A New Climate for Christology

Kenosis, Climate Change, and Befriending Nature

Sallie McFague

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781506478739
• eBook ISBN: 9781506478746
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

For decades, Sallie McFague lent her voice and her theological imagination to addressing and advocating for the most important issues of our time. In doing so, she influenced an entire generation and empowered countless people in their efforts to put religion in the service of meeting human needs in difficult times.

In this final book, finished in the year before her death in 2019, McFague summarizes the work of a lifetime with a clear call to live in "such a way that all might flourish." The way, she argues, is the "kenotic interpretation of Christianity: the odd arrangement whereby in order to gain your life, you must lose it. The way of the cross is total self-emptying so that one can receive life, real life, and then pass this life on."

A masterful and life-giving summing-up of a theology that makes a profound difference for us, our communities, and our planet.

One

The Kenotic Stories of Jesus and God

The Kenotic Story of Jesus

As we dig more deeply into kenoticism and its meaning both for Christianity and for climate change, we need to be reminded of an important qualification from Lucien Richard: “The only way in which a kenotic Christology can become intelligible is if it is perceived within the whole divine life and economy. A kenotic Christology must be rooted in the Trinitarian mystery; it must be evident in the creation and redemption of the world.”1 Elsewhere Richard adds, “Kenosis is a way of describing the divine being and the divine action in Jesus Christ. It describes not only who God is in Jesus Christ but also who the believer must be.”2 In other words, kenosis is a way of understanding Christian faith much like “individualism” has been for those Christians interpreting God as a superindividual, with human beings as lesser individuals.

But we human beings of the twenty-first century occupy an entirely different reality from that of our forebears. We live in a totally relational reality, where no individual exists by him- or herself; in fact, one of the best expressions of current understandings of reality is the Buddhist “dependent co-origination.”3 This notion suggests that each depends on all and all originate with all. It is difficult for most Westerners to envision, let alone embody, such a notion, given how thoroughly brainwashed we are by “individualism.” And yet it is imperative that we begin to imagine “dependent co-origination,” since it is far closer to reality as presently understood not only by various religions but also by the sciences. While dependent co-origination is commensurate with current evolutionary theory, it is also widespread in various religions, including some forms of Christianity. Kenoticism is one such form of Christianity. The kenotic story of Jesus is about God, as are all stories about Jesus. This is the case because Jesus is “the face of God” for Christians. Richard writes, “The true face of God is unveiled in the human face of Jesus.”4 It matters which story of Jesus we accept, since it determines to a large extent what we not only say about God but say surreptitiously. For we are seldom fully aware of the story that dictates our behavior; thus it is more powerful than we suspect.

In popular circles, the most widely accepted story of Jesus often passes as a “description” of the life and death of Jesus and hence will brook no opposition. The traditional story goes something like this: Jesus, the Son of God—and hence God’s embassy—dies on a cross for the sins of all human beings, past, present, and future. Thus the all-powerful God’s honor has been saved by his Son’s substitutionary atonement, and we human beings are granted eternal life in heaven. There are several variations of this story, but its heart is the absolute honor and power of God upheld by the substitutionary atonement of the Son. Our only role is faith in Jesus as our savior.

The kenotic story of Jesus is significantly different at its center. One of the best early versions of this story is Philippians 2:5–11. It comes in Paul’s interpretation of an early hymn, with the key passage as follows: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though [or because] he was in the form of God . . . emptied himself, taking the form of a slave. . . . And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.”5 The key difference between the traditional and kenotic stories of Jesus is the understanding of power. Rather than the linear, controlling view of power (which Jesus appeases with his death on a cross), the kenotic story has a counterintuitive view, which is expressed in weakness and vulnerability. Thus Jesus as the Son of God reveals God to be the One who empties himself of all common views of power in order to identify divinity with creation, especially the weakest, most oppressed parts of creation. Thus a new way to live (and die) is being introduced into the world, one in which self-emptying for the benefit of others (one’s neighbors) is the new story.

There are several key points that we need to emphasize in this new story. First, the kenotic story of Jesus is the recovery of the relational self. Whereas the traditional story focuses on individual human beings benefiting from Jesus’s substitutionary atonement on the cross, the emptying of the self in the new story is preparation for a new kind of life: a radically relational one where self-emptying is preparation for being filled with God and neighbor. By accepting a life of participation in God, one receives the power to love from God and passes it on to the needy neighbor. Above all else, the kenotic story of Jesus claims that the myth of individualism is a lie and that fulfilled human life must be relational. There is no way to live as an isolated individual. Contemporary evolution insists on radical interrelationship and interdependence, but so does kenotic Christian faith. Unless one is human as Jesus was human (as radical self-emptying for the neighbor), one cannot be human at all. Evolution and kenotic living both insist on radical relational existence.

