Thursday, April 11, 2019

The Two Wills of Christ

(A recent Facebook conversation about William Lane Craig's Heterodox Christology brought this to mind. This is a paper I wrote during seminary. It is highly academic but since I am not a specialist it should be comprehensible and hopefully informative for anyone interested in Christology and Christian theology in general.) 
Christology is a complicated topic. There were seven councils dealing directly with Christology which are recognized as ecumenical. The theology of the later three is infallible for Rome or Constantinople/Moscow, but amongst Protestants it has differing reputations.1 This section will be irenic and not polemical. I am dealing with the sixth of these great councils, also known as the Third Council of Constantinople (ad 680-681). I will describe what the council actually said about the nature of the incarnation. Then I will explain the heresy of monothelitism which was the occasion for holding the council. Then I will explicate dyothelitism, and to a lesser extent dyoenergism, which were the dogmas established by the council.2
I. The Acts of Constantinople III
Any discussion of a church council should involve what was decided at the council in the very words of those present. There seem to be two things of primary importance stated directly in The Acts of the 6th Ecumenical Council (ad 680-681): the naming of heretical teachers and the true teaching of the church that Christ possesses two wills and two energies. The council clearly declares that monothelitism and monoenergism are heresy and undoubtedly affirms that dyothelitism and dyoenergism are orthodoxy.3 Then it goes on to posthumously anathematize several church teachers, the most important being Pope Honorius I (ad 625-638), who reputedly taught this doctrine.4 While every council is complicated, reading the acts of Constantinople III gives one the impression that the issue is very simple. Christ has two wills and that as they say is that. Of course almost nothing in connection with Jesus Christ is that simple. There are many layers and complicated issues within the theology of this great council. One of the most vexing for the Roman Catholic tradition is the unchallenged and unqualified condemnation of a Petrine Bishop “who in everything agreed with them [heretics].”5 But first we need to understand the preceding theological developments and problems which led the church to this point.
II. Monothelitism
This ecumenical gathering, just as each previous council, did more than affirm mere metaphysics. The fathers at Constantinople III had soteriological dogma in mind.6 The issue of Christ having one or two wills seems very esoteric given the theological challenges of 21st century Christendom. But to these bishops and teachers of the church it was like asking the question: are humans really and truly saved by Jesus Christ? The defenders of monothelitism were under the impression that to affirm dyothelitism was to affirm Nestorianism and therefore to separate God and man in Christ to the point of unraveling the salvific work of the Hypostatic Union.7 The historic concern of the monothelite tradition was to maintain the synthesis of Cyril Patriarch of Alexandria (ad 412-444) who affirmed the unity of the incarnation in the person of Christ. Cyril’s theology prevailed at the council of Ephesus over the teachings of Nestorius by preserving “the deep substantial nature of the conjunction of God and man in Christ.”8 But in spite of his success, Cyril’s terminology could be confusing or ambiguous, specifically his use of the phrase “one incarnate nature.”9 But this phrase was not alone. The monothelite heresy which followed claimed the central tenets of Cyrillian Orthodox Christology as its foundation.10
“The doctrinal edifice of Monoenergism was built upon three pillars: first, the recognition of the Cyrilline doctrine of ‘one incarnate nature of God the Word’; second an acceptance of the theopaschite formula, that is, the statement that ‘one of the Trinity suffered in the flesh’; and finally, the ps.-Dionysian affirmation of ‘a new (or ‘single’) theandric activity’ in Christ after the union. Both the statements of Cyril and ps.-Dionysius the Aeropagite seemed, on a superficial reading, to endorse the existence of a single activity in Christ.”11
This quotation shows the deep interconnectedness of Christology and soteriology. Each of the theological principles listed is primarily soteriological. “One incarnate nature” was Cyril’s way of emphasizing the deification of man through Christ.12 It was not a reference to one nature after the Hypostatic Union, an explicitly Eutychian idea, but the belief that “very God of very God” became incarnate. The divine nature was united to the human nature through Christ. And the same logic can be applied to both the theopaschite formula and talk of a theandric will. Because Christ is truly God and Christ has died therefore God has died. But that is not to say that God the Father or the divine essence were crucified. And a theandric will was simply a deified human will. So Christ would still be dyophysite and dyothelite but his human will is deified. Still it is not hard to see how the monophysite confusions were made consistently, or how indebted genuine Christian soteriology truly is to Cyril.13
But the irony of Constantinople III is that both the dyophysite Nestorians and monophysite Eutychians were monothelites.14 In the case of both they were under the impression that to have one will and energy was to preserve the union of natures.15 For the Monophysites this followed from their insistence on one nature, for their reading of Cyril was such that the one incarnate nature actually meant a new combined divine-human nature.16And for them the concept of a theandric will meant a God-human composite will, not a deified will.
