Concept

Kenosis

Intro

Philippians 2:7 says that Christ "emptied himself." The Greek verb is kenoō, and the noun formed from it, kenosis, has become the name for a whole family of views about what happened to the Son of God at the incarnation.

The question is simple to state and easy to get wrong. Emptied himself of what?

The answer most people assume, that he set aside some of his divine powers in order to become human, is the one the sentence itself rules out. Paul never says what Christ emptied himself of. There is no "of" in the sentence at all. What follows instead is a pair of phrases explaining how he emptied himself: by taking the form of a servant, and by being made in human likeness. The emptying happens by addition, not by subtraction. He did not become less; he took on more.

This matters far beyond exegesis. A whole school of nineteenth-century theology built a Christology on the subtraction reading, and it produced a Jesus who was God with the divine attributes switched off. That view has a name, kenotic Christology, and its problems are severe enough that using it to answer a challenge usually concedes the challenge. If someone objects that Jesus got hungry and tired and therefore cannot have been God, reaching for a kenosis that means "he gave up being omnipotent for a while" hands them the argument. The orthodox answer runs the other way, and it is stronger.

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In full

The kenosis hub, treating Philippians 2:5-11 exegetically, the nineteenth-century kenotic Christologies historically, and the boundary conditions any account must satisfy to remain within Chalcedonian orthodoxy. Sibling to Extra Calvinisticum, which supplies the positive doctrine that does the work kenoticism was invented to do, and to Communicatio Idiomatum, which governs how the two natures' properties are predicated of the one person.

The term derives from ekenōsen heauton in Philippians 2:7, within the hymn or encomium at 2:6-11 conventionally called the Carmen Christi. The passage is among the most heavily worked in the New Testament, and three separate disputes run through it: the meaning of morphē, the meaning of harpagmon, and the force of the participles following ekenōsen. Only the third is decisive for the doctrinal question, and it is the one most often skipped.

The distinction that organizes everything below is between ontological kenosis, the claim that the Son actually divested himself of divine attributes or properties, and functional kenosis, the claim that the Son voluntarily refrained from the independent exercise of divine prerogatives while retaining them. The first is the nineteenth-century innovation and it sits badly with Chalcedon, with divine immutability, and with the New Testament's own statements about what the Son was doing during the incarnation. The second is compatible with catholic orthodoxy and is roughly what the tradition had always meant.

The text

What Philippians 2:6-7 actually says

The structure, laid out clause by clause:

• who, existing in the form of God (en morphē theou hyparchōn)
• did not consider equality with God something to be grasped (harpagmon)
• but emptied himself (heauton ekenōsen)
• taking the form of a servant (morphēn doulou labōn)
• being made in the likeness of men (en homoiōmati anthrōpōn genomenos)

The decisive grammatical point

There is no genitive of content. In ordinary Greek, when a verb of emptying takes an object of what is removed, that object appears. Paul supplies none. He writes heauton ekenōsen, "he emptied himself," absolutely, and then attaches two aorist participles, labōn and genomenos.

Those participles are best read as participles of means or manner: they specify the mode of the emptying. He emptied himself by taking the form of a servant. The self-emptying is not a prior subtraction that made room for the humanity; it is the assumption of the humanity, described in the language of self-abasement.

This is the majority reading among modern commentators across confessional lines, including Gordon Fee, Peter O'Brien, Moisés Silva, and Markus Bockmuehl. It also explains why the passage never says what was surrendered: nothing was.

Any ontological-kenotic reading has to supply the missing genitive from outside the text, and the choice of what to supply, usually omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence, comes from a theological program rather than from Paul.

The context is ethical, not metaphysical

The whole point of the passage in its setting is exhortation: "have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus" (2:5), following the appeal at 2:3-4 to regard others as more important than oneself. Paul is grounding humility in the pattern of the incarnation.

That context tells against the subtraction reading in a way that is easy to miss. The Philippians are not being asked to divest themselves of their properties. They are being asked to use what they have in the service of others rather than for their own advantage. The analogy works only if the emptying is about the disposition of what is possessed, not about ceasing to possess it.

Harpagmon

The disputed noun at 2:6 admits three main construals:

1. Something seized (res rapta): equality with God was not something he had stolen
2. Something to be seized (res rapienda): equality was not something he grasped after
3. Something to be clung to or exploited (res retinenda): equality was not something to be used for his own advantage

Roy Hoover's philological study of the idiom harpagmon hēgeisthai (Harvard Theological Review 64, 1971) and N. T. Wright's development of it (Journal of Theological Studies 37, 1986) support the third construal, which is now widely followed. On that reading Paul is not saying the Son declined to seize something he lacked; he is saying he declined to exploit something he already had. That reading reinforces the addition reading of ekenōsen: possession is presupposed throughout.

The nineteenth-century kenotic Christologies

What they claimed

Beginning with Gottfried Thomasius of Erlangen in the 1840s and 1850s, and continuing through W. F. Gess in Germany and Charles Gore, P. T. Forsyth, and H. R. Mackintosh in Britain, a school of theologians argued that at the incarnation the Son genuinely divested himself of some divine attributes.

