I was at a charismatic conference recently where Bill Johnson (once again the pastor from Redding, not my father) was one of the speakers. Not being charismatic myself I had never really bothered to look into what Johnson teaches so it came as a shock when I heard Bill Johnson speak of Christhood as an anointing received at the time of Christ’s baptism. I recalled this was an issue in the early church due to gnosticism; however, the early church fathers recognized the heresy of the idea that Jesus was not deity until his baptism.
The Kenosis heresy was picked up from a misunderstanding of Phillipians 2:7 where the term kenoo [κενόω] used to get translated as “emptied.” At first it may sound good as Matthew 24:36 may appear to convey that Christ does not utilize or does not have omniscience as he does not know when the father portion of God will allow his return, but Matthew does not contradict that Christ was God incarnate from birth. John 17 is a prayer Jesus makes before his arrest and Christ points out the inseparable nature of himself as the son and co-creator aspect, since before creation, with the father aspect of God. He also seems to loop around concepts of inseparable shared glory.
Again we see that Christ was part of the Godhood from at least creation according to John 1:1-5, and that he was made human to come live amongst humankind (John 1:14-18). Luke makes it quite clear that Jesus was far from ordinary even prior to his baptism (Luke 2:21-52), and I would contend this was due in no small part to his dual nature as fully divine and fully human. Likewise, we don’t see Christ setting aside his divinity, in many places his divinity is apparent when he commands nature or demons to do something. Many of his miracles were entirely because he is God; sometimes he prays for someone, other times he just heals them. He is, was, and will always be fully divine.
I’d like to return to the word κενόω, it really shouldn’t read as “emptied” and in fact, newer translations read along the lines of giving up privileges or humbled himself. This fits the Matthew 24:36 dilemma of a Christ sans total omniscience without depriving Christ of his divine nature. I’d like to point out that time is a very complex topic, we only discovered relativity recently and now realize we live in a universe in which time can completely stop as well as continue on as normal for the same object based on where the observer is located, the best we could ever do is conjecture why Christ said he doesn’t know the exact time of his return and loss of omniscience would not cleanly solve the dilemma. The kenosis heresy doesn’t really simplify but would actually confound issues as the “Christ anointing” would not make Jesus fully divine and would fly in the face of the immutability of the Logos.
So why do I actually bother to take issue with the kenosis heresy? Quite simply the kenosis heresy is often used as a way to diminish Christ and self deify… that is, we attempt to make ourselves or our abilities an idol of sorts. Bill Johnson very much taught at that conference that people can receive an anointing and become greater than Christ. This is the same old false teaching that has been around nearly 2000 years in various forms of gnosticism, of which the original apostles and later church fathers stood in vehement opposition and together formed creeds against.
I’d like to remind the reader that Christ is the way, the truth, and the life; no one can have relationship with God without Jesus. If anyone comes telling you otherwise or tempting you with power, money, or authority, even under the guise of spiritual power or authority, instead of the message of Christ as the only hope of salvation… run away!