{"id":5845,"date":"2023-03-31T23:28:01","date_gmt":"2023-03-31T21:28:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/predication.net\/?p=5845"},"modified":"2023-03-31T23:28:04","modified_gmt":"2023-03-31T21:28:04","slug":"the-will-of-jesus-and-the-will-of-the-father","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/predication.net\/?p=5845","title":{"rendered":"The Will of Jesus and the Will of the Father."},"content":{"rendered":"
But what does this mean? What is “my” will as opposed to “your” will? What is it that they are opposing here? The Father and the Son? Is the man Jesus and God alone in the Trinity? In no other place \nHoly Scripture do we see inside the mystery of Jesus as deeply as in the prayer on the Mount of Olives? Therefore, no it is no coincidence that the efforts of the ancient Church to understand the person of Jesus reached their final form thanks to the reflections of the faith over the prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. \nAt this point, we must look briefly at the Christology of the ancient Church to understand its concept of the interrelation of the divine and human will in the person of Jesus Christ. The Council of Nicaea (325) contributed to the clarification of the Christian understanding of God. The three persons – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – are one, having a single divine “essence.” More than a hundred years after this first Council, the Council of Chalcedon (451) attempted to capture the interrelationship of divinity and humanity in Jesus Christ in a formulation according to which in him the one person of the Son of God is “unmixed and undifferentiated form” includes and bears both natures – human and divine. Thus, the infinite distinction between God and man, between Creator and creature: the human being remains human, and the divine being remains divine.<\/h2>\n
The divine in Jesus did not swallow up or reduce him to humanity. His human being is still present, but at the same time contained in the divine person of the Logos. In the undiminished difference of natures, the term One Person expresses the radical unity with man into which God entered in Christ. This formulation – two natures and one person – originates in the timeless intuition of Pope Leo the Great, which immediately received enthusiastic assent on the part of the Council Fathers. It was, however, an intuition whose concrete meaning at that time had not yet been explored in depth. What does “naturalness” mean? Well, in particular: what does “person” mean? Since this was not yet clear to the will, several bishops after The Council of Chalcedon declared that they did not want to think like Aristotle, but rather like the fishermen. The whole formulation remained unclear. Therefore, the reception of the Council of Chalcedon had a very turbulent history and was marked by considerable struggle. In the end, there was such a division: only the Roman and Byzantine Churches accepted the Council and its formulation in its definitive form. Alexandria (Egypt) preferred to stick to the formulation of the “one divine nature” (monophysitism); in the East, Syria the notion of a person maintained a skeptical distance, because it seemed to undermine the real humanity of Jesus (Nestorianism). More powerful than concepts, however, were the types of religiosity that stood in opposition to each other and irreconcilably polarized this opposition by the force of religious feeling.<\/h2>\n
The Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon remains for the Church of all times a binding orientation on the way to the mystery of Jesus Christ. We must reclaim it in the context of our thinking, in which the concepts of “nature” and “person” have taken on a different meaning than they had then. This effort of re-appropriation must go hand in hand with ecumenical dialogue, which must also be conducted with the pre-Chalcedonian churches, to bring about the lost unity in the center of our faith, which is the confession of God made man in Jesus Christ. In the great struggle that took place after the Council of Chalcedon, especially in the Byzantine area, it was essentially a question of the nature of Jesus, if there is only one divine person in him that includes both natures. Can this human nature, contained in a single divine person, exist in its specificity and authenticity? Is it not necessarily absorbed in divinity, at least in its highest layer, which is the will? This proclaims the last of the great Histological heresies, “monotheism”. In one person, monotheism maintains, there can be only one will. \nA person with two wills would be schizophrenic. A person ultimately manifests himself in the will, and if there is only one person, it follows that there is only one will. In contrast, however, the question arises: What would be the man who had no human will of his own? Would a man without a bed, be a real man? In Jesus, did God become truly human if this man has no will? The great Byzantine theologian Maxi m Confesses no (f 662) elaborated the answer to this question in the context of the efforts to understand Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. Above all, Maxim was a staunch opponent of raonothelitism: unity with the Logos does not cripple Jesus’ human \nnature; it remains fully human. And human nature includes the will. But this inherent duality of human and divine will in Jesus cannot lead to the schizophrenia of a dual personality. Therefore, the nature of and the person must always be considered according to their specific ways of being. That is, there is a “natural will” of human nature in Jesus, but it is only, one “personal will” which incorporates the “natural will”.<\/h2>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"