Chapter 15

Kenotic Christology — The Case Against Divine Self-Emptying

Introduction: The Appeal and the Problem of Kenosis

There is something deeply attractive about the idea that God gave up everything for us. When we read in Philippians 2 that Christ Jesus "emptied himself" and took the form of a servant, something stirs in our hearts. We picture the King of the universe setting aside His crown, stepping off the throne, and entering the poverty and pain of human life — all out of love. That picture is powerful because it captures something genuinely true: the Incarnation really was an act of breathtaking condescension. The infinite God really did enter our world as a helpless infant. The One who sustains all things really did hang on a Roman cross.

But here is the critical question — the question that this chapter will explore in detail: When we say Christ "emptied himself," what exactly did He empty Himself of? Did the Son of God actually give up His divine attributes — His omniscience, His omnipotence, His omnipresence — in order to become human? Or did He do something else entirely? Did He add human nature to His divine nature without subtracting anything from His deity? The answer to this question has enormous consequences. It determines whether Jesus Christ was fully God during His earthly life, whether the Trinity remained intact during the Incarnation, and whether the conciliar definitions of the early church are still true.

Kenotic Christology — from the Greek word kenosis (κένωσις), meaning "emptying" — is the view that the Son of God emptied Himself of certain divine attributes in order to become truly human. This model has attracted many thoughtful Christians over the past two centuries because it seems to take seriously the genuine limitations of Jesus' earthly life. Jesus got tired. He got hungry. He didn't know when He would return (Mark 13:32). He wept. He suffered. Doesn't all of this suggest that He really did set aside His divine powers?

I want to be fair to kenotic Christology. The theologians who have defended it are serious scholars who love Christ and want to honor His genuine humanity. Their instinct is right: any model of the Incarnation that turns Jesus into a pretender — someone who merely acts limited while secretly knowing and controlling everything — does not do justice to the Gospel accounts. Jesus really did grow in wisdom (Luke 2:52). He really was surprised by the centurion's faith (Matthew 8:10). He really did cry out in agony in Gethsemane. Any adequate Christology must account for these realities.

But I believe kenotic Christology pays too high a price for this genuine insight. In its attempt to preserve Christ's real humanity, it undermines His real deity. And there is a better way — a way that preserves both the genuine limitations of Jesus' human experience and the full, undiminished possession of all divine attributes. That better way is the kryptic model — the view that the Son concealed (rather than surrendered) His divine attributes during the Incarnation. We will preview that model here and develop it fully in Chapter 17.

The thesis of this chapter is straightforward: kenotic Christology — the view that the Son of God emptied Himself of certain divine attributes in order to become incarnate — is both philosophically problematic and theologically unnecessary, because the kryptic model provides a superior alternative that preserves both Christ's genuine humanity and His full deity.

We will begin with the passage that started it all — the great "kenosis hymn" of Philippians 2:5–11. Then we will survey the major kenotic models, examine the devastating philosophical problems they face, consider the patristic and conciliar witness against them, and finally preview the kryptic alternative. By the end, I hope to show that we can have everything the kenoticists rightly want — a Jesus who truly shares our human condition — without sacrificing anything that orthodox theology rightly demands.

Philippians 2:5–11 — The Kenosis Hymn

The entire kenosis debate centers on one passage — perhaps the most majestic Christological text in all of Paul's letters. Let us read it in full before we analyze it:

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. (Philippians 2:5–11, ESV)

This passage is often called the "Christ Hymn" or the "Kenosis Hymn" because of its poetic structure and its use of the verb ekenōsen (ἐκένωσεν) — "he emptied himself" — in verse 7. Many scholars believe Paul is quoting or adapting an early Christian hymn or confession that predates his letter to the Philippians.¹ Whether it was composed by Paul himself or drawn from an earlier source, this passage gives us one of the earliest and most exalted portraits of Christ's identity and mission in the entire New Testament.

The theological weight of this passage is staggering. In just seven verses, Paul moves from the pre-existent glory of the Son in the "form of God" to the lowest point of human degradation — death on a cross — and then to the supreme exaltation of Christ as Lord over all creation. The passage is a breathtaking arc: glory, descent, humiliation, death, resurrection, exaltation, universal worship. Every word matters. And the word that has generated the most intense debate in the history of Christology is that single verb in verse 7: ekenōsen.

The Greek Text and Its Key Terms

Let us look at the Greek more closely. Verse 6 reads: hos en morphē theou hyparchōn ouch harpagmon hēgēsato to einai isa theō (ὃς ἐν μορφῇ θεοῦ ὑπάρχων οὐχ ἁρπαγμὸν ἡγήσατο τὸ εἶναι ἴσα θεῷ) — "who, though he was existing in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited." There are several key terms here that require careful attention.

First, morphē theou (μορφῇ θεοῦ) — "the form of God." The word morphē is crucial. In Greek, morphē does not mean a mere outward appearance or shape — like a costume someone wears. It refers to the essential form or nature that makes something what it is. When Paul says Christ was "in the form of God," he is saying Christ possessed the very nature and essential reality of God.² As Andrew Loke observes in The Origin of Divine Christology, the lexical evidence shows that morphē can denote a visible appearance that describes the underlying nature. The existence of an underlying truly divine nature is confirmed by the context of Philippians 2:6.³ This is not merely a title or a role; it is an ontological statement about who Christ is in His deepest being.

Second, the word harpagmon (ἁρπαγμόν) — translated variously as "something to be grasped," "something to be exploited," or "something to be taken advantage of." This word occurs only here in the entire Greek Bible, making it exceptionally difficult to interpret.⁴ The debate around this word is significant. Roy Hoover's landmark study demonstrated that harpagmos in the double-accusative construction functions idiomatically to mean "taking advantage of" — that is, Christ did not take advantage of His equality with God for selfish purposes. N.T. Wright has built on Hoover's work to argue that Christ already possessed equality with God but chose not to exploit it. He rejected this view of kingly power — using it for self-serving purposes — and instead poured Himself out for others.⁵

The implications of this reading are profound. If Christ already possessed equality with God (rather than grasping for something He did not yet have), then the "emptying" in verse 7 is not about acquiring a status He lacked but about how He exercised a status He already had. He was fully God — and He chose to serve.

