Dyotheletism: Two Wills in the One Christ of Philippians 2
Short answer: Dyotheletism is the doctrine that Jesus Christ, the one person who is fully God and fully human, has two natural wills, a divine will and a human will, neither of which cancels the other. The word comes from Greek words for two and will. It was formally defined by the church in the seventh century against the view that Christ had only one will. The doctrine matters because Philippians 2:5-11 presents Christ as one who obeyed, and obedience requires a real human will that chose the Father's purpose. If Christ had no human will, his obedience would be a performance rather than the obedience of a man. The doctrine protects both the gospel and the reality of our salvation in a genuine human Savior.
What dyotheletism actually claims about the one Christ
Dyotheletism does not teach that Jesus is two persons or that he was divided in his inner life. It teaches that in the one person of the eternal Son made flesh there are two complete natures, divine and human, and that each nature has its own proper will, knowledge, and activity. The divine will belongs to his deity; the human will belongs to his humanity. Because he is one subject, the acts of both natures are truly his acts. The Son of God is the one who wills, and he wills both as God and as man. This is the same logic the church already used regarding his two natures after the Council of Chalcedon: the distinction of natures is not abolished by their union, and the union does not swallow either nature. Dyotheletism simply applies that settled Christology to the will.
This is not a philosophical hobbyhorse. Everything the gospel says about Jesus depends on it. John 1:14 says, "The Word became flesh, and lived among us. We saw his glory, such glory as of the one and only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth." The Word who became flesh did not cease to be the Word, and the flesh he took was true flesh. Colossians 2:9 says, "For in him all the fullness of the Deity dwells bodily". If deity dwells bodily, then the one Christ is not a hybrid with a diluted God-part and a shadow human-part. He is fully both, and therefore his willing is fully both. The doctrine is simply the grammar of the incarnation applied to desire and decision, not a speculative addition to it.
Careful language helps here. Theologians often speak of Christ willing according to each nature, not of two competing agents inside one skin. There is one person, one Lord, one Son, one Savior. He does not deliberate against himself the way two people in a dispute do. Yet the human will of Christ is not a puppet or a channel for a divine decision made elsewhere. It is a real, created, creaturely willing, freely and perfectly conformed to the divine will. Where faithful Christians have sometimes differed is in how strongly to press the psychological description of this union, but the basic claim that Christ has two natural wills has been the church's settled teaching since the seventh century, and it rests on the plain witness of Scripture that Jesus both acted as God and obeyed as man.
Why the church had to say two wills and not one
The controversy did not begin as an academic puzzle. In the early seventh century, some teachers proposed that although Christ had two natures, he had only one will, a single divine-and-human energy or operation. This view, sometimes called monothelitism, was offered as a way to preserve the unity of Christ and to avoid the appearance of inner conflict. It sounded devout. But the more the church examined it, the more it looked like a quiet return of an older error: a Christ whose humanity was real in name but not in function. If the human will of Christ does not exist, then his human obedience is not really human obedience. Something in our humanity that God made good would be missing from the One who came to redeem it, and the salvation he accomplished would not reach as far as our actual condition.
The church also had to reckon with the Gospels. In the garden, Jesus prays in Luke 22:42, "Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done." Matthew's account records the same prayer: "My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass away from me; nevertheless, not what I desire, but what you desire" (Matthew 26:39). These are not the words of a man without a will. They are the words of a man who genuinely recoils at what is coming and genuinely submits. He does not merely recite submission; he chooses it against the pull of his own human dread. If Christ had no human will, the agony of Gethsemane becomes theater. If he has a human will, the scene is the deepest obedience the world has ever seen, and it is obedience offered on our behalf.
Notice also what the garden does not show. It does not show two persons arguing. It shows one person, the Son, speaking to the Father in the Spirit, holding together a real human aversion and a perfect human submission. The divine will is not the enemy of the human will; the human will is healed and directed by its union with the divine person. That is why the church's definition says the two wills are not contrary to one another. The human will of Christ is not reluctantly overruled; it is freely conformed. The prayer reaches its resolution in a single act of obedience, and that act is the obedience of the God-man, not of a mere instrument or a mere man. The doctrine of two wills is the doctrinal explanation of why Gethsemane is both a real struggle and a sinless victory.
