A Worked Passage: Philippians 2:5-11

Begin where the routine of the last lesson begins, with the context, because this passage is so famous that it is easily lifted out of its letter. Paul is not writing a treatise on the person of Christ. He is writing to a church he loves, in which there is rivalry. He has urged them to stand firm in one spirit (Philippians 1:27), to be 'like-minded, having the same love, being united in spirit and purpose' (2:2). Then comes the command that the passage is meant to support: 'Do nothing out of selfish ambition or empty pride, but in humility consider others more important than yourselves' (2:3). Two chapters later he names two women who must 'agree with each other in the Lord' (4:2). The greatest paragraph about Christ in the letter was written to settle a church quarrel.

The Greek makes that connection visible in a way English cannot. In the SBL Greek New Testament (SBLGNT), 2:3 forbids κενοδοξία (kenodoxia, empty glory or conceit), commends ταπεινοφροσύνη (tapeinophrosynē, humility), and tells them to be ἡγούμενοι (hēgoumenoi, considering) others above themselves. Three verses later Christ ἡγήσατο (hēgēsato, considered), then ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσεν (heauton ekenōsen, emptied himself), then ἐταπείνωσεν ἑαυτόν (etapeinōsen heauton, humbled himself). The roots of all three words in 2:3 return in 2:6-8. Whatever else the passage does, it answers the command in 2:3 with the story of Christ, word for word.

Verse 5 is the first place the translators had to decide something, and it is a real decision. The Greek reads τοῦτο φρονεῖτε ἐν ὑμῖν ὃ καὶ ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ (touto phroneite en hymin ho kai en Christō Iēsou), literally, think this among you which also in Christ Jesus. φρονεῖτε (phroneite, think, set your mind) is a present active imperative, second person plural. The second half of the verse has no verb. The translator must supply one. The BSB supplies was: 'Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus.' On that reading, called the ethical reading, Paul tells the Philippians to have the same attitude Christ had, and the passage that follows is the pattern. Its defenders, probably the majority of commentators today, Gordon Fee among them, point to exactly the word links just described: the passage is told in the vocabulary of 2:3 because it is offered as the example of 2:3.

The other reading, argued by Ernst Käsemann in an influential essay of 1950 and followed by Ralph P. Martin, supplies a different verb: think this among yourselves which you also think, or which is fitting, in Christ Jesus, that is, as people who are in Christ. On this kerygmatic reading the passage is not chiefly an example to copy but the story of salvation by which the church lives: Christ's descent and exaltation are unrepeatable, nobody else can empty himself from the form of God, and Paul's point is that their life together should match the realm they now inhabit in Christ. Its defenders point out that in Christ in Paul usually means in union with Christ, not in the mind of Christ, and that the passage spends its second half on an exaltation no believer can imitate. Both readings are grammatical. Both make the passage the ground of the Philippians' humility. They differ over whether Christ is chiefly the model or chiefly the Lord whose story has made them a new people, and many readers think the passage does both.

One more question about the setting: is this a hymn? In 1928 Ernst Lohmeyer, in Kyrios Jesus, set the passage out in strophes and argued that Paul was quoting an early Christian hymn, perhaps one already sung in worship. Ralph P. Martin's Carmen Christi (1967) made that view the standard one for a generation. Gordon Fee challenged it in 1992 in an article titled 'Philippians 2:5-11: Hymn or Exalted Pauline Prose?', arguing that the passage lacks the regular features of Greek hymns and reads as Paul's own exalted prose, written for this letter. The question matters less than it seems for preaching, since on either view Paul has placed the passage here and made it his own. But it does matter for one thing: if the lines are a hymn, a student should be cautious about pressing every word as though Paul had chosen it for this argument.

Verse 6 opens with a relative pronoun and a participle: ὃς ἐν μορφῇ θεοῦ ὑπάρχων (hos en morphē theou hyparchōn, who, existing in the form of God). ὑπάρχων is a present active participle, nominative singular masculine, of ὑπάρχω (hyparchō, to exist, to be). The noun μορφή (morphē, form) appears twice in this passage, here and in μορφὴν δούλου (morphēn doulou, the form of a servant, or of a slave) in verse 7, and only once more in the New Testament, in the longer ending of Mark, where Jesus 'appeared in a different form to two of them' (Mark 16:12). So the meaning must be argued from wider Greek and from the passage itself. Three readings have strong defenders, and one argument cuts across them all.