The Crucial Verb: Ekenōsen

Now we come to the heart of the debate. Verse 7 says: alla heauton ekenōsen morphēn doulou labōn (ἀλλὰ ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσεν μορφὴν δούλου λαβών) — "but he emptied himself, taking the form of a servant." The verb ekenōsen comes from the root kenoō (κενόω), which can mean "to empty," "to pour out," or metaphorically "to make of no account" or "to make nothing."

Here is the critical question: Does "emptied himself" mean (a) He emptied Himself OF divine attributes — subtracting something from His deity — or (b) He emptied Himself BY taking on the form of a servant — adding human nature without subtracting divine nature?

I believe the grammar of the passage strongly supports interpretation (b). Notice the structure: "He emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men." The two participles — labōn (λαβών, "taking") and genomenos (γενόμενος, "being born/becoming") — are participles of manner. They explain how the emptying happened. They tell us the mode or method of the self-emptying. And what do they describe? Not subtraction but addition. Not giving up divine attributes but taking on human nature. Not losing the form of God but adding the form of a servant.

As Loke notes, drawing on Gordon Fee's careful exegesis, "emptied himself" does not have to mean "emptied himself of something." Rather, it could be a metaphor meaning something like "he made himself nothing" in becoming human. Fee argues this reading on the basis of the parallel structure of the two sentences in verses 6–8, which suggests that the participles carry the same sense in both instances — this is how Christ emptied himself and humbled himself: by "becoming human" and by "becoming obedient."⁶

This is a critical point, so let me state it plainly. The morphē theou — "form of God" — is retained. The morphē doulou — "form of a servant" — is added. Christ did not exchange one form for another. He did not take off His deity like a robe and put on humanity instead. He kept His divine nature and added a human nature to it. The "emptying" was not a subtraction from His deity; it was the supreme act of condescension by which the eternal Son added to Himself a complete human nature — a real human body and a real human soul — and entered the world as a servant.

Richard Swinburne captures this beautifully when he observes that kenotic theories all have to do with a self-emptying that involves a "giving up." But the Chalcedonian tradition, by contrast, affirms that the humility involves a "taking on." The king humbles himself by becoming a servant as well as being a king — not by ceasing to be a king.⁷

Loke further observes that the inherited exegetical tradition — going back centuries before the nineteenth-century kenoticists — interpreted ekenōsen as a krypsis, a voluntary concealment of divine powers by the pre-existent Logos, not as a literal metaphysical emptying of divine attributes.⁸ The nineteenth-century kenoticists were innovators, not traditionalists. They offered a new interpretation of Philippians 2:7 that departed from the received exegetical tradition. We should weigh that fact carefully.

The Exaltation and Its Implications

The second half of the hymn — verses 9–11 — is equally important for our discussion. Paul writes that "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."

This language echoes Isaiah 45:23, where YHWH declares: "To me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear allegiance." Paul takes language that Isaiah reserves exclusively for the God of Israel and applies it to Jesus Christ. Every knee will bow to Jesus. Every tongue will confess that Jesus is Lord — kyrios (κύριος), the Greek word used in the Septuagint to translate the divine name YHWH.⁹ This is a breathtaking affirmation of Christ's deity. Paul is saying that the worship that belongs to God alone is rightly directed to Jesus — because Jesus is included within the identity of the one God of Israel.

Now, here is the question for the kenoticist: If Christ had truly surrendered His divine attributes — if He had ceased to be omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent during His earthly life — then what exactly was "exalted" in verse 9? On the kenotic view, the Son would have gone from full deity, to diminished deity, and then back to full deity. But does it make sense to say that God can be diminished and then restored? Can the Son cease to be fully God and then become fully God again? This creates enormous theological difficulties, as we shall see.

The simpler and more theologically coherent reading is that the exaltation in verses 9–11 is the public vindication and cosmic revelation of what was always true — that Jesus Christ is Lord, the one to whom every knee will bow. He did not become Lord at the exaltation. He was always Lord. But during His earthly ministry, His lordship was concealed — hidden beneath the form of a servant. The exaltation strips away the veil and reveals the glory that was always there.

The Rise of Kenotic Christology

If the traditional reading of Philippians 2 understands the "emptying" as an act of addition — the Son adding human nature to His divine nature — then where did the alternative kenotic reading come from? The answer lies in the intellectual ferment of nineteenth-century German theology. Kenotic Christology, as a developed theological position, is a relatively recent innovation in the history of Christian thought. It arose in the context of the heightening of historical-critical methodology during the nineteenth century as an apologetic attempt to construe the person of Christ in His historical and unitive integrity.¹⁰

The problem that drove the kenoticists was a real one. The Gospels present a Jesus who is genuinely limited — who does not know the day of His return, who gets tired and hungry, who learns and grows. How do we reconcile these genuine limitations with the traditional affirmation that Christ is fully God — omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent? The kenoticists proposed a bold answer: Christ really did set aside certain divine attributes in order to live a genuinely human life.

Nineteenth-Century Kenoticism: Thomasius and Gore

The first systematic kenotic theory was developed by the Lutheran theologian Gottfried Thomasius (1802–1875). Thomasius drew a distinction between two categories of divine attributes. On one side, he placed what he called the "immanent" or "moral" attributes — attributes like love, holiness, righteousness, and truth. These, Thomasius argued, are essential to God's nature and cannot be surrendered without God ceasing to be God. On the other side, he placed the "relative" or "metaphysical" attributes — attributes like omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence. These attributes, Thomasius claimed, pertain to God's relationship with the world rather than to His inner being, and therefore can be temporarily set aside.

