Kenosis

Based on Wikipedia: Kenosis

Imagine being all-powerful and choosing to forget it. Not pretending to forget, not putting on a show of weakness, but genuinely setting aside access to infinite power so you could experience hunger, exhaustion, and the slow creep of doubt. This is kenosis—one of Christianity's most radical and puzzling ideas.

The Word That Empties Itself

Kenosis comes from the ancient Greek word kenóō, meaning "to empty out." The Greeks used related words in all sorts of contexts: doctors spoke of depletion after illness, astronomers described the waning of the moon, philosophers talked about the emptiness that comes at the end of a life poorly lived. But when early Christians grabbed hold of this word, they filled it with an entirely new meaning.

The concept appears in a letter the apostle Paul wrote to Christians in the city of Philippi, a Roman colony in what is now northern Greece. In the second chapter of this letter, Paul writes that Jesus "emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness." The Greek phrase is ekenōsen heauton—he emptied himself.

But emptied himself of what, exactly?

This is where things get interesting, and where Christians have argued for two thousand years.

Two Ways to Read One Verse

The less controversial interpretation focuses on will rather than power. In this reading, Jesus emptied himself of his own desires and preferences, becoming completely receptive to what God wanted. He surrendered his personal agenda so thoroughly that he was willing to die—and not just die, but suffer the humiliating execution reserved for slaves and rebels: crucifixion.

This interpretation carries a clear ethical message. If Jesus could set aside his own will so completely, then his followers should be willing to do the same. Your plans, your comfort, your very life—all of it should be held loosely, ready to be released if that's what's required.

But there's a more dramatic interpretation, one that makes theologians nervous.

What if Jesus didn't just empty himself of willfulness, but actually set aside access to his divine abilities? What if, to truly experience human life, God had to voluntarily bind his own power?

Think about what this would mean. An omniscient being choosing not to know. An omnipotent being choosing to be weak. Not as a disguise, not as a temporary costume, but as a genuine limitation. In this reading, when Jesus said he didn't know when the world would end, he wasn't being coy—he genuinely didn't know, because he had emptied himself of that knowledge.

The Problem of a God Who Gets Tired

The early Christian church was a battlefield of competing ideas about who Jesus actually was. Some groups, called adoptionists, believed Jesus was a regular human being whom God had chosen and elevated. Others, called docetists, argued the opposite: Jesus was pure spirit who only appeared to have a physical body. His hunger and thirst and suffering were illusions, a divine being playing a role.

The position that eventually won out—formalized at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 CE—was that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine. Not half and half. Not switching between modes. Fully both, simultaneously.

This creates a logical puzzle that kenosis attempts to solve.

If Jesus was fully God, how could he experience genuine human limitations? How could an all-knowing being learn to walk? How could an all-powerful being be tempted by the devil in the wilderness? The Gospels show Jesus getting frustrated at a fig tree for not having fruit out of season—a strangely human moment of irritation. They show him sweating drops of blood in the garden of Gethsemane, dreading what's coming. They show him crying out on the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

Kenotic Christology says: these weren't performances. Jesus genuinely experienced these limitations because he had genuinely emptied himself of the divine attributes that would have prevented them.

The Theologian Who Named It

While the concept stretches back to Paul's letter, the formal theological exploration of kenosis didn't really begin until the nineteenth century. A German Lutheran theologian named Gottfried Thomasius was the first to systematically develop what he called "kenotic Christology."

Thomasius was trying to take seriously both the divine and human aspects of Jesus. If Jesus truly became human, he argued, then he must have genuinely experienced human limitations—not just acted them out. The incarnation wasn't God wearing a human costume. It was God genuinely becoming something he hadn't been before.

This idea proved both attractive and controversial. Other theologians picked it up and developed it further: P. T. Forsyth and H. R. Mackintosh in Scotland, Charles Gore in England, and later American theologians like Fisher Humphreys and Roger Olson. Each brought their own nuances, but all grappled with the same central question: what does it mean for God to empty himself?

The Orthodox Paradox

Eastern Orthodox Christianity developed its own rich understanding of kenosis, one that emphasizes the mystical and transformative dimensions of the concept.

In Orthodox thinking, kenosis isn't just something that happened once, two thousand years ago in Palestine. It's a pattern that believers are called to repeat in their own lives. The Russian Orthodox tradition developed something called poustinia—a practice of withdrawing into solitary prayer and self-emptying. Practitioners would enter small, sparse dwellings to strip away everything that cluttered their interior life, emptying themselves to make room for God.

Here's where Orthodox theology gets genuinely strange: they see kenosis as a paradox. You empty yourself, and in that emptying, you become full. You give up your own will, your own desires, your attachments to the world, and what rushes in to fill that space is divine grace. The self you lose isn't really lost—it's transformed.

Orthodox theologians make a careful distinction here. Kenosis doesn't mean you become God in your essential nature. That would be pantheism—the belief that everything is God. Instead, you become united with God through what they call his "energies"—his active presence and grace in the world—while remaining a distinct created being. The emptying doesn't erase you; it makes you more fully yourself by connecting you to the source of all being.

