Note 3 — INTRODUCTION. HOW IS OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM RELATED TO CHRISTIANITY?

The self-humiliation of Christ is described (need I remark?) by St. Paul as a κένωσις (Phil. ii. 7). How far this κένωσις extended is a theological problem which in the sixteenth century, and again in our own, has exercised devout thinkers. For the modern form of the Kenotic view or doctrine the English reader will naturally go to Dorner’s History of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ, vol. iii., in Clark’s Library. Dorner’s opposition to this view is a weighty but not, of course, a decisive fact. We must be loyal to the facts of Christ’s humanity reported in the Gospels. The question as to the extent of the κένωσις is an open one.