Epistle to the Philippians

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The Epistle to the Philippians is one of the letters attributed to the apostle Paul in the New Testament, addressed to the Christian community he had founded at Philippi, a Roman colony in Macedonia. It belongs to the small group of Pauline letters that scholars across the spectrum accept as genuinely his, and it is among the warmest: Paul writes to a congregation he plainly loved, thanks them for a gift, and frames the whole letter from confinement — he writes, he says, in chains. Where he was imprisoned, and when, the text does not settle; Rome, Ephesus, and Caesarea have each had their defenders, which leaves the date somewhere in the 50s or early 60s of the first century.

Much of the letter is occasional and personal — news of his situation, the plan to send his coworkers Timothy and Epaphroditus, a plea for two quarrelling women to be reconciled, and the recurring instruction to rejoice. But its weight, for later readers, gathers in a short passage in the second chapter. There Paul urges humility and offers, as its model, a description of Christ who “did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped” but “emptied himself,” taking the form of a servant and submitting to death on a cross, after which God exalted him and gave him the name above every name. The Greek verb at its center, ekenōsen — he emptied — gives the passage the name by which theology knows it: the kenosis, or self-emptying, hymn.

Whether the lines are Paul’s own composition or an earlier hymn he is quoting is a question scholarship has not closed; the cadenced, balanced phrasing has long struck readers as liturgical, set apart from the prose around it. What is not in dispute is its later importance. The passage became one of the load-bearing texts in the long Christian argument over how the divine and human met in Christ, and the word kenosis was eventually built into a doctrine of its own — the claim that in becoming human the Son laid something divine aside. That such a structure could be drawn from a few verses Paul wrote to settle a local dispute about humility is a measure of how the letter has been read.

For traditions outside the church the descent-and-ascent shape of the hymn — a divine figure who comes down, takes a lowly form, and is raised again — has invited comparison with the wider late-antique pattern of a soul that falls into the world and is restored to its source, though the comparison runs only so far: Paul’s Christ empties himself by choice and as an example to imitate, not as a spark to be awakened. The letter ends as it began, in gratitude and in chains, its largest claim folded almost in passing into an appeal for two people to get along.

→ Related: Epistle To The Romans · Epistle To The Ephesians · First Epistle To Timothy · Gnosis