The first is the classic reading of J. B. Lightfoot, whose commentary on Philippians (1868) contains a famous detached note on morphē and schēma. Lightfoot argued that morphē denotes the essential and abiding form of a thing, what it truly is, while σχῆμα (schēma, outward fashion, appearance), the word used in 'being found in appearance as a man', denotes the changeable outward shape. On this view, existing in the form of God means possessing the very nature of God, and taking the form of a servant means truly becoming a servant, not merely looking like one. The reading has been the backbone of much evangelical and Reformed exegesis, and it lies behind translations that render the phrase very nature.

The second reading accepts much of Lightfoot's conclusion but rejects his method. Later study of Koine usage, including the papyri, showed that morphē was often used of visible form or appearance, the shape something is seen to have, and that Lightfoot's sharp distinction owed more to classical philosophy than to ordinary first-century speech. Mark 16:12 itself uses morphē of how Jesus appeared. So these interpreters read form of God as the visible manifestation of God, and many connect it with the glory of God as the Old Testament describes it. Markus Bockmuehl, in a 1997 article and in his commentary on Philippians, argued that Jewish texts about the visible form of God's glory are the best background: to exist in the form of God is to share the divine glory that God alone possesses. On this reading the phrase still points to deity, but by way of glory rather than of abstract essence.

The third reading hears an echo of Adam. Genesis 1:26-27 says humanity was made in God's image, and in Genesis 3:5 the serpent promises that 'you will be like God.' James D. G. Dunn, in Christology in the Making (1980), argued that Philippians 2:6-11 is best read as Adam Christology: Christ, like Adam, bore the image of God, but where Adam grasped at being like God, Christ did not, and where Adam's grasping led to death, Christ's obedience to death led to exaltation. Dunn argued that the passage can be read entirely this way without requiring a personal existence of Christ before his human birth. Others who hear the Adam echo, N. T. Wright among them, accept it as one strand while holding that the passage plainly speaks of a pre-existent Son, and they note that the verbal links are loose: the Greek of Genesis does not use morphē, and like God is not the same phrase as ἴσα θεῷ (isa theō, equal with God). Dunn's full position has not been widely followed, but the Adam contrast is taken seriously by many who reject his conclusion.

The fourth point is not a separate reading but an argument that cuts across all of them, and it is the strongest single observation in the verse. Whatever morphē means in the form of God, it must mean the same thing in the form of a servant, because Paul has set the two phrases deliberately side by side. If Christ's servanthood was real, not a costume, then his existence in the form of God was real too. Defenders of a high reading press this hard; the parallel is in the text and needs no theory of the word to make it work.

One more grammatical question sits inside ὑπάρχων. A participle like this can be read as concessive, although he existed in the form of God, he did not consider equality something to be grasped, which is how most translations take it. Or it can be read as causal, because he existed in the form of God, he did not. Michael Gorman, in Inhabiting the Cruciform God (2009), argued for holding both: although he was in the form of God, he emptied himself, and because he was in the form of God he did so, since self-giving love is what God is like. The concessive reading guards against confusing Christ's humiliation with his natural state; the causal reading presses the claim that the cross reveals God's character rather than hiding it. The participle itself does not decide; the theology of the reader usually does, and a preacher should say so.

The next clause is οὐχ ἁρπαγμὸν ἡγήσατο τὸ εἶναι ἴσα θεῷ (ouch harpagmon hēgēsato to einai isa theō), he did not consider the being equal with God harpagmos. ἡγήσατο is an aorist indicative, third person singular, of ἡγέομαι (hēgeomai, to consider, regard), a verb that is middle in form. τὸ εἶναι is an articular infinitive, the being, and ἴσα is a neuter plural used as an adverb, on equal terms. The grammar is a double accusative: he did not regard X as Y, where X is the being equal with God and Y is ἁρπαγμός (harpagmos). Everything turns on Y, and the word occurs nowhere else in the New Testament and only a handful of times in all of surviving Greek.

