Kenotic Leadership

Woodward reads Philippi as a city where status was everything and honor was pursued over the honor of others. Roman rulers claimed divine status and used it to enlarge their own glory. Local elites imitated that pattern. Christ, who genuinely possessed divine status, took another route and received the highest honor for approaching power in a countercultural way. The ground of that freedom, as Woodward tells it, is belonging. Jesus heard the Father's word at the baptism: this is my son, whom I love, with him I am well pleased. Having received his identity, he could spurn the devil's temptations and avoid acquisitive mimesis. Because he knew the Father's love, he had no need to find status in the conventional world, and he refused to use his status as God in exploitative ways.

Paul is the second picture. Woodward cites Gombis: Paul had placed full confidence in inherited credentials and in a constructed social identity. The autobiography in Philippians 3 lists circumcision, tribe, Pharisee, zeal, and faultless law-keeping. Hellerman, as Woodward uses him, hears that list in the form of honor inscriptions, inherited honors first, achieved honors after. Wink's negative sense of flesh, which Woodward recalls, is the self subjugated to the opinion of others and socialized into the domination system. Worth located in titles or achievements becomes selfish ambition. Titles remain a fact of life. Finding value in them creates mimetic rivalry.

The practice is concrete in the letter's opening. Paul is an apostle and does not use the title with the Philippians. He chooses the label slave. Woodward's question follows: Have I become possessed by my image instead of fully possessing the identity I receive from my triune God? The same test returns when he defines kenotic leadership. Possess your image in God. The ideologies that captivate a leader do their work by getting that leader to rely on private power for affirmation and attention.

Woodward says the opposite of emptying ourselves is being full of ourselves: a sense of self-importance that exalts us above others, often from ascribed or achieved status. That attitude ends in mimetic rivalry and disunity. He does not think Jesus emptied himself of his power. John 13:3, as he cites it, says Jesus had all power, and he did not wield it in a worldly or coercive way. Sarah Coakley, in the definition he uses, treats kenosis as choosing never to have certain false and worldly forms of power, forms sometimes wrongly construed as divine. If that reading holds, Jesus' self-emptying shows a true image of divine power and a reflection of the Father's self-emptying way.

The foot washing is the scene. The disciples argued about who was greatest. Jesus became their slave and washed their feet. They were content, Woodward says, to remain where mimetic rivalry prevails. Paul then empties his own honor list. Whatever was gain he considers loss for the sake of Christ, and he calls the old credentials garbage. The pathway requires emptying every previous way of forming identity. In the world's perception of value, worth, and honor, we become nobodys so that God might make us somebodys.

It is not a single event. Paul had to die daily. Woodward borrows Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's stages as a map for dying to a constructed self: denial that mimetic desire is real, anger that the impressive image is dead, bargaining to keep one achievement, depression in the wilderness while the powers keep us in their grasp, and acceptance that an honorable self can be received from God. Acceptance sounds like Paul's contentment in Philippians 4, and like Jesus' yoke, gentle and humble in heart. Identity is found in Christ and in a communal life of humble obedience, in the non-rivalrous life of the triune God. The desire that defines the pathway, as he reads Philippians 3:10, is to know Christ, the power of his resurrection, and participation in his sufferings.

Humble obedience, in this chapter, is how a missional leader gets free of the mimetic trap inside the domination system and is released to start a revolution of love. Hellerman's point, as Woodward quotes the force of it, is that being humbled was common in the ancient world, where men grew their honor at a peer's expense. Humbling oneself was outside the dominant culture's values, and Christ's self-humiliation went to a Roman cross. Paul writes from prison, a place tied to shame, and still shows joy, prays for the Philippians, and is unfazed by rivals who preach with rivalrous intentions. Gombis, in the passage Woodward uses, says the measure of Paul's faithfulness is a life and ministry that resemble a dying corpse on a Roman cross, because that is where God poured out resurrection life. Ministry from another posture draws on an inferior power.

Woodward refuses to treat exaltation as a prize handed out for humility. We do not become last in order to be first. The last is first in reality. To be humble is to be exalted. He cites Bauckham: God is seen to be God in radical self-giving, descending to the most abject human condition, and in that obedience is no less truly God than in cosmic rule. Kenosis becomes a permanent revelation of who God is. He rules as the one who serves.

He also answers the objection that this journey is only for people who already sit low. Hellerman's reminder, as Woodward gives it, is that Paul used the cross to call those with status in the community to treat social capital as something to use, even to renounce, in the service of others. The hymn was not a tool for extracting submission from the powerless. People whose status is already low may have a shorter journey toward becoming nobody. He points to James 2:5, that the poor are rich in faith. Romero is the chapter's picture of this third practice: humble obedience that is also bold and prophetic, willing to bear the cost.