Kenosis Theology and Communal Incarnation – Part 1
Kenosis: Linking the Divine and Mundane
What Is Kenosis?
The source text for kenosis is Paul’s Philippians 2:5-7: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness” (NRSV). The phrase emptied himself, the act of kenosis, is crucial to understanding the relationship between the Son and the human Jesus.
The image of something emptying into something else makes very clear that something was transferred. Believers simply take this as a matter of faith and move on. Theologians and philosophers, on the other hand, want to understand what “emptying” is, why it happened, how it happened, and what we can do with that knowledge. It is not just an academic exercise: if we understand how the Son somehow melded with Jesus and what the Son offered humanity in that act, we understand more about how all humans should relate to the Son, and more importantly to God and God’s plan.
Why is Kenosis Controversial?
Like most theological concepts, the meaning of kenosis is determined in part by what we already know; we interpret kenosis in light of existing theology. But there are many different schools of theology, and many of them have conflicting views of the relationship between God and the Son, God and Creation, and humanity’s role in God’s plan. Kenosis only makes sense (or we have to make it make sense) in the context of a larger system of concepts and interpretations.
And that is where the matter gets complicated. How we understand the Son-Jesus kenosis depends upon (or has implications for) how we understand God’s relation to creation in general. It also depends upon (or has implications for) how we view humanity’s spiritual and ethical relationship to God, that is, what are good acts and how free is “free will”?
Typically, kenosis is thought of as a one-time event between the Son and a human that involved the Son giving up some of His divinity, though the Eastern Orthodox tradition and (so some theologians would argue) Luther would disagree. With the advent of process theology, emergence-based theology, and kenosis theology, there is even more disagreement. To focus just on the Son-Jesus relationship for a moment, three questions need to be answered.
We need to know what was depleted (e.g., did the Son somehow diminish his divinity? Did Jesus somehow slough off sin?). We need to know who was emptied and why (Was this a voluntary act by the Son, and if so at what cost and with what implications for the receptacle Jesus?). And we need to know its value (is the union of divine and human in Jesus unique and symbolic or is it experientially and ethically exemplary?).
However, the incarnation and crucifixion are arguably the two moments in time when the divine nature, will, and plan was most physically, tangibly immanent in human history. So any explanation of the Son-Jesus relationship potentially affects how we understand the relationship between God and humans. If the divine melds with the mundane, does that mean Jesus and the Son shared a physical body, but somehow remained separate? Does the Son’s entrance into the physical body of Jesus also mean the divine took residence in all physical creation at the same time, so the divine infused the mundane? Each of these interpretations has significant impact on the Christian message as much as its theology: if the Son fused with a human, can He do that to us as well? Can we embody Christ and actually be the love of God in the flesh, or do we simply appeal to and emulate Christ in our actions?
As if those questions were not daunting enough, kenosis can be applied beyond the incarnation to the Creation as well as the writing of the canonical scriptures. For example, George Murphy makes the case that if we accept the kenotic act of the Son’s incarnation into the human Jesus, we have to accept kenosis is possible elsewhere. If the Trinity is also a unity in its love and care for humanity, then there is no reason why kenosis cannot occur in other events or through God or the Holy Spirit. Murphy thinks God’s act of Creation was kenotic and makes a case that the writing of the scriptures was a kenotic act by the Holy Spirit. [1]
Why is Kenosis Theology Crucial for a General Theology?
The current discussion of kenosis involves players the original Church Fathers never dreamt of as they struggled with kenosis in the centuries after the crucifixion. Philosophy of science, sociology and anthropology, systems theory, and information theory have joined a long standing and difficult debate amongst competing Christian doctrines and theologies. But kenosis, like its counterpart theosis or theopoeisis (how humans can attain some measure of divinity), is a cornerstone of the religious impulse. If we can understand how the divine becomes human, or human divine, we have the theological and experiential basis for a vital, practical, and in its largest sense ecological faith.
More importantly, that “faith” need not be traditional Christian in the sense that a practicing Protestant or Catholic would consider themselves Christian. Kenosis describes a relationship between divinity and humanity; it does not require (and most modern interpretations of kenosis do not assume) full congruence with Biblical or Creedal or Covenantal doctrine. In fact, one could argue that organized Christianity needs kenosis but kenosis is independent of organized Christianity.