The first classic option is called res rapta, Latin for a thing already seized. On this view equality with God was something Christ already had, and he did not regard it as a prize to be clung to or held on to tightly. Defenders note that the context requires him to have something he can give up: he existed in the form of God, and he emptied himself. If he already possessed equality with God, the sense is that he did not treat his possession as a treasure to keep for himself. Lightfoot argued that the Greek fathers broadly read the verse in this direction.

The second classic option is res rapienda, a thing to be seized. On this view equality with God was something Christ did not yet fully have in some respect, and he did not grasp at it. This reading fits the Adam contrast closely: Adam reached for likeness to God, Christ did not reach. Its defenders add that it gives the but of verse 7 a sharp contrast: he did not snatch at a higher status, but on the contrary emptied himself.

A third, older reading takes the ending of the noun at face value. Greek nouns in -μος (-mos) normally name an action, so ἁρπαγμός would naturally mean an act of seizing, robbery, while the related ἅρπαγμα (harpagma), with its -μα (-ma) ending, would name the thing seized. The older Latin and English versions followed this action sense: the Vulgate has non rapinam arbitratus est, he did not think it robbery, and the KJV reads: 'Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God' (Philippians 2:6, KJV). On that reading Christ did not think equality with God a usurpation, because it was his by right. It is the one classic reading that makes the clause a claim about his status rather than about his attitude, and it is no longer widely held, largely because it fits poorly with the but of verse 7.

In 1971 Roy W. Hoover published 'The Harpagmos Enigma: A Philological Solution' in the Harvard Theological Review, and the discussion has not been the same since. Hoover gathered Greek texts in which harpagmos or harpagma appears with verbs of regarding, such as ἡγέομαι, and argued that together they form an idiom. In that idiom, he argued, the question is never whether the thing is possessed or not; it refers to something already present and at one's disposal, and the idiom asks whether one will regard it as something to take advantage of, to use for oneself. So the clause means that Christ did not regard equality with God as something to exploit. N. T. Wright refined and defended the argument in a long article in the Journal of Theological Studies in 1986, reprinted in The Climax of the Covenant (1991), and many recent commentators have followed it. Its great strength is that it explains the but: he did not treat his equality with God as something to use for his own advantage, but on the contrary emptied himself. On this view the passage reveals what divine equality looks like when it acts, which is self-giving rather than self-serving.

Hoover's argument has had serious critics, and they deserve the same hearing. J. C. O'Neill replied in the same journal in 1988, arguing that Hoover had not shown a fixed idiom and that the meaning of harpagmos remained doubtful. Others object that many of Hoover's examples use harpagma rather than harpagmos, that the -mos ending still points toward an action, that Hoover's texts are few and often later than Paul, and that an idiom built from so small a base cannot bear the weight placed on it. Defenders of res rapienda, especially those who hear an Adam contrast, continue to read the clause as he did not grasp at equality. The honest summary is this. The idiom reading is probably the most widely followed today among commentators on the Greek text; it is not universal; and every one of the readings described here has been held by capable scholars who knew the evidence. The BSB's something to be grasped is a good choice for an ordinary reader precisely because it does not settle the question.

One small word deserves notice, because it shows how the debates connect. Some interpreters, Wright among them, have argued that the article in τὸ εἶναι ἴσα θεῷ points back to the form of God just mentioned, so that equality with God is the same reality as existing in the form of God, and therefore something already possessed. Others reply that the article's main work here is grammatical: in a double accusative it marks which of the two is the object, and it need not point back at all. If the first view is right, it supports res rapta or Hoover's idiom; if the second, the article leaves the question where it was. A student should notice how much theology can be loaded onto a single τό, and be slow to load it.

Verse 7 begins ἀλλὰ ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσεν (alla heauton ekenōsen, but he emptied himself). ἐκένωσεν is aorist active indicative, third person singular, of κενόω (kenoō, to empty, to make void). The reflexive ἑαυτόν, himself, stands before the verb. From this verb comes the word kenōsis, emptying, and a whole family of theological proposals. The first thing the Greek tells you is what the verse does not say. There is no genitive of content. Paul does not say what Christ emptied himself of. Every answer to that question is an inference, and that is where the disagreements begin.

