Philippians 2:6

Steven Craig Miller scmiller at www.plantnet.com
Mon Dec 20 23:17:11 EST 1999


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 at www.plantnet.com
Disclaimer: "I'm just a simple house-husband (with no post-grad degree), 
what do I know?"




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