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313
Comm.; Vos, Notes on Christology of Paul; Cooke, The Incarnation and Recent Criticism, pp. 201
ff.]
3. OBJECTIONS TO THE KENOSIS DOCTRINE.
a. The theory is based on the pantheistic conception that God and man are not so absolutely
different but that the one can be transformed into the other. The Hegelian idea of becoming is
applied to God, and the absolute line of demarcation is obliterated.
b. It is altogether subversive of the doctrine of the immutability of God, which is plainly taught
in Scripture, Mal. 3:6; Jas. 1:17, and which is also implied in the very idea of God. Absoluteness
and mutability are mutually exclusive; and a mutable God is certainly not the God of Scripture.
c. It means a virtual destruction of the Trinity, and therefore takes away our very God. The
humanized Son, self-emptied of His divine attributes, could no longer be a divine subsistence in
the trinitarian life.
d. It assumes too loose a relation between the divine mode of existence, the divine attributes,
and the divine essence, when it speaks of the former as if they might very well be separated
from the latter. This is altogether misleading, and involves the very error that is condemned in
connection with the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation.
e. It does not solve the problem which it was intended to solve. It desired to secure the unity of
the person and the reality of the Lord’s manhood. But, surely, the personal unity is not secured
by assuming a human Logos as co-existent with a human soul. Nor is the reality of the manhood
maintained by substituting for the human soul a depotentiated Logos. The Christ of the
Kenotics is neither God nor man. In the words of Dr. Warfield His human nature is “just
shrunken deity.”
The Kenotic theory enjoyed great popularity in Germany for a while, but has now practically
died out there. When it began to disappear in Germany, it found supporters in England in such
scholars as D. W. Forrest, W. L. Walker, P. T. Forsyth, Ch. Gore, R. L. Ottley, and H. R.
Mackintosh. It finds very little support at the present time.
G. THE THEORY OF GRADUAL INCARNATION.
Dorner was one of the first and the greatest of the opponents of the Kenosis doctrine. He set
himself the task of suggesting another theory which, while escaping the errors of Kenoticism,
would do full justice to the humanity of Christ. He proposed to solve the problem by the theory
of a gradual or progressive incarnation. According to him the incarnation was not an act
consummated at the moment of the conception of Jesus, but a gradual process by which the