Moltmann’s Perichoretic Trinity

Perichoresis is a concept originally appropriated by Moltmann in order to frame his understanding of an intensely relational, communal Trinity. Derived from the teaching of John Damascene and Richard of St. Victor, perichoresis has come to refer to a circulatory, interpenetrating, relational sharing between two realities or forms of existence, to the point where they co-define each other and share attributes.
 
In reference to Christology, perichoresis was traditionally seen as a one-way interpenetration and exchange between the two natures, flowing solely from the divine to the human—the classic image was the piece of iron (the humanity) heated red by fire (the divinity). But much like his trinitarian radicalization of the Lutheran communicatio idiomata, Moltmann posits a reciprocal exchange in his articulations of perichoresis. For him, perichoresis becomes the great binary blurring device; it is, in essence, the supreme form of “both/and” (rather than “either/or”) reasoning. Dualisms dissolve and conceptual dichotomies disintegrate as perichoretic logic argues for unity and diversity to co-participate as mutually-shaping realities.
 
In Moltmann’s trinitarianism, perichoresis involves a clear kenotic element. His use of kenosis here bespeaks the necessary limitations inherent in relationship, rather than a divestiture of some attribute or another. Moltmann will speak of the trinitarian persons “making room” for each other; they are three distinct persons, and yet are united in all things, through the hospitable perfection of kenotic love.
 
Each one of [the three Persons] is active and passive, giving and receiving at the same time. By giving themselves to each other, the perichoretic community is also a kenotic community. The Persons are emptying themselves into each other. . . . It is divine love which draws a Person so much out of himself, that it exists “in” the other. It is the self-emptying of the three persons in this perichoretic exchange that Moltmann relies on to deflect the charge of tri-theism, which often assails his social trinitarian outlook.
 
Though many of Moltmann’s more impassioned descriptions of his perichoretic Trinity are striking, some scholars have objected to his sometimes inconsistent employment and qualification of such language. But more directly pertinent to our project is how Moltmann eventually applies the concept of perichoresis to his understanding of the two natures in Christ (which is how John Damascene initially employed it). Explicit affirmation of this perichoretic unity of the natures has emerged in Moltmann’s more recent work:
 

Perichoresis describes the unity of Godhead and humanity in the person of Jesus Christ. This is not a matter of two who are by nature similar being bound together in inward community. Here are two different natures—that is, the one and the other. . . . In Christology, perichoresis describes the mutual interpenetration of two different natures, the divine and the human, in the God-human being Christ.

Perichoresis, as we noted for his trinitarianism, is a kenotic reality for Moltmann. Thus, when we talk about Moltmann’s kenotic Christology, we must recognize that we are dealing with a dual-leveled kenosis. One level is intra-trinitarian and refers to the continued kenotic relating between the divine persons; this is derived by Moltmann from the way in which Christ relates to the Father and the Spirit in the course of earthly life. The other level of the kenosis is the relationship between Christ’s divinity and humanity, and refers to the humiliation and lowliness undertaken by God in becoming human. Both dimensions of this perichoretic kenosis are operative in his understanding of the incarnation, though they are not always explicitly highlighted and much of the specifics of their mutually exchanging interpenetration (especially any kind of specific ontological commentary) are left without speculation. Moltmann is comfortable to simply say: “This is undoubtedly God’s greatest mystery: his closeness . . . Emmanuel, ‘God with us’—with us, the godless and God-forsaken.”
 
Once these themes are balanced, we can see the truth in Gary Badcock’s assessment that “Moltmann’s position is best understood as a trinitarian intensification of the doctrine of the hypostatic union. . . . Moltmann’s point is not to deny the divinity but to affirm its unity with the humanity, on the basis of his understanding of the unity of the economic and the immanent Trinity.” 

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

The Christology of Jürgen Moltmann, 2019 

Radical and Revelatory: Moltmann’s Reading of Kenosis

The beginning of Moltmann’s kenotic Christology is thus neither in the concealment nor abandonment camp; his overarching kenotic theology means that his Christology reads Phil 2 as revelatory for divinity itself. Likewise, Colin Gunton (in the midst of a salvo against radical forms of kenotic Christology) writes that “it seems not inappropriate to speak of a self-emptying of God, but only if it is understood in such a way as to be an expression rather than a ‘retraction’ of his deity.” This well sums the trajectory that initializes Moltmann’s kenotic Christology.
 
Thus, we can call the baseline outlook on kenotic Christology that we find in Moltmann a “radical revelatory” model, for it uniquely combines emphases from both the radical interpretation and the revelatory. It entails real limitations applied to the divinity of Christ in his becoming human, but these limitations are extensions and radicalizations of the already existing kenotic patterns of the God-world relationship. The thematic thrust of this is conveyed by Moltmann in the following key passage:
 

[If] the significance of the Son’s incarnation is his true humanity, then the incarnation reveals the true humanity of God. That is not an anthropomorphic way of speaking, which is therefore not in accordance with God’s divinity; it is the quintessence of his divinity itself. . . . His strength is made perfect in weakness. The traditional doctrine about God’s kenosis has always looked at just the one aspect of God’s self-limitation, self-emptying and self-humiliation. It has overlooked the other side: God’s inward limitations are outward liberations. God is nowhere greater than in his humiliation. God is nowhere more glorious than in his impotence. God is nowhere more divine than when he becomes man.

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

The Christology of Jürgen Moltmann, 2019. 

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