but isn't claiming that Jesus has two wills sort of tearing Jesus apart and bordering on nestorianism?
thank You for reply.
That's the obvious argument against it. The history of this doctrine is long and staggeringly complicated, but in a nutshell, the doctrine that Jesus had only
one will - known as monotheletism - was proposed in the early seventh century by the patriarch Sergius I, with the deliberate aim of appeasing the Monophysites and avoiding Nestorianism. He believed that the Monophysites were suspicious of Chalcedonian Christianity (and its claim that Jesus had two natures) on the grounds that two natures implied two persons, which would be Nestorianism. He hoped to use the formula of "one will" to show that it was possible to believe that Jesus had two natures without thereby having to say he was two persons, because where there is only one will, there is clearly only one person.
(Sergius had already attempted something similar by suggesting the formula "one energy/activity" in Jesus, but this hadn't been very successful, I suspect largely because it wasn't very clear what it meant.)
So Sergius would probably have agreed with your point that "two wills" sounds like "two persons"; at any rate he thought that "one will" would categorically rule out "two persons" and hopefully mollify the Monophysites. Needless to say, it didn't. More damagingly, many people within the Chalcedonian church, including many monks, argued that "one will" was heretical for the reasons given above, namely that it denied Jesus' true humanity.
The thing to understand about these debates is that they weren't using "person" in our modern sense. When people accused each other of holding that Jesus was "two persons", as Nestorius was charged with saying, they didn't mean it in a psychological sense, that is, two centres of consciousness or two agents (or something along those lines). They understood "person" in the sense that Boethius put it, namely, a single substance of a rational nature. So to call Christ "two persons" would mean holding that he was two
substances, that is, two distinct concrete entities. So when people sought to make it clear that they believed that Jesus was a single person, they were aiming to show that he was a single substance or concrete entity, not that he had mental unity of some kind. If you held that Christ was only a single substance or concrete entity, and that that substance was rational, then that was enough to say he was a single person. If that substance had more than one will, that was really neither here nor there as far as the number of persons went.
Now personally, I'm not even sure what it means to say that a person (or whatever) has two wills, if we understand "will" to mean a faculty or ability to choose; because it seems to me that a person either has such a faculty or doesn't, and talking about having two abilities to choose doesn't make much sense. One might as well say "He has the ability to swim - in fact he's such a great swimmer he has
two abilities to swim." You can't multiply the same ability in the same person. A more charitable interpretation of the doctrine might be to say that Jesus had the ability to choose in a human way and to choose in a divine way, so rather than talking about two distinct faculties of choice we are perhaps talking about two distinct sets of actions he could choose, or something like that. That makes a bit more sense.
In modern philosophical theology, the idea of "two wills" isn't much used, but instead many writers have appealed to the idea of "two minds" or "two consciousnesses". On this view, Christ had a split mind, rather like someone with multiple personality disorder. One stream of consciousness was divine and the other was human. The divine stream was omniscient, but the human stream was not. Indeed, the human stream may not even have known that the divine stream was there (opening the possibility that although Jesus was God, he didn't know he was God - at least, he didn't know it in his human consciousness, although of course his divine consciousness knew it). This sort of thing is supposed to help preserve Jesus' true humanity and explain how, despite being God, he could still have a genuinely human consciousness, including limited knowledge. Thomas Morris and Richard Swinburne are probably the most prominent proponents. But others have argued that it really turns Jesus into two people - maybe not two persons in the Nestorian sense, but still it seems pretty weird.
Did common people call God "Father" then? I mean: would it have made sense, if ordinary guy said the same when enduring hard times. (I know the saying "son of God" has been mentioned few times in this thread, but don't remember if this has been).
I don't know if it was common for people to do that. But I do know that Honi the Circle Drawer (an itinerant miracle worker who lived some time before Jesus) also called God "Father", and was noted for the very intimate way he addressed him, sometimes verging on disrespect. He was famous for rain miracles: he would draw a circle on the ground, sit in it, and harangue God until it rained.
Incidentally, the common belief that Jesus used a child's word for "Father" - like "daddy" or similar - is discredited by scholars today. The word he used was vernacular but seems not to have been one associated with children.
