Chapter 15

Kenotic Christology — The Case Against Divine Self-Emptying

Did Jesus stop being God when He became a man?

That is the question hidden behind one of the most beloved passages in the New Testament. In Philippians 2, Paul tells us that the Son of God "emptied Himself" in order to become human. The Greek verb he uses is ekenōsen (ἐκένωσεν). And ever since the nineteenth century, an influential school of thought has answered the question above by saying, in effect, "Yes — sort of." Kenotic Christology argues that when the Son of God became incarnate, He set aside, surrendered, or somehow gave up some of His divine attributes — His omniscience, His omnipotence, perhaps even His omnipresence. He had to, the argument goes, in order to become genuinely human like us.

I want to be honest with you. When I first encountered kenoticism, it sounded almost beautiful. The God who loved us so much that He laid aside His glory — what a moving picture that paints. And the kenotic theologians I have read are clearly serious Christians, wrestling honestly with hard questions about the Incarnation. We owe them a fair hearing.

But the more I have studied this view, the more I have come to believe that kenoticism cannot be right. It runs into devastating philosophical problems. It cuts against the Chalcedonian definition of the Incarnation. And — most importantly — it is not actually what Philippians 2 teaches. The good news is that we do not need it. There is a better way to read the kenosis hymn, and a better model for understanding how God could become a man without ever ceasing to be God. That model is the kryptic model, which I will defend in detail in Chapter 17. Here, my goal is more modest: I want to show why kenoticism fails on its own terms.

The Kenosis Hymn: Philippians 2:5–11

Everything begins with this passage. Let me lay it out in full:

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (ESV)

The whole debate hinges on one verb: ekenōsen (ἐκένωσεν), translated "emptied himself." The verb comes from the noun kenos (κενός), which simply means "empty" or "void." The kenotic theologian hears this verb and asks the natural follow-up question: emptied of what? And then answers: emptied of certain divine attributes — of omniscience, of omnipotence, of omnipresence.

That reading sounds plausible at first, but I think it is grammatically forced. Look closely at how Paul actually writes the sentence. He does not say, "He emptied Himself of His divine attributes." He does not say "emptied Himself of" anything at all. Instead, the verb is followed by a participial phrase: morphēn doulou labōn (μορφὴν δούλου λαβών) — "taking the form of a servant." In Greek, this kind of participle explains how the action of the main verb happened. In other words, Paul is telling us the way the Son emptied Himself: He emptied Himself by taking — by adding the form of a servant.

That is a striking reversal of the usual picture. The "emptying" is not subtraction at all. It is addition. The Son did not empty Himself of anything; He poured Himself out into a new mode of existence by taking on a real human nature. He kept the morphē theou (μορφὴ θεοῦ, "form of God") and added the morphē doulou (μορφὴ δούλου, "form of a servant"). This is why some translators render ekenōsen as "made Himself nothing" or "poured Himself out" — they are trying to capture the metaphor without smuggling in the idea that He gave up divine attributes.

Andrew Loke, whose work I rely on heavily throughout this book, points out that the language of self-emptying in the New Testament makes perfect sense on a model that retains all the divine attributes. The Son chose, out of love, to function in a self-limited way as a man. He did not surrender what He had. He veiled it.¹ That is exactly what the participle labōn ("taking") suggests. The Son's poverty is His chosen humanity, not the loss of His deity.

The Major Kenotic Models

That is the exegetical case. But the more interesting battle is philosophical. Kenotic theologians know all about the participle, and they have offered several different versions of the doctrine to make their case stand. I will walk through the three most important ones.

Nineteenth-Century Kenoticism

The classical kenotic position was developed in the 1800s, especially by the German Lutheran theologian Gottfried Thomasius and the English Anglican theologian Charles Gore. Their idea was straightforward enough: the Son surrendered what they called the "metaphysical" attributes (omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence) while keeping the "moral" attributes (love, holiness, justice).

You can see why the move felt necessary to them. If Jesus is genuinely human, He has to grow, learn, get tired, not know certain things. Mark 13:32 says He did not know the day or hour of His return. John 4:6 says He grew weary at Jacob's well. How can someone who is omniscient learn? How can someone who is omnipotent be tired? Easier, the kenotic theologian thinks, to say He gave those attributes up.

But this version of kenoticism falls apart almost immediately. If the Son surrendered omniscience, what kind of God was He during the Incarnation? A God who knows almost everything, but not quite? The traditional Christian doctrine is that God is omniscient essentially — meaning that being all-knowing is part of what it means to be God. A "God" who is not omniscient is not really God at all anymore.

