God’s Addition
Franz Pieper and the strange equipment of the incarnation.
A week ago or so, I shared some thoughts on Philippians 2 and the self-emptying of Christ that gives the church its unity, along with the help of R. C. H. Lenski, whose New Testament commentaries have proven invaluable in recent years. If you haven’t interacted with Lenski’s work, I’d highly commend it to you. But within his treatment of Paul’s letter to the church at Philippi and the kenosis, he cites Franz Pieper (1852—1931) at length. Pieper’s comments on Christ’s descent are well-placed within Lenski’s project and well worth your time, too. Hence, this brief post.
For the life of me, I can’t ascertain the original source to cite it, but I’ll include the notation to Lenski’s work if you’d like to see it in context for yourself. What Pieper draws on is the unfathomable chasm of Christ’s coming and the incomprehensible “equipment,” as he puts it, with which he girds himself as he carries out the Father’s will. He writes:
The earthly warrior, who determines to gain the victory, girds his sword to his side and strives to be high. Christ’s equipment for the victory to be gained develops in the opposite direction. Christ . . . divested, emptied himself to naught, became lowly, altogether lowly. But this strange equipment accords with the nature of the work to be done. It was not to conquer cities. It was also not by a divine word of power to hurl him into hell who by God’s permission held men captive. It was, in the execution of the divine redemption method, by substitution, through being obedient, suffering, and dying, to pay the sin guilt of men. That, to be sure, could not be effected by laying aside his deity partly or completely. He could not do without his deity in his state of humiliation. He had to attach the full weight of his deity to his being obedient and to his suffering and dying. Even in the midst of his death he had to be the mighty God in order by his death to conquer death, to raise up again the temple of his body (John 2:19, 21), to take up his life again (John 10:18).1
What’s notable about this paragraph is not only the way Pieper refers to the incarnation without directly mentioning it, but also how he alludes to Nicene or even Chalcedonian Christology without overtly broaching that subject either. Jesus’s self-emptying, so to speak, wasn’t so much a matter of losing something as much as it was adding. Without surrendering a milligram of his deity, the Christ of God took on flesh and “the form of a servant” (Phil. 2:7) so he could be about his Father’s business.
I think the bulk of the debate concerning the kenosis centers on the incorrect premise that Christ “set aside his glory.” But this frames the incarnation in terms of subtraction, which sends the whole conversation backwards. When the eternal Word became incarnate, it was addition all the way down. It was deity added to skin and bone; glory to humility and obedience “to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:8). Within the paradox of the infinite Word clothed in finite flesh, we’re given a glimpse of the fullness of God, hidden in weakness to do that which only God can do.
Grace and peace.
Franz Pieper, quoted in R. C. H. Lenski, The Interpretation of St. Paul’s Epistles to the Galatians, to the Ephesians, and to the Philippians (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1961), 781–82.