Kenosis

“Who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men.”

— Phil. 2:6-7 (NASB)

Kenosis (from Greek kenoō, “to empty”) names Paul’s description of Christ’s self-emptying in taking “the form of a servant” (Phil. 2:6-7). Historic Christian doctrine holds that the eternal Son, in becoming man, retained his full divine nature undiminished throughout the incarnation: the “emptying” describes his taking on a genuinely human nature and voluntarily concealing his divine glory, not the loss of any divine attribute. “Kenotic theology,” a nineteenth-century Christological movement, held instead that the Logos divested itself of some or all of its divine attributes at the incarnation, a view the confessional tradition rejects as incompatible with Christ’s unchanged deity.

Confessional Witness

The question kenotic theology raises, whether the incarnate Son retained his full deity, was settled by the wider church centuries before the Reformation. The Council of Chalcedon (451) confessed one Christ “truly God and truly man,” his two natures joined in a single person “without mixture, without change, without division, without separation.”¹ The Second London Baptist Confession (1677) and the Westminster Confession (1646) restate the same doctrine, in nearly identical wording, as Christ’s “two whole, perfect, and distinct natures… inseparably joined together in one person, without conversion, composition, or confusion; which person is very God and very man, yet one Christ, the only mediator between God and man.”²³

Kenotic theology’s central claim, that the Logos gave up or laid aside a divine attribute, falls under what “conversion” rules out: exchanging an attribute for its absence would convert the divine nature into something less than fully divine, which “two whole, perfect, and distinct natures” excludes from the start.

Biblical Basis

Paul introduces the self-emptying in a participial construction: Christ, “existing in the form of God,” did not treat equality with God as “a thing to be grasped,” but “emptied himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men” (Phil. 2:6-7). The text supplies no object for what Christ emptied himself of; the two participles that follow the verb, “taking” and “being made,” are instrumental, explaining what the self-emptying consists of rather than naming something laid aside. Steven J. Duby writes that “the self-emptying is explained by the instrumental participles that follow it: Christ empties himself by taking the form of a servant and by being made in the likeness” of men.⁴

Paul’s other reference to the same movement states it in terms of riches and poverty, not deity gained or lost: “though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich” (2 Cor. 8:9). And in John 17, Jesus asks the Father to “glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed” (John 17:5), asking for a glory he already possessed to be manifested, not for a diminished deity to be completed. Duby explains:

The glory that the Son receives is, according to Jesus’ description of it, materially the same as the glory he had before the existence of the world. It is simply now manifested in his exaltation after a period of relative concealment under his flesh and humiliation.⁵

John Owen, quoted by Duby, states the underlying principle:

The advancement and exaltation of Christ as mediator to any dignity whatever, upon or in reference to the work of our redemption and salvation, is not at all inconsistent with the essential honour, dignity, and worth, which he hath in himself as God blessed for ever. Though he humbled himself, and was exalted in office, yet in nature he was one and the same.⁶

Historical Development

The seventeenth-century Lutheran debate

Lutheran Christology taught that Christ’s human nature received a communication of divine attributes from the divine nature (the genus majestaticum). This raised a question the Reformed tradition did not share: since the Gospels show Christ living as a limited, developing man, what became of those communicated attributes during his earthly life? Between 1607 and 1624 the Lutheran theological faculties at Tübingen and Giessen debated the answer. Tübingen held that Christ merely refrained from the public use of the communicated attributes, a “concealment” (Greek krypsis); Giessen held that he actually laid them aside, a “self-emptying” (kenōsis).⁷ Reformed theology rejected the debate’s own premise, the communication of divine attributes to the human nature, and so never had occasion to choose a side. Herman Bavinck writes that Reformed theologians, treating the kenosis question “with great caution,” were “not for a moment wanting to grant that the kenōsis (self-emptying) consisted in putting aside some or all of the divine attributes,” and instead held that Christ “voluntarily from all eternity taken on the form of a servant and in his incarnation laid aside or concealed the divine glory of his divinity,” never using it to his own advantage during his humiliation, so that his exaltation was a real reward earned by his obedience (Phil. 2:9; Heb. 1:3; 2:9-10; 5:7-10).⁸

The nineteenth-century kenotic movement

A distinct, later Christological movement, doctrinally unrelated to the Giessen-Tübingen dispute, arose “about the middle of the nineteenth century,” chiefly among German Lutheran theologians though with some Reformed adherents, as part of an effort to draw the Lutheran and Reformed traditions closer together and “to do full justice to the reality and integrity of the manhood of Christ.”⁹ Louis Berkhof documents four main forms:

