Three areas of questioning above all press in upon us on the basis of the Christology offered in these pages. The first has to do with the doctrine of the immanent Trinity. How is the immanent Trinity to be conceived if this Christology be accepted? What relation of the Father to the Son does it imply? What relation of the Son to the Father? What relation of each and both to the Spirit? The second has to do with the relation of Trinity to election. I danced around this issue a bit in Chapter 7. In the book that follows this one, it will constitute a central problem. And, third, how might it be possible to think together a biblically warranted concept of divine “immutability” with divine “passibility” (in the sense of being acted upon)? A solution to the last question has already been adumbrated here. But I will enter into it more deeply in the next book – once answers to the first two areas of questioning are in place. In the process, I will elaborate more fully what I understand by a “psychological ontology” of God.

This chapter develops a Reformed version of kenotic Christology. In the place of two discreet (substantially conceived) “natures” subsisting in one and the same “person,” this chapter posits the existence of a single composite hypostasis, constituted in time by means of what it calls the “ontological receptivity” of the eternal Son to the “act of being” proper to the human Jesus as human. It is the Son’s “ontological receptivity” that makes an eternal act of “identification” on the part of the Logos with the human Jesus to be constitutive of his identity as the second “person” of the Trinity even before the actual uniting occurs. What emerges is in the spirit of Chalcedon even if it is not according to the letter. This chapter develops this Christology, shows how it follows the spirit of Chalcedon, and defends it against possible objections.

This chapter argues that the distinction between “low” and “high” Christologies as well as the assumed incompatibility of the Synoptic Christologies and that of the Fourth Gospel both need drastic revision. Instead, this chapter argues that a discernable measure of compatibility of the Synoptic witness to the Johannine does exist, but it can only be seen and understood where a twofold condition is met: 1) the Synoptics are interpreted first and on their own terms, and 2) John is not read through the lens provided by the fifth-century Christological dogma. One of the greatest needs – if Chalcedonianism is to become more widely respected outside the circles of “orthodox” dogmaticians – is for a Christology that does not suppress the all too human character of the Jesus born witness to in the first three Gospels especially.

This chapter examines nineteenth-century kenoticism through the theologies of Gottfried Thomasius, Wolfgang Geß, A. B. Bruce, and H. R. Mackintosh. Before doing so, however, it establishes the historical context for kenoticism through two periods. First, analyzing the classical Lutheran Christology that took shape in the debates between Lutheran and Reformed theologians, giving special attention to the Christology of Martin Chemnitz. Second, through examining the revolutionary critique of classic Lutheran theology found in David Friedrich Strauss. In the end, this chapter argues that all of the kenoticists’ attempts to introduce modifications into the Chalcedonian dogma, without addressing the logical aporia of the definition itself, were bound to result in divine mutability – or, more precisely, a mutation of the divine nature of the Chalcedonian Logos.

Taking its cue from Barth, who suggested that the human humility and obedience of Jesus Christ are grounded in God’s being as God, this introduction outlines the argument of the book as a whole. The book attempts to reestablish the credibility of Chalcedonian logic on the soil of Barth’s theology through developing a “Reformed kenotic Christology.” Through the ontological receptivity of the eternal Son, the humility and obedience of Jesus are made to be his “own” in a sense that makes it clear that the subject of that human attitude and activity is also the eternal Son. The result is a pneumatologically driven two-“natures” Christology. This introduction outlines the explanation of this argument as it unfolds through the entire book and discusses the methodology used in the following chapters.

The first two theologians treated in this chapter – Robert Jenson and Eberhard Jüngel – were conditioned by both a deep-lying attraction to revisionary metaphysics and by eschatology in their reception of Barth’s theology. This helped to uncover aspects of Barth’s dogmatics that had previously gone unnoticed. Ultimately, however, the temptation for both Jenson and Jüngel was to treat the immanent Trinity as something that is “complete” only in the eschaton. For divine kenosis, this meant that it was not an ontological precondition to incarnation but something that takes place in Jesus’ way to the cross. The third theologian treated in this chapter is Piet Schoonenberg. He shares a starting point with Jenson and Jüngel in the narrated history of Jesus of Nazareth attested in the New Testament, yet the “principles” he employs in his constructive Christology could just as easily be taken in a direction in which the second person of the Trinity is not collapsed into a human being. This chapter’s historical analysis finally raises the questions: why resist a collapse of the eternal Son into Jesus of Nazareth? Why engage in any sort of return to the received Christological dogma, however modified we might make it to be?

Each of the three theologians treated in this chapter – Karl Barth, Sergei Bulgakov, and Hans Urs von Balthasar – had a deep interest in Christological issues touching upon the divine kenosis. In thinking through the involved issues, they understood themselves to be guided by the “spirit” of Chalcedon. They share the conviction that God and the human should be understood to have been joined together in Christ in a union that is no mere externally realized juxtaposition. But they did not feel themselves bound to retain Chalcedon’s categories. Even more significant is the fact that all three twentieth-century theologians attempt in their differing ways to reconcile divine passibility with a more nearly biblical account of divine immutability.

This chapter argues that there is a logical aporia at the very heart of the Chalcedonian Definition: namely, that Jesus of Nazareth contributes nothing to the constitution of the “person,” or, said differently, that he stands in no real relation to the Logos. This aporia has its origins in a twofold historical pressure: the desire to affirm a unified subject and in Gregory of Nazianzus’ declaration that “the unassumed is the unhealed.” Throughout this chapter the historical conditions for this aporia are explored in the theologies of Origen, Apollinaris, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Cyril of Alexandria. The chapter argues that the majority of the bishops at Chalcedon followed Cyril in making the preexistent Logos as such to be the “person of the union,” leading to this aporia in the Chalcedonian Definition. The chapter ends with John of Damascus’ Christology and his solution to working with the given Chalcedonian definition.

The present work is the first instalment of a “trilogy” of books that, taken together, comprise a single project. Other volumes may be added later, should strength endure. But the plan now is for just three. The first is devoted to the “person” of Christ, the second to the doctrine of the triune God of electing grace, and the third to the “work” of Christ.1