Kenoticism and Kenosis: What Christ Emptied Himself Of

Kenoticism is the family of Christologies holding that in the Incarnation the Son of God emptied Himself of some divine attributes, or of their use, so that He could live a truly human life; the name comes from kenosis, the "emptying" Paul describes in Philippians 2:7. It arose to honor something the Gospels set before their readers: a Son who did not know the hour of His return and who grew in wisdom. Its critics answer that a God who lays down His knowledge has changed in the one respect in which God cannot change, and Thomas Morris's two-minds Christology offers a rival way to keep the Gospels' limits real. The Many Beings Framework takes the question seriously and answers it by asking where the limitation lives: it is real, and it belongs to the human nature the Son took.

Key takeaways

• Kenoticism locates the Incarnation's limits in the divine nature. The Son gives up omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence, or ceases to use them, for the length of His earthly life.
• Its strength is honesty about Christ's humanity. Mark 13:32 and Luke 2:52 describe real ignorance and real growth, and this school refuses to treat them as appearances.
• Its critics press four objections. Immutability and simplicity, the identity of a Son who sheds essential attributes, the Trinitarian absurdity, and glorification.
• Frame-Indexed Classical Theism relocates the limitation. Against kenoticism and two-minds Christology alike, it holds that the limit belongs to the human nature and frame the Son assumed, so kenosis is the humility of taking a servant's nature.

What does kenosis mean?

Kenosis is a Greek noun meaning the act of emptying. The New Testament uses the verb five times, and the occurrence that gave the doctrine its name is Philippians 2:7, where Paul writes that Christ ekenōsen Himself. The NRSV renders it "emptied himself." The NIV renders it "made himself nothing," and the whole sentence reads:

"In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness." (Philippians 2:5–7, NIV)

Paul goes on to say that Christ humbled Himself to the point of death on a cross, and that God therefore exalted Him and gave Him the name above every name, so that every tongue will confess Him Lord.

Two features of the passage govern the debate that follows. First, Paul writes to change how the Philippians treat one another; the meaning of kenosis in context is the humility of One who had every right to hold His status and used it for others. Second, the grammar ties the emptying to a taking. The same word, morphē, "nature" or "form," stands in verse 6 of God and in verse 7 of a servant, and the NIV reads the emptying as accomplished "by taking the very nature of a servant."

The church fathers read it that way. Gregory of Nazianzus, preaching against those who denied the Son's full deity, put the Incarnation in two clauses: "What He was He continued to be; what He was not He took to Himself." The Council of Chalcedon in 451 confessed Christ in two natures "without confusion, without change, without division, without separation," each nature keeping its own properties in one Person. On the patristic reading, the Son emptied Himself by adding a nature, and His deity stayed whole.

What is kenoticism?

Kenoticism, also called kenotic Christology or kenotic theology, is the modern claim that the emptying reached the divine attributes themselves. Where the fathers read Philippians 2 as a taking, its defenders read it as a giving up: to become a real man, the eternal Son laid aside some of what belongs to God, or at least laid aside its exercise.

Beneath its variety the school makes one structural move. It explains how the Incarnation happened by a change on the divine side. The versions differ over how much changes.

Gottfried Thomasius, as usually summarized, held that the Son laid down the attributes that concern God's relation to the world, such as omnipresence and omniscience, while keeping those internal to deity, such as holiness and love. Wolfgang Gess went further and had the Word contract almost wholly into a human soul. P. T. Forsyth preferred to say the attributes were condensed into a human mode of life. Analytic philosophers of our own day revise which attributes God must have at all.

One distinction keeps the terms clear. Thomas Morris and Richard Swinburne also speak of the Son not availing Himself of His powers, but for them omniscience remains essential and possessed throughout. The school proper treats such attributes as ones the Son could lose, and did lose, for a time.

Where did kenotic Christology come from?

The question first became a quarrel among Lutherans. In the early seventeenth century, in a dispute that ran from 1619 into the late 1620s, the theologians of the universities of Giessen and Tübingen argued about Christ's humanity in His humiliation. Both sides agreed that His human nature possessed the divine attributes communicated to it.

