Video Summary coming soon.
Having argued that, at its conceptual heart, the Philippians hymn proclaims the presence of two persons in the one God, I move to consider its role in the letter. Paul, I propose, cites this LORD Jesus Christ and God the Father Hymn to remind the Philippians of the person who is their Saviour (3:20), who it is to whom they are being and will be fully conformed (3:7–11, 21), and what, therefore, that conformity entails and how it is being achieved. Both letter and hymn articulate a personal soteriology.
There is an ethical aspect to the hymn, but its primary purpose is not to praise Christ as an example to be imitated (as many in the modern period have thought). Conformity is a better label for the kind of relation Paul envisages between believers and Christ, and to summarize Paul’s purposes in the main body of the letter’s argument. Paul writes (and prays—1:9–11) to aid the completion of his readers’ conformity to Christ. Since that conformity is a kind of deification (3:21) the letter’s main argument is ultimately about soteriology (cf. 2:12 “work out your salvation”; 3:20 “the Saviour,” cf. 1:19, 28): a soteriology that is both future and present, transcendent, and yet oriented to living well in the first-century polis.
To gain further conceptual purchase on the precise character of that soteriology, I review the arguments of Ernst Käsemann against the ethical interpretation of the hymn and its purpose, as that is stated in the important transitional verse, Phil 2:5. K.s criticisms of the “ethical” interpretation are cogent. However, against his own “kerygmatic” and “soteriological” reading, Phil 2:6–11 is not primarily interested in Christ’s sovereignty, and K. was wrong to reject the traditional view that the hymn reveals a divine “person”. He paid too little attention to the ways it is integrated into the rest of Paul’s arguments and was mistaken in thinking the hymn serves as a confession of Christ’s rescuing humanity from any and every deluded aspiration to a divine transformation or “apotheosis”.
The hymn is soteriological and personal, in the sense that it proclaims the offer of a deification worked through an interchange or double participation by which Christ became what we are, in order that humans might become what he is. The arguments of the foregoing chapters also lead to the conclusion that the “how” and the “what” of the hymn’s soteriology depend on its primary focus: the “who” of the divine identity, namely the persons LORD Jesus Christ and God the Father. It offers the person who is the divine Christ as the one to whom believers are being conformed and in whom (that is, in whose being) they may now live and move and have their own being. The “how” and the “what” of that conformity are probably parsed out by Paul in his opening prayer, in dependence on the conceptual structure of the opening lines of the hymn. Christ’s person is defined, first, by “being” (or ontology) (v. 6a, c), then by an epistemology in which Christ reckons rightly in regard to “the being that is in a manner equal with God” (v. 5b), probably also by an affect (namely his self-giving love for humanity), and, finally, by action (or ethos, character), in his decision to self-transform, to empty himself, adopt a humble posture, and to be obedient. So, too, in Phil 1:9–11 believers are to love, “in the splacgna of Christ Jesus” (both a commitment to a particular kind of affect and an ontological statement?), to discern (epistemology), and to bear fruit in accordance with Christ’s own character and conduct. This manner of life is fitting for those expecting Christ’s return and their own full transformation. But it is also fitting for those who are already “in Christ”: hymn and letter put forward a soteriology dependent on present participation in divine being. That is, just as Paul’s politics sit under and are warranted by his metaphysics (revealed in Christ) (as I argued in Chapters 2–11), so too his soteriology and ethics (inextricable one from the other) arise from participation in the divine identity—through participation in Christ.
Conformation for this (modified version of Käsemann’s) soteriological reading of the hymn is provided by Phil 2:5, which is not best translated to say Christ is an ethical example (e.g., “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus” NRSV). Rather, Paul’s ellipsis in the subordinate clause is best completed drawing on the main clause: “Think (φρονεῖτε) this way among yourselves, which also you think/is thought in Christ Jesus”. K. thought v. 5b means “as is fitting within the realm of Christ”. However, we have seen that the hymn does not so much focus on the establishing of a sphere of Christ’s sovereign authority over all, as it reveals the personal character of the divine identity and the dynamic nature and affective inclination of divine being, in relation to humans and to creaturely becoming and frailties. Incarnation, and only secondarily sovereignty, is the hymn’s primary burden (or kerygma). For Paul, the point of verse 5, that connects the ethical injunctions in vv. 1–4 to the hymnic narrative of vv. 6–11, is to “encourage” and “console” readers (cf. 2:1) with the reminder that their identity is now defined by participation in the dynamic, transformative and personal, divine identity revealed in LORD Jesus Christ’s self-transformation and exaltation.
This personal and soteriological interpretation of 2:5 answers some of the objections lodged against Käsemann’s non-ethical form of the kerygmatic approach. And it fits what Paul says in 2:1–4. For example, it is now reasonable that Paul warns against vainglory because men and women who are “in Christ” need not act in anxious pursuit of an ephemeral recognition and status, because like Christ they have an identity from which they now act for the glory, honour, and the praise of others. They are grounded, in Christ Jesus, in divine being. From there they extend themselves to others, as he did. Being “in Christ,” they impersonate him, not in the sense that they imitate him, but because they participate in his being and are being conformed to his person.
