Joe examines Thomas Aquinas’ Christmas reflection, and why Christmas and the Nativity weren’t actually necessary.

Transcript:

Joe:

Merry Christmas and welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. And today I want to talk about a Christmas sort of isn’t necessary because the incarnation sort of wasn’t necessary. Now that might sound heretical, might sound insane for a Christian to say, but I think it’s actually an important thing for us to get right. And for support, I would point to the arguments made by people like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. Who argue that Christmas was not strictly speaking necessary, but it’s really good that it happened anyway. But let’s unpack both halves of that. Why wasn’t Christmas necessary in the strict sense? And why is it still really good that this is the course of action God chose anyhow? As I say, I’m going to start with St. Augustine and then we’ll look at St. Thomas Aquinas and I think you’ll see as they lay out their arguments that they’re right.

So St. Augustine, this is from a work called Detroitate or on the Trinity and he’s trying to decide how we should answer the objection. And the objection goes something like this. What? Had God no other way by which he might free men from the misery of this mortality, that he should will the only begotten son, God coeternal with himself to become man by putting on a human soul and flesh and being made mortal to endear death. So that’s the objection he’s hearing. Somebody is going to hear the story of Christmas and they’re going to say, “Really? God had to do that. That was the only way to solve the problem of sin.” And I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about it, but it’s a good question to ask. All right, even if we say Christ came into the world to save sinners or the cross is a remedy to sin, or any of these things that we might be in the habit of just saying, have we stopped to think, “Wait, did he have to?

Couldn’t he have done something else instead?” And Augustine’s going to say, “Yeah, he could have done something else, but it’s good that he didn’t.” He puts it like this. He says, “It’s not enough so to refute as to assert that that mode by which God deins to free us for the mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus is good and suitable to the dignity of God.” But we must also show not indeed that no other mode was possible to God, to whose power all things were equally subject, but that there neither was nor need have been any other mode more appropriate for carrying our misery. So he’s saying three things there. It’s a little bit unclear at first what he’s saying. He’s saying, “It’s not enough to just say this isn’t contrary to the dignity of God.” There’s going to be one argument that says it’s inappropriate for God to become man.

It’s inappropriate for the God of the universe to be a baby and a manger that we’re going to have to be able to defend as Christians. No, no, there’s nothing in humanity that is contrary to divine dignity given the humility of God. We’ll have to unpack all of that, right? But we also have to show, this is actually the very last thing he says, that this was the best way he could have done it. We don’t have to show this was the only way he could have done it. So notice that he doesn’t say it’s strictly necessary because obviously all things are possible with God. And so of course he could have done it some other way. So even if you say Jesus Christ comes into the world to save sinners, absolutely true. Does that mean that this was the only way the problem of sin could be remedied?

You’ll hear some theologians, some pastors today who talk that way. That is simply not true. And it’s offensive to the dignity of God to imagine that it is, that God couldn’t have come up with some other solution. After all, when we talk about the problem of sin, he’s the one to whom the debt of sin is chiefly owed. And if you’re the one somebody owes, you can always just say, “Eh, don’t worry about it. ” Or you can say, “You know what? I’ll regard that debt is paid off if you do this other thing for me. ” How often have you found yourself in a situation where someone can’t really repay you? So for instance, if you’re a parent, you have a situation where your kid wants something that costs money, you know they can’t actually afford it, but you just say, “You know what?

You do this. You put $3 from your Christmas money or you do a chore around the house or something else that isn’t really equal, but you have the sovereignty as the parent to say you’re going to count it as equal.” Well, similarly in this case, God as sovereign and God is the one to whom the debt of sin is paid could have said either, “I’m just going to wave away the dead or I’m going to allow the debt to be satisfied in some trivial kind of way,” but he does not do that. And if your solution to why he doesn’t do that is because he is indebted to some higher law of justice, then you don’t think God is truly sovereign. You think he is beneath some higher law that he is a servant of or a slave of, not that he’s the actual sovereign of all things.

And so Augustine’s point is he wasn’t forced by some higher power to do the incarnation. That’s not what’s happening here. So in that sense, Christmas isn’t necessary, but it is still good, not just good in the sense that it’s not offensive to his dignity, but it’s actually the best thing he could have done. St. Thomas Aquinas is going to approach very much the same kind of conclusion. He’s going to make a slightly different way of articulating this distinction. He’s going to say, when we talk about something being necessary, we mean that in two senses. Sometimes we mean you can’t get your goal without it. Like you need to eat or you’re going to die. Now, intubation and all of that exists now, but in his day it didn’t. Or if you want to choose like you need to breathe or you’re going to die, whatever example you want, something where it’s literally strictly necessary.

