Kenosis or sovereignty? Christ Jesus and the disclosure of the divine mind

Introduction

In the thesis set out in Church, Gospel and Empire: how the politics of sovereignty impregnated the West, ¹ I proposed that the colonization or subsumption of our understanding of divinity by sovereignty culminated in the fourth-century partnership of Church and empire and continued throughout subsequent church history. I then suggested that a robust kenoticism might repair the resultant misapprehension of divine power. In pursuit of this, I referenced Bruce McCormack’s exploratory paper in which he suggested reversing the genus maiestaticum (the genus of majesty) of classical Lutheranism and its genus tapeinoticum (the genus of humility). ² My hope was that this might mean that, rather than struggling to apply supposedly divine attributes to the human, the way might open up for us to apply attributes previously considered human to the divine. As David Brown put it, McCormack’s book ³ would suggest that the theologian’s task is not to consider first what it is to be divine and then to think about the Incarnation, but rather to ‘consider first the particular history of Jesus Christ, and then discover such ideas of divinity as emerge from that particular pattern of events’. ⁴

This way of framing the theologian’s task fitted my own faith experience. Coming from a somewhat legalistic Christian background from which, as a youngster, I rather hoped to escape, I was interrupted by a profound encounter with transcendence in my mid-teens. This encounter linked directly with my knowledge of the gospel testimony to Jesus and the kingdom of God and issued in a commitment to follow him. ⁵ Simply put, from that point on I regarded the Jesus of the gospel testimony as both the human Jesus of history and the God of eternity, revealing what God is like, what we ought to be like, and how we can be like it. In subsequent years, this consolidated into the incarnational hermeneutic that undergirds my theology. While this standpoint motivated much experimental counter-politics intended for the common good, the apparent contradiction between this depiction of applied incarnational theology and the sovereignty-orientated gospel of the church councils, creeds and politics responsible for much oppression of women, children, the poor, the stranger, the environment, prisoners and the sick became the focus of my theological research.

In the decade since David Brown’s observations, applied theologians and activists associated with the Ashburnham Kingdom Theology Research Collective, the Jim Forest Institute ⁶ and The Kenarchy Journal, ⁷ among others, have been exploring the implications of arguing directly from the Jesus of the Incarnation to God. Taking as our hermeneutical lens the gospel testimony as it has been handed down to us in the four Gospels, together with the Philippians statement that points towards them, ⁸ we have utilized the term ‘kenarchy’ to describe our particular configuration of kenosis. This existential and political approach to the Gospels resonates with the lived experience of those of us associated with the original thesis. It accords, too, with the increasing impact on us of feminist theologians who move in a kenotic direction, such as Catherine Keller, Anna Mercedes and Sarah Coakley. ⁹ While aware of McCormack’s different roots in the Reformed tradition, I nevertheless looked forward with excitement to reading his The Humility of the Eternal Son. The subsequent arrival of Paul Nimmo and Keith Johnson’s Kenosis ¹⁰ collection of contemporary essays dedicated to McCormack increased my expectation of significant developments.

Exploring McCormack’s approach

Unsurprisingly, my first intention was to explore the ways in which McCormack helps us to argue directly from Jesus to God, as David Brown expected. However, difficulties with this emerge swiftly from the Introduction onwards. McCormack is a clear thinker and writer and, for this, there is much to be grateful. The fact that the book is positioned as the first in an expected trilogy provides the restraint that characterizes his economy of expression. His decision to structure the argument via a critical history of kenotic theology recognizes the collaborative and progressive nature of theological knowledge. It also provides a helpful overview of a broad spread of kenotic thought. His intention, as the subtitle states, is the repair of Chalcedon. The front page explains that the Chalcedonian Definition of 451 ce never completely resolved the unity of the person of Christ and positions the book as a potential resolution of this. This has the effect of qualifying his exposition of Philippians 2.1–11 and the gospel testimony’s outworking to which it points. This despite his wonderful commentary on the Christ hymn in chapter 5 of his book and his very helpful discussion of the depiction of what he describes as the Christological subject in the Synoptics and John in chapter 6.

