The Grand Coherence, Chapter 19: Why God Became Man

This post is part of the book The Grand Coherence: A Modern Defense of Christianity. For all the links in the book, see this introductory post.

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Long ago in chapter 3, we saw why the resurrection of Jesus is unique in being a definite, factual event, which happened or didn't, with plenty of evidence, about which people nonetheless diametrically disagree. The evidence for it is overwhelming, but it would be an exception to the laws of nature, which we have reason to consider very reliable, and in that sense the reason to disbelieve in it is also strong.

In chapter 6 and chapter 15, we touched on a reason why a strong prior belief in universal human mortality should give way in Jesus's case to an initial doubt or hesitancy that would tip the balance in favor of the resurrection. Jesus was clearly a morally unique individual. His uniqueness consists, upon reflection, in courage, wisdom, and love in a uniquely high degree, unmarred by any self-interest or passion or sin. In short, He was sinless, perfect, in a way that sets Him apart from all mankind. And where there is one oddity, other oddities become less unlikely. If one generalization about human beings, sin, fails in the case of Jesus, it's at least a little likelier that another generalization about human beings, mortality, also fails. And if you admit only slightly reduced prior certainty about the permanence of Jesus's death, then the consistent testimony of numerous disinterested eyewitnesses to the resurrection, with nothing to gain but persecution and death for their testimony, the boldness and persuasiveness of the apostles, the growth and zeal of the early Church, the rich documentary evidence going back almost to the lifetimes of the apostles, and so forth, are more than enough to warrant confident belief.

But the resurrection, if accepted, must throw any non-Christian worldview into disarray. All of us rely heavily on the day-to-day consistency of the laws of nature. If that can be overridden, what can we trust? How do we make sense of it all? The mind must keep searching for consistency, coherence, reflective equilibrium. And although there's no easy chain of inference from the resurrection of Jesus to the whole Christian worldview, yet once the resurrection has been admitted, there is no reflective equilibrium to be found short of the whole Christian worldview. The resurrection of Jesus must continue to seem like a weird exception until it is revealed to be the central event of all history. 

As we try to make sense of the resurrection, we're driven to rediscover old mysteries and old discontents, and we gradually realize how high the stakes are, namely, nothing less than whether it was worthwhile for the world to exist at all. Without the resurrection of Jesus, the best we could do is try to convince ourselves that although everything's doomed to disintegrate, it had a good run, so that's okay. But it won't do! There are so many things to love about this world. For all of them to go away would be infinitely sad. And yet the world is so vitiated, so prone to self-destruction, that unless some inconceivable change is wrought in it, it can't do otherwise. Disintegration, dissolution, the slow triumph of chaos, entropy, the heat death of the universe, should win out in the end by all the laws of history. But there's something awry, counter-intuitive and strange about that conclusion. We rebel against it. And only in the Incarnation do we find a strangeness fit to answer and disarm the strangeness of Creation and Fall.

Contemplate for a moment the mystery that a certain baby, a certain carpenter's son (for all the world knew), was God, who made the heavens and the earth. That God needed the milk from Mary's breast. That God felt hunger and thirst, the heat of the sun and the chill of the night, and pulled a blanket over him to stay warm as He slept. It began as a very small event. Very few, beyond the shepherds and the Magi, knew on Christmas night that the great change in the world was beginning. Since then, many have heard, and nations and civilizations have been changed by the message, yet it is still a small event in a way, which can almost be forgotten amidst the hubbub of history. Almost, but not quite. It will give the mind no peace. If Revelation is true, what happened at Bethlehem is destined to become much more important, even as God's promise to Abraham became more important when it bore fruit in the plagues of Egypt and the liberation of the Hebrews from Pharaoh. For now, we have a choice. We can ignore, belittle, try to convince ourselves by inadequate dismissals, change the subject. Or we can let the evidence lead us where it will. And it leads to the Church. 

There's a kind of prima facie impossibility about the Incarnation, which must be appreciated in order to do it justice. In the last chapter, I raised a paradox about divine omnipotence by asking whether God can make a rock so heavy that He can't lift it. Well, in a way, He did. When God was a baby in the stable at Bethlehem, all the rocks on Earth were too heavy for Him to lift. But how is it consistent with the omnipotence of God to be a man, when it is so essential to human nature to be weak, limited, and full of needs? Was Jesus omnipotent? If He wasn't, how could He be God? If He was, how could He be a man? In what sense could He inhabit a particular body, if by His omnipotence, He could control all of nature? And the Gospel narrative doesn't exactly answer these questions, yet it somehow disarms them. We see His omnipotence when He says "Peace, be still," and the stormy winds and waves immediately grow calm. We see His human limitations when He asks "Who touched me?" or weeps for Lazarus, or prays in Gethsemane that the cup might be taken from Him. And yet somehow He remains a coherent character, and sends our questions back to the drawing board.