Giessen, led by Balthasar Mentzer with Feuerborn and Winkelmann, held that during His earthly life Christ abstained from using them, and called that abstention the emptying. Tübingen, with Thumm, Hafenreffer, Osiander and Nicolai, held that He used them secretly, a view called krypsis, hiddenness. The dispute concerned use, and possession stayed common ground.

The nineteenth century moved the question from the human nature to the divine. Gottfried Thomasius (1802–1875), a Lutheran theologian at Erlangen, was the first theologian to set out a kenotic Christology by name, in Christi Person und Werk (1852–1861). His aim was to account for the limited consciousness of Jesus without surrendering the unity of God and man in Him. Wolfgang Friedrich Gess (1819–1891) pressed the idea to its limit. On his account the Word reduced Himself to what could exist as a human soul, His self-consciousness extinguished and then awakening and developing like ours, and Gess openly set aside the Chalcedonian Definition to say so.

British theologians took the idea up at the turn of the century. Charles Gore edited Lux Mundi (1889), and in his Bampton Lectures of 1891 he revisited the kenotic theory to explain how the incarnate Christ could be subject to human limits of knowledge. P. T. Forsyth, in The Person and Place of Jesus Christ (1909), argued that the Son condensed His attributes into a human mode, so that the Incarnation expressed omnipotence. H. R. Mackintosh followed Forsyth in The Doctrine of the Person of Jesus Christ.

The late twentieth century brought an analytic revival. Its representative collection is Exploring Kenotic Christology, edited by C. Stephen Evans (Oxford, 2006), with Stephen T. Davis asking "Is Kenosis Orthodox?" and Ronald Feenstra offering a method for rethinking the divine attributes. The same volume prints its critics, Sarah Coakley and Edwin Chr. van Driel among them. The Roman Catholic Church had already given its verdict: in Sempiternus Rex Christus (1951), Pius XII called the kenotic doctrine "a wicked invention, equally to be condemned with the Docetism opposed to it."

Volume Four gives Lutheran kenoticism a chapter of its own in Resolving Immutability & Interaction.

What is the strongest case for kenoticism?

The strongest case begins with the Gospels. Speaking of His own return, Jesus says:

"But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father." (Mark 13:32, NIV)

Luke, having told of the twelve-year-old in the temple, adds:

"And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man." (Luke 2:52, NIV)

And Hebrews makes the likeness the ground of our salvation:

"For this reason he had to be made like them, fully human in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people." (Hebrews 2:17, NIV)

Read at face value, these texts describe a Son who did not know something, who learned, and who shared our condition in every way. Its defenders ask how growth in wisdom is possible for a mind already exercising omniscience, and how "nor the Son" can be true of One who at that moment knew the hour. The standing danger in Christology is docetism, a Christ who only seems human, and this Christology refuses to make the Gospels a performance. Philippians 2 does speak of a self-limitation the Son freely undertook, and on that point the kenoticist reads Paul correctly.

Its analytic defenders add philosophical care. If omniscience and omnipotence are essential to God, the Son cannot give them up. So they revise the list: what is essential to divinity is omniscience unless freely given up, and omnipotence unless freely given up. To block the objection that all three persons could then lay these down at once, Ronald Feenstra refines the property further, to omniscience and omnipotence "unless freely given up for the sake of reconciliation," as the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on the Incarnation reports. Feenstra defends the method in the spirit of Alvin Plantinga's advice to Christian philosophers: begin with what revelation teaches about the Incarnation, and let our concept of God answer to it.

C. Stephen Evans has faced the hardest follow-up question, what happens at the ascension. His answer is that the emptying and the Incarnation can come apart: the emptying may end at Christ's glorification while the Incarnation continues, because a glorified body may be compatible with the full divine attributes. Stephen Davis argues that kenosis, so understood, can be held within Chalcedonian orthodoxy. These philosophers, like their rivals in the same literature, claim the Chalcedonian Definition for themselves.

What do critics of kenoticism argue?

The first objection comes from the doctrine of God. Classical theism holds that God is immutable, simple and a se: He does not change, He has no parts, and He depends on nothing. A Son who lays down omniscience has changed at the deepest level there is.

The damage spreads from there. Classical theists hold that God's attributes are His one essence known under different names, so an attribute that could be detached would make God a composite of parts, and a divinity that could be surrendered would be held on condition, which aseity denies. Chalcedon's "without change" is hard to square with a Christ who is less than fully God at any moment of His incarnate life.

