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God’s Masterpiece

by Philip Yancey

| 16 Comments

More than two centuries before the Reformation, a theological debate broke out pitting the premier theologian Thomas Aquinas against an upstart Franciscan priest from Britain, John Duns Scotus. The heart of the debate circled around the question, “Would the event we celebrate at Christmas have occurred if humanity had not disobeyed God?”

Like most theologians, Aquinas viewed the incarnation as God’s remedy for a fallen planet, a rescue plan that God first prophesied in Genesis 3. Aquinas pointed to Bible passages highlighting the cross as God’s redemptive response to a broken relationship with humanity.

John Duns, nicknamed the Scotsman, saw much more at stake. To him, the Word becoming flesh, as described in the prologue to John’s Gospel, must surely represent the Creator’s primary design—God’s original goal—and not some sort of Plan B or afterthought. Duns Scotus cited passages from Ephesians and Colossians on the cosmic Christ in whom all things have their origin, hold together, and move toward consummation.

Was the incarnation an accommodation to human failure, or was it the center point for all creation? Duns Scotus and his school suggested that incarnation was the underlying motive for creation, not merely a correction to it. “God is love,” wrote the apostle John. But how can God express that love without some object to receive it? Perhaps God spun off this vast and beautiful universe for the singular purpose of sharing divine life and love, intending all along to join its very substance.

Ultimately the church fathers decided that both approaches had biblical support and could be accepted as orthodox. Although most Western theologians followed Aquinas, in recent years prominent Catholics such as Karl Rahner and Richard Rohr have taken a closer look at Duns Scotus.

The evangelical tradition often emphasizes the atonement and Christ living in us. We urge children to “accept Jesus into your heart,” an image both comforting and confusing to a child. More pietistic strains speak of “the exchanged life” in which Christ lives in the believer. Yet far more often—164 times in Paul’s letters, according to one author—the New Testament speaks of us being “in Christ.” At a time when theories of the atonement seem mystifying to moderns, we could learn from the Christ-centered view of creation espoused by a Scottish theologian from the High Middle Ages.

Imagine a time before the creation of matter. What did God have in mind with our planet, one of trillions in the universe? One answer to that question is Jesus: that he came to show earthlings what God is like, a model for what we should be like. The history recorded in the Old Testament serves as a prelude for the supreme act of incarnation. As the Gospels’ genealogies stress, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Judah, David, and others provided Jesus a family and a culture into which to be born.

When Mary gave birth to a baby in Bethlehem, she participated in an act of divine creation that continues to this day. And Paul’s recurrent phrase “in Christ” hints at a reality made vivid in his metaphor of the Body of Christ: the church extends the incarnation through time. When Jesus ascended, he turned over this grand mission to his followers.

Hang on—am I suggesting that the miracle of Christmas is somehow replicated in the lives of those of us who identify as Jesus’ followers? Objections immediately arise, as exemplified in these words from Eugene Peterson: “Friends, we are immersed in great and marvelous realities. Creation! Salvation! Resurrection! But when we come up dripping out of the waters of baptism and look around, we observe to our surprise that the community of the baptized is made up of people just like us: unfinished, immature, neurotic, stumbling, singing out of tune much of the time, forgetful, and boorish. Is it credible that God would put all these matters of eternal significance into the hands of such as we?”

In a sermon to his students at Oxford, theologian Austin Farrer articulated the same question, one that occurs to anyone who applies Paul’s lofty metaphor to the sad reality of the church: “But what are we to do about the yawning gulf which opens between this Christhood of ours and our actual performance…this gulf which yawns between what Christ has made us and what we make of ourselves…”

We do, proposes Farrer, the very thing Jesus’ disciples did: on the first day of the week, we gather to “reassemble the whole body of Christ here, not a member lacking, when the sun has risen; and have the resurrection over again.” We remind ourselves, to borrow Paul’s words, that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, that we are dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus, that if anyone is in Christ, they are a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! (Romans 8:1, 6:11, 2 Corinthians 5:17). In short, we confront the stunning truth that God gazes at us through the redemptive lens of the Son who became incarnate and dwelt among us.

Then, assured of that new identity, we go forth to recolonize God’s world. Duns Scotus called his approach the Doctrine of the Absolute Primacy of Christ in the Universe. Those who root their identity in Christ have a holy mission to reclaim territory that has been spoiled. Christians insist on justice because God insists on it; minister to the poor and suffering not out of humanistic motives but because “the least of these” also express the image of God; honor nature because it stands as God’s work of art, the backdrop for incarnation. As Simone Weil put it, “The beauty of the world is Christ’s tender smile for us coming through matter.”

