Kenosis on the Ground
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,6 who, though he was in the form of God,did not regard equality with Godas something to be exploited,7 but emptied himself,taking the form of a slave,being born in human likeness.And being found in human form,8 he humbled himselfand became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross. Philippians 2
Larry Chapp has posted part 3 of a 5 part series on The Hermeneutics of Kenosis: On the Humility and Kenosis of God. You can find more posts of his on kenosis, here, including the earlier parts of the series.
Kenosis is one of those words that you wouldn't think you would need very much, and indeed, I'm sure many saints and martyrs and ordinary Christians have gone from birth to death without hearing it. But the concept the word represents is quite integral to Christianity -- it is the crux of the salvation story, in fact, as you see from the Pauline hymn above.
This 3rd post of Dr Chapp's, he says, should have been the first:
And that is because my previous posts on the topic simply assumed what they needed to first establish as at least theologically plausible. And that is the theological assertion that kenosis is indeed an important and very central theological principle. Perhaps even the most central principle.
So I'm treating it here as the first in the series, but when trying to think how to write about it, I realized that I needed to back up and get some context, for my own sake.
First, a few starter links:
- Kenosis: Strong's Lexicon
The verb κενόω primarily means "to empty" or "to make void." In the New Testament, it is often used metaphorically to describe the act of making something of no effect or rendering it powerless. It can also imply the act of divesting oneself of status or privilege
- Kenosis: Catholic Encyclopedia
According to Catholic theology, the abasement of the Word consists in the assumption of humanity and the simultaneous occultation of the Divinity. .
------------------------
Dr Chapp writes in the prologomen to the essay:
.... In what follows therefore is a theological argument against this strict Thomistic view and in favor of the Balthasarian view that there is in God an “Urkenosis” that is the very condition of possibility for a creation of anything by God ad extra, and for the Incarnation.
After reading, I have a sense of the difficulty of the theological issues at stake here. On one hand, we have the Lord God, who is eternal, unchanging. On the other hand, we have the universe around us where everything is in flux, subject to continuous change and decay. There seems to be a gap from the beginning.
So we have the mystery of the eternal and unchanging God creating time and change. This, as Dr Chapp indicates near the beginning of the post, has led to various confusions in what we could call natural religion, where even people who acknowledge the existence of God have trouble steering between a kind of deism, where God walks away from His creation and leaves it mostly to itself, and a form of pantheism where God and creation are closely identified, even the same.
The Catholic faith reconciles the tension, by revelation.
After that, we have the further, actually rather scandalizing mystery of this same God entering HIs own creation. The liturgy and popular devotion love to, as Chesterton says, ring changes on the paradox of the Lord of all creation residing in the womb of a created being, being too small and helpless to reach the oxen he had brought into being:
A mass of legend and literature, which increases and will never end, has repeated and rung the changes on that single paradox; that the hands that had made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle. Upon this paradox, we might almost say upon this jest, all the literature of our faith is founded.
Again, natural reason will come to confusion over this, if one is not careful, though faith like Wisdom will play and delight in such things.
One extreme would emphasize God's immutability and what is called his "impassibility" (a term meaning roughly that since He does not change, He can't be said to have emotions --etymologically, emotions are movements --or to be moved from outside Himself). This is what Dr Chapp above a strict form of Thomism. I don't think it is really Thomistic, because it would be too simplistic for Aquinas himself.
The other extreme would make too much of Jesus's emptying -- a heresy sometimes called kenoticism, according to Wikipedia. Newman says it can border into Monophysitism. In that case Jesus becomes more like the way we as Catholics consider Mary. I haven't really met any of the proponents of either extreme, but as a convert from Protestantism, I am more aware of that end of things.
Bottom line -- any theology that treats of kenosis formally will need to steer between the extremes. This is a recapitulation of much of the theological history of the first 4 or 5 centuries of the Church.
Larry Chapp makes use of Hans Urs von Balthasar, here and in many of his other writings, so I was very happy to find a passage by Balthasar that encapsulates his thinking in this area. Von Balthasar on Kenosis, Impassibility, and Immutability. It doesn't get much better than that. It is a quote from Balthasar's book Mysterium Paschale. I read that he discusses his urkenosis in another book as well, on the Credo.
Balthasar writes:
Doubtless the Kenosis of the Son will always remain a mystery no less unsoundable than that of the Trinity of hypostases in the single God. And yet, by placing the emphasis, in the doctrine of the Kenosis, so exclusively on the human nature assumed by the Son, or on his act of assuming that nature — the divine nature remaining inaccessible to all becoming or change, and even to any real relationship with the world — one was running the risk of under-estimating the weight of the assertions made in Scripture, and of succumbing at once to both Nestorianism and Monophysitism. Only the ‘Jesus of history’ would do the suffering, or perhaps the ‘lower faculties’ in Christ’s being, whereas the ‘fine point’ of his soul remained, even in the moment of the abandonment, united to the Father in a beatific vision which could never be interrupted.
