Jesus Christ: God Emptied

I find myself wondering why I went on such a doctrinal tangent in beginning my ground-up theology. If I started out by stating that my goals were apologetic and that I would stay mostly in the reason corner of the Wesleyan quadrilateral, then it seems quite odd to start from a standpoint of tradition. Yet, it does help to know the basic assumptions that I am working with. So far, I have named Jesus Christ as the fully human and fully divine second person of the Trinity (the Son of God), who, in taking on human form, was emptied of divine qualities. His birth into this world was a significant and extraordinary event, showing God's freedom to intervene in the course of human history in unexpected ways. In moving into reflections on the earthly life of Jesus, it is worth exploring further the concept of Jesus Christ as God emptied.

Kenosis is a difficult concept to reconcile with the Chalcedonian formulation of Jesus having both fully human and fully divine natures. One way around this problem is to make a distinction between divine qualities and divine nature. Divine qualities are all of the omnis (omnipresence, omnipotence, omniscience, etc...) and any other way God, or any divine being for that matter, may be described. All of these ways of describing God are of course limited and God is free to have or not have any of them and still remain fully God. Simply stated, God may or may not display divine qualities and may choose to give them up, but will always have a divine nature, because God is God, even if God decides to change. It may even be possible to say that God is absolutely free to be or not to be God, but will always have a divine nature.

One fairly obvious thing that gets in the way of the concept of Jesus Christ as God emptied is the tradition of Jesus as a miracle worker. If Jesus had to give up all of the divine qualities in order to become fully human, then his ability to perform miracles is an anomaly. It is logical to question if Jesus' divinity somehow gets in the way of his humanity on this point. An historical-critical approach to this problem is to say that, in Jesus' time, miracle workers were not all that uncommon. Ancient stories about great people quite often included extraordinary or miraculous events. The miracle stories of Jesus may very well have been rhetorical devices utilized by the Gospel writers.

A more faith centered approach to this problem is to say that Jesus' divine nature gave him command over the Holy Spirit, who was really the miracle performing agent. The miracle stories, while they contain a wealth of meaning for life and faith, are mostly about the authority of Jesus as the divine Son. Still, these miracles throw a wrench in the God emptied metaphor. Why did the process of kenosis not empty Jesus of every divine quality, including authority? Taking the form of a slave means giving up all claims to authority. How can God be sovereign and slave at the same time? Perhaps only God can exist in such a profound and paradoxical mystery.