Sola's First thread on Kenosis

Sola1517

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The definition of Kenosis is the renunciation of the divine nature, at least in part, by Christ in the incarnation. (cited in Philippians 2:6)

How could Christ not know what time the Father had planned the second advent and still be divine?

Also, how could Christ not have known what time the Father had planned the second advent and not have a kenotic nature?
 

paul becke

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The definition of Kenosis is the renunciation of the divine nature, at least in part, by Christ in the incarnation. (cited in Philippians 2:6)

How could Christ not know what time the Father had planned the second advent and still be divine?

Also, how could Christ not have known what time the Father had planned the second advent and not have a kenotic nature?
 
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Doug Melven

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When Christ was on Earth He had given up His divine power.
He was totally dependent upon the Holy Spirit for all He did.
He did nothing by His own power. All of the miracles He did were by the Power of the Spirit.
Any knowledge He possessed while on Earth was given to Him by the Father, and the Father chose not to reveal this to His Son.
 
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HereIStand

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Augustine has a good discussion in chapters 1-4 of Book II in On the Trinity. Essentially, passages that speak of the equality of the Son with the Father represent Christ in the "form of God." Yet the Son was "less than the Father according to the form of a servant which He took," as other passages indicate.
 
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paul becke

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Jesus would have voluntarily renounced the fullness of his divine knowledge. We all share in that divine knowledge in some degree, as did he, nevertheless. However, while remaining fully human, he nevertheless found it difficult to understand how much more acute his own spiritual understanding was in comparison to that of his disciples, and it led to some situations I find extremely comical.

'Then Jesus said, “You know the way to the place where I am going”

Thomas said, 'Lord, we do not know where you are going, so how can we know the way ?'
Jesus said :

'I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.
No-one can come to the Father except through me.
If you know me, you will know the Father, too.
From this moment you know him and have seen him.'

'Philip said : Lord, show us the Father and then we shall be satisfied. 'Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me ?
Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father, so how can you say, 'Show us the Father ?....'
... and so on.

I think it took till the First Ecumenical Council, in about 300 years time, before the nature of the Holy Trinity had been teased out of the scriptures and officially defined. And it surely remains the ultimate mystery... how seeing Jesus was to see the Father "! And Jesus was getting quite testy about it !

I've been thinking a lot these past two days about how Francis' schismatic critics, who always accuse him of heresy and goodness knows what, when it is they who are the miscreants. And it strikes me that the problem is that, unlike good priests, age has not taught them to draw closer to God as our loving Father, but they remain stranded seemingly permanently with the 'throne-room' mindset.

There is absolutely no question that the very formal, throne-room aspect of our celebration of the Mass is the sine qua non, its foundation, its substrate, as its antiquity would suggest. 'To fear the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.' However, the very purpose of Jesus' incarnation, life, death, burial and ascension was to draw us close to God as nothing less than infinitely-cherished sons and daughters ; and not only are both of those aspects essential, the former must lead to the latter, if we are to see any of growth in the Spirit we are called seek.

There is a place for rote prayer in our worship. If we had to concentrate entirely on the words of our prayers, we would not be able to meditate on the sacred mysteries of the Rosary, for instance, and would probably undervalue our beautiful litanies. Nevertheless, surely it was the very personal demeanour towards God of St Padre Pio, for example, that made his Masses so special.
 
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paul becke

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I guess God isn't omniscient.
How could he have accepted the limitations of human nature - and that fallen - by his incarnation and ultimate crucifixion? By a freely-made act of his divine Will. Who are you to tell God he can't do that? And don't forget, while all this was taking place - his life and ministry - he had never departed from his Father's side in heaven ! As Christian, you absolutely need to get used to paradoxes, extreme mysteries.
 
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Sola1517

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How could he have accepted the limitations of human nature - and that fallen - by his incarnation and ultimate crucifixion?
The person who said something about my question acted like the question how can Jesus be God without knowing everything was irrelevant.
 
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redleghunter

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The definition of Kenosis is the renunciation of the divine nature, at least in part, by Christ in the incarnation. (cited in Philippians 2:6)

How could Christ not know what time the Father had planned the second advent and still be divine?

Also, how could Christ not have known what time the Father had planned the second advent and not have a kenotic nature?
From RC Sproul :

ONE PERSON, TWO NATURES

We live in a time when the person of Christ is a matter of great controversy among theologians. However, this is not a new problem. In the fourth century, the Arian controversy precipitated the Council of Nicea (AD 325). Another controversy brought about the ecumenical Council of Chalcedon (AD 451). The nineteenth century saw the advent of liberalism, and in the twentieth century there was the group called the Jesus Seminar, both of which sought to define Christ with no regard for biblical integrity. The church has had to define her understanding of the person of Christ repeatedly.