The second implication of the new kenotic story insists on Jesus taking on the embodied, fleshly, earthly, human life. The incarnation, God taking on human flesh (another way to speak of God’s self-emptying), means that fulfilled humanity has to do with bodily well-being. Hence healing and feeding bodies are central parts of Jesus’s new kenotic story. The incarnation means that following Jesus is not principally a spiritual matter, but it has to do with the basics of life: food, water, health, education, and so on—whatever makes up the good, earthly life for various species.

The third significant difference between the two stories of Jesus is its “inclusion.” As a story that insists upon the radical relationality of existence, its scope is wide—the kenotic story, similar to today’s evolutionary story, insists that basic minimal life for each creature entails the inclusion of many different other creatures and earthly systems (such as weather, arable land, water, etc.). A story that focuses on the well-being of all creatures, who are interrelated and interdependent with many others, is an inclusive, mutually dependent interpretation of life that includes human beings but not as the sole actors in or as the only recipients of the story.

In fact, when one takes the three critical features of this Christian kenotic story together, what emerges is a story of empowerment of all through the dance of death and new life, sacrifice and renewal, mutual reciprocity. Jesus—in his life of countercultural compassion for the weak and forgotten elements of creation, including oppressed human beings, culminating in his sacrificial death—epitomizes kenoticism for Christians and is the finger pointing to the nature of God. Here we have a living, human expression of radical kenoticism for the “Other” that not only gives discipleship its paradigm but, as importantly, tells us of God.

After this analysis of the story of Jesus as the summary of kenosis, we see several issues that the story raises. First, it asks how widespread is kenoticism; second, it asks for a fuller picture of kenoticism in the New Testament; and third, it asks for a more complete picture of what this story tells us of God. We will supply a little filler for each of these concerns.

First, kenoticism is widespread in contemporary religions. In Buddhism, for instance, the notion of sunyata (emptiness) is similar to kenoticism. It stresses letting go of all attachments, and hence, presumably, it leaves the practitioner free of suffering. Moreover, the Buddhist notion of “dependent co-origination” is a powerful way to express the mutual dependence of all individuals on each other; in fact, dependent co-origination insists that there is no becoming alone. Individuals are the result of a fundamental activity of energy, so existents have no reality in themselves but are interdependent.

Moreover, the French philosopher Simone Weil’s notion of “decreation” has similarities to both kenoticism and sunyata: “[Weil] practiced what she called ‘decreation,’ a form of self-emptying in which she sees herself diminish as God grows in her. Decreation, or the death of the will, is giving up control over one’s life, so that God can subvert the self’s exorbitant and constantly growing desires. The point is not mortification but a discipline of emptying herself so that God can be all in all.”6

The unencumbered human individualism of Western theology now appears not only naïve but wrong. The world is much more complex and varied than we suspected, and science and religion appear much closer, since both now seem to rely on a combination of verifiable information and interpretation. Sacrifice and sharing, mutual reciprocity, death and new life, and giving and receiving are widespread in various religious cultures, including First Nations. They embrace stories of the lives of bears and salmon as comparable to human stories of loss and fulfillment. The pattern appears to be similar: the necessity of giving and receiving. Jesus did not invent the relation between the cross and new life but was only adding to a universal story of the way the world works: no new life except through death.

The second issue we will expand upon is a fuller picture of kenoticism in the New Testament and early Christianity by focusing on Irenaeus’s contribution and on Paul’s expression of kenoticism. The grand narrative that Irenaeus projects as deification, becoming like God (theosis), begins with the kenotic story of Jesus. Irenaeus adds an essential motif: the grand exchange in which God became human so that humans might become Godlike. This is unfortunately not a strong motif in Western theology, but we are the losers because of this oversight. The Eastern view of the grand exchange explains how salvation entails our participation in God’s own life. This gift assumes from the very beginning that human beings are endowed with a closeness and likeness to God that potentially draw us to God. Thus the incarnation is not a “second thought” to repair the broken relationship between God and humans due to our sin, but it is what God planned from the beginning: that human beings (along with all other creatures) be invited to live God’s life. This intimacy and joyous call to all to participate in God’s own life is a long way from the negativity and coldness of the juridical story of Jesus repairing a ruptured relation between God and humans due to sin. For Irenaeus, the founder of the theosis doctrine, we were created with an affinity and likeness to God, which implies that the accurate story is one that has human beings longing for and being fulfilled by God.

The intimacy between God and human beings that Irenaeus supports is similar to the closeness of God and human beings in Paul. Thus, in a statement justly famous for its mystical intimacy, Paul says in Galatians 2:20, “It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” This extraordinary passage where Paul seems to suggest that he is unclear who is acting—Christ or himself—is the new creation that follows Christ’s death and resurrection. There are several important features to Paul’s understanding of the master narrative that shape not only the story of Jesus but also all subsequent stories, such as yours and mine. First, it is not a mere imitation of Jesus but a transformation, a new birth, a new creation. Thus theosis (deification) for Paul involves not only cruciform living but also resurrected living. Paul does not focus on the cross alone, the place where Christ performs justification for our sins, for the negative justification is always seen together with the new resurrected life.

