The Week of the Compass II

Part two of Rick Floyd's “The Work of Christ in the Thought of P.T. Forsyth: Kenosis and Plerosis Revisited” is especially helpful for gaining an understanding of what kenosis is as we continue walking and working through the most important of all weeks and reflecting on how Jesus poured himself out.

Kenosis with a difference: Moral not metaphysical

But if Forsyth holds to a kenotic theory it is a kenotic theory with a difference. It is construed in moral rather than in metaphysical language; it is dramatic and active rather than static, in keeping with its object, the free God who acts in the man Jesus Christ. The term kenosis is derived from the Greek heuton ekenõsen, “he emptied himself,” which the King James Bible of Philippians 2:7 renders “he made himself of no reputation.’ As a substantive it is used, in the technical sense, of the Christological theory which sets out “to show how the Second Person of the Trinity could so enter into human life as that there resulted the genuinely human experience which is described by the evangelists.” (H.R. Macintosh, New Bible Dictionary; See also N.T. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant, for a comprehensive rehearsal of the history of the interpretation of Philippians 2.)

In the late nineteenth century Kenotic theories of the atonement had been popular among German Lutherans (ie. Gottried Thomasius, W.F. Gess, F.H.R. von Frank) and with some British Anglicans, notably Charles Gore who gave the Bampton Lectures at Oxford in 1889. Kenotic views of Incarnation or Atonement put forth the idea in one way or another that, in Christ, God relinguished some aspect of his divinity.

The kenotic approach was criticized for a number of reasons: that it was pantheistic, blurring the line between God and humanity; that it undermined the doctrine of divine immutability; that it jeopardized the Trinity, for a humanized Son empty of divine attributes could be no part of the Trinitarian life; that it failed to recognize the proper relationship between divine existence, divine attributes and divine essence when it claimed the former can be separated from the latter; and, finally, that the kenotic Christ is neither God nor Man and therefore doesn't solve the problem it sets out to solve. The popularity of the kenotic approach was already waning by Forsyth's day. This he no doubt knew, as well as the criticisms and difficulties. “Many difficulties arise readily in one's own mind” he wrote, “It is a choice of difficulties.” (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 294) He takes pains in places to separate himself from some of the more vulnerable of the kenoticist's views.

Nevertheless, he does not shy away from the kenotic language as long as it is in his distinctive moral vocabulary. Although Forsyth's full treatment of kenosis will wait until 1909 with The Person and Place of Jesus Christ we see a kenotic emphasis already by 1895 in a sermon on Philippians 2: 5-8 entitled “The Divine Self–Emptying” (later to appear in the anthology God the Holy Father) In that earlier treatment Forsyth already has in outline the the two–act Christology which will be spelled out in the kenosis/plerosis scheme of The Person and Place of Jesus Christ. Where the critics of kenotic theories worry about loss of divinity Forsyth wants to view kenosis as constitutive of Christ's divinity. He understands Christ's self–emptying as the very act which makes him Lord. It is only because of his Godhead that Christ can empty himself and in so doing He fufills his Godhead. So in this case limitation is understood as a power rather than a defect: “Well, notice here that Christ's emptying of Himself is not regarded as the loss of His true Godhead, but the condition of it. Godhead is what we worship. Christ's emptying of Himself has placed him at the centre of human worship. Therefore He is of Godhead. We worship Him as the crucified—through the cross, not in spite of the cross.” (God the Holy Father, 32)

One of the traditional objections to a kenotic theory is that if the divine nature is given up how can the subsequent human act be an act of God and therefore a saving act, since only God can save? But Forsyth's view of kenosis doesn't involve the loss of divinity so much as its self–retraction or self–reduction. This is language about a free personality who chooses to act and is known by his acts, rather than language about a deity known by his attributes.

From Kant Forsyth acquired a metaphysical agnosticism; this keeps him away from using the language of two natures to understand how the human Jesus relates to his Godhead. Rather than thinking about Christ in the language of two natures, Forsyth wants more active categories. He refers at times to “two modes of being” and elsewhere to “two moral movements:”

Let us cease speaking of a nature as if it were an entity; of two natures as two independent entities; and let us think and speak of two modes of being, like quantitative and qualitative, or physical and moral. Instead of speaking of certainattributes as renounced may we not speak of a new mode of their being? The Son, by an act of love's omnipotence, set aside the style of God, and took the style of a servant, the mental manner of a man, and the mode of moral action that mark's human nature.” (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 307)

This “setting aside” is the language one would use of a personal subject, and this is what Forsyth presses for, a move away from the terms of entities and their substance to the terms of personalities and their freely chosen moral acts. So:

As the union of wills we have in Christ, therefore, the union of two moral movements or directions, and not merely their confluence, their mutual living involution and not simply their inert conjunction. Much that may seem obscure would vanish if we could but cease to think in terms of material substance or force, however fine, and learn to think in terms of personal subjects and their kind in union; if our minds gave up handling quantities in these high matters and took up kinds. It is the long and engrained habit of thinking in masses or entities that makes so unfamiliar and dark the higher habit of thinking in acts.” (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 346)

Forsyth believes that construing the act of God in Christ in dramatic and moral terms is truer to the witness of the New Testament than the metaphysical language of Greek Philosophy and the Fathers of the early centuries. It is also truer, he is convinced, to the Christian experience of an atoning, saving Christ. There is a decidedly experiential dimension to Forsyth's understanding of Christian authority: “It is the evangelical experience of every saved soul that is the real foundation of Christological belief anywhere. For Christ was not the epiphany of an idea, nor the epitome of a race, nor the incarnation, the precipitate, of a metaphysic—whatever metaphysic he may imply.” (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 9)

Notes from Rick:

(This is the original paper that I presented at the United Reformed Church Centre at Windermere, England in May of 1998, at a conference: P.T. Forsyth: Theologian for a New Millennium. It was gathered with the other papers into a book by the same name edited by Alan P. F. Sell. It later appeared also as a chapter in my book When I Survey the Wondrous Cross: Reflections on the Atonement. Pickwick, 2000, Wipf and Stock, 2010.