The compressed, poetic style of Philippians 2:6–11, its crafted design, and its use of terms unparalleled in the Pauline corpus have convinced many that the origins of this text lie before and outside Paul’s letter to the Philippians, perhaps in an early Christian faith-summary or “hymn.”² Nowadays there is less confidence in judgments concerning the historical, cultural, and liturgical origins of this text. Whatever its source, it reaches us already contextualized and interpreted by Paul, and this fact should be decisive for our own interpretation. Rather than speculate on its “original meaning,” we should ask what sense can be made of this drama within the frame of Paul’s theology, as articulated in this letter to the Philippians and within the corpus of Pauline letters.³ In other words, rather than isolating this paragraph, I will ask how its allusive poetry acquires meaning within its wider literary and theological context. There is a place for the historical self-discipline that examines each text or text-segment on its own. But when a text such as this could “mean” many different things, it seems reasonable to ask what understanding is gained by placing it within the literary frame generated by its first known user, or author, Paul.⁴

I will argue that Philippians 2:6–11 is first and foremost about soteriology: kenosis (like its other motifs) is located within a drama that climaxes in a depiction of eschatological salvation, in acclamation of Jesus as Lord (2:10–11). Without this soteriological frame, neither the Christology expressed in this text nor the ethics that derive from it can be properly understood. Within God’s determination of all things toward the saving Lordship of Christ, the kenosis that descends to crucifixion enables the obedience that draws all reality (even death) into the compass of God’s transformative love. Because humility is not an end in itself, the Philippians’ conformity to this good news entails not the imitation of “selfless” sacrifice, but a “self-with” solidarity that participates in the reconciling work of God.

This claim may surprise New Testament scholars, who have been known to insist that “Philippians 2 makes no direct soteriological statement.”⁶ It is true that we find within Philippians 2:6–11 no “for us” statements and no references to sin, faith, or the church. Nonetheless, there are at least two reasons to read this text as outlining the saving movement of God toward the cosmos. First, the characteristically Pauline “even death on a cross” (2:8) evokes numerous associations in the letters of Paul, for whom “the cross” is never a bare fact, but the site of God’s saving power (e.g., 1 Cor 1:18–25; Gal 3:13–14; 6:14–15). Secondly, one should read 2:9–11, the telos of this drama, as the installation of Jesus as saving Lord of the cosmos. For Paul, the acclamation “Jesus Christ is Lord” does not merely recognize the authority of Christ (as if his Lordship was an objective fact with no subjective implications); it affirms allegiance to and alignment with his purposes. The (baptismal?) confession “Jesus is Lord” (1 Cor 12:3) is a self-involving declaration of faith, and Paul makes plain that “if you confess (homologeō) with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Rom 10:9). Those in our text who “confess” (exomologeō) with their tongues that Jesus Christ is Lord have recognized that God has “super-exalted” him (Phil 2:9—an act that at least includes the resurrection). As Lord of all, he is rich to all who call upon him, for “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved” (Rom 10:13, citing LXX Joel 3:5). In other words, the bending of “every knee” and the acclamation of “every tongue” in Philippians 2:10–11 is not just submission but saving submission, since it is through reordered alignment to the lordship of Christ that the world is rescued from its “enemies” (1 Cor 15:20–28).⁷ As Paul puts it later in Philippians, those who await the “Lord Jesus Christ” (an echo of 2:11) await him as Savior, whose power to submit all things to himself redeems created beings from their humiliating subjection to decay (Phil 3:20–21). That submission is depicted in Philippians 2:9–11, and Jesus’s eschatological power is, for Paul, not an overpowering, but a salvific reordering of creation toward its telos.⁸ The things in heaven, on earth, and under the earth that will confess the Lordship of Christ may include nonhuman powers, but they do not exclude human beings, since Paul traces a close connection between the redemption of humanity and the liberation of the cosmos (Rom 8:19–23; cf. Col 1:15–23). Thus the climax of our Philippian drama is a scene in which Christ determines the destiny of the cosmos, which is restored to worship and thereby to its proper share in the glory of God.

If Philippians 2:9–11 depicts the goal of the Christ-event, how does it follow from the first half of this passage (2:6–8)?⁹ The dio kai (“that is why,” 2:9) that serves as the hinge between the two halves suggests a logical connection. Those who offer an ethical reading of the passage sometimes take 2:9–11 to vindicate or validate the example of Jesus: God’s exaltation of Jesus authorizes his life of humility, which provides a “Lordly example.”¹⁰ Or the reversal of Jesus’s fortunes is the “reward” for his exemplary behavior, a demonstration of the “divine law” (Lohmeyer) that God lifts up the humble and delivers the oppressed. But to be installed as Lord of the cosmos is no ordinary reward or paradigmatic deliverance: Christ’s Lordship is completely incommensurate with anything that humble believers could expect for themselves, even if it is the source of their hope (3:20–21). Those whose reading of our text is primarily christological find in 2:9–11 God’s manifestation of the status of the one who emptied himself: God here demonstrates who the humble Jesus really is. But 2:9 depicts a substantial change in conditions (with the change in subject, from Christ to God): what happens in 2:9–11 does not simply reveal what was true in 2:6–8; it follows on from it as a result. So our question becomes sharper: How does the downward Christ-movement of 2:6–8 lead toward God’s action in 2:9–11?