Second, for Paul, crucifixion is always cocrucifixion. That is, we are involved in our own salvation: what could be called “cruciform theosis.”7 Paul does not, as in much of Western theology, focus on substitutionary atonement for our sins but sees salvation in inclusive, joyous terms as the reenactment of the intimacy that God intended for all creation with the divine life. Thus the story of salvation is not limited to Jesus and the cross but has deep implications for disciples, for Paul sees himself and every believing individual and community as part of the narrative. According to Michael Gorman, “For Paul, to be in Christ is to be a living exegesis of this narrative of Christ, a new performance of the original drama of exaltation following humiliation, of humiliation as the voluntary renunciation of rights and selfish gain in order to serve and obey.”8 Thus the Pauline view of the new Christian life is a complete one with notes of both the cross (kenotic sharing in the burdens and unfair oppressions of earthly life) and the joyous, resurrected life, which is already partially present. Hence if “cruciform theosis” is the form of the new life in Christ, it will have motifs of not only cruciform (mutual sharing of earthly resources for the well-being of all created life-forms) but also joy (moments of inclusive peace and harmony, glimmers of the resurrected life to come).

The final (as well as the source) of Paul’s understanding of the God/world narrative is the Trinity. One could say that the story begins and ends with the Trinity, for it provides the best expression of the nature of God and the accompanying nature of creation. The central feature of the kenotic story of Jesus is its witness to and expression of the nature of God, the Trinity. The Trinity is the heart, the essence, of God, of who God is in God’s self. But an important caveat now appears: the kenotic story of Jesus does not point to the Western Augustinian model of the Trinity, which, based on aspects of a human individual, supports a substantial, static view of the Trinity as similar to a human individual. This emphasis underlies Western Christian theology supporting a view of God as a supernatural individual. The Eastern Orthodox view of the Trinity, on the other hand, stresses the three “persons” in constant, reciprocal, loving activity, thus promoting the picture of the Trinity not as a superhuman being but as universal, loving activity constantly expressing itself in creation as empowering, inclusive self-emptying love for others.9 While I will use the handy tags of “Western” and “Eastern” views of the Trinity, I should mention two qualifications. First, the two views are not historically as sharply delineated as I have suggested, but for the sake of clarity, I have emphasized the differences. Second, while I am identifying the “individualistic” view with the Western church and the “kenotic” with the Eastern, that is only partially true, since the positions are historically much more diverse than I suggest. However, the individualistic view has influenced Western culture very deeply. The two types I call “Western” and “Eastern” are partly historically based and partly ideal types.

Nonetheless, the difference between these two stories is critical because the first one expresses a view of God as a supernatural, static being who is not credible in view of twenty-first-century science, whereas the other view of the Trinity is consonant with evolutionary and quantum science, stressing constant change, energy, and reciprocal mutuality. Christianity should be an affront to greedy, consumer-oriented visions of creaturely life, but it should not be an affront to the intellect. That is, theologians have the duty to interpret Christian faith as consonant with the science of the day so that disciples are not forced to dualistic interpretations—one religious and one secular. Rather, the disciples ought to be able to live a holistic, integrated life of the mind, although aware at the level of the will, this often countercultural faith will be opposed to the greedy consumer story in one’s society.

In summary, the central reason the story of Jesus we choose to believe (and to follow in our lives) is important is that it tells us about God. While the traditional story is outmoded, is unbelievable to most, and contains a hurtful view of one-way, imperialistic power, our kenotic story tells us that the heart of God is self-emptying compassion for all of creation. It is a joyous story of divine limitation giving freedom to creation and divine love bent on maximal flourishing of all creation. Not only does the traditional story focus on a negative aspect of divine-human relations—that is, human sin demanding divine forgiveness—but it lacks much of a positive dimension. The kenotic story, on the other hand, while seemingly negative in its insistence on self-emptying, is actually positive because of its understanding of self-emptying. One New Testament critic says this of Philippians 2:5–11: “If the hymn exposes one paradox in its proto-Christology, it is that no exaltation is possible without humbling; no fulfillment is possible without emptying.”10 Another critic frames Jesus’s words in Mark 8:35 with a similar remark: “Jes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Publisher’s Note
• Prologue: Jesus Christ and Climate Change
• Introduction: Kenosis, Christ, and Climate Change
• 1. The Kenotic Stories of Jesus and God
• 2. Postmodern Insights for Climate Change
• 3. Divine and Human Relational Ontology
• 4. God as Friend and We as Friends of the World
• 5. Christian Theology in View of Kenosis, Theosis, and Postmodernism
• Afterword: A Reflection on Kenosis and Christianity
• Notes
• Index