Modern Kenoticism

Stephen Davis and Ronald Feenstra have offered more careful versions of the doctrine. Davis tries to soften the older position by drawing a distinction between properties that are essential to divinity simpliciter (in itself) and properties that an incarnate divine being might possess. On this view, omniscience is essential to God-considered-in-Himself, but a divine person can be incarnate as a non-omniscient being — so long as the relevant properties are not absolutely essential to every mode of divine existence.²

Oliver Crisp has examined this move in detail, and he points out that it asks us to make a major revision in our doctrine of God just to rescue kenoticism. Crisp's verdict is that the standard ontological version of kenoticism is incompatible with Chalcedonian Christology because it implies that the Word ceases to fully exemplify the divine nature for the duration of His earthly life.³

Functional Kenoticism

A third version, sometimes called "functional kenoticism," tries to go even softer. On this view, the Son did not actually surrender any divine attributes — He just chose not to exercise them during the Incarnation. He retained omniscience but voluntarily refrained from accessing all His knowledge. He retained omnipotence but voluntarily refrained from using His unlimited power.

This is a real improvement over the older view, and at first glance it may sound a lot like the kryptic model I will defend. But there is an important difference. Functional kenoticism still says the Son chose to "shut down" or "switch off" the active use of His divine attributes. The kryptic model, by contrast, says the divine attributes were always active in some sense — they were just concealed at a preconscious level rather than dominating Christ's human conscious experience. Loke argues that the kryptic model better explains the moments when Christ does access His divine knowledge or power — reading thoughts, performing miracles, prophesying — without violating the genuineness of His human limitations.⁴

The Philosophical Problems with Kenoticism

Now let me walk through the four major problems that, taken together, I think make the kenotic view untenable. These problems do not all carry equal weight, but together they form a cumulative case that I find decisive.

The Essential Properties Argument

Classical theology has always held that the divine attributes — omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, eternity, immutability — are essential properties of the divine nature. That means they are part of what it is to be God. A being that lacks any one of them is not God.

This is what philosophers call a modal argument, and it is a powerful one. If omniscience is necessary for being God, then there is no possible world in which a divine being is non-omniscient. To say "the Son surrendered omniscience" is to say "the Son ceased to be God" — at least for the duration of the Incarnation. And that result is heretical. It contradicts the universal Christian conviction that Jesus, even as a baby in the manger, was fully God.

The Scottish theologian Donald Macleod once compared the idea of a divine person abdicating divine attributes to imagining Albert Einstein being suddenly reduced to a mollusk — a transformation so drastic that it is hard to believe the result is the same being at all.⁵ The shock isn't a matter of degree. It is a metaphysical impossibility.

The Trinity Problem

Here is a question that kenoticists rarely answer well: when the Son surrenders omniscience, what happens to the Father and the Spirit? Do they still know everything?

If yes, then we have a real problem on our hands. The Nicene Creed says the Son is homoousios (ὁμοούσιος) — "of the same essence" — as the Father. The three Persons share all the divine attributes equally. If the Son lacks omniscience while the Father possesses it, the Persons are no longer of the same essence. The Trinity has been fractured at its very heart.

If no — if the Father and Spirit also somehow gave up omniscience when the Son did — then God Himself was non-omniscient for the thirty-three years of Jesus' earthly life. Who was running the universe? Who answered the prayers of the faithful while the Son was a toddler in Nazareth? This option, frankly, is even worse. Either way, kenoticism puts the doctrine of the Trinity under enormous strain.

The Chalcedonian Problem

The Council of Chalcedon (451) settled the church's official Christology. It says the two natures of Christ — divine and human — are united "without confusion, without change, without division, without separation" (the four famous adverbs). The Greek word translated "without change" is atreptōs (ἀτρέπτως). The divine nature does not change in the Incarnation.

But kenoticism, by definition, requires change in the divine nature. The Son went from being omniscient to being non-omniscient. From omnipotent to non-omnipotent. That is change — and not just any change, but a fundamental change in the divine essence itself. Timothy Pawl shows in detail how the Conciliar Christology of the church fathers requires that for any divine attribute, Christ retains it without alteration during the Incarnation.⁶ Kenoticism cannot meet that standard. It is not merely strained by Chalcedon; it is ruled out by it.

This is one of the reasons many evangelical theologians, Crisp included, end up rejecting kenoticism even when they find parts of it appealing. To preserve the doctrine of God taught by the councils, you have to give up the idea that the Incarnation involved a change in the divine nature itself.

The Coherence Problem

Finally, there is a deep logical problem at the heart of the kenotic project. What does it even mean for an essentially omniscient being to "become" non-omniscient? An essentially omniscient being is omniscient in every possible world. To say such a being "becomes" non-omniscient is to say that something which is necessarily X has come to be non-X. That is not a difficult truth — it is a logical contradiction.

This problem is similar to asking whether a necessarily existent being could become contingent, or whether the number 7 could become odd. The answer is no, and not because we lack imagination, but because the very notion contains a contradiction. If kenoticism asks God to do something logically impossible, we should not be surprised that the doctrine generates problems wherever we look.

The Strongest Kenotic Reply — and Why It Falls Short

I want to be fair here. There is a sophisticated kenotic response to this whole litany of problems, and it deserves a hearing.