It seems to me that the only way which might avoid the two opposed and incompatible extremes is that which relates the event of the Kenosis of the Son of God to what one can, by analogy, designate as the eternal ‘event’ of the divine processions. It is from that supra-temporal yet ever actual event that, as Christians, we must approach the mystery of the divine ‘essence’. That essence is forever ‘given’ in the self-gift of the Father, ‘rendered’ in the thanksgiving of the Son, and ‘represented’ in its character as absolute love by the Holy Spirit.
He goes on to call the "great Scholastics" to his aid in this Protestantizing tendency:
According to the great Scholastics, the inner-divine processions are the condition of possibility for a creation. The divine ‘ideas’ for a possible world derive from that everlasting circulation of life, founded as it is on the total and unconditional gift of each hypostasis to the others. De necessitate si est productio dissimilis praeintelligitur productio similis (Saint Bonaventure). Ex processione personarum divinarum distinctarum causatur omnis creaturarum processio et multiplicatio (Saint Thomas).
We shall never know how to express the abyss-like depths of the Father’s self-giving, that Father who, in an eternal ‘super-Kenosis’, makes himself ‘destitute’ of all that he is and can be so as to bring forth a consubstantial divinity, the Son. Everything that can be thought and imagined where God is concerned is, in advance, included and transcended in this self-destitution which constitutes the person of the Father, and, at the same time, those of the Son and the Spirit.
You can see it gets complicated fast, as Balthasar does. (I read Aidan Nichol's book A Key to Balthasar, and Fr Nichols is a lucid thinker, but I still am a bit lost).
However, it's clear enough so that it can act as a footnote to Larry Chapp's explication of the ideas at hand. Chapp writes:
For now I simply want to lay the foundations for why the Pauline concept of the kenosis of God in Christ – a concept he articulates in a creedal form in Philippians (2:6-11) -- is a truth that goes beyond the instrumentalization of the Divine action as a merely efficacious movement of grace for our salvation, and actually reveals to us that God, from all eternity is a trinity of relations, is kenotic. To show that kenosis is an essential attribute of who God is.
This is an absolutely key point since a hermeneutics of kenosis would make no sense unless kenosis has as its theological condition of possibility a truth of the Divine nature rather than a merely contingent “artifact” of the salvational act. Kenosis in the latter sense would be in large measure an epiphenomenal by-product of the positive “fact” of the Incarnation and not a central truth about God as such which can then be extrapolated into broader theological speculation about the trinitarian relations.
I am still thinking this through. If I am understanding correctly, an "hermeneutics of kenosis" would depend on at least the possibility of kenosis showing analogically a truth of the Divine Nature as it is, rather than being a mere byproduct or artifact of the Incarnation.
What one has to avoid on the Protestantizing extreme of things is anthropomorphizing God. Please note, I am not here saying that all Protestants fall into this trap, just that it's a tendency once you let go of the precision of the Thomistic formulations.
I think the quote from Balthasar indicates that he is very aware of the danger and determined to avoid it. Whereas Dr Chapp (I would say) is aware of the reverse tendency because his blog, and the Communio school in general is positioned to steer between Protestantizing on one side and a kind of end-stage-rationalized-neo-Scholasticism on the other.
I'm obviously scribbling with a very broad marker here, almost a crayon perhaps. The takeaway for this contextual post is to be very aware of the Scylla and Charybdis on the sides, as far as theology goes.
As far as the life of faith goes, kenosis as the event of the Incarnation, Passion and Resurrrection -- the Paschal mystery, as we now often term it -- is thoroughly unavoidable and can be accepted without difficulty by any child of the age of reason. We behold it for ourselves every time we go to mass and participate in the kenosis of the Real Presence. Our Lord's very Body and Blood! I am just rereading the Gospel of St John and it is plain that the Twelve see Jesus truly, though incompletely, right from the start, as He Is.
“I praise You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because You have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. 26Yes, Father, for this was well-pleasing in Your sight..
Next time, I hope to get to the actual case that Dr Chapp makes. I like very much the idea of a hermeneutics of kenosis, partly because I really like Hellenized words, but mostly because of its irreducibly Christological and Incarnational focus.
When Pope Benedict XVI spoke famously about a "hermeneutics of continuity and reform" he was in a sense talking about process or method. The idea of a hermeneutic of kenosis seems to imply a focus on "final end" or the teleology of hermeneutics. There is no way around it, that this goal of hermeneutics has to be focused on Christ -- the true Christ as He is. Gaudium et Spes 22, from which Dr Chapp gets the title of his blog, is a good conclusion here:
22. The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. ....
...... Since human nature as He assumed it was not annulled, by that very fact it has been raised up to a divine dignity in our respect too. For by His incarnation the Son of God has united Himself in some fashion with every man. He worked with human hands, He thought with a human mind, acted by human choice and loved with a human heart. Born of the Virgin Mary, He has truly been made one of us, like us in all things except sin.
Further Reading;
- Communio has an issue dedicated to Poverty and Kenosis -- you can download several of the articles for free.
- Nova et Vetera has an article on "Kenosis, Christ and the Trinity in Thomas Aquinas"
- Artur Rosman has He Emptied Himself: A Kenosis Reading List.
Comments
Post a Comment