Thomasius, Delitzsch, and Crosby distinguished the Logos’s “absolute” or essential attributes (power, holiness, truth, love) from its “relative” attributes (omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience), and held that the Logos laid aside only the latter while retaining its divine self-consciousness.¹⁰
Gess and H. W. Beecher held a more thoroughgoing view, which Berkhof reports one writer called “incarnation by divine suicide”: the Logos “depotentiated” itself of all its divine attributes, literally ceasing its cosmic functions and eternal consciousness, its consciousness becoming a purely human one that took the place of Christ’s own human soul.¹⁰
Ebrard agreed the incarnate Logos took the place of the human soul, but denied a complete depotentiation: the divine properties were retained, “but were possessed by the God-man in the time-form appropriate to a human mode of existence.”¹⁰
Martensen and Gore posited two non-communicating “life-centers” in the incarnate Logos, one continuing its trinitarian and cosmic functions, the other, depotentiated, united to the human nature and unaware of them.¹⁰

Charles Hodge documents the same three named theologians (Thomasius, Gess, and Ebrard) at greater length.¹¹ Isaak Dorner, “one of the first and the greatest of the opponents of the Kenosis doctrine,”¹² proposed a rival, non-kenotic theory of his own: a “gradual incarnation” in which the Logos progressively communicated divinity to an already-existing human soul, completed only at the resurrection.¹¹ Berkhof judges Dorner’s theory unsupported by Scripture, which treats the incarnation as a completed fact rather than a process, and prone to Nestorianism, since it locates Christ’s real personal center in the man Jesus rather than in the eternal Logos.¹³

The movement “enjoyed great popularity in Germany for a while,” Berkhof reports, “but has now practically died out there”; as German interest waned it found English successors (D. W. Forrest, W. L. Walker, P. T. Forsyth, Charles Gore, R. L. Ottley, and H. R. Mackintosh), though by the time Berkhof was writing it found “very little support at the present time.”¹³

Opposing Views

Moderate kenoticism (Thomasius’s form) holds that the Logos retained its essential divine attributes and self-consciousness while laying aside only its relative attributes, omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience, in order to live a genuinely limited human life.¹⁰

Radical kenoticism (Gess’s form) holds that the Logos was completely emptied of all its divine attributes and cosmic functions at the incarnation, its consciousness reduced to that of a human soul, only “redeveloping” into a full divine-human person over the course of Christ’s life.¹⁰

Objections and Responses

The kenotic theory does more justice to the reality of Christ’s humanity than a Christology that keeps his divine attributes fully intact throughout the incarnation. This was the kenoticists’ own stated aim.⁹ Berkhof answers that the theory secures neither the unity of Christ’s person nor the reality of his manhood:

The personal unity is not secured by assuming a human Logos as co-existent with a human soul. Nor is the reality of the manhood maintained by substituting for the human soul a depotentiated Logos. The Christ of the Kenotics is neither God nor man.¹³

Citing B. B. Warfield, Berkhof adds that on this view Christ’s human nature is “just shrunken deity.”¹³

“Emptied himself” (Phil. 2:7) states in plain language that the Logos gave up something of his deity. The Greek verb ekenōsen appears elsewhere in the New Testament only figuratively, meaning “to make void” or “of no account” (Rom. 4:14; 1 Cor. 1:17; 9:15; 2 Cor. 9:3); Warfield judged the American Revised Version’s “emptied Himself” a mistranslation on this basis.¹⁴ Even read literally, the verb’s grammatical object is Christ’s “being on an equality with God,” a state, not “the form of God,” a nature: Paul describes an exchange of one state for another, sovereignty for servanthood, not the surrender of deity itself.¹⁵

A God who can lay aside and resume divine attributes is not thereby shown to be less than the immutable God of Scripture; he is simply doing, in the incarnation, what an infinite God is free to do. Berkhof answers that this treats the divine mode of existence, the divine attributes, and the divine essence as if they could be separated from one another, “the very error that is condemned in connection with the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation,” and that a Logos capable of shedding his own attributes is “altogether subversive of the doctrine of the immutability of God” taught in Scripture (Mal. 3:6; Jas. 1:17).¹⁶ It also costs the doctrine of the Trinity itself:

It means a virtual destruction of the Trinity, and therefore takes away our very God. The humanized Son, self-emptied of His divine attributes, could no longer be a divine subsistence in the trinitarian life.¹⁷

Related Doctrines

References

Charles Hodge, “Chapter III. Person of Christ,” in Systematic Theology, Volume II (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 401-402. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677), chap. 8, “Of Christ the Mediator,” para. 2. ↩
The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chap. 8, “Of Christ the Mediator,” para. 2. ↩
Steven J. Duby, God in Himself: Scripture, Metaphysics, and the Task of Christian Theology, Studies in Christian Doctrine and Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019), chap. 3, “Incarnation in Context,” 158. ↩
Duby, 160. ↩
John Owen, quoted in Duby, 161. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 14, “The Only Begotten Son of the Father.” ↩
Bavinck, chap. 16, “The Exalted Lord Christ.” ↩
Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1969), 310. ↩ ↩²
Berkhof, 311. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶
Charles Hodge, “Chapter III. Person of Christ,” in Systematic Theology, Volume II (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 431-433. ↩ ↩²
Berkhof, 313. ↩
Berkhof, 313. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Berkhof, 311-312. ↩
Berkhof, 312. ↩
Berkhof, 312. ↩
Berkhof, 312-313. ↩