On Thomasius's view, the Son of God surrendered His metaphysical attributes at the Incarnation while retaining His moral attributes. During His earthly life, Jesus was genuinely limited in knowledge, power, and presence — because the Son had actually given up omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence. But He retained His love, holiness, and moral perfection. After the resurrection and ascension, the Son resumed the metaphysical attributes He had set aside.¹¹

The Anglican theologian Charles Gore (1853–1932) advanced a similar proposal. Gore argued that the Incarnation required a genuine self-limitation of the divine — a real act of condescension in which the Son laid aside certain prerogatives of deity. Gore was particularly concerned with the problem of Christ's knowledge. If Jesus was omniscient, then how could He have held beliefs about the authorship of the Psalms or the historicity of Jonah that modern criticism calls into question? Gore's solution was that Jesus had genuinely limited knowledge because the divine Son had surrendered omniscience for the period of the Incarnation.¹²

Another important early kenoticist was Wolfgang Friedrich Gess (1819–1891), who pushed kenotic theory to a more radical extreme. Gess argued that the Logos not only surrendered divine attributes like omniscience and omnipotence but also, in a sense, emptied Himself of His divine self-consciousness. On Gess's view, the incarnate Christ was conscious only in a human way — He did not retain any awareness of His divine identity during His earthly life. This was the most thoroughgoing version of kenotic Christology, and it raised immediate red flags. As Archbishop William Temple observed, "To say that the Creative Word was so self-emptied as to have no being except in the infant Jesus, is to assert that for a certain period the history of the world was let loose from the control of the Creative Word."¹³ If the Logos truly emptied Himself of all divine consciousness, then who was sustaining the universe while the baby Jesus lay in the manger?

Modern Kenoticism: Davis and Feenstra

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, more nuanced versions of kenotic Christology have been proposed. Two of the most prominent modern kenoticists are the philosophers Stephen T. Davis and Ronald Feenstra.

Davis has defended a kenotic theory at considerable length. His basic idea is that Christ was simultaneously truly divine and truly human, and that this was made possible by the Logos emptying Himself of those divine properties that are inconsistent with being human. Davis draws a distinction between properties that are essential to being divine and properties that are essential to being divine simpliciter — that is, being divine without also being human. On Davis's view, properties like omnipotence and omniscience are essential not to being divine per se, but to being divine simpliciter. A divine being who is also human — an incarnate divine being — need not possess them.¹⁴

Davis has also used the language of "giving up" to describe the self-emptying: "God gives up property p" would roughly mean that at a given point God has property p but at a later point, of God's own free choice, God does not have property p.¹⁵ This is a clear statement that, on the kenotic view, the Son genuinely loses certain properties at the Incarnation. He changes from being omniscient to being non-omniscient, from being omnipotent to being non-omnipotent.

Feenstra has offered what he calls a "kenotic Christology of divine attributes." He suggests that perhaps what is essential to God is having properties like being-omniscient-unless-freely-and-temporarily-choosing-not-to-be-otherwise. On this view, omniscience is not straightforwardly essential to the divine nature; rather, what is essential is a more complex property that includes the freedom to temporarily suspend omniscience. This is an ingenious move, but as we shall see, it faces devastating objections.

Functional Kenoticism

A third approach, sometimes called "functional kenoticism," tries to walk a middle path. On this view, the Son did not actually give up His divine attributes at the Incarnation. He still possessed omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence. But He voluntarily chose not to exercise them during His earthly life. The attributes were there, but they were inactive — like a powerful engine that is turned off but still installed in the car.

This view has significant advantages over ontological kenoticism. It preserves the Son's possession of all divine attributes — He never ceases to be omniscient, omnipotent, or omnipresent. He simply chooses not to use these capacities for the duration of the Incarnation. This avoids some of the most damaging objections to ontological kenoticism (such as the essential properties argument, which we will examine shortly).

However, functional kenoticism still faces serious problems of its own. As Oliver Crisp observes, even on the functionalist account, the Incarnation involves a real change in the Word from His pre-incarnate to His incarnate state that is monumental. The Word goes from exercising omnipotence to not exercising omnipotence — from actively sustaining all things to (on this view) refraining from that activity. As Donald Macleod colorfully put it: "Supposing Einstein had suddenly been reduced to a mollusc, the shock could not have been greater."¹⁶

Moreover, Crisp argues that functional kenoticism still requires giving up an important element of the traditional view of the divine nature — namely, a strong view of divine immutability. Even if the Son retains His divine attributes, the decision not to exercise them represents a genuine change in the divine life. This is a significant concession.¹⁷

It is also important to distinguish functional kenoticism from the kryptic model that I defend (and that we will develop fully in Chapter 17). These two views are sometimes confused, but there is a crucial difference. On functional kenoticism, the Son chooses not to exercise His divine attributes at all during the Incarnation. On the kryptic model (Loke), the Son conceals His divine attributes at a preconscious level but sometimes accesses them — for instance, when He performs miracles, reads people's thoughts, or prophesies about the future. The kryptic model allows for a selective, occasional access to divine attributes when the Father wills it, while functional kenoticism envisions a blanket non-use of divine attributes for the entire earthly ministry. This is an important distinction, and we will return to it below.

The Philosophical Problems with Kenoticism

Now we come to the heart of the case against kenotic Christology. There are at least four devastating philosophical problems that, taken together, make kenoticism untenable as a Christological model. I will present each one carefully and show why the kenotic response to each is inadequate.

Problem 1: The Essential Properties Argument

This is the most fundamental objection to ontological kenoticism, and I believe it is decisive all by itself. The argument can be stated simply: divine attributes like omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence are essential properties of the divine nature. A being who is God must be omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent — not just as a matter of fact, but as a matter of metaphysical necessity. If omniscience is essential to being God, then any being who lacks omniscience is not God. Period.

Let me put this in philosophical terms. An essential property is a property that a being has in every possible world in which it exists. If omniscience is essential to the divine nature, then in every possible world in which God exists, God is omniscient. There is no possible world in which God exists and is not omniscient. A being who is not omniscient is simply not God — just as a triangle that does not have three sides is simply not a triangle.

