Lecture 5-2: Kenotic Christology

Philippians 2:6-7 - "who, existing in the form of God, didn't consider equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men." (World English Bible)

John 1:14 - "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." (WEB)

The text kenoticism starts from

Philippians 2:6-8 is one of the densest Christological statements in the New Testament, and every side of this debate has to reckon with its actual wording rather than a paraphrase of it. Paul writes that Christ Jesus, "existing in the form of God, didn't consider equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, yes, the death of the cross" (Phil 2:6-8, WEB).

Two exegetical questions decide most of what follows. First: what does emptied himself (heauton ekenōsen) take as its object - what, specifically, did the Son empty himself of? The verb has no stated object in the Greek; Paul says the Son emptied himself, full stop, and then immediately explains the emptying with two participial phrases: taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men. On the most natural reading of the grammar, the "emptying" is explained by what follows it, not by some unstated third thing - the Son emptied himself by taking on servanthood and human likeness, not by subtracting divine properties before or apart from that act. Second: what does "form" (morphē) mean here, and does the "form of a servant" the Son takes correspond in a technical, one-to-one way to any specific divine "form" or attribute he sets aside? Most exegetes across traditions read morphē as closer to "essential nature made visible in a mode of existing" than as a stand-in for one particular attribute like omniscience.

This matters because kenotic Christology, in its strongest and most historically influential form, reads much more into the "emptying" than the immediate grammar straightforwardly supports.

Strong kenoticism: the nineteenth-century proposal

The kenotic theory associated with Gottfried Thomasius in German Lutheran theology, and with figures such as Charles Gore in Anglican theology, in the nineteenth century proposed something more specific and more theologically ambitious than the older two-natures framework: the eternal Son, in becoming incarnate, actually laid aside - not merely veiled behind a human nature, but genuinely relinquished for the duration of the incarnation - certain divine attributes incompatible with a normal, finite, developing human consciousness: omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence. On this account, the incarnate Son's ignorance of the day and hour (Mark 13:32) is not explained by "he did not know it according to his human nature while knowing it according to his divine nature" (the classical, two-natures answer); it is explained by the fact that the Son, for the time being, simply did not possess unlimited knowledge at all, in either nature, because he had emptied himself of it.

The theory's appeal is real and should be stated fairly before it is criticized: it takes with full seriousness texts that otherwise require some interpretive labor to square with a Son who is, without qualification and in every respect, still fully God during his earthly ministry. If the incarnate Son really does not know something, is it not simpler, kenotic theologians ask, to say he genuinely does not know it, rather than reaching for a nature-distinction most ordinary readers of the Gospels have never heard of and would not find in the text on their own?

The classical objection

The classical objection, made forcefully at the time by theologians defending the historic two-natures Christology and still made by the great majority of systematic theologians across every tradition today, is not a matter of preferring an older theory out of habit. It is that strong kenoticism has a genuinely high cost: if the Son actually ceased to possess omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence for roughly three decades, then for roughly three decades the second person of the Trinity was not, in the full and ordinary sense, fully God - because full deity, on essentially every classical definition across every tradition, includes those very attributes as necessary, not optional, properties of what it is to be God at all. A Son who has laid aside omniscience has laid aside deity itself for that period, not merely veiled it, which raises an acute question the theory has struggled to answer: was the second person of the Trinity, then, fully divine and fully human simultaneously during the incarnation, or was there instead a stretch of history in which the Trinity was, functionally, down to two fully divine persons and one who was not? Historic Trinitarian theology (chapter 2) has no resources for that outcome; it is not a modification of Nicene Christology but arguably a departure from it. This is why strong kenoticism, though seriously argued by able theologians, never became more than a minority position, and why its critics - across Reformed, Lutheran, Catholic, and Orthodox lines alike, since Chalcedonian orthodoxy is common ground to all of them - regard the theological bill it runs up as too high to pay for the exegetical convenience it buys.

The modern, modest form: exercise, not possession

Partly in response to that objection, most contemporary theologians who still find something right in the kenotic instinct hold a considerably more modest version, sometimes called "functional" kenosis as against the older "ontological" kenosis. The key move is a distinction between possessing an attribute and exercising it. On this account, the incarnate Son never actually ceased to possess omniscience, omnipotence, or omnipresence - deity is not something that can be laid down and picked back up, and the second person of the Trinity remained fully divine, in full possession of every divine attribute, throughout the incarnation. What the Son voluntarily restrained was the exercise of those attributes as they bear on his human, historical life: he chose, as a matter of the Father's will and his own voluntary self-limitation, not to draw on unlimited knowledge or unlimited power in the ordinary course of living a genuinely human life, growing genuinely in wisdom, and genuinely being tempted (a point 5-3 develops further). This is close enough to the older two-natures answer that some theologians argue it is really just that answer restated in different vocabulary - "the Son did not display omniscience in his human nature" versus "the Son restrained the exercise of omniscience" can sound, on a generous reading, like two ways of saying nearly the same thing. Other theologians insist there remains a genuine difference: the modest kenotic account locates the restraint in a single, unified subject's voluntary choice, in a way meant to take the language of the Son's own agency and self-limitation (as in Phil 2:7's "emptied himself," an active, first-person verb) more seriously than a nature-distinction that can sound, if stated carelessly, like something that merely happened to the Son rather than something he did.

Whichever way that comparison is finally judged, the modest form escapes the classical objection to the strong form, because it never has the Son actually lacking any divine attribute at any point - only choosing not to exercise the full scope of what he never stopped possessing.

6. Further Reading

• C. Stephen Evans, ed., Exploring Kenotic Christology: The Self-Emptying of God (Oxford University Press, 2006) - the standard contemporary collection defending and criticizing kenotic Christology from multiple angles.
• Thomas V. Morris, The Logic of God Incarnate (Cornell University Press, 1986) - an analytic philosopher's defense of the classical two-minds Christology against kenotic alternatives.
• Donald G. Dawe, The Form of a Servant: A Historical Analysis of the Kenotic Motif (Westminster Press, 1963) - the standard historical account of the nineteenth-century German Lutheran kenotic theologians.
• Gordon D. Fee, Paul's Letter to the Philippians (New International Commentary on the New Testament, Eerdmans, 1995) - a careful evangelical exegesis of Philippians 2:6-11's grammar and background.
• Oliver Crisp, Divinity and Humanity: The Incarnation Reconsidered (Cambridge University Press, 2007) - includes a sustained analytic critique of both strong and modest kenotic proposals.
• Sarah Coakley, "Kenōsis and Subversion," in Powers and Submissions (Blackwell, 2002) - a feminist theological engagement with kenotic themes from outside the strict analytic-theology debate, broadening the conversation beyond its usual participants.