which he calls God's "consummate attribute," the fierce, invincible, leonine love that purposes to rescue those who would sooner spit in the face of God with head held high than beg for mercy on bended knee. This Holy Love of God, that is, takes form soteriologically, as a response to man's suicide; thus Warfield calls sin the "proximate occasion" of the Incarnation and redemption its "prime end." The "principle of the Incarnation" is found "in the provision of a remedy for human sin." Its proximate cause cannot be found "either ontologically or ethically in God, or in the nature of the Logos as Revealer, or in the idea of creation, or yet in the created product and especially man as made capable of receiving God and therefore not finding his true end until he is raised to union with Him."

What, then, of seeing in the Incarnation the consummation of creation, the answer to man's longing for fullness of being in union with God? Is it to be dismissed as just so much pious pantheistic nonsense, a contentless romantic longing to be swallowed up by the Absolute in the ecstasy of an overindulged and malformed aesthetic sensibility? To be sure, it could take this form, and probably often does. But it need not--and anyway, abusus non tollit usum; and Warfield is surprisingly candid in his endorsement of the partial truth of what advocates of "Incarnation anyway" (I borrow the phrase from the title of a recent book by Edwin Chr. van Driel) propose--of the deep insight regarding the chief end of man that they want to protect. Warfield remarks that "[t]he Incarnation is so stupendous an event that it is big with consequences and reaches out on every side to relations that may even seem at first glance to stand in opposition to its fundamental principle." He goes on:

Again:

I have quoted Warfield at some length, because readers may be startled at how far he is willing to go to meet the partisans of "Incarnation anyway." But how does one square these affirmations with Holy Scripture's insistence that the occasion and end of the Incarnation were sin and redemption?

Warfield finds the solution in the "order of the decrees," something that perhaps on first glance sounds stridently Calvinist and therefore catholically useless--so goes the assumption of fuzzy ecumenical thinking. That is to say, the decree of Incarnation follows in God's plan as a consequence of the fall. Note what this allows Warfield to do, viz., to view the Incarnation as both predestined to occur before the creation of the world (in keeping with suprlapsarian Christology) and as contingent (in keeping with the infralapsarianism indicated by the apostolic witness). Therefore the world--this world, the world we live in--was created with both fall and Incarnation in view, and so it would make sense for us to be able to see traces of the divine counsel respecting man's fall and man's restoration by the God-man bodied forth in creation itself. "It can be truly said," Warfield says, "that the Incarnation was contemplated and provided for in creation itself and we may seek to discover and trace the provisions for it made in creation." The divine plan included redemption from the beginning, and it can therefore be seen to be indicated in creation itself as we know it (we should not be surprised at the close connection between creation and redemption; the history of redemption is the true history of postlapsarian creation, after all). God governs the universe absolutely, and creates in accord with his own sovereign plan and purpose. For that reason, the world that he has made--again, this world--reflects that purpose. The Incarnation is part of that purpose, and therefore the world as we know it reflects the Incarnation. "To such a God," says Warfield, "there belongs of necessity an all-inclusive plan for the government of the universe; and He contemplates this in all its parts from the depths of eternity: and in the unity and completeness of this plan the fall too will take its place, and the Incarnation as contingent upon it, but not therefore in any way uncertain of occurrence,--towards which therefore the whole creation may move."

Finally, the predication of the Incarnation upon the fall is for Warfield not only true because it is the Scriptural scheme; affectively it answers to something deep in the bones of our faith. His witness here is the Seraphic Doctor: "And surely we may say with Bonaventura, that even if some other opinion of the motive and end of Christ's coming into the world seemed to us more consonant with the rational judgment, it would nevertheless be this [that is, that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners] that would commend itself to the Christian heart,--'because it more ardently kindles the affection of faith.'" "Only so," Warfield concludes, "is the answering love of the saved sinner drawn out to its full height." In part 2, then, we will look at the way in which the Incarnation functions as an example for the redeemed sinner.