The objection to the Monophysites’ understanding of Jesus’ one nature that Chalcedon intended to resolve was that it rendered him neither fully divine nor fully human. Chalcedon set out to affirm that he was both fully divine and fully human via a doctrine of two natures. However, as McCormack shows, this failed to express properly what was happening in the Incarnation because of an underlying problem, namely that the human Jesus had no constitutive role in the composition of the person in which the two natures were supposed to subsist. ‘Jesus was said to be fully human … and yet he played no role whatsoever in defining the Christological subject.’ ¹¹ The problem was never fully resolvable because the early church fathers and the Chalcedonian bishops who proceeded them were committed to the idea of divine simplicity and impassibility, so that a human breathing, feeling, suffering Jesus could not possibly be constitutive of divinity. It would be a contradiction in terms. McCormack seeks a more appropriate configuration of the Incarnation while remaining as faithful as possible to Chalcedon. He does this by positing a special, receptive relationship between what he describes as the Eternal Son, identified with the Logos, and the human Jesus. Indeed, this particular receptivity is synonymous with his understanding of kenosis.

Kenosis, then, is just this: that ontological receptivity on the part of the eternal Son that makes the humility and obedience of Jesus to be his ‘own’ – not merely in a figurative possessive sense but in a sense that makes it clear that the subject of that human attitude and activity is also the eternal Son. ¹²

McCormack has given 33 years to researching and teaching these matters and so it is with some trepidation that I attempt to step gently in. For whether or not the idea of ontological receptivity resolves the aporia of Chalcedon as McCormack analyses it, the problem that it attempts to resolve emanates from theoretical properties applied to God extraneously to the incarnational Jesus. True, McCormack avoids, as he puts it, presupposing ‘a fully formed concept of God’. ¹⁴ But the ontological receptivity he puts forward emerges ‘through consideration of the ontological conditions in God that would render coherent and credible the earliest Christian confession – made in response to the history of Jesus – that “Jesus is Lord”’. ¹⁵ This statement immediately qualifies his approach. Rather than arguing directly from Jesus to our understanding of God, he introduces a consideration based in prior theological thought, which he distinguishes from the Philippian hymn as a necessary consideration of a range of dogmatic options required of theologians. ¹⁶ Something that, of course, Chalcedon was attempting. Yet who has the authority to say what the ontological conditions in God are that would render the confession of Christ’s Incarnation credible? The relevant argument here is that there is not a God outside of the revelation of Christ to which we submit the originary gospel mind; rather, the mind of Christ is what substantiates the ontology of God. Any dogmatic approach surely needs to justify itself in these terms.

Whether or not Chalcedon can be repaired or replaced is a moot point. However, whatever the case, Chalcedon needs to be brought to Jesus and not Jesus to Chalcedon. Chapters 5 and 6, or at least some of their findings, really needed to precede chapters 1 to 4. This difficulty with McCormack’s perspective is obvious again in the Introduction, when he explains his resistance to the idea of a common life of the Trinity that he regards as a tendency within orthodox theology towards an unitarianist approach to the divine persons, ¹⁷ to which he returns in depth in the final chapter. ¹⁸ The incarnational hermeneutic, from which the kenarchic approach stems, makes no such prior assumptions. Instead, it attempts to proceed from this, Paul’s originary statement about Jesus’ Incarnation, as encapsulated by such Synoptic and Johannine declarations as ‘This is my beloved son, listen to him’ ¹⁹ and ‘if you have seen me you have seen the Father’, ²⁰ and takes its Trinitarian perspective from there. The insightful discussion of the Christological subject in chapter 6 seems to affirm this, but the final chapter, with its emphasis on a Reformed attempt at repairing Chalcedon, ultimately brings extraneous considerations to the table that risk subsumption by sovereignty in a way that the gospel accounts themselves do not. On the basis of the original thesis set out in Church, Gospel and Empire: how the politics of sovereignty impregnated the West, this is of course hardly surprising. The Council of Chalcedon was summoned by the Roman Emperor Marcian (396–457 ce) at Pope Leo I’s request. It was an ongoing measure of the partnership of Church and empire and an attempt to anathematize heresy and impose ongoing hierarchical order on the Church, at least in part for the benefit of the Pax Romana. This by no means meant that nothing useful or true could proceed from it, but that it was characterized by a hierarchical perspective on humanity, gender, Church and authority, undergirded by a theology of Trinity and atonement that legitimated it. Any repair of Chalcedon needs to bring these subsumptive elements to the originary gospel testimony.