Scientific Theology, Theological Science
Anyone encountering modern theology is likely to wonder where the theology is.[2] Much of modern theology seems concerned with science, especially complexity and emergence, rather than god or moral behavior. It is a matter of urgency, not kind – Gregory of Nyssa’s On the Soul and the Resurrection also employs then-current scientific models but Nyssen did not face the staunch opposition from empirical scientific circles that theologians today face.[3] Fortunately, across different creeds and with help from a variety of philosophical schools and even scientific disciplines, theologians are fashioning a coherent if as yet incomplete picture of how the Divine fashioned a cosmos larger than the apparent divide between ‘science and religion’ and, mercifully, more inclusive.
But that means discussions in contemporary theology start more often with Heisenberg, Whitehead, or Peacocke than with Paul, Aquinas, or Luther. Kenosis is no exception. There are significant differences between the stub-your-toe-on-it classical physical world and the quantum world, between static linear systems and those that are self-organizing, emergent, and autopoietic; these have troubled philosophers of science for decades and now have become significant for theologians as well. The issues are well summed up in a position piece by John Polkinghorne that appeared in Zygon in 2006.[4]
Chaos, Emergence, and Divine Action
John Polkinghorne looks at the intersection of physics and metaphysics and identifies ontological and epistemological differences in views of the universe, as a preamble to introducing God into the spatio-temporal universe. He distinguishes between the block time of classical physics and classical theology, and the universe of becoming described by emergence/chaos science and open theology. On the block time hypothesis, the universe is closed causally. Past, present, and future are already established, constrained, and thus knowable. Thus in a classical theology based on block time, God can be omniscient and omnipotent: what is, is all there is to know, and it was knowable from the start. There’s an interesting implication here, of course: unless God is somehow something other than the universe, God too is bounded and constrained by block time so Its omniscience and omnipotence is relative to that universe. This in turn, opens up another issue: if God is some thing other than the universe, how does It act in the universe? This is the basis for the compatibilism/incompatibilism argument that Peters and Gregersen pursue (see below): if God is absent from the universe, It can only act by intervening in that existing universe; if God is immanent, God can act within the known universe. The first solution means God’s actions do not have to comply with the laws of the physical universe It abdicated – miracles are possible. On the second solution, God’s action must be consistent with the universe It indwells.
But the matter is further complicated by the difference between the lawful behavior of Newtonian physics and the apparent indeterministic behavior of the quantum world. Polkinghorne distinguishes between two forms of unpredictability. There is the realist view, where physical processes are themselves causally open, and the future cannot be known because it must happen before we know what it is. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle does not reflect our inability to get to the reality of quantum behavior (an epistemic constraint), it simply IS how things work in that domain (an ontological given).[5] Polkinghorne also takes the view often used in theology that chaotic systems elude determinism because of their dependence upon the entire context of the system, which cannot be known. These two positions avoid the embarrassing situation determinists find themselves in: quantum physics and chaotic systems are deterministic but we just can’t observe that deterministic behavior because of constraints on our observational capacity. One would look long and hard for a better illustration of confirmation bias and religious faith than that.
Beyond that, however, Polkinghorne takes the view that both chaotic systems and the universe in general are holistically guided by dynamic patterns of behavior, and ‘causal’ action is best understood as a dispersal of effects rather than as a linear, unique effect-event. A universe of “active information” (980), where God causes the structure of things but not the specific events, makes room for both classical and open time and frees theology to accept determinism at one level and reject it an another. This is crucial for Polkinghorne (and many other theologians) because it at least makes plausible the claim that the universe has a providential creator who establishes the holistic (causal) patterns of behavior but does not guide each and every event. Such a creator would participate in “a true divine engagement with time, the gracious acceptance by the eternal God of a temporal pole within divine nature” (982). Polkinghorne distances himself from process theology (which takes this view but makes it a metaphysical necessity) by calling this acceptance “a free kenotic act of God in choosing to relate to temporal creation in this way” (982).[6]
As one might expect, Polkinghorne’s view has been challenged by both philosophers of science and by theologians.[7] Nonetheless, many of its philosophical themes – different processes operating at different levels of creation, linkages to chaos and complexity and systems, a kenotic divine act – appear in the work of many other theologians who examine kenosis. Let’s take a look at a relatively simple application of the themes in the kenotic theology of Bradford McCall.[8]
Creation, Kenosis Theology, and the Responsive God
Bradford McCall’s agenda is to adapt emergence to existing doctrine: the kenotic pouring forth of God creates an emergence-capable system from chaos. In that respect, this is less synthesis of science and Christian doctrine than an accommodation of the former to the latter, and the programme pursued is thus less complicated than the programme pursued by Phillip Clayton (whose work McCall uses in his own argument). McCall’s emergent creation myth goes something like this: God kenotically enters into chaos, turning it into cosmos-in-potentia. God does not fashion chaos into anything per se, rather God enspirits it by imbuing chaos with the Word or, as McCall alternatively refers to it, the information necessary for it to become self-regulating, self-creating, and, possibly, indeterministically dynamic.
