KENOSIS. — From the Greek κένωσις (κενόω = I empty), it is equivalent to stripping, annihilation, and is the subject of a modern Christological theory, predominantly Protestant, which maintains, based on a text of St. Paul (Phil. 2:7), a limitation or loss of Divinity by the Word at the moment of the Incarnation. The full Pauline text reads as follows: “Who (Christ), subsisting in the form of God, did not consider equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself (ἐκένωσεν), taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men and appearing in the form of a man.”
The Fathers understood this passage in a moral sense, interpreting it as the voluntary humiliation of Christ,
who, though truly being and remaining God (ἐν μορφῇ τοῦ θεοῦ ὑπάρχων... εἶναι ἴσα θεῷ), lowered Himself to the point of concealing His infinite greatness in the humility of our flesh in order to appear as our brother. Thus St. Leo the Great encapsulates the sense of tradition: “In both natures, therefore, the same Son of God is present, who takes on what is ours without losing what is His, renewing man in man, yet remaining immutable in Himself” (Serm. 7 de nat. Domini, 1). Among the Fathers, when the term k. is found, it has no special meaning but is synonymous with Incarnation.
It was Luther who began to misuse it, explaining St. Paul’s text in the sense of a transfer of divine attributes from the Word to human nature, which was thereby left deficient (De libertate christiana and Defensio verborum Christi, vols. VII and XXIII, ed. Weimar).
In the 17th century, a controversy arose between the theologians of Tübingen and those of Giessen regarding the use of divine attributes in Christ the Man: the human nature assumed from the beginning took possession (κτῆσαι) of all the divine properties of the Word, yet without making use of them, as if it had been stripped of them (κένοια), held the Giessen theologians; or else making use of them only secretly (προθύμως), argued those of Tübingen.
In the last century, the term k. began to be used in the technical sense of stripping, of limitation of the Word. Specifically, Thomasius (Beiträge zur kirchlichen Theologie, Erlangen 1845) spoke of a limitation (Selbstschränkung), and Gess (Lehre von der Person Christi, Basel 1854) of a true loss or complete renunciation (Entäusserung) of divine properties, as if in a kind of sleep or falling into unconsciousness.
But the technical theory soon migrated to England, where it saw wide development. After some tentative essays by O’Brien and Hutten, there followed a series of technical writings by the Anglican bishop Charles Gore, followed by numerous disciples who adopted and expanded the master’s ideas (Ottley, Moorhouse, Bright, Rashdall, and later Garvie, D’Arcy, Forrest, Valentine, and others). With more personal perspectives, the question was taken up again by Forsyth, Mackintosh, and Bethune-Baker.
Three forms of kenoticism can be distinguished among these authors: 1) divine attributes are divided into physical (extrinsic-relative) and ethical (intrinsic-absolute); the incarnate Word stripped Himself of the former (e.g., omnipotence, ubiquity) and retained the latter (e.g., love, truth); the physical attributes, during Christ’s earthly life, remained outside the scope of His potentiality (as Faibairn following Thomasius); 2) the Word, in becoming incarnate, lost the consciousness of His Divinity and felt Himself to be a mere man, capable of error and sin; during His earthly life, He no longer exercised the cosmic functions of Creator and Preserver of the universe (as Clarke following Gess); 3) in the Word, two spheres must be considered, one divine, the other human; in the former, He continues to possess divine attributes, while in the latter, He self-limits, laying aside relative physical attributes to adapt Himself to the conditions of man (an opinion held by Gore). The latter, despite the self-limitation of the Word, maintains the principle of the two natures, two wills, and even two consciousnesses, yet seeks to preserve the personal psychological unity of Christ. However, more recent and less constrained authors, such as Mackintosh, abandon the traditional metaphysical doctrine of nature and person and firmly adopt a psychological line to overcome abstract dualism with a vital unity in Christ. Thus Anglican kenoticism slides into psychologism, in which the divinity of Jesus Christ is asserted by virtue of His human consciousness, to which the divine is progressively manifested. This psychological tendency, in which Anglican kenoticism is ultimately dissolved, was developed into a complete system by W. Sanday, who exploited for this purpose the theories of James and Myers on the subconscious. For Sanday, Christ is first and foremost a man, in whom a clear consciousness must be distinguished from an obscure or subliminal one (subconsciousness), which is an eddy of the experience of the divine. Christ the man thus felt the divine in the subconscious, from which it gradually emerged into clear consciousness until it produced the conviction of being the true Son of God, the eternal Word.
K., as understood and explained by Protestant theologians, lacks biblical and patristic foundation; St. Paul would recognize in it nothing more than the word k., which, moreover, has been twisted to extravagant meanings. Yet it represents a metaphysical absurdity in its claim of the possibility of an intrinsic limitation or mutation of Divinity, which is necessarily infinite and immutable. From a theological standpoint, kenoticism of the first kind, with its assertion of a metamorphosis of the Word or a deification of the human nature assumed by Him, inevitably reverts to the positions of the old error of Eutyches (v. EUTYCHES AND EUTYCHIANISM). The more recent kenoticism, with its psychological underpinning, insisting on Christ as man and on His human consciousness, in which the experience and contact with the divine would be realized, recalls the old heresy of Nestorius (v.). Bethune-Baker, following the same psychological path as Sanday, logically arrives at defending the doctrine of Nestorius as an expression of the orthodoxy defined at the Council of Chalcedon. Kenoticism is thus false in its origin, development, and most recent conclusion.