by Brandon D. Smith
In the early church, Jesus’s baptism (Matt. 3:13-17) was a paradigmatic Trinitarian text. Augustine, for instance, considered it one of the clearest pictures of the unity and distinction of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In the baptism scene, he reasoned, “The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are a Trinity inseparable; one God, not three Gods.”[1] This focus makes sense, of course, because it is one of the clearest texts in which the three persons appear together and are distinguished clearly from one another; the Father speaks about the Son, the Son is in the water, and the Spirit comes down “like a dove.”
Some have taken this passage (and others) to assert “kenotic” Christology. Kenotic Christology – from the word kenosis (“empty”) – teaches that Jesus renounced some or all of his divine attributes in the incarnation, and thus needed the Holy Spirit to perform miracles and other signs. I want to briefly address two (very related) related issues with holding to kenotic Christology, one Trinitarian and the other biblical.
Trinitarian Implications
I wrestled with whether to start with the biblical implications first, since much of this argument is centered around particular texts. However, I’m starting with Trinitarian implications because these are drawn from the larger scope of biblical witness about the Trinity and thus help us better understand passages that may be more thorny or confusing. So, briefly, let’s survey how kenotic Christology undercuts a few basic historic affirmations about the Trinity.
First, God is simple, meaning he cannot be broken into parts or have his attributes reduced or minimized. God is God – he is whole and unchanging (e.g. Exod. 3:14; Deut. 6:4; Job 23:13; Heb. 6:17; Jam. 1:17). Since Jesus is the second person of the Trinity, fully God in every way, he cannot cease to be God or divest himself of divine attributes. The Nicene Creed says that he is
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father.
To say that he “empties” himself of divinity in any way would assert that he ceases to be “one being with the Father.” The Trinity would then become two persons, or perhaps three persons but with only two persons exercising divinity. God is Trinity, and God cannot be less than God, and thus cannot be in any way less than Trinity – three persons, eternally and fully God, without change. And these persons cannot not exercise divinity because they are divine. This would be akin to saying you or I could not be human or have human attributes.
Second, historic Christology teaches that Jesus is two natures in one person. As the Chalcedonian Creed summarizes,
one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved. . .
To say that he “empties” himself of divinity in any way would assert that he was only and merely a human for some period of time, which would deny “the property of each [nature] preserved.” Put another way, it would not be a preservation of his divinity if it were diminished, minimized, or suppressed—as though that would be possible with God. As stated above, God cannot be not God, which means he cannot not have all of his attributes and power. God can never be not powerful or loving or just. To claim that the Son puts his divinity on the shelf causes serious concern about the stability of the divine nature of the Son and, thus, the whole Trinity, since they equally share in the divine nature. The “emptying” is the humility and assumption of human nature, not the suppression of divine attributes. In whatever way Jesus might “need” the Holy Spirit as a true human in dependence on the Father—and I would affirm this—it would not be proper to say that this also requires Jesus to have no divine power of his own. So even if we (rightly, I think) affirm that Jesus is truly human and thus dependent on the Holy Spirit as any human would be, this doesn’t mean that Jesus is not also fully and truly divine.
Third and finally, the doctrine of inseparable operations says that because God is one and not at odds with himself, then the three persons of the Trinity are not individual “wills” on three islands, doing what they please apart from one another. Rather, the divine power and will is part of who God is – his essence – and thus is shared by the three persons. So, Jesus doesn’t need the Spirit to help him do divine works. Instead, the Spirit works inseparably from the Son (and the Father) in creation and salvation. They are not dependent on one another; they are truly and fully unified as the one triune God.
Biblical Reflections
If these Trinitarian implications are true and drawn from large swaths of biblical texts about God, then the more difficult individual biblical passages should be interpreted according to the larger interpretive rule.[2] We will cover three texts that are commonly raised in kenotic Christology.