TWO HERESIES

The fifth century witnessed a two-pronged assault on Christian orthodoxy. First, there was the Monophysite heresy, brought about by a man named Eutyches. The name of this position comes from the prefix mono, meaning “one,” and the word physis, which means “nature.” The Monophysites believed that Christ had only one nature; they denied that He was one person with two natures, one divine and one human. Even before Eutyches, some had argued that Christ had only one nature. Of those, some said that Christ was merely human, with no deity. Others, such as the Docetists, argued that He was completely divine, with no humanity. Eutyches formulated the idea that Christ had a theanthropic nature. The term comes from the Greek word theos, which means “god,” and the word anthrōpos, which means “man.” Eutyches said that Christ’s nature was neither truly divine nor truly human; rather, it was a mixture of the divine and human.

The other heresy of the fifth century was Nestorianism. Nestorius argued that since Christ has two distinct natures, one divine and the other human, He must therefore have two distinct personalities. If there are two natures, there must be two persons.

So the doctrine of Christ was attacked from both sides, one denying the dual nature of Christ by reducing it to a single, confused mixture of divine and human, and the other affirming two natures but denying their unity. ~Sproul, R. C. (2014). Everyone’s a Theologian: An Introduction to Systematic Theology (pp. 133–134). Orlando, FL: Reformation Trust.


THE CHALCEDONIAN COUNCIL

These twin heresies prompted the Council of Chalcedon, and from that council came the classic formulation of the dual nature of Christ, namely, that Christ is one person with two natures—vera homo vera Deus. The word vera comes from the Latin veritas, meaning “truth.” The idea here is that Christ is “truly man and truly God.” Christ has a true human nature and a true divine nature. These two natures are perfectly united in one person.

Along with that affirmation, the Chalcedonian Council put forth four negatives.* As I noted earlier, throughout its history, the church has sought to describe certain concepts by way of negation. For example, in some ways we can define God by what He is not. He is infinite, meaning He is not finite. He is immutable, meaning He is not mutable. Likewise, the framers of the Chalcedonian Creed put forth four negatives, confessing that Christ is truly human and truly God, and that these two natures are perfectly united with no mixture, confusion, separation, or division.

The first two of these negatives, directed at the Monophysite heresy, states that the two natures, the divine and the human, are not blended so as to render a deified human nature or a humanized divine nature. The human nature is always human, subject to the normal limitations of humanity, and the divine nature is always divine. For instance, the divine mind did not lose its omniscience in the incarnation; the divine mind knew everything, even though the human mind did not.

SUI GENERIS

The church has had to grapple with the implications of that idea in considering some of Jesus’ words. At one point, the disciples asked Jesus, “What will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?” Jesus replied, “But concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only” (Matt. 24:3, 36). In other words, Jesus told His disciples that He did not know when the end of the age would come. Was that an indication of the human nature or the divine nature?

When we look at the life of Jesus as it is displayed on the pages of Scripture, certain actions are easy to assign to His human nature. When Jesus perspired in the garden of Gethsemane on the night before His crucifixion, was that a divine manifestation? Is sweat something we would expect from God? No, God does not sweat. Likewise, He does not get hungry, bleed, or cry. Most importantly, the divine nature did not die on the cross. If the divine nature had died on the cross, the universe would have ceased to exist. All these events evidenced Jesus’ humanity.

In the same way, when Jesus said He did not know the timing of the end of the age, it obviously was a statement of His humanity. Some object that if God knows everything, and if in Christ there is a perfect union of the divine nature and the human nature, how could there be anything that Jesus did not know? That is similar to questioning how Jesus, with His divine nature, could have experienced hunger, which the Bible clearly says He did. The point is the importance of distinguishing between the divine nature and the human nature so that we do not confuse them or blend them in such a way as to obscure the reality of either.

The fact that Jesus did not know the day or the hour of the end of the age does not indicate a separation between His human nature and His divine nature. There is no separation, but there is a distinction. His human mind was always in unity with His divine mind, and in the New Testament we see Jesus display supernatural knowledge frequently. He reveals things that no human could possibly know. Where did He get that information? He got it from the One who is omniscient. Yet it is one thing for the divine nature to communicate knowledge to the human nature; it is another thing for the divine nature to swallow the human nature and deify the human mind of Christ. The human mind had access to the divine mind, if you will, but they were not the same, so there were certain things that Jesus did not know, by His own testimony.

That perplexed even the brilliant thirteenth-century theologian Thomas Aquinas, who formulated what he called “the accommodation theory.” Aquinas said that Jesus had to know the day and the hour because He is God incarnate. Given the perfect union of His two natures, how could the divine mind know something that the human mind did not know? Aquinas said that this could not be, so Jesus must have known and chosen not to tell the disciples because the answer to their question was too mysterious or theologically difficult for them to grasp. However, with all due respect to Thomas, if Jesus told His disciples that He did not know when He actually did know, He was lying, and even one lie would have disqualified Him from being our Savior. We have to take seriously what Jesus said about the limits, humanly speaking, of His knowledge.

So the first two negatives of the Chalcedonian Creed, without mixture and without confusion, were designed to address the Monophysite heresy. The other two, without separation and without division, were designed to confront the Nestorian heresy, affirming that the presence of two natures in Jesus did not mean He was not one person.

All four negatives set for us the boundaries in which we seek to understand the mystery of the incarnation. I stress the word mystery, because even with the formulations provided by the church, no one has ever penetrated the depths of how Christ can be truly God and truly man. We have One who is sui generis. He is in a class by Himself. Only one person in all of human history has ever been God incarnate, and the mystery of the incarnation is beyond our full understanding.

