One of the more mind-boggling doctrines of the church is that Christ has two natures. The doctrine is central to orthodoxy, but it is no less easy to understand because of it. How can the Son of God be both divine and human without any changes being made to his divinity or humanity? How was it that the natures did not combine into a special, third nature? We have already made an attempt at defining this doctrine earlier by looking at the hypostatic union. Last week we defined “propitiation” and looked at how the two natures of Christ had an impact on how we understand the atonement. God does not suffer or change, so it was the human nature that suffered and died on the cross. Today, I want to define another $1 word and do my best to understand how two natures in Christ also resulted in two wills in Christ. Dyothelitism. noun. As Christ had two natures, and that did not change the other or combine into a third semi-human, semi-divine nature, Christ also had two wills, each acting according to its respective nature. You can see how this doctrine is closely related to both the hypostatic union and propitiation. The hypostatic union says that Christ had two natures, and propitiation helps clarify which nature was doing what and when. What dyothelitism does is show that separating a person’s nature and a person’s will is impossible and really, nonsensical. There can’t be two natures in Christ and only one will. That would be like saying that there are two people in a marriage but only one chair. If John 1:1, which says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” is true, then Jesus definitely had a divine will. If he had one will, then the apostle John goes to great pains to establish at the outset that it was divine and not human. But it does raise the question, how could Jesus Christ be both divinely omniscient and know what people were thinking, yet humanly ignorant about the timing of his own return and not know who touched him? How could Jesus Christ be both divinely eternal and exist forever, yet humanly physical and die? Don’t those contradictions undermine the claim of Dyothelitism? John 6:38 says, “For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me.” In Luke 22:42, Jesus says, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.” Taken together, there is clearly a will within the person of Christ that is distinct from the Father’s, although we don’t get a clear sense from these passages of just how many “wills” there are in Christ. But the Trinity shares a single will. The Godhead does not have three distinct wills as if they simply came together to share the load of work in creation and salvation. This can be true because of the Trinity consisting of three persons yet a single essence. This is why the 2 married people/1 chair metaphor doesn’t fall apart, because in a marriage, you still have two separate people with two separate natures or essence, even though they’re both human. In the Trinity, there may be three persons, but they share a single essence. If anything, these passages identify the human will of Christ, which needed to be conformed to the divine will. Hebrews 5:8-9 tells us, “Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered. And being made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him.” Paul tells us in Philippians 2:7 that Jesus “emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.” Jesus was eternally divine, as John 1:1 tells us, but at a point in time he emptied himself, technically meaning that he became a servant, by taking on the human nature and a human will. What these passages do teach us is that Jesus is the perfect representative of the human race before a perfect God. As a man, he learned obedience without being disobedient and was then able to save all those the Father sent to him. Christ having both two natures and two wills according to each nature was so important to the early Christians that monothelitism, or the idea that Christ had two natures yet one will, was condemned as a heresy in the third Council of Constantinople in 681. Decreeing a doctrine as heretical really did not happen that often in the early church. But when it did, the effects of that doctrine were understood to be a rejection of the biblical witness. To argue for one will in Christ requires a black marker over too much of the Bible's pages. Christ had two natures in one person, each nature retaining the attributes of its respective will. Christ had come to do the divine will, which he shares with the Father and the Spirit, while learning to conform his human will to the divine will through suffering.
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