Necessity of Incarnation

Would the Son have been incarnate if Adam had not sinned?

1 Corinthians 15:44-45 provides a prooftext for an affirmative answer. Verse 44 says that the “spiritual body” is implied by the existence of the “natural body.” Human beings were created in a natural state, but they were destined from the beginning to be transfigured into what Paul is calling a spiritual condition.

Paul’s proof text for this is Genesis 2:7 (v. 45): Adam became a living soul. He is the natural man, the soulish man. But the last Adam is life-giving Spirit; the spiritual man. Adam is the original possessor of the natural body, Jesus of the spiritual body. And the same conditional logic, the same “if” from verse 44, applies in verse 45: If there is a natural body there is a spiritual body; the proof is that Adam was born natural, and this implied a last Adam who would be spiritual. In short: If there is an Adam, there must needs be a last Adam. (This all, note, is premised on a creation-eschaton structure that does not depend on the intervention of sin.)

Paul’s argument implies too that this translation from natural to spiritual would take place through something like death and resurrection. The “sown”/”raised” contrasts of vv 42-44 culminate with the “sowing” of the natural body and the “raising” of the spiritual body, and then Paul states his conditional “if there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual.” The line of argument strongly implies that the natural body would have been transformed to a spiritual through being “sown” and “raised.”