The Emptied Christ of Philippians

Mah?y?na Meditations

John P. Keenan

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781498221313
• eBook ISBN: 9781498221320
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Before the Gospels were written, long before the creeds of the Church were hammered out, Christ followers in Philippi sang a hymn of the Christ who, "although he was in the form of God... emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born as are all humans." But this emptied Christ never fit neatly into later theologies of the church, shaped by Greek thought, concerned with being and essence. In Philippians, Paul struggles, stumbling over his own awkward words to express his hope, his eschatological faith, that he might "gain Christ and be found in him... and participate in his sufferings by being conformed to his death, if in some way I may reach to what goes beyond the resurrection from the dead."Might we better comprehend Paul's inchoate, even mystical, faith in Jesus Christ with aid from a less empirical world of thought than our western heritage offers? Might the thinking of Mah?[set macron over a]y?[set macron over a]na Buddhism guide us toward an awareness of a truth in the Christian faith that is more profound than anything reducible to historical "facts, " or even to human language?

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Introduction

Christian Exegesis and Mahāyāna Hermeneutics in Paul’s Letter to the Philippians

Many fine exegetical commentaries elucidate the text of Paul’s letter to the Philippians, both building upon and challenging one another in the process. The following meditation on Philippians takes careful account of that mainstream scholarship on this letter and its author, but this is a commentary of an altogether different ilk. This is a reading of Philippians from the philosophical perspective of Mahāyāna Buddhism and its understanding of the mind of emptiness. My hope is that a thoughtful rereading of Philippians in this less familiar key will allow the music of Paul’s words and of the Philippian hymn to seep into our minds and suggest new understandings of this epistle.

The Letter to the Philippians is the apostle Paul’s side of a correspondence he carried on with a Christian community in the Greco-Roman town of Philippi during the years 54–55 ce. In other words, we are reading someone else’s mail here. And because we have only Paul’s side of a back-and-forth correspondence, we are forced to conjecture from his words what the Philippians, in their turn, may have written to him. Extensive scholarly work on Paul’s epistles has contributed much to our understanding of the background of this correspondence by sketching the broad social and cultural milieu of Paul’s time and place, as can be ascertained from other sources. Careful studies on issues of authorship, composition, rhetoric, and implied audience have also helped to throw light on the meaning of Paul’s letters to his various correspondents in furtherance of the gospel.

I refer to a broad array of these Christian commentarial works in my treatment of Philippians. At the same time, my reading of the epistle is informed by my long engagement with an entirely different set of scriptures possessing their own distinct set of philosophical commentaries—the scriptures of Mahāyāna Buddhism. Weary of the metaphysical certitudes of my own scholastic seminary training, and dubious of recent scholars’ attempts to read Christian texts with “fresh” innocence by retrojecting themselves back over the centuries, I have chosen to look at Paul’s correspondence with the Philippians through the lens of the Mahāyāna philosophy of emptiness. The Mahāyāna approach aims consistently to empty all things and every viewpoint of any presumed essence so that their dependently arisen being and truth may thereby emerge to shed new light and new understanding. The hope here is that a Mahāyāna approach to Philippians will enable this ancient Christian manuscript—possibly our earliest Christian text—to offer new insight to its readers.

Paul’s epistle to the Philippians is distinctive among New Testament texts for the hymn in 2:6–11, which sings of a Christ who empties himself. In fact, this provides the recurring theme of the entire Philippian correspondence. Despite the importance of the theme of emptiness in this very early Christian text, however, theological thinking over the centuries has been so overwhelmingly dominated by ontological philosophies that Christian theologies of emptiness emerged only in relatively modern times. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a vigorous kenotic theology was developed in Germany by Gottfried Thomasius and in England by P. T. Forsyth. However, even these kenotic theologians, who attended carefully to the theme of the empty Christ, remained faithful to the Chalcedonian insistence upon Christ’s essential being.1 These theologians focused on how, given the commonly affirmed consensus on God as essential being, we might explain the assertion in Phil 2:7 that Christ emptied himself. Despite the hymn’s unambiguous declaration that Christ himself did not consider divinity as anything to be grasped, they nevertheless adopted an interpretation that protects the ontotheological essence of Christ as God.

In contrast to this late-blooming and rather peripheral Christian kenotic theology, Mahāyāna—Buddhism’s Great Vehicle of liberation—begins and ends with emptiness. Mahāyāna emptiness does not, as sometimes imagined by westerners, signify a spiritual philosophy of nihilism.2 It is instead a robust discourse about the being of things as they emerge, with a strong insistence upon our abandonment of any confidence that we can ever capture the truth of things in the self-assured language of viewpoints. An emptiness theology is thus the polar reverse of the many Christian theologies that—with great conviction but a singular lack of success—endeavor to bolster our sense of Christian selfhood and assuage Christians’ increasing fear of a loss of religious self-identity.