In fact, the Incarnation challenged the Jewish conception of God, and compelled Christian theologians over the next few centuries to work out the new ideas of the Trinity. Christians believe that God is not merely one, but three in one: three persons, comprising one deity. There is God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. The Son is begotten by the Father. The Holy Spirit "proceeds" from the Father. Theologians have usually held that this truth cannot be discovered by reason. It was learned by experience when the apostles met Jesus, and found Him to be God, yet not the whole of God, for He could still pray to the Father, and say that he was sent by the Father. And after Jesus's Ascension, the Holy Spirit came upon them and filled them at Pentecost, and gave them wisdom and energy to spread the gospel through the world, and that too was God, but was not the same as either Christ the Son, or God the Father. 

Once they had discovered the Trinity by experience, they saw the evidence for it throughout the Old Testament. In Genesis 1:26, we hear God saying, "Let us make man in our own image." Who is He talking to? Here we glimpse community in the heart of God. In the prophecy of Joel, God says, "I will pour out My Spirit on all flesh" (Joel 2:28), as if His Spirit is something separate from Himself. In Proverbs 8, the Wisdom of God speaks in the first person, and claims to have been begotten before the world began, present with God from the beginning, and a co-creator of the world. Thinking hard about passages like these and the life of Jesus, the early Church wrote and debated and prayed, until in the seven great Church councils of the 4th through 8th centuries, they formulated creeds and doctrines encapsulating the best that they could discern about the nature of God and the Incarnation. The doctrines are meant to fend off misunderstandings and to guard a mystery. They are not meant to dispel the mystery. If you read about Jesus, and think hard, and try to imagine, it will leave you wondering. Wonder and puzzle as much as you like! Just be careful about arriving at any firm conclusions that put the matter to rest. If you do that, you'll probably get it wrong. As we see all things by the light of the sun yet cannot safely look at the sun, so we we can reason brilliantly about the world by the light that Jesus has given us, but trying too hard to reason about Jesus Himself tends to make us go blind.

It's not a unique case. We have met many mysteries already in this book. What are patterns? How is it that conscience and instinct operate in your mind and soul at the same time, often giving you conflicting desires, and yet you are still one person? How do ideas relate to things? How do you have reasons for your choices, and you can recount those reasons, and yet you were still free, and might have done differently? Mysteries all. Philosophers who think they have settled these old questions usually only make fools of themselves. So with the nature of Jesus. But we can know things without understanding them. We shouldn't reason away our knowledge. We shouldn't deny what we know just because we can't always articulate and justify it in logical terms. We might have reasoned, a little tentatively, that it was impossible for God to be a man, but then we meet Jesus, and realize we never knew what God or man, those old abstractions, meant, compared to the way we begin to know His character. And in it we meet both humanity perfected and God revealed. There's a difference between knowing a person and understanding an argument, and in this case it's more important to know the Person.

One benefit of the Incarnation that is not usually mentioned is that it spared us from the temptation of envying God. Before Jesus, people believed in gods as blessed, immortal beings with strange powers, and they often envied them. Gods were rich in all the things that people wanted, like strength and prosperity and beauty and above all length of life, and they suffered few if any of the burdens that blight human life. Sometimes they might suffer thwarted love, but never poverty, toil, hunger, pain, or death. And so men envied the gods. But Jesus suffered all of those things. He suffered more than any of us. Who would be tempted to envy God now, after the scoffing, the angry crowds, the scourging, the crown of thorns, the abandonment by His disciples and the betrayal of Peter, the nails through His hands and feet, and the cry from the cross: "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" (Matthew 25:46) Though God is all-powerful and praised by billions and will live forever, He will never again tempt us to the sin of envy. 

More importantly, through His life and death as a man, God proved that He loved us. In doing so, He fulfilled a long-cherished hope of the human race, and refuted an agonizing doubt. The idea that God loves men didn't begin with Jesus. The Old Testament is full of it, but I came to appreciate how widespread is the human need to be loved by God from The Iliad. Near the end of that famous epic that was a kind of Bible for the Greeks, after the death of Hector, when the fall of Troy to its furious Greek enemies is only a matter of time, the goddess of the rainbow, Iris, appears to King Priam. The king has no hope left for this life or the next. The gods have sided with his enemies. He has lost his worthiest and most beloved son. No one in The Iliad believes in any afterlife for mortal men except the senseless dark of Hades. And yet Iris addresses him with these astonishing words: "Fear not, O father! no ill news I bear; From Jove I come, Jove makes thee still his care." And then she tells him how he may, with divine help, recover the body of Hector. And he trusts, and obeys. 