After the description of Christ “in the form of God,” the downward movement in 2:7–8 is described in two sets of three clauses, each with one main verb. First, Christ “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming to be in the likeness of humans” (2:7); then, “being found in form as a human being, he humbled himself, becoming obedient all the way to death, even death on a cross” (2:7–8). Leaving aside for now what it means for Christ to “empty himself” (see the next section), we may examine the explanatory clauses that follow. The “form of a slave” indicates a radical lack of power and honor. Slaves, who had no rights over property, their children, or even their own bodies were legally and socially the most powerless members of ancient society, even if a fortunate few derived influence from the power of their owners.¹¹ In what sense did Jesus take the form of a slave? Some suggest that Jesus is here the “slave of God” (echoing the Servant of Isaiah) whose life is lived in “obedience” (2:8). But Paul nowhere else uses that title of Jesus, whose status is that of a Son not a slave. Others find a forward reference to the cross (which was often but not only used for slaves), although Paul never himself associates the cross with slavery.¹² Since “the form of a slave” is immediately followed by “coming to be in the likeness of humans,” it seems more likely that Jesus’s slavery is part of his human condition, “under” the constraints that have befallen the whole created order. In a parallel text, Jesus is described as “born of a woman, born under the law” (Gal 4:4), the latter state described as “slavery” (Gal 4:1; 5:1) and correlated with a general condition of slavery “under the elements of the cosmos” (Gal 4:3, 9). Elsewhere the whole creation is subject to “the slavery of decay” (Rom 8:21). If death “no longer rules” (kyrieuei) over the risen Christ (Rom 6:9), it appears that once it did, when he died (what is subject to a kyrios is a doulos, a slave). In sharing the human lot, Christ became subject to the limiting conditions, including mortality, that rule our current created life.

In the second set of clauses (2:7–8) Jesus’s self-humbling takes him all the way to death, indeed, most shamefully, death on a cross. As we know from 1 Corinthians, the term “cross” (stauros) evokes for Paul utter incapacity and degrading foolishness (1 Cor 1:18–25). Death—and Jesus’s “cursed” death, in particular (Gal 3:13)—is as far removed from God as a human can be, the nadir in human alienation from the life of God. And that seems to be the point. Jesus goes all the way to the furthest point of human misery, in full solidarity with a broken world. Elsewhere, Paul links the dead Jesus with the “abyss” (a bottomless depth) to which one might think of “descending” to bring Jesus up (Rom 10:7). As described in Ephesians 4, he descended to the “lower parts of the earth” (Eph 4:9), probably when he joined the dead. There may be hint of this solidarity in Philippians 2:10, when the knees that bow to the exalted Lord belong to entities that are heavenly, earthly, and “beneath the earth” (katachthonia/oi). That last term was widely associated with death (both the dead themselves and the powers that rule the “underworld”), and Jesus’s presence even there is integral to his capacity to be Lord of every part of the cosmos.¹³ The logic seems to be spelled out in Romans 14:9: “For this reason Christ died and lived again, that he might be the Lord both of the dead and of the living” (Rom 14:9). That suggests that Jesus’s participation in death entails not just his acceptance of human mortality or his complete self-devotion. It is his self-extension into the world of the dead, normally regarded as lost to God.¹⁴

Now we begin to sense why God’s exaltation of Christ to universal Lordship follows from his kenosis and self-humbling in 2:6–8. Throughout Jesus’s path of descent, even to death, he operated in “obedience” (2:8), that is, in obedience to God: this is, for Paul, Jesus’s singular mark that no human being had displayed since Adam (Rom 5:12–21). Obedience indicates that there is a divine purpose in this descent, and that in his solidarity with the limitations and horrors of human life Jesus maintained an unfailing “link” with the Father. His obedience tethers the whole human experience to the life of God, holding it within God’s purpose and “reach.” Why? So that God’s redemptive power might work from within the alienated world, and might absorb, enclose, and thereby transform what is lost. It was because Jesus reached to these depths, but still, in obedience, was joined to the saving purposes of God, that therefore (dio, 2:9) God installed him as universal Lord, as the fulfilment of the plan to which Jesus was obedient. What is depicted in 2:9–11 is not the reward for Jesus’s self-humbling obedience, but the completion of its purpose. Although the exaltation of Jesus was a reversal of his previous condition, it fulfilled t...