The Roman Catholic Warning

Not everyone was comfortable with these ideas. In 1951, Pope Pius XII issued an encyclical called Sempiternus Rex Christus, celebrating the fifteen hundredth anniversary of the Council of Chalcedon. In it, he specifically condemned certain interpretations of kenosis.

The Pope worried that some theologians were taking the "emptying" too literally—as if the divine Word had actually lost or set aside his divinity when becoming human. This, Pius argued, was just as wrong as the ancient docetist heresy it was trying to correct. If docetism denied Jesus's humanity by making it an illusion, extreme kenotic theology denied his divinity by making it something that could be abandoned.

Pius quoted the fifth-century Pope Leo the Great: "With the entire and perfect nature of man, He Who was true God was born, complete in his own nature, complete in ours." The incarnation, in this view, wasn't about subtraction but addition. Jesus didn't become less divine to become human; he added humanity to divinity without diminishing either.

The Mystic's Path

The sixteenth-century Spanish mystic John of the Cross took kenosis in an intensely personal direction. For John, self-emptying wasn't primarily a doctrine about Christ's nature—it was a description of the spiritual path every believer must walk.

His famous work Dark Night of the Soul describes kenosis as a process God initiates in the believer's life. It's not comfortable. The "dark night" involves the stripping away of everything you thought you knew about God, everything you enjoyed about spiritual practice, every emotional consolation. You're left feeling abandoned, dry, empty.

But John saw this emptiness as preparatory. Like a vessel being cleaned before it can hold something precious, the soul must be emptied of its attachments and illusions before it can be filled with God. The darkness isn't punishment or abandonment—it's transformation. You're being remade into what John called the "likeness of Christ," and that remaking requires the breaking down of the old self.

Unitarians and the Question of When

Christians who don't accept the traditional doctrine of the Trinity—particularly Unitarians—have their own distinctive take on kenosis. Since they don't believe Jesus existed as a divine being before his birth, they can't interpret his "emptying" as something that happened before the incarnation. Jesus didn't empty himself to become human because, in their view, he was simply born human like everyone else.

So what did Jesus empty himself of, and when?

The nineteenth-century Unitarian theologian Thomas Belsham located the moment of kenosis at the crucifixion. Jesus emptied himself by accepting death, giving up his life and all his earthly hopes. Joseph Priestley—yes, the same Priestley who discovered oxygen—placed it earlier, in the garden of Gethsemane, when Jesus chose not to resist arrest. He could have called down legions of angels, the Gospels suggest, but he emptied himself of that option.

The Christadelphian thinker Tom Barling proposed something more gradual: Jesus's self-emptying was a continuous process throughout his life, beginning in childhood and extending through every temptation, every difficult choice, every moment when he could have taken the easy path and didn't.

The Gnostic Light

Ancient Gnostic Christians—groups that developed elaborate mythologies about the spiritual world—had their own fascinating parallel to kenosis. In their texts, particularly one called the Pistis Sophia, Jesus doesn't empty himself of power or will. Instead, he dims his own light.

In Gnostic mythology, divine beings radiate unbearable brilliance. When Jesus appeared to his disciples after his resurrection, according to the Pistis Sophia, they asked him to withdraw some of his luminosity because they couldn't bear to look at him. "Jesus drew to himself the glory of his light," the text says.

It's kenosis as accommodation—not a genuine loss of divine attributes, but a voluntary restraint so that limited beings could be in his presence without being overwhelmed. Like an adult crouching down to speak with a child at eye level, divinity contracted itself to make relationship possible.

The Ethical Imperative

Whatever interpretation you prefer, kenosis carries an ethical charge that's hard to ignore. Paul didn't write about Jesus's self-emptying as an abstract theological puzzle. He was making a practical point to the Philippians: "Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus."

In other words: do what he did. Empty yourself.

This is what scholars call the "kenotic ethic." It reads Philippians 2 not as a statement about the metaphysics of incarnation but as a call to radical humility. Look at what God was willing to do for others. Now consider what you're willing to do.

Are you holding onto status, comfort, certainty, control? Are there things you refuse to release, privileges you consider non-negotiable? The kenotic ethic asks: what would it look like to empty yourself of those things? What would it cost? What might become possible if you did?

The Ongoing Mystery

Kenosis remains one of those ideas that refuses to be fully tamed by any theological system. Every attempt to pin it down seems to let something essential slip away.

Say it means Jesus gave up his divine powers, and you risk making him less than God. Say it was just a moral example of humility, and you risk losing the cosmic drama—the idea that something unprecedented happened when eternity entered time. Say the emptying was total, and you flirt with the absurdity of God ceasing to be God. Say it was merely apparent, and you reduce the incarnation to theater.

Perhaps that's the point. Kenosis names a mystery that resists resolution: the mystery of infinite power choosing vulnerability, of omniscience accepting ignorance, of the source of all being taking the form of a servant and submitting to death.

It's an idea that empties out our usual categories, leaving us with something that doesn't quite fit anywhere—and that refusal to fit might be exactly what makes it worth contemplating.