The Interpretative History of Kenosis

There are three general trends in the interpretative history of the passage, and we can identify them heuristically as follows:

• the traditional interpretation (which sees the kenosis as concealing the divine qualities in Christ),
• the radical interpretation (in which kenosis consists in the abandoning of divine qualities in Christ),
• a contemporary interpretation that has lately become quite prominent in exegetical scholarship (wherein the kenosis has been viewed as revelatory of God’s character and action).

 A. Concealment (Traditional) Interpretation

“In the form of God” [morphē theou] was taken as parallel with “equality with God” [einai isa theōi] and thereby glossed as the divine substance of the Second Person of the Trinity (Athanasius called it “the essential nature of the Word”). This reading of the “form of God,” when combined with the Hellenistic assumption of divine immutability,meant that the “self-emptying” (heauton ekenōsen, v. 7) was seen to entail a hiding or concealing of divine qualities in the midst of the human nature’s assumption: “‘[the Word] humbled himself’ with reference to the assumption of the flesh.
 
B. Abandonment (Radical) Interpretation

For these more-properly kenotic schools of thought the “kenosis of Philippians 2:7 and context (vv. 6–11) was . . . taken as a real self-relinquishing, limiting, or emptying of divine attributes, powers, prerogatives, and/or glory by the pre-existent Logos upon the event of the Incarnation.

Thomasius famously distinguished between what he termed the “immanent” attributes (which are divinely essential and necessary) and the “relative” attributes (which are not essential, because they only relate to the governing of the contingent created order). It is this second category of attributes, which includes omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence, that Thomasius saw to be relinquished by the assumption of humanity. Thus Thomasius felt he could say that though Christ truly abandoned certain divine properties upon becoming incarnate, he still “lacks nothing which is essential for God to be God.” The immanent attributes of the Godhead—love, faithfulness, holiness, etc.—are retained fully in the incarnation. But the self-emptying of the Logos in the kenotic Christology of Gess was yet more extreme. Whereas Thomasius supported the abandoning of some attributes possessed in the pre-existent state, Gess argued for their complete abandonment in order for the Logos to be transformed, quite literally, into a human person. As Gerald Hawthorne states, for Gess, “the presence of any divine attributes would destroy the reality of Jesus’ humanness.
 
C. Revelatory (Contemporary) Interpretation
Commentators as diverse as Hawthorne, Hurtado, Wright, David Brown, and James Dunn recognize that the hymn is calling the Philippians to account using the example of Christ’s sacrificial humility as a kind of paraenesis.

- Samuel J. Youngs, The Way of the Kenotic Christ: 

The Christology of Jürgen Moltmann, 2019 

 

The Ambiguity of “Emptying” in the Revelatory View

All of the contemporary exegetes we cited earlier as supporting the revelatory interpretation (Wright, Bauckham, Fee, Gorman, etc.) have maintained that the christological kenosis reveals that God is a God who loves in sacrificial ways and is willing to humble himself for the sake of his creation’s redemption. But these same thinkers are so resistant to being identified with the nineteenth-century radical kenoticists that they consistently refuse to follow through on the underlying logical and doctrinal force of their exegetical claims. What does the divine Son sacrifice? In what specific aspects of his existence is the divine Son humbled?
 
These questions are often treated by this group of interpreters as though their position itself does not necessitate any positive answers to them, as seen in the representative passages below:
 

It is not necessary . . . to insist that the phrase ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσεν demands some genitive of content be supplied [emptied himself of something]. . . . Rather, it is a poetic, hymn like way of saying that Christ poured out himself. - Hawthorne
 
Christ did not empty himself of anything; he simply “emptied himself,” poured himself out. This is metaphor, pure and simple.. . . Pauline usage elsewhere substantiates this view, where this verb means to become powerless or to be emptied of significance.The phrase “emptied himself” in should not be read as a reference to the divestiture of something (whether divinity itself or some divine attribute, or even as self-limitation regarding the use of the divine attributes), but “figuratively,” as a robust metaphor for total self-abandonment and self-giving. - Fee.

All of these statements argue that nothing constitutive of Christ’s pre-incarnational existence is given up (or, for Gorman, even limited) by the incarnational act. But the logic of the Philippians passage does not seem to allow for this; the paraenetic point fails without a sacrifice (a giving-up, a surrendering) of some ability, status, or capacity on the part of Christ. Moreover, these same commentators seem to be tacitly aware of this, for they imply quite clearly that Christ did, in fact, give up something, however vaguely stated, even in the same context in which they deny that he gave up anything.
 
Fee’s example, the second quotation above, demonstrates this most immediately: he claims that no genitive of content is required in Phil 2:7, but he then indicates that Paul’s usage of the emptying language elsewhere does imply some genitive of content—for to become “powerless” (Fee’s own language) is to be emptied of power, and to be emptied of significance (Fee’s own language) is clearly indicative of some content (“significance”) for the emptying. The other commentators use similarly ambiguous or contradictory phrasing. The corrective to such inconsistency can be rendered quite simply: to be sacrificial means to sacrifice something; to be humbled means to be diminished, limited, or divested in some way.
 
