On the Necessity of Jesus Christ’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection

"If the end desired by God was the redemption of man in such a way as to bring man into full union with Himself—that is, to make us saints in loving union with Him—then there could have been no other way."

From The European Conservative

By Sebastiaan Morello, PhD

If the end desired by God was the redemption of man in such a way as to bring man into full union with Himself—that is, to make us saints in loving union with Him—then there could have been no other way.

God could have saved mankind in any number of ways, but He deemed the passion and death of Jesus Christ the best way to save us. I’m not sure when I first heard this in a homily, but over the years I’ve heard it said on a number of occasions during sermons at Holy Masses. It seems to me that there could hardly be a teaching more damaging to faith and piety than this. It is damaging not because it’s untrue, but because it is only half true. Left to linger as a half-truth, it possesses all the power to produce in the faithful’s minds the thought that Jesus Christ’s sacrifice was, it turns out, an arbitrary affair.

I recall driving back from Sunday Mass with my family after one such homily was delivered from the pulpit, and my two older children were very confused by the sermon’s message. If God wanted to reconcile us to Himself, they asked, why did He think the best way to do that was to have us kill His son, after which we were expected to blame ourselves for what took place, when it never even needed to happen, and God could have chosen other ways? Before we had gone to Mass that morning, God had been the object of my children’s adoration, but now they were beginning to suspect that He was a lunatic—not what you want from a Sunday sermon.

Granted, this idea—the idea being what we might call the unnecessity of Christ’s sacrifice—is not exactly plucked out of nowhere. Even the Common Doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas, seems to advance such a case in his celebrated Summa Theologiae. It was possible, he tells us, “for God to deliver mankind otherwise than by the Passion of Christ, because ‘no word shall be impossible with God’” (ST III, 46, 2). 

Aquinas, though, seems to acknowledge that this proposition is indeed a half-truth, for he writes in the very next sentence: “since it is impossible for God’s foreknowledge to be deceived and His will or ordinance to be frustrated, then, supposing God’s foreknowledge and ordinance regarding Christ’s Passion, it was not possible … for Christ not to suffer, and for mankind to be delivered otherwise than by Christ’s Passion.” 

This is what I mean by the notion of the ‘unnecessity of Christ’s sacrifice’ being a half-truth. For whilst God’s omnipotence entails that it was possible for God to save us otherwise, His divine wisdom required Him to save us in exactly the way by which He did so. 

Aconfusion, may I suggest, was introduced to this question by an idea that, though very old in Christian history, only gained a prominent following in the 16th century, specifically among the so-called Reformers. That idea being that sin is the sole cause of the incarnation. Indeed, if you think that the incarnation happened so that God could pay a debt which we ourselves could not pay—paid by the punishment of His son—and thereby He could enter an agreement with us, of which we’re the beneficiaries by being contractually included among the elect, then indeed the incarnation is—and must be—only a response to sin. Such a view, however, was far from unanimously held in earlier centuries.

Aquinas admittedly seems to favour the view that there would have been no incarnation had there been no Fall, and in analyses of this question he is often contrasted with Duns Scotus, who was profoundly committed to the opposite view, namely that God still would have incarnated had there been no Fall. But Scotus is not alone. Saints Irenaeus of Lyon, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Maximus the Confessor, among others, insisted that the incarnation—God’s action of entering history and the created order—was itself the perfection of the creation, towards which the original moment of creation always pointed.

Human wisdom traditions the world over have recurrently contained within them various incarnation narratives. The divinity has been said to enter our world either by manifestation—as in the case of Vishnu, for example, when he becomes the avatar Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita—or by the divinity becoming materially commingled with our nature, as in the case of the classical heroes Perseus and Hercules. 

Man has always intuited that his existence, by virtue of its contingency or lack of necessity, must have been willed. Thus, man must exist for the sake of relationship with Him who desired man’s existence, and relationship entails personal presence. Without incarnation, therefore, our knowledge of God would not only remain profoundly obscure but utterly third-personal. Only by becoming present among us could God-known-as-He (or worse, It) become God-known-as-You. And such personal presence and revelation of Himself seem to have been desired by Him from the beginning, otherwise, there would be no obvious reason for having brought us into being.

But the divine intention from which creation unfolded, namely that we would be loved by God and God would be loved by us, was frustrated to the point of rupture. By our choice to turn away from Him, we rejected the purpose for which we were brought into being. And this, it seems to me, is what is so astonishing about the incarnation: not that God incarnated—even the pagans intuited that such a thing must happen—but that He incarnated despite our rejection of Him.