HUMAN AND DIVINE

The value of Chalcedon is twofold. First, there is the affirmation every Christian has to make—Christ is truly human and truly divine. Second, when the church tries to explain the nature of His unity, it falls back on negatives, thereby establishing borders past which we dare not travel. The only thing on the other side of those borders is some kind of heresy. One of my seminary professors said to his students, “If you try to think concretely about the union of the human nature and the divine nature, if you go beyond the negative categories established by Chalcedon, you must choose your heresy.” The Chalcedonian Creed restricts us so that no matter how we conceive of the two natures, we must not think of them as an amalgamated blending or a stark separation from one another. They are united yet distinct.

An important phrase of the creed has been woefully neglected historically: “Each nature retaining its own attributes.” Christ did not lay aside any of His divine attributes. The divine nature of Christ is eternal, infinite, immutable, omniscient, and omnipotent. The human nature also retains the attributes of humanity; it is finite and restricted by space and time. The Chalcedonian formula provides us some direction as we continue our study of the person of Christ. ~Sproul, R. C. (2014). Everyone’s a Theologian: An Introduction to Systematic Theology (pp. 134–137). Orlando, FL: Reformation Trust.
 
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jax5434

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I think you may be conflating Ontology and function. Ontology is the study of Gods nature and being. Ontologically , the 2nd part of the trinity remained co-equal with God the Father even after being incarnated in a human body. He voluntarily became subordinate in function while he walked the earth.
As an example when I was in the Army I served under the command of Colin Powell. Ontologically we were the same in our natures; we were both human beings. But during my enlistment I was functionally subordinate to him even though our natures were the same.
God Bless
Jax
 
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Ancient of Days

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I guess God isn't omniscient.
No, he is. Jesus is "the first born of all creation". So before he was and is, God was and has always been. So can you not deduce that there are some things only God knows. "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD."
All the finite brain can comprehend is what it see's. The spirit can comprehend what God has allowed our spirits to comprehend. There is infinitely more to God than what he has revealed to us.
 
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ViaCrucis

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The definition of Kenosis is the renunciation of the divine nature, at least in part, by Christ in the incarnation. (cited in Philippians 2:6)

How could Christ not know what time the Father had planned the second advent and still be divine?

Also, how could Christ not have known what time the Father had planned the second advent and not have a kenotic nature?

The paradoxical nature of the Incarnation. Christ did not renounce His Divinity, but remained--and remains--truly and fully God. The kenotic element of the Incarnation is not in a lessening of the Divine Nature; but in the humility of the Son of God becoming a mortal human servant.

I would in fact argue that the Incarnation shows us that kenosis is a dimension of God, of God as God. The Son who empties Himself in humility in becoming a human servant is the pure reflection of God, "He is the image of the invisible God"; "If you have seen Me you have seen the Father". The kenosis is an act of love, the love which the Son has for the Father, and the love which He has for us.

This kenotic love is a reflection of the Divine perichoresis; because the Father does empty Himself as well, the Father empties Himself to the Son in love, this is the eternal generation of the Son from the Father's own Essence as it is the Father eternally giving of Himself. The Father pours Himself out, gives and offers Himself, empties Himself to the Son and the Spirit, the Son being eternally generated and the Spirit eternally proceeding. Even as the Son eternally pours Himself out in love to the Father, even as the Spirit Himself also pours Himself out to the Father and the Son. This is perichoresis, the mutual co-inhering of the Three Divine Persons.

The Incarnation is the eruption of that into our world, the breaking-in of God's Self, of His own love, into the world in order to redeem and rescue the world and indeed to share the love and life which is God with us mere creatures. We have, the Apostle says, received the Spirit of God's Son who in us cries out, "Abba! Father!" thus we have received sonship and heirship from God in Christ by the power of the Spirit.

The kenosis is not the disavowal of the Divine Nature in the Incarnate Logos; nearly the oppositie--the kenosis is the bearing forth of the Divine Nature in the humility of human flesh for the sake of sinful creatures and a sin-torn world.

-CryptoLutheran
 
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paul becke

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Where is that in the Bible?
I can't remember now, but I'll try to find it. Here are two quotes of St Augustine, however:

'The Son of Man which is in heaven came from the Father and yet never left Him.'
'Equal to the Father as God, inferior to Him as Man.'
- from the first column, here:
Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers First Series, St. Augustine

In his fully divine nature, Jesus is inseparable from the Father and the Holy Spirit in the Holy Trinity ; In his fully human nature, He was inferior.

However, I'm pretty sure, it is explicitly referred to in the Gospel.

I've seen some great posts, here, by the way, better presented and more detailed.
 
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Sola1517

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Sola1517

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No, he is. Jesus is "the first born of all creation". So before he was and is, God was and has always been. So can you not deduce that there are some things only God knows. "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD."
All the finite brain can comprehend is what it see's. The spirit can comprehend what God has allowed our spirits to comprehend. There is infinitely more to God than what he has revealed to us.
Well then maybe Kenosis is one of those things.
 
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