5 - Divine kenosis

Summary

To say that the Creative Word was so self-emptied as to have no being except in the infant Jesus, is to assert that for a certain period the history of the world was let loose from the control of the Creative Word.

Archbishop William Temple

Kenotic Christology is the view, drawn from New Testament passages such as Philippians 2.7, that, in becoming incarnate, the second person of the Trinity somehow emptied himself (ekenosen) of certain divine attributes in order to become truly human. This view has had a rather chequered history in Christian doctrine, and, at least in the versions current in the literature, seems to be of recent vintage, dating back to the nineteenth century. There are some systematic theologians who are defenders of kenotic Christology today. And in the recent literature, several philosophical theologians have sought to show that a case can be made for the doctrine, which helps in explaining how Christ could be ‘fully God and fully man’ at one and the same time. In this chapter we shall restrict ourselves to consideration of the recent philosophical-theological literature on the subject, making reference to the wider literature on kenotic Christology only where it is germane to this contemporary discussion of the doctrine.

This chapter approaches the topic of kenotic Christology by outlining two generic versions of the doctrine that are often conflated in the literature. These two sorts of kenotic Christology we shall designate ‘ontological’ and ‘functionalist’, respectively.