“Have this mind in you,” said the writer, “which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being (subsisting) in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God.” As subsisting in very form of God, eternally so we may say, we first see Him as we proceed to trace the course detailed here of Him. Equality with God then was for Him no prize to be grasped at, or possession to be tenaciously clutched, whichever of the two we understand to be here so emphatically negatived. Certain it is at all events He sought not to retain this place and estate of Godhead glory; but exchanged in wonderful grace the form of God for the form of a servant, coming in the likeness of men. And this surely in itself for Him is descent of no mean degree. When one considers all that it involves, without at all following out the metaphysics, but on quite another plane, a veritable kenosis it indeed is, a very real emptying of Himself. To be found in fashion as a man, beset with all that of sorrow and suffering accrues to the estate fallen man is in, sin itself excepted, He who in heavenly glory subsisted in the very form of God, does this imply no emptying of Himself? Lord of all, and equality with God no object of aspiration to Him, His assuming in love to us the bond-servant's form, though He was Son learning obedience by the things He suffered, yea, humbling Himself and becoming obedient unto death, even the death of the cross, is all this not “kenosis” enough? Does it need that we amplify consideration of exactly in what respect limitations or altered conditions mentally and intellectually attached to the humanity He assumed? Is not all that, even if answerable at all, of but secondary importance, and foreign really as a matter of precise exegesis to the passage in its original setting? Pity it would indeed be if the wonderful power and pathos of its beautiful appeal were found to evaporate, the remarkable force and poignancy of its moving example to lose its potency, or the morally glorious exhibition of the grace and love of our blessed Savior's course it contains, to melt away by such “botanizing on a mother's grave.”
But what is it then that we are told is involved in this kenosis, this self-emptying of the Son of God? For with them it is not simply the giving up of position, privileges, and honor that constitutes this. Such renunciation of these as is involved in His becoming man, great as was the surrender by Him who, rich in glory, for our sakes became poor, the simple relinquishing of these does not appear to exhaust the meaning of His kenosis. It is carried back beyond all this, and made to apply to a sphere of things, to the ordinary Christian, savoring more or less of the abstruse or occult. Much intricacy of thought, and ingenuity of conjecture, which could obtrude upon or emanate from no mind but that of a metaphysician, has been expended upon the subject. In the effort to construe more intelligibly to such the truth as to His person incarnate, the expression “He emptied Himself” has been much dwelt upon. In this is to be found, it is imagined, much more than any mere general statement of His descending from glory on high to the condition of humiliation implied in His being found in fashion as a man. This kenotic process, it is affirmed, extended much further than either position or physical conditions. It took in, it is said, the much deeper sacrifice of powers and faculties. A field this is, this to which we are invited, where conjecture can find much room for play. The point of emphasis is that it was not merely in external or extraneous features that Christ's self-emptying took place, but in what may be called intrinsic ones. That is to say that in the act of becoming incarnate the Son of God so shut off or reduced in potency all that pertained to His divine nature, that in the realm of mind and intellect no less than in physical qualities, all was of the human order. Superlative in degree perhaps; but indistinguishable in kind from that of ordinary men. Thus it is sometimes said, “Of what was it that Christ divested Himself in becoming man? Of everything pertaining to His deity, essential attributes alone excepted.”
God He was they confess. God He remained, but with everything proper to Godhead in abeyance, all divine prerogatives absolutely renounced, and all the conditions and limitations of real humanity assumed. A sort of temporary depotentiation of His divine nature in, by, or for its contact with the humanity He took to Himself. “Deity can,” they say, “without real self-impairment lay aside what belongs to it except essential attributes, and omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, are not these, but only expressions of free relation to the world he has made.” Still another way to put it is to say that “He retained the ethical attributes of God while abandoning the physical.” Accordingly, within a carefully defined list of prerogatives capable of being surrendered there has been an absolute kenosis, and among the abdicated attributes are to be found such as the above-mentioned-omnipotence and omniscience, but a short step being needed also, which many, alas, do not hesitate to take, to include the holiness, or inherent sinlessness proper to God. And in such limitations, physical, mental, or moral as the case may be, it is thought there may be found not only relief from the distracting problem of the relation of the divine to the human in His person incarnate; but fresh evidence also of the genuineness of His sympathy and the reality of His humanity.
Altogether does it not seem like what may be called intellectual tight-rope walking with metaphysics for a balancing-pole. On the Godhead, the manhood, and the unity of the Person alike, or in turn, one is in danger of losing balance. Even a modernist of the Roman communion can warn that “The whole doctrine of Christ's χένωσις or self-emptying can be explained in a minimizing way almost fatal to doctrine, and calculated to rob the incarnation of all its helpfulness by leaving the ordinary mind with something perilously near the phantasmal Christ of the Docetans.” If an unbeliever sneers at their “limited God slowly emerging from imperfection and limitation,” they have nothing but their theory to blame; although pity it is that they should give occasion for his scoff at the incarnation as “an absurd localization of the Infinite, a differentiated moment in eternity, a limitation within the conditions of a fleeting human organism, of the omnipotent, omniscient, and perfect God.” This from the very class the theory is best calculated to conciliate. Kenoticists speak of saving the divine in Jesus by not shattering His humanity through ascribing extravagances of powers and faculties to Him. It rather appears to be sacrificing the divine to accommodate those who make all of the human. And when they do venture forth on their narrow fine-spun theory, such as the above quoted, they show no hesitation in using these their concessions to push them ruthlessly from their slippery foothold. If the precipice will be encountered, the overbalancing need not surprise. Precarious at the best any theory that can be framed to explain the adjustment of the two natures in one person must be. This metaphysically-inclined conception of Christ Jesus as a sort of amalgam of a self-emptied, depotentiated divinity, and humanity raised to its highest power, inspires no more confidence than others.
