How now should we speak of the divine Christ in Philippians 2:6–11? An assured result of the modern study of the New Testament has been that it is a mistake to anachronistically read back the categories of later Christian theology into discussions of Pauline theology. However, I have argued that already in the Philippians Christ Hymn there is Platonic language and a concern for ontology, that anticipates last patristic-era ways of doing Christology. In this chapter, I contend we can now say one purpose of the hymn that Paul cites in Philippians 2:6–11 and 3:20–21 is to remind the Philippians that the one God they worship is the God of Israel’s scriptures now freshly revealed to be one in two persons. “Person” is the right, historically appropriate, category, that helps us understand how the hymn’s author understands the freshly revealed character of the singular divine identity. Person is also a word and category that helps us understand the relationship between the letter’s Christology and Paul’s vision for believers who are now “in Christ,” on a journey of conformity to him. Believers are persons being conformed to this divine person.
I use the word “person” with deference to the Latin persona and its Greek equivalent—πρόσωπον, both of which I propose, are words that the hymn’s author and first readers would have judged a fitting and linguistically economical way of referring to the two actors in the hymn’s drama. The history of these two Latin and Greek wordsbegins in the theatre (a mask, a character, role, or part in a play) and by Paul’s day had come to have an increasingly technical sense in rhetoric, in the legal sphere, in grammar and literary criticism. In his early work On Invention Cicero sets out topics to be addressed when describing a “person (persona)”:
We hold the following to be the attributes of persons (personis has res attributas putamus): name, nature, manner of life, fortune, habit,feeling, interests, purposes, achievements, accidents, speeches made (nomen, naturam, victum, fortunam, habitum, affectionem, studia, consilia, facta, casus, orationes).[1]
This list of “attributes of persons” has parallels in the rhetorical treatises’ and handbooks’ descriptions of the topics covered when composing a piece of praise (laus, ἐγκώμιον) or blame. An encomium was also conceived as “a speech revealing greatness of virtuous deeds and other goods that define a particular person (περί τι ὡρισμένον πρόσωπον)” (Aelius Theon Exercises 109), whether they be a human or a god. Bearing in mind such evidence for the ancient (theatrical, poetic, and rhetorical) uses for the word “person,” there are eight observations about the Philippians Christ Hymn that warrant and explain its use as a label for the hymn’s protagonists.
Firstly, inasmuch as Christ is an imperial or royal figure he is a person. In the case of Hellenistic kings and Roman emperors, it was the ruler’s person—their benefactions, signature deeds of power, and particular virtues—that attracted the attention of their subjects.
Secondly, the Philippians Christ Hymn has an encomiastic form, fitting for the praise of persons. The attributes of persons listed by Cicero are either all present in the hymn, or there are absent in a way that we should take to be indicative of the peculiar divine nature of this person. For example, there is nothing that would fall under Cicero’s category “manner of life (victus)”. That is, there are no details of Jesus’ upbringing, education, close friends and profession or trade. No Christ the carpenter here. But with that lacuna, this person’s divine nature (his earthly life grounded in divine “being”) is stressed at the expense of any human nurture. The omission of some of Cicero’s attributes (such as the usual examples of studia, consilia and facta) is also indicative of the ways Christ’s life is a subversion of elite expectations for powerful men.
Thirdly, its content is distinctive or has unusual features that speak to the matter of an individual, personal, identity. This is so for the expression τὸ εἶναι ἴσα θεῷ (v. 6c), since in the Greek language environment (examined in our Chapter 4) divine equality connotes distinct personhood. It is true also of Christ’s distinctive manner of self-transformation since, just as each of the Greek and Roman deities had its signature story (or stories) of epiphanic self-transformation—each memorable and easily depicted in paintings, engravings and statues—so too does the divine Christ. And there is the distinctive way the hymn engages the relationship between identity, actions and achievements. Treading the boards of the stage of human history—playing his part in the drama of great deeds and fortunes, of loves won and lost, of tragic slavery and the hope of future exaltation—this divine person is able to become because he is; not acting, or striving, in an effort to be as being was defined by mortals in the realm of becoming. So, revealing an identity in which his exalted status witnesses to his eternal divine being, the hymn engages the (theatrical) category “person”. And by contrast to philosophy’s depersonalising of deity, our hymn’s protagonist is a person, with a discrete biography.