Now apply this to the Incarnation. If the Son of God surrendered His omniscience at the Incarnation, then the Son of God became not omniscient. But if omniscience is essential to divinity, then a non-omniscient being is not divine. Therefore, if the Son surrendered omniscience, He ceased to be divine. And if He ceased to be divine, the Incarnation was not the union of God and man — it was the transformation of God into man. The eternal Son did not become incarnate; He became merely human.¹⁸

As Loke observes, this argument has been pressed forcefully by J.P. Moreland and William Lane Craig. What follows from ontological kenoticism is that there is a possible world in which a person exists who (like baby Jesus) is no more powerful and no more intelligent than an ordinary human being — and yet this person is supposedly divine, even though he is weaker and less intelligent than many other persons. This strains credulity. Most people from diverse cultures and religious traditions would think that knowledge is a good thing — a perfection. There is no state of knowledge that is bad or merely neutral in value. It is precisely because knowledge is almost universally regarded as a good thing that many theologians have derived God's omniscience from the doctrine that His nature is absolutely perfect. On the understanding of God as the greatest possible being, many people would justifiably conclude that a divine person who was no longer omniscient and omnipotent would no longer be divine.¹⁹

The kenoticist might respond by redefining divine attributes as non-essential properties. This is Davis's strategy: perhaps omniscience is essential not to being divine but only to being divine simpliciter — divine without also being human. But this move is deeply problematic. As Moreland and Craig point out, these contrived properties — like "being-omnipotent-unless-freely-choosing-to-limit-himself" — are not really properties at all. They are statements masquerading as properties. They are really just assertions like "Christ remains divine even if he temporarily gives up omniscience" — which is precisely the issue under dispute.²⁰

Moreover, on Davis's view, the Son who has given up omnipotence — and lacks the ability to take it back again — is in a state where He is weaker, less intelligent, and smaller than many other beings. Does He still share the essence of God, who is the greatest possible being? It seems not. The essential properties argument remains devastating for ontological kenoticism.

Problem 2: The Trinity Problem

The second major problem for kenoticism concerns the doctrine of the Trinity. If the Son surrendered His omniscience at the Incarnation, what happened to the Father and the Spirit? Did they remain omniscient? If so, then during the Incarnation, the Persons of the Trinity no longer shared all divine attributes. The Son was not omniscient, but the Father and the Spirit were. This means the Son was ontologically different from the Father and the Spirit during the period of the Incarnation.

But the Nicene Creed affirms that the Son is homoousios (ὁμοούσιος) — "of the same substance" or "of the same essence" — with the Father. The Son shares the identical divine nature with the Father and the Spirit. If the Son loses omniscience while the Father retains it, then the Son no longer shares the same divine nature as the Father. The homoousios is broken. The Trinity is fractured.²¹

This is not a minor problem. The Nicene definition of the Son's relationship to the Father was achieved at enormous theological cost — through decades of controversy, multiple councils, and the tireless work of Athanasius and the Cappadocian fathers. The homoousios is the bedrock of Trinitarian orthodoxy. Any Christological model that requires the homoousios to be even temporarily suspended is one that orthodox theology cannot accept.

Furthermore, as Karl Barth observed, if in Christ God is not wholly God, then "everything that we may say about the reconciliation of the world made by God in this humiliated One is left hanging in the air."²² If the Son who died on the cross was not fully God — if He had surrendered essential divine attributes — then the atonement is no longer the act of God saving the world. It is the act of a diminished deity who may lack the power and knowledge needed to accomplish salvation.

Problem 3: The Chalcedonian Problem

The Council of Chalcedon (451) defined the orthodox understanding of the Incarnation in words that have shaped Christian theology ever since. The Chalcedonian Definition states that the two natures of Christ — divine and human — are united in one Person "without confusion, without change, without division, without separation" (asynchytōs, atreptōs, adiairetōs, achōristōs — ἀσυγχύτως, ἀτρέπτως, ἀδιαιρέτως, ἀχωρίστως). Each nature retains its own properties without being altered by the union.

The key word for our purposes is atreptōs (ἀτρέπτως) — "without change." The divine nature retains its properties without change in the Incarnation. But kenotic Christology says the opposite: the divine nature does change, because it loses certain properties (omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence) at the moment of Incarnation. This is a direct contradiction of the Chalcedonian Definition.

As Timothy Pawl demonstrates in his rigorous analysis of the conciliar statements, the councils consistently affirm that the Son does not diminish in any way in the Incarnation. The Second Council of Constantinople (553) reaffirmed the Chalcedonian Definition. The Third Council of Constantinople (681) further specified that Christ has two natural wills and two natural operations — divine and human — "without change." At every turn, the conciliar tradition insists that the divine nature is not altered by the Incarnation.²³

Pawl shows that Leo's Tome to Flavian — included in the documents of Chalcedon and affirmed at both the Second and Third Councils of Constantinople — presents both a non-kenotic notion of self-emptying and an affirmation that Christ does not diminish in the Incarnation. Leo writes that Christ's self-emptying, whereby the invisible rendered Himself visible and the Creator chose to join the ranks of mortals, involved no failure of power; it was an act of merciful favor. Each nature kept its proper character without loss.²⁴

Sarah Coakley has observed similarly that the patristic theologians, far from endorsing a kenotic view in which the Son gives up some divine attributes, rarely even consider the possibility of questioning divine attributes like impassibility in light of the Incarnation.²⁵ Kenoticism is a modern innovation, not a recovery of ancient wisdom. The patristic and conciliar tradition stands firmly against it.

Problem 4: The Coherence Problem

The fourth objection targets the internal logic of kenoticism. What does it actually mean for a divine being to "become" ignorant? To "become" weak? To "become" spatially limited? Can an essentially omniscient being become non-omniscient? This is like asking whether a necessarily existent being can become contingent — whether a being that must exist can suddenly become a being that might not exist. It is a logical impossibility.

Think about it this way. An essentially omniscient being is one who knows all truths in every possible world in which it exists. There is no possible world in which this being exists and fails to know some truth. Now, if this being "becomes" non-omniscient, it transitions from a state of knowing all truths to a state of not knowing all truths. But this transition is impossible, because the being's omniscience is essential — it holds in every possible world. The being cannot transition out of omniscience any more than the number 7 can transition out of being prime.

The kenoticist might object that God is free — surely God can choose to limit Himself. But freedom and essential properties are different things. I am free to choose what to eat for dinner, but I am not free to choose to stop being human. My humanity is essential to me; it is not something I can freely set aside. Similarly, God is free in how He acts, but His essential attributes — the properties that make Him God — are not optional features He can toggle on and off.