The ὃ καὶ ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ of 2:5 is a literary hinge. The ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ looks back to all of 2:1–4 and introduces the (new information in the) story of “Christ Jesus” that follows. Verse 5b means, therefore, “… which (heartset or way of thinking) is also in Christ Jesus—the Christ Jesus whose personal story, let me remind you, we celebrate in this hymnic summary ….”. There is a parallelism between v. 5b and 6a which commentators have missed:
v. 5b … ὃ καὶ ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ
v. 6a ὃς ἐν μορφῇ θεοῦ ὑπάρχων …
This parallelism suggests that, for Paul, the relationship between believers and Christ is cognate to the relationship between Christ and God: Christ has always been “in the form of God”; believers are now “in Christ”. Just as Christ was something (ἐν μορφῇ θεοῦ ὑπάρχων)—and so was able to think, feel and act (as vv. 6b–8 describe), so too believers are and have something (ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ)—and so, too, they are able to think, feel and act.
Since Phil 2:5 ties the identity of believers (who are “in Christ Jesus”) to Christ’s own identity in God, and, thereby, the conduct of the one to the many, we should reject one common view of the way Paul must have thought about the relationship between the hymn and his exhortations to his readers. It is not the case that Paul could not have thought that Christ’s conduct in the pre-incarnation phase of his existence was not somehow determinative for the conduct of those now “in him”. This is because, when Paul tells the Philippians to think (φρονεῖν) and regard (ἡγέομαι) as is thought and judged “in Christ” (vv. 2, 5), he has in mind Christ’s own thinking and regarding (ἡγέομαι) that precipitated his particular manner of self-giving and non-violent self-transformation. Conformity to Christ incarnans, not mere imitation of Christ incarnatus.
This is the kind of conformity evident in Paul’s empathic and honouring-of-the-Philippians love, as we have seen in Chapter 12. By means of this letter and from a posture in which the Philippians are on his heart (1:7), Paul extends and accommodates himself in empathy for his gentile readers, who are many miles away. In this, Paul conforms himself to Christ who, by means of a human body and life, extended himself from heaven to earth, for all humanity.
There is also a kind of incarnational conformity to Christ in 1:12–26. This can be seen once other features of that long autobiographical reflection are observed. In 1:12–26 there is an epistemological distinction between the reality that Paul knows (and that gives him confidence in adversity) and his enemies’ perception of his fate. That is a similar epistemological distinction to the one charted in the central hymn, between Christ and those who put him on a cross. In telling his readers that “I want you to know brothers and sisters, that my predicament has actually turned out to the advancement of the gospel” (1:12) and that he “knows” that opposition to him will turn out for the good (vv. 18–19), Paul writes as one who, in his being “in Christ,” perceives reality from the perspective of the divine and pre-incarnate Christ, not from the perspective of those who misperceive Jesus in the epistemologically flawed realm of becoming.
This means that, as regards the empathy Paul demonstrates in 1:12–26 (part of which I explored in Chapter 12), there is a kind of dual perspective taking. On the one hand, Paul knows and feels the apprehensions of the Philippians, in their response to their founder’s imprisonment. On the other hand, Paul explains how he sees such situations of persecution (his own and theirs) through the eyes of Christ. In trusting in God’s loving sovereignty (1:19–20), Paul trusts the way Jesus himself trusted in the face of the cross (v. 8). And God-in-the-spirit-of-Christ works through Paul’s body (v. 20). At his forthcoming trial, he will not be his own persona. Rather, he will play the persona of Christ. Christ was the founder of a new polity. Its citizens conduct themselves as those who are now “in Christ”—thinking and acting from Christ’s own divine being. They have an empathy that maintains a dual perspective. That empathy also explains Paul’s highly compressed comment in 1:28 that can now be seen as a dense summary of the epistemological argument of 1:12–26 applied to the Philippians’ own circumstances.
Finally, Paul’s understanding of conformity to Christ and what it is to “in Christ” the person, helps to explain the way he appropriates for himself the traditional philosophical ideal of self-sufficiency at 4:11–13. The conceptual and linguistic connections between Phil 3:21 and 4:11–13 suggest that in the latter Paul is still cashing out the implications of all that the hymnic tradition at the letter’s centre says about God and Christ. Indeed, it is understandable that Paul would believe Paul’s adopting of the self-understanding and posture of the self-sufficient philosopher is one of the ways he thinks believers are “in Christ” and in the process of being conformed to Christ’s divine person. That is because, my argument in earlier chapters has been, in effect, that there is a kind of self-sufficiency in the life of the human Christ, as that is summed up in Phil 2:6–8. In Philippians 2, Jesus is a self-secure man, protected, by his inclusion in the divine identity, from the otherwise deleterious effects of the judgements and behaviours of his blind and murderous contemporaries, free from any hunger for futile human glory. In like manner, Paul is secure and able to do all things “in the one enabling (ἐν τῷ ἐνδυναμοῦντί)” him (4:13). What Paul says about self-sufficiency is yet one more way in which this letter envisages salvation as conformity to the divine and human person, who is LORD Jesus Christ.
The chapter closes with a brief dialogue with Wayne Meeks’ influential claim that “this letter’s most comprehensive purpose is the shaping of a Christian phronēsis, a practical moral reasoning that is ‘conformed to [Christ’s] death’ in hope of his resurrection”.[1] This, I point out, is an assessment of the letter’s purpose that misses out much that I have attempted in this volume to expose and highlight. In particular, it misses the logic of the Incarnation in the letter’s theology. In its place, I propose this summary of the letter’s purpose:
Philippians is written, from a posture of prayer and thanksgiving, in service of God’s own purpose for the Philippians, namely the complete formation (1:7, 9–11; 3:21) in them of both an identity (that is personal and communal, political and ethical), a spirituality (that has both cognitive and affective aspects) and moral faculties, that are all conformed to the divine and human person who is (the incarnate, crucified, resurrected, and exalted) LORD Jesus Christ.
[1] Meeks, “Man from heaven,” 333.