A Kenotic View of Human Flourishing

Following on from yesterday's post, about Wilfred Owen's passionate appeal for and understanding of Jesus' radical call to peace as a call to passivity rather than war, I came across this quotation from Nancey Murphy. It occurs at the end of her essay 'Agape and Non-violence', in Craig Boyd (ed.) Visions of Agape. Problems and Possibilities in Human and Divine Love, (Ashgate: 2008), 61-72.

Agape is said to be a kind of love that is without regard to status, beauty, relationship, kinship of the object of love. This essay has argued for a more radical (Radical) understanding, emphasizing the call to love particularly one's enemies, and to love without regard to the cost to oneself. God's paradoxical promise is that those who participate in this way in his unlimited and self-emptying love will not lose their very selves, but instead will find eternal life.  page 72

In a previous book, On the Moral Nature of the Universe: Theology, Cosmology and Ethics, Murphy and Ellis argued for noncoercive and self-sacrificial responses to threat, oppression and overt violence. This is not an argument for passivity but for non-violent direct action. Murphy's conversation partners in her essay are an interesting and eclectic gathering round the table – Simone Weil, John Howard Yoder, and Gustav Aulen amongst others, with considerable side comments from the Radical Reformation. In this essay as elsewhere Murphy is arguing for a 'kenotic view of human flourishing as a core thesis to be elaborated and tested in the social sciences'. This is both a courageous and radical position for a Christian moral philosopher, and it's no impractical idealism either, as she applies a kenotic ethic to economics, judicial practices and coercive social policies.

My interest in all of this is because my own theology and theological ethics are shaped by that same kenotic instinct, perhaps even conviction. Trinitarian theology can be articulated from numerous perspectives, but my own explorations have been about the relationship between kenosis and perichoresis as explanatory terms about the eternal movements of love and self-giving as these are revealed in the economic Trinity. Such a Trinitarian kenotic theology has ecclesial implications in that an understanding of the church as the Body of Christ, suggests that the Christian community is kenotic and perichoretic in its internal and external relations, in its ethical practices and in its bearing witness to Jesus Christ whose Body it re-presents to the world.

I'm well aware of the theological hesitations around the concept of kenosis, but I am equally aware, and more impressed by, the presence in the New Testament of ineradicable trajectories pointing to self-giving love, the pouring out of life for others, the cross-carrying practices of discipleship and the call to live, by the grace of God, towards the outrageous demands of the Sermon on the Mount. The intricacies of systematic theology notwithstanding, there are equally strong arguments which take with uncomfortable, and discomfiting seriousness, kenosis as the revealed disposition of the life of the Holy Trinity. I am therefore compelled to affirm one of Murphy's distilled sentences, itself a distillation of Yoder's vision of Christian existence as informed by Anabaptist thought and practices:

The moral character of God is revealed in Jesus' vulnerable enemy love and renunciation of dominion. Imitation of Jesus in this regard constitutes a social ethic.