Moreland and Craig press this point with devastating force. If the Son, having relinquished omnipotence, retained the power to get omnipotence back again, then He never truly ceased to be omnipotent — since omnipotence is a modal property concerning what one can do. But if He lacked the power to get omnipotence back again, then how is it that He was only temporarily non-omnipotent?²⁶ Either way, the kenotic position is incoherent.

The Kenotic Response and Its Inadequacy

Kenoticists are thoughtful theologians, and they have offered several responses to these objections. Let us consider the most important ones and evaluate them carefully.

Response 1: Redefining Essential Properties

The most common kenotic response to the essential properties argument is to redefine which properties are essential to the divine nature. As we saw, Davis proposes that properties like omniscience and omnipotence are not essential to divinity per se but only to divinity simpliciter — divinity unaccompanied by humanity. On this view, there is no logical problem with the Son lacking omniscience, because omniscience was never essential to being divine in the first place.

But this response comes at an enormous cost. If omniscience is not essential to being divine, then there is a possible world in which God exists and is not omniscient. There is a possible world in which the Creator of the universe does not know some truths about His own creation. There is a possible world in which God is ignorant of significant facts. This seems to undermine the very concept of God. As Loke observes, most people from diverse cultures and religious persuasions would think that a being who is ignorant and weak — even temporarily — is simply not God.²⁷

Moreover, the strategy of redefining essential properties can be applied to anything. If we are willing to say that omniscience is only "phase-essential" to the divine nature — essential in the pre-incarnate phase but not in the incarnate phase — then we have introduced a principle that has no clear limits. Could God also lack goodness in some phase? Could God lack existence in some phase? Once we start treating divine attributes as phase-essential rather than absolutely essential, the entire concept of the divine nature becomes unstable.

Crisp makes a similar point. The Word does not have certain divine properties that are only essential to His pre-incarnate phase of existence but not essential to His incarnate phase. What happens at the Incarnation is that the Word takes on certain properties in addition to His essential divine properties. He does not relinquish one set of phase-essential properties to take up another set. He is a de re necessary being who has all His properties essentially. The phase-essential strategy will work only if the theologian is willing to concede to the ontological kenoticist the very point at issue — that there are divine attributes, non-essential to the divine nature, that may be only phase-essential to a particular stage of the life of the Word. But no classical theologian will accept this.²⁸

Response 2: The "Greater Love" Argument

Some kenoticists argue that a God who is willing to give up His divine attributes for the sake of humanity is greater and more worthy of worship than a God who could not or would not do this. On this view, the kenosis is the supreme expression of divine love — God loves us so much that He was willing to become genuinely weak and ignorant for our salvation.

This is an emotionally powerful argument, but it fails on closer inspection. As Loke points out, on the Divine Preconscious Model, the incarnate Logos could accomplish salvation for humanity by genuinely experiencing fatigue, suffering, temptation, and death on the cross without losing His omnipotence and omniscience. Hence, a loss of His knowledge and power would have been an unnecessary loss of His greatness.²⁹ If there is a model — the kryptic model — that preserves both genuine human experience and full divine attributes, then the kenotic sacrifice was not necessary. And if it was not necessary, then it does not demonstrate greater love; it demonstrates a needless diminishment of deity.

Furthermore, the "greater love" argument proves too much. If giving up omniscience shows greater love, then wouldn't giving up goodness show even greater love? Wouldn't giving up existence itself show the greatest love of all? But these are absurd conclusions. The argument from "greater love" has no natural stopping point once we begin treating divine attributes as dispensable.

Response 3: The Non-Standard Properties Approach

C. Stephen Evans has proposed that perhaps the Son possesses non-standard divine properties — properties like "being-omniscient-unless-freely-choosing-to-limit-himself" — rather than the standard versions of these properties. On this view, the Son was always capable of choosing to limit His knowledge, and at the Incarnation He exercised that capability.

Moreland and Craig's response to this proposal is incisive. These contrived properties are not genuine properties in the sense of capacities or qualities. They are really statements masquerading as properties — assertions like "Christ remains divine even if He temporarily gives up omniscience," which is precisely the issue under dispute. The kenoticist has simply reformulated the problem rather than solved it.³⁰

Moreover, even if we grant that the Son possesses such non-standard properties, the question remains: in the state of having given up omnipotence without the ability to take it back again, is the Son still divine? Does He still share the essence of God, who is the greatest possible being, even though He is weaker, less intelligent, and smaller than many other beings? The intuitive answer is no — and no amount of property-redefinition can change that.

Response 4: Functional Kenoticism as a Middle Path

Some theologians try to avoid the problems of ontological kenoticism by moving to functional kenoticism — the view that the Son retained His divine attributes but chose not to exercise them. This is a significant improvement over ontological kenoticism because it avoids the essential properties argument: the Son never ceases to be omniscient; He simply chooses not to use His omniscience.

But functional kenoticism has its own problems. As Crisp notes, even on the functionalist account, the Word restricts the exercise of His divine attributes in toto for the duration of the Incarnation. He is not exercising His omnipotence anywhere — not even outside the person of Christ. He is not exercising His omniscience at all. This means that the entire universe was, for thirty-three years, not being sustained by the actively exercised omnipotence of the Second Person of the Trinity. This is a staggering implication.³¹

Moreover, functional kenoticism still implies a monumental change in the divine life — from actively exercising omnipotence to refraining from exercising omnipotence. This may not technically violate the essential properties argument, but it raises serious concerns about divine immutability. Is God really the same God if one Person of the Trinity suddenly stops doing what He has always done?

Finally, functional kenoticism creates a problem of its own with respect to the Gospel accounts. If the Son possessed omniscience but simply chose not to use it, then when Jesus said "I do not know the day or hour" (Mark 13:32), He was not telling the truth in a straightforward sense. He did know — He just was not accessing His knowledge. This starts to look like the "pretending" that kenoticists rightly want to avoid. The kryptic model handles this much more naturally, as we will see in Chapter 17.