Matthew 3:13-17
In the case of Jesus’s baptism, we shouldn’t conclude that he needed the Spirit’s anointing to do divine work. Yes, there is a sense in which he doesn’t perform miracles or signs until after the baptism, but (1) the miracles and signs are not the only way he exercises divinity and (2) he would be divine even if he did not perform those miracles.
It makes more sense of the Trinitarian implications above to say that the Spirit’s work is inseparable from Jesus’s, not that Jesus needs the Spirit. Jesus’s birth narratives clearly show his divine nature being preserved in the incarnation (“Son of God,” “God with us,” etc.), he is seen wowing leaders in the temple with his knowledge and authority (Luke 2:47), and his prayers state that he and the Father’s relationship has not changed (John 17:24). It is important to note that his inseparable work with the Spirit as a true human in dependence on the Father is a pattern for the apostles and for us, who would later do the same works by the power of Jesus’s name and through the Spirit (e.g. Acts 2-3); however, Jesus wasn’t merely a Spirit-empowered man setting up other Spirit-empowered men. No, he is God in the flesh, whose power is equal to the Father and Spirit’s, who all work through the apostles inseparably.
Mark 13:32
In this passage, Jesus claims to “not know” the future. The obvious question is, “If he’s God, then he knows all things!” Yes, but he is also a man. Remember the Chalcedonian Creed above: he is fully God and fully man, with no mixture or confusion. Gregory of Nazianzus used a rule called “partitive exegesis,” in which he said that we should attribute divine actions to Jesus’s divinity and human actions to Jesus’s humanity. It’s not always that simple, but it’s a good general rule of thumb. Luke Stamps and I wrote an extensive post on this topic, so I won’t belabor it here, but we must acknowledge that part of the mystery of the incarnation is that Jesus is both God and man, so there are “logical” problems we may not fully be able to reconcile. That said, we are not required to say that Jesus’s ignorance of the future must mean he divested himself of divine attributes.
Philippians 2:5-11
This passage gets perhaps the most attention because a form of the word kenosis is used explicitly here. Paul says that Christ,
existing in the form of God,
did not consider equality with God
as something to be exploited.
Instead he emptied (ἐκένωσεν, ekenōsen) himself
by assuming the form of a servant,
taking on the likeness of humanity. . . (CSB)
For some, the “straightforward” reading here is that Jesus divested himself of divinity and became a servant instead. The problem, as we’ve outlined above, is that the Bible is remarkably clear that he never stops being divine, nor that God could (or would) stop being all that God is in himself.
Instead, in this context, Paul uses Christ as the example for our humility. In Phil. 2, Paul says that Christ is God in all that it means to be God (“in the form of God”), but he chose not to “exploit” (or grasp after, plunder) his divinity. We know this because he put on flesh and walked among us. God the Son could’ve stayed separate from us, enjoying heavenly riches or perhaps even saving us from outside of creation. And yet, in his intentional humility and love for us, he stepped into our mess (emptied himself) and became obedient as the Second Adam. Paul’s point: we should be willing to sacrifice ourselves for the sake of others, even if it means not exploiting or grasping after the advantages we possess. Nowhere does Paul tell the Philippians to sell all their possessions or to renounce their “rights”; rather, Paul instructs them to be like Christ, who didn’t look out for his own self-interests even though he had every “right” to. So, nowhere in this passage’s wording or context, or Scripture’s larger picture about God, is a kenotic understanding required or even preferred.
Simply put, the Trinitarian affirmations and biblical reasoning above are consistent with classic, historic Christian logic and conclusions. While kenotic Christology might seem beneficial on the surface, it is ultimately a novel view that undercuts some of the most fundamental and basic biblical teachings about God and Christ.
Did Jesus need the Holy Spirit? That’s the wrong question that leads to wrong conclusions. Rather, we should ask: in what ways do Jesus and the Holy Spirit work inseparably for our salvation, and also recognize that he’s truly human and thus dependent on the Holy Spirit. Both are true.
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[1] Lessons of the NT, 2.
[2] Irenaeus was saying this way back when; cf. Adv. Haer. 2.