Karl Barth's Christology as a Resource for a Reformed Version of Kenoticism

Abstract:  This article starts by examining the ‘shift’ in thinking on kenosis from the sixteenth-century doctrine established by Lutheran orthodoxy to the nineteenth-century understanding developed by Gottfried Thomasius. Karl Barth's understanding of ‘kenotic Christology’ was largely controlled by the nineteenth-century definition and, as a result, he rejected it. However, Barth's later treatment of the incarnation in CD IV/I provides resources for taking up the language of kenosis in a positive way that would be thoroughly ‘Reformed’ in character. There are considerable theological gains to be made by such an approach.