The Patristic and Conciliar Witness Against Kenoticism

It is worth pausing to note that kenotic Christology is not just a modern philosophical problem. It is also a departure from the unanimous witness of the church fathers and the ecumenical councils. Let me briefly survey this witness.

The Church Fathers

The early church fathers consistently understood the "emptying" of Philippians 2:7 as an act of condescension — the Son taking on human nature — not as a literal surrender of divine attributes. The entire inherited exegetical tradition interpreted ekenōsen as a krypsis — a voluntary concealment of divine powers — rather than a literal metaphysical emptying.³²

Athanasius (c. 296–373) is representative. In his De Incarnatione (On the Incarnation), Athanasius argues that the Word became human without in any way diminishing His divine nature. The Word was not confined to the body; He continued to sustain all things by His providence even while dwelling in human flesh. As Athanasius memorably put it, the Word was not enclosed in the body, nor was He present only in the body and nowhere else. He filled all things and was outside all things, and was present in the body by His condescension.³³

Karl Barth echoed this patristic consensus when he wrote that "the kenosis of the Son in the incarnation is not that he wholly or partially ceases to be the eternal Son of the Father (otherwise the incarnation would not be a revelation) but that as the Son of God he is also made the Son of Man."³⁴ The Incarnation is an addition, not a subtraction.

John of Damascus (c. 676–749), in his Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, provides the mature patristic synthesis. The Word assumes human nature without any change or alteration in His divine nature. The two natures are united in one Person without confusion, change, division, or separation. The divine nature retains all its properties — omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence — throughout the Incarnation. These properties may not have been manifested through the human nature in Christ's daily experience, but they were never surrendered. This is essentially a kryptic understanding of the Incarnation — one that anticipates the formal kryptic model that Loke develops in the modern period.³⁵

The Ecumenical Councils

The ecumenical councils are equally clear. As we noted above, the Council of Chalcedon (451) defined the two natures of Christ as united "without change" (atreptōs). This directly rules out ontological kenoticism, which requires a change in the divine nature (the loss of certain attributes).

Pawl's exhaustive study of the conciliar statements demonstrates that the councils consistently affirm the following points, each of which is incompatible with kenoticism: (1) The Son does not diminish in any way in the Incarnation. (2) The divine nature retains all its properties without loss. (3) The "self-emptying" of Philippians 2:7 is understood as the Son taking on human nature, not surrendering divine nature. (4) Even in the state of humiliation — even on the cross — the Son remains fully God with all divine attributes intact.³⁶

Leo's Tome is particularly significant because it was explicitly endorsed by the Council of Chalcedon and reaffirmed at subsequent councils. Leo writes that the self-emptying whereby the invisible rendered Himself visible and the Creator chose to join the ranks of mortals spelled no failure of power. Each nature kept its proper character without loss. The form of God does not take away the form of a servant, and the form of a servant does not detract from the form of God.³⁷

The Councils of Ephesus (431) and Constantinople II (553) similarly affirm that, even in light of the self-emptying passage in Philippians, Christ remained what He was. As Pawl observes, if even in self-emptying Christ did not change, then the modern kenotic understanding of self-emptying is not the understanding championed by conciliar Christology.³⁸

The Kryptic Alternative: A Preview

If kenoticism fails — if the Son cannot have surrendered His divine attributes — then how do we account for the genuine limitations of Jesus' earthly life? How do we explain the fact that Jesus grew in wisdom (Luke 2:52), didn't know the day of His return (Mark 13:32), got tired, got hungry, and was genuinely tempted?

The answer is the kryptic model, which I will develop fully in Chapter 17. Here I will offer a brief preview so that the reader can see that there is a viable alternative to kenoticism — one that preserves everything the kenoticists rightly want (a genuinely human Jesus) without the devastating philosophical and theological problems we have identified.

The word krypsis (κρύψις) comes from the Greek verb kryptō (κρύπτω), meaning "to hide" or "to conceal." Where kenoticism says the Son emptied Himself of divine attributes, krypsis says the Son concealed them. The divine attributes — omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence — were not surrendered at the Incarnation. They were hidden. They were present but veiled — not eliminated but voluntarily restrained from flooding Christ's human conscious experience.³⁹

Andrew Loke develops this idea into a specific model — the Divine Preconscious Model — which proposes that the Son's divine attributes existed at what Loke calls the "preconscious" level during the Incarnation. Think of it this way: right now, you know your phone number. But unless someone just asked you to recall it, that knowledge was not in your conscious awareness a moment ago. It was in your preconscious — stored in your mind, available if you needed it, but not actively occupying your attention. In an analogous way (with appropriate qualifications for the infinite difference between divine and human minds), the Son's divine knowledge and power were "there" — fully present, fully possessed — but not constantly flooding His human conscious experience.⁴⁰

On this model, when Jesus said He didn't know the day or hour of His return, He was telling the truth about His human conscious experience. His human mind genuinely did not have that information at the conscious level. The divine knowledge was present at the preconscious level — available if the Father willed it — but it was not part of Jesus' moment-by-moment human awareness. Similarly, when Jesus got tired, He genuinely experienced fatigue — because He was relying on the finite strength of His human body rather than drawing on the divine omnipotence that was available at the preconscious level.

This model has several decisive advantages over kenoticism:

First, it preserves the essential properties of the divine nature. The Son never ceases to be omniscient, omnipotent, or omnipresent. He possesses these attributes throughout the entire Incarnation. They are concealed, not surrendered. The essential properties argument has no force against this model.

Second, it preserves the Trinity. The Son continues to share the identical divine nature with the Father and the Spirit. The homoousios is intact. The Trinity is not fractured.

Third, it is fully consistent with Chalcedon. The divine nature retains all its properties "without change." There is no alteration of the divine nature at the Incarnation — only the addition of a human nature and the voluntary concealment of divine attributes from Christ's human conscious experience.

Fourth, it preserves the genuine humanity of Christ's experience. Jesus really did grow in wisdom, really did not know the day or hour, really did get tired, and really was tempted. These were genuine features of His human conscious life — not a pretense. The kryptic model takes Christ's humanity just as seriously as kenoticism does, but without the devastating cost to His deity.