Finally, the church reasoned from salvation itself. The consistent patristic principle was that what is not assumed is not healed. If Christ did not assume a human will, then the human will is not healed in him. Our deepest problem is not merely that we do wrong things but that we want wrongly, choose wrongly, and bend away from God. A Savior who never had a human will cannot heal the human will. A Savior who has a human will, and who perfectly conforms it to God across a lifetime and through the garden and the cross, can heal it. Dyotheletism is therefore pastoral at its core: it tells us that the place where we most need rescue, our willing, is a place Christ has entered, possessed, and sanctified.
Philippians 2:5-11 and the obedience of a man
The primary passage supplies the heart of the matter. Philippians 2:5 begins, "Have this in your mind, which was also in Christ Jesus,". Paul is calling the church to a mindset of humble self-giving, and he grounds it in who Christ is and what Christ did. What follows is often called a hymn, and its movement is from glory to humiliation to exaltation. The one who existed in the form of God did not cling to his status but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, becoming in the likeness of men. Then, being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient, even to the point of death, death on a cross. That word obedient is the hinge for this whole discussion. Obedience is an act of a will. You cannot obey where there is no will to bend.
Whose will, then, obeyed? The subject of all these verbs is the one person, the Son. He is the one who humbled himself and became obedient. But the obedience is described in the context of his having taken servant form and having been found in human likeness. The obedience is the obedience of the incarnate one, enacted in and through his real humanity. He did not pretend to obey; he obeyed. And what did he obey toward? The Father's will, as the garden makes explicit. Paul's hymn gives us the shape, and the Gospels give us the scene. Together they show a Christ whose human willing is not an afterthought but the very material of his saving work. The cross was not merely something done to him; it was something he chose in love.
This rules out a common confusion. Some imagine that the divine nature simply overrode the human nature, so that the human Jesus was passive while the divine Son did the deciding. But Paul's language of self-humbling and obedience resists that. The Son humbled himself; he was not humbled against his will. He became obedient; he was not coerced into a show of obedience. The human will of Christ is genuinely active in the work of redemption. He is not a man who wanted to escape the cross and was dragged to it, nor a man who had no will at all. He is the man who said, in effect, my Father's will is my will, and then went to the cross. The two wills are distinct, and in him they are perfectly one in purpose.
This also explains the moral power of the passage. Paul does not use the incarnation as an abstract doctrine; he uses it as a pattern. If the eternal Son could lay aside the exercise of his rights and obey in a human life, then the Philippians can lay aside their rivalries and serve one another. The doctrine of two wills gives teeth to that appeal. Christ's obedience was not effortless in the sense of being automatic; it was the obedience of one who had a human will to submit. That means his example is not remote from ours. He has walked the path of choosing God's will over the pull of self, and he walked it without sin. He is therefore both the pattern we are called to imitate and the Savior who empowers the imitation.
Does two wills in Christ mean two persons?
No, and the distinction is essential. The church has always insisted on one person and two natures. The person is the eternal Son, the second person of the Trinity, who took to himself a complete human nature. A nature is not a person. My human nature is not a second self alongside me; it is what makes me human. In the same way, the human nature of Christ, including its will, belongs to the one person of the Son. So when we say Christ has two wills, we are not saying there are two Christs, or that he sometimes acted as one person and sometimes as another. We are saying that the one Christ has everything that belongs to deity and everything that belongs to humanity, sin excepted, and that both are truly his.
The practical test is how we speak of him. It is right to say that the Son of God died for us, because the person who died is the Son. It is right to say that the Lord of glory was tempted, because the one tempted is the Lord. It is also right to say that Jesus grew in wisdom and learned obedience, because the one who grew and learned is the same Son, in his human nature. The church's careful grammar keeps us from splitting him into two subjects or confusing his natures into one. He is one Lord, and everything he does, whether in divine power or human weakness, is the act of that one Lord on our behalf.
This matters for worship. If we divide Christ into two persons, our worship becomes confused and our assurance shaky. Which Christ saved us? The one who is both. If we collapse his natures into one, we lose either his ability to save or his ability to represent us. If he is only God appearing as a man, then he did not truly bear our humanity and cannot sympathize with our weakness. If he is only a good man empowered by God, he cannot bear the infinite weight of our sin or reveal the Father to us. Two natures in one person, with two corresponding wills, is the only confession that keeps both the majesty and the mercy of Christ intact. The doctrine is not a puzzle to solve for its own sake; it is the shape of the Savior we actually need.