But then there’s other times we use need when we actually mean something more like it’s fitting, it’s appropriate, it’s the best way. So if you say you need, he gives the example of you need a horse to get there, or we would say something is driving distance. You need a car if you’re going to get from Kansas City to St. Louis. Could you walk it? Technically, yes. It’s a four hour drive and it’s a very long walk. I don’t know how long, because I’m not crazy enough to have ever tried that, but that’s the idea. Sometimes when we say you need to do X, we mean literally strictly necessary. Other times, it’s not strictly unavoidably necessary, but it’s obviously the appropriate kind of course of action. We use it in both ways. They used it back then in both ways. If you mean necessary in the strict sense, he’s going to say no.

In the first sense, it’s not necessary that God should become incarnate for the restoration of human nature. He’s omnipotent and his omnipotent power could have restored human nature in many other ways. On the other hand, if I necessarily just mean fitting, well then sure, it’s necessary that God should become incarnate for the restoration of human nature. And in fact, it’s good to think about why he chose to do it. That this isn’t just some technical nuance thing of like, “Do you need to or do you need need to? ” No, no. The point here is really simple. God was powerful enough to have done something other than Christmas to resolve the problem of sin. So why Christmas? Why the incarnation? Why the story of Jesus of Nazareth? Why is that the solution? Because once you see that it is fitting but not necessary, then you can’t just say, “Well, he had to do it.

He had no other choice. He did have other choices.” So why this? And so I think it’s actually really beautiful to start with the fact that Jesus did not have to come at Christmas. Christmas is not strictly necessary, but it is necessary in another sense, the necessity of fittingness. It is fitting, it is appropriate, it is apt. So why is Christmas fitting? I’m going to just draw strictly from St. Thomas Aquinas for this part because he is going to be drawing very heavily from St. Augustine and a little bit from St. Leo, and we’re going to get to St. Leo last. But I’m going to just follow the way that St. Thomas Aquinas lays this out because he’s going to give five negative reasons and five positive reasons. The five positive reasons are five ways Christmas draws us to the good and the five negative reasons are going to be five ways Christmas draws us away from evil.

And so these 10 reasons are the 10 reasons for Christmas that he lays out, but he’s very clear to note there are a bunch of other reasons as well you could easily come up with. But here are 10 good reasons that are worth praying on, reflecting on, meditating upon and beginning with the positive reasons, the way Christmas draws us to the good. Number one, this is true in regards to faith, which is made more certain by believing God himself who speaks. So think about it. Whenever we talk about faith, there’s an act of trust we have to make in somebody else. And Jesus, by becoming incarnate, makes it easier for his listeners to make an act of faith in him because it’s not a prophet saying that God said something, is God in the flesh saying something. It’s easier to say yes to that. And so he’s going to quote Saint Augustine here, as he’ll do repeatedly.

And Augustine says, “In order that man might journey more trustfully toward the truth, the truth itself, the son of God, having assumed human nature, established and founded faith.” Everyone still has to make an act of trust that Jesus does not come to take away the need for faith, but he does come to make the act of faith easier to make. It’s easier to trust Jesus of Nazareth than it is to trust somebody else telling you about him. And so now that there is this established point in history where we know Jesus lived, he taught, we have a really good sense even from just history, even apart from faith, you can compile a pretty decent amount of evidence that there really was a guy named Jesus, he taught more or less this and his followers believed he rose from the dead. All of that you can establish even before you get to the act of faith, and that makes it so much easier to make the act of faith rather than just hearing something like Moses says that he saw God in a burning bush.

Now this is also, by the way, the reason that those prophets could do things like miracles to make the act of faith easier. It’s more likely you’re going to believe a guy saying he saw God in the burning bush if his brother can turn the staff into a serpent or he can perform all these incredible miracles with the plagues. The point there is in all of these supernatural activities, including with the incarnation, he’s making this necessary thing, faith, more palatable. And so we can talk about him establishing and founding faith in the incarnation. That’s the first reason. Second, hope. It’s greatly strengthened. Here’s Augustine. Nothing was so necessary for raising our hope as to show us how deeply God loved us. I love that line and it’s easy to gloss over that, but let’s just pause on that. I want you to think about that because sometimes life can feel hopeless.