Having rejected God, we turned away from the meaning and purpose of our very own nature, and in place of the love for God that ought to have animated our hearts, we were filled with a diabolical hatred. We even preferred the idols made by our hands to the presence of the true God. And on account of that hatred for God which we harboured in our hearts, He knew that if He did assume our nature to walk among us as one of us, we would kill Him. 

Knowing the consequences of the incarnation, He entered history anyway in order to call us His friends (John 15:15), aware that we would respond by torturing Him and murdering Him. And he chose to take upon Himself all that demonic odium that knotted up our souls and bound us to thraldom in Satan’s wretched domain, and He used it precisely to reconcile us to Himself. 

Through a perfect act of love, in His self-offering during His passion and crucifixion, He merited all the power to transform our hearts, that we might love God again. In short, He made it possible for us to be divinised. Whilst even the pagans intuited that the divine wisdom might imply incarnation—at least, of some kind—it would have been impossible to foresee that the divine wisdom would entail such infinite amity. 

Ido not deny that, in an absolute sense, God had the ability to save mankind by means other than the one by which he in fact did so. Were I to deny such a proposition, I would have to deny the divine attribute of omnipotence. But there are plenty of things that God could do—things neither illogical nor immoral—that He would nonetheless never do because they are manifestly contrary to the divine wisdom. 

From the perspective of God’s omnipotence, He could have saved us merely by willing our salvation, by a celestial click of His fingers. But then, He would not have incarnated, which I have submitted the divine wisdom required, and to which the world’s sapiential traditions looked forward. And if, only for the sake of personal presence, He had incarnated after effecting our redemption, He would have reconciled us to Himself not by the nuptial mystery of the cross—entailing the loving human cooperation we call ‘conversion’—but by modifying our hearts as if we were automata. Hence, we would have had redemption without love, which again is flatly contrary to the divine wisdom, the wisdom of the God who is love.

While God’s omnipotence thus entails that He could have saved us in some way other than the way He in fact did so, His divine wisdom required Him to save us in exactly the way He did so. And without acknowledging this fact, Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection by which He conquered death are all rendered arbitrary. 

Let us return to Aquinas. It is worth quoting at length the relevant passage for our purposes, lest anyone suggest that the Angelic Doctor really holds to the ‘unnecessity of Christ’s sacrifice’: 

There are several acceptations of the word ‘necessary.’ In one way it means anything which of its nature cannot be otherwise; and in this way it is evident that it was not necessary either on the part of God or on the part of man for Christ to suffer. In another sense a thing may be necessary from some cause quite apart from itself; and should this be either an efficient or a moving cause then it brings about the necessity of compulsion; as, for instance, when a man cannot get away owing to the violence of someone else holding him. But if the external factor which induces necessity be an end, then it will be said to be necessary from presupposing such end—namely, when some particular end cannot exist at all, or not conveniently, except such end be presupposed. It was not necessary, then, for Christ to suffer from necessity of compulsion, either on God’s part, who ruled that Christ should suffer, or on Christ’s own part, who suffered voluntarily. Yet it was necessary from necessity of the end proposed. (ST III, 46, 1)

So, in the passage above, Aquinas rules out the notion that Christ’s sacrifice was necessary in the sense that God was powerless to act otherwise, as such a view would be absurd, given that He is God. Absurd also would be the view that Christ’s sacrifice came about because God was somehow compelled to effect it by some cause external to Himself, which of course Aquinas in turn also rejects. 

But if we take ‘necessity’ in a different sense, namely that a particular end necessitates a particular means, and the end desired by God was the redemption of man in such a way as to bring man into full union with Himself—that is, to make us saints in loving union with Him—then there could have been no other way. In that sense, namely the sense of what God’s divine wisdom required, the sacrifice of Christ was necessary. As Aquinas puts it, “It was not necessary for Christ to suffer from necessity of compulsion… Yet it was necessary from necessity of the end proposed.”

And what is the end proposed? Aquinas writes elsewhere, “The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods” (Opusc., 57:1-4). So, the end for which Christ incarnated, preached the kingdom of heaven, instituted the sacraments, established His bride the Church, and suffered, died, and rose from the dead, was to make us into gods. And the way by which He has made us gods was not arbitrary, but necessary. Behold the mystery and the glory of Holy Week.