Why God Became Man?

In his book, On The Incarnation, Athanasius wrote of The Divine Dilemma. How does God who promised death for the transgression of Adam keep His word, yet, save those created in His image and likeness? For God to not punish the transgression would make God a liar and therefore not God at all. But on the other hand, how could God, finding Adam and Eve in their nakedness and shame allow those created in His image, those who once reflected the very Word of God, disappear and the work of God be undone? “The creatures whom He had created reasonable, like the Word, were in fact perishing, and such noble works were on the road to ruin, what then was God, being Good, to do?” (Athanasius, On the Incarnation, p.12). What then was a good and holy God to do?

Before God’s very eyes degeneration and death was evident in Adam and Eve; they were in fact perishing and all of God’s creation with them. Only God could solve The Divine Dilemma. Only the Word of God himself, who in the beginning made all things out of nothing, could again bring regeneration and a new birth to all creatures of our God and King. “For He alone, being Word of the Father and above all, was in consequence both able to recreate all, and worthy to suffer on behalf of all and to be an ambassador for all with the Father. For this purpose, then, the in-cor-poreal and incorruptible and immaterial Word of God entered our world. . . . He entered the world a new way, stooping to our level in His love and Self-revealing to us” (Ibid, p.13).

Over 700 years later Saint Anselm, the Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote another book important to our understanding of the Incarnation entitled “Why God Became Man?” While the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement would wait another 500 years, Anselm rightly understood that for humankind to be saved from the results of the Fall of Man God would have to be satisfied. Anselm argued, “Satisfaction cannot be made unless there be some One able to pay God for man's sin something greater than all that is beside God. . . . Now nothing is greater than all that is beside God except God Himself. None therefore can make this satisfaction except God. And none ought to make it except man. . . . If, then, it be necessary that the kingdom of heaven be completed by man's admission, and if man cannot be admitted unless the aforesaid satisfaction for sin be first made, and if God only can, and man only ought to make this satisfaction, then necessarily One must make it who is both God and man" (Anselm, Cur Deus Homo, Book II, ch. 6). If only God can make satisfaction and only man is responsible for satisfaction, then only One who is both God and man can satisfy the debt we owe.

In other words, we owe a debt we cannot pay. Only God can pay the debt He does not owe. Therefore, only a God-man, Jesus Christ, can both bear the guilt of human sin and pay the debt incurred by it.