Hebrews 4:15 presses the point: "For we don’t have a high priest who can’t be touched with the feeling of our infirmities, but one who has been in all points tempted like we are, yet without sin." Temptation is addressed to a will. To be tempted is to be solicited toward a choice. If Christ has no human will, his temptation is not like ours at all, and the comfort of this verse evaporates. Because he has a human will, and because he resisted in it without sin, he can be touched with the feeling of our infirmities. The doctrine of two wills is therefore the ground of the sympathy of Christ. Our High Priest is not a distant deity who cannot understand our struggle; he is the God-man who has fought the battle of the will and won, and who now helps us in our own.
How the two wills appear in Gethsemane without contradiction
Gethsemane is where objections usually surface. If Jesus says, not my will but yours, does that not imply a conflict in God? Only if we confuse the persons or the natures. The prayer is addressed by the Son to the Father in the Spirit. The human will of Christ, in its natural and sinless aversion to death, asks that the cup be removed if it is possible. The divine will, together with the Father's will, ordains that the cup be drunk for the salvation of the world. These are not two gods disagreeing. They are the two wills of the one Christ, and the human will freely yields to the divine. The aversion is not sin; it is the natural human shrinking from suffering and death, which our first parents did not have in the same way before the fall and which the sinless Christ bore in full solidarity with us.
What makes the scene sinless is not the absence of desire but the perfect ordering of desire. Sin would be the human will set against God. In Christ, the human will is real, it feels the weight, it asks honestly, and then it submits because it loves the Father and loves us. That is obedience in its purest form. Adam in a garden took what he wanted against God; Christ in a garden surrendered what he naturally wanted to God. The first Adam's will curved inward; the last Adam's will curved toward the Father. The doctrine of two wills lets us say both that he truly recoiled and that he truly obeyed, without making him a sinner or a stoic.
Some worry that if the human will of Christ can ask for something the divine will does not grant, then the human will was in some sense wrong. But the answer is that a request is not a rebellion. Jesus frames the prayer with if it is possible and if you are willing, leaving the outcome to the Father. He does not demand; he asks. He does not set his will against God's; he brings his will to God and lets it be shaped. This is exactly what he teaches his disciples to pray: your will be done. In Gethsemane he does what he taught, and he does it under pressure that we cannot fully measure. The two wills are on display, and the result is not contradiction but the most profound harmony: a human will freely conformed to the divine in the face of death.
This is why the church's definition insists that the two wills are not contrary. To say they are contrary would be to say Christ sinned or that God is divided. To say there is only one will would be to say the prayer is not really a human prayer or the obedience is not really human obedience. The two-wills confession walks between these errors and lets the text speak. It lets Jesus be genuinely tempted, genuinely grieved, genuinely asking, and genuinely obedient. It lets the cross be both the plan of God and the choice of a man. And it lets us sing with the church that our salvation was accomplished by one who is like us in every way except sin, and who therefore can save us to the uttermost.
Why this doctrine still matters for ordinary Christians
Dyotheletism can sound like a relic of ancient councils, but it touches daily faith. If Christ's human will is real, then his obedience is real, and his obedience can be credited to us who are joined to him by faith. The gospel is not that God overlooked our sin, but that a real man in real flesh really obeyed where we failed, and really died under the judgment we deserved. His human will made that obedience possible. His divine person made that obedience infinitely valuable. Remove either, and the gospel is diminished. Remove the human will, and we have a Savior who played at being human. Remove the divine person, and we have a mere martyr whose obedience cannot cover anyone else.
It also shapes how we pray. When we struggle to submit to God's will, we are not facing something Christ never faced. He faced the same wrenching choice, and he faced it in the same kind of human will we have. He is not embarrassed by our prayers of honest reluctance; he has prayed one himself, though without sin. And he has prayed the prayer of surrender, and he can teach us to pray it. The doctrine tells us that our will, which is so often the seat of our rebellion, is not beyond redemption. Christ has a human will, which means human willing can be healed, reordered, and made obedient. In him, our willing can begin to be conformed to God's will, the way his was.
