“The incarnation is the “projection” of the eternal God. There is therefore no sense in talking of the eternal Son of God apart from the incarnation except to make the point that the incarnation was logically contingent. That is, there is no point to it if by this we mean there was a time when the eternal Son of God existed unincarnated. It is of course possible for us to think of the eternal Son of God as unincarnated, by an abstraction of thought, but that is a different matter. The point is, as Herbert McCabe says, there is no preexistent Christ with a life history independent of and prior to the incarnation. There was no time when the eternal God was not Jesus of Nazareth. There is no other life story—story in time—of God than the story of the incarnation. There was no time when the Son of God was not willing himself to be incarnate, but only decided at a particular time to become incarnate in our history. God did not exist and then at some later point decide to become incarnate, for there is no change or succession possible in the timeless eternity of God’s life.”