Re: Philippians 2:6

From: Steven Craig Miller (scmiller@www.plantnet.com)
Date: Mon Dec 20 1999 - 23:17:11 EST


<x-flowed>To: Grant Polle,

<< On one hand, Jesus does not attempt equality." This seems to agree with
opponents of the Trinity. Yet, on the other hand, KJV's translation and
others shows Jesus as not considering his equality as robbery or that his
equality was wrong. Which of the two translations agrees more with what the
bible writer intended? >>

First of all, I would note that there are two basic interpretations of
early Christology. One group appears to assumed that God downloaded his
theological library into the minds of the NT authors, and that these
authors cleverly hid theological truths throughout their writings only for
later equally clever theologians to discover. The other group believes that
Christology slowly evolved over many centuries and that this first group
has anachronistically read later theological ideas back into earlier
scriptural texts.

I belong to this second group. IMO the notion of the deity of Jesus did not
fully evolve until sometime around the turn of the century (ca. 100 CE).
Paul's letter to the Philippians is generally dated to somewhere around 56
CE, four decades before the turn of the century.

Concerning "hOS EN MORFHi QEOU hUPARCWN OUC hARPAGMON hHGHSATO TO EINAI ISA
QEWi" (Phil 2:6), I will make the following observations.

First, the passage continues in verse 7: "but he emptied himself taking the
form of a slave" (Phil 2:7a NRSV). This does not mean that Jesus was a
literal slave (i.e., owned as property by another), rather "the form of a
slave'" is being used metaphorically. It would also make sense then to take
"the form of God" as a metaphor.

Second, the Greek term MORFH generally refers to something which may be
perceived by the senses (e.g., the "form of a slave"). As such the "form of
God" does not belong to the very essence of divinity. And so even if one
assumes that Jesus is "the form of God," that doesn't necessarily imply
that Jesus is God.

Third, Philippians 2:6 does not state that Jesus is "the form of God,"
rather it states that Jesus was "in the form of God." The Greek preposition
EN can have a number of different uses. Here it might be taken as a
locative usage where Jesus is thought to be "within" a spatial "form of
God." Or perhaps the Greek EN is being used to state that Jesus is located
within the sphere of influenced of the "form of God." Either way, neither
of these alternatives indicate that Paul, the author of Philippians,
thought that Jesus was God.

Finally, I would like to point out that even if Paul did not think of Jesus
as divine, that does not disprove Jesus' divinity. The divinity of Jesus is
a theological notion. There is nothing inconsistent with someone holding
that Jesus is divine and yet Christians didn't learn this fact until
sometime around the turn of the century (ca. 100 CE). Many mainstream
Christians take such a point of view (or something similar).

But if one want to look at this passage historically, and to try to
discover what the historical Paul might have thought theologically about
Jesus, then one would do well to try to understand the historical
circumstances under which Paul wrote. The earliest Christians were
Palestinian Jews. Later as Christianity gained converts a large number of
non-Palestinian Jews, and a large number of non-Jews joined in. Many of
these early Palestinian Jewish-Christians were monotheistic and would have
found the notion of Jesus' divinity to be blasphemous. If Paul had wanted
his audience to understand that Jesus was divine, one would think that he
would be plan about it, and that he would not hide such a notion behind
flowery words. From my point of view, it makes more sense to see that the
notion of Jesus' divinity slowly evolved and that it was easy for later
generations to take Paul's ambiguous words and re-interpret them in light
of later theological thinking.

-Steven Craig Miller
Alton, Illinois (USA)
scmiller@www.plantnet.com
Disclaimer: "I'm just a simple house-husband (with no post-grad degree),
what do I know?"

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