The second thing the Greek tells you is how Paul uses this verb elsewhere. A concordance search finds κενόω five times in the New Testament, all in Paul, and in the other four it is plainly figurative: if those who live by the law are heirs, faith is useless (Romans 4:14); Christ sent Paul to preach 'lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power' (1 Corinthians 1:17); Paul would rather die than let anyone nullify his boast (1 Corinthians 9:15); and he sends the brothers so that his boasting should not prove empty (2 Corinthians 9:3). In none of them is anything poured out of a container. The verb means to make something void or of no effect. That is why the KJV rendered Philippians 2:7: 'But made himself of no reputation' (KJV), and why several modern translations use an idiom like making himself nothing. On this reading, the verse describes a humbling, not a subtraction.

The third thing the Greek shows is the participle that follows: μορφὴν δούλου λαβών (morphēn doulou labōn, taking the form of a servant). λαβών is an aorist active participle, nominative singular masculine, of λαμβάνω (lambanō, to take). Many interpreters read it as a participle of means: he emptied himself by taking the form of a servant. The classical theology of the church has rested a great deal on that observation. The emptying, on this view, was accomplished by addition, not subtraction: the Son did not cease to be what he was, but took to himself what he was not. Gregory of Nazianzus, in his Third Theological Oration (Oration 29), put the idea in a form that became a watchword: he remained what he was, and took up what he was not. Cyril of Alexandria pressed the same point against those who divided Christ, and the Definition of Chalcedon (451) confessed one Christ in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation. On this view the Son veiled his glory and accepted the limits and the shame of a servant's life and death, but did not lay aside any attribute of God, and the texts that speak of his ongoing divine life, such as Colossians 2:9, 'in Christ all the fullness of the Deity dwells in bodily form', are taken to apply to the incarnate Christ.

The kenotic Christologies take the verb more strongly, and their best defenders were serious, orthodox-minded theologians, not careless ones. In the mid nineteenth century the Lutheran theologian Gottfried Thomasius of Erlangen argued that the Son, in becoming man, gave up the exercise of what he called the relative attributes of God, those that concern God's relation to the world, such as omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence, while retaining the essential ones, holiness, love and truth. In Britain Charles Gore in the 1890s, P. T. Forsyth in The Person and Place of Jesus Christ (1909) and H. R. Mackintosh in The Doctrine of the Person of Jesus Christ (1912) developed related views, and in the twenty-first century philosophers and theologians gathered by C. Stephen Evans in Exploring Kenotic Christology (2006) have restated them carefully. Their strongest texts are not in Philippians alone. Jesus says that no one knows the day or hour, 'nor the Son, but only the Father' (Mark 13:32). He 'grew in wisdom and stature' (Luke 2:52). He was 'tempted in every way that we are, yet was without sin' (Hebrews 4:15). Kenoticists argue that a Christ who possessed and used unlimited knowledge while appearing not to would be only seemingly human, and that the strongest verb in the passage should be allowed its weight.

Between these lie views that try to keep what each side guards. Some speak of the Son voluntarily refraining from the independent use of his divine powers while still possessing them, living his human life in dependence on the Father and by the power of the Spirit; Gerald Hawthorne's The Presence and the Power (1991) argued along these lines from the Gospels. The Lutheran church itself argued in the early seventeenth century over whether the incarnate Christ abstained from using his divine attributes or used them hiddenly, a dispute between theologians of Giessen and Tübingen. And Joachim Jeremias proposed that ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσεν echoes Isaiah 53:12, where the servant 'poured out His life unto death', which would make the emptying a reference to Christ's self-giving to death rather than to the incarnation as such; others answer that the Greek of Isaiah uses a different verb and that the sequence of Philippians 2:7 points to the incarnation. Each of these is held by careful readers.

What is settled? Every one of these traditions agrees that the Son humbled himself freely, that he became truly human, and that the humiliation went all the way down: 'He humbled Himself and became obedient to death - even death on a cross' (Philippians 2:8). θανάτου δὲ σταυροῦ (thanatou de staurou, and death of a cross) is the bottom of the passage, the death Romans reserved for slaves and rebels. Where they differ is on what, if anything, the Son set aside to do it. A preacher can preach the first with complete confidence. He should not preach any one answer to the second as though Philippians 2:7 settled it, because the verb, as Paul uses it, does not.