Crisp provides an important independent analysis of the kryptic model. He argues that there is a crucial difference between the functionalist kenotic account and the krypsis account. On functional kenoticism, the Word restricts the exercise of His divine attributes in toto — He is not exercising His omnipotence at all during the Incarnation. But on the krypsis view, the only change to the exercise of divine attributes is in the human nature of Christ. It is only the human nature, in hypostatic union with the Word, that does not have access to certain divine attributes. The restriction the Word places upon the exercise of His attributes is, on the krypsis view, really no restriction on the Word as such. Strictly speaking, it is just that the human nature of Christ, taken up in the Incarnation, is created such that it has no access to those divine properties that would compromise or threaten to compromise the unglorified human nature.⁴¹

This is a crucial point. On the kryptic view, the Word does not restrict Himself. The Word continues to exercise all His divine attributes as He always has. It is only the human nature of Christ — the body and soul that the Son assumed — that does not have conscious access to the divine attributes. The Son, in His divine nature, remains fully omniscient, fully omnipotent, and fully omnipresent. It is only in His human conscious experience that these attributes are veiled.

Kenoticism, the Human Soul, and the Book's Central Argument

Before we close this chapter, we need to connect the kenoticism debate to the central argument of this book — the case against physicalism. How does the choice between kenoticism and krypsis relate to the question of whether Christ has an immaterial human soul?

The connection is this: both kenoticism and the kryptic model presuppose that Christ's human nature includes a genuine inner life — a mind, a will, emotions, and consciousness. Both models are trying to explain the relationship between Christ's divine knowledge and power and His human limitations. Both models assume that there is a "human side" and a "divine side" to Christ's experience, and they differ on how the two sides relate.

On the kryptic model, the "human side" is the human soul's conscious experience. The divine attributes are concealed at the preconscious level, while the human soul experiences a genuinely limited, finite conscious life. This requires a human soul — an immaterial center of consciousness, will, and emotion that serves as the "location" of Christ's human experience. Without a human soul, there is no metaphysical substrate for the conscious/preconscious distinction that makes the kryptic model work. If Christ has no soul — if He is merely a physical brain — then the "preconscious" divine attributes would need to be somehow stored in neural connections. But divine omniscience cannot be contained in a finite brain. The information content of omniscience is infinite; a brain is finite. The kryptic model collapses without a human soul. (We will develop this argument fully in Chapter 17.)

Kenoticism, interestingly, might seem to fare better on physicalism — since if the Son has actually surrendered His divine omniscience, there is no infinite knowledge that needs to be "stored" anywhere. But even kenoticism needs a human mind that can grow in wisdom, experience genuine temptation, and exercise moral choice. On physicalism, all of this is reduced to brain states — electrochemical patterns in neural tissue. The "growth in wisdom" becomes neural development. The "temptation" becomes a competition between neural pathways. The "moral choice" becomes the firing of one set of neurons rather than another. This is an impoverished account of the rich interior life that both kenoticists and kryptic theorists attribute to Christ.

As Michael Wilkinson argues in Crowned with Glory and Honor, the Chalcedonian Definition explicitly describes Christ's human nature as consisting of a rational soul and a body — ek psychēs logikēs kai sōmatos (ἐκ ψυχῆς λογικῆς καὶ σώματος). Both the kenotic model and the kryptic model make most sense when we understand Christ's human nature as the councils defined it: a body-soul composite in which the soul serves as the seat of consciousness, will, and the moral life.⁴²

Joshua Farris makes a related point. In his Introduction to Theological Anthropology, Farris argues that the Christological debates of the early church presuppose a substance-dualist anthropology. The councils defined Christ's human nature as including a rational soul precisely because they understood human nature to consist of body and soul. The entire apparatus of conciliar Christology — the two natures, the two wills, the communication of attributes, the hypostatic union — presupposes that the human nature has an immaterial component. Physicalism removes that component and leaves the conciliar framework without the anthropological foundation it requires.⁴³

The debate between kenoticism and krypsis, then, is a debate that only makes full sense within a dualist framework. Both models are trying to explain the inner life of the incarnate Son — His consciousness, His knowledge, His will. Both models need a human soul as the bearer of that inner life. The kryptic model, which I defend, needs the soul even more urgently — because the preconscious/conscious distinction requires an immaterial mind in which different "levels" of awareness can operate. On physicalism, there is only a brain — and a brain simply cannot serve as the metaphysical substrate for the kryptic model's architecture.

Addressing Potential Counterarguments

Before we conclude, let me address two additional objections that kenoticists sometimes raise.

Objection: "Krypsis Is Just Functional Kenoticism by Another Name"

Some theologians have argued that the kryptic model is not really different from functional kenoticism — that it is just a relabeling of the same idea. If the Son possesses divine attributes but does not exercise them in His human conscious experience, isn't that the same as voluntarily not exercising them?

Crisp addresses this objection directly and shows that there is a crucial difference. On functional kenoticism, the Word restricts the use of His divine properties in toto — in both His divine and human natures during the Incarnation. The Word is not omnipotent at all during the Incarnation. But on the krypsis view, the only restriction is placed on the human nature of Christ. The human nature does not have access to certain divine attributes. But the Word Himself — in His divine nature — continues to exercise all His attributes without any restriction whatsoever.⁴⁴

This is the key difference. On functional kenoticism, the Word Himself is restricted. On krypsis, only the human nature is restricted. The Word continues to sustain all things by His omnipotence, to know all things by His omniscience, and to be present everywhere by His omnipresence. None of this changes at the Incarnation. What changes is that a human nature is added — a human nature that does not have conscious access to these divine attributes, because such access would overwhelm the genuinely human character of Christ's earthly experience.

Crisp acknowledges that if a functionalist kenoticist were willing to concede that the Word restricts the exercise of His attributes only in the human nature of Christ and not in His divine nature, then the distinction between functional kenoticism and krypsis would collapse. But, as Crisp notes, all the functionalist kenoticists he has read want to say something more than this — they want to say that the Word Himself restricts His divine properties in such a way that in the person of Christ, the Word is not omniscient, omnipotent, and so forth. The kryptic model is clear that no restriction is placed upon the Word in the exercise of His properties in the Incarnation. There is only a restriction placed upon the human nature of Christ at its creation, which prevents it from accessing these divine attributes.⁴⁵

Objection: "The Kryptic Model Makes Jesus a Pretender"

Another common objection is that the kryptic model turns Jesus into a pretender — someone who acts limited while secretly being unlimited. If Jesus had omniscience at the preconscious level, wasn't He being dishonest when He said He didn't know the day of His return?

