Does anybody know where, in the Christian tradition, there’s speculation about what would have happened if Jesus not been crucified—if he had come in the flesh, and the world had known him and embraced him instead of killing him?
First Things’ editor, Jody Bottum, asked me for our help on this. He points to 1 Corinthians 2:8 (“had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory”) and a passage in Dante as proof that the counterfactual was known, and he asks if anyone remembers passages in the theological tradition, from the patristical era on, developing the idea.
October 25th, 2009 | 7:15 am | #1
Stanley Stowers thinks Paul believed Jesus was never intending to die but only went to his death because he was rejected. I believe some other New Perspective people have the same view, perhaps E.P. Sanders, but I’m not sure. I don’t know of anything way back in the tradition, though.
You have to have a pretty thin view of the importance of the atonement to think this was even possible given the clear statements throughout Paul and the NT in general (not to mention Isaiah 53) for what God’s plan was to begin with.
October 25th, 2009 | 11:46 am | #2
Joe,
Oops, I just saw in my RSS the same thread opened up at the First Thoughts blog; I’ll go answer there. Thanks for highlighting it.
Fred
October 25th, 2009 | 5:51 pm | #3
Romano Guardini speaks tantalizingly about this possibility at a number of points in his book on the life of Christ, The Lord. Take a look at chapter ten of Part three, “Destiny and Decision”, where he discusses the decision made against Him by the leaders of Israel, and speculates that it was not completely foreordained. He depicts it as a kind of second Fall. Guardini also says somewhere in this book that the contradictory images of the Messiah in the Hebrew Scriptures — suffering servant and triumphant king — might have been referring to the two possible outcomes of His earthly mission.
October 25th, 2009 | 11:05 pm | #4
I did a quick search just for “Lord of glory” through my early church writings and most of the stuff was either a response to Jews, an examination on who were the deceived princes (comparing with Acts 3:17), or a response to a number of heresies that dealt with the nature of Christ. They seemed to have more to deal with than counterfactuals.
During a search for “if Christ” AND crucified, I hit this portion dealing with Judas: “What then,” one may say, “though Judas had not betrayed Him, would not another have betrayed Him?” And what has this to do with the question? “Because if Christ must needs be crucified, it must be by the means of some one, and if by some one, surely by such a person as this.
Schaff, P. (1997). The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers Vol. X. Saint Chrysostom: Homilies on the Gospel of Saint Matthew. (486). Oak Harbor: Logos Research Systems.
It sounds like something Molina would have at least touched on but that’s way after Dante.
October 26th, 2009 | 2:51 am | #5
The Scotist Tradition, which I’m an advocate of, believes that Christ would’ve incarnated even w/o the ‘Fall’. BUT, it does not speculate through counterfactualism on if Christ was not crucified.
So, in fact, maybe Scotism does not apply here; but it might be a place where folks uncritically and naively moved from . . . in order to get to the question you present here. Don’t know.
October 26th, 2009 | 9:36 am | #6
This is specifically why Augustinianism/Calvinism is better: we don’t have to wonder “what if”. God did what he did because that’s what God intended to do, and God knew what he knew because this is how man is.
And just to make a pre-Christ point of this, somebody should take a look at the end of Deuteronomy before they start talking about what God does and does not know about us. Moses recounts to Israel the whole of the law, and explains in detail its use and purpose, and Israel, as they accept Joshua as their leader, say, “yes: we will do this Law.”
But God takes Joshua and Moses aside and says … what? “I like the sound of this new generation? maybe they are an improvement over their fathers?” Nope. “I’m a little iffy about this — maybe another 40 years in the desert to teach them they really are wholly dependent on me?” Nope. “What if they don’t obey?” Nope.
[Deu 31:16] And YHVH said to Moses, “Behold, you are about to lie down with your fathers. Then this people will rise and whore after the foreign gods among them in the land that they are entering, and they will forsake me and break my covenant that I have made with them.”
God knows what’s what. But there is a greater problem with the “what if Christ was not rejected by the rulers?” riff: the whole system of salvation has been playing out since the foundation of the world. That is: God was not hinging multiple plans to make it all right again based on whetehr or not some fallen man or men would obey.
I’d run away from this kind of myth-making or myth-seeking becuase it denigrates what Christ came to do, did, and will always be glorified for doing.
October 26th, 2009 | 2:23 pm | #7
Speculation or stewardship (I Timothy 1:3-7)?
Or speculative stewardship since I Corinthians 2:8 does bring to the surface?
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