Stephen Davis has argued that the classical doctrine of God's essential attributes should not be the "control" — the fixed point — for our doctrine of the Incarnation. Instead, we should let the Incarnation control our doctrine of God. If Jesus is non-omniscient (as the Gospels seem to show) and Jesus is God (as the New Testament teaches), then perhaps we should conclude that omniscience is not, after all, an essential divine attribute. The kenotic theologian asks us to revise the doctrine of God, not the doctrine of the Incarnation.⁷

I find this move bold, but I think it ultimately fails. Here is why. The classical doctrine of God is not an arbitrary philosophical add-on. It grew out of careful biblical reflection on what Scripture actually teaches about God's character and nature. Passages like Psalm 139 ("Where shall I go from your Spirit?"), Psalm 147 ("his understanding is beyond measure"), and Hebrews 4:13 ("no creature is hidden from his sight") commit us to omniscience and omnipresence as real attributes of God, not merely conventional ones. To say "well, maybe these are not essential after all" is to overturn the biblical witness in order to rescue a particular reading of one verb in Philippians 2:7.

There is a better path. We do not have to revise the doctrine of God or deny the genuine humanity of Christ. We just have to read ekenōsen the way the Greek participle suggests — emptying by addition, not by subtraction — and adopt a model of the Incarnation that explains how the Son could be omniscient and yet experience genuine human limitation. That model, as Crisp himself notes, is the kryptic alternative.

A Better Way: The Kryptic Alternative

I will defend Loke's kryptic model in detail in Chapter 17, so I will only sketch it here. The Greek word krypsis (κρύψις) means "hiding" or "concealment." On the kryptic view, the Son did not empty Himself of His divine attributes — He concealed them. They remained fully present, fully His, but veiled at a "preconscious" level so that Jesus' human waking experience was genuinely human.

Think of it this way. You know your own phone number, but you are probably not consciously thinking about it right now. The knowledge is still in you, ready to surface when you need it. Loke argues that Christ's divine omniscience worked something like this: it was always present, always available to be accessed when the Father willed it (so that Jesus could read thoughts, prophesy, and perform miracles), but not constantly flooding His ordinary human consciousness. That is why Jesus could truly grow in wisdom (Luke 2:52), truly not know the day or hour (Mark 13:32), and truly experience genuine temptation — without ever ceasing to be the omniscient Son of God.⁸

Crisp, after rejecting both the strong and the weak versions of kenoticism, ends up sympathetic to a kryptic view as well. He treats divine concealment as a way to preserve traditional Christology while still doing justice to the language of self-emptying in Scripture.⁹ What I find compelling about this is that it gives us everything kenoticism was trying to give us — a genuinely human Jesus who grows, learns, and suffers — without the price of denying that He remained fully God throughout the entire Incarnation.

And notice what the kryptic model preserves that kenoticism cannot. Michael Wilkinson has argued that a faithful Chalcedonian Christology must shape our anthropology — Christ is the paradigm human, and His full deity must be affirmed alongside His full humanity at every moment.¹⁰ The kryptic model lets us do this without compromise. Joshua Farris likewise notes that any Christology which forces us to choose between Christ's deity and His humanity has misunderstood the hypostatic union — the goal is to affirm both, simultaneously, throughout the entire Incarnation.¹¹ Krypsis lets us do that.

This is, I think, the right reading of Philippians 2. The Son did not unload His glory; He veiled it. He did not lose His divine knowledge; He hid it. He did not surrender His omnipotence; He chose to act, almost always, by the limited strength of a human body united to His divine person. The result is a Savior who is both fully God and fully man, every moment, from the first heartbeat in Mary's womb to the resurrection morning and forever beyond.

Conclusion

Kenoticism is a serious attempt to take the genuine humanity of Christ seriously. I respect the theologians who have defended it, and I share their concern that we not turn Jesus into a kind of Superman in a Clark Kent disguise — a divine being only pretending to be human. The Gospels make abundantly clear that Jesus' weariness, His tears, His not-knowing of certain facts, and His real suffering were genuine, not playacting. Any view of the Incarnation that makes those experiences less than real has failed.

But kenoticism solves the wrong problem. It treats Christ's human limitations as if they could only be explained by subtracting something from His divine nature. The exegesis of Philippians 2 does not actually demand this — the participle "taking the form of a servant" tells us the Son emptied Himself by adding humanity, not by giving up deity. And the philosophical and theological cost of the kenotic view is immense: it puts the doctrine at war with Chalcedon, fractures the Trinity, and asks us to believe that God essentially became non-God for thirty-three years.

A better path is open to us. The kryptic model — which I will explain fully in Chapter 17 — accounts for everything kenoticism tries to account for, while preserving the full deity of Christ at every moment. The Son did not empty Himself of His glory. He veiled it for our sake, so that He could walk among us without overwhelming us, suffer with us without bypassing us, and one day reveal His full glory in the resurrection.

The Word that became flesh did not become less than God. He became more than we expected — God with us, in every sense of the word.