So much do men need to be loved by God that even when corrupt myths have poisoned their image of heaven to the point where they see in it only passionate quarreling and petty intrigue of a pantheon of adulterers, when when they have received from it nothing but doom, yet the merest rumor that a god may care for them gives hope amidst the most irreparable disaster. Surely it was the hope of being loved by God, and not only fear of the gods or hope of earthly rewards, that made men, through so many generations, deep into the pagan past, keep bringing their gifts to the altar and composing hymns of praise. But it was hope, not confidence. Are we loved by God? We might well doubt, and almost despair. We live in a beautiful world that God made, but did He make it for us? We don’t always feel very at home in it. Nature is beautiful but often hostile and dangerous. Why should He love us, weak and sinful as we are? How could He? The fact that we are doomed to die would almost seem to settle the question in the negative. The curse of death doesn't seem like a sign that God loves us. But we can't help hoping. And then, on the cross, God proved His love for mankind more emphatically than we could have dreamed of. So let's live up to it by loving Him back!

To believe that God loves you improves the likelihood of achieving salvation, because a loving God will surely help you, but even more, it adds something to the motive for seeking salvation. We needn't fear that we will be admitted to heaven reluctantly, like an unwanted guest at a party included for the sake of form. We'll be welcomed with open arms. It's possible, up to a point, to seek salvation from a kind of self-interest. It sounds merrier to rejoice around the throne of God than to be banished into eternal darkness. But it's so difficult that we might despair. If God loves us, the expectation of His help can ward off despair. But the revelation of God's love also means that it isn't self-interest alone that can goad us onwards in the struggle for salvation. We can do it from a kind of justice to God, or even, dare I say it, a kind of pity, like that a beautiful woman might feel for an honest, lovesick suitor. If only we can get sin out of the way, God will rejoice in our company. Let us not deprive Him of that joy! Don't make Him grieve for the loss of you! Think of what He suffered on the cross for your sake. 

When God became man, it was settled once and for all that the human race will never be erased and forgotten as a mere blunder or botched project, for human nature was given a place in the being of God Himself. The Son of God took a human body. He lived among us, and taught us, and shared our poverty and toil and pain, and died to save us, and then brought His hard-won human nature with Him into heaven. We go to Him as members of a race with which heaven is now already familiar, strange as that may be in light of humanity's sad and bloodstained history. So do not hold back. Do not be afraid. Go and join Him there!

Another reason why God's Incarnation as a man helped Him to save mankind is that Jesus set the perfect moral example of how human beings ought to live. It wasn't available before, as we saw in chapter 15. A good example can inspire and teach. It's easier to discern the right thing to do when we can look to the example of Jesus. When we know the right thing to do but lack the willpower, thinking of Jesus can give us courage.

Yet it's usually hard to apply the example of Jesus to our own lives. Indeed, the part of Jesus's life that might have supplied the best moral examples for us is the part we know nothing about. For thirty years, Jesus seems to have lived as an ordinary man. His hometown rejected Him, more or less, because they saw Him was just an ordinary carpenter's son (Matthew 13:55-57). They don't bring up any sins against Him, and tradition affirms that He led a sinless life, yet it seems nonetheless to have been an unexceptional, undistinguished life, and just for that reason, might have been more suitable for emulation by you and me. But tradition has remembered almost nothing about it. And during His ministry, His whole way of life and all His actions are so distinctive that most people's lives can bear very little resemblance to them. There's an occasional fad for using the question "What would Jesus do?" to prompt good behavior, but I'm not sure that's really very helpful. How would we know what Jesus would do in our place? His life was so different from ours.

Also, why would God have to become a man in order to set us a perfect moral example? Can't we men do well by imitating the conduct of God? Indeed, we can, and we do so very often. God is a great artist, whose work we see displayed in meadows dancing in spring breezes, in forests set ablaze with all the colors of autumn, in sunrises and sunsets and stars and all the pageantry of the heavens. And we men often imitate God by being artists, by drawing or writing beautiful things, and if we do it in all humility and in a spirit of thanks and praise, we please God by doing so. Jesus urged men to love their enemies so as to imitate the conduct of God. "I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous" (Matthew 5:44-45). That is, God loves His enemies by making the sun shine and the nourishing rain to fall even on the wicked, and we should imitate God by turning our good will and generosity on the wicked and the good alike.

