So God wills human nature to be such and so, but humans will differently and so the human will is able to overthrow the divine will on your account. So much for predestination.

The devil has no image or logos apart from that which God gave him. Sin is personal and not natural. Here the obvious conflation between person and nature is present for all to see.

When you say that Christ was made a literal sinner, do you mean hypostatically or something else?

Again, attributions are things of language and not per se properties. On your account, God has no properties. I’d suggest picking of Muller, Chemnitz, Pieper and co. on the Lutheran tradition on what constitutes “attributes.”

I never claimed that Christ willed in the opposite direction. I argued he willed otherwise. Otherwise and contrawise are not equivalent concepts. Different doesn’t imply in opposition to. Here the hellenism of your position is plain. The Son is otherwise qua hypostasis from the Father, yet he is not contrawise to the Father. Your conflation of the two leads to tri-theism very quickly.

The fear of death is natural since it existed as a natural potency in humanity. Even on your view this must be so, since God’s threatening death would have no deterring effect. Death? Why worry about that? Fear is natural to humans, and fear of that which is unnatural, namely death, which is why all men fear death.

Sure, Christ said, not as I will, and that is the point, his remark would make no sense if he had not in fact so willed. Hence it is proof that he so willed. The will to avoid death certainly did, which is why he asks if it be possible to avoid it. Your gloss is entirely docetistic since it denies to Christ genuine human experience in the face of death.

To say that the human will is subordinated to the divine will is, once again, monoenergism and monothelitism, a position your own tradition claims to condemn. And here is the rub. You can reject my position and maintain a Lutheran one, and yet the Lutheran formularies commit you to adherence to the theology of councils 4-6. Any fair reading of those councils’ teaching along with that of their representative theologians will show that a committment to it is incompatible with Lutheran and Reformed teaching on the matter. So if the Lutheran formularies are right, then they are wrong.

Given that the divine will is one and common to all three persons, it wasn’t merely the Father’s will for salvation via the cross, but of the Son and Spirit as well.

I’ve never argued that the divine will of the Son was employed different than the Father with respect to different objects. I’ve maintained two points. First that the willing otherwise was according to Christ’s human power of choice. 2nd That the divine will tri-hypostatically wills also the preservation of human life such that both options before Christ are willed by God and good options. Your question betrays the monothelite principle that the will is hypostatic, thereby conflating the use of the will and the thing that is used.

It doesn’t then deny foreknowledge and predestination. Second, I don’t take those things to be the same thing in God. Third, I don’t think God is being so the kinds of objections to the doctrine of timelessness as simultaeneity are not possible on my view since even tenseless propositions are applicable to things that be. Fourth, I don’t take predestination to be hypostatic. If I did, I’d have to subsribe to a subordinating Christology where the divine person is parred of from the Father’s essence via an act of will, an implicit Arianism if ever there was one.

Jesus did not say I do not want to die, however, I also want to do the Father’s will. He said emphatically, *not* as I will, but as Thou wilt. The will to avoid death never entered into the ‘equation’ here, as it is clear the human will is subordinated to the divine will, of the God the *Father.* How could the divine will of the Son be employed differently from the Father’s with respect to the same things? This would deny both foreknowledge and predestination. And how could the human will of Jesus ever be willed differently from the divine will since the person doing the willing is none other than the Son Himself?

In the final analysis, in your construal, *ultimately* the human will is still subordinated to the divine will, notwithstanding the initial scenario.

To will in the opposite direction of the Father’s will which is to suffer death is to will contrariwise.

As for fear of death as natural, how can it be natural when such a fear did not exist prior to the Fall? And fear of death is different from willing not to die, metaphysically and psychologically.

Was Christ made a sinner in a literal sense? The answer is: Yes, not merely forensically but truly and really. Of course in all of this, sin, death were swallowed up by, in and through Christ. This is foolishness whereby opposite attributes are united in the divine person, not merely of immortality and mortality, eternity and temporality but also the energies of goodness, holiness, beauty versus evil, sinfulness, ugliness.

The denials here begin to streatch reason to its breaking point.

He is sorrowful to the point of death, but he can’t have human fear? Huh?

Second, that he expresses human fear is not a point of contention between the Orthodox and the Reformation traditions. You are free to defend an idiosyncratic view but what would be the point?

Third, your argument is a non-sequitur. It doesn’t follow that if we cannot know for certain (whatever that means) that Maximus’s view is unwarranted. It may not follow necessarily from the premises, but many things can be known without a necessary implication.

I never said Jesus willed “contrariwise”. That is your term and not mine. I said Jesus willed differently and what he willed was a divine good.

Sure fear of death is natural, since death is not natural to man. Even on your own principles, God never would have threatened it as a punishment for sin if it were natural and so its fear is not unnatural but natural. Your thesis that the fear of death is unnatural entails the Pelagian thesis that death is natural to humanity which is why in their fallen state they fear what they should not. I am just not a Pelagian.

In any case, pick up Luther or any Reformation expositor really and they all say pretty much that Jesus experienced human fear. If you reject this, it just shows how far you have to place yourself at odds and outside of your own tradition to attempt to make an argument work.

Lastly, Jesus explicitly says “not as I WILL…” Not, “not as I am saddened” as if the remedy would be to be happy. The remedy was to will salvation in his human power of choice.