The kenarchy approach

Kenarchy as it is currently developing is a synonym for the phrase ‘kingdom of God’; as such, it is a form of socio-political practice developed from the use of the Greek verb keno (to empty), as found in Paul’s admonition to the Philippians to ‘have the mind of Christ Jesus’. This statement of the Incarnation is, as McCormack recognizes, probably the earliest we have. Written between 54 and 63 ce, ²¹ it almost certainly predates the four Gospels and points to their narratives. It has at its core – as many, including McCormack, think ²² – an already existing hymn, ²³ and is therefore the earliest description of incarnation. ²⁴ Rather than struggling over possible external definitions of the word keno, my approach has been to exegete it simply in the context of its use in this possible hymn and the sentences that introduce it. This can be done with considerable clarity in two ways. First, the word keno is used twice but quite differently, the first time as a noun, very negatively, and the second as a verb, very positively. This can hardly be accidental and sets the parameters for the whole discussion. Second, the content of the second emptying is spelled out in seven progressive steps that delineate the extent of what the emptying signifies.

The two occurrences of the root word are in verse 3 and verse 7, where keno-doxian (empty or vain glory) is contrasted with Christ’s eauton ekenosen (self-emptying). The difference is between a wrong emptiness or vain glory, which is emphatically to be avoided, and a right emptiness that Christ Jesus embraced to the true glory of God the Father. It follows that the glory of God is not about the self-promotion of God – or, in my terms, the sovereignty or domination of subsumed transcendence – but rather a self-emptying by God. According to Paul’s hymn, Christ Jesus demonstrates the content of this divine self-emptying in seven steps that are set out in verses 5–11. Step one emphasizes Christ’s utter divinity, ‘who in the morphe [form] of God subsisting’, ‘esteemed it not robbery ²⁵ to be equal with God’. ²⁶ Therefore, the emptying is itself defined as a divine act, not an act that severs from or ceases to be divine. Hence, the steps that follow are divine steps. Step two, ‘taking the morphe [form] of a slave’, makes the point crystal clear: the form of God manifests in the form of a slave. God is revealed to us as a slave, not as a hierarchical sovereign. It is very important to discern the order here: ‘taking the form of a slave’ is prior to becoming a human. Given that a slave is a human category, the ascription is from humanity to God without awkwardness. Paul apparently has no problem with Jesus’ humanity having a constitutive role in our understanding of the composition of deity.

Step three begins the fully incarnational move: ‘in omoiomati [likeness] of humanity becoming’ – that is, the divine becomes embodied in human flesh. Step four continues this movement of becoming humanity from likeness to ‘schemati [in figure] being found as a human’ – that is to say, that in Christ God became a human being. In step five, ‘he etapeinosen [humbled himself] becoming submissive to the point of death’. Here is the extent of the divine measure of humility, namely to death itself. Step six extends this to ‘even death on a cross’ – that is, that the humility of God deliberately confronted the ultimate consequence of resisting the dominant sovereign powers of empire that crucifixion represented at that time. Finally, step seven affirms the hugely counter-political nature of this divine kenosis. This is what resurrection and ascension accomplished.

Wherefore, God highly exalted him, and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

A sympathetic way forward

Christoph Schwӧbel’s essay ‘The generosity of the Triune God and the humility of the Son’ in Kenosis: the self-emptying of Christ in Scripture and theology largely affirms McCormack’s approach. He describes McCormack’s suggestion that ‘we take as the subject of the whole Chalcedonian Definition the one divine-human subject that is constituted through the ontological receptivity of the Son to Jesus as grounded from the beginning in the humility of the eternal Son’ as ‘a minimalist proposal with maximal effects’. ²⁸ However, Schwӧbel then suggests a series of questions for a helpful conversation with McCormack ‘on the interplay between Christology and the Doctrine of God’, which is to be the subject of the next volume in the series. ²⁹ The heart of these questions is Schwӧbel’s conviction, which coincides with mine, that:

Jesus’ true humanity is relational in the sense that in Jesus, the true humanity of others is restored, reinstated and recognised as the inalienable dignity conferred to every human being in that their personal identity is rooted in the triune God.