Will and Nature

Is the begetting of the Son an act of God’s will or nature. Barth, with the tradition, says that it is not an act of God’s will if will means the freedom to be thus or not to be thus. “God cannot not be God,” and Barth is correct that this is identical to the statement “He cannot not be Father and cannot be without the Son. His freedom or aseity in respect of Himself consists in His freedom, not determined by anything but Himself, to be God, and that means to be the Father of the Son.” Yet, God would still be God if He had not willed to create.

Yet, Barth, following a comment from Aquinas (ST 1, 41, 2), says that there is a sense in which the begetting of the Son is an act of God’s will: This is true “only of will in which Deus vult se esse Deum, as the act of will in which God, in freedom of course, wills Himself and in virtue of this will of His is Himself. In this sense, identically indeed with God’s being Himself, the begetting of the Son is also an ERGON THELESEOS [work of will] for her THELESIS and PHUSIS are one and the same.” For God to will to be God is for God to be God, and since being God means being Father and Son, for God to be God is for the Father to will the begetting of the Son.

This identification of will and nature is essential at this point. Errors lie in either direction: If they are not identical, then (it would seem) either God’s will determines His nature or His nature determines His will. To take the first possibility: God wills to be Father and Son in such a way that this is NOT identical to His being Father and Son, which makes the Father-Son a result of a “secondary” decision of the will, which in turn suggests modalism (of a voluntarist variety). On the other hand, God’s will to be Father and Son might be a will to conform to some prior nature, then God has an “unwilled” nature to which he must conform His will. This second error is not necessarily modalist, but it is intellectualist. Identifying will and nature is essential to avoid dizzying pendulum swings between volunarist and intellectualist poles.