Christianity Today Op-Ed: Christmas Was Always God’s Plan, by Philip Yancey (Author: Where the Light Fell: A Memoir (2023)):
More than two centuries before the Reformation, a theological debate broke out pitting the premier theologian Thomas Aquinas against an upstart Scottish Franciscan priest, John Duns Scotus. The heart of the debate circled around the question “Would the event we celebrate at Christmas have occurred if humanity had not disobeyed God?”
Like most theologians, Aquinas viewed the Incarnation as God’s remedy for a fallen planet, a rescue plan that God first prophesied in Genesis 3. Aquinas pointed to Scripture passages that highlight the Cross as God’s redemptive response to a broken relationship with humanity.
Duns Scotus, nicknamed “the Scotsman,” saw much more at stake. To him, the Word becoming flesh, as described in the prologue to John’s gospel, must surely represent the Creator’s primary design—God’s original goal—and not a plan B. Duns Scotus cited passages from Ephesians and Colossians on the cosmic Christ in whom all things have their origin, hold together, and move toward consummation.
The evangelical tradition often emphasizes the atonement and Christ living in us. We urge children to “accept Jesus into your heart,” an image that can be both comforting and confusing. More pietistic strains speak of “the exchanged life” in which Christ lives in the believer. Yet far more often—164 times in Paul’s letters, according to one author—the New Testament speaks of us being “in Christ.” At a time when theories of the atonement seem mystifying to moderns, we could learn from the Christ-centered view of Creation once expounded by a Scottish theologian from the high Middle Ages.
Did Jesus only come to earth as an accommodation to human failure? Was the Incarnation a humiliation God had to endure, or was it the center point for all creation? Duns Scotus and his school suggested the Incarnation was God’s underlying motive for Creation, not merely a correction to it. God spun off this vast and beautiful universe for the singular purpose of sharing the divine life and love with humanity, intending all along for us to participate in eternal fellowship with him.
Ultimately, the church fathers decided that both approaches had biblical support and could be accepted as orthodox. And although most Western theologians followed Aquinas, prominent Catholics like Karl Rahner have since taken a closer look at Duns Scotus.
Imagine a time before the creation of matter. What did God have in mind with our planet, one of trillions in the universe? One answer to that question is Jesus: that he came to show us earthlings what God is like and what we should be like. The history recorded in the Old Testament serves as a prelude for God’s supreme act of incarnation. And as the Gospels’ genealogies stress, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Judah, David, and others provided Jesus a family and a culture into which he would be born.
When Mary gave birth to Jesus in Bethlehem, she participated in an act of divine creation that continues to this day. Paul’s recurrent phrase “in Christ” hints at a reality made vivid in his metaphor of the church as the body of Christ, which extends the Incarnation through time. And when Jesus ascended, he turned over this grand mission to his followers.
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