You can look around at the world and a lot of things are going crazy and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed in the midst of that. And it’s easy for people … Look, right now, people are often very isolated, very alone, and there can be this incredible despair and hopelessness and rage and everything else that kind of builds up in that, that are all these kind of manifestations of a kind of hopelessness, of thinking, “This is not good. I am not good.” One of the beautiful things that I know the group live action is doing right now is they’re making t-shirts that just say, “It is good that you exist.” Because what they found is that in combating abortion, one of the things they needed to do was to convince mothers that it was good that they existed. Because if you don’t believe in the goodness of your own existence, the idea that it would be good that you’d be bringing a child into the world is so much harder to believe in.

But it’s not just like from a utilititarian perspective, like, no, no, people need to know it is good that they exist. And so Augustine can say nothing was so necessary for raising our hope as to show us how deeply God loved us, but the incarnation is a sign of an incredibly loving and merciful God. You’ve got the problem of sin, we get it. We’ve done things that are horrible. We’ve done things that might seem unforgivable at times. And you might imagine God just sending fire down from heaven, but instead he sends his son down from heaven and his son greets us a cooing baby in the manger. That’s the response that he has to sin, is to send his son into the world to lead us to a better place. Augustine continues, and what could afford us a stronger proof of this than that the son of God should become a partner with us, of human nature.

It’s easy to be misanthropic. Like right now, if you say you hate the opposite sex, if you say you hate other races, people regard you as a social pariah and understandably. But if you say you hate humanity, you’re just a misenthrope, human stink, we should have zero population growth and we should all just die out as a species, that is for some reason, a completely acceptable position to have socially. It’s this most profoundly deeply antisocial position and it’s treated with an air of intellectual respectability that I think it has not earned. Augustine’s point is in the face of this, this desire to give up not only on yourself, but on the human race, God shows us a dignity to the human race that he is not giving up on it. He’s become a partner. He has assumed our humanity in the person of Jesus Christ.

And so that should make us hopeful that no matter what else we may do wrong as a species, God is not giving up on us. And so we have a well-founded hope. Third, the incarnation helps with regard to charity, with love, which is greatly inkindled, as St. ThomasSequana says, or as Augustine says, “What greater cause is there of the Lord’s coming than to show God’s love for us?” And he afterwards adds, “If we have been slow to love, at least let us hasten to love and return.” So yeah, open your heart this Christmas. Maybe you’re somebody who is a little mythanthropic. Maybe you’re someone who has trouble loving your neighbor, but once you see not only the hope that you should have that God’s not giving up on you, but the incredible love that God has shown you, even if you’ve been slow to love, be quick to love and response, love back.

Because one of the reasons it can be hard to love is you don’t want to be the person who’s really vulnerable while the other person is … I’m thinking of you more as a friend, but Jesus doesn’t just think of you as a friend. He actually has this profound, incredible, to the cross kind of love for you. And so if you’re too afraid to love, at least be bold enough to love back. And the incarnation is him making the first move so you can at least love back. Fourth reason. With regard to what he calls well-doing, it’ll be clear when you just see what he means. Augustine says, “Man who might be seen was not to be followed, but God was to be followed who could not be seen and therefore God was made man that he who might be seen by man and who man might follow might be shown to man.” So I don’t know if you’ve thought about this.

This is a strange kind of paradox of human existence, but think about prior to the incarnation, you’ve got this God who is invisible and you’re expected to listen to him and follow him. And meanwhile, you’ve got all these people leading you in the wrong direction, showing you visible like idols and giving you visible bad examples and everything else. And it’s so easy to want to just follow what’s immediately before you. I think we have this problem with politics today, with current events today, with celebrity culture today. They’re on your screen, they’re in your ears and your eyes and in your head, and you start to follow them without even really noticing. Whereas God feels more remote. He closes that distance in the incarnation. So now you can know what he would say to you because he’s said it. You could know the example he would set because he said it.

And so it’s easier to do the things you’re supposed to do now because you have a visible example in the person of Jesus Christ. Now obviously that example has now sent it into heaven, but he has set that example in history in a way that he hadn’t before. So you no longer have to, like the WWJD, what would Jesus do bracelets? That’s a little hammy maybe, but it’s pointing to something real that we can look to Christ for an example of well-doing and then follow the example that he sets. All right, fifth positive reason. This is a biggie because it’s the full participation of the divinity, which St. Thomas Aquinas says is the true bliss of man and the end that means the goal of human life. And this is bestowed upon us by Christ’s humanity. This is what’s sometimes called theosis or divinization. It’s the idea that as Augustine says, God was made man that man might be made God.

