Dialogue on the Humanity of Christ

Reed. Pastor, as we have been going through Matthew’s Gospel, I cannot help but wonder about these two places where Jesus says that He does not know (24:36) and denies His own will in submission to the will of God (26:39). Is it not true that Jesus is God? 

Pastor. Indeed it is true. What is it about these two statements that seems to trouble you concerning His divinity? I think I know, but I would rather hear it from you.

R. Well, if He is fully God, you would think that the divine mind and will would be His own, such that there could never be a time or place in which He does not know all or in which His will could be submitted to another. Isn’t that the case?

P. You are certainly right that the divine mind and will can never become anything but what God is. However, you have neglected that Jesus is also truly man. That means that He has a truly human mind and truly human will. 

R. Are you saying that Jesus’ human mind can think what is false or that His human will can will what is not God’s will?  

P. Not at all; but you may also be assuming that to not know is to “know” what is not. Ignorance is not error. It is simply an absence of some knowledge. The statement in Matthew 24:36 says nothing more than that. All that the human Christ thinks and says is true, without exception. But it does not follow that He thinks or says all that can be known or communicated by God. 

R. And what about His will? Even as a human being, if He were sinless, wouldn’t He already be willing all that the Father wills? 

P. Yes, certainly. But there are two more mistakes to avoid here.

First, there are several different senses of “the will of God.” I won’t torture you with the different Hebrew and Greek words that are used for these, but in the simplest terms, these are divided between things like desire (as in His preferences), moral obligation (as expressed in His commandments), and causation (as in His decree).

Second, will and knowledge actually converge in an important way here. God’s will is learned by human beings. The human experience of Jesus is actually no exception to this. While Jesus always obeyed God’s will, it does not follow that He did not also learn it, as the Scriptures say, “Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God” (Lk. 2:52), and “he learned obedience through what he suffered” (Heb. 5:8).

R. But you have also said to avoid the idea that when Paul speaks of the Son “emptying” Himself in Philippians 2, that this means that His divinity “went away”? So wouldn’t Jesus still have the thoughts that God has, or think like God thinks?

P. Given the design of the Incarnation, the human mind of Christ had access to divine thoughts whenever required. This can be thought of as an aspect of the anointing of the Holy Spirit by which Christ did all His works on our behalf as a man. Or it may be that in some cases, there could be direct revelation from the divine mind as one. We are not told in Scripture the exact mechanism—only that He was in fact truly God and truly man.

R. So His words on earth are not divine? 

P. None of this implies that what Christ did know and say is in any way defective. Again, the opposite of omniscience is not error. A human knowledge can be a perfect knowledge in a way fitting for a human. And likewise, God was perfectly able to supply the human mind of Jesus with all manner of supernatural revelation as He saw fit for the design of the Incarnation. So this does not in any way minimize the infallible truth of all that Jesus spoke.

R. Alright, but getting back to the Garden of Gethsemane, your division of ways to understand “the will of God” may be helpful for some things, but I don’t see how it solves the whole problem of Jesus’ statement there. Most obviously, how many wills did Christ have?

P. Christ has two wills, corresponding to the divine and human natures. And it is actually crucial that He did indeed have a human will.

R. Why? I know you have said that He is “truly” man in the same way that He is truly God. But is this just to be accepted because it is in a creed? 

P. It is the language the church has always used, and, as a matter of fact, one of the less famous heresies in the early century was called monothelitism because it held that there is only “one” (mono) “will” (theléma) in Christ. 

R. Sometimes I think these people had too much time on their hands! Is that really the only reason?

P. Well, no, I was coming to that. This matters because it was this human will of Jesus that submitted to the Father for obedience in our place.

R. Isn’t it a bit much to call this a heresy though? I couldn’t think of a single Christian around me that has ever heard of that word, or even contemplated this. 

P. What matters is not the word itself, but the idea. And we have talked about the nature of heresy before—namely, that the burden of guilt is weighted toward the false teacher (cf. Jas. 3:1) and not toward the average laypersons. But we have also discussed how that false doctrine, like leaven, does spread (cf. Gal. 5:9) through the whole of our thinking and life.

So let me summarize the importance of the truth itself to the reality behind it. In denying the human will to Christ, one is denying Christ’s office as our representative. As one consequence of this, it could not be that the will of Christ substituted His obedience to the law in the place of ours. And that would be bad news for our souls.

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(To Be Continued)