Edwin Chr.vanDriel, The Incarnation as God's First Intention: Supralapsarian Christology for Faith and Practice . Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2025, x + 309pp. $37.99

The Incarnation as God's First Intention: Supralapsarian Christology for Faith and Practice.Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2025, x + 309pp.$37.99 Supralapsarian Christology is enjoying a renaissance: the view in which the incarnation is not merely God's response to sin, but rather what traditional Roman Catholic scholastics call the primum volitum, the first intention of the Triune God ad extra.Protestant theologians as diverse as Kathryn Tanner, Oliver Crisp, and Samuel Wells have championed it, and its modern Thomist form, found in the Salmanticenses and Matthias Scheeben, is making a comeback among Catholic theologians such as Dylan Schrader and David Augustine.The Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart has argued for a brusque Bulgakovian form of the doctrine, and -rest assured -Scotists are waiting in the wings.Edwin Chr.van Driel's The Incarnation as God's First Intention is a manifesto -a call to arms even -for this new movement.The book builds upon van Driel's earlier historical work, Incarnation Anyway: Arguments for Supralapsarian Christology (Oxford University Press, 2008), which framed its discussion of supralapsarian Christology in Schleiermacher, Dorner, and Barth in terms of the hypothetical question whether the Word would have become incarnate if Adam had not sinned.The Incarnation as God's First Intention picks up the speculative proposals that concluded van Driel's earlier work, clarifying his conception of supralapsarian Christology.Here, van Driel defines supralapsarian Christology as the position that Jesus Christ is God's first intention ad extra.On this definition, Schleiermacher and Dorner are no longer supralapsarians, because they see the incarnation as the means to a larger end, even if they conceived it without reference to sin (p. 6).In terms of van Driel's larger body of work, The Incarnation as God's First Intention might be seen as an expansion of the supralapsarianism of Barth's Church Dogmatics, in which Jesus Christ is both electing and elected, strongly inflected by the eschatological 'being with' developed in Samuel Wells's Constructing an Incarnational Theology (Cambridge University Press, 2024).After a programmatic introduction, The Incarnation as God's First Intention contains six chapters that treat supralapsarian themes in John Duns Scotus, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Kathryn Tanner, Samuel Wells, and Lesslie Newbigin.These historical chapters are followed by seven more that show how supralapsarian Christology can shed light on the theology of election, the