But where the example of Jesus becomes indispensable is when we face moral challenges that God, in His own nature, never has to face, and could only experience when He became a man. God, as God, never has to feel the pain of being rejected, scorned, scoffed at, and hated by his fellows, by those whose friendship and respect all his natural instincts make him desire, and who have the power to hurt him. For we humans want to be approved of by our fellow men. "Peer pressure" is one of the greatest temptations to wrongdoing. But sometimes it is our duty to estrange ourselves from the crowd and to become enemies to family and friends, kin and country, for the sake of God, and/or for the sake of social justice and truth. More than that, we have to stand firm in the face of pain, sometimes in the face of torture, even unto death. For such trials, God in heaven can set us no example to follow. God had to come to Earth and live as a man to do that. 

Also, Jesus sets us the perfect example of prayer in a way that God in heaven never could. We see Him going up to a mountain to spend all night in prayer (Luke 6:12). And we see Him praying for one thing yet being open to the will of God to tell Him something else: "My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as You will" (Matthew 26:39). How can Jesus pray to God, when Jesus is God? Well, for one thing, there are three persons in the Trinity, and they can talk to each other. But also, the human nature of Jesus can propose things to divinity, and then accept divine decrees, whether or not they fulfill what was requested. So He did in Gethsemane. And because Jesus was a man and did as men should do, we can imitate Jesus's perfect submission to the will of God.

Another reason why the Incarnation helped to save mankind is that it led to the birth of a community which was not founded on sin. Men are born for community and for love. A life completely alone is hardly conceivable, and a life reduced to loneliness is a life in exile, terribly impoverished and incomplete. The holy hermits of Christianity are the exception that proves the rule, for they still need to partake of Holy Communion at the hands of a priest, and they have the companionship of God in the wilderness. But even so, the hermit's life is a rare vocation, and usually seems to have a penitential character. And even very devout Christians often find it hard to feel much appeal in the lives of hermit saints. We need community. But before Christianity and the Church, every community was tainted with social sin, complicity in which was impossible to avoid.

I introduced the idea of social sin in chapter 15, as one of the reasons why no one before Jesus or outside Christianity has ever achieved moral perfection. The idea of social sin is rather subtle, and can be opaque to Westerners because of a strong individualistic strain in Western culture. Still, the moral position of white Americans with respect to black Americans is a well-known example which can be illustrative of a broader phenomenon. White Americans treated black Americans terribly in the past, first by holding them in slavery, then through racist laws that segregated them from mainstream life and treated them as inferior people. Then the racist laws were abolished, and black Americans enjoyed legal equality. Socially, too, the casual racism of past generations became stigmatized and was rarely heard openly. Most white Americans today have never known a legal regime that treated blacks as inferior, and many have not only never personally participated in white racism, but have had little or no personal exposure to white racism by others. Nevertheless, most educated white Americans accept that it's their peculiar moral duty to remember and to some extent resist and repent of the past sins of people like themselves. If white Americans today have to worry about avoiding complicity in social sin, how much more difficult that would have been for the vast majority of historical mankind! 

Most people have been expected by their communities to hate enemy peoples, to approve of wicked and oppressive rulers and ruling classes, to fight in or at least to cheer for unjust wars, and to pretend to believe in, and to worship, false, unworthy, wicked gods. Such social sin was woven through all moral instruction, so that people would feel their adherence to the moral law was all mixed up with their submission to bad kings and their worship of wicked gods. Moral respectability meant not stealing the fruits of a neighbor's labor, and also, paying respect to a wicked, plundering king. It meant not seducing a neighbor's wife, and also, burning incense to an image of a god who in the official legends had seduced other men's wives. The authorities who were invoked in teaching morality embodied immorality, in both obvious and subtle ways. By such moral confusions, men got hopelessly lost in the labyrinths of sin, until Jesus showed the way out, and marked it with the cross, and left the Church behind as a guide.

Christianity certainly did not abolish social sin. The best that can be said is that it has fairly steadily, though more at some times than others, struggled against it, and achieved a kind of cumulative amelioration of society, so that the world's happiest and most thriving societies today are more ethical in most ways than any pre-Christian societies and than most Christian societies in the past. But sin is still woven into the fabric of every polity and every nation. Nowhere on earth is it morally safe to be merely a good citizen or a good patriot. Nowhere in this world can the good man safely let himself feel at home. We must be vigilant, and sometimes we must withdraw, or protest.

But in the Church alone there is a community that in its inmost heart is free of sin, such that a man who hungers and thirsts after righteousness is led deeper into it and not out of it. That is not to say, of course, that the Church is free of sinners. On the contrary, it is full of sinners. It is devoted to righteousness, yet full of sinners, as a hospital is devoted to health, yet is full of sick people. But the bond among these sinners is not sin. The bond among these sinners is the struggle against sin and the shared aspiration to righteousness. In no way is sin the price of admission to the Church. By contrast, there is always an element of sin involved in membership of and participation in other communities, though it's often right for Christians to engage with them up to a point.