The reasons for Nestorian monothelitism are far more ambiguous and complicated. Their main motivation came from the Nestorian desire to affirm one prosopon.17 But the fullest definition of Nestorianism is something more akin to one prosopon and two hypostases which is why the Nestorian heresy is usually described as belief in two persons in the incarnation due to the historical ambiguities between those Greek words, and how prosopon and hypostasis became synonyms eventually. Nestorianism recognizes, along with all other Christians, that there must be a unity to the incarnation of some kind but that there must be a genuine duality as well. But rather than the duality merely being emphasized the duality came to be understood as two complete or independent dualities united by a prosopon, but the prosopon in question is not God the Son or even Jesus Christ but the conjunction of God the Son with Jesus Christ in two complete hypostases. 18 This is why Nestorius denied the term Theotokos as the virgin Mary’s liturgical title and opted for Christotokos instead and why he also denied the theopaschite formula. The human nature of Christ could not experience divinity and the divine nature of God the Son could not experience humanity so the prosoponic unity of these two independent natures must have been a unity of action or willing. And since willing seems intuitively to be personal as opposed to natural both the Eutychians and the Nestorians placed will in the person rather than nature.19 Here it is important to note Pope Leo’s (ad 391?-461) contribution to the discussion.
Since Leo’s Tome is an official part of the acts of the council of Chalcedon, all Christians who commit themselves to the binding teaching authority of Chalcedon are committed to Leo’s Tome as well.20 This is interesting because the Eastern Church will often remark that the Tome has problems, namely that it flirts with Nestorianism at worst and is ambiguous at best; even though they know it must be orthodox.21 In any case Pelikan shows that Leo’s phrasing of the natures doing things was essential for defeating monothelitism and paving the way for Constantinople III. As I’ve already admitted it seems appropriate to make “actions” or willing belong to person and not nature but the Christological problems with this intuition were at the center of the theology of the sixth council. According to Pelikan both heretical groups sought to reinterpret Leo’s language, in fact they completely altered it.22 They tried to read a single subject of action into the actions being performed.23 Leo’s theology was universally hated outside the churches that wanted to follow Chalcedon consistently.24
The actual phrasing that caused this trouble for the heretics was Leo’s claim that each “form” does the acts which belong to it.25 Pelikan explains:
“Without any change in the spelling of the Latin and with at most a very slight change in the spelling of the Greek, Leo’s formula could be read to say that the incarnate Logos ‘does, by means of each form, the acts that belong to it, in communion with the other,’ with the word “form” now in the ablative or instrumental dative. This was the interpretation of Leo set forth by Sergius, patriarch of Constantinople, an advocate of ‘one action.’ Yet if our transmitted texts are reliable, he elsewhere quoted the same passage correctly, ascribing the acting to each of the natures rather than to the single hypostasis of the Logos.”26
This issue is not an irrelevant vestige of Chalcedon because Constantinople III directly cites Leo’s Tome as its proof and basis for dyoenergism. The exact passage is quoted that the heretics tried to manipulate as evidence for their view.27 The significance of this point cannot be overstated for Constantinople III. A direct connection to Pope Leo I showing that Christ had two wills means that dyothelitism was self-consciously in step with Chalcedonian dogma. Regardless of intuitional problems there is no great difficulty in seeing how a will could be proper to nature and not person.28 It would be like a metaphysical appendage, just as legs or lungs are something a body has but do not themselves make up a physical body. A will is something that can be accessed and utilized but it is not the center of action or more importantly agency. In other words a person uses a will, but persons perform determinative and deliberative actions and the will is where those decisions are actualized. That is why we tend to think of and call ourselves agents or centers of action. So if anything were to be located in Christ’s person it would seem to be action. But Leo’s language prevents this conclusion! He has located action as well as will in each nature, because the natures are actually doing something not merely being utilized by the Hypostasis. Like my legs deciding to walk rather than my use of my legs to walk. If this is an accurate description of Leo’s theology then it would appear to be wholly unorthodox because of the conciliar distinction between person and nature, and seemingly lead to Nestorianism.29 Yet the theology of Chalcedon and Constantinople III, two anti-Nestorian councils, rests on Leo’s theology. It is therefore probable that agency and action are in fact different for conciliar Christology. Also the council of Chalcedon and Leo’s theology has to be read and understood in light of Cyril’s theology. For as Fairbairn argues Chalcedon was not a compromise between Cyril and Nestorius but was in fact a defense of Cyril’s theology.30 All of this makes a Nestorian interpretation of Leo, and therefore dyothelitism, highly incredulous.
