Karl Barth's Christology as a Resource for a Reformed Version of Kenoticism

  This article starts by examining the ‘shift’ in thinking on kenosis from the sixteenth‐century doctrine established by Lutheran orthodoxy to the nineteenth‐century understanding developed by Gottfried Thomasius. Karl Barth's understanding of ‘kenotic Christology’ was largely controlled by the nineteenth‐century definition and, as a result, he rejected it. However, Barth's later treatment of the incarnation in CD IV/I provides resources for taking up the language of kenosis in a positive way that would be thoroughly ‘Reformed’ in character. There are considerable theological gains to be made by such an approach.