IV - Philippians ii. 5–11: Main lines of Twentieth Century Interpretation

Summary

This part of our study attempts what German New Testament scholarship calls Auslegungsgeschichte in respect of Philippians ii. 5–11. This entails passing under review the main lines of interpretation of the passage which have been offered in the last sixty years or so.

As our investigation is not concerned with studies which appeared before the turn of the century we are permitted to pass over the task of disentangling the tortuous complexities with which the nineteenth-century Lutherans discussed the problems of the passage as they saw them. But three questions placed in the foreground of that discussion were carried over into the present century.

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY LEGACY

The ‘Dogmatic’ View

The Lutheran contribution identified the Subject of the ‘Hymn’ with the historical Christ. The time of the action of the verbs, ‘He emptied Himself’ because ‘He thought it not robbery to be equal with God’ (A.V.), is located, not in some pre-temporal existence or in the presence of God from which the Lord of glory came forth on His redemptive mission, but in the course of His earthly life when He was faced (as in the Temptations of Matt, iv = Luke iv) with a choice to be equal with His Father but in which He declined to oppose the Father's will.