The Gifted Subject: Kenosis, Phenomenology, and the Constitution of Responsive Agency
Contemporary discussions of kenosis remain caught between two insufficient anthropologies. A tradition of passive self-surrender collapses the human subject into divine action, while a tradition of strategic self-limitation preserves autonomy by reducing kenosis to a moral model for imitation. Both assume that agency and receptivity are mutually exclusive. This article argues for a third option: the subject of kenosis is neither passive nor autonomous but responsively constituted through divine address. Building on Sarah Coakley and engaging contemporary kenosis debates, the argument develops a phenomenological account of responsive agency through Levinas’s ethical anteriority, Marion’s saturated givenness, and Merleau-Ponty’s embodied mediation. Historically, the proposal is anchored in the Giessen-Tübingen kenosis-krypsis controversy, where the Giessen insistence on real renunciation already implies an anthropology in which divine self-giving constitutes rather than negates creaturely agency. Philippians 2:6–11 is read as disclosing a somatic grammar in which kenosis, embodiment, servanthood, and obedience form a single Christological movement, liturgically enacted in the Eucharist. The result is a theological anthropology in which reception becomes the deepest form of agency.
Published in Studia Theologica - Nordic Journal of Theology, 2026
Read the article here