That the Church alone among human communities is not founded in sin is, like the elephant standing halfway in the room in chapter 16, a truth that can only be partially seen from a secular perspective. A church building can harbor mutual encouragement of shared sinful passions, and alas, sometimes the authority of God is claimed as support for selfishness or hatred. That such communities are actually alienating themselves from the body of Christ is invisible. But the deeper one works one's way into the Church, not the Church hierarchy necessarily but the real community of the faithful, the more one understands that its unity is never based on sin, but on love, and Christ, and the truth. Even from a secular perspective, it's possible to recognize that over the grand sweep of history, moral progress is profoundly indebted to Christianity, while moral evils have roots outside Christianity and meet resistance from it.

Perhaps most importantly, the Incarnation made human beings the kinsmen of God and a part of His story, needed as elements in that story.

One of the purposes of the story of Adam and Eve, and the long, boring, and apparently incomplete genealogies that follow, is that it establishes the common descent of the human race. All men are brothers, or at least cousins. That's the antidote to racism and a check on individualism. Of course, science agrees. It doesn't particularly trace human genealogies back to one couple, but it does hold that all family trees converge if they're traced back far enough. It follows from this that you and I and all members of the human race are blood relations of the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus, and thereby blood relations of Jesus Himself, that is, kinsmen of God. We will not enter paradise as strangers, but as kinsmen of the Prince of Heaven, and then God will adopt us as His sons and daughters. 

If the Church is the body of Christ, Christians are members of the body of Christ, part of Him. As He said, "you are in Me and I am in you" (John 14:20). If the story of God is to be told in eternity, we Christians must be included in it, for we are part of that story. That gives us a reason to be there. It gives us a way to account for ourselves in the presence of the angels. Isaiah prophesied long ago that "through your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow" (Isaiah 1:18). Yet so pervasive is sin in human life that we might worry that the cleansing of our sins would leave us only blank. Thanks to the Incarnation and the Church, we need not be blank. Perhaps we will have stories worth telling even when they have been purged of sin, but at the least we Christians can say this for ourselves in eternity: that we are kinsmen of God, adopted heirs of the Kingdom, who share the human nature that He took upon Himself during one of the strangest but most glorious chapters of His long adventure, and that we have partaken of His body and blood. And that will be enough that we can walk the golden streets of the Eternal City without shame.

And now the whole story begins to come together. I'll try to summarize it in a way that all Christians will agree with, and that is consistent with the official creeds, with the caveat that "all Christians" can't include some modernizers who have compromised and conceded too much to fit into any Christian worldview. But I'll also tell it in a way that I understand it, trying to unpack some of the creeds' mysterious language and looping in other matters to flesh out a comprehensive worldview. And in thus personalizing my statement of the Christian worldview, I may provoke some dissent or reservations. I think it's nonetheless reasonable to make such personalized, contemporary statements of the faith, as long as one doesn't claim for them an authority like that of the official creeds. One must understand the creeds somehow, and some meaning will attach to them in one's mind, so it may as well be publicly stated, so it might instruct or be corrected by others.

Long ago, before time began– and there's a paradox in the words "before time began," but we're dealing in mysteries, and must sometimes settle for clumsy words to express things that transcend language– God was alone, and yet not alone, for in the divine nature there are three Persons. We can't imagine what the love of Father, Son and Holy Spirit was like then, but they weren't lonely, and they didn't need to create. Nonetheless, God began to create, to make things separate from Himself. It seems to have begun with the spiritual heavens, home of the angels, created as sinless beings of everlasting light, praising God forever. Again, we can't really imagine their state of being or the happiness they had, for we are incarnate beings, at home in a material world, which hadn't been made yet. But they weren't bored. They were happy, and some have remained so. They were, however, free. They could love and worship God, but they could also change and worship themselves, turning to pride and evil. And some did. God had made freedom, and the cost of that was high. But it made the praise of the free angels worth more.

