Kenosis and Scientific Theology
Was Kenosis a One-Time Event?
McCall’s application is a good example of how emergence and kenosis are used in contemporary theology. The problem for us here is that it seems to close the door on kenotic experience for anyone other than Jesus. But that’s easily addressed. In his attempt to save unaltered the systematic theological view that Jesus was enSpirited and is somehow unique, McCall ignores one implication of this view of kenosis: that it is available to humans in general. Consider this: IF God sets in motion a cosmos where one hominid can be enSpirited, and IF God is reactive to and interactive with all creation, THEN there’s no logical reason why Jesus was unique. There may be doctrinal needs for uniqueness, one theological camp may require such uniqueness to complete its system, and God may simply have decided to go through the trouble of incarnation and crucifixion only once; but nothing in the meta-physics of McCall’s account makes it impossible for you or I to become enSpirited.
That is, with some reservations, the position that Roland Kern and Meelis Friedenthal take.[1] If we reduce Christ’s kenosis to a singular instance in history, we embrace its theological significance at the expense of its practical significance. Practicing Christians try to emulate the human named Jesus, and the developmental and ethical aspects of Christianity rest on our ability to do more than sympathetically appreciate that human’s action. It would be fruitful, they suggest, to examine Jesus as human first and then understand how that human became, or at least hosted, the divine Christ.
If one examines kenosis experientially (phenomenologically) and experimentally (as a function of neurophysiology), one realizes that ek-stasis, that sense of being outside of time and space, is common to the experience of people irrespective of faith, and especially common to the experience of people of faith. The authors suggest that Paul’s use of “emptying” in his Letters does not mean emptying oneself of something (the classical understanding of kenon), it means being without consciousness of something outside ourselves, being free or receptive to the external world without immediate and necessary reference to a self. Examining the neurophysiology of altered conscious states, the authors suggest that when the brain’s self-monitoring locations are blocked we feel “nothing,” either a sense of an empty void or a felt unity with what we see and hear and touch. It is the latter alternative Karo & Friedenthal pursue.
It is difficult to separate the ego-centric perception from the perception of things in the world: they simply present to us as something-not-us. Believing this is caused by neural conditioning, that is, groups of neurons all firing together, the authors suggest that if we could rewire the brain to disregard its experiential history we might attain a kenotic state. That we do not is due to our social conditioning, which leaves us biased towards perceiving ourselves and the world around us in particular ways. It requires conscious effort to overcome our own limitations and to take other humans as important, divine and enSpirited rather than in our lane, in our face, and impossible to control. Jesus, on the other hand, was able to attain this state because of his privileged, divine status.
Karo and Friendenthal suggest that the Eucharist is the pivot point for a specific Christian sense of “nothing” in that it promotes the shedding of ego and bias and limitations in favor of a fulfilling of ourselves by God. At the Last Supper, Jesus brought attention to two ideas: life was supposed to be lived with Christ within us; our actions must be other-centered (to invoke McCall). The rituals of Communion, therefore, simply remind us that though the world seems external and linearly temporal, the ceremony takes us out of our own ego-centric world to celebrate unity with someone who exemplifies self-lessness.
For Karo and Friedenthal, kenosis scales: there is at one end the pouring forth into (or giving over to another) that requires minimal participation or neural rewiring (e.g., a parent’s care for its child), and at the other a more demanding ek-stasis in which we can attain divinity. When those of us not chosen to be sons and daughters of God participate in the Eucharist we accept into ourselves an historical personage, breaking the bonds of time and space and culture. Moreover, we do so in order to achieve something not for ourselves but for others and through a particular Other.
Left as it is, the authors’ position is not especially significant. Except for the appeal to God, they do not explain how garden variety ek-stasis becomes kenotic experience of the divine. As a result, the scale of kenotic behavior is just that, a scale, not a programme for improvement or development. The authors assume that Jesus had to have received divine assistance in order to break free of his social conditioning, so one end of the scale seems to be beyond our reach. What they have shown however is that there is a state of consciousness in humans in which distinctions been subject and object, between I and Thou or It, are no longer operative. Further, it appears that in such moments we discover who we are, intuit the reasons for our existence, and/or perhaps even participate in divinity. The door to full participation in divinity, to an individual and non-unique kenosis is ajar, if not yet wide open and beckoning us to enter.
Kenosis Depends on the Nature of Divine Action
But so far we only know that we could be receptive to divine infusion, not that it happens. How (and ultimately by Whom) are we infused in a kenotic event? To understand that, in the context of modern theological debate anyway, we have to take a detour into the argument over compatibilism, that is, how God “works” in the natural world. After all, if you or I are to have a kenotic experience, God somehow has to affect our neurophysiological state, right? Compatibilism holds that God must work in the natural world in concert with natural law; incompatibilism holds that God can intervene and override such laws. So ultimately a universally accessible kenosis depends on where one stands on the compatibilist / incompatibilist issue: God is always above natural law and accesses “us” directly as it were, or God is somehow revealed or actualized in and through the natural world and, in some way we do not yet understand, we ‘live’ always in a potential, if seldom realized, state of kenosis.
