Has Ruben A. Bühner solved the morphē theou problem?

In his book Messianic High Christology: New Testament Variants of Second Temple Judaism (2021), Ruben Bühner sets out to demonstrate that a high christology is compatible with Jewish messianism. The title says it all. The title may turn out to be a contradiction in terms.

Chapter one looks at Philippians 2:6-11, probably the key New Testament text for a high christology, comparing it with two Qumran texts, which Bühner thinks have some bearing on how we locate the second stanza of the encomium in the thought-world of second temple Judaism. As far as I can see, he offers no Jewish messianic premise for the first stanza. In fact, he will argue that the linguistic and conceptual background for the metamorphosis from “form of God” to “form of a slave,” and so on, is Greek. A good start, at least.

I came across Bühner’s book only recently—I wasn’t aware of it when I was working on In the Form of a God: The Pre-existence of the Exalted Christ in Paul. So let’s have a look at what he has to say about the expression morphē theou—just in case I’ve missed something important.

Some arguments about morphē theou

Bühner makes the point, first, that the genitive theou, without the article, is ambiguous: ‘Thus, in Phil 2:6 it remains grammatically vague if we should interpret μορφή θεοῦ as Christ being in the “μορφή of a god” or in the “μορφή of (the one) God”’ (26). Since no other beings are called “god” in the context, however, he is inclined to think that this is the “one God” of Jewish belief.

He then briefly outlines and passes judgment on four main ways in which scholars have understood the phrase. He will propose a combination of the third and fourth approaches “in light of Second Temple messianism,” though, as I say, I don’t see where the messianism comes into it.

1. Morphē has been taken to be the semantic equivalent of eikōn, which is the Greek word for “image” : so Christ is depicted as being the first of a new humanity “in the image of God” (cf. Gen. 1:26-27 LXX); he was obedient where Adam was disobedient. But Bühner says that “there is no real linguistic link between μορφή [morphē] in Phil 2:6 and the creation narrative” (27). I agree.

2. Scholars have suggested that morphē really means “essence” or “that which truly characterizes a given reality.” The ontological assumption has been key for trinitarian hypothesising and goes back a long way. In the fourth century, Gregory of Nyssa wrote:

Now, he who ‘is in the form of God’… is not shaped by any stamp other than the Father, since he is the stamp of the Father’s being (hypostaseōs); for the form of God is surely the same as his being (ousia). When he was born in the form of a slave…, he was conformed to the being (ousia) of a slave, not taking upon himself the mere form divorced from the being (ousia), but the essential being (ousia) is indicated at the same time as the form; just so, surely, the writer who said he was in the form of God indicated the being (ousia) through the form. (Against Eunomius 3.2.147)1

Bühner says, however, that there is little evidence that morphē was understood in this way before the christological debates of the third and fourth centuries. In fact, it seems to me that Gregory is implicitly working against the obvious sense of the word: in effect, morphē in this case must mean “being”—even if it normally doesn’t—because Jesus is the “stamp” of the Father’s hypostasis.

I would add that it has sometimes been claimed that morphēhas this meaning in earlier philosophical writings (Plato, Aristotle), but as far as I can tell, the proper distinction between ousia (“essence,” “being”) or hylē (‘matter,” “substance”) and morphē (“form,” “outward appearance”) is always maintained.2

3. This is the interesting one in my view: ‘in accordance with most uses of this lexeme within Greek literature, it is translated as “form” or “shape” and refers first of all to the visible appearance of Christ’ (27). This is exactly right, but Bühner then takes it to mean that the transformation described in Philippians 2:6-8 has been construed as an epiphany or metamorphosis: “Christ would take on a human appearance just as Zeus can appear as bovine in the Europa myth, but Christ would in fact always remain a god rather than becoming human” (28).

The objection to this, he says, is that it doesn’t do justice to the “earthly and human existence of Christ,” who suffered and was crucified—incarnation, kenōsis, and suffering fall entirely outside the pagan epiphanic paradigm. Correct, but there is a better of reading the metamorphosis trope, which happily preserves the proper sense of morphē theou, which we will get to.

4. The juxtaposition of “form of God” and “form of a slave” suggests the meaning “status,” by which Bühner understands “the social rank an individual holds in terms of authority, power, and esteem” (28-29). So Christ “emptied himself” in the sense that he exchanged the status of God for the status of a slave. The emphasis on visible appearance is retained inasmuch as “the change of status can be connected with the change of someone’s appearance” (30). I presume Bühner means that the word morphē still plays on the idea of a “metamorphosed god” but that Paul’s argument goes beyond this in two ways:

First, it lays much more weight on the human and earthly existence of Christ, who “empties himself” and finally even dies. Second, the argumentative focus lies more on Christ’s selfless change of status than on the change of his visible appearance. (30)

So this is Bühner’s own position, but I don’t think he has succeeded in establishing a notion of Christ’s pre-existence “in the form of God” compatible with first century Jewish thought. So I will restate my own solution at the end.