Next, God made matter, and the physical world that we know, characteristically free in its own way, not that it exercised choice but that the laws of nature served as its declaration of partial independence, governing its affairs with a certain autonomy from the will of God. Why? I can see two reasons. One is that physical nature, with its own distinctive, stable order and integrity, is full of beauty. There comes a time when the artist stops meddling and lets his work be. The other is that physical nature provided an arena for human freedom, and the peculiar fruits that it was meant to bear, and someday will bear, and sometimes bears even now, in the bad times. And so God made light and darkness and the stars and the galaxies and the splendor of the physical heavens. And then He made the planets and the Earth, places where there was permanence and solidity, and gravity organized space into up and down, north and south and east and west. And then, on Earth, He made clouds and rain and rivers and seas, and He made life, drinking the light and multiplying and filling the seas with a new, resilient, beautiful kind of order. Then He cleansed the atmosphere and made it transparent, revealing the sun and the moon and the stars, splendidly marking time over the living world, their permanence and its changefulness starkly contrasting yet strangely harmonious. Then He made animals in the seas, moving life in thousands of forms, and in the air, flying. And He also brought life, and animals, onto the land, and the beasts walked among the forests. And at last, to crown all, He made mankind.

Even though the Bible says at this point that God looked on His world and saw that it was "very good," things seem to have gone a little awry already. The serpent who appears in Genesis 3 and tempts Eve evidently has malicious purposes. Where do they come from? Christian tradition has long traced them back to the fall before the Fall, to that original fall of Satan and the rebellious angels from the company of God into pride and evil. Satan seems to have some kind of access to the physical world, such that he could take the form of a serpent and speak. I don't know whether this is figurative or literal. But paleontology reveals that some of the evils that are physical nature as we know it, such as predation, began long before the presence of mankind on the Earth. Was Satan interfering somehow, marring God's creation? 

Again, physical nature as we know it is running down, sinking slowly into a swamp of irrevocable entropy, destined to dissipate and die until eternal silence reigns in the graveyard of the stars. When did that begin? We're never really told, and in a way it doesn't matter. Science assumes rather than proves that the physical laws we know, including the Second Law of Thermodynamics, go back to the beginning of time. For what it's worth, I think that some tendency to entropy and breakdown is consistent with a good universe designed by God. There's no reason a good world would have to be completely permanent by its own nature. If it needed occasional maintenance by God, infusions of new order and design to make up for what was very slowly being lost, that might be part of the pleasure. Some gardeners might prefer a garden that makes them attend to it sometimes by its need for weeding and watering over a garden that is completely self-sufficient. And if God had plans to intervene in nature in grand ways to introduce whole new kinds of order to it, adding life to planets and animals to life and so forth, why should He make each phase be more inherently durable than He intended it to be? Perhaps entropy is not a symptom of the Fall per se, but merely a sign of physical nature's designed dependence upon God, which becomes a sign of the Fall inasmuch as the world alienates itself from God and cuts itself off from the occasional infusions of order that it needs even in order to remain itself. But this is speculative. Suffice it to say that there was some kind of fall before the Fall, and the devil was there in the garden to tempt Eve.

Why did God make man? He was there to tend the garden, to care for it, to rule it for its own good, and to be the living image of God in its midst. And human nature is not so fallen as to erase all traces of man's original vocation. Far from it! We can still add beauty to nature. In the domestic dog that mankind has made from the raw material of the wild wolf, there are all sorts of excellences that the wolf lacked. Man-made gardens rival the most beautiful natural meadows, and some man-made orchards might be reasonably preferred to wild forests for their beauty as much as their fruitfulness. A rustic cottage or a ruined castle or a hermit at prayer can usually add something to the beauty of a natural meadow or forest. A rider adds to the beauty of a horse, and an old-fashioned sailing ship to the beauty of the ocean. Nor is it only in our eyes that the dog is better than the wolf. Many dogs are ill-used by sinful men, and I think even the best dog owners are dull and domineering compared to the ways that unfallen man might have delighted and ennobled all beasts. But still, many or most dogs love their masters and are happier, I think, in their subordinate friendship with man than they would be in the wild, even had they still the lost powers of the wild wolf. We still love to tend the garden of nature, growing plants and caring for pets, admiring and appreciating while benevolently meddling a little. Such now is our best, most innocent leisure, but it was meant to be our principal vocation.

But man fell, like some angels before him, into pride and evil. There was a time, perhaps a literal Adam or perhaps he's a symbol, when the first disobedience was committed. There was a time, perhaps a literal Cain or perhaps he's a symbol, when the first murder was committed. And things tended to get worse. It seems to me that the propensity to sin must have become written into our genes. Certainly, it became written into the culture of human communities, and we can't do without culture. We were never meant to. By a kind of terrible, inexorable law, we sank into a world of survival of the fittest, where all too often the fittest were the most treacherous and cruel, the men rapists and murderers, men and women alike slavishy submitting to brute power. 

