A pure bleg, as a beg for information from blog readers seems now to be called:
I know there’s a theological tradition of considering what might have been had Adam not fallen. Russell Hittinger has written of it, and it extends in the tradition from the patristical era all the way down to C.S. Lewis’ sci-fi novels.
But is there also a tradition of considering what might have been had Christ not been crucified? If he had come in the flesh, and the world had known him and embraced him instead of killing him?
I seem to remember something in the Victorines, Hugh or Richard, on this, but I can’t find it with a casual online search, and, anyway, my memory ain’t what it used to be.
Do you of you know about discussion in the tradition on this point?
The great theologian Thomas Guarino pointed me to a passage from Dante’s Convivio:
Hence it is said of Plato, who may be said to have possessed a supremely excellent nature both for the perfection of its being and for the physiognomic image which Socrates observed in him when he first saw him, that he lived to the age of 81, as Tully affirms in his book On Old Age. I believe that if Christ had not been crucified and had lived out the term which his life could have encompassed according to its nature, he would have undergone the change from mortal body to immortal in his eighty-first year.
Which indicates, at least, that the counterfactual was known in the tradition. But Dante doesn’t use it to engage any serious theological or metaphysical issues. Who does?
Any help with this gratefully received.
October 25th, 2009 | 1:16 am
I recall Kallistos Ware referring to speculations on that point by Orthodox theologians, but I don’t recall him citing sources.
October 25th, 2009 | 1:38 am
Thanks, Adam. Yeah, I’m sure there’s speculation in the tradition on the point, if we could just find it. St. Paul himself puts the counterfactual in 1 Cor. 2:8: “had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.”
October 25th, 2009 | 2:44 am
[...] Things’ editor, Jody Bottum, asked me for our help on this. He points to 1 Corinthians 2:8 (“had they known it, they would [...]
October 25th, 2009 | 8:01 am
There’s a whole religion formed around this. It’s called Islam.
October 25th, 2009 | 11:50 am
had Christ not been crucified the chain reaction his crufication set off would never have taken place,the world would have been a different place
October 25th, 2009 | 12:06 pm
I can’t think of any patristic, medieval, or Reformation discussions of this. I do think most of the relevant decisions about it tend to get made with the prior question you allude to: Whether there would have been an incarnation without a fall. (I see there’s a new book out on this subject: Incarnation Anyway, by Ed. Chr. van Driel).
The closest I’ve heard to an explicit discussion of whether Christ, incarnate in a fallen world, might have accomplished God’s will without dying on the cross, is in the dispensationalist tradition, which has its own quirky integrity as a research paradigm, and has the merit of keeping its nose right in the text.
There, the question is about the “offer of the kingdom” which Jesus makes when he first preaches to Israel. Jesus seems to announce the presence of the kingdom of God, to offer to fulfill the promise of the kingdom as the son of David, and (this part is clearest, I think), to react to his contemporaries’ rejection of that offer by altering his ministry program. Matthew’s gospel marks the transition best.
Lewis Sperry Chafer says things like this: “Some claim to find difficulty in believing that God would offer the kingdom to Israel when He knew that they would reject the King and His kingdom. But God created man when He knew he would fall…” etc. I think you can see where he’s going with that line of argument; foreknowledge is a safety net that keeps this line of thought from becoming radical in Chafer. I think there is an extended discussion of “the offer of the kingdom” in Chafer’s Systematic Theology, possibly describing a hypothetical crossless kingdom, but I don’t know where. And Chafer would have known that the Bible isn’t about that kingdom.
Sadly, the dispensationalists have never excelled at the historical footnote, so if there were previous voices saying this, they didn’t point out the echo.
Fred
October 25th, 2009 | 2:59 pm
Hugh of St. Victor, De Sacramentis I.viii.6-7
“God, however, would have been able to achieve the redemption of humanity in a totally different manner, if he had wanted to. It was, however, more appropriate to our weakness that God should become a human being….taking its mortality upon himself.”
as found in Alister McGrath, Christian Theology Reader:
http://books.google.com/books?id=S2_eiONVgBMC&pg=PA359&lpg=PA359&dq=hugh+of+st+victor+death+of+christ&source=bl&ots=9noYptnBkE&sig=mhzBLh9Cgk5pU-XiAY1FvoFlCy8&hl=en&ei=oJnkStbsKNPAlAf0svGKBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CBAQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=hugh%20of%20st%20victor%20death%20of%20christ&f=false
(scroll down)
Also, Beatrice in Paradiso VII responds to Dante’s puzzlement: “I follow closely what I hear, but why God wanted this to be the very way for our redemption is obscure to me.”
Briefly, she argues that God’s mercy and justice would not have been so evident if a mere pardon had been granted.
October 25th, 2009 | 5:08 pm
Thanks for this start. There are really two questions here, aren’t there?
The counterfactual of Adam Unfallen asks (1) What was God’s plan in allowing the Fall? and (2) What would have happened if Adam had refused temptation?
And so the counterfactual of Christ Uncrucified asks (1) What was God’s plan in allowing the Crucifixion? and (2) What would have happened if the world had not performed the Crucifixion?
The Victorine passage and Beatrice’s remark, which Patrick Molloy mentions, are clearly directed at the first question. But is there any sharp discussion of the second?
Fred Sanders’ pointing to the “offer of the kingdom” is interesting, but what we’d need is some analysis in the tradition of what would have happened if Israel had taken the offer.
October 25th, 2009 | 5:46 pm
Apropos of all this, I wrote a theologian friend:
And he replied:
October 25th, 2009 | 5:47 pm
I’m totally ignorant in the field of church tradition, but I might speculate that the reason why such a question is so hard to find in the church fathers, or even in later theologians, is that it’s an impossible question to answer, and a fruitless question to ask. We may as well ask the question “what if I did not exist?”, or “what if God did not exist?”. It has happened, and it changed all of human history, and there is no doing without it. The world (as we know it) would not exist apart from it. (Coincidentally, this is why I don’t believe time travel is impossible, among other reasons, like the fact that it’s totally absurd. But that’s another discussion).