Fourthly, the hymn progressively reveals an identity, disclosing in stages the true divine nature of the human “Jesus (of Nazareth)”. In so doing, its distinctive form and content, I contend, is designed to put a spotlight on a discrete person, or persons. In v. 6 Christ has no face. He is not, at that juncture, a πρόσωπον. The remarkable fresh revelation of the singular divine identity through his human life, death and exaltation fills out, gives definition, colour and depth to the hazy and low-lit vision of one “in the form of God”. From the perspective of this hymn, it is perhaps even, therefore, a mistake to speak of the man Jesus of Nazareth as a “person”. In truth, the man Jesus, says the hymn, was only the human form of the divine person who is properly named LORD Jesus Christ.
Fifthly, the hymn’s first and second stanzas say, in various ways, that LORD Jesus Christ is a distinct individual who is separate from the second individual known, by the end, as “God, the Father” (2:11). Phil 2:6–11 presents a distinction of two divine persons within the singular divine identity. Israel’s scriptures speak repeatedly of the one who is κύριος (ὁ) θεός “LORD God”. Our hymn further specifies, and progressively reveals, the identity of κύριος (who is Yhwh-Kyrios) as Κύριος Ἰησοῦς Χριστός “LORD Jesus Christ” and, in stages, it determines the name of the singular θεός of Israel’s scriptures as Θεός Πατήρ “God the Father”. Initially, there is only θεός “(a) god/God,” in whose form Christ exists (ἐν μορφῇ θεοῦ)” (v. 6). At the drama’s turning point θεός becomes ὁ θεός “(the) God” (v. 9) and, in the end, he is freshly named as “God the Father” (v. 11).
There are ways in which the two persons are distinct, separate and independent of each other. Secondly, there are ways in which the two persons are distinct, separate, and dependent on one another’s actions and being. Thirdly, there are ways in which the hymn seems to express a shared identity between the persons, such that there is a dialectic between distinction and identity; between that which is proper to each and that which is shared by each. Strictly speaking, because it praises both God the Father and LORD Jesus Christ and in so doing it reveals distinct, interdependent, identities, it would be best now to label it a LORD Jesus Christ and God the Father Hymn.
Sixthly, the remarkable way in which our hymn presents Christ and God the Father as distinct divine persons can be appreciated by comparison with the one Jewish messianic text that provides some (limited) precedent for the belief that there is a divine messiah who will come from pre-existence to receive praise and glory at the end of days, that is the Similitudes of Enoch (1 Enoch 37–71).
Seventhly, taking up my observations (in Chapters 1, §3.1 and 8, §3.8, following Larry Hurtado) that the hymn’s composition came about through a creative exegesis of the Greek text of the staunchly monotheistic prophecies of Second Isaiah, it is likely that the author of the hymn was aware that they were practising a form of (what specialists now call) a prosopological exegesis of scripture. That is, the identification of two divine persons in Isa 45:19–25 (one who is “LORD” and another who is “God”) that is presupposed in Phil 2:9–11 is best treated as an example of a sophisticated literary critical method, first employed by Homeric scholarship in the third century B.C.E. That method was known in antiquity as λύσις ἐκ τοῦ προσώπου “solution from the character speaking.” We have long known that this method of identifying discrete characters (or persons— πρόσωπα, personae) in a culturally authoritative text played a major role in the development of a trinitarian hermeneutic in the second century C.E., by the likes of Justin Martyr and Tertullian. Philippians 2:6–11 (like 1 Corinthians 8:6 which employs the hermeneutic in its creative reworking of the Shema) may now count as one of the earliest pieces of evidence for a first-century C.E. (even pre-Pauline?) example of Christ followers identifying distinct persons, each a manifestation of the one God, in Israel’s scriptures.
Eighthly, there are two obvious ways in which, by what he says in the surrounding context about and to his readers, Paul shows that he is aware that the hymn celebrates a fresh revelation of divine persons. Firstly, the praise of the divine persons comes at the centre of a web of praise of human persons (as I argued in Chapter 11). From Paul’s opening prayer onwards, it is the realisation of his readers’ Christ-conformed personhood that is a primary aim of the letter (1:9–11). Secondly, Paul’s evident concern for unity in the relations between Philippian believers (1:27; 2:2–4, cf. 4:1) correlates to his portrayal of the divine identity as one characterised by mutual regard and reciprocal service between the two persons, God the Father and LORD Jesus Christ, and in the relationship of those persons to humanity.
[1] Cicero On the Invention of Rhetoric 1.34 (24) (this and the following quotations are from the LCL), cf. 2.28–34 (9–10).