Without the Fall, Would There Have Been an Incarnation?

The Handbook of Libertarian Theology is more empirical, but also more experiential than most other works of Theology.

We have one definitive resource, the Bible, but at this stage no Catechisms, and for at least a long while, do not expect to have Catechisms. Libertarian Theology is also more experential and subjective oriented.

What delineates Libertarian Theology the most is an emphasis on the Personality of God. God is a Person; God is Three Persons; God is many more than three Personas. Our guidebook, the Bible, can tell us these things, but it cannot describe and define the relationship of each person to God. That can only be found out as each person relates to God, person to person.

So, while we can talk about general truths about the relationships from the outside, as we can by observing any other friendship, or marriage, or work relationship, the Bible cannot delineate the specific quirks of God’s personality that he may manifest to you or I as we relate to Him. Those can only be learned through relating to Him.

We may both agree that God has a sense of humor, but while the one he shows you may seem quite slap-stick comedy, I might find his sense of humor much more “intellectual” or “punny”.

All of this to ask the question: Would God have gone through the Incarnation if there had been no Fall? I am not certain there is an answer I can definitively say I know for certain, but based on the fact of His personality, I want to say YES, and I want to point out a few reasons why I think so.

And to start (gasp), I will quote from the book of Genesis.

And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking the garden in the cool of the day …

— Genesis 3:8

Before the fall God’s voice walked with Adam and Eve. He was embodied in some form, His voice had a location to be with them. He was Immanuel, God With Us.

God never intended to be merely transcendent, but also immanent.

That is just a hint to base a large assumptive leap on my part, but I posit that God, to be with us, to know us and love us as He wanted us to know Him, would probably have incarnated, experienced our experience, so He could truly know us from the inside out, and also reveal Himself to us in a way His transcendence could not.

So perhaps the incarnation was always planned. Would His death have been required? No, I think not, because we would not have died and thus needed to be brought back to His life. But as in the words of the hymn “I come to the garden” …

And He walks with me, and He talks with me, and He tells me I am His own. And the joy we share, as we tarry there, none other has ever known.

He would walk with each of us, and each of us would know Him, in a way special to us, and yet in harmony to the way everyone else of us know Him. Because He is that personal, that individual, that unique that we can each relate to Him in a way that is all our own, and share that with each other, in a chorus of praise and thanksgiving, a song of millions of voices, millions of parts, with overtones that yield ever more voices of praise and understanding, world without end. Amen.