From childhood, I remember the Polish Christmas carol “Amidst the Silence of Night” from around the beginning of the 19th century, and I remember being particularly impressed by the lines:
Ahh, welcome, Savior, longed for of old,
four thousand years awaited.
For you, kings, prophets waited,
and you this night to us appeared.
I have lately found troubling the question: Why did God wait over a hundred thousand years from the beginning of the human race to send us his Son and give us the Gospel?
The standard answer is that God needed to prepare humankind. The carol’s version of this answer suggests that this preparation intensified our longings for salvation through millenia of waiting. A variant is that we need a lot of time to fully realize our moral depravity in the absence of God. Or one might emphasize that moral teaching is a slow and gradual process, and millenia are needed to make us ready to receive the Gospel.
I think there is something to all the answers, but they do not fully satisfy as they stand. After all, a human child from 100,000 years ago is presumably roughly as capable of moral development as a modern child. If we had time travel, it seems plausible that missionaries would be just as effective 100,000 years ago as they were 1000 years ago. The intensification of longings and the realization of social moral depravity are, indeed, important considerations, but human memory, even aided by writing, only goes back a few thousand years. Thus, two thousand years of waiting and learning about moral depravity would likely have had basically the same result for the individuals in the time of the Incarnation as a hundred thousand years did.
I am starting to think that this problem cannot be fully resolved simply by considering individual goods. It is important, I think, to consider humankind as a whole, with goods attached to the human community as a whole. The good of moral development can be considered on an individual level, and that good needs a few decade rather than millenia. But the good of moral development can also be considered on the level of humankind as well, and there millenia are fitting for the development not to ride roughshod over nature. Similarly, the good of longing for and anticipation of a great good only needs at most a few decades in an individual, but there is a value in humankind as a whole longing for and anticipating on a species timescale rather an individual timescale.
In other words, reflection on the waiting for Christ pushes us away from an overly individualistic view. As do, of course, other aspects of Christian theology, such as reflection on the Fall, the Church, the atonement, etc.
Am I fully satisfied? Not quite. Is the value of humankind’s more organic development worth sacrificing the goods of thousands of generations of ordinary humans who did not hear the Gospel? God seems to think so, and I am willing to trust him. There is doubtless a lot more to be said. But it helps me to think that this is yet another one of those many things where one needs to view a community (broadly understood) as having a moral significance going beyond the provision of more individualistic goods.
Two more remarks. First, a graduate student pointed out to me (if I understood them right) that perhaps we should measure individual moral achievement relative to the state of social development. If so, then perhaps there was not so great a loss to individuals, since what might matter for their moral wellbeing is this relative moral achievement.
Second, the specifically Christian theological problem that this post addresses has an analogue to a subspecies of the problem of evil that somehow has particularly bothered me for a long time: the evils caused by lack of knowledge, and especially lack of medical knowledge. Think of the millenia of people suffering and dying of in ways that could have been averted had people only known more, say, about boiling water, washing hands or making vaccines. I think there is a value in humankind’s organic epistemic development. But to employ that as an answer one has to be willing to say that such global goods of humankind as a whole can trump individual goods.
(Note that all that I say is meant to be compatible with a metaphysics of value on which the loci of value are always individuals. For an individual’s well-being can include external facts about humankind. Thus the good of humankind as a whole might be metaphysically housed in the members. The important thing, however, is that these goods are goods the human has qua part of humanity.)
4 comments:
Interesting post. Just a couple further thoughts: First, if we measure by life-years, the Incarnation happened much closer to the beginning of humanity than if we measure by years, since population has increased so much over the course of human history. Second, given the state of human culture, say 50k years ago, and given climatic conditions, it presumably wouldn't have been possible to spread the gospel to any reasonable fraction of humanity from any specific location. Seems like that would have to await the end of the ice age, rise of complex agricultural civilizations, commerce, cultural-exchange, writing, etc.
Given essentiality of origins, I wonder if the timing of the incarnation depends on the strength of God's desire(s) that certain specific people play the roles that they, in fact, played in the redemptive story. For example, if God has a strong desire that Mary be his mother, that Joseph be his earthly father, that John be one of his disciples, etc. then perhaps his metaphorical hands were tied, so to speak, and the incarnation had to occur at least roughly when it did. But, admittedly, I'm not at all sure what to think about whether Jesus had such specific preferences in this regard.
Very helpful comments. Thank you.
This quote (from Gravity And Grace) has resonated with me when thinking about the sweep of history and the many evils contained in it: "A man whose whole family had died under torture, and who had himself been tortured for a long time in a concentration camp. Or a sixteenth-century Indian, the sole survivor after the total extermination of his people. Such men if they had previously believed in the mercy of God would either believe in it no longer, or else they would conceive of it quite differently than before. I have not been through such things. I know, however, that they exist: so what is the difference? I must move toward an abiding conception of the divine mercy which does not change whatever event destiny may send upon me and which can be communicated to no matter what human being."
There are certainly people who have survived horrors and remained believers; I am not sure if this contradicts the part about "conceiv(ing) it very differently" or not (or what impact it should have on our own opinions about theodicies). Weil famously had highly idiosyncratic views about God and suffering, but this has stuck with me, as nearly all of humanity has endured much lower standards of living than we do now, as we worry about the problem of evil (and yet they mostly found their lives worth living).
Also, while I am here, are you able to make either of these papers available? https://academic.oup.com/book/32266/chapter-abstract/268462420?redirectedFrom=fulltext and https://academic.oup.com/book/2574/chapter-abstract/142906641?redirectedFrom=fulltext
They seem relevant to the question at hand but are not available for download there, on philpapers, or on any other sites that I've found.
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