Thy Will Be Done: A Dogmatic Defense of Dyothelite Christology

by R. Lucas Stamps

"Thy will be done." When Jesus prayed these words in Gethsemane, the church came to read them as clear evidence that the incarnate Son has two the divine will he shares eternally with the Father and Spirit, and a true human will he took on for our salvation. The Third Council of Constantinople (680-81) made this dyothelite teaching part of the church's confession, and it was accepted East and West and by the Reformation churches. In recent decades, though, a number of theologians and Christian philosophers have argued that Christ has only one will, on the grounds that this better protects the unity of his person.

Thy Will Be Done is a thorough dogmatic defense of the two-wills position. R. Lucas Stamps begins by setting out and critiquing three overlapping kinds of contemporary abstractist, kenotic, and Spirit Christologies. He then recovers the dyothelite consensus of the patristic and medieval church, from Maximus the Confessor and John of Damascus to Thomas Aquinas, and follows how it was carried into Reformed Christology through John Calvin, John Gill, W. G. T. Shedd, and Thomas F. Torrance. The final chapter builds a contemporary dyothelite Christology from Scripture, including the Gethsemane narrative, John 6, and Hebrews 10, and shows what is at stake for Christology, the Trinity, and soteriology. The book argues that monothelitism creates more problems than it solves, and that theologians today have good reason not to move the ancient dyothelite landmark.

326 pages, Kindle Edition

Expected publication December 1, 2026