In the Introduction to the Abstract Fallen World, we saw that the material creation proves the most complex and wonderful, in that, if it falls, an Incarnation introduces the possibility of God loving the creatures to a greater degree than if the world had never fallen, namely that God might suffer for His creatures and forgive them. Too, the same form of love can be granted the fallen creatures who are redeemed: they can suffer for others and forgive them.
Now, in this essay, we probe the considerations of the history of the abstract world relative to the timing of the Incarnation.
The Requirement of a Prefiguring Covenant prior to the Incarnation
One of the primary arguments of our thesis is that God can in now wise enter Incarnate into a fallen world immediately after such fall if it is to be in any way significantly efficacious for the creatures' renewal. Rather, at least several stages of Revelation and development are necessary in order that the Coming of Incarnation might be most efficacious.
This will be argued as follows:
Firstly, we remember that whereas the angelic creature, freed from the impediments of physical steps of intellectual development, is able to digest the profound mysteries in a single instant, the material creature of necessity can only progress in stages to comprehend the profound . In other words, just as a child must develop in intelligence into maturity only by a slower process, so also must humanity as a whole progress in its capacity to comprehend the spiritual mysteries.
This is the first reason to argue that God can only progress humanity in stages of Revelation to prepare for their capacity to accept the fullness of truth that comes in the Incarnation.
The second reason for preliminary ages to precede the Incarnation is humanity's severe tendencies toward materialism and paganism because of its fallen nature. To illustrate, we perhaps recall the infamous "mark of the beast" in the NT apocalypse and that its number is 666. A mystical way to look at this symbolism is to reverse the relationship between God and man. We see this by first recalling that 7 is the number of perfection and so, in one sense, of God. It follows that 6 is a symbol of imperfection and therefore of man, who falls very short of God. But then, just as God is three Divine Persons in one Nature, so three 6’s in one numbersymbolizes man [6] making himself as God [three in one].
Consequently, whereas God made man in the God’s Image and Likeness, the flip side is that, through the evil number above, man makes God in man’s image.
Subsequently, when man makes God into his image, one greater result is paganism, which is precisely the nature of man projecting his image onto the Divine. For, in paganism, the deities are largely a reflection of the fallen nature of man, themselves finite in power and in constant struggle according to diverse, and many times arrogant and selfish, passions.
An additional severe hurdle in the nature of man making God into his image is the blasphemous tendency of humanity to even deify themselves, presuming utter independence from God, the makers of their own destiny and fulfillment, and the final arbiter of truth.
This very construct presents the supreme problem of the mystery of God's Plan to impart the Revelation of the Incarnate One to a fallen world. Why? Well, firstly, because of paganism, man tends to see God in multiplicities and with conflicts , whether through the multiple gods of polytheism, or pantheism, where the god of the universe is having a bad dream from which man must help "him" [and therefore themselves also] to wake up.
From this, we see that, preliminarily, God must first overcome the hurdle of multitheism and limited power of the deities by emphasizing the Unicity, Omnipotence, and Omniscience of God. Likewise, the emphasis on God's unicity and infinite transcendence must also be ground in first to make certain the reality that man cannot ascend above God, fashion his own fulfillment, nor determine the truth independent of God.
Only after this hurdle can the next much more profound mystery of the Incarnation and Trinity be made manifest, where we see the threefold family of love within God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, each different Persons but all fully God (which must not be confused with a multiplicity of limited deities ) and of the Son Himself taking on human nature, so as to suffer in humility for the creatures (not to be confused with a lack of potency on God's part, nor to imply that man, as a mere creature, can ascend and become God, but to reveal His Immeasurable love to suffer in solidarity with and for fallen man).
Hence, our first conclusion is that before the Incarnation, the Spiritual Nature, Unicity, Omnipotence, and Omniscience of God must be firmly grounded in Revelation.
Furthermore, we now come to an additional argument of what the preliminary Revelation and stages must include to prepare in a unique way for the Coming of Incarnate One.
More specifically, precisely because of man's materialistic existence, he will tend to need to learn or discern the spiritual dimensions through visible signs, or types, before the abstractions that transcend the material signs are more palatable, just as a child must first learn through illustration before graduating to the raw abstractions of written word without images.
For this reason, it in fact implies that God must first establish stages of Revelation and Covenant that, in the beginning, use material things that only later shall be unveiled to point to their respective fulfillments. For example, killing a literal lamb must prefigure the sacrifice of the EternalLamb, the Christ; a literal land, or nation, will prefigure the ultimatePromised Land, heaven , the union with God in the eternal Beatific Vision; the miraculous but merely physical bread fulfilled in the spiritual bread of God Himself, the Eucharist. One must abstain from literal unclean meats , to fulfilled in the abstinence form unclean moral actions. Henceforth, this special covenant that uses these material signs shall be referred to as the Prefiguring or Foreshadowing Covenant . In this world, it refers to the Old Testament Judaic Covenant.
All these conditions show us that the Incarnate One can in no wise come to the world prematurely and that certain stages of understanding--the supreme of which are the utter emphasis on the Unicity of God, His spiritual nature, omniscience and omnipotence--must first progress before any substantial portion of humanity shall be prepared to accept, if even grudgingly, the deeper of the mysteries of God as Trinity and Incarnation.
In the subsequent section, we shall probe that even before the aforementioned Prefiguring Covenant, two preliminary, or preeminent, stages must first arise concerning the totality of the material world, as opposed to the Foreshadowing Covenant, which we shall see shall only be able to be given to small portion of humanity, who, in this world, are the People of God that would always exist, the People of the Prefiguring, the Jews.