Verse 9 turns on διὸ καὶ (dio kai, therefore also): 'Therefore God exalted Him to the highest place and gave Him the name above all names.' The verb is ὑπερύψωσεν (hyperypsōsen), aorist active indicative, third person singular, of ὑπερυψόω (hyperypsoō, to exalt beyond, to the highest place), a compound with ὑπέρ (hyper, above) that appears nowhere else in the New Testament. Notice who acts. In verses 6-8 Christ is the subject of every verb. In verse 9 God is. The one who would not use his position for himself is given the highest position by another. That turn is the shape of the whole passage, and it is the shape Paul asks of the Philippians: look not to your own interests, and leave your vindication to God.

Then come verses 10-11, and here the Greek tools show something a preacher can say with full confidence. God's purpose is 'that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow' (2:10), 'and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord' (2:11). In the SBLGNT the phrases are πᾶν γόνυ κάμψῃ (pan gony kampsē, every knee should bow) and πᾶσα γλῶσσα ἐξομολογήσηται (pasa glōssa exomologēsētai, every tongue should confess), both aorist subjunctives after ἵνα, so that. These are the words of Isaiah 45:23 in its Greek translation, the Septuagint, as it is usually printed, where the same knee, the same verb to bow, the same tongue and the same verb to confess appear; some Septuagint manuscripts have swear in place of confess, as the Hebrew does. And in Isaiah the speaker is the LORD, who has just said, 'There is no other God but Me' (Isaiah 45:21), and swears that 'Every knee will bow before Me' (45:23). Paul takes that oath, which in Isaiah belongs to the one God alone, and makes Jesus its object. Richard Bauckham, in God Crucified (1998) and Jesus and the God of Israel (2008), has argued that this is one of the clearest places where the earliest Christians included Jesus within the identity of Israel's one God, without abandoning their monotheism; the sentence ends, after all, 'to the glory of God the Father.'

The confession itself is κύριος Ἰησοῦς Χριστός (kyrios Iēsous Christos, Jesus Christ is Lord), with no verb, as early confessions often were. κύριος (kyrios, Lord) was the word the Septuagint used to render the divine name in Isaiah 45 and throughout the Old Testament, though it was also used of masters and of the emperor. In Philippi, a Roman colony, the confession that Jesus is Lord had a political edge as well; the letter calls the church's citizenship heavenly (3:20) and its Savior the Lord Jesus Christ. Interpreters differ over how strongly Paul intends the contrast with Caesar. They agree that the confession of 2:11 applies to Jesus the Lord's own oath from Isaiah, and that it is the climax of the passage.

Then the passage turns back to the church, and this is the last thing the Greek teaches about it. The next verse begins ὥστε (hōste, therefore, so then): Paul tells his beloved to 'continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling' (2:12). The great Christology was told for the sake of a quarrelling congregation, and the apostle does not let it float free of them. Neither should the preacher. A sermon on Philippians 2:5-11 that explains morphē and harpagmos and never reaches 2:3-4 and 2:12 has studied the passage and missed its purpose.

So here is how the debates sort for the pulpit. Say with confidence: the passage answers the command of 2:3 in its own vocabulary; Christ existed in the form of God and took the form of a servant, and whatever the form of God is, the form of a servant was equally real; he did not use his status for his own advantage, on any reading of harpagmos; he humbled himself to the death of a cross; God exalted him; and the oath of Isaiah 45 now has Jesus as its object. Say as debated, and say fairly: whether verse 5 presents Christ chiefly as model or chiefly as the Lord whose story has remade them; what precisely morphē denotes; whether harpagmos means something held, something seized, or something to be used for advantage; and what, if anything, the Son laid aside in emptying himself. Say nothing that depends on a single reading of those words as if the passage proved it. The congregation does not need you to settle what Lightfoot, Hoover and Wright did not settle. They need to see Christ, and to see what he asks of them on Monday.

Your practical step. Work Philippians 2:5-11 with the routine of the last lesson, compressed into two or three sessions. In your notebook, set out the passage in phrases with the three main verbs, he considered, he emptied, he humbled, at the left margin and every participle indented under the verb it belongs to; then a fourth line at the margin for God exalted him in verse 9. Beside each of the three words studied in this lesson, morphē, harpagmos and kenoō, write one line summarising each reading and mark it in the confidence column. Then write one paragraph, in plain words, of what you would say about Philippians 2:6-7 to your congregation, and check it against the last paragraph of this section: every sentence you have marked certain must be something every reading accepts.