Some time ago I had a conversation with Makoto Fujimura, an esteemed artist who founded the International Arts Movement to encourage Christian artists to look to their own faith for inspiration. “So many contemporary artists turn to other religions, like Buddhism,” he said to me. “I remind them that God is about creation from the book of Genesis to the book of Revelation, in which God promises to make all things new.”

Among Jesus’ final words, in Revelation, are these: “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” In this light, Christmas represents God’s masterpiece, the as-yet-unfinished act of cosmic restoration. John Duns Scotus must be smiling.

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Discussion

  1. Linda Tripp Avatar
    Linda Tripp

    Dear Philip – you make profound truths approachable in a way that allows me to embrace and understand them. Thanks for introducing me to Duns Scotus. It was refreshing to learn of his thesis – not a dismissal of Aqinas but in addition to…
    Wishing you God’s continued Blessing in 2025 and looking forward to more of “Yancey”.
    Linda

  2. Rev. Wallace Mayo Avatar
    Rev. Wallace Mayo

    Lots of good thoughts to digest in this article. I do not see as much of a question in all this. We are so bound temporally. That is, when we read the Bible and read truths about Gods action and nature, we sometimes forget He works in all time all at once. You see, God is wasn’t just there yesterday, He is still there; and won’t be there tomorrow until tomorrow, but is already there in tomorrow now. That sense short circuits some of our questions and wonderings as we question how God does things.
    Three verses confirm this, in amazing fashion:
    “The hope of eternal life, which God, who does not lie, promised before the beginning of time.” (Titus 1:2)
    “He chose us in him before the creation of the world.” (Eph. 1:4) – (world can mean universe)
    2 Timothy 1:9 – He has saved us and called us to a holy life—not because of anything we have done but because of his own purpose and grace. This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time,…
    Wow. So, the birth, cross, resurrection was never an afterthought or new response God had to come up with. He knew it all, and already planned it.

  3. Peter Hiett Avatar
    Peter Hiett

    Beautiful!

  4. Gail W. Ward Avatar
    Gail W. Ward

    Thank you Philip for your wonderful insight into the bible.

    I remember you and your brother from GHS. Also my pastor Jeff Cranston, Lowcountry Comminity Church quotes you often.

  5. Rachel Clifton Avatar
    Rachel Clifton

    Philip, we have followed you for decades. This article was stunning to us, not only because of its moving and fantastical implications, but also because it gives all of us (particularly us old Evangelicals) the freedom and joy to continue to grow, explore, embrace new ways of seeing God through men of old who were never given any time or credibility on our faith journey in the past. This idea, this thought is overwhelming, almost unbelievable due to the emphasis on past theology, that Gods design for eternity was to fully enter into our humanity to show us what he is like and to bring his creation into the very Godhead itself. Wow. Thank you.

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16 thoughts on “God’s Masterpiece”

  1. Dear Philip – you make profound truths approachable in a way that allows me to embrace and understand them. Thanks for introducing me to Duns Scotus. It was refreshing to learn of his thesis – not a dismissal of Aqinas but in addition to…
    Wishing you God’s continued Blessing in 2025 and looking forward to more of “Yancey”.
    Linda

    Reply
  2. Lots of good thoughts to digest in this article. I do not see as much of a question in all this. We are so bound temporally. That is, when we read the Bible and read truths about Gods action and nature, we sometimes forget He works in all time all at once. You see, God is wasn’t just there yesterday, He is still there; and won’t be there tomorrow until tomorrow, but is already there in tomorrow now. That sense short circuits some of our questions and wonderings as we question how God does things.
    Three verses confirm this, in amazing fashion:
    “The hope of eternal life, which God, who does not lie, promised before the beginning of time.” (Titus 1:2)
    “He chose us in him before the creation of the world.” (Eph. 1:4) – (world can mean universe)
    2 Timothy 1:9 – He has saved us and called us to a holy life—not because of anything we have done but because of his own purpose and grace. This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time,…
    Wow. So, the birth, cross, resurrection was never an afterthought or new response God had to come up with. He knew it all, and already planned it.

    Reply
  3. Thank you Philip for your wonderful insight into the bible.

    I remember you and your brother from GHS. Also my pastor Jeff Cranston, Lowcountry Comminity Church quotes you often.

    Reply
  4. Philip, we have followed you for decades. This article was stunning to us, not only because of its moving and fantastical implications, but also because it gives all of us (particularly us old Evangelicals) the freedom and joy to continue to grow, explore, embrace new ways of seeing God through men of old who were never given any time or credibility on our faith journey in the past. This idea, this thought is overwhelming, almost unbelievable due to the emphasis on past theology, that Gods design for eternity was to fully enter into our humanity to show us what he is like and to bring his creation into the very Godhead itself. Wow. Thank you.

    Reply

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