It also guards our worship from sentimentality and from coldness at the same time. We do not worship a vague spiritual force. We worship the Son who became flesh, who had a mother, who grew tired, who wept, who chose, who obeyed, who died, and who rose. The full humanity of Christ, including his will, gives weight to every scene in the Gospels. His tears are real tears. His prayers are real prayers. His obedience is real obedience. When we come to the Lord's Table or to the cross in meditation, we are not remembering a symbol. We are remembering a person who in his human will said yes to the Father for us, and who in his divine power raised himself and will raise us. That is comfort that reaches the root of our condition.
Finally, the doctrine humbles our pride and anchors our hope. We cannot obey our way to God, but the Son obeyed in our place and gives us his obedience. We cannot repair our own willing, but the one who has a human will perfectly ordered to God can renew ours by his Spirit. The ancient church fought for these words because they were fighting for the gospel, and the gospel is the same today. Two wills in one Christ is not a speculative curiosity. It is the confession that the Savior is fully God and fully man, and therefore fully able to save, fully able to sympathize, and fully worthy of our trust. Philippians 2 calls us to have his mindset; the doctrine tells us who he is so that we can.
Biblical fidelity check
What the passages establish: Philippians 2:5-11 establishes that the one who existed in the form of God became a servant and became obedient, which requires a real human will, and that this same person is exalted as Lord. Hebrews 4:15 establishes that he was tempted in all points like us, yet without sin, which requires a will that could be solicited and could resist. Luke 22:42 and Matthew 26:39 establish that he prayed a genuinely human prayer of submission to the Father's will. John 1:14 and Colossians 2:9 establish the two natures, deity and flesh, in one person. The doctrine of dyotheletism is the faithful summary of these witnesses, not an addition to them.
What the passages do not establish: they do not give us the later technical vocabulary of two natural wills, nor do they describe the metaphysics of how the two wills relate. They also do not teach that Christ had a sinful will or that his human will was a separate person. A common misreading is to treat the Gethsemane prayer as proof that Christ was internally divided or that the human Jesus was somehow at odds with God, even to the point of sin. That reading is wrong because Scripture says he was without sin, and because the prayer itself is a surrender, not a rebellion. Another misreading is to imagine that his divine will simply overrode his human will, making his obedience a fiction. Scripture presents his obedience as genuine, voluntary, and human. Faithful Christians have phrased the relation of the two wills in different ways, but the church's settled confession rejects both one-will teaching and any splitting of Christ into two persons.
Other passages that speak to Philippians 2:5-11
The themes of Philippians 2:5-11 run through the rest of Scripture, and several articles explore those connections. If you want to think further about the incarnation and the witness of the apostles, see What Does 1 John 1:1 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application, which opens with the Word of life that was seen and touched. For the confession of sin that the humble Christ makes possible, see What Does 1 John 1:8 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application. The promise of forgiveness and cleansing is treated in 1 John 1:9 Meaning: Confession, Forgiveness, and Cleansing. And for the call to a mind set on Christ rather than the world, see What Does 1 John 2:15 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application.
Frequently asked questions
What is dyotheletism in simple terms?
Dyotheletism is the teaching that Jesus Christ, who is one person, has two wills: a divine will and a human will. It comes from Greek words meaning two and will. The church defined this in the seventh century to protect the truth that Christ is fully God and fully man. He is not a mixture or a compromise. He has everything that belongs to God and everything that belongs to a sinless human being, including a human will that truly chose obedience to the Father. This matters because a real human will makes his obedience real and his sympathy for our weakness real.
Does having two wills mean Jesus had two personalities?
No. The church confesses one person and two natures. A will belongs to a nature, not to a separate person. The eternal Son is the one person who acts in both his divine and human natures. So we do not say there were two Jesuses or that he switched between two selves. We say the one Christ willed as God and willed as man, without sin and without internal contradiction. His human will was freely conformed to the divine will, so his two wills never opposed each other in rebellion but worked in perfect harmony in the one Savior.
Why does Gethsemane matter for this doctrine?
Gethsemane shows a real human will in action. Jesus prays for the cup to pass if possible, yet submits to the Father's will. That prayer would be meaningless if he had no human will, and it would be sinful if his will were set against God. Instead it reveals a sinless human will honestly recoiling from death and freely choosing obedience. The scene confirms that Christ's obedience was not automatic or pretended. He truly chose the Father's will under pressure, and he did so for us. That is why the doctrine of two wills is pastoral, not merely technical.