III. Dyothelitism
According to O’Collins, “at the level of Christs will and ‘natural’ activities, the Council upheld the Chalcedonian balance between a ‘Nestorian’ separation and a ‘Eutychian’ blending.”31 And clearly it was necessary for this clarification to take place because the heresy in question was not as gross or violent as Apollinarism or Arianism. It was and remains a subtler falsehood. This is evidenced by its widespread speculation in the orthodox churches.32 After Chalcedon it was clear to most of the church that Christ must have two natures. But was “will” proper to “nature?” This is why Collins says that it is a soteriological question.33 If the unassumed is the unhealed and part of human nature is a human will then Christ must have one if we are to be saved.
The concept of operation/activity or energy is less clear in the theological texts I have surveyed.34 But as has been shown it was important to Constantinople III, and apparently Pope Leo I. According to Pelikan, dyoenergism was a clear derivation from dyothelitism, which is strange considering two things. First, it is clearly an Aristotelian concept rather than a Biblical one.35 Second, if “action” comes after “willing” then why was there so much controversy over it being located in the person of Christ?36 In any case dyoenergism was seen as following from dyothelitism.
Conciliar Christology was defined by many things, but probably the most important of these was the principle of the unassumed being unhealed. So the sixth council affirms that Christ had to have two wills: one will shared with the other members of the trinity, and one will shared with human nature. The reason for this is quite simply that only God can save and in order for God to save something he must connect it to himself. That is essentially the first three councils in a nutshell. The argument against Arius:
  1. Only God could save us
  2. Christ has saved us
  3. Therefore he must be God.
And contra Apolinarius human nature can’t be healed unless all of it is healed, Christ has perfectly healed us therefore Apolinarius was wrong. So Christ must be fully God and fully man as explained at Chalcedon. The Sixth council was really about how God saves us by giving further clarification to the fourth ecumenical council. There are still questions which need to be answered and puzzles that need to be solved, but it seems clear that the council thought of itself as merely a continuation of the previous five ecumenical decisions, which includes the theologies of Cyril and Leo. Right or wrong Constantinople III thought it was representing the continual and unified soteriology and Christology of the Chalcedonian church. And so if the theologians of this council were correct then the current Neo-monoenergism is in serious trouble.
1 Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy but this is also true of some Anglicans and Lutherans.
2 For much of this paper dyothelitism and dyoenergism as well as monothelitism and monoenergism will simply be equated with each other. The distinction between them is important and will be discussed but generally speaking they are so closely related as to be undifferentiated, at least from a historical Nicene perspective.
3Schaff, Philip and Henry Wace, eds., The Seven Ecumenical Councils, vol. 14 of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994), 342.
4Schaff and Wace, eds., The Seven Ecumenical Councils, 343. See also Leo Donald Davis, The First Seven Ecumenical Councils (325-787) Their History and Theology (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1990), 282.
5 Schaff and Wace, eds., The Seven Ecumenical Councils, 352.
6 Gerald O’Collins, Christology: A Biblical, Historical, and Systematic Study of Jesus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 197.
7 Davis, The First Seven Ecumenical Councils (325-787) Their History and Theology, 280. This also seems to be the primary concern of Neo-monoenergism, which means that it is properly motivated even if ultimately wrong.
8 Aloys Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition (vol. 1): From the Apostolic Age to Chalcedon (451), 2nd rev. ed., trans. John Bowden (Atlanta: John Knox, 1975), 477.
9Andrew Louth, trans., The Early Church Fathers: Maximus the Confessor (London: Routledge, 1996), 9.
10And as we shall see later even earlier fathers whose theological arguments were entrenched in related but different issues. Nicene theology in the seven councils is a gradual unfolding and reestablishing of essentially the same theology in light of different problems. Lack of clarity in otherwise unquestionably Nicene fathers led to many of the heresies in question.
11Allen, Pauline and Bronwen Neil, eds., Maximus the Confessor and his Companions: Documents from Exile(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 3.
12Daniel Clendenin, Eastern Orthodox Christianity: A Western Perspective, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2003), 128.