Some arguments against Bühner’s interpretation

1. There are other proposals which Bühner does not mention: that Jesus was in the form of the massive body of God (Gieschen), or of a pre-existent apocalyptic messiah (Horbury) or Son of Man (Holloway), or of an angel (Vollenweider).

2. To be clear, morphē does not mean “status.” It denotes the outward appearance of a person or object. So “form of God” means “status of God” only by association: Jesus was in a form which by association could be understood to signify divine status. The question remains open: what was the actual form of this “god”—in contrast to the “form of a slave,” which arguably has something to do with the appearance of his degrading death?

3. Bühner cites scholarly support for the status interpretation but does not give a single example of a text in which this meaning holds. Hellerman has defended the view but only by introducing clothing as the outward marker of status. So Jesus was in the form of God in the sense that he appeared clothed in the glory of God.3

4. The grammatical ambiguity holds if we take tou theou in isolation, but morphē theou in context is theologically unambiguous: the one God of Israel does not have a form; only the pagan gods have forms.

5. The phrase morphē theou looks very much at home in Hellenistic pagan discourse, but it does not necessarily point to an epiphany or metamorphosis. In fact, I would say that it does not imply that. It could be said quite properly that a god took the form of a slave—that’s a metamorphosis. But to be “in the form of a god” is not to be a god in the first place. Rather, a human person, who was perceived to be “in the form of a god,” chose a very different path and was found actually to be merely and vulnerably human, in the form of a slave.

6. In this respect, the emphasis on status is apposite. The encomium tracks the dramatic shifts in the public estimation of Jesus from a Greek point of view: he appeared at first sight to be a wonder-worker in the form of a god, but he rejected the opportunity, when it was presented to him, to fulfil the imperialistic potential of that sonship, and instead suffered a humiliating death on a Roman cross; but God exalted him, raising his name or reputation or authority in the Greek world, to the extent that it became a realistic expectation that every knee would bow, etc., to the glory of the God of Israel—exactly the sort of conversion of an idolatrous civilisation to a just monotheism envisaged in Isaiah 45:22-46:2. Praise, dispraise, and praise.

7. Bühner is right to humanise the self-emptying, but in that case it is difficult to see how the transition can happen between a heavenly pre-existence, in whatever form, and an earthly existence. Does the divine person Jesus become incarnate and then empty himself? My argument is that the kenōsis draws on a model of Jewish asceticism, perhaps in popular usage, illustrated by Philo’s explanation of why God gave the commandments to Israel in the wilderness: Moses “led away (his people) from the harmful customs of the cities into the wilderness that he might empty (kenōsei) their souls of unrighteous deeds” (Decalogue 13). Significantly, the reason is that people had “given form to” (μορφώσαντες) an infinite variety of images and statues and had shown them “honours equal to the Olympians (isolympious) and equal to the gods” (isotheous) (7).

The whole point…

Bühner goes on to say that the notion of Christ’s pre-existence is not only found elsewhere in Paul (1 Cor. 8:6; 10:4; 2 Cor. 8:9), it is crucial for his argument in Philippians 2:1-11.

In v. 3 Paul demands, “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves.” Within the argumentative structure of the letter, the following passage of Phil 2:6-11 is then used as an example for the Philippians’ behavior. Yet without Christ’s existence before his earthly life, Paul could not use Jesus’ selfless humiliation as an exhortation to the Philippians within his paraenesis.

Bühner, Ruben A. Messianic High Christology: New Testament Variants of Second Temple Judaism. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2021, 31.

But how does such a metamorphosis, from form of God to form of a slave, work as a model to be emulated by your ordinary human Philippian believer? If, as I argue, a tradition relating to the temptation in the wilderness lies behind the opening lines of the encomium, we have an excellent example of a person who does not exploit charismatic power and authority for personal gain, who does not act out of “selfish ambition” and “vainglory.”

So what I think we have is an encomium, composed from a Greek perspective, which captures the acute dilemma at the heart of Jesus’ career as a Spirit-empowered prophet-messiah. He would have appeared to the Greek onlooker as a person “in the form of a god,” but he resisted the satanically inspired allure of the ruler cult, emptied himself of such self-serving ambition in the wilderness, and took instead the “form of a slave,” becoming all too human and mortal.

• 1

  Johan Leemans and Matthieu Cassin (eds). Gregory Of Nyssa Contra Eunomium IIl An English Translation With Commentary And Supporting Studies (2014), 101.

• 2

  Perriman, In the Form of a God, 79-80.

• 3

  Perriman, In the Form of a God, 82-83.