If the whole fullness of God dwells bodily in Christ (the Plērōma entry), what could it possibly mean that Christ also emptied Himself?
Paul puts both claims in the same letter cluster. In Colossians, the fullness. In Philippians, the emptying. Both are about the same Person. Both are descriptions of the same incarnation. And any Christology that loses either claim, or tries to soften the tension between them, has stopped being Christian.
The verb in Philippians is kenoō — to empty. The verse is one of the most contested in the New Testament. This is the entry where we make our way through what Paul did and did not mean by it.
The Word
κενόω (kenoō), pronounced ke-NO-oh. A verb. The family includes the adjective kenos (empty, vain), the noun kenōsis (an emptying), and various compounds. The basic meaning is plain: to empty, to pour out, to make void.
The word is rare in the New Testament. It appears only five times — Romans 4:14, 1 Corinthians 1:17, 1 Corinthians 9:15, 2 Corinthians 9:3, and Philippians 2:7. Four of those uses are non-christological — they describe faith being “made void,” preaching being “would not become useless” or boasting being “made empty.” The fifth use is the christological one: “but emptied himself by taking on the form of a slave, by looking like other men, and by sharing in human nature” (Phil 2:7, NET).
One verse. One word. And on it has hung an enormous amount of Christology, including a notable nineteenth-century heresy that the church had to push back on by name.
Range of Meaning
In its New Testament usage, kenoō covers:
- To empty literally, as one might empty a vessel by pouring its contents out.
- To make void or null. Faith is “made null” if salvation is by works of the law (Rom 4:14).
- To deprive of force or significance. Paul does not preach with eloquent words “so that the cross of Christ would not become useless” (1 Cor 1:17, NET).
- To make empty in the sense of taking away the basis for something. Paul will not accept payment from the Corinthians because no one should be able to “make empty” his ground for boasting in the gospel (1 Cor 9:15; 2 Cor 9:3).
- Used reflexively in Philippians 2:7 — “emptied himself” — in a sense Paul does not unfold elsewhere.
The lexical baseline is straightforward: to make empty, to render void, to deprive of content or force. The interpretive question, when Paul applies the verb to Christ, is what content Christ emptied Himself of. Or whether He emptied Himself of any content at all.
Where You’ll Meet It
The dominant text is one passage. Worth quoting in full:
“You should have the same attitude toward one another that Christ Jesus had, who, though he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking on the form of a slave, by looking like other men, and by sharing in human nature. He humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death —even death on a cross! As a result God highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow —in heaven and on earth and under the earth— and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.” (Philippians 2:5–11, NET)
The passage is what scholars often call the Christ hymn. It may have been a pre-Pauline liturgical text Paul incorporated into the letter, or it may be Paul’s own composition with a hymnic shape. Either way, the passage was meant to be heard, possibly sung, by a congregation that already knew its rhythms.
The structure is descent and ascent. Christ descends from divine equality through the emptying into the form of a servant, into death, into the worst death. Then God exalts Him — bestows on Him the name above every name (see Kyrios), receives the universal confession of His Lordship.
The crucial detail for understanding kenoō is the grammar of verse 7. Paul says Christ “emptied himself” — heauton ekenōsen — and then he attaches a participle that explains how: “but emptied himself by taking on the form of a slave, by looking like other men, and by sharing in human nature.” The participle tells us the manner of the emptying. Christ emptied Himself by taking on the form of a servant. The emptying is not a subtraction from His divinity. It is an addition of humanity. He did not become less God. He became also a servant. The kenosis is the incarnation.
The other four uses of kenoō:
“For if they become heirs by the law, faith is empty and the promise is nullified.” (Romans 4:14, NET)
The verb here describes faith being deprived of effect. Useful for showing the word’s basic sense of “making void.”
“For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel—and not with clever speech, so that the cross of Christ would not become useless.” (1 Corinthians 1:17, NET)
The cross can be emptied of its power — drained of its content, robbed of its force — by the wrong kind of preaching. The verb again describes deprivation of effect.
“But I have not used any of these rights. And I am not writing these things so that something will be done for me. In fact, it would be better for me to die than—no one will deprive me of my reason for boasting!” (1 Corinthians 9:15, NET)
Paul will not allow his ministry to be emptied of its integrity by accepting payment that might compromise his message.
“But I am sending these brothers so that our boasting about you may not be empty in this case, so that you may be ready just as I kept telling them.” (2 Corinthians 9:3, NET)
Same verb, same range — Paul does not want his confidence in the Corinthians to be made void.
These four uses are useful precisely because they show what kenoō normally means: to make void, to drain of effect. The christological use in Philippians 2:7 is unusual — it is the only place where the object of the emptying is the self. And it is the only place where the meaning has launched two thousand years of theological debate.
What Confessional Lutherans Hear
Two emphases sound in kenoō for the confessional Lutheran that the wider church often mutes.