What makes kenosis theology problematic is it appears to be both compatibilist and incompatibilist.
If God’s in His Heaven, Who’s Ruling the World?
Ted Peters’ main goal in “Happy Danes and Deep Incarnation” is to reject as inconsistent one branch of theology, the kenotic theology of deep incarnation.[2] Peters claims that kenosis theologians (like the “Happy Dane” Neil Henrik Gregersen) are compatibilist when it comes to God’s actions in the quantum level and incompatibilist where free will and God’s actions in humanity’s spiritual development are concerned.
On a compatibilist view, God’s actions (including the incarnation) are compatible, congruent, and coherent with natural processes such as quantum physics and evolution: in effect, God’s actions conform to natural physical laws as humans understand them. God can select outcomes at the indeterministic quantum level, where His actions cannot be examined or predicted by science, yet the effects of His actions are still consistent with the laws of quantum behavior. God does not intervene in the actions of complex material structures or organisms with consciousness and a felt sense of will and purpose; those entities are subject to and guided by natural laws even if at this time we have not discovered those laws.
On the other hand, the incompatibilist position separates the divine and mundane worlds to such an extent that God may act in the world only through intervention, not by nature, in the form of miracles. The incompatibilist asserts we have free will informed and infused with and by God; God Itself is outside of empirical space and time so God may create a universe that is subject to the laws of thermodynamics but God Itself is not subject to those laws. Kenosis is one way in which the distinction between the mundane and the divine is manifest: for the Son to incarnate, there must be a real distinction between divine entities and mundane, natural entities. The miracle of the incarnation is required because the perfect, atemporal, immaterial domain of God is actually and logically incompatible with the world of deadline-driven, pleasure-seeking, and acquisitive humans.
Peters believes that process theology and kenotic theology are fundamentally incompatibilist. Suggesting that contemporary theology has adopted a critical view of power as tyrannical, Peters accuses process theology of a “metaphysical revolution” in which God’s power is diminished and given over to creatures and their free wills and decisions. Kenosis theology, on the other hand, makes God a compassionate tyrant, for He voluntarily limits His own power that we may be free and powerful ourselves. The process theologian wants a world in which the laws of natural science are absolute, the ‘power’ of the interaction between matter and energy is absolute; and the God of the process theologians is related to the world but only because of his Love. Kenosis theologians make God share in the suffering of the world, but this is because God voluntarily, out of love for the world He created, withdraws from it to give it a chance to be creative and well as pathetic, self-expressive as well as self-damning.
Peters believes we can’t have it both ways – an incompatibilist God and any kenotic act other than the incarnation. He has two objections to kenosis theology. First, he rejects a kenotic creation. If the incompatibilist God is indeed inaccessible, aloof, and distant, then this makes kenosis a single, unique, and solely divine act. Peters’ second objection to the Deep Incarnation camp, and Gregersen in particular, is about the inconsistency in how kenosis theology sees God’s role in the world in general. Peters accepts Gregersen’s compatibility view of God at the quantum level, and parts ways with him only when Gregersen moves from simple linear or at least predictable systems to self-organizing, emergent, autopoietic systems. The objection is simple: if compatibilism is operative at the quantum level, why is it not also operative at all higher levels? Peters thinks the switch from compatibilism to incompatibilism as one moves up the chain of biophysical complexity is a leap not of faith but of bad logic.
It’s About Love, Not Rule
Neil Henrik Gregersen, writing in response to Peters in the same issue of Dialog, argues that Deep Incarnation is not incompatibilistic and that there are degrees of compatibilism as one moves from simple to complex systems.[3] Ultimately, Gregersen wants to turn the tables on Peters by arguing that the primary issue is not power or divine agency or natural law: instead, it is about love and self-actualization.
Gregersen, rightly I think, dismisses Peters’ requirement of a consistent compatibilist position as a legacy of the Chalcedonian doctrine of two natures: Jesus must be completely human and the Son must remain completely divine. Gregersen sees compatibilism as a matter of degree. He rejects Peters’ view that God somehow abdicates Its power in the kenotic act. He even rejects Polkinghorne’s idea that God chooses to limit Itself by allowing mundane determinism. He rejects self-limitation in favor of self-actualization: God kenotically reveals Its true nature in being other-focused, that is, in creating the world and its human inhabitants. This includes, but is not limited to, natural processes.