13Demetrios Bathrellos, The Byzantine Christ: Person, Nature, and Will in the Christology of St. Maximus the Confessor, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 24-27.
14 Jaroslav Pelikan, The Spirit of Eastern Christendom (600-1700), vol. 2 of The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 64.
15 Sergius Bulgakov, The Lamb of God, trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), 75.
16 Allen and Neil, Maximus the Confessor and his Companions, 4.
17 O’Collins, Christology: A Biblical, Historical, and Systematic Study of Jesus, 186.
18 Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition (vol. 1), 505-507. It should become clear later how this has impacted both Medieval, Reformed, and Neo-Monoenergist Christology. It is also possible to formulate Nestorianism in modern terms as a divine person and a human person coming together to form a new divine-human person. This sort of confusing language or unclear thinking can be found even in such a venerable document as the Westminster Confession where in Chapter VIII, article VII it says: “Christ, in the work of mediation, acteth according to both natures; by each nature doing that which is proper to itself; yet by reason of the unity of the person, that which is proper to one nature is sometimes, in Scripture, attributed to the person denominated by the other nature.” The problem does not lie in the two natures acting but of a seeming multiplicity of persons. As we will see shortly the two natures of Christ doing things is actually a mark of Chalcedonian orthodoxy against Nestorianism.
19 It is hard to see how the Eutychians did this. My conclusion is that they considered the will to be personal and hypostatic is due to the fact that they still maintain distinctions between the Father and the Son. So unless the Father is incarnated along with the Son they have to be monothelites. Of course this is part of the problem with Eutychian theology, even understood in its nuanced miaphysite formula, there seems to be confusion not just of the two natures in Christ but of what the incarnation actually consisted. Are the Father and Spirit just as equally incarnated as the Son? Does the divine nature die along with Christ on the cross? It has the exact opposite problems of the Nestorian ambiguities.
20 Teaching authority and simple intellectual adherence are completely different. The Neo-Monoenergists are generally not committed to the teaching authority of Chalcedon or Nicaea but they still wish to be Chalcedonian broadly.
21 This is an observation from my personal interaction with the Eastern Tradition. And the kickback against the Pope in question has more to do with Roman Catholic apologetics than it does with the East’s acceptance of Leo’s Tome. As we will see Leo is a fundamental pillar within the Eastern theological system, but while his Christology is clear and systematic they think that Cyril’s theology is clearer in terms of soteriology. This is probably true but shows how indispensable a multiplicity of teachers within the church has always been. Because where Cyril is ambiguous Leo is not and vice versa. Where Leo could be misinterpreted Cyril could not.
22 Pelikan, The Spirit of Eastern Christendom, 65.
23 Allen and Neil, 10.
24 Bathrellos, The Byzantine Christ, 32.
25 Schaff and Wace, eds., The Seven Ecumenical Councils, 256.
26 Pelikan, 65.
27 Schaff and Wace, eds., The Seven Ecumenical Councils, 342.
28 It is difficult for many current evangelicals, which is the basis of the occasion for the writing of this paper. It is not difficult for many other Christians, myself included, to think that will is natural rather than personal. I think my claim is substantiated by the fact that most Christians throughout history have been dyothelites, and so if they are/were wrong then it was/is an easy mistake to make.
29Bathrellos, 37. A better or more appropriate analogy than legs deciding to walk would be stubbing a toe while walking. Your leg is going to respond to that stimulus, it is going to do something: react to the pain. And so in the case of Jesus it could be that his nature’s doings are these sorts of things. He receives pain from his human nature, etc.
30Sanders, Fred and Klaus Issler, eds., Jesus in Trinitarian Perspective, (Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing Group, 2007), 82.
31O’Collins, 197. This is not a compromise position as much as it is an understanding of what the heretics were right about. For as I have tried to demonstrate Cyril and Leo are neither Eutychian nor Nestorian.
32Pelikan, 62.
33O’Collins, 197.
34Bulgakov seems to agree. The Lamb of God, 75.
35 This point is minor but usually extra biblical words like trinity or homoousios are used to defend what seem to be clearly biblical ideas or concepts, especially in the conciliar debates. But in this case it seems that what was generally understood by energia had to do directly with Aristotelian philosophy.
36 Pelikan, 63. Bulgakov disagrees that it was connected to Aristotle’s use of activity or energy, but David Bradshaw has argued a whole book opposing this point and Barthellos (cited above) agrees with Bradshaw. See David Bradshaw, Aristotle East and West: Metaphysics and the Division of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

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