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In the first chapter of his wide-ranging and well-written book, He Came Down From Heaven: The Preexistence of Christ and the Christian Faith, Douglas McCready confesses that his topic is something of an oxymoron. He is right. The pre and exist of preexistence, often pinned together by a hyphen like siblings stuck in the back seat on a long car ride, add nothing in their combination to our understanding of Jesus Christ. Jesus exists, and he exists prior to everything, so talking about his preexistence is incoherent. He certainly does not exist prior to his own existence, which the term seems to imply.
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Of course, theologians often retool ordinary words with technical meaning. This word, however, is neither ordinary nor precise. In fact, preexistence actually does not apply to anything, because nothing exists prior to his saying so, and he exists like nothing else. It would be better to speak of his eternal existence than his preexistence.
If preexistence were merely confusing, it might be worth salvaging, but its damage extends beyond the rules of grammar. Although this word has a long history of theological use, it actually drives a wedge into the life of Jesus Christ. The pre of preexistence suggests, in an insidious fashion, that Christians worship a split person if not a split personality: Jesus of Nazareth the miracle worker who had a prior career as the Son of God.
The truth is that Jesus exists in a manner that befuddles the way we are cursed to divide time into before, now, and after. We preexist ourselves, to coin a variant of this term, because we are always looking to the receding past to discover who we are. We have a problem with time, not Jesus. Rather than view the existence of Jesus Christ through the prism of our fragmented sense of time, we should let the coherent wholeness of his life judge our own. The Son of God mixes together time and eternity as if they were as easily interchangeable as mayonnaise and Miracle Whip. That is why we can hope that the rushing blurs of our lives will one day find their rest in him.
Rather than give this misleading term a decent burial, McCready tries to give it new life. He explains that there are at least three interpretations of preexistence. The first is real or personal preexistence. It is one of the awkward features of this term that even heretics such as Arius, who denied the full deity of Christ, could affirm his preexistence as a lesser deity created before the rest of the world. The second is ideal preexistence, which means that Jesus existed in God's mind prior to the incarnation. McCready shows how trivial this position is, because, given God's omniscience, everything preexists in the divine mind. The third interpretation, eschatological preexistence, argues that the experience of the resurrection led Jesus' disciples to create the myth of his preexistence. Post-existence gave rise to pre-existence in order to provide balance to the story of Jesus, as if the prolonged ending of the Gospels in his being raised from death into glory required an equally elongated beginning in his coming down from heaven.
In order to combat eschatological preexistence, McCready conducts a common-sense survey of the New Testament, concluding that the earliest writings affirmed personal or real preexistence. McCready's method keeps as low to the ground as Simon Gathercole's soars into higher criticism, but they both reach the same conclusion. With The Preexistent Son: Recovering the Christologies of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Gathercole—who has previously written a fascinating book on the role of boasting in Paul's letters—has produced what should become the standard scholarly treatment of preexistence in the Synoptic Gospels. Like much of even the best New Testament scholarship, however, Gathercole's book strikes me as an arduous exercise in belaboring the obvious. Gathercole is writing for the skeptics, who make the Bible more complex in order to make it less believable. Yet what the skeptics do with the numerous "I have come" sayings is hardly worth refuting. Jesus did not mean he had come from Nazareth, and his use of the first-person pronoun did not refer to somebody else.
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