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Helen and Rosemary, thanks for helpful comments pushing the discussion along in these recent posts. Paul's limited use of "kenosis" as a term, but its quite widespread use as a concept in his letters, suggests to me no simple either /or will do, when talking of kenosis as either gift or disciplne. "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God at work in you to will and to act according to his good purpose". (Phil 2.12-13).  Enabled by grace to develop and maintain a disposition increasingly Christlike because 'he who began a good work in us will bring it to completion at the day of Christ'.( Phil 1.6), The first ref. above comes immediately following the great kenosis hymn, the first at the outset of the letter.

Gorman's argument isn't so much that we are to work at being kenotic, but that those who are in Christ by faith are being conformed to his image which is kenotic, cruciform and raised from death. I've been asked to preach in August on a text that says this and more, and which I have to say has been programmatic in my own understanding of what Christian existence is and must be, when the reality of Christ crucified and risen becomes not only definitive of existence, but radically redefining in terms of self. 'I am crucified with Christ. I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me, and the life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me, and gave himself for me'. (Gal. 3.20) I can't read those words without realising that the issue of what is gift and what is discipline dissolves into all through grace, all through love, and a grace and love that is inexhaustibly generous, utterly self-giving and radical in transformative intent and power. (Sometime I'd like to write about the influence of autobiography on exegesis – this verse has been paradigmatic in my own spirituality from the beginning because it was "given to me" by two very special people….).

This summer I happen to be re-reading Charles Partee's recent The Theology of John Calvin, while also thinking my way through Gorman's discussion of kenosis and theosis. The union of the believer with Christ has always been seen as important in understanding Calvin's thought ; Partee thinks it is more than that, it is central  to his spirituality.

In a beautiful epigrammatic statement about Christ as source and origin of Christian existence, Calvin says, "As God he is the destination to which we move; as man the path by which we go. Both are found in Christ alone. (Institutes II.2.1) And here is Partee explaining how in Calvin's thought, faith is both human response and divine gift.

That is as elegant an account of Calvin's theology of faith and response, of gift and obedience, as I've read. And one that answers some of the crude caricatures of Calvin's thought, generated by his enemies, and at times more damagingly those generated post-Calvin by his less pastorally astute friends who claim his name for their theology.

Helen asks about the dilemma of knowing who we are, our true self. "To what extent is 'myself' the 'me' made in the image of God and to what extent is it the human, fallen, sinful 'me' ? 

Perhaps the beginnings of the answer are in the recognition that as human beings we are self-contradictory, our place in the world ambiguous, our moral capacities ambivalent, our lives lived under shadow of judgement yet looking hopefully for light. There is a Romans 7 dilemma we all recognise whether that tortured passage of Romans 7.14-25 refers to Paul's experience, or ours, before or after conversion. Who is this radically uncertain "I" who does what I don't want to do, and who is helpless to do the good I both must and want to do? Why can't I do what I must, be what I am called to be?

Three brief quotations sharpen our dilemma because they each say something true about that mysterious mixture of feeling and knowing, wanting and longing, of conscience and wilfulness, of flesh and soul, mind and spirit, that is this person called me. And the truths don't seem to fit – except in a theology of creation and redemption, of justification and sanctification, of judgement and mercy, and of life through death as the self-giving love of God whose creative purposes persist in pursuing at infinite personal cost, the goal of a redeemed, renewed and reconciled creation.

“This is my dilemma: I am dust and ashes; frail, wayward, a
set of predetermined behavioral responses, riddled with fears, beset with
needs, the quintessence of dust, and unto dust I shall return. But there is
something else in me. Dust I may be, but troubled dust. Dust that dreams. Dust
that has strange premonitions of transfiguration, of a glory in store, a
destiny prepared, an inheritance that will one day be my own…So my life is
stretched out in a painful dialectic between ashes and glory, between weakness
and transfiguration. I am a riddle to myself, an exasperation enigma…this
strange duality of dust and glory.”

(Richard Holloway – but I can't find the reference – anybody help to pin this down?)

This quoted by Gorman, (page 97), from one of the most profound and important theological works of the last 20 years.

From Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace. A Theological Exploration of
Identity, Otherness and Reconciliation. (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996),
71, 92.