Men grew more and more brutal, yet they still had faculties that set them above the brutes. They still bore the distorted and defiled image of God, and could reason, and could make a kind of imaginative outreach to God, and sometimes they could invoke the memory of divinity to check their descent into animality. Yet often that only made them worse. Both honest error and motives of propaganda must have driven them to recreate God in the image of themselves, full of passions and violence and adultery. Christian tradition has long held that men came even to worship fallen angels, and demons sat in the thrones rightly reserved for God among men. And so these false gods goaded men to do more evil even than they wished, and often men who had enough conscience still to desire peace were yet driven to war because they thought it was the will of the gods, and men were murdered as sacrifices on their altars.

What could God do about this? To simply override the freedom of men, which they were so grotesquely abusing, would go against God's design for men, and the promise of free will written into men's natures. We are told in the Bible that in the time of Noah, God despaired of mankind to such an extent that He sent a flood to kill all of them except a single family, and natural history attests to events much like this, as when the world ocean broke through and flooded the Black Sea or the Persian Gulf. Sometimes the case is hopeless and the slate must simply be wiped clean. But also, God sometimes spoke to men, coming to them as a friend and giving them information or counsel. How? In what form did God appear? Sometimes we are told, with detailed narrative or vivid imagery. Other times we are not. We know nothing of how God first spoke to Abraham. Perhaps the best way to guess would be to consult open-mindedly with some of the many contemporary Christians who say that God has spoken to them, and extrapolate. It seems as if God becomes more selective over time. He speaks to all the first humans, even to Cain after he has committed the first murder, but by the time of Abraham, it seems to have become a rare thing to be spoken to by God. 

In Abraham, God begins the work of crafting a chosen people, governed by a special law and prescribed to follow a special routine of worship. Their journeys, their way of life, their occasional triumphs, their many sufferings, their intermittent righteousness, and their many temptations and fallings away, are the theme of the bulk of the Bible. They have some special purpose. It is as if they are being prepared for something. But for what? We finally learn that in the New Testament. They are being prepared as the scene of the Incarnation. They are being painstakingly taught enough of the truth that some of them at least will be sufficiently teachable to become the hearers and bearers of the message that the Son of God will bring.

Finally, in the stable at Bethlehem, God was born as a human baby, and lived among us for thirty years as an ordinary man, so undistinguished that when He suddenly began His ministry as a prophet, hardly anyone seemed to know anything about Him. But then He spoke marvelous wisdom and did wonderful miracles, revealing a character that all people who hear of Him admire and take comfort in, even though He was also capable of terrible judgments. When Revelation says that at the end of the world He will come riding on a white horse and "strike the nations with the sword of His mouth" (Revelation 19:15) we recognize Him, for so He struck the Jews during his three years ministry in Israel. He did no violence, yet His words were like a sword against pride and hypocrisy, and His defiant denunciations of the Jewish religious establishment couldn't help but make Him enemies. He worked miracles, and they almost always expressed something of the life-giving creativity of God, such as healing the sick or turning water to wine. Usually, the miracles were done for people in trouble: the apostles in the boat, on the verge of sinking; the crowd that had followed Him into the wilderness to hear Him speak, without enough food to stay on their feet for the walk home; lepers; Lazarus dead. His miracle-working power made people wonder in a new way who He was, and He began to say, cryptically and guardedly at times but ultimately and cumulatively with unmistakable clarity and conviction, that He was God, or the Son of God, sent into the world to save sinners. With His benevolent miracles and His ethics of love, Jesus won the grateful allegiance of many simple and humble people, and the apostles and other disciples dedicated their lives to Him. But His following made Him dangerous.

In the death of Jesus, His perfection was crowned, with a crown of thorns that turned to everlasting glory, while the world stood condemned. The moralistic piety of the Jews and the patriotic statecraft of the Romans were among the best things mankind had developed. They had each, in their different ways, been wholesome, noble, edifying things, which brought out the good in men, enriched people's lives and made them happy. Even today, men and women are inspired by Roman heroism and justice, and by old Hebrew psalms. But in that hour, they failed the test. Legalistic scruples about the Sabbath gave the Jewish priests and lawyers a pretext for despising a man who was obviously doing so much good, and speaking so much wisdom, and performing signs and wonders. The high priest charged Him under oath to tell them if he was the Son of God. "You have said so,” Jesus replied. “But I say to all of you: From now on you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven" (Matthew 26:64). The high priest tore his robes at the "blasphemy," and then the Sanhedrin condemned Jesus to death. But how could they know the claim was not true, especially after all the wisdom and miracles? Yet they were blind. And Pilate, for his part, recognized Jesus's innocence, yet with a legion of Roman swords at his command, he lacked the courage to resist the fury of the Jewish mob. Jewish piety was put to the test and exposed as hypocrisy and fanaticism, then Roman justice melted into cynical realpolitik, and how should any of us feel confident that all our virtue, too, would not turn to ashes in like case? There but for the grace of God go we all.