Perhaps it’s an interesting metaphysical question that can make your brain explode if you try to think about it too long, but I don’t think it’s worthy of the examination/study of a theologian, in the first century or now or for all eternity. The cross is as foundational to the character of God as is His holiness and His goodness and His justice, His mercy, and His sovereignty. In fact, the cross is the very manifestation and revelation of those things. We cannot relate to God apart from it.
October 25th, 2009 | 6:02 pm
Thanks, III, but yours is really a logical rejection of all counterfactual historical speculation—to which the only answer is: Fair enough, particularly when referring to Sacred History.
And yet, it does leave us without an explanation for why the Christian tradition would contain so much speculation on the counterfactual of Adam Unfallen.
Besides, I’m not yet convinced that the tradition doesn’t contain speculation on what might have happened if Israel had chosen Christ. We really need our medievalists to weigh in here.
October 25th, 2009 | 6:08 pm
Over on the new evangelical group blog that First Things is hosting, Fred Frankel notes:
October 25th, 2009 | 6:55 pm
Here’s a modern discussion by Carlos M.N. Eire, Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale —- The Quest for a Counterfactual Jesus, Imagining the West without the Cross:
http://books.google.com/books?id=CYldK3ngFVIC&pg=PA119&lpg=PA119&dq=carlos+eire+cross&source=bl&ots=64rXCJ5rt_&sig=t8XD1x6YYJdXjqs_-lMD46RF6Bw&hl=en&ei=9dPkSqjGLoitlAfN_LDoCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=10&ved=0CCwQ6AEwCTgK#v=onepage&q=carlos%20eire%20cross&f=false
October 25th, 2009 | 9:15 pm
“We really need our medievalists to weigh in here”
Where’s C.S.Lewis when you need him….
I’m in way over my head here, and so I’m going to stop talking (commenting, that is) now. If you ever find some historical commentary on it, please do all of us ignorant folk a huge favor and post a brief summary on the different views. That would be fantastic.
October 25th, 2009 | 11:23 pm
Anselm believed he could demonstrate logically that Christ’s death was both fitting and necessary for the restoration of man to God. From that point of view, it would make sense to conclude that if the Jews and Romans had not crucified Christ, then God would have found another way to sacrifice him. Otherwise, we’d all be condemned.
October 26th, 2009 | 12:14 am
Unfortunately, I don’t have an answer to the bleg.
Maybe there’s a good reason that this question has been seldom considered at depth. The possibility of Adam’s not having fallen always seems real to us because we know that the unfallen Adam did not suffer the same kinds of temptations we do today. It is imaginable that Adam might never have fallen. But it is difficult to imagine how people like us might have accepted Christ during his life — not because it wasn’t a real possibility, but because it seems so out of character for the way we actually behave.
Perhaps even less in character than our having accepted Christ outright would have been our having rejected Him in a persistently mundane way: no crucifixion and no royal parade into Jerusalem, but only yawns and faded memories.
October 26th, 2009 | 6:21 am
I agree with Evelyn Waugh. Had Adam not fallen we would be living in a Wodehouse novel world.
October 26th, 2009 | 9:57 am
Our discussion here, including Professor Eire’s essay, seems not to have mentioned the story’s key element (I Corinthians 15:14) — the Resurrection. There is something beyond arresting in the fullness and irony of a particularly horrible and shameful and alienating death, leading to an unpredecented manifestation of Divine Life — that seems pivotal for the Cosmic Work as well as for the psychology of humans.
This doesn’t exactly join the counterfactual issue, but seems worth mentioning.
October 26th, 2009 | 11:02 am
A friend emails: “The classic text is Scotus, Ordinatio III, dist. 7, q. 3. All of the major Scotists comment on it”
October 26th, 2009 | 2:16 pm
OK, so this is a little off-topic, but the great science fiction novelist Orson Scott Card (also a strong social commentator) published several years ago a novel called “Pastwatch”, which is a contrafactual novel about what would have happened if Christopher Columbus and the Indians had, you know, gotten along and been friends. I actually remember the novel being pretty good:
http://www.amazon.com/Pastwatch-Christopher-Orson-Scott-Card/dp/0812508645
October 27th, 2009 | 3:28 pm
The most interesting discussion of this question I know is in the chapter “Destiny and Decision” in Romano Guardini’s classic The Lord. It needs to be said, though, that the existing English translation of this book is wretched, and this chapter is full of omissions and obscurities. Catholics could do an immense favor to all of English-speaking Christianity (including themselves) if they would produce a decent translation of this great book. It would be a wonderful way of supporting what Pope Benedict is trying to do with his own book on Jesus.
October 27th, 2009 | 4:15 pm
The neglected Anglican theologian (and friend of C. S. Lewis) Austin Farrer has a few lines on the speculation “that God’s people might have been in such friendship with his will, that the death of Son was not required to reconcile them” in his _Saving Belief_ (1964), concluding that even had the Atonement been unnecessary “Christ would still have come to transform human hope, and to bring men into a more privileged association with their Creator than they could otherwise enjoy.” The counterfactual leads to the positive judgment that “Christ did not come to get himself killed; he was not a suicide. He came to associate his people with divine life, and they killed him for doing this. By so dying he reconciled sinful wills to God, and made their incorporation in his mystical body a real possibility” (first 3 pp. of the 5th chapter on “Law and Spirit; page numbers vary in the original and the reprint). Farrer scarcely ever footnoted anything, but he may well have drawn on the Scotists for this.
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