Turner spins an argument that I find challenging, since for years I have been on the 'Scotist' side of that great divide about the 'necessity' of the Incarnation. In short, so the question goes, would the Second Person of the Trinity have become incarnate had Humanity not sinned? Mine has been a kind of 'soft Scotist' answer to that question, inasmuch as on the one hand I find it a bit pointless given that Humanity did in fact sin, while on the other hand I would never confess that the Fall took God by surprise. He had no need for an emergency remedy, yet the Incarnation is a remedy indeed.
So, to Turner we go.
'And the reason why Julian would appear to have less need of this Scotist distinction is that she has less trouble with seeing the Fall as behovely, because for her the divine end of self-disclosure in glorified humanity is most fully achieved precisely through the single complex event of the Fall and its remedy. Creation, Fall, and Redemption are all of a piece with one another, embodying in their conjunction the primary and only motive of the Incarnation.
'...Within that providential act the Fall is indeed a crucial element, but not as if standing outside it and as if necessitating it causally. That, of course, was the principal burden of the example of the Lord and the Servant: Adam's fall and the falling of the divine Word into Mary's womb are one and the same falling. Hence Julian, unlike Scotus, has no need to distinguish between what God would have willed absolutely had human beings not in fact fallen, and a secondary motivation arising out of the fact that human beings did in fact do so. From all eternity "sin is behovely." That is all we can know as governing the Incarnation's necessity, because all you need to know by way of answering Anselm's question is that "it is a joy, a blisse, and endlesse liking to me that ever I sufferd passion for the[e]."'
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