McCall recognizes that he could be describing a pantheistic position just as easily as the panentheistic position he wants, so he turns to Genesis 1:2 and the meaning of rahap, suggesting that God moved the waters by causing them to vibrate – that is, by giving them energy. But this is a particular kind of energy; it is structural and organizational, a telos that is attained through dynamic changes between material existences and between material existences and the divine itself. Creatio continua in other words: Genesis marks the start of development, not an event. Turning to other terms in Genesis, McCall points out that God evaluates, names and acts upon what appears in the early moments of creation. God is immanent, involved, creative and, most importantly for McCall, “reactive”.
McCall believes this view ensures the theological view of evolutionary history as the unfolding of God’s plan, but at the same time avoids determinism: God directs and guides, matter responds, God reacts. The kenotic God pours Itself into potential relationships between created entities and energies and structures, a pouring from pitcher to trough in which the Word enables an evolving cosmos. There is no subtraction from God’s divinity in this act (God does not “limit” Itself in any way), because God does not become anything else, God simply enspirits. The Son’s kenosis into human form is, therefore, another instance of God’s enspiration directed towards enabling human moral evolution.
Kenosis, whether at the beginning of time or in the person of Jesus, is a manifestation not of the divine-wrapped-in-material-swaddling-clothes, but of the divine nature, what McCall refers to as “others’-centeredness” [sic]. Creation is God’s “self-offering” in which the Spirit is embedded into a created but henceforth creative environment, for the sake of the development and improvement of that environment. Following Arthur Peacocke and Polkinghorne, McCall wants the cosmos imbued with propensities – ways in which it self-actualizes and remains at once stable and dynamic – and these are the “lure of the Spirit”.
[1] Murphy, G. L. (2012), Kenosis and the biblical picture of the world. Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, 64(3), 157-165.
[2] Some would wonder where, in particular, the Christian theology is. See Cooper, J. W. (2013), Created for everlasting life: Can theistic evolution provide an adequate Christian account of human nature? Zygon, 48(2), 478-495.
[3] See: Ludlow, M. (2009). Science and theology in Gregory of Nyssa’s De Anima et Resurrectione: Astronomy and automata. Journal of Theological Studies, 60(2), 467-489’ Costache, D. (2013). Making sense of the world: Theology and science in St. Gregory of Nyssa's An Apology for the Hexaemeron. Phronema, 28(1), 1-28.
[4] Polkinghorne, J. (2006). Space, time, and causality. Zygon, 41(4), 975-983.
[5] Phillip Clayton would add another distinction here: weak and strong epistemic emergence, weak ontological emergence, strong ontological emergence. See: Clayton, P. (2006). Emergence from physics to theology: Toward a panoramic view. Zygon, 41(3), 675-687.
[6] I am aware of subtle changes in Polkinghorne’s views but his own summary here serves my introductory needs. See: Silva, I. (2012). John Polkinghorne on divine action: A coherent theological evolution. Science & Christian Belief, 24(1), 19-30.
[7] I am not concerned here with objections that come from deterministic philosophy of science; those are rather complicated and have been well addressed by Clayton and others. However, there is one significant objection to this ‘tiered’ view of creation and divinity, which we will look at later on.
[8] McCall, B. (2010). Kenosis and emergence: A theological synthesis. Zygon, 45(1), 149-164.