The usual form of the proposal distinguished:

• Relative or physical attributes, omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, which were surrendered
• Immanent or moral attributes, holiness, love, truth, which were retained

The motivation was serious and worth stating fairly. These theologians were responding to the rise of critical study of the Gospels and wanted a Christology that could accommodate a Jesus who grows in wisdom (Luke 2:52), does not know the day or hour (Mark 13:32), and is genuinely tempted. They judged that the classical account made the humanity look like a costume.

Why the proposal fails

1. It makes divine attributes accidental rather than essential. If a being can shed omnipotence and remain God, then omnipotence was never essential to deity in the first place. But the attributes are not detachable accessories; on the classical account, defended in Divine Simplicity, God is not composed of parts that could be subtracted. A being who was omnipotent yesterday and is not today was never omnipotent in the sense classical theism means.

2. It conflicts with divine immutability. See Divine Immutability. A change in what the Son possesses is a change in the divine nature, which is precisely what Chalcedon's "without change" (atreptōs) excludes.

3. The New Testament says the Son was upholding the universe during the incarnation. Colossians 1:17 says that in him all things hold together, and Hebrews 1:3 describes him as upholding all things by the word of his power, using a present participle. Neither text permits a period during which the Son had laid down the sustaining of creation. This is the doctrine treated at Extra Calvinisticum, and it is flatly incompatible with strong kenoticism.

4. It does not actually solve the problem it was invented for. The Gospel data about growth, ignorance, and temptation are handled by the two-natures account without any surrender of attributes, since those predicates attach to the human nature. The kenotic proposal pays a very high metaphysical price for a result already available.

5. Apologetically, it concedes objections rather than answering them. This is the practical point. When a Muslim or Unitarian objector argues that Jesus ate, slept, grew, and was ignorant, and therefore was contingent and not God, the strong-kenotic reply agrees that the Son's divine properties were suspended, which grants the objector's premise and then tries to survive it. The orthodox reply denies the premise: nothing was suspended, and the predicates in question belong to the assumed human nature. See the reduplicative strategy at Communicatio Idiomatum.

The contemporary discussion

Analytic philosophers of religion have revived a more careful version. Rather than saying the Son gave up omnipotence, some propose that the divine attributes be reconstrued as conditional, for instance omnipotent-unless-freely-and-temporarily-incarnate. Ronald Feenstra, Stephen Davis, and contributors to C. Stephen Evans's Exploring Kenotic Christology (Oxford, 2006) develop versions of this.

The proposal is more sophisticated than the nineteenth-century form and it is not obviously heretical, but it faces two standing objections: the conditional attributes look gerrymandered to fit the case they were built for, and the account still has to explain Colossians 1:17 and Hebrews 1:3. Thomas Morris's two-minds model (The Logic of God Incarnate, 1986) and Oliver Crisp's critique (Divinity and Humanity, 2007) are the main alternatives on offer. Donald Macleod (The Person of Christ, 1998) and Stephen Wellum (God the Son Incarnate, 2016) give the standard confessional criticisms.

The codex does not adjudicate the analytic dispute. It holds the boundary: any account on which the Son ceased to possess a divine attribute is outside Chalcedon.

The orthodox account

What the tradition means by kenosis:

• Addition, not subtraction. The Son took a full human nature into personal union without ceasing to be or to possess anything he was. The result is one person in two natures, treated at Hypostatic Union.
• Veiling, not divesting. The glory proper to the Son was concealed rather than surrendered. The transfiguration is the moment the veil lifts.
• Voluntary non-use of prerogatives. In the state of humiliation the Son did not exercise divine prerogatives independently but acted in dependence on the Father and by the Spirit. This is functional and voluntary, and it entails no loss.

The seventeenth-century Lutheran Giessen and Tübingen theologians divided over a narrower version of this question, whether during the humiliation Christ's human nature abstained from using the communicated divine attributes (Giessen) or used them secretly (Tübingen). The controversy is a useful marker of how carefully the tradition tried to keep non-use distinct from non-possession.

Analogy warning

Use no analogy here. State the distinction directly. Every popular illustration of the incarnation encodes a heresy, and a knowledgeable opponent will name it:

The correct move in live conversation is to state the two-natures grammar plainly: one person, two natures, each retaining its own properties, neither converted into the other, and predicates assigned to the person by way of the nature to which they properly belong.

See also

• Extra Calvinisticum, the positive doctrine that the Son continued to sustain all things while incarnate; the direct answer to what kenoticism was invented to explain
• Hypostatic Union, one person in two natures
• Communicatio Idiomatum, how properties of either nature are predicated of the one person
• Council of Chalcedon, the four adverbs that fix the boundary
• Incarnation, parent hub
• Christology, master hub
• Divine Immutability, the attribute strong kenoticism cannot preserve
• Divine Simplicity, why divine attributes are not detachable parts
• Council of Nicaea, on the Son's full deity
• Cyril of Alexandria, the patristic architect of the one-subject Christology
• Athanasius, on the Word acting in and beyond the body