Christ is the “living will” of the Father, says Athanasius. Rowan Williams glosses this with: “since Scripture makes clear that the Word is the understanding and purpose of the Father, then to claim that the Son exists by an act of will is absurd: he is the Father’s conscious, purposive act. Deny this, and you end up with the gnostic picture of an indeterminate divine void, which might turn out to be anything, at the source of being; unless you say that the Father’s expressed though or will exists in virtue of an innate thought and will that must be in some way different from it . . . which negates the essential scriptural idea of the Son as simply and directly the reasoning act of the Father.”
Have Reformed treatments of God’s will absorbed this point sufficiently?