A second difficulty concerns identity. The Stanford Encyclopedia's entry on philosophy and Christian theology puts the difficulty in modal terms: if omnipotence and omniscience are essential divine attributes, the Son cannot give them up and regain them while remaining the same being. The defender escapes by making the attributes accidental, and then owes an account of what makes God God that most classical theists find thinner than the God of Scripture.

Then there is a reductio. If what divinity requires is only omniscience unless freely given up, the Father and the Spirit could give it up too, and there could be a time when ordinary human beings knew more than God. Feenstra's qualifier, "for the sake of reconciliation," closes that door. Critics answer that the qualifier looks ad hoc: nothing in the doctrine of God motivates it except the need to rescue the account.

Evans himself states the fourth objection. Either the glorified Son takes back the attributes He laid down, and then they were compatible with incarnate life after all, or He does not, and the resulting account of glorification is deficient. Paul's present tense weighs on the second horn:

"For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and in Christ you have been brought to fullness. He is the head over every power and authority." (Colossians 2:9–10, NIV)

The last objection is exegetical. Philippians 2:7 specifies the emptying by an addition, taking the very nature of a servant, and that is the whole content the verse gives it. Pius XII's verdict stands for the Roman Catholic response, and on the Reformed side Donald Macleod's The Person of Christ defends the classic Chalcedonian account against such revisions.

Some kenoticists reply that the classical doctrine of immutability is itself too strict and should be revised. That reply moves the dispute upstream: whether the Son may change in the Incarnation then turns on the doctrine of God, and that is where the two sides now meet.

Volume One lays out the framework that answers both sides, and you can download it free.

What is the two-minds view?

The most developed analytic rival to kenoticism is Thomas V. Morris's two-minds Christology, first set out in The Logic of God Incarnate (1986). Morris begins with two distinctions. Christ is fully human without being merely human, possessing every property essential to humanity along with a higher, divine nature. And the properties common to human beings, such as limited knowledge, need not be essential to being human.

On that footing Morris proposes that God the Son incarnate has "two distinct minds or systems of mentality." The eternal divine mind knows all things and is present to all creation. The earthly mind came to be with Christ's conception and grew as He grew, and during His earthly life the Son lived from its resources. On this view Mark 13:32 reports what the earthly mind knew.

The view keeps what kenoticism gives away. The divine attributes remain whole, and the Gospels' limits remain real. Its pressure point is the one Morris anticipated: two minds sound like two persons, which is Nestorianism. He replies that for One who is fully but not merely human, personhood follows His ultimate metaphysical status, which is divine, so there is one Person. Critics still ask what makes the two minds a single "I," and why the human mind has no view into the divine one.

How does Frame-Indexed Classical Theism answer the kenotic question?

Frame-Indexed Classical Theism (FICT) is a research program in analytic theology that resolves classical theological dilemmas by diagnosing them as artifacts of a single formal error. It is the Many Beings Framework's position. Kenoticism secures the Son's real limitation at the expense of the divine nature. Two-minds Christology keeps the divine nature and divides the Son's mental life. FICT holds a third position: the limitation is real, it belongs to the nature the Son assumed, and the divine nature stays whole.

There is one reality. God knows it in His own frame, which is atemporal, simple and a se. Human beings know that same reality in the human frame, which is sequential, composite and contingent.

Terms whose content involves time, possibility, agency and value, and knowing is among them, are said of God and of us analogically, in senses that are related and distinct. The Many Beings Fallacy is treating such a term univocally, as though it meant the same thing in both frames. The statement of the framework sets this out in one place.

Now return to the dilemma. It runs: Christ knows all things; Christ does not know the hour; so Christ both knows and does not know. The argument carries "knows" across in a single sense. Index the term to its frame and the contradiction dissolves.

The Son took a complete human nature, and with that nature came a human frame, the sequential, embodied way a man apprehends the world, which learns, grows and can be ignorant of what is still to come. Mark 13:32 and Luke 2:52 are literally true of the Son as He knows in that frame. The divine knowledge, which belongs to the Son in God's frame, is unchanged. Kenoticism is right that the limitation is real. The framework places it in the nature taken, where Chalcedon's "without change" leaves room for it.

