I think your option #2 is the closest to the way I think of it. However, there is an additional concept that helps it make sense. Jesus was, at the time of the passage you are quoting, in a moral and *fallen* body. (Just as we all are.) That is to say, Jesus’ spirit, at birth, was joined to a mortal body complete with fallen nature. Just like all of us, He had a spirit and body that sometimes wanted different things. But unlike us, Jesus always over came the temptations of the flesh and was perfect. (The bible makes it very clear that Jesus was in fact tempted.)

After His resurrection He no longer faced the temptations of a fallen tabernacle and presumably (this is just my speculation) no longer faces the pull of two wills and thus the ultimate state of the Godhead would not be a continual pulling in different directions like you describe.

I have to run… I’ll do a better job of explaining myself later.

Imagine, from the Christian POV: God had enough power and knowledge, the Will, to create a creation so perfectly individual and sub-willed enough it could reject His will and thereby become imperfect. In order to fully redeem us, which brings Himself glory, He chose to become human. If he had to become human then that would question Himself as the authority, and place authority outside Himself. So if we agree that He chose to be human I think it’s exciting to consider what it says about us more than what it says about Him. Not the usual line of thought of what it means for humanity to become divine — because we were not divine who become human now seeking to become divine, or rather divine in the sense we equate with God. God was divine before becoming human. Being human did not make Him more divine. But it was a step to redeeming us. Why?

Therefore the interesting question to me is: what does it mean for God to be human?

Consider: Could Jesus be fully human and still possess the complete unified Will, foreknowledge and power of God in order to redeem mankind? If we say no do we not reject His power to completely redeem us, to perfectly interrelate with us before God? If we say yes must we consider that His becoming fully human is not the absence, or opposite, of real humanity. There is within the state of human existence to coexist with Godly Holiness. To ponder this, I think, invites us to consider what it means to be fully human. Instead we often get hung up on what we think it says about God.

Perhaps seeking God to reconcile like a mathematical equation is waste of time. But perhaps there is something beautiful that can come from the vibration of discord and “illogical-ness” that it may teach us about what it means to be human.

My mother and father were united in every way that mattered. They wanted the same things for their children; they were united completely on every decision of significant import, because they were willing to discuss anything and not act until they reached a consensus. They were distinctly separate and unique “beings”, but they functioned in every important way as a one united couple.

Jesus’ experience in the Garden - and on the cross - illustrate the same process, I believe. Prior to the creation of the world, the Godhead reached a unanimous plan in which each had a role but all functioned together to fulfill it. At the apex of practical difficulty, the Garden and the cross, the one experiencing the **physical** suffering turned to the one experiencing the **observational** suffering (the one who suffers specifically because he can’t “take the pain away”) and said, in essence, “Is there any other way to do this? If so, let me know.” The Father responded, essentially with either a “No” or with silence - an effective “No.” Given the lack of an alternative, they agreed to continue in the predetermined plan - even when that plan included the Father eventually stepping away and leaving the Son to finish it all alone.

I don’t see a conflict of will in this “big picture” view. It only is a conflict if the plan had not been worked out collectively beforehand - if it was one Being bowing to the will of another Being without full choice and original input into the solution.

Having said that, our theology does NOT place the Father, Son and Holy Ghost as true “equals” from the very beginning. It only posits such equality as an end result - that the Father allows equality to be gained, first by the Son and then by others. That is very different than the classic view of the Trinity and the primary reason we are not viewed as Christian by the mainstream Protestant majority.

It seems to me that there are several possible responses to this puzzle, but I don’t really like any of them.

First, we could say that Jesus’s experience of pain and suffering was special–for people, it doesn’t count as pain and suffering if we don’t, at some level, want it to stop, but Jesus was able to experience the pain and suffering without wanting it to stop, not even a little bit. This response leads to two problems, though: first of all, that feeling of kinship we have with Jesus (the one we get when we recall that he understands our pain and suffering because he experienced it himself) is going to be weakened because his pain and suffering weren’t really the same as ours; and second, we still have to explain what he meant when he said “take this cup away from me”. Was he only pretending to not want it?

Second, we could differentiate between basic desire (e.g. I want to avoid pain) and moral will (e.g. I want to do as God wishes, even if it means frustrating my basic desire for pain-avoidance) and say that when we say the godhead is united in perfect unity of will, we mean that their moral wills are united, but that their basic desires aren’t necessarily so consonant. However, if we take this tack, we’d be giving up a significant aspect of the idea of unity of will. If the different members of the godhead have basic desires that sometimes conflict, but they’ve made a firm agreement to always come to an agreement even at the cost of frustrating those basic desires, then they don’t seem to be much more united than, for example, the twelve members of a jury, and then the concept of unity-of-will seems to lose much of its force and beauty.

Third, we could say that Jesus is only a member of the godhead inasmuch as his will agrees with the godhead’s, and thus in the moment when he was torn and almost-halfway-wished to escape his fate, he was less fully a member of the godhead. If we say that, though, then we’re calling Jesus’s absolute godliness into question–if he was less godly in the garden of Gethsemane, then when else in the documented history of his life might he also not have been speaking as a member of the godhead?

Fourth, we could say that Jesus’s possessing a physical body and thereby being able to experience physical pain was what led him to have the desire to avoid his fate, and since his essential nature is not physical but spiritual, then it wasn’t really *Jesus* who had that moment of weakness in Gethsemane; it was just *Jesus’s temporary physical body*. But that response collapses back onto the problem we had in #3–if Jesus’s physical body messed up the consonance between his will and God’s, then what else in his life and ministry did it mess up?

So I’m not sure any of those responses is really satisfactory, although at the moment #2 is looking the least bad. Is there a way out of this puzzle that I’ve missed?

Here is the point of the pointless post that I thought was the most pointed:

“Point #1: Even Really Smart People Are Incapable of Using Reason If It Goes Against Their Beliefs”

This is proven on this blog, the radio and many other places time after time.

Thanks for this.

Austin, this is a good question that has many possible answers. So for the moment, let me just say that if two beings share each other’s best interests (see #7) and never have their wills come into conflict that it would be a minor matter to have one being be greater than the other in one sense (say because one is the father and one is the son) and yet have them be equal in power.

This is a matter of what you can imagine. I can imagine two beings (or multiple beings) that have separate personalities but that never come into conflict. To use a simple example, when I was a teen I wanted to listen to rock but my father didn’t. But I also wanted my father to not have to listen to rock music and he wanted me to be able to. So I got a walkman. Our wills never came into conflict and we wanted different things for ourselves but wanted the other to be happy. This does not strike me as being subsumed in the slightest.

Myself I don’t like the concept of omnipotence. Nothing to learn. Nowhere to grow. Stagnant. Boring.

I suspect this is why “no unlcean thing can dwell in the presence of God.” If He/She merged to become one with an “unclean thing,” then logically they would also become unclean (whatever that word means).

You’ve never met my parents. I have never had difficulty understanding the Godhead as separate but united, specifically because I’ve seen my parents in action. They truly are two in one.

This should be inscribed on the archway one passes under to enter the Internet.

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