First, the emptying is the incarnation, not a subtraction of divinity. Read Philippians 2:7 carefully. Paul does not say what Christ emptied Himself of. He says how Christ emptied Himself: “but emptied himself by taking on the form of a slave, by looking like other men, and by sharing in human nature.” The participle controls the verb. The emptying is the taking on. He did not become less God by adding humanity; He became God-and-servant, fully, both at once. The kenosis is incarnational addition, not divine subtraction.
This matters because the alternative reading — that Christ emptied Himself of certain divine attributes (omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence) for the duration of His earthly life — became a real christological position in the nineteenth century. Theologians in Germany, beginning with Gottfried Thomasius in the 1850s and continued by others, argued that the incarnation required the Son to lay aside certain divine attributes in order to live a genuinely human life. They were trying to make sense of passages where Jesus appears not to know certain things, where He grows in wisdom, where He is hungry and tired and limited in human ways. Their question was a real one. Their answer was a heresy.
The orthodox Christian answer, which Lutheran theology has held consistently since the Formula of Concord, is that Christ retained all the divine attributes He had always had. The two natures are united in one Person without confusion and without separation. The man Jesus is fully God — fully omniscient, fully omnipotent, fully omnipresent — even when, in the days of His flesh, He did not always exercise those attributes in their fullness. The attributes were present; their use was sometimes veiled. Christ did not pretend to be human. He genuinely was human. And He was fully God in His humanity. Both, simultaneously, without diminution of either.
Second, the kenosis is the pattern of the Christian life. Paul did not write Philippians 2:5–11 as an abstract Christology lesson. He wrote it as an ethic. The passage opens: “You should have the same attitude toward one another that Christ Jesus had,” (Phil 2:5, NET). The Christology grounds the call. The pattern Christ set is the pattern Christians are to live. We are not asked to give up our humanity, or to subtract anything from ourselves. We are asked to add — to humble ourselves, to take the form of servants, to count others more significant than ourselves, to look out for the interests of others rather than our own. The incarnational shape is the shape of Christian discipleship: not diminishment, but humble addition.
The pastoral payoff: when you read Philippians 2 and feel uncomfortable about the call to humility, remember that the call comes from the One who emptied Himself by adding the form of a servant to the form of God. He did not subtract His own dignity. He added the dignity of the servant alongside it. You are not asked to lose yourself. You are asked to add the humility of Christ.
Where People Get It Wrong
Three common ways.
The first is real kenotic Christology — the nineteenth-century view that Christ actually gave up divine attributes during the incarnation. This is the heresy named above. The motivation was good: take seriously the genuine humanity of Christ, including His limitations. But the solution emptied (the irony is hard to avoid) what the orthodox church has always confessed about the two natures of Christ. If the Son gave up omniscience, He was not fully God during the years of His earthly life. The incarnation became God-becoming-less rather than God-adding-humanity. The cross became something other than the death of God in our place. Confessional Lutherans, along with the broader orthodox tradition, reject this reading.
The second is what might be called docetic over-reaction. If we worry too much about the kenotic heresy, we can drift into the opposite mistake — treating Jesus’s humanity as a kind of disguise. He looked tired, but He wasn’t really. He looked hungry, but He didn’t really need food. He looked surprised, but He was just playing along. This is the ancient heresy of Docetism, which the early church also rejected. The Word genuinely became flesh (John 1:14, Logos). The humanity was real. The hunger was real. The grief at Lazarus’s tomb was real. The two natures are both real, both unmingled, both unimpaired.
The third is reading Philippians 2 as if it were systematic theology rather than a hymn embedded in a pastoral exhortation. The passage is christological — and the entry has spent most of its time on the Christology — but Paul’s purpose is to ground a call to congregational humility. The Philippian church had unity problems (Phil 4:2 mentions Euodia and Syntyche). Paul gives them the most exalted Christ-hymn in the New Testament as a corrective for petty quarreling. When you read Philippians 2 and the entry ends, the question Paul wants you to take with you is not “what did Christ empty Himself of?” but “have you got the mind of Christ among you?”
So What
The cross is God on the cross. Not God-lite. Not a divine being who left His full divinity behind to make the trip down. The whole fullness died — in the body that Paul described as having been emptied. Plērōma and kenoō describe the same Christ. The full deity, in the form of a servant, on the cross.
This grounds the gospel. If it was not fully God who suffered, the suffering does not pay the infinite debt that sin owed. If it was not fully human who suffered, the suffering does not pay the debt that humans owed. Both natures matter. Both are present, and both are operative, in every gospel scene from the manger to the empty tomb.
It also patterns the Christian life. Phil 2:5 — “You should have the same attitude toward one another that Christ Jesus had.” The shape of Christian discipleship is incarnational. We do not subtract from ourselves. We add humble service. The shape of the kenosis is the shape of how a Christian lives among other Christians, among neighbors, in the world.
For Sunday school teachers: when your students ask whether Jesus really was God when He was on earth — and they will ask — the answer is yes. All of God. He didn’t give up His deity to be human. He added humanity to His deity. The mystery you cannot fully explain is not a flaw in the doctrine; it is the doctrine. He is fully God. He is fully man. He is one Person. And the cross is what happens when that Person is sent to the death we owed.