This does not answer Peters’ objection as much as it side-steps it: God is compatibilistic in ways other than those attended to by the natural sciences. Natural causes and laws are, experientially and conceptually, distinct from humanity’s universal sense of self and others and union. Motives and causes are not the same, especially when the motive of divine love creates the causal relationships that science studies.
Deep incarnation is not restricted to a fleshy union of the Son and Jesus: the Incarnation establishes within the as-perceived linear universe of humans a universal, supportive communion not with just Jesus, but with all humanity. Adding “as” to the commonly accepted Lutheran “in, with, and under,” Gregersen suggests that the incarnation was the realization of the divine in the world – as the world. “It is all about being together – God must appear as human in order to be real divine love” because we must understand that as love, in a real human, in a real world (257).[4]
If we assume our world is bounded by our skin, a dermal ontology as Gregersen calls it, then it makes sense that “incarnation” seems to us something that happened in a particular body. But Gregersen, following other theologians influenced by Merleau-Ponty and others, suggests that our fleshly existence is a stance in the world, not a bounded, touchable boundary. The incarnation took place into that stance, into how humanity as a whole relates to the “world” it perceives as something external yet with which it is existentially, ultimately unified. The Son did not enter Jesus’ body as much as enter all of humanity in entering one instance of humanity; the incarnation and the resurrection are social, societal, universal events.
Stance and God as Love in the Human World
Stance may be a difficult concept to grasp at first. We think of ourselves as contained selves: “we” exist someplace between our toes and scalp. But we also feel “we” are affected by, and can affect, others in the world. We are both contained and communal. Alhough the research agendas and terminologies differ, much current research in psychology, linguistics, and anthropology suggests our containers are more porous than they may appear: our inner experience and sense of self is affected by other people’s language and behavior just as their inner lives are affected by ours. A stance is a non-conscious receptivity to others and the world we share with them; it affects what we feel, how we behave, what we perceive and what we understand.
Reductionist science would reduce that stance to a neuro-physical event. Social systems theory would claim that stance is the confluence of social customs, language, and our own inner personal experiences. For example, we can all intuitively tell the difference between the meaning of the words “god” and “love” in the following phrases: “For God so loved the world….”; “OMG, I love cheesecake”; “I swear to God I really do love you.” For each of us, “god” and “love” have what are in one sense unique nuances, yet those nuances are unique because of our shared experiences in our social and linguistic world. That intuited significance is the effect of our stance.
The point that Gregersen and other kenosis theologians are making is that the Incarnation created a new social context, a communal sharing of language and attitude and meaning, as humans with a god present to us as human in the world with us. It opened us up to the possibility of experience beyond the sensed-self, something more universal and divine. In the Incarnation into humanity, not just Jesus, God created a new nuance, universally accessible, to the experience and significance of “love” – solely because “…God so loved the world….”
Let’s recap what we have so far. We have a kenotic act of creation, and a kenotic event in the incarnation. We know that humans are innately receptive to attending to, perhaps conjoining with, the divine. We know also that the divinity with which we conjoin is neither the abstract conceptualized Omnipotence of classical theology nor somehow remote and separate from us. And we know that, at one point in linear human-historical time, the divine infused itself at least potentially into all of humanity. This comprehensive kenotic act is the basis of our understanding of God, and of the world: the created humanity which God infused, that evolving species that exhibits consciousness and love, perceives the world and its God because it was created to do so. To quote Gregersen again, “When the world is said to be created ‘out of nothing,’ it is because it has its only source in God’s love. Being created ex nihilo is the cosmological correlate of being created ex amore dei” (258). To add to Gregersen, in the Incarnation God exemplified that created nature and revealed a more obvious, compelling, and human example of love than we humans had previously been able to perceive and to understand. In Jesus, God held the mirror up to our nature.
Now we need to understand how we, now, today, open up to God and actually experience kenosis ourselves. We need to understand what the mundane equivalent of divine kenotic creation and incarnation is.
Kenosis as Actualizing the True Communal Self
How we individually experience kenosis in mundane real-time has been discussed, strangely enough, in the context of abuse victim therapy, which in turn ironically is a response to a critique of kenosis by Daphne Hampson. Hampson rejected the classical view of kenosis because it was based on a power/powerlessness dichotomy. That classical view had no significance for women first because their subjugation by males had made such an experience inaccessible and second because that view simply perpetuated male domination. Sarah Coakley in answer to Hampson argued just the reverse: that in kenosis, human frailty in general was absorbed into Christ’s divine power.
