Did Jesus empty himself of his deity? (Philippians 2)
✓Fact-checked & reviewed for Nicene orthodoxyHow we review →No - he did not empty himself of his deity. Philippians 2:5-11 says Christ, "though he was in the form of God... emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant." From that verb (ekenosen) comes the word "kenosis" - and the crucial question is whether it means Christ set aside his deity. It does not. The Greek contains no genitive; it names nothing he emptied himself of. Instead the grammar tells us how he emptied himself: "by taking the form of a servant." As Gordon Fee argues, the self-emptying is an act of addition - Christ emptied himself by adding humanity and veiling his gloryVeiling his glory — not giving up his deityIs sayingThe incarnation hid the outward, visible display of Christ's divine glory: he did not walk the earth shining in unveiled majesty.Not sayingNot that he set aside, suspended, or diminished his divine nature. He remained fully and actively God throughout — the kenotic heresy is exactly the view this page denies., not by subtracting his divine nature. In the old confession, he "remained what he was and became what he was not."
The passage is widely regarded as a pre-Pauline hymn (the Carmen Christi), which means this exalted view of Jesus was being sung within perhaps two decades of the crucifixion - far too early for legend. The parallel "form of God" and "form of a servant" resists being softened, and the difficult word harpagmos, on the reading of Roy Hoover and N. T. Wright, means Christ did not exploit the equality with God he already possessed. The climax then applies Isaiah 45:23 - where God says every knee shall bow to him alone - directly to Jesus, placing him, as Richard Bauckham puts it, within the unique identity of the one God.
So the honest answer is emphatic: no, Jesus did not empty himself of his deity. The idea that he shed his divine nature is the kenotic heresy, not the text's teaching. He remained fully God while taking on our full humanity - and it is precisely because he was equal with God that his self-lowering to the cross is so astonishing.