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