Could God have used an alternative to the Incarnation to redeem mankind? NO!

Could God have used an alternative to the Incarnation to redeem mankind?  A resounding NO!

To answer that question realistically as well as spiritually we need to go back before humanity was created.  God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.”  (Gn 1: 26).  

What does that mean “In our image after our likeness.”  We can not look physically like God but by receiving the authority to have dominion over creation man has the responsibility to rule judiciously all he inherited.  However, the more practical manner of God’s imagery is the love and compassion we need if a peaceful co-existence is to be realized by man and woman.

If the fall of man was from someone other than man himself then redemption would have to be with an unknown entity that needed to be redeemed.  Of course that did not occur.   

Therefore, since it was man who sinned and corrupted the very beauty that God handed to us it would be through man that God entered our world by becoming one of us.  Adoptionism is a heresy that denies the true incarnation of the divine taking on humanity in lieu of Jesus receiving the Holy Spirit later in life, as in his baptism.

During the very early years of Christanity there were numerous heresies that attempted to remove the truth of how Jesus was sent by his Father to redeem us and present each of us to his Father’s love and the plan to bring us home.  

With God using a woman to give birth to God’s Son and Jesus taking on humanity before he was humanly born, God entered the world as a man but also as the Father’s divine Son as well.  Jesus grew up under the tutelage of Mary his Mother, and Joseph in the role as a step-father, Jesus learned the role of a child from infancy through adolescence to a man like us.  He felt pain, learned obedience, and came to understand what every other human person endures in life.  We make mistakes as all humans do, so Jesus must have done the same.  We sometimes reject our parents’ rules as youngsters, and Jesus must have done the same.  These are simple steps of learning right from wrong and understanding the words please and sorry.  

To think for a moment that Jesus had a halo over his head and could hold out his hand and turn water into wine as a youth would be erroneous.  His divinity was always there but the choice appears that he also was 100 % human as well as 100 % divine.  

For God to redeem you and me it was not through a magical entity that zap everything was alright.  Jesus’ two natures were always present and one did not overshadow the other.

“Everything that Christ is and does in this divine nature derives from one of the Trinity.  The Son of God therefore communicates to his humanity his own personal mode of existence in the Trinity.  In his soul as in his body, Christ thus expresses humanly the divine ways of the Trinity.”  (see CCC 470).  

None of the above would have occurred if the Incarnation had not existed.  Through it’s perfection God used the only possible action to resolve man’s descent into unforgivable sin by becoming the ransom for man’s sin, by becoming man’s sin.  The Incarnation is and will always be the answer to no other way to redeem mankind.  

Ralph B. Hathaway