Ben Witherington makes the point effectively:

[Ekenōsen] must have some content to it, and it is not adequate to say Christ did not subtract anything since in fact he added a human nature. The latter is true enough, but the text says that he did empty himself or strip himself. . . . The contrast between verses 6 b and 7 a is very suggestive; that is, Christ set aside his rightful divine prerogatives or status. This does not mean he set aside his divine nature, but it does indicate some sort of self-limitation.

In short, some “genitive of inferred content” seems to be necessitated, though this is certainly not to say that we are thereby permitted to speculate in any sort of detail about the precise nature of that content.

But the point remains: one cannot undertake a sacrificial act that does not impose a sacrifice of something; sacrifice and humility imply content, else they surrender meaning. Moltmann gets at this quite strongly with his notion of “active suffering” or willing vulnerability. He argues that loving sacrifice-in-relation entails, at the most basic level, the surrendering of some level of security or status or power, because one has opened oneself up to another in relationship—the “other” can “affect” oneself.

- Samuel J. Youngs, The Way of the Kenotic Christ: 

The Christology of Jürgen Moltmann, 2019. 

Revelatory Interpretation on Kenosis

There are three general trends in the interpretative history of the passage, and we can identify them heuristically as follows: the traditional interpretation (which sees the kenosis as concealing the divine qualities  in Christ), the radical interpretation (in which kenosis consists in the  abandoning of divine qualities in Christ), and a contemporary interpretation that has lately become quite prominent in exegetical scholarship  (wherein the kenosis has been viewed as revelatory of God’s character  and action).

Revelatory (Contemporary) Interpretation

For the ancient Christologies, the majesty of God in Christ as the immutable, transcendent, almighty deity had to be preserved in the face of ancient challenges like Arianism, and so the hymn was appropriated to those ends. For the ninenteenth-century kenoticists, the radical humanity of the incarnation had to be emphasized in the face of ever-growing post-Enlightenment critiques of dogmatic history. Ultimately, however, in both cases, there seems to have been a certain determinative sense in which the passage was commandeered by foregoing doctrinal concerns, rather than being used to formatively direct those doctrinal concerns.
 
Gratefully, much contemporary scholarship has studied the passage with more critical awareness of such ingrained presuppositions, and this more neutral work has opened new avenues in understanding. Thus we now turn to a spectrum of scholarship on the passage that is both recent and integrative, encompassing many of the foregoing interpretive issues into a fresh outlook on the passage. This interpretation takes the kenosis of Christ to be not a concealment of divinity, and not an abandonment of any foregoing aspect of that divinity, but rather a revelation of the divinity’s character and nature. Hence we can call this the “revelatory” interpretation. The major interlocutors who have contributed to such an understanding include Gerald Hawthorne, N. T. Wright, Richard Bauckham, Gordon Fee, and Michael Gorman.
 

Philippians 2:7 and Its Christological Interpretations

The final element of this line of exegesis comes into focus when we consider that the participle hyparchōn has been argued by Moule (and followed more recently and forcefully by Wright, Gorman, and others) as being causative—“because he was in the form of God”—rather than concessive—“although he was in the form of God.”That is, the self-emptying does not provide any sort of exception to or abandoning of the form of God. Rather Christ’s self-emptying is illustrative of the fact that he possesses the form of God. This fundamentally shifts the understanding of kenosis in the passage. For, on this interpretation, it is quite correct to say that when Christ empties himself he is demonstrating his divinity, and not doing something that obscures it (as in the traditional interpretations) or that is an exception to that divine life (as in the radical interpretations).
 
Gorman is emphatic here: “Kenosis, therefore, does not mean Christ’s emptying himself of his divinity (or of anything else), but rather Christ’s exercising his divinity, his equality with God.” Wright expresses it similarly, saying ekenōsen “does not refer to the loss of divine attributes but—in good Pauline fashion—to making something powerless, emptying it of apparent significance. The real humiliation of the incarnation and the cross is that one who was himself God, and who never during the whole process stopped being God, could embrace such a vocation.”
 
Such an interpretation—the kenosis as a revelation of God’s divinity rather than an exceptional mode of being undertaken by that divinity—clearly challenges the radical forms of kenotic Christology.
 
Graham Ward, quoting F. F. Bruce, concurs, saying that “the implication is not that Christ, by becoming incarnate, exchanged the form of God for the form of the slave, but that he manifested the form of God in the form of the slave.” It is in this sense that we can unify also the tapeinotic and kenotic aspects of the hymn, which means that we must go beyond positions that claim “Jesus’ kenosis was sociopolitical rather than metaphysical,” for Christ’s “tapeinosis” (humble bearing of his life in the world) is reflective of the kenotic divine economy at large and involves the real suspension of things that had characterized the divine life “prior to” the incarnation (majesty, glory, splendor, etc. see John 17:5). Here then we find exegetical foundation for discussion of the “humanity of God.” 

- Samuel J. Youngs, The Way of the Kenotic Christ: 

The Christology of Jürgen Moltmann, 2019