Ad extra and incarnation problem

[fineca]

for all of you who love systematic theology…

According to our faith everything God does ad extra (outside himself) is done by all the Persons of the Trinity. But only the Son was made flesh, and it seems to me the incarnation is clearly ad extra, or at least everything Christ did and said, those are not things pertaining to the relations of the divine persons. So how do we explain the contradiction?

And secondly, has anyone ever thought why the Father didn’t become flesh himself? Why did he send the Son to do the redemption, why not himself?

Thanks,
E

 

[tdgesq]

for all of you who love systematic theology…

According to our faith everything God does ad extra (outside himself) is done by all the Persons of the Trinity. But only the Son was made flesh, and it seems to me the incarnation is clearly ad extra, or at least everything Christ did and said, those are not things pertaining to the relations of the divine persons. So how do we explain the contradiction?

An interesting set of questions. It is true that God’s acts that occur within the world are said to proceed from all Persons indifferently. It is also true that God became man through the hypostatic union of Jesus the man and the second Person of the Trinity, the Logos. But I don’t see a contradiction between the two propositions. That this union occurred as a result of an act of the undifferentiated Triune God does not in my mind conflict with the union between the man Jesus and the Person of the Logos.

As for the Christ’s actions on Earth; what he said and what he did. To my knowledge there is nothing in our theology that indicates that it was only the Logos acting in union with Jesus. The divine nature of God through the Logos is the substantial bearer of Jesus’ human nature. The trinitarian relationship between all three Persons of the Godhead does not cease to exist because the union is between the Logos and Jesus the man. Otherwise we couldn’t say things like Jesus is God or that God died on the cross.

And secondly, has anyone ever thought why the Father didn’t become flesh himself? Why did he send the Son to do the redemption, why not himself?

I have seen some theological speculation into whether the Father or the Holy Spirit could have become flesh instead of the Son. I think the answer has to be “no.” I approach this from the perspective of the economic Trinity. The Second Person of God is the Word. If Jesus’ mission was to be the final word of God to us on Earth, then in terms of the relationship between humanity and God that word would most appropriately come through the Logos to reveal the Father and the Spirit.

This is an extraordinarily difficult area to discuss, and their may be some errors in my thought here.

 

[yinekka]

Frank Sheed in *Theology for Beginners *Chapter 11 The Redeemer explains it this way. …Creation as a work of omnipotence, bringing something into existence of nothing, is appropriated to God the Father. But the order of the universe, as a work of wisdom, is appropriated to the Son. The order has been wrecked, and a new order must be made; it was the Son who made it. To make it, He became Man.
Chapter 12 – The Redemption

*Owing to the sin of the first man, the race had lost its union with God; a breach lay between….God could, of course, have simply written off the race as a failure. He could, as simply, have forgiven the sin. He did neither. He chose that in human nature the sin committed in human nature should be expiated

For the act by which Christ redeemed us was a wholly human act. The life He offered as a sacrifice was His human life; an offering of the divine life would have been meaningless. The suffering was in His soul and body; the death was the separation of His soul and body… *
*He who performed the act was God: actions, are always in the nature, but the person does them: and the Person whose human nature this was, in whose human nature all this was done, was, is, God the Son. Because He was truly man, His sacrifice was truly human, so that it could be set against the sin of the race. But because He was God, His act had an infinite value, by which it compensated, outweighed, not only all the sin men ever had committed but all they ever could. That, in essence, is why it is redemptive. *

Frank Sheed was a Thomist and so I would suppose that St Thomas’ Summa would be able to answer your question more fully.