Kenosis

KENOSIS. - From the Greek ἐκνῶσις (ἐκνῶς "I empty"), it is equivalent to divesting, annihilation, and is the subject of a modern Christological theory, predominantly Protestant, which maintains, on the basis of a text of St. Paul (Phil. 2:7), a limitation or a loss of Divinity on the part of the Word at the moment of the Incarnation. The full Pauline text reads thus: "Who (Christ), subsisting in the nature of God, did not regard his equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself (ἐκνῶσις), taking the nature of a servant, made like unto men and outwardly recognized as a man."

The Fathers understood this passage in a moral sense, reading in it, that is, the voluntary humiliation of Christ, who, though being and remaining truly God (ἐν μορφή τοῦ θεοῦ ὑπάρχων... εἶναι ἴσαι θεῷ), lowered himself to the point of hiding his infinite greatness in the humility of our flesh in order to appear as our brother. Thus St. Leo the Great gathers the sense of tradition: "In the one and the other nature, therefore, it is the same Son of God, who assumes what is ours without losing what is his, renewing man in man, but remaining immutable in himself" (Serm. 7 de nat. Domini, 1). In the Fathers the term k., when it is found, has no particular meaning, but is a synonym for Incarnation.

It was Luther who began to abuse it, explaining the text of St. Paul in the sense of a transfer of divine attributes from the Word to the human nature, which therefore remained as it were deified (De libertate christiana and Defensio verborum Christi, vols. VII and XXIII, Weimar ed.).

In the 17th century a controversy arose between the theologians of Tübingen and those of Giessen over the use of the divine attributes in Christ as Man: the human nature assumed from the beginning took possession (ἀτήσις) of all the divine properties of the Word, without however making use of them, as if it had divested itself of them (ἀγίωσις), held the theologians of Giessen; or making use of them only secretly (ἀρήψις), maintained those of Tübingen.

In the last century people began to speak of k. in the technical sense of divesting, of limitation of the Word. And precisely Thomasius (Beiträge zur kirchlichen Theologie, Erlangen 1845) spoke of a limitation (Selbstbeschränkung), Gess (Lehre von der Person Christi, Basel 1854) of a true loss or complete renunciation (Entäusserung) of the divine properties for a kind of sleep or fall into unconsciousness.

But the kenotic theory soon emigrated to England, where it had a broad development. After some timid attempts by O'Brien and Rutten, there came a series of kenotic 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 views, Forsyth, Mackintosh and Bethune-Baker took up the question again.

Three forms of kenoticism can be distinguished in these authors: 1) the divine attributes are divided into physical (extrinsic-relative) and ethical (intrinsic-absolute); the incarnate Word divested 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 (thus Fairbairn, following in the footsteps of Thomasius); 2) the Word in becoming incarnate lost the consciousness of his Divinity and felt himself a pure man, capable of erring and of sinning; during his earthly life he no longer exercised the cosmic functions of Creator and Preserver of the universe (thus Clarke, following Gess); 3) in the Word two spheres must be considered, one divine, the other human; in the first he continues to enjoy the divine attributes, in the second he limits himself, laying aside the relative physical attributes, in order to adapt to the conditions of a man (such is the opinion of Gore). The latter, despite the self-limitation of the Word, maintains the principle of the two natures, of the two wills and even of the two consciousnesses, seeking however to save the personal-psychological unity of Christ. But more recent and more unprejudiced authors, such as Mackintosh, abandon the traditional metaphysical doctrine of nature and person and place themselves decisively on the psychological line in order to overcome abstract dualism with the vital unity in Christ. By this path Anglican kenoticism slides into psychologism, whereby the divinity of Jesus Christ is asserted by virtue of his human consciousness, to which the divine manifests itself progressively. This psychological tendency, in which Anglican kenoticism is definitively dissolved, was developed into a complete system by W. Sanday, who for this purpose exploited the theories of James and Myers concerning the subconscious. For Sanday, Christ is first of all a man, in whom one must distinguish the clear consciousness from the obscure or subliminal one (subconsciousness), which is the proper seat of the experience of the divine. Christ as man therefore felt the divine in the subconscious, from which little by little the divine itself surfaced into the clear consciousness until it produced the persuasion of being the true son of God, the eternal Word.

K., as it has been understood and explained by Protestant theologians, lacks biblical and patristic foundation; St. Paul would recognize in it nothing of his own beyond the word k., which moreover has been bent to extravagant meanings. But it represents a metaphysical absurdity because of its claim of the possibility of an intrinsic limitation or mutation of the divinity, which is necessarily infinite and immutable. From the theological point of view, kenoticism of the first kind, with its affirmation of a metamorphosis of the Word or of a deification of the human nature assumed by it, leads inexorably back to the positions of the old error of Eutyches (v. EUTICHE ED EUTICHIANESIMO). The more recent kenoticism, with a psychological background, insisting on Christ as man and on his human consciousness, in which the experience of and contact with the divine would be realized, recalls the old heresy of Nestorius (v.). Bethune-Baker, by the same psychological path as Sanday, arrives logically at defending the doctrine of Nestorius, as an expression of the orthodoxy defined at the Council of Chalcedon. Kenoticism therefore is false in its origin, in its development and in its most recent epilogue.

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