The problem is that the course you are on will set you at odds to the incarnation. what will go next is the idea that Christ was genuinely ignorant and then eventually that the divine person suffered and died at all. And of course, in line with the post, the Goodness of God and creation is already gone given your predestinarianism.

And justification is extrinsic since human nature is bound, curved inwards. God has to free the person from the outside, so to speak. The personal employment of the will is bound to its natural determination, which is the ‘principle’ of sin. Here person is dependent on nature, or bound to sinful nature. He/she is not now in a position to decide good or evil simply there is no such thing as free choice in relation to God. One is either already in a state of faith or faithfulness or defiance. As mentioned, our first parents were already in the former state, with the exception that they had the potential to fall upward. The post-Fall situation has introduced a different set of circumstances. In the eschaton, there is no potential or hypothetical scenario is the new heaven and new earth will be free of the circumstance existed prior to the Fall, namely the existence of Satan.

The restoration of the balance or harmony between person or nature is not to enable the potential of theosis to be fulfilled but precisely means that in Jesus Christ, all things *have been* recapitulated so that those who are in Him are justified, deified.

The plain meaning of the text was that Jesus was in agony. Did he fear death? We cannot know for certain. So, Maximus to say that fear of death is natural by inferring from the Passion is unwarranted. What is certain is that he *knew* what lay ahead of him.

Matthew says:

“And he went a little farther, and fell on his face, and prayed, saying, O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt.”

Jesus did not will contrariwise. He expressed sorrow. This is different from willing with respect to avoiding death. Fear of death is not natural. It is always unnatural. This is because death is *unnatural.*

The statement that mortal humanity is not grace masks the Pelagianism since by mortal you probably mean fallen. But that again is not the issue. You affirm, and please correct if I am mistaken that humanity is intrinsically immortal and righteous.

if Christ recaptiulates humanity, then justification can’t be extrinsic since recaptitulation would be unnecessary if it were extrisic. Justice can’t then be grounded in recapitulation which leaves it explanatorily unmotivated.

if there was no dialectic of opposition between extrinsic and intrinsic, there would be no need to posit the subordination of the human to the divine as you do. Nor would we need justification to be a merely forensic.

Since the logos of human nature is a divine activity itself, it isn’t passive in the face of divine power. Divinity is not opposed to divinity.

To say that the humanity is active is only to the extent that the divine will is active is the monothelitism of Honorious, Sergius and Pyrrus. They thought that the divine will moved the human will. Hence what you are advocating is explicitly monoenergism.

You are free to argue that Maximus was wrong, but then you are committed to denying the decisions of the sixth council, which is at odds with confessional Lutheran stance on the 6th council.

Since attributes are linguistic predications, they do not fall under the communiation of properties. Properties and attributions are different things.

Here you also misrepresent Maximus’ position. Maximus does not claim that Christ willed contrary things. That is a major point against the Monothelities who took difference to be the same as contrary or in opposition. Maximus’ solution turns in no small measure on the claim that the willing to preserve human life is also something willed by God and hence good. Therefore Christ’s willing to preserve his life while different, isn’t contrary to the divine will to go to the cross.

Second to argue that Christ merely desired something contrary to God makes more problems for your position that you think it solves. For now it will be true that not only an impeccable person but human nature in its pristine condition in Christ is intrinsically opposed to God. So humanity in and of itself at creation and in Christ is either evil so that God is good since it wills contrary to it, or God is evil and humanity is good, grounding no small amount of contemporary atheism and nihilism.

The “plain meaning” of the text is that Christ willed to preserve his life. It was a chosen end and one that it seems that you have to, like Rome, lower to a mere appetite. The committment to platonic conception of simplicity still lingers here.

Maximus doesn’t get the 0rdo wrong and he doesn’t appeal to some nebulous notion of energy in general or start from energy as somehow separate from the person. Here again you misrepresent Maximus’ position.

As I noted already, it was the Nestorians who took there to be one will in Christ and hence one energy that was the prospon “Christ.’ This is why they also held that Christ was a result of the union and why they took Christ in his humanity to be a passive instrument of the divine will, just as you do.

To say that the natural is active is not Nestorian. It would be so if I affirmed that the energy was anhypostatic. This is what you inferred from what I wrote, but it is not what I wrote and can’t be inferred from what I wrote.

If the humanity were always passive in receiving the divine properties via the divine hypsotasis, then it follows that there is no divine hypostasis in the humanity doing the receiving.

I am sure you affirm that Christ was made a sinner, but the question is what that means. I’d bet good money you take this in merely a forensic way. This is certainly not what the joyous exchange has been traditionally understood as. To say that the sinner can become truely human once again betrays the idea that the imago dei was lost at the fall.

Christ redeems all of human nature and the fullness of that redemption is had by those who fulfill the hypostatic conditions for the fullness of redemption. If God were to over ride the human will, he would will contrary to what he himself willed for the imago dei to be, and hence contradict himself.

Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a sinful nature. There is human nature which is deprived of divine power and so disordered in its powers, which are never lost per se. If what is not assumed is not redeemed and then we add that the human person is redeemed, it will follow that either all persons are Christ or universalism or some aren’t human and hence not redeemed. If they are not human then the sin of Adam cannot affect them and hence they have no need of Christ.

As to the assertion that the Orthodox have made too much of the distinction between person and nature so as to actually separate them in practice, it is just that, an assertion. Second, even if true, a practical inconsistency is not the same as a principled one.