Why Did God Become Man? The Absolute Primacy of Christ According to Blessed Duns Scotus – Prof. Thomas Ward
The Thomistic Institute
The Thomistic Institute
4.8 • 873 Ratings
🗓️ 25 December 2025
⏱️ 38 minutes
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Summary
Prof. Thomas Ward explains Scotus’s bold claim that the Incarnation is not primarily a response to human sin, but the centerpiece of God’s eternal plan for creation, so that Christ would have become incarnate even if Adam had never fallen .
This lecture was given on March 4th, 2025, at Universidad Panamericana.
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About the Speakers:
Thomas M. Ward is Associate Professor of Philosophy at The University of Texas at Austin, in the School of Civic Leadership. He specializes in the history of philosophy and theology of the Middle Ages. Ward is the author of After Stoicism: Last Words of the Last Roman Philosopher (Word on Fire, 2024), Ordered by Love: An Introduction to John Duns Scotus (Angelico, 2022), Divine Ideas (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and has translated, with commentary, John Duns Scotus’s Treatise on the First Principle (Hackett, 2024). He has been a NEH Fellow (2022) and Harvey Fellow (2009-2011), and is a past winner of the Society for Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy Founder's Award (2013) and the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly Rising Scholar Essay Contest (2018). He studied philosophy at Biola University (BA 2004) and theology at Oxford University (M.Phil 2006), where he was Head Resident at the Kilns, the former residence of C.S. Lewis. His PhD in philosophy is from UCLA (2011). Ward is married with six children and is a member of St. Peter Catholic Student Center in Waco.
Keywords: Absolute Primacy of Christ, Blessed Duns Scotus and Incarnation, Christ as Head of Creation, Divine Freedom and Predestination, Incarnation and Fall of Adam, Primacy of Christ in Salvation History, Sin and Redemptive Suffering, Thomism vs. Scotism, Why God Became Man
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | College students are struggling to find Christ in a culture that rejects God. |
| 0:04.5 | They need the Christmas message of hope and truth now more than ever. |
| 0:08.2 | Thanks to a generous matching gift, every dollar you give to the Thomistic Institute before December 31st will be doubled, |
| 0:14.9 | so your gift will touch twice as many souls. |
| 0:17.7 | You can give the greatest of all gifts by sending the light of Christ to students |
| 0:21.7 | aching for truth. Please use the link below or go to to mystic institute.org slash donate to give today. |
| 0:31.8 | Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast. Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual |
| 0:37.0 | tradition in the university, |
| 0:38.6 | the church, and the wider public square. The lectures on this podcast are organized by university |
| 0:43.9 | students at Thomistic Institute chapters around the world. To learn more and to attend these events, |
| 0:49.6 | visit us at Thomisticinstitute.org. Before I really get started, I want to say something about why we're having a talk about |
| 0:58.6 | John Dunscotus at a chapter meeting of the Tomistic Institute. |
| 1:04.3 | There is a kind of long-standing rivalry, sometimes friendly, sometimes less friendly, |
| 1:12.6 | between the Dominicans and their greatest theologian, St. Thomas Aquinas, |
| 1:17.9 | and the Franciscans and their greatest theologian, |
| 1:21.4 | or at least their greatest philosopher, John Dunscotus, |
| 1:24.6 | perhaps their greatest theologian is St. Bonaventure. |
| 1:28.6 | So there's this tension sometimes, but I think there need not be such a tension between these great thinkers. And so while |
| 1:37.4 | on this particular issue that we're discussing today, John Duns Godin Scotas and St. Thomas Aquinas differ. There is, |
| 1:47.0 | in fact, some important overlap that I'm going to highlight and recommend to you. So the |
| 1:54.0 | Thomistic Institute is primarily about thinking through issues of faith and philosophy and culture |
| 2:02.8 | through a broadly Thomistic lens. |
... |
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