Section 26.3
The Form of a Servant
Creator: Jason Paul · Developed with AI by ToC Works.
Philippians 2 gives the movement of Christ's life through self-emptying, service, obedience, and death, followed by exaltation. The passage also asks its hearers to share that disposition in their own relations.
This brings us back to the book's earlier concern with grasping. Where desire tries to secure greatness by taking, Christ's path takes the form of giving himself. His equality with God is not made an occasion for exploiting others.
Self-emptying does not mean that he stops being divine. It describes the humility and service of the one who truly enters human life. The theological account remains the Incarnation, rather than the replacement of one nature by another.
The passage therefore provides a Christian measure of power and greatness. The route to exaltation runs through obedience and self-gift. That measure changes how a reader hears the heroic struggle for honor and the primordial movement from desire to possession.
Sources
- Philippians 2:5-11 NRSVUE - Let the same mind be in you that was in - Bible Gateway
- and making their own the will of the Father, even to self-emptying and abasement (cf. Phil 2:7-8). For a religious, to advance on the path of obedience means to abase oneself in service, that is, to take the same path as Jesus, who “did not deem equality with God a thing to be grasped” (Phil 2:6). By emptying himself he made himself a servant in order to serve.
- ‘A Thing Like God’: Re-Reading Gothic Philippians 2.6–8 | New Testament Studies | Cambridge Core
- Philippians 2.6–11: Son of God or Adamic Christology? | New Testament Studies | Cambridge Core
- The Entire Cosmos’ Voluntary and Involuntary Homage to Jesus as Lord. An Investigation into the Scope and Background of Philippians 2.9–11 in Psalm 148 and Isaiah 45.20–5 | New Testament Studies | Cambridge Core