Of Kenoticism as a theory to account for the relation between the two natures in the one person of Christ it may quite safely be predicted that it shall only have its day. The face of things is in fact undergoing a change even now, and this fashionable theory is now beginning to be tainted and tinctured with new and ever newer ideas. This is not the first attempt by any means to construe into intelligibility the question of how Christ could be God and man in one person, and to set out in rational fashion how the two natures were related. To take what are generally regarded as the most conspicuous points in the history of Christology, there was in Appollinarianism a sort of pruning away of the humanity of Christ, excluding a rational human soul, principally with the idea of maintaining intact the singleness of His personality. Nestorianism, again, brought the two natures into no more than sympathetic harmony with one another, and by holding them too far apart the person was no longer an irrefragible unity. Eutychianism, in the very opposite direction, merged the two natures into one compound, a confusion not at all counterbalanced by the singleness of personality still retained. The statement of the Council of Chalcedon propounds no theory; but merely asserts the unity of personality and duality of natures. Not so the next landmark, Lutheran doctrine, which by almost a deification of His humanity approximates to Eutychianism. After all these comes Kenoticism, with its attempt to adjust the relation between the two natures, as we have seen, by the idea of a kenosis or self-emptying on Christ's part. in the sphere of His divinity, not in the relative way legitimately following from the scripture supplying the term, but in an absolute and universal fashion unsupported by it, and inconsistent with all that otherwise scripture reveals of Him.
This inconsistency is abundantly evident from comparison with the Gospels, to even the most superficial study of them. Take as an instance that element of the teaching which has to say to Christ's knowledge. The theory as it applies to this is that, in becoming man, “He laid aside the loud attributes of omnipotence and omniscience, and shared in these matters the limitations of our nature. Omniscience as to His mind was no more an attribute of the Man Christ Jesus than omnipresence as to His body.” “We are in the habit,” it is said, “of attributing, unconsciously perhaps, the divine mind to Christ, whereas, if any one thing is clear from the Gospels, it is that His knowledge and intelligence were of the ordinary human order.” Here at last we come to a question of plain facts, capable of being verified by reference to Scripture. Having now something definite to go upon, let us examine it. And first as to what is said of what Christ has laid aside. Is it the case that omniscience, or the knowledge of things divinely, was never manifested by the Man Christ Jesus? Does the Gospel record bear this out? Was it not on the contrary over and over again made apparent that such an attribute was really His, and was really there to flash out as occasion time and again called it into exercise? It was indeed precisely one of the ways in which at times He indicated that He was God. How frequently now during His ministry do we find simple souls, discovering themselves so fully read through by one penetrating glance of Him who discerned their inmost thoughts, impressed, in a way they could not have been by anything else, with the sense of who He really was.
One striking example of this comes to mind. In John 16 we learn that a certain statement of the Master's had occasioned no small cogitation and perplexity to His disciples. Among themselves, strictly so, they had discussed it, not as yet making Him aware of their trouble (vers. 17, 18). Yet into the privacy of their secret thoughts Christ had penetrated, manifesting thus the power of reading men's hearts, which is so clearly a divine prerogative. Knowing, in a most literal sense of the word divining, their still unexpressed difficulty, and that they were desirous to ask Him, He said unto them, “Do ye now inquire among yourselves of that I said?” Explaining and amplifying His previous utterance, He so fully and correctly dealt with their unconfessed perplexity that at the close they were forced to exclaim, “Now we are sure that thou knowest all things, and needest not that any man should ask thee; by this we believe that thou camest forth from God.”
Nor was this a solitary instance of His ability to discern things as well as truths beyond the range of merely human vision. How often it is apparent that His knowledge of men, their deeds, their thoughts, their hearts, was such as we can attribute only to the divine mind. He seemed to hear men thinking, as it is sometimes said. “Come see a man which told me all things that ever I did,” said the woman of Samaria. “Is not this the Christ?” On how many occasions was such conviction of His deity wrought in men who came in contact with Him. Take but two, one from the beginning, the other from the close of John's Gospel. Nathaniel under the fig tree was known by Him, both as to his character and circumstances, and on hearing both described so accurately by One to whom such information could not possibly have been conveyed by the ordinary channels, he was constrained to ejaculate, “Rabbi, thou art the Son of God, thou art the King of Israel.” Thomas again, absent on the first occasion when, in spite of closed doors, the risen Lord appeared among His disciples, on the second occasion heard from the Savior's lips the very words his unbelief had framed, and how was he forced to exclaim in ever-memorable words, “My Lord and my God!”
Ask such as these what opinion they would have of Christ's having laid aside His omniscience. Why, it was the discovery of this very fact, “Thou knowest all things,” that so forcibly brought home to them conviction of who He really was. This it really was that, among the many ways in which His deity was often manifested, formed one of the most striking. The kind, no less than the scope, of the knowledge usually shown to be His, far from being an evidence of the extensive degree in which He had surrendered divine prerogatives, most clearly manifests His continued possession of such prerogatives in that very sphere. Knowledge such as He habitually displayed, consciousness of things others needed to have revealed, discernment of things no others could see, seem to argue in an inevitable way not the giving up, but the retention, back of all if in no other way, of full divine omniscience. [ J. T.]
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(To be continued)