Keneosis, Kenotic Theory and Divine Revelation by Tamice Namae

This paper explores various arguments related to the incarnation of Christ and Kenotic Christology. It will show that, functional and ontological theories of kenotic Christology are not exclusively slippery slides toward heresy but they can serve as onramps for a more fortified orthodoxy. Kenotic Christological theories have raised questions related to the divine incarnation which provide a new way to approach the mystery of the incarnation and which give more insight into the humility of God. This paper will begin with an introduction to Kenotic Christological theories and the arguments against them. The body of the paper will consist of answering the question of what we can know about the divine before the Incarnation and how Christ ministry fits within the criteria of the Jewish understanding and recognition of YHWH. The conclusion will determine whether Kenotic theory is necessarily implausible or helpful upon a different exegetical approach to Philippians 2. This new way of understating kenosis and divine revelation can be the basis for a more ardent love, appreciation, and worship of Jesus the Christ and Son of God. Kenotic Christological theories began to emerge in the 19th and 20th centuries as an attempt to understand what was meant by the Greek word ekenōsen in Philippians 2:6-7. The larger context of this passage communicates the humility of Christ and exhorts believers to have the same mind and follow the example set by Christ in his earthly life. It states:

1Therefore if there is any encouragement in Christ, if there is any consolation of love, if there is any fellowship of the Spirit, if any affection and compassion, 2make my joy complete by being of the same mind, maintaining the same love, united in spirit, intent on one purpose. 3Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves; 4do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others. 5Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, 6who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. 8Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. 9For this reason also, God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, 10so that at the name of Jesus EVERY KNEE WILL BOW, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Theologians and scholars have sought to understand the mystery of the incarnation and to determine what exactly is meant by the use of the word ekenōsen in a way that stays within the confines of orthodoxy. C. Stephen Evans does a superb job of explaining Kenotic Christology in his work Exploring Kenotic Christology: the self-emptying of God, he states: “Kenoticism insists that, in assuming our humanity, the divine Son “emptied himself,” that is, “in some way [the Son] limited or temporarily divested himself of some of the properties thought to be divine prerogatives, and this act of self-emptying has become known as ‘kenosis’.” Stephen J. Wellum goes a step further and divides the various theories into two categories: Ontological Kenotic Christology which deals with which essential properties of the divine nature, if any, can be relinquished in order for God to actually embrace humanity in Christ and Functional Kenotic Christology which deals with the divine will and how God exercises the divine will in Christ. While Wellum seems to be more sympathetic to a functional view of Kenotic Christology, he asserts that there are serious problems with all kenotic Christological theories. He argues that Kenoticism does not appropriately deal with the distinction between “nature” and “person” and went so far as to redefine the ways in which these terms function in Trinitarian and Christological theology. He argues that Kenotic theories fail to maintain continuity between the preexistent Logos and the incarnate Son, which has obvious heretical implications. Kenotic theory also, according to Wellum fails to rightfully attribute cosmic functions to the Son, fails to do justice to the entire biblical presentation of Christ and thus is irreconcilable with the Chalcedonian definition of the incarnation. It is the last three objections the remainder of the paper will address. With regard to doing justice to the entire biblical presentation of Christ and the cosmological functionality of Jesus during His earthly ministry, one must ask the question of what can be known about YHWH prior to the incarnation? In other words what was the defining criterion which upon observation one could draw the conclusion that God was present. We turn now to Richard Bauckham’s critical work. In Jesus and the God of Israel Baughman gives the reader helpful tools to use in terms of understanding the Jewish understanding of monotheism. He goes on to note that :

the intention of New Testament Christology, throughout the texts, is to include Jesus in the unique divine identity as Jewish monotheism understood it the writers to this deliberately and comprehensible by using precisely those characteristics of the divine identity on which Jewish monotheism focused in characterizing God as unique. They include Jesus in the unique divine sovereignty over all things, they include him in the unique divine creation of all things, they identify him by the divine name which names the unique divine identity, and they portray him as accorded with worship, which for Jewish monotheists is recognition of divinity identity. In this way, they develop a kind of Christological monotheism which is fully continuous with early Jewish monotheism but distinctive in the way it sees Jesus Christ himself as intrinsic to the identity of the unique God.