But death could not hold Him, for its power comes from sin. Old Christian tradition represents the death and resurrection of Jesus as a kind of jailbreak, with Jesus entering the shadowy realm of Hades by stealth, by fooling the devil into thinking that he was a mere man, and then shattering the gates of Hades with the strength of God, so that all the souls imprisoned there can burst out. That's a mystery that I can't quite unpack, though my soul thrills with the excitement of it. But I think we shed a little light in chapter 17 on why sinful souls must ultimately be exiled into a loneliness without God of which hell is the description, and I think we shed a little light in this chapter on why the Incarnation gives men enough honor that some of them may be released from that exile and enter the company of the angels without shame. Before that day, death had had a terrible permanence about it because its power was the power of sin. Even the few who were raised from the dead went back to the grave in due course. But when death made the mistake of taking a sinless man, its power was broken, and even to the dead in the shadowy realm of Hades Jesus brought His message of hope, and His offer to those who would kill the old sinful self, that He would give them His own self instead, and raise them up to eternal life. From that day on, Christian men and women began to cease fearing death, since for them, it was only a temporary state, and they kept proving that in the arena until they converted the Roman Empire.

It was the beginning of the end of the world, although it has gone on longer than people seem to have expected. Perhaps Christians who want to hurry the apocalypse along, and who wonder what God is waiting for, should remember that Jesus said this: "And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come" (Matthew 24:14). That makes sense. Let each nation, each people, each human lineage, have a fair chance to hear the gospel, to really get acquainted with it, and see if they'll repent and be saved. He gave His apostles, and by extension the Church, the task of doing it: "Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature" (Mark 16:15). We haven't finished that job yet. But progress is being made. In some ways, circumstances have never been more favorable than now to finishing it. Before the 16th century, Christians didn't even know where all nations lived. Even in the 19th century, missionaries had to endure epic voyages and tropical diseases and penetrate uncharted jungles to find them. Now most of the world has the internet, and an instructed Christian could explain the gospel over a Zoom call to a seeker on the other side of the world without leaving his or her living room. Was this, perhaps, the purpose of the Covid pandemic: to awaken Christians to the way digital connectivity empowers them to finally finish the Great Commission? I don't make the suggestion very seriously… yet it wouldn't hurt to act as if it were true.

And then someday, perhaps someday very soon, the Lamb who was slain will begin to open the scroll, and the terrible testing times, through which the saints will journey unscathed, will begin. There will be disasters natural and disasters apparently supernatural, and we will need great courage, not so much to do anything as simply to endure, for "the one who endures to the end will be saved" (Mark 24:13). No doubt, we will have better things to think about then, than to try to mark the precise moment where the catastrophic disruption of the routines of nature as experienced by historic mankind will involve an accelerating dissolution of the physical constitution of nature as described by Newton and Einstein and Heisenberg and Mendeleev. We will be too busy staying alive and repenting our sins to try to preserve the coherence of physical nature. Or we should be. Because we, above all, are the harvest that God wants to reap from this world, and though the process of being harvested may be confusing and uncomfortable and even harrowing, the point of it is that the valuable part of what is harvested, its merit, its virtue, is preserved. There will be continuity in us amidst the discontinuity in everything else, for the discontinuity in a Christian's life came earlier, when he or she died to the old self and became a member of the body of Christ, and real, sincere, saved Christians, or rather those "who are being saved" as Saint Paul said (1 Corinthians 1:18), are already citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven, disguised in the garb of this dying world which is not their home, where they are strangers and sojourners. When Heaven and Earth flee away from the great white throne of God, and they look around and see the new heaven and new earth that have been made, they will sigh with relief that they have finally made it home.

Such is the Christian worldview, but I will not claim to have proved that it is true, and it may not be in your power to believe it just yet. But if any moderately intelligent reader can have read this far without understanding very clearly and beyond doubt that Christianity is a candidate for the true worldview, I'll be surprised, and I'd be eager to know what hasn't been understood, or what blockers to faith haven't been taken into account in the argument so far. And yet there's still room for doubt. As I said in chapter 1, apologetics never seems to be completely successful. The public evidence never seems to be entirely decisive. I speculated in chapter 16 that God may not want the public evidence to be decisive, for He doesn't want people to believe in the truth of the Gospel for whom it would not come as good news. The public evidence needs to be supplemented by private evidence, such as answers to prayer. 

Meanwhile, you don't have to be completely convinced of the truth of Christianity in order to be try to lead a Christian life. Some parts of Christianity need to be discovered from the inside. And so a good next step if you're a seeker is to start trying to pray.