Kenosis: The Self-Emptying of Christ in Scripture & Theology ed. by Paul T. Nimmo and Keith L. Johnson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Kenosis: The Self-Emptying of Christ in Scripture & Theology ed. by Paul T. Nimmo and Keith L. Johnson Mark Mattes Kenosis: The Self-Emptying of Christ in Scripture & Theology. Edited by Paul T. Nimmo and Keith L. Johnson. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2022. xi + 332 pages. This book on Christ's "emptying" or kenosis (Philippians 2:6–8), usually interpreted not as a loss Christ suffers but instead as a gain, that is, his incarnation, is a collection of sixteen contributions, scanning the history of Christian interpretation of kenosis and offering contemporary statements on the doctrine, all authored in honor of retired Princeton theologian Bruce McCormack. These essays are extremely helpful for anyone studying Christology. In this brief overview, I will focus on those essays which I found most relevant. In the introduction, Paul Nimmo and Keith Johnson point out that historically the kenosis was not seen as the incarnate Logos somehow foregoing his divine powers but instead as his assumption of a human nature and the "consequent concealment of the divine glory during his life on earth" (4). They refer to the historic dispute (early seventeenth century) between the theological faculties of Giessen, which argued that Christ refrained entirely from using divine attributes during his ministry, and Tübingen, which argued that Christ did employ the communicated attributes of divinity, but only in secret (4). Unfortunately, the nineteenth-century Erlangen theologian Gottfried Thomasius, who advocated that the incarnate Christ divested himself of some of his divine attributes, is not considered in this volume. However, David Fergusson does present the influence of Thomasius's Erlangen kenotic theory on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Anglican theologians. Interpreting Philippians 2, John M. G. Barclay points out that, unlike Edwardian interpretations of kenosis, the apostle Paul did not see Christ's self-emptying as displaying "an ethical ideal" but instead as his enveloping "the full gamut of human life within the renewing love of God—a purpose that reaches its goal in the saving Lordship of Christ" (13). Christ's vulnerability in the incarnation should not be seen as antithetical to divine power because God's power operates "on a different plane" than that of human power. It is radically transcendent, "such that [paradoxically] it can be expressed both in humanly measured weakness and in human measured power" (17). [End Page 210] Han-luen Kantzer Komline examines kenosis in Augustine. For Augustine, as for the majority of Christians, "kenosis happened, not by giving up the form of God, but by taking up the form of a servant" (100). Specifically, the form of a servant was added, not the form of God subtracted (107). Augustine was both proto-anti-Nestorian and proto-anti-monophysite. His response was not to resolve the "Pauline paradox" with how God could incarnate himself as a slave. Instead, "Christ was greater than himself and he was less than himself simultaneously as one unified person" (113). In a powerful essay, Katherine Sonderegger builds on Cyril of Alexandria's imagery of heated iron to describe the hypostatic union: "Altogether and through and through, the iron bar is fiery hot; and altogether and without reserve, the fire is ironclad. They penetrate one another, that is, and although the fire is the sole efficient cause—important for Cyril and later for Thomas Aquinas—the iron receives the fire wholly, and indeed becomes a molten mass …" (126). This leads her to conclude: "What Jesus saw, or better, what he was, in his own unique person, was the holy fire who is God, cascading down the ladder between heaven and earth, a molten divine Son, who will make his own flesh the sacrifice to be burned to ash on the world's altar" (135). Matthew J. Aragon Bruce, interpreting Luther's view of kenosis, notes that Luther "refused to consider the logos asarkos, i.e., the word apart from the incarnation. It is in personal union with humanity that the Word saves us. It is this union itself … which saves us because this is what accomplishes the work of salvation" (173). In his constructive essay, the late Christoph Schwöbel summarizes the whole point of the kenosis thus: "While Christ was in...