Understanding the incarnation must begin with understating how the Bible defines divinity and more specifically what are the attributes and actions that make God unique. It should be noted that the incommunicable attributes or more commonly known as the Omni’ s (i.e omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent) and the im's (such as immutable, impassible, etc.) are not biblical phrases but Greek philosophical terms meant to communicate attributes that God alone possesses. These ideas cause friction when incarnation is brought to bear because of dualistic attempts to separate God from man. These terms albeit well-intentioned, do a disservice to the Bible understanding of divinity and cause unnecessary rifts in appreciation of the incarnation because at their core they bifurcate nature and essence. Unfortunately, the Greek philosophical rendering of terms related to deity are the ones that stuck with theologians and philosophers alike. Take this excerpt from a book called Doctrine by Mark Driscoll and Gerry Breshears: Jesus possessed the attributes of God. In 1 Timothy 1:17, Jesus is “King” and “the only God” who has the divine attributes of externality, immortality, and invisibility. According to other scriptures, the other divine attributes Jesus possessed during his life on the earth include Omnipresence, omniscience (including predicting the future) eternality, creator sustainer of all creation, savior, sovereignty and deity as the only God. However, positioning Christ within the Godhead due to His possession of the divine identity the way Bauckham does, not only frees us from the pressures of explanation which produce heretical Kenotic Christological theories but it also frees us from having to dismiss them altogether. This paradigm makes the problem simple: if God has always been defined by the things He does and the things He does are things only God can do, then anyone who does those things, is God. Jesus in the gospel narratives demonstrates the ability and the authority to do these “God-things” this would naturally lead a Jewish monotheist toward the conclusion that this Nazarene was a God-Man. In short, the divine criterion in Jewish monotheism’s was the ability to create, to rule all things, to be in covenant, to offer salvation, to offer forgiveness of sins, to deliver Israel at the end of the age and to possess the divine name. Jesus of Nazareth either did or promised to do all of these things during His earthly ministry. In light of this, one can have decreased reluctance to accept the plausibility of Robert Feenstra’s kenotic Christology which starts with the incarnation and sets forth Christ as the tool to understand divinity. In essence, whatever we see in Jesus is what God is like. Wellum disputes this approach because he thinks it is dismissive of the whole counsel of scripture and considers it to have gone beyond a Christological hermeneutic to being a Christological reduction. According to T.W. Bartel [Feenstra] argues

that the kenotic theologian has plausible responses to two of the main objections made against her. One of those objections is that kenotic Christology is unmotivated unless it maintains that some of the attributes are incompatible with truly being human—which is inconsistent with the orthodox Christian affirmation that the post-resurrection Christ is not only human but also exemplifies every one of the attributes of divine glory. Unlike most other kenotic theorists, Feenstra fully appreciates the strength of the theological evidence for this orthodox belief. He also proposes an intriguing way out for the kenotic theologian: distinguish between incarnation per se, which is compatible with having all the attributes of divine glory, and kenotic incarnation—sharing our human condition.

In other words, Feenstra gives the theologian permission to start at a different end of the equation. Instead of trying to figure out how our conception of God fits into Jesus, we can start with Jesus to gain our perception of God. This position seems most consistent with Jesus’ response to Phillip “if you have seen me, you have seen you have seen the Father.” Or “No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him” Armed with these tools, it is possible to exegete Philippians 2 in a way that honors the text, the counsel of scripture and stays within the confines of orthodoxy. First, if one focuses principally on the Greek word morphé (form) then the emptying (ekenōsen) is freed from the snare of theological and interpretative pressure. Throughout the scripture, the word morphe speaks of outward appearance, not internal essence. It refers to the ways that God reveals himself in terms of how an onlooker would perceive him—the form of Christ we behold in scripture changed, not His essence. Bauckham writes: He possessed all the majesty of the deity, performed all its functions and enjoyed all its prerogatives. He was adored by His Father and worshipped by the angels. He was invulnerable to pain, frustration, and embarrassment. He existed in unclouded serenity. His supremacy was total, his satisfaction complete, his blessedness perfect. Such a condition was not something he secured by effort. It was the way things were and had always been, and there was no reason why they should change. Secondly, the emptying that is characterized by the word ekenōsen can be extremely valuable for worship and orthopraxy when pointed away from quibbling over the relational dynamics of Christ’s nature and essence and is pointed toward Christ’s disposition toward it. In this way, Kenosis is removed as an interpretive lens and is replaced by a focus on Christ’s attitude toward His own identity. The beauty of the incarnation is not found in the metaphysical explanations of how it works, but rather in the details of what it means and who it’s for. Jesus’s nature, identity, and actions as the divine Son were never relinquished, that is simply not what the emptying refers to. The kenosis or emptying specified in Philippians 2 was in relation to the way Christ’s divine identity affected his own humanity. Christ emptied himself of the right to use his power as God for Himself. He entrusted his humanity to the Father’s care and in this way, he stands as an example for humanity in submission and the revelation of God in his actions on the behalf of humanity at the same time. In Christ we see a man fully submitted to the Father and who though having the power to shield or rid himself from the vulnerability, suffering, and perils of a human life only used that power deliver those around him from them. In this way, kenotic Christology leads us to a moment whereupon beholding the face of the God-Man Jesus we are beckoned not only to adore Him but to long be conformed into the same image and to have the same mind. Bibliography Bartel, T. W. "Trinity, Incarnation, and Philosophy." Religious Studies 31, no. 03 (1995): 391. doi:10.1017/s0034412500023738. Baukham, Richard. Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Essays on the New Testament's Christology of Divine Identity. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2008. Brazier, Paul. "Exploring Kenotic Christology: The Self-Emptying of God. Edited by C. Stephen Evans." The Heythrop Journal 49, no. 1 (2007): 132-34. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2265.2007.00361_3.x. Davidson, Ivor J. "Exploring Kenotic Christology: The Self-Emptying of God." Ars Disputandi 7, no. 1 (May 06, 20014): 32-37. doi:10.1080/15665399.2007.10819944. Driscoll, Mark, and Gerry Breshears. Doctrine: What Christians Should Believe. Crossway, 2010. LEVERING, MATTHEW. "PHILIPPIANS 2:5–11 IN THE Summa Theologiae." Paul in the Summa Theologiae, 2014, 267-82. doi:10.2307/j.ctt7zswbz.13. Wellum, Stephen J. God the Son Incarnate: The Doctrine of Christ. Crossway, 2016.