Identity issues will permeate this commentary, for although no particular or intrinsic Christian identity is anywhere to be found, Christian exegetes and interpreters all too often urge upon us just such an assured theology. In fact, appeals to “Christian identity” misdirect our attention, miss the point, and paint churches into a corner where they assume a defensive stance and fail to critically examine the cultural and social worlds around them. Ultimate meaning as offered by Christic faith—what Paul calls life in Christ—is that which we stretch towards without ever grasping a truth that we might claim as the prized possession of a Christian identity. We are not to cling to spiritual realities as though they are attainable goals, but neither are we to cling to this life of ours as though the horizons of the self constitute what is really real. When our minds are emptied of such self-assurance, we may be found in him, stretching forth to be conformed to his empty mind of wisdom. Such a radical conversion of consciousness can enable us to let go of imagined realities and essential identities, freeing us to engage our world with the offer of an eschatological Christian faith that looks to the future in hope.

To anyone who appreciates the Mahāyāna philosophy of emptiness, the Philippians hymn, with its enunciation of a Christ who empties himself (ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσεν), reverberates with the very foundational insight of Mahāyāna Buddhism’s wisdom scriptures: that all things and all persons are empty of any inner essence or core self that could possibly be the stable subject, or object, of a supernatural relationship. Traditional Christian theologians borrowed from Plato and Aristotle when they identified the core of human beings as an immortal soul infused into the human body by a creative God. That theological notion of “soul” then precipitated into our cultural consciousness so thoroughly that it came to be understood as the personal, core identity of who we are. Many in the twenty-first century take this view to the extent of assuming that, individually, we are exactly who we define ourselves to be—and we tend to understand God as well in the context of that definition of ourselves.

Mahāyāna regards any form of a “core” personal identity as something that we ourselves have constructed in the course of our living. As such, it can never be the starting point of a spiritual quest. A self-less person, by contrast, is capable of recognizing and acknowledging the very transience of our being here and so, freed from any a priori definition of identity, is able to engage in bodhisattva3 practices of wisdom and compassion in this world. So it is that, to those like myself who are involved in the conversation between the Buddhist and Christian traditions, no other Christian text is more pregnant with the potential for interfaith contemplation and insight than Paul’s letter to the Philippians, with its theme of the emptying Christ. This is precisely what has drawn me to engage in this Mahāyāna-driven lectio divina of the Philippian correspondence.

In Mahāyāna’s teaching of emptiness, no viewpoint can capture the very being of beings, for all ideas and all viewpoints are recognized as having been constructed in the context of our conventional world and expressed in human language. Nothing that we humans understand through insight and judgment has its own self-enclosed essence. Indeed, we can never grasp the “essence” of things in clear and distinct ideas, for there is no essence there to be apprehended. In constructing theologies, we filter our insights—and the judgments we ground upon them—through what we ourselves have experienced and understood from that experience. All things and views are contextual and empty of essence, for all things and views come into being in dependence upon countless converging causes and conditions. Still, Mahāyāna emptiness is not a denial of the existence (Skt. sat) of beings (sattva); it is rather a denial of the existence of essences (svabhāva). At the same time, it is an affirmation—of the pervasively interdependent and transient existence of all things and all beings.

The Perfection of Wisdom sūtras, which mark the rise of Mahāyāna thought, were the first Buddhist scriptures to present the notion of emptiness. The classical explication of emptiness and its implications is found in Nāgārjuna’s Stanzas on the Middle.4 Especially important is the famous chapter 24 of that work, in which Nāgārjuna insists that the scope of emptiness encompasses not only the deluded world and its false viewpoints about the real, but also applies even to the true teachings of the Buddha. This was a remarkable turn in Buddhist thinking. Buddhist thinkers could not thereafter simply contrast the truth of their own tradition to the false views of their opponents. They were henceforth forced to turn the critique back upon their own affirmations of truth and to inquire into the status of those affirmations as judgments of truth.

Christians have long held that the devil is a good theolog...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Self-Sufficiency Letter A
• Chapter 3: Emptiness Letter B, Part 1
• Chapter 4: Emptiness Letter B, Part 2
• Chapter 5: Emptiness Letter B, Part 3
• Chapter 6: Resurrection Letter C
• Chapter 7: Postscript
• Selected Bibliography