Interpretation in a Community of Interlocutors: Reflections on The Interpretation of Kenosis from Origen to Cyril of Alexandria

Abstract

Abstract Four interlocutors posed questions about the understanding of Christ's self‐emptying on display in the book, The Interpretation of Kenosis from Origen to Cyril of Alexandria (Oxford, 2024). The author here responds to Margaret Mitchell by proposing again that Philippians 2:7 appears to be a passage that Origen uses to interpret other passages, rather than a passage to be interpreted on the basis of others. In response to Paul Blowers, the author advances some ideas on how Cyril himself used the concept in public preaching and how the Syriac miaphysite tradition may have self‐consciously adopted Cyril's interpretation. In answer to Crawford, the author proposes that Bruce McCormack's reading of kenosis seems limited to a certain problem of suffering and that Cyril and the patristic tradition are interested in a wider range of questions. Finally, the author is glad to come to a meeting of minds with Coakley on Gregory of Nyssa's understanding of incarnation. Magree returns again to the claim that, for the Nyssen, the concept of kenosis signifies not so much the exchange of properties that happens in deification but rather signifies the taking of human nature that makes the exchange possible.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. International Journal of Systematic Theology, 2026 · DOI ↗