This objection misunderstands the kryptic model. On this model, Jesus was genuinely limited in His human conscious experience. When He said He didn't know the day or hour, He was reporting the truth about His human conscious awareness. The information was not available to His human mind at that moment. It was "there" at the preconscious level — available if the Father willed it — but it was not in His conscious awareness. This is no more dishonest than you saying "I don't remember" when you genuinely cannot recall something, even though the information might be stored somewhere in your long-term memory.

Loke argues this point carefully. Although Jesus retained the ability to access His divine preconscious at all times, He truly experienced the desires, limitations, and hence the temptations that humans face. His human conscious experience was a genuinely limited experience. He was not pretending to be limited; He was genuinely experiencing human limitations at the conscious level, even while His divine nature remained omniscient at the preconscious level.⁴⁶

Consider an analogy. A master chess player who agrees to play blindfolded is genuinely limited in her ability to see the board — even though her chess knowledge and skill remain intact. She is not pretending to be limited; she is actually limited in her visual access to the board. But her chess ability is still there, available if she removes the blindfold. In an analogous way (with all the caveats about the limitations of human analogies for divine realities), Christ's divine knowledge was genuinely inaccessible to His human conscious experience — not destroyed, not surrendered, but hidden. He was not pretending to be human; He was genuinely experiencing human limitations.

The Incarnation and the Companion Books

The kenosis debate connects directly to themes developed in the author's companion books. In "Beyond the Grave: A Biblical and Theological Case for Postmortem Salvation," we argued that substance dualism — the view that human beings consist of both a material body and an immaterial soul — is supported by Scripture, philosophy, and the empirical evidence from veridical near-death experiences. In "The Heart of God: Does God Feel?," we argued that God has genuine emotional responses to His creatures — that divine love, compassion, grief, and joy are real, not merely metaphorical. In "The God Beyond the Clock: A Biblical and Theological Case for Dynamic Divine Temporality," we argued that God is genuinely temporal — that He genuinely enters into time and acts within the temporal order.

All three of these themes converge in the Incarnation. The Son genuinely entered time (divine temporality). He genuinely experienced human emotions through His human soul (divine emotion). And His human nature — the body-soul composite that He assumed — is the very same kind of nature that survives death, as substance dualism teaches. The kenosis debate shows us why getting the mechanics of the Incarnation right matters so much. If we get the Incarnation wrong — if we say the Son surrendered His divine attributes — then we distort the picture of God that the Incarnation is meant to reveal. The God revealed in Jesus Christ is not a God who becomes less than God for our sake; He is a God who remains fully God while also becoming fully human — adding our nature to His own, entering our pain, sharing our limitations from within, and redeeming us by the power of a love that never ceases to be divine.

Conclusion

We have covered a great deal of ground in this chapter. Let me summarize the key findings.

First, we examined Philippians 2:5–11, the passage that gives rise to the kenosis debate. We showed that the grammar of the passage supports the interpretation that Christ emptied Himself by taking on human nature, not by surrendering divine attributes. The participial clauses in verse 7 are participles of manner that explain how the emptying occurred: it was accomplished by the addition of the form of a servant, not by the subtraction of the form of God.

Second, we surveyed the major kenotic models — from the nineteenth-century kenoticism of Thomasius and Gore, through the modern proposals of Davis and Feenstra, to the functional kenoticism that tries to find a middle ground. Each model attempts to solve the genuine problem of Christ's human limitations, but each creates far worse problems than it solves.

Third, we examined four devastating philosophical objections to kenoticism: (1) the essential properties argument — divine attributes are essential, not optional, properties of the divine nature; (2) the Trinity problem — kenosis fractures the homoousios and damages the doctrine of the Trinity; (3) the Chalcedonian problem — kenosis directly contradicts the conciliar definition that the divine nature is unchanged in the Incarnation; and (4) the coherence problem — the very concept of an essentially omniscient being "becoming" non-omniscient is logically incoherent.

Fourth, we showed that the patristic and conciliar tradition unanimously rejects the kenotic interpretation of Philippians 2:7. The church fathers understood the "emptying" as an act of condescension — the Son taking on human nature — not as a literal surrender of divine attributes. The ecumenical councils, especially Chalcedon, explicitly rule out any change to the divine nature in the Incarnation.

Fifth, we previewed the kryptic alternative — the model I defend — which holds that the Son concealed (rather than surrendered) His divine attributes at a preconscious level during the Incarnation. This model preserves everything the kenoticists rightly want — a genuinely human Jesus who truly grew, truly was limited, and truly was tempted — without any of the devastating costs to Christ's deity, the Trinity, or the conciliar tradition.

Finally, we connected the kenosis debate to the central argument of this book: the case against physicalism. Both kenoticism and the kryptic model presuppose a rich inner life for Christ — a consciousness, a will, emotions, moral deliberation. Both models make most sense on a substance-dualist anthropology in which Christ's human nature includes an immaterial soul. The kryptic model in particular requires a human soul as the seat of Christ's human conscious experience and as the metaphysical framework for the preconscious/conscious distinction. Physicalism — which denies the existence of the soul — undermines the very anthropological foundation on which both models depend.

In the next chapter, we will examine Thomas Morris's two-minds view of the Incarnation — another major alternative model that takes Christ's genuine humanity seriously while preserving His full deity. Then, in Chapter 17, we will develop the kryptic model in full detail, showing why it represents the best available framework for understanding the mystery of the Word made flesh.

The Incarnation does not require us to diminish God. It requires us to marvel at a God who can add our nature to His own — who can enter our world, share our limitations, experience our pain, and die our death — all without ceasing for a single moment to be the infinite, eternal, all-knowing, all-powerful Creator of heaven and earth. That is not a lesser God. That is a God of breathtaking, incomprehensible love.

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