Carolyn Chau and Aristotle Papanikolaou extend Coakley’s view of kenosis into the kenotic act of forgiveness of one’s abuser.[5] Chau relies heavily on Papanikolaou’s analysis of Coakley, and Papanikolaou’s analysis is in turn heavily influenced by Hans Urs von Balthasar’s theology. Papanikolaou explains that Balthasar rejected kenosis as a single event between Christ and humans, on Trinitarian grounds. If the event involved only the Son, then the act was not in a significant sense divine. To be a fully divine act, God had to be involved in it. If one accepts that argument, it makes kenosis an event brought on by both God and the Son.
There are two difficulties with this position as it stands. That God was involved does not entail that the Christ-Jesus kenosis was an instance of a universal act. Second, there’s no explanation as to how God could become involved in the first place, since Jesus (at least since the Chalcedonian two-nature doctrine was accepted) was decidedly not divine.
Balthasar’s solution was to make the Trinity itself a kenotic act, a communion of the persons, a combination (synthesis might be a better term) of unity and disparity, kenosis and distance. This establishes the means and rationale for a fully divine kenotic event involving the human Jesus, and it also establishes the purpose of kenosis: the establishment of genuine personhood.
Jesus Christ is the link between divine and human personhood. Insofar as the Father is known through the Son, the Son is the image of the Father, and as such, the image of God’s trinitarian life. As the God-man, Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of the imago dei, and as such, exists not simply as the model, but the condition for the possibility of human personhood. Insofar as Jesus Christ as God-man is the image of God’s trinitarian existence, human personhood as imago dei must be an imitatio Christi. (Papanikolaou, 48)
The emphasis on personhood in general rather than a particular individual is significant. Kenosis is not a temporary grafting of the divine onto the mundane in order to somehow save the mundane from its own behavior. It is the creation of (or, one might say, the fulfillment of) the reason for the mundane in the first place. Jesus did not change in the kenotic event, he became who he really was: an instance of the kenotic love that is the essence of the Trinity.
This, suggest both Papanikolaou and Chau, is what Coakley means when she says we achieve our true self through contemplative prayer, in which one opens oneself up to the presence of God and is received into a space made available by God. It is this interstice between divine and mundane, God and creature, self as receiver and self as giver, that is the ground of and means for kenosis. Vulnerable, both to one’s oppressors and to God, one discovers a durability (to distinguish its efficacy from “power” per se), the ability to resist oppressive and egoistic relationships by responding in self-giving acts that emulate and instantiate Christ’s Person-ifying gift to us. Our personhood is based on our relationships with others and should be modelled on or instantiate the kenotic relationship between the Trinity, a “self-giving toward the other in order to receive the other” (Chau, 6; italics mine). What is given in this mundane but divinely-infused kenosis is trust and faith and love when least expected and least possible. Its source is not the ego-self or the social-self Karo and Freidenthal examine, but the true self.
In other words, kenosis is presented to us as a divine action but only to reveal to us that we, as creatures of the divine made to commune with the divine, can and should act kenotically as well. Jesus is not the one-time, Abrahamic-God-assisted human that marks the epitome of kenotic experience. Jesus is instead the exemplar of the pervasively human capacity for receptivity to divinity’s self-giving, combined with an extraordinary sense of our experience of “our self” as a fully diffused and distributed sense of ‘self-as-relationship-with-the divine’.[6]
[1] Karo, R., & Friedenthal, M. (2008). Kenosis, Anamnesis, and our place in history: A neurophenomenological account. Zygon, 43(4), 823-836.
[2] Peters, T. (2013). Happy Danes and deep incarnation. Dialog: A Journal of Theology, 52(3), 244-250.
[3] Gregersen, N. H. (2013). Deep incarnation and kenosis: In, with, under, and as: A response to Peters. Dialog: A Journal of Theology, 52(3), 251-262.
[4] Examining the limits of both science and theology, Thomas Tracy suggests that science can only causally explain events that have sufficient natural causes, and as soon as science assumes that all events in the world have natural causal links, science moves into speculative metaphysics. Gregersen here is exploring other possible causes, which here for simplicity sake I call motive. See: Tracy, T. F. (2013). Divine purpose and evolutionary processes. Zygon, 48(2), 454-465.
[5] Chau, C. (2012). “What could possibly be given?” Towards an exploration of kenosis as forgiveness – continuing the conversation between Coakley, Hampson, and Papanikolaou. Modern Theology, 28(1), 1-24. Papanikolaou, A. (2003). Person, kenosis, and abuse: Hans Urs von Balthasar and feminist theologies in conversation. Modern Theology, 19(1), 41-65.
[6] This relationship is not unique to mainstream Christianity if I read correctly David Litwa’s analysis of the Barbelo – Christ - Adam – human relationship in the Gnostic Apocryphon of John. See: Litwa, D.L. (2013). The God ‘Human’ and human gods. Models of deification in Irenaeus and the Apocryphon of John. Zeitschrift Für Antikes Christentum