Miroslav Volf lived with his family through the violence, ethnic cleansing and orchestrated hatred of the Balkan conflicts in the 1990's. He is one of the Christian church's most authoritative and persuasive voices on the subject of living humanely in a pluralistic world, fragmented by fear, hatred, guilt, religious demonisation of the other, and the deep memories that can embed such toxic responses in nationalist and ethnic conflict.

His book Exclusion and Embrace is hard reading – (1) Volf doesn't have an easy style and can be like a mountain guide, sometimes impatient with those who don't keep up;  (2) he is dealing with areas of human experience not many of us are ready to examine, such as the origins of hate and enmity, the relations between fear and prejudice, our capacity to turn on our neighbour, the terror of community validated violence against some of its own members who happen to be different; (3) he isn't content with social and psychological analyses of the problem of ethnic conflict and religiously driven hatreds. He insists on a Christian theological exploration of the root causes in sin, communal and individual, banal and radical, and the even more radical cure of new creation in Christ; and he does so by constructing a theology that centres on what God has done, is doing and will do in Christ by the power of the Spirit.

The book is a theologically determined, philosophically sophisticated and biblically insistent study of the existential collision between the Gospel of Jesus Christ and our all too human addictions to the preservation of the self, the will to power and personal security, and thus the elimination of any "other" perceived as threat. Volf is a frequent conversation partner in chapter 4 of Gorman's book entitled 'While we were enemies. Paul, the Resurrection and the End of Violence'. I'll do a separate post on that chapter where Gorman makes an explicit link between non-violence and kenosis. That's a connection I hadn't before made, but now seems so obvious – turning the other cheek as a kenotic act?

In his comment Tony notes the important link between the nature of God the Creator and the redemptive response to the fallenness of creation by God. Self emptying and other-giving love is the characteristic and outward movement of God. In the gift of life, created and redeemed, self-emptying love reveals what is eternally true of the heart of the Triune God.

The central thrust of Gorman's book is that kenotic love is characteristic of God, Father, Son and Spirit, and such kenosis is not passive surrender but takes intentional cruciform shape. Christian existence, defined by our being in Christ and Christ in us, and thus by the indwelling of individual Christian and Christian communities, is therefore shaped around the reality of the Cross. "To be truly human is to be Christlike, which is to be Godlike, which is to be kenotic and cruciform." (Gorman page 39) Gorman understands Philippians 2.6-11 to be Paul's master story about Christ, and with others such as NT Wright, Stephen Fowl, Richard Bauckham, translates "though he was in the form of God" as meaning not only "though" but "because". Kenosis, self-emptying love, is not a one off act of unilateral obedience – it is of the very nature of God. Heaven is not surprised by the self-emptying love of the Son – kenosis is only to be expected in a Triune relationship of self giving love in eternal communion. It is human beings whose default view of God insists power, sovereignty and exalted status are of the essence, the core realities of who God is; on the contrary, "divinity has kenotic servanthood as its essential attribute" (Gorman, 31).

The cross and resurrection of Jesus, as actions of self-emtpying love and its vindication, reveal the heart of God through a narrative of surrendering love absorbing rather than inflicting violence, loving enemies rather than destroying them, but yet doing all this in a way that absorbs finally and fully, the fatefull consequence of sin and negating them by God's great Yes in Christ. The political and ecclesial implications of Christian witness being shaped by such cruciform kenosis, vindicated and energised by God's raising of Jesus, are yet to be worked out by the 21st Century Church often obsessively concerned about its own relevance, influence and even survival. Such a theology of cross and resurrection, as self-emptying love, points to a radically different discipleship, and in our time, a radically different way of being the Body of Christ.

Recognising some will be uneasy at the apparent loss of power and majesty implied in the notion of a self-emptying cruciform God, Gorman approves an important comment by John Webster( Professor of Systematic Theology in Aberdeen – and for me essential reading):

"Webster rightly defines God's holiness, not as pure majesty, but as "majesty in relation". Because God's majesty and God's relationality cannot be separated, we must understand  God's majesty in light of God's revealed relationality. We do not simply hold the majesty and relationality of God in tension; with Paul, we must see them in concert, a unison revealed in the power of the cross. God is not a God of power and weakness but the God of power in weakness…we must always keep the divine activity and divine atributes together: God's actions  are self revelatory, the expression of God's essence and character. Thus if the cross is theophanic [God revealing], God must be understood as essentially cruciform." ( Gorman page 33)

I'm not finished with this book yet!