Read Philippians 2 in this light. "He made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant": the emptying consists in the taking. The eternal Son stoops to live within a finite frame, hungry, learning, and obedient to death. Kenosis is humility by addition, and it is the greater humility: the Son keeps all that He is and still takes the servant's place.

From kenoticism the framework keeps the refusal of docetism. From two-minds Christology it keeps a whole divine nature and a real human mind. It grounds the distinction in the two natures and the frames those natures carry, borne by one Person.

A careful critic will push back in three places. He may say this is the two-minds view renamed. He may object that two frames in Christ divide Him as surely as two minds do. Or he may suspect that "analogically" is a word that absorbs any objection.

A frame follows a nature, and both natures are borne by one subject, so the Person who knows in both frames is the one eternal Son. That is the hypostatic union as Chalcedon confessed it: one Person in two natures, each keeping its own properties. The index marks a difference in being fixed by natures before any dilemma was in view, and the terms that carry it are named in advance. How one Person bears both natures and frames, and which terms carry the index, is argued in Volume Four.

The full Christology, from Chalcedon to Mark 13:32, is argued in Volume Four.

Kenoticism, two minds and FICT compared

Each position answers the same Gospel texts, and they differ over where Christ's limitation lives.

Frequently asked questions

Is kenoticism a heresy?

The answer depends on the version and the judge. Gess openly set Chalcedon aside, and Pius XII condemned the doctrine in 1951 as the opposite error to docetism. The seventeenth-century Lutherans on both sides of the Giessen–Tübingen dispute agreed that Christ possessed the divine attributes, and Donald Macleod defends the classic Chalcedonian account from the Reformed side. Its analytic defenders argue that their version, with attributes held unless freely given up for reconciliation, fits within Chalcedon. The question comes down to whether omniscience and omnipotence are essential to God.

What did Jesus empty himself of?

Philippians 2:7 defines the emptying by what He took: the NIV reads that He "made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant." The classical reading holds that the Son veiled His glory and set aside the privileges of His status by adding a human nature. Kenotic readings hold that He laid down divine attributes or their exercise. The framework reads the emptying as the humility of taking a servant's nature.

How could Jesus not know the day or hour?

Mark 13:32 says the Son did not know it. Kenoticism says He had laid down omniscience. On the two-minds view His human mind did not know while His divine mind did. The Many Beings Framework holds that "know" is said of God and of man analogically: the Son truly did not know the hour as He knows in the human frame He assumed, and the divine knowledge was unchanged.

Is kenotic Christology Lutheran?

Its roots are Lutheran. The Giessen–Tübingen dispute of the seventeenth century argued over Christ's use of divine attributes, and Gottfried Thomasius, a Lutheran at Erlangen, first set out the doctrine by name in the nineteenth century. The school spread well beyond Lutheranism: Charles Gore was an Anglican bishop, Forsyth a Congregationalist, Mackintosh a Scottish Presbyterian, and today's analytic defenders write across Protestant traditions.

Isn't frame-indexing just the two-minds view renamed?

The two views share ground: both keep the divine attributes whole and the human limits real. They differ in what does the work. Morris divides Christ's mental life into two minds. Frame-Indexed Classical Theism grounds the difference in natures, holds that each nature carries its frame within one Person, and states in advance which terms change sense between frames. Kenoticism, by contrast, changes the divine nature itself.

Where to go from here

The kenoticists pressed a question the tradition had often left to mystery: how can "nor the Son" be true of God the Son? They were right to press it and right that the limitation is real. The answer the framework gives is to add a frame, as Philippians 2 adds a servant's nature, and to leave the divine attributes where the church has confessed them.

Volume One sets out the framework itself, and it is free to download. Volume Four, Resolving Immutability & Interaction, argues the full Christology and engages Lutheran kenoticism in its closing part alongside open theism and process theology, and it is available now in every format. The rest of the series carries the same rule through free will, evil, time, infinity and providence.

Related reading

• Does God Have Emotions? What Impassibility Really Claims
• What Is Divine Providence? The Doctrine and Its Parts
• Does God Change His Mind? The Relenting Texts Explained