Now this is the subject of a lot of confusions. I want to say just a couple words on it. Number one, this is the goal of the whole Christian life. This is the goal of all of human existence and it deserves to be talked about much more that the point of this life is not just God put you here to give you a bunch of tests and if you don’t pass the test, you get burnt up for all eternity. And if you do pass the test and you avoid getting burnt up. That’s not a very good understanding. God has invited you into his own life. Now, we don’t share that life by our nature. We are not ontologically the same as God. Just as Jesus needs to become man, so we need to, in a certain way, become God. We need to become partakers of the divine nature, as St. Peter says.

St. John puts it like this. He says, “We already are children of God by virtue of our baptism.” So you’ve got these three tears. Let’s start here. First here, there’s a certain sense in which all of us are children of God by dent of creation. So if you look at the genealogy of Luke and Luke three, he traces his genealogy back to Adam’s son of God. Or in Acts 17, when St. Paul is at Mars Hill, when he talks about all creation being or all humanity being God’s offspring, there’s a certain sense in which every author has a kind of paternal relationship to his books. Every painter has that relationship to his paintings. And so every creator has a certain kind of fatherly, or I guess in the case of a woman, motherly relationship of a certain kind to the things lovingly created, because in the things that you’ve made, a reflection of the author can be found.

But those things aren’t ontologically the same thing, meaning at the level of being, they’re not the same thing. I’ve got books and I’ve got children and all of them reflect something about me, the books and the kids, but the books are not of the same nature. They’re not the same kind of thing that I am a human being, my kids are. That’s what we mean here. So the first way we are children of God, offspring of God in a loose sense, is by being his creatures. We share something of God’s glory that the invisible attributes of God are seen in the visible. So in one sense, all creation does this, but man being made in the image of God does this in a fuller way. That’s the first level. But then we are invited by baptism to become children of God. And this is all over the New Testament, but this idea that the spirit of sonship and adoption is put in our hearts by the Holy Spirit so we can cry out Abba, Father.

Now we become sons in a deeper sense. So now the life of God is dwelling within us. And so there is a deeper thing going on, but all of this happens through the incarnation. Like you don’t get to step two if you don’t have Jesus coming into the world and presenting God as Father, but also letting us access this union between divinity and humanity that begins on the incarnation. We are then invited in a strange way into that unity. We’re invited into this relationship, this interplay, and so that God can come and dwell in your soul. So this is where one John three comes in, that we are God’s children now. And that’s why the world doesn’t know us. If the world’s still at level one, they don’t know what it’s like to become a child of God in this much deeper, fuller, realer sense.

But then John says, that’s actually not enough because what shall be has not yet been revealed, but we do know that when it is revealed, we shall see him, we’ll be like him for we shall see him as he is, that we’re actually being transformed to become Godlike. That’s the promise. That’s step three, so to speak. And so you don’t get to step three without the incarnation and getting to step two. That’s the Christian promise. Going from glory to glory, as St. Paul says, that we become sons and if sons, then heirs, heirs of God and co-ers with Christ. That’s the idea. And this happens in the incarnation, which is amazing. If God had just waved away the problem of sin and said, Ed, don’t worry about it, you don’t become divinized. You don’t become like God because then in that just waving away, he’s just ignoring or wiping away the problem, but he’s not creating this solution in which the solution is a union, the marriage of humanity and divinity, which is signified in the union of the divine bridegroom and the human bride, the church.

That’s this union, the two become one flesh. As St. Paul says in Ephesians five, that’s the mystery of Christ in the church. That’s the mystery in a certain way for every one of us. You are called to become like God. Much more could be said on that. I know I’ve said stuff on that before, but because it is genuinely like the most important part of Christianity, I think it bears repeating. All right. So those are the positive ways. What about the negative ways? What about the ways that Christmas leads us away from evil? Negative here, I don’t mean like these are the bad things about Christmas. This is the crampest part. No, I mean, what are some of the things that the incarnation is good for in leading us from the bad outcomes? Number one.

I could go six through 10. I’m just going to start the one through five over again because that’s what St. Thomas Aquinas does. Number one, because man is taught by it not to prefer the devil to himself. Now that might be very confusing. Why would we need to be taught not to prefer the devil to ourselves or to honor the devil who’s the author of sin? Well, he quotes Saint Augustine. Since human nature is so united to God as to become one person, let not these proud spirits dare to prefer themselves to man because they have no bodies. Think about it. This is why that matters. By order of creation, the angelic spirits are of a higher order than human beings. I don’t know if you know that or not, but this is true. The angels are higher at the level of nature than you and